Better Planners Podcast

Hands-On Play as Community Engagement

• Mary Heberling-Creighton, Shelley Denison

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The Better Planners Podcast is back for 2025! In this episode, Shelley and Mary interview James Rojas and John Kamp to talk about their new book, Dream Play Build: Hands On Community Engagement for Enduring Places and Spaces.

They talk extensively on their process with using hands-on community engagement methods to create an equal playing field for everyone to get involved in community planning work.

Find their book at Island Press.
Find James Rojas at PlaceIt.org.
Find John Kamp at Prairieform.com. 

Want to be a part of the podcast? Send in an email!
The team behind the upcoming Better Planners podcast wants to hear from you about the real life issues you handle as a planner. What are the honest, gritty, wicked problems you find yourself managing?

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Website: https://oregon.planning.org/community/betterplannerspodcast/
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Mary Heberling-Creighton:

You're listening to the Better Planners Podcast, brought to you by the Oregon Chapter of the American Planning Association. I'm Mary Harbeling Creighton. And I'm Shelly Denison. You can find us on Instagram at Better Planners, planners is plural, on the webpage for the Oregon APA Chapter, and on all of your favorite podcast streaming platforms.

Shelley Denison:

You can also get in touch with us by sending an email to better planners podcast at gmail. com.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

And if you're enjoying the podcast, you can support us on Kofi at Kofi. com slash better planners. That's K O hyphen F I. com slash better planners.

Shelley Denison:

So we are really excited about today's episode. We are recording at OAPA's annual conference at the downtown Marriott Waterfront in Portland. Uh, and we're chatting with the two keynote speakers at the conference, James Rojas and John Camp. James and John are community engagement experts and authors of the book, Dream Play Build, Hands On Community Engagement for Enduring Spaces and Places. This book offers a look at how people of all ages and backgrounds can incorporate creative engagement methods into their own efforts to affect change in their neighborhoods and cities.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

James Rojas is an urban planner, community activist, educator, and artist who runs the planning, model building, and community outreach practice Place It!. Through Place It!, he has developed an interdisciplinary community healing, visioning, and outreach process that uses storytelling, objects, art production, and play to help improve the urban planning outreach process. He is now an international expert in public engagement and has traveled around the U. S., Mexico, Canada, Europe, and South America, facilitating over 500 workshops and building over 100 interactive models. His research has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Dwell, Places, and in numerous books. Relevant areas of expertise include using model building as a means of community and planning outreach. Working with underserved, disadvantaged communities, and bringing overlooked voices to the planning discussion. Making the physical form of cities relevant to broad audiences, and understanding how immigrants, especially Latino immigrants, see and understand urban and suburban space in the U. S., and why they oftentimes reshape those forms in the ways that they do.

Shelley Denison:

And John Camp is an urban and landscape designer, a licensed landscape contractor, License C 27, number 307 917, and facilitator who runs the Landscape Design and Engagement Practice, Prairie Form. He has developed innovative tools to engage people of all ages and backgrounds in urban and landscape design, transportation, walkability, climate change, and water conservation. His landscape work centers on the creation of what he calls climatescapes. Landscapes that do not require irrigation and that are anchored within the climates they are located in and a response to climate change. Frequently collaborating with James and building off of his 15 years of experience in landscape and urban design, he is able to translate findings from Place It!'s community engagement workshops and trainings into designs for vibrant, sensory rich, and resilient landscape and urban spaces. Welcome! Thank you so much for being here.

John Kamp:

Yeah, thanks for having us.

James Rojas:

Yeah.

John Kamp:

It's always fun to be in Portland.

Shelley Denison:

Good, I'm glad. Not everybody thinks so.

John Kamp:

I know!

Shelley Denison:

But we like Portland.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Um, alright, well, uh, let's start out with your book. Where did your interest in writing this book come from?

James Rojas:

Well, I've been doing this work for like 15 years, did over 1500 workshops, and they've been really successful. But I didn't know why. It's like, I'm making a cake, I have a recipe, but why does it work? So I just thought, I think, I think to up our game, we have to kind of understand this whole process that we're putting people through and figure out why it's successful. So that's what we started to, during that pandemic, we decided to write this book on looking at the whole reason why, and that's how it all got started.

John Kamp:

Well, it's a little more backstory too, is James kept being like, I have to write a book. We have to write a book about this. We have to write a book about this. You know, this sort of like once a month thing, like, ah, like we have to write a book. And I finally was like, all right, I don't want to hear this anymore. I'm going to write up a proposal and then you send it to your, to people, you know, you know, contacts with publishers and things, and we'll just see what happens. And that was in. Oh, don't quote me on this. I feel like it was in like 2018, maybe. And then, so we pitched it to two publishers and the second one bit. And that was Island Press. And I won't, I won't tell you who the first publisher was. They were like, they, they use this expression, square peg in a round hole. So they were like, not into it.

James Rojas:

Well, it's not an academic book.

