On Friday, February 25, GOPC staff members attended “Dream ▪ Play ▪ Build: Hands-On Community Engagement for Enduring Spaces and Places,” a webinar presented by James Rojas of Place It! and John Kamp of Prairieform and hosted by the Maryland Department of Planning and the Smart Growth Network. The webinar detailed Rojas and Kamp’s decade’s long experience using creative, hands-on public engagement to build common ground and invite active participation among diverse groups.

Rojas and Kamp have developed a unique approach to public engagement, “Place It!,” which draws upon three methods: the interactive model-building workshop, the pop-up, and site exploration using the senses. The creative, play-based and hands-on approach to public engagement asks stakeholders to tap into memory and sensory-based reactions to solicit feedback that can be incorporated into site designs or larger plans.

Rojas and Kamp’s hands-on approach to community engagement is based in psychology, differentiating between public engagement that relies on spoken and written responses and play-based engagement. The distinction being that talking-focused engagement, like a visioning session or even a post-it note board activity, engages the “survival” part of the brain, often generating unimaginative or negative responses. When you engage someone in a play-based activity (e.g. using popsicle sticks and bottle caps to build your ideal transit stop), you engage different parts of the brain and generate more imaginative feedback. These creative, aspirational comments are often more aligned with a community’s core values, and then can be more effectively incorporated into a final plan in a way that feels more transparent and authentic.

During the webinar, Rojas and Kamp outlined various project profiles that illustrated “how they do it.” A pandemic-friendly example included engagements with residents of the Washington Neighborhood of Long Beach in hands-on model-building, sensory-based neighborhood explorations, video-making, and advocacy training so that they could become their own planners and designers of their neighborhood. In the process, residents went on sensory-based explorations where they recorded themselves in their favorite places describing what they liked about the area (see videos on the Prairieform youtube channel). Residents then participated in a virtual model-building activity using found objects from their own homes, proving that a hands-on, creative engagement approach can successfully adapt to virtual circumstances.

Read more about the Place It! approach in Rojas and Kamp’s newly released book Dream Play Build or watch the webinar recording on the Smart Growth Network website (and catch their upcoming webinars here).