Incorporating Immigrants’ on-the-ground Knowledge and Lived Experiences into the Urban Planning Process

April 18, 2017

Before the interactive urban planning workshop started, children had begun tinkering with the 1,000s of small objects placed in front of them. This pre-workshop tinkering put the participants at ease and was a great start to the high-energy planning activity, organized by University of Oregon Professor Gerardo Sandoval and facilitated for undocumented Latinos in Eugene and Springfield, Oregon.

The exercise was made possible by a Department of Housing and Urban Development grant – awarded to the Lane Council of Governments and the University of Oregon’s Sustainable Cities Initiative – to improve civic engagement with Oregon’s under-represented communities. The workshop was an excellent opportunity to introduce the Place It method of interactive tools to this much-needed dialogue.

A local high school cafeteria was transformed into an urban planning studio where participants sat alongside their children at tables as part of the workshop set up.  Workshop facilitators intentionally invited children to participate in the process to give children a voice in the urban planning process, learn that community engagement can be fun, and ease the seriousness of the planning process. More importantly, it allowed parents to spend time with their children. The community meeting was like a family gathering with constant activity as participants discussed ideas as they placed brightly colored ribbons, strings, buttons, blocks, and other objects on the table – creating a vision for their neighborhood and community.

Immigrants bring new innovative planning ideas and solutions to this country based on their prior lived experiences. Place It has developed a tool to humanize the urban planning process to uncover this knowledge by using storytelling, objects, art-making, and play. This process provides a platform that everyone can participate in regardless of typical barriers, such as language, age, ethnicity, and professional training. The method creates a safe space for immigrants and others to come together, listen, share, bond, and collaborate to find common values and generate cutting-edge ideas and solutions for their communities.

Validating immigrants’ lived experiences is a critical first step to engage them and make them feel welcome. Having them reveal who they are, where they come from, and what they value is key in building this relationship.

Many immigrants live in the shadows of our communities and are busy struggling to make ends meet, therefore they don’t have the time or access to attend public meetings. Many immigrants might feel too humble to participate in public discourse because the format is impersonal, intimidating, or they simply don’t trust government. Engaging and incorporating immigrants’ ideas requires urban planners to rethink the standard community meeting format by providing a safe space where immigrants are able to look across the room or table and see liked minded people where they can be open, forthright, and share their most intimate and personal experiences.

The Place It method assumes everyone is an urban planner and everyone has something to offer. Members of the public who participate in the planning process need to be supported in working together and in developing a shared sense of ownership over their places; this is especially important for new participants. If planning professionals want to access crucial community knowledge, they must start with an effective engagement strategy rooted in respect for difference.

Humanizing the urban planning process through storytelling.

The Place It workshop begins with storytelling because every person and place has a story. Storytelling addresses the intangible relationship participants have to place and what places mean to us. This emotional attachment to place can be a productive method to reimagine communities rather than create “not in my backyard” syndrome. These stories can be a favorite childhood memory, or what do you like about a place?

Building the story goes beyond just telling it.

How we communicate these stories is critical to building trust between city planners and immigrants. Cities have their own nonverbal spatial and visual language that residents understand and use more intuitively than words.

Integrating objects with words in the storytelling process provides immigrants multiple ways to express themselves and uncover rich spatial knowledge of place.

In a city planning context words can be static, constricting, and don’t always fully capture the emotional meaning of place. Many times at public meeting words are used to define problems, and complaints, which encourage negative feelings.  On the other hand, when participants build a story with their hands, imagination, and objects the participants enter a positive frame of mind.

Objects have material qualities such as shape, color, and texture, that help participants uncover the visual, spatial, and emotional knowledge they have about place. Objects can be a mediator between memory, emotion, imagination, and place. Building their story with objects allows participants to investigate the physical details of a place that matters and what they remember. Participants can easily transfer that rich visual and spatial knowledge of place to another place through the choosing and arrangement of objects.