John Kamp:

It's not an academic book.

James Rojas:

Yeah.

John Kamp:

So, and we didn't want it to be, and we also didn't want it to be like, and Island Press did not want it to be a book of case studies either, so that was like a big part of the early phases of the book, was figuring out what the structure was going to be. So anyways, there was, there was, it, from start to finish, from pitching it to publication, three years. Yeah.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

I do not have a desire to write a book, but it's always fascinating to hear how, how that comes about and sort of all the work. Cause it's like, you don't even write the full book. You have to pitch it first and then, and then write it.

John Kamp:

And then write it. So we had an outline and then a sample chapter and that's what the publisher required of us before we could sign a contract with them. And we went back and forth and back and forth with the outline and figuring out, like I was saying earlier about how to make it. Like a book, book like, and then I was out on a jog one morning and it was like literally on one of those jogs where I was like, Oh, I think I know what the structure could be. And I came back and typed it up and pitched it to them and they were like, yes, this is, this is it.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Cool.

John Kamp:

So then I was just off to the races. And then the pandemic hit, and then there was like an excuse to, do nothing but write. So it was good. We got an advance from the publisher. We also did crowdfunding to finance Those writing hours and that was super helpful.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah.

Shelley Denison:

Nice. That's awesome.

John Kamp:

Yeah.

Shelley Denison:

Cool. So what you're saying is we have to pick up a jogging habit

John Kamp:

Well, it's funny those kinds of things, you know when you're trying to come up with the Like, the name for my business, Prairie Farm, or like, you know, I don't know, some advertising slogan or something. Those things, I feel like they come to you when you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing. Like, you're not sitting down thinking about that. You're doing something else and it's like, poof, you know, it just, it comes to you. I think part of it's because you're giving your mind that expansive, you know, space. space to be in so you can, it can wander.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah. I agree with that.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Well, that's why you have like your best thoughts in the shower is because you're sort of in this, like, you're doing something mundane or mind, mindless, quote unquote, and then it sort of frees your brain to think. Yeah.

John Kamp:

Yeah.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah.

John Kamp:

Absolutely. That's why these, these things, these phones, I'm holding a phone right now. I mean, these are. So these are creativity killers because you're, you're filling your mind with stuff all the time.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah.

John Kamp:

And if you want to be creative, you have to be able to have some boredom.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Right.

John Kamp:

It'll offer boredom in your, in your life. Yeah. Force yourself to be like, I'm not going to do anything.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

I was just listening to a podcast episode on the author of Stolen Focus.

John Kamp:

Oh.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

And when you were in your keynote presentation, when you were talking about the flow state, He said, like, that's actually the easiest state that our mind can get into. But we have so many distractions in the world, like our phones, um, that are preventing us from getting into that mindset.

John Kamp:

No, I didn't. I mean, I didn't even know that about how it's the easiest to get into.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Or at least one of the easiest.

John Kamp:

Yeah, I know, but I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure. And then, um, but yeah, the part about having all these distractions and not allowing ourselves to is Totally true and relates to the work we do. I mean, we are, you know, in this day. It's not only if so there's age like as people get older. They work with their hands less and less. They have opportunities to be expensive and their thinking less and less. But then there's also the technology factor that comes into play so that hampers all that to gets in the way and is constantly jolting you with distractions and things to pay attention to instead. So with our work, you know, even if it's just a short, because the workshops tend to be pretty short, you know, like an hour and a half, we give people 10 minutes to build a model of their favorite childhood memory and then 10 minutes to build an ideal space or place with other people. That's, those 20 minutes might be like the first time in ages that they've had the chance to just be free with their thinking and be creative and build and work with their hands. Right. I mean, that's the other thing is a lot of us. We don't work with our hands that much anymore. Um, and we're, you know, we're wired to be able to want to work with our hands. Um, and we like that. I mean, there's a physiological, there is, we feel better when we work with our hands. Um, it can be really meditative and so on and so forth. Um, so that, that's like a rare, what we're trying to do in part, I mean, we're trying to do a lot of things with our workshops, but that's part of it is giving people this opportunity, especially grownups, a chance to just tinker and think big and work with their hands. And they always leave the workshops feeling better.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Mm hmm.

Shelley Denison:

Mm hmm.

