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

THE ORIGINS OF THE IDEAS in this book are deeply personalwhich makes sense, because cities are deeply personal, too. Although the majority of Dream Play Build combines our perspectives as true coauthors, we wanted to take a moment in the beginning to share our individual experiences and motivations. We hope our stories inspire you to think about how your interests and experiences might inform your own endeavors to create more-effective modes of community engagement, and, by extension, better cities and places.

Jamess Story: The Personal Roots of Place It!

Growing up, I wanted a dollhouse, but in those days boys didnt play with dolls. The second-best option, blocks, my family couldnt afford. So instead, my grandmother gave me a shoebox full of recycled objects. Out of the box I created two rooms, and with the objects I created a sofaout of scraps of aluminumand a carpet of clear plastic, which I placed the sofa on (see remember not just the finished product but also the process of creation itself: I was able to think about space and shape it, which felt empowering and inspired me to make more.

P-1. An imagined version of Jamess first model-building endeavors, which he explored with a shoebox and simple found objects. (Illustration by John Kamp.)

Around that time, I had become fascinated with looking at Los Angeles through the rear window of my parents car. I saw hills, mountains, old windmills, cows, and the patterns created by the rows of orange groves. Yet I also started to see change. I saw hilltops disappear, new skyscrapers overtake City Hall, and freeways rip through my neighborhood. Modernism was removing my favorite landmarks. While I felt a sense of real loss, LAs rapid urban transformation became my next muse.

Moving from the confines of the shoebox, I expanded my endeavors out to the bedroom itself and the yard just beyond. For hoursI would lay out streets and buildings on the bedroom floor; out of mud in the yard, I would sculpt and mold hills and imaginary rivers, placing little homemade buildings in and around the landscape. My first attempts to build a city involved just a wash of random objects from my shoebox, all jumbled together. Then I discovered how streets help to organize objects into little neighborhoods. Through these early hands-on activities I started to learn that vacant spaces became buildings, big buildings replaced small ones, and landscapes always changed. And a satisfaction came from transforming my urban experiences and aspirations into these small dioramas.

Most children outgrow playing with toys, but I didnt. Building small cities became my hobby as I continued to find objects to express architecture and landscapes in new ways. I also started capturing the urban experiences from cities I would visit; I became fascinated with San Franciscos hills, and, after a family trip there, I spent months building cities on slopes.

After high school, I studied interior design at Woodbury University. This program helped me express my creativity with new tools, teaching me to understand peoples emotional connection to space through color, texture, and form. I was particularly fascinated by how space could be manipulated to create a certain feeling. However, after I graduated I could not find a design job. Not only was the job market weak at the time, but also Latinos were scarce within the profession. Much to everyones surprise, I decided to join the army, with the promise of being stationed in Europe. In essence, it was a poor mans European vacation.

Rather than quickly visit Europe like a tourist, I had four years to immerse myself there. I was stationed in