Urban planners can use this information to understand the values and ideas of immigrant communities. It’s impossible to recreate the past. However, we can learn from these stories and transfer the physical spatial and material knowledge to the present.

Through sharing their stories with others, immigrants are validated, bond with one another, and build the trust need to start the collaborative planning process.

Collaboration.

Cites are collaborative by their nature and participants need to understand how their ideas impact each other.  Place It uses collaboration as a key part of its methodology because people feel better about themselves when they work together to solve problems.

After participants build and tell their story, they are placed in teams. The group is given a real-life urban planning problem to solve. Each team can solve the problem based on their on-the-ground expertise.  However, each team has to build their solutions on imaginary maps with objects. Integrating words with objects, and spatial mapping provides immigrants multiple ways to solve a problem. 

Building their solution together with objects creates innovation.

Words can sometimes be abstract and lack tangible physical clarity of an object. For example, the word park might have various meaning to different people. Participants however can place a descriptive, and emotional value to an object based on its color, shape or form.

Words, in addition, have limited flexibility in solving spatial problems collectively. A list of words, like tree, lawn, pond, and bench describe a park. However, when a park model is created with objects representing these elements the spatial mapping is highlighted and new knowledge is created.

When placed on imaginary maps, objects can serve as a vehicle to explore, describe, and negotiate the emotional, visual, and spatial nature of place. This process allows participants to quickly share and test their ideas. The creation of a collective model makes it possible for the team members to investigate the visual and spatial landscape in a direct way, with their bodies and hands, changing their viewpoint and posture, focusing and standing back, touching, and changing things. Through this process new ideas and opportunities emerged that weren’t known or visible at the beginning of the process. New connections and ideas emerge through spatial negotiations. Conversations are struck up between people commenting on the objects, values, uses, and the model itself becomes a site of political expression and debate in a playful format. The model begins to take shape and have a life all its own representing the team!

Once time is up, each team presents their solutions, usually with conviction and enthusiasm.

This exercise is designed to promote the teams’ sense of agency in the planning process. The communal nature of this process provides a platform that everyone can participate in regardless of background.

In developing a variety of solutions based on their detailed understanding of the built environment, the teams reveal social and cultural patterns central to their experiences of place. Planning professionals would not normally have access to these shaping factors if they were not from the same area or did not share the same background. The participants tap into their individual imaginations and the community’s assets to introduce inspirational ideas into the planning process.

As a wrap-up for the workshop, participants are asked to think about themes from the first and second activities. This pushes them to consider what impact the workshop will have on their perspectives on “place” going forward. When participants bring their life experiences into an open community planning process, they enjoy a greater sense of empowerment about civic participation. It also gives planners important material that will enable them to serve more community needs.

Conclusion

The Place It workshop creates a feeling of euphoria because immigrants are able to stop, look, and listen to each other and discover something about themselves, each other, and the places they value.

We live in a world in which immigrant experiences are not always highlighted or respected in the urban planning outreach process. Humanizing and relaxing the community meeting format to integrate storytelling, imagination, objects, and hands-on activities allows for all voices to be expressed in a variety of different ways. Participants personalize the planning process based on their experiences, which creates a sense of ownership and attachment to each other and place. The workshops put participants’ focus on skills crucial to urban planning, such as critical thinking, creative problem-solving, collaboration, and civic literacy. In acknowledging that they already have these skills, we validate the identities and experiences of marginalized populations. We increase the likelihood that they will engage further in civic participation, when otherwise they might have felt intimidated, fearful, or skeptical about such engagement. Urban planners have a social responsibility to engage with all members of community because their contributions are needed in shaping the future of the Oregon.

Submitted by James Rojas. James Rojas is an urban planner, community activist, and artist that developed this outreach method that uses storytelling, objects, and art-making play to increase community participation for underrepresented communities. He has facilitated over 500 workshops across the country.  He has collaborated with municipalities, non-profits, educational institutions, museums, and galleries to introduce urban planning to the public.

Contact James Rojas at jamestrojas@gmail.com or visit the web site www.placeit.org