John Kamp:

They could go in cranky or maybe they were stuck in traffic before they got to the meeting and they come to the meeting. It's after work. They're kind of tired and cranky. And even after the first activity where they build their first childhood memory with felt objects, even after that, we always notice a change in the room. There's a discernible change in just the overall vibe of the room. Um, and I think the other thing that's happening too is people get to know each other really quickly. Um, people let their guards down too. And so sometimes like with certain clients, you know, if we're hired by a planning department, or Sometimes the planner will be like, no, no, no. You guys, the planners, you guys are not going to be a part of this workshop. I don't want you. And we're like, no, no, no, you should at least be a part of the part where you build your favorite child of memory, because the residents are going to see that you're a human being by way of this activity, and you're going to see that they're human beings too. So, you know, going back to this kind of letting your guard down. Um, comment, you know, that's what it does. Like people let their guards down, but we're not telling them to. We're not like forcing them. We're not saying, okay, you are now you're gonna let your guard down. Now, you know, it's just by way of this very simple activity, people just do it.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah. At the, like in the first chapter of the book, you talk a lot about like the psychology of engagement. Um, And I think that that's something that planners don't really think about very much. And, uh, planners sort of have this expectation that people are rational decision makers, right? That people, um, you know, just need a little bit more information, just a little bit of education in order to, to give good feedback to a project. Um, yeah, but you guys talk about how we are hardwired to, to behave more out of our emotional states than our rational states.

John Kamp:

Yeah.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah. Could you talk more about that?

John Kamp:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a part of what we, how we talk about it with our work is, uh, it's knowledge producing as opposed to knowledge sharing. So a traditional planning meeting or most meetings, you know, some sort of public meeting, civic meeting, it's usually, um, like, as you said, you're appealing to people's rational side. You're like. If only they knew more about FAR.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Right.

John Kamp:

Floor area ratio, or if only they knew more about building height to street width ratios, then they would love narrower streets, right? And they would love denser housing and blah, blah, blah. So that belief and this approach of knowledge sharing drives a lot of how meetings are conducted. Presentation about the topic. In the ideas that people are going to listen, they're going to change. They're going to be like, Oh yeah, that's right. Totally like building height to street width. Like, yeah, I'm on board. Like narrow that street. Right. And then you're going to have this Q and a part or this like space for some time, a lot of for comments and people are like, we want a wide street, right? Like keep our wide street and we want like one story buildings. And then, you know, you as the planner are like, we failed. Like, our presentation sucked. And the thing is that it's not really that the presentation sucked, it's that expectation that you're going to change people by way of this transfer of knowledge, like, just like that, is not realistic, right? That's just not how it works. And, um, it's also kind of not fair, you know, you're like really asking a lot of people, I think, like, you know, fundamentally change a conception that they have about streets or sidewalks or, you know, building heights or whatever. So the way we approach it is more knowledge producing, so we don't engineer an outcome in the process. So we have people build models of their favorite childhood memory. No memory is right or wrong. It's not like it's competition. And then in the second activity, we have people build an ideal space or place. We're not engineering that either. We're not saying like, okay, and it needs to have this and it needs to have this and he said that. We might prompt them and say, Here's some things to think about. But those are very gentle, you know, prompts, you know, kind of sub prompts. So it's like, build your ideal community. Oh, so we did one recently with the national park service for the rivers, trails and conservation assistance program staff. And we had them build their first memory of landscape, and then we had them build their ideal park. And the, but the prompts, the little, just an example of like these gentle prompts, it was build your ideal park, but then think about the connections to and from the park and what surrounds the park. So it's not just like park, you know, floating off in the ether, but like, it's actually anchored within a place. And you're thinking about how people get to and from that place and, um, and that was enough, right? I think that's enough. So that's as far as we go. Um, but I think that's, that's the main difference. The fundamentally is at the end of the day, our approach is knowledge producing versus knowledge sharing. And so we're, it's, we're, We're from the get go. We're saying you are going to produce knowledge for us and we're going to produce knowledge for you and you guys are going to create together and produce knowledge together and produce new knowledge that didn't exist before. That's a big, big difference versus the traditional approaches like we're the experts. We're the planners, we know, we've got this knowledge, which we do, and that maybe is something we can talk about later, but I do think there is a point at which you can ask too much of the community when it comes to their input, and where we as experts, I don't know, I don't want to call it, maybe not experts, but like, you know, practitioners, where it is important for us to come in and be like, okay, here's where our skills are important to you, so. I'll just, I'll jump in. I'll just answer this. So I think once we start working at a scale, that's where I feel like it's too much to ask of everyday people. There are people out there who do community engagement where they'll introduce scale with residents. I just feel like, you know, that's where we, as designers, people who've been trained to do this, that's where we step in. It's hard for everyday residents to be creative and work at a scale at the same time.

James Rojas:

Yeah, I think scale is really tricky. Cause you get these like little Lego models that are just tiny.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah. Yeah.

James Rojas:

Well, everything, everything right by the floor and people"what does that mean?", you know, I think what we had to do is we had to like allow people to bring themselves into the space. It's whatever floats your boat, work with that.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah.

James Rojas:

You know, so like, so you,make it people that love bikes, people that love cars, bring it all in. Because there isn't any of this like Pure one issue that people are just going to go through a meeting about, right? They're going to have all the issues that go with this, with themselves to that meeting. You want to allow that type of synergistic ideas flow into the process. So people feel like, oh yeah, I've been heard because I can talk about, I can, I can build more trashcan because I want to see more trash pick ups or something.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah.

