James Rojas sent me an email that I thought would be of interest to the ABCD and Youth group, so Im posting it below with his blessing. His website www.placeit.org has more information about the workshops he facilitates.

-Mina Brown

I facilitated a great interactive workshop at Franklin High School's parent teacher night, in Los Angeles. It was powerful to watch Latino high school students take charge of the urban planning process and walk their parents through the interactive exercise to create a better community. These students explained the essence of planning to a largely Spanish-speaking audience. This was done with the use of thousands of small objects and pieces of construction paper, which helped stimulate dialogue and creative thinking.

A few weeks prior I had facilitated an interactive workshop with the Franklin High School students. This workshop investigated how to design and plan their ideal walking street, which was part of a project to create access to the Cornfields Park. The students enjoyed the exercise, which stimulated their creative thinking to investigate the urban landscape around the Cornfields from Highland Park to Downtown LA. With this education they were later able to facilitate a similar workshop with their parents--with stunning results.

The participants were asked to improve the neighborhood, community or city they come from, by any means they saw fit. They were given no constraints, and there were no right or wrong answers. This made the planning exercise accessible to everyone and allowed for maximum creativity. Plus, who has not thought about how they would improve their community!

The participants had twenty minutes to build a model on construction paper using hair rollers, buttons, yarn, shiny beads, blocks and thousands of other small items. These materials help the participants re-create their personal experience in the built environment: green yarn becomes grass, blue poker chips form the edges of the ocean, and hair rollers shape a skyline of apartments or office buildings.

By using their hands to shape these spaces, the participants manipulate their relationship with the built environment. As they rearrange and move objects on the model, they create and discover relationships between objects and activities, thus creating small vignettes of urban life.

After the twenty minutes were up the participants had one minute to explain their model. Since people interject their own personal experience and memories of place the explanations become very interesting with the interjection of random yet relevant ideas.

With the help of the students, the adults as well as a few children were able to look inside themselves to create solutions. They tapped into memories of their favorite places, their neighborhood landscape, and new fantastic places only envisioned in their minds. These provided a rich, creative, motive for their solutions. These solutions were visualized physically through their models and briefly summarized.

I want a piata city, one four-year-old presented to the audience as he pointed to a bubble gum and other small candies. We need crosswalks in my neighborhood, as the woman pointed to a series of Popsicle sticks which formed a crosswalk. I want a bike path down North Figueroa that connects the Carneceria, beauty shop, many other small shops as well as Metro station, as he pointed to a string of shiny beads which formed his bike path. We need a park in north of Figueroa because all the parks are south of Figueroa, as the woman pointed to a green yard. I wish all the buildings had beautiful skylights to bring in the sunshine, a woman said as she pointed to a fantastical structure created with green mess. I want a zoo for the children of the community. They need to learn about animals, a man stated as he pointed to an elaborate maze created with rollers and cocktail stirrers that housed animals. We need to beautify our community with green, a woman said as she pointed to an elaborate mini model of Highland Park. In her model pink yarn represented the Arroyo Seco and yellow the bridges which crossed it. She used a small piece of bark to simulate Debs Park. These were just a few of the comments from the twenty or so people who participated in the exercise, which were by and large said in Spanish.

The array of design approaches participants used to solve the design challenge was fascinating. Some approaches were very conceptual, while others were literal. Each participant captured the essences of how to improve their community. Given the opportunity of approaching the topic from their perspective, participants were able to shape the community as they saw fit. Everyone brought in their baggage to the exercise, which made all the models very different in scope, scale, concept, and details.

It was nice to see a multi-generational planning process where the whole family could work together to find solutions to improve their community. We need to train all students to become planning ambassadors to facilitate workshops. We also need to create equity in the planning process through the visual arts.

updated by @ron-dwyer-voss: 10/25/16 02:06:45PM