Dream Play Build : Hands-On Community Engagement for Enduring Spaces and Places

The room is dim, the chairs are in perfectly lined rows. The city planner puts up a color-coded diagram of the street improvement project, dreading the inevitable angry responses. Jana loves her community and is glad to be able to attend the evening meeting, and she has a lot of ideas for community change. But she has a hard time hearing, and cant see the diagrams clearly. She leaves early. Its time to imagine a different type of community engagement one that inspires connection, creativity, and fun. People love their communities and want them to become safer, healthier, more prosperous places. But the standard approach to public meetings somehow makes everyone miserable. Conversations that should be inspiring can become shouting matches. So what would it look like to facilitate truly meaningful discussions between citizens and planners? What if they could be fun? For twenty years, James Rojas and John Kamp have been looking to art, creative expression, and storytelling to shake up the classic community

dreams we have for our communities. Readers will find themselves weaving these artful, playful lessons and methods into their own efforts for making change within the landscape around them. [Publisher's text]