James Rojas:

This whole process, right? So, oh no, you can't talk about that, that's another meeting.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and it seems like the reason why, well, one of the reasons why this, this approach works so well, um, certainly better than traditional engagement approaches is because of the way it, like, abstracts space, like it abstracts ideas, and that allows, uh, participants to, um, to connect with a part of their cognition or a part of their experience. That, um, they're not necessarily invited or encouraged to connect with in more traditional engagement approaches.

John Kamp:

Absolutely.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah.

John Kamp:

Yeah. I mean, we were talking about this earlier today, this morning about, um, feeling and feel and the feel of a place, you know, and how that's so overlooked in planning discourse, planning education. Planning as a practice. You know the one of the the people at the book talk this morning And she said, you know, those are considered like bells and whistles. Those are like fluff, you know the the feel of a place. So that's considered fluff, but it really isn't I mean, you know, you,think about like the places that you like to be in Urban places that you like. They don't have to be urban, but let's, let's take urban because we have so many bad examples in the US of places that just get the feeling totally wrong. Um, you know, that, that says to me that this is really important. If, if, if our minds gravitate towards these spaces and places where we feel really good in these spaces, spaces and places. Then feeling and the feel of place really matter. And James always talks about this, how we get the use right, but the feeling wrong. Like that's a lot of what American infrastructure is.

James Rojas:

I think also planning is kind of evolving because for probably the past 100 years, it's always been about highest and best use. We were on this big production mode. We're going to build it, we're going to build a factory. We're going to build a skyscraper. We're going to build all these things to really facilitate production. But now we see that after COVID, a lot of stuff just doesn't work. These numbers, these things we build, become obsolete. So we're stuck with these giant, we're stuck with these white elephants that, well it worked for, you know, you pass by an old factory and you think, how did it even work? You had all these random buildings, but it was a function and it worked, and, but now it's gone, it's obsolete, and how do we take it from there? But I think now that cities are a lot more, people are a lot more flexible, and really in tune with their feelings and their lifestyle that they look at Portland or Denver or Austin as a destination place to want to want to live in, but it's based on how they feel there. It's not be like our parents probably thought, well, I'm going to work in a factory in Pittsburgh because with a job in Southern or go there or Detroit or go to this place. And now it's very different decisions we make now. So what kind of planning tools do we have in this day nature really capture what cities want to achieve.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah, that's so interesting. My previous job before this was as a municipal planner for like a pretty small town, kind of an ex urban, rural ish, smaller, smaller town. And most cities in Oregon are small. It's like 75 percent of Oregon cities are less than 5, 000 residents. Um, and something that I got kind of obsessed with when I was working there was this idea of like a small town feel. Um, cause every, every engagement we would do every time we would talk to people and we would say, you know, what, what is it that you like about the city? Like, what, what needs to like, stay here? Like, what, what, what do we need to hold on to? And everybody would say like, Oh yeah, the small town feel, but nobody could define it. Like I would, I would follow up and I would say like, okay, what do you mean by that? And they're like, Oh, you know, like the, the people and you know, it's, you know, The community, right? And nobody could really define it. And so I got kind of obsessed with like, what does this mean? Like, what does small town feel mean? And it seems like, like what you're describing is a way to sort of access that definition to access that, that meaning beyond like some kind of like Dictionary definition, right? Or some kind of like, encyclopedia entry.

John Kamp:

Yeah, I think so. You know, we have people build models of their ideal neighborhood, um, of their ideal city. They tend to build something that is akin to kind of a small town within a larger area. I think that's generally what people do. So, they want a place that's walkable. They want a place that's connected. connected in the sense of, you know, connected streets, connected sidewalks and all that, but also connected in the sense that they know people, there's a sense of community in, in the neighborhood. They want trees, they want, um, you know, all the things I guess we would think of as being part of like an urban village.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah.

John Kamp:

And they, that's what most people want. Yet, the built environment that we keep giving them is not that at all. Um, we have very few examples in the U. S. of like, of spaces and places that fit that bill. Uh, most of what we build is, is, is sprawl. And I, we were just in Colorado, in Denver, um, and you know, the place is sprawling. It's like, there's all this grassland in the east of Denver and it's just like, alright, well I guess we'll just do it. So I'm gonna go ahead and just fill this with houses. And part of me is like, okay, A, you know, the environmentalist in me, just the ecologist, whatever it is, it's like, oh my God, this is so wrong. Then also like, you know, the urbanist in me is like, this is so wrong because you can't, you're now we're like, those places are going to be, they're baked in now. Now it's like very hard to change once those are built. It's like very hard to change them. And I'm like, God, we're still doing this after all these years, we're still doing this. Another thing is we do all these workshops and people don't build that like they don't want that. They want this like if they work with their hands and they're tapping into what they really want, which is that's part of our work is, you know, people talk about they want. It's very different from if they build what they want and when they build what they want, they're really accessing more of their creative, emotional side and talking and access is more of the rational side in general. I mean, that's, that's very like, but in general, that's what happens. So when they work with their hands and they build a community, they build this walkable place. But then they might think, well, what I want is more square footage. I want this big house and I want this. When they think about it and when they talk about it. Um, and I think there's a real disconnect between what people think they want and what they feel they want. Right. And we don't give people the tools to express that at all. And that's partly what we're trying to do with our work is give people the tools to express what they feel about a place and not, I think this kind of goes back to what we were saying earlier about feel, the feel of a place. People, planners writing it off as kind of fluff or like, Oh, those are the, that's like that nice little add on you can put to a place, but to not discount that, you know, it's not be like a feeling, like, that's what you feel like. Uh, that doesn't matter. You know, that does, that does matter. I mean, that's like a lot of your existence is how you feel in places. And if you feel like not so great in most of the places you're in, that's not, that's not a good life.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah, and I mean, there's so many like studies that have come out recently, well semi recently, that talk about, you know, like commuting is actually detrimental to your health as much as like a heart attack. It's like the the built environment can physically cause harm to your mental and physical state And yet we keep building it the same way.

John Kamp:

We keep doing it.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Um But I also find it so fascinating too, of do people realize as they're doing it of like, Oh, I'm building something that I actually would have been kind of against if somebody had described it to me, you know, it's, they may not be like, like density, but it could be like, well, you have to have a little bit of density to get this walkability or, um, How do you sort of bridge that gap between the, like, thinking and the feeling? Or do they even realize that that's what's happening?

James Rojas:

Yeah, I don't think they really realize it.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah.

James Rojas:

This is what they want a place to feel like for them.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Mm.

James Rojas:

So they don't really make, it's hard for them to kind of say, Oh yeah, that was what the plan was trying to get at. You want, you want them to kind of establish that on their own.

John Kamp:

Mm hmm.

James Rojas:

Oh yeah, this is what, this is what I want. And they want it to be this way. And now it's their world, you know, and then, okay, yeah, maybe we need to have narrow streets and smaller apartments or more density, but I think they just, it's almost, it's making them kind of come to that self realization.

John Kamp:

Yeah. So we're never trying to engineer, I just think I mentioned this earlier, but you know, for us, we're not trying to engineer any kind of outcome and we're also making it, by way of the process we use, get it so that, the participants are coming to these conclusions themselves and we facilitate them making connections that they might not have made before. So we do this activity where we have people pull out the recurring themes of the models that they build. We don't tell them what the themes are. We're not like, okay, so we as expert planners, we see this, we want them to do it. So we facilitate that process. So they come to that realization on their own like, oh, we actually have a lot in common. Like we, we built somewhat different neighborhoods, but there are all these things that these neighborhoods have in common. These are shared core values that we have despite the fact that we're from all different places and different backgrounds and that kind of thing. So it's not us saying like, you guys actually have a lot in common, right? It's them coming to that realization by way of us facilitating. moving them through this, this process. And then they come out of that process a bit transformed. Like, Oh, wow. Like I care about those things. I, I thought I cared about, you know, the fact that the Amazon delivery didn't come on time, but like, it doesn't really matter. Like what matters is all these other things, friends, family, trees, nature, walkability, connectivity. Like, these are the things that really matter. Um, so yeah.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

I remember, uh, I mentioned this before we started recording, but, uh, in one of the cities that I worked in, uh, James had come and done his Place It!, um, event with us for our, um, 20 year visioning process, which is like the perfect type of project for that. Cause it's, it was the start of our, our whole thing of like, what do we want to see the community be in the next 20 years? And I remember. It wasn't any of the planners. It wasn't, um, any of the facilitators, but somebody just goes after we were, you know, reporting out of, you know, our, um, I think it was like our favorite childhood memory and he goes, Oh, everyone's got like some sort of form of water in there. And so we all like, and everyone's like looking around and going, Oh, that's right. And so it's like, then we sort of realized this collective, like, Oh, everyone really values being near water or some sort of water feature being around them.

John Kamp:

Right.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Um, that sort of thing.

John Kamp:

Absolutely.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Um, but it didn't come from the planners, it didn't come from James, it didn't come from any of the facilitators.

John Kamp:

Yeah, it wasn't like a planner, it was like, let's talk about water.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah.

John Kamp:

And why water's important.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah.

John Kamp:

You know, it's like, that wasn't it at all. I mean, I think the biggest thing for, well, not the biggest thing, but you know, one of the things that we, we're always trying to do with our work is ultimately change how spaces and places are are made, or redesigned. And that's like the hardest part because over the past however many years that we've been doing this, you see this recurring theme of a real disconnect between what's getting built and what people are building in these workshops. So they're building, like we were saying earlier, they're building these walkable places that might have that small town feel that you're talking about. But we're building. places that are not walkable at all. And if they are walkable, the feeling might not be that great. Like they might, you know, they might have the right width, the side right, quote unquote, with a sidewalk and the street's not too wide. And, you know, they've got their crosswalks, they've got all these things, but then they still kind of feel half baked. You know, they don't, there's something off or missing with them. So that's always like the nagging, um, feeling that I have with the work we do. And especially when we go to these places where you see so much new development and you're just like, oh my god, this development is the same kind of development we were doing in the 70s and we're still doing it today and we're moving farther and farther away from these healthy, walkable, connected places. Um, and so that feels discouraging at times. And you're just like, how is this happening?

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

It's like every town USA, you bring that up a lot Shelly, where it's like you could be in different cities in the United States and yet it feels the same.

James Rojas:

Oh yeah.

John Kamp:

Especially outside the urban cores.

James Rojas:

Yeah, I think also you're really trying to target the small town feeling. It's really kind of a code word for a multi sensory experience.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah.

James Rojas:

I think that's what people want. A childhood memory is why it sticks is because it's multi sensory.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Mm. Mm hmm. A

James Rojas:

kid was At the beach, with his family, swim in the ocean, look at the waves, smelling the water, smelling the sea salt. It's multi sensory. So the more senses you pack into a place, the more people like it, remember it. You know, and I think that's something that's really important. If it's multi sensory, you can really pack all your senses in there because you're feeling safe. You know, you're safe, healthy, and physical. Oh yeah, that's what it felt like. You know, some people realize that. So their senses can be free to experience the wind, or the smell, or the visuals, where people think about a city, you're stuck in a car, you're stuck in concrete, you're stuck in, you have a very limited range of sense that you can explore. If you're a woman, it might be dangerous, so therefore you just shut down when you walk down the street. That's why I think a lot of our workshops, a lot of our clients are women, because they can really talk about these multi sensory experiences and how they navigate the city from that perspective. Where an engineer said, well, it's just getting from point a to point b in your car. You shouldn't have these experiences.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah, that is so interesting.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

So interesting.

Shelley Denison:

That when you're in a car, your experience of the city is always the same. Which is the experience of the inside of your car.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah. Yeah, that is really interesting.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

We, one of our other episodes talked a little bit about like women in transportation and how women need, the use of transportation is drastically different. Well, not drastically. It tends to be more different than the average like worker who's just using it for their commuting, 9 to 5, where um, This woman, or any sort of caregiver, is like taking the stroller with them onto the bus. They're going to doctor's appointments. They're going to all these various different things, but when we talk about like transportation or like peak periods, it's always on the commute and it just sort of leads into the fact of engaging as many people as possible because you can get the full scale of what's going on.

John Kamp:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's also what we're trying to do in the work is level the playing field so that anyone and everyone can participate, right? So there isn't some, any kind of barrier to entry in terms of you have to have some sort of planning background or design background or you're comfortable with public speaking. Um, or you, you know, you have this kind of institutional, institutional knowledge to be able to navigate the whole process and the system. You know, in a lot of towns, historically, you've had these kinds of pillars of knowledge and these people who really know how to navigate the whole public participation process. And San Francisco is kind of like, I feel like that's like the epicenter of, of that, you know, where you have these people who are retired, well to do, educated, and they're very engaged in local politics and they know exactly how to navigate the system. And then you have all these people who just don't, they don't know how they don't have the time. Um, they've never done it before. It's intimidating. They don't want to go up against those kinds of neighbors. So what we're trying to do is take that potential for conflict out and level the playing field. So the folks who have been really heavily involved can still be involved. But it's like you're bringing them down to a certain level and bringing the people who have been involved up to that level. So they're on a level playing field. So it's not that we're saying, no, no, you can't participate anymore. It's just saying, like, we're all going to build these models together. And no, no memories will be better than another. And no team's model of their ideal space or place is going to be better than another. We're going to gain value from all of them, and going back to what I was saying about knowledge sharing versus knowledge producing, we're all going to produce knowledge together. And so that's a big part of what we're doing, what we're trying to do, and what I think happens. Because we're engaging people with their hands and their senses and not through language. Um, and so the language part can be a real barrier for people, not just for people whose first language isn't English. Um, and we talked, you know, I asked the question today at, during the keynote about how many people like speaking in public. And maybe there were some, there were more hands today than normally, but you know, given the size of the group, it was probably about the same percentage. 3 percent raised their hand, maybe 4%. Most people hate speaking in public. So, Another thing that we're doing with our work is making it so people can participate without having to speak in public and without having to speak against a neighbor or even against, like, council people or, you know, these people who are sitting up around this, you know, this, this arrangement in this very formal way and it feels very intimidating. Um, and in most meetings you're expected to, like, go up and, like, Tell them what you, I mean, that's like a lot to ask. Most people are like, I'm not doing that. So it's funny that we've set things up. The process has been set up for people to do this thing that they hate. But then it's kind of baked in and assumed that, well, if you really care, you'll get around this thing you hate, public speaking, and do it, right? You'll force yourself to do it. But then the end result is that A, a lot of people are just not going to do it. B, some people will do it and they'll be horrified and terrified of it, and C, what most likely happens is that only the people who are comfortable with doing it will speak and no one else will, and that's not helpful. And then you'll get the same responses, the same answers, the same feedback, and then the general conclusion within the planning world is, well, that was a waste of time, because it probably was a waste of time, because of how it was done, the community engagement has been a waste of time.

James Rojas:

It's probably the same people who show up to every meeting.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Shelley Denison:

Oh yeah.

James Rojas:

And they could predict exact thing they'll say.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah, we all know. Yep. We know those people.

Shelley Denison:

Uh huh. Yeah, and they are certainly not demographically representative of, their community.

John Kamp:

Right.

James Rojas:

Yeah, but I think to your point about transportation is, you know, transportation is kind of shifting because again, you know, it's all based on work. How do we build better transit for that? So the other trips never mattered, but I think now it's changing. Okay, you know when I worked at LA Metro 20 years ago, 30 years ago, we didn't even, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't consider bikes Legit. They weren't even considered. They were for kids. So why should we fund bike lanes? It's for kids. It's really been kind of a hard sell to change that whole, you know, way of thinking. Because that's kind of what's, that's been baked in. That, you know, it's always based on work.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Well, and then when you ask somebody to describe their favorite childhood memory, maybe bicycles then come up a lot more.

John Kamp:

Yeah, bicycles, uh, free range stuff, a sense of freedom. A sense of risk, I think, is part of it, you know, like, oh, I remember when I was able to bike past this certain point that I hadn't been allowed to bike past before. And people really remember those experiences, and they love those.

James Rojas:

Yeah, because it's multi sensory.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah.

James Rojas:

You're on this bike, you're moving around, you're exploring, you're wind hits your face, you're nervous, all these things are happening at the same time. So you remember that, really.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

I still like when I bike because I don't, I don't bike all the time, but when I do, I get like this giddy feeling like as a kid that I would, because it's, it's just like this natural instinct of like, oh my gosh, I'm going so fast, like the freedom.

John Kamp:

You saying that I'm like, oh yeah, that feeling. I, I know that feeling you're talking about and I want that. I want to be able to bike and experience that. When we do these workshops and we have people build their ideal transit system or their ideal rail line or their ideal transit trip, what they build is an experience. They don't build the getting from point A to B and like, okay, so here it is. And you get there really fast. Okay. So getting there fast is part of it. But part of it is that they're like, well, I have this awesome experience from start to finish from the walk from where I live to the station. To the trip to the walk from the station or the bike ride or whatever from the station to where I'm going. And Likewise when we have them build their first memory of a mobility experience That memory is never. Oh, it's so awesome one time. I got from this one place this one place really fast.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah.

John Kamp:

That was it.

James Rojas:

Or I got school on time.

John Kamp:

I got school on time. And it was great. Right. It's, no, what they build is an experience. This feeling, like we were talking about earlier, this sense of discovery, this sense of like risk, this, um, trees, shade, uh,

James Rojas:

friends.

John Kamp:

I'm with my friends, yeah, we're, we're biking down the street and it's so much fun and I can feel the wind in my face and like all that. And, and those are the kinds of the things that we need to be thinking about and folding into how we design transit, how we design streets, um, how we're thinking about a transit trip, how awesome is it gonna be?

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Mm-hmm.

John Kamp:

Right? Not just this sort of baseline, like, okay, yeah, you'll be able to go to this bus stop, you know, be able to this bus and it will take you to where you wanna go. Okay, great. But like, make it awesome.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah. Yeah.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Uhhuh. Yeah.

John Kamp:

Um, so I mean, this is an interesting conversation'cause I think part of. What we need to be doing and having these conversations this morning, and we're talking about feel and feeling and all these things and experience, is we have to be pushing the envelope and turning the dial on, on that. How do we get the people who don't care to take transit, to bike, to walk, to do all these things? Like, that's who we need to, that's what we need to be designing for, right? So we make it. So that it's just the most pleasant, funnest, most convenient way to get around.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah.

John Kamp:

And then you just do it.

James Rojas:

Yeah, one time I did a workshop with women in biking. And they build all these beautiful bike lanes, but they had restrooms every corner.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah. Uh huh.

James Rojas:

And I was thinking like, you never hear about restrooms and bike paths.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

No.

James Rojas:

And for women that's probably a big important issue.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Mm hmm.

James Rojas:

But yet it's never really talked about.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Yeah. I love the ability of it just Being so open ended that you get so many and it's kind of goes to this topic of like planners as being the technical experts. And yeah, we like are trained in this stuff. We have education in our background, but like every person is experiencing something differently.

John Kamp:

Right.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

So like I would probably have never thought about putting a bathroom along the transit or along the bike lane, but that absolutely makes sense. And it's, It's such an interesting way to get feedback from people.

James Rojas:

Historically, we used to have people build their ideal city at the first prompt. And not the childhood memory. But we'd get so many planners that would build their TOD, their BLT, their LRT.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Uh huh.

James Rojas:

You know, so we wanted to get something a little more personal that they couldn't do that. So the childhood memory kind of popped up as a The prompt. And it works really well. It unleashes all this other knowledge too.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Right.

James Rojas:

People have a sense of space and who they are, their identity. You know, that they can transfer to their adult. I tell people after they build their first prompt, that this memory is built. It's a feeling you had. It's your DNA. It's your DNA that's going to be planted. It's your intangible that you bring with you wherever you go. You're going to look for that water. You're going to look for that shade. You're going to look for all these things you had when you were a kid. Now they realize, oh yeah, city planning is not just brick and mortar, but it's also this emotion that I'd be into it, that I'd look for.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah.

John Kamp:

Yeah, and we do these sensory based site explorations, and these sensory based walking tours, and building off of what you're saying, what we're all saying, is with the site explorations, what we'll have people do is we'll go to, well, like the grounds of whatever, like, so here, you know, we'd have people explore like the grounds of this hotel or, um, if we're at, like we did one in Minnesota recently at this training center. So we had people explore the grounds of this training center and we had them find a place that they like, use their senses to find a place that they like just hang out there and just kind of soak it all in with their senses. It all sounds very like, you know, hippie dippie and ridiculous. But it is incredible the results that come out of this because we meet back and then we go to each spot that each person's picked and they tell us why they picked it. And kind of going back to what you were saying about how it's, you know, we have this open ended process and you learn all these things and you're like, I never would have thought of that. This is exactly what happens with these where people pick kind of radically different spaces and places depending on What makes them feel comfortable? What makes them feel calm? And those are very relative you I mean before doing these activities. I really had like this idea that well, everyone just wants to like sit underneath a tree and

Shelley Denison:

Yeah.

John Kamp:

that's what you want to do just like comfortable spot underneath the tree away from traffic and away from noise, but we did this one in Minnesota and Some people wanted to hear the whirr of the air conditioner unit.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Oh, interesting.

John Kamp:

Because that was comforting. There was a woman from Alabama and she was like, the whirr of the air conditioning is like such a sound in the south because of the heat. And she's like, so it's like this comfort thing. Whereas to me, I hate the sound of air conditioning. You know, it's like, um, it just drives me kind of nuts. And. People wanted to be close to where they could hear traffic, and some people didn't, and all these other things. And so you realize, like, you bring so many of your own assumptions into a process. Like, let's say we were going to redesign that. You bring all of these assumptions that you have into that process. And until you do an activity like that, you don't realize, like, Oh, I just made, like, all these assumptions about how people want to use the space.

Shelley Denison:

Right, exactly.

James Rojas:

And plus also you, you put new values to, you put a new value to that space.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Mm-hmm

James Rojas:

Because now it's not only you, but it's like other people's stories are in that space.

John Kamp:

Mm-hmm

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Right.

James Rojas:

It might have been like nothing but, oh yeah, that person liked that tree because that was a tree they had in their farm, or that person like that, you know, that view because it was something that they could see and talk about, you know? So, so now you have more value in this, would it be a kind of a. neutral ground.

John Kamp:

It is. It's really true. Yeah. I mean, you can really heighten like that though. So the grounds of that conference training area in Minnesota, I mean, I'd never been there. I grew up in Minnesota. I'd never been in this place before. Um, but now oddly I have this kind of like, random. It's not random, but this sort of odd affection for the grounds of this place, because we did this activity with people and I have these memories now of these different spaces and places that people pick. So, you know, as an activity for getting people to see the value in a place, it's really effective, right? So there might be a space or a place that's neglected or undervalued or people have a misconception about it, and you can do this kind of activity with them, and they'll suddenly be like, Oh, I actually see the value, I see the potential in this place, I see the value in this place, you know, like all these things that they wouldn't have seen before because you've done the sensory activity and you had people share their stories about why they picked the space that they picked.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

And it's like, builds relationships too, where I think we've really struggled a lot for the last few years of people feeling lonely and this sort of, without having to participate at that, what you're saying, like the normal public comment, Where it's like I have to be there and you know, maybe Talk to somebody who's like mad or there's conflict.

John Kamp:

right.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

You're you're starting to create these relationships without any sort of without any conflict and you're building Like the values set together as a group or as a community.

John Kamp:

Right. Yeah, again, you're you're you're producing that knowledge together and you're you're unearthing those values together.

Shelley Denison:

Well, thank you so much. This was, this was such a good conversation.

John Kamp:

I hope so.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah.

John Kamp:

It was really fun.

Shelley Denison:

Yeah.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

Oh, good. I'm glad.

John Kamp:

Yeah. I mean, I learned, I've learned things in the process.

Shelley Denison:

Good. I'm glad.

Mary Heberling-Creighton:

We shared knowledge.

Shelley Denison:

Shared knowledge production.

John Kamp:

Yeah. It was very like sharing all[fade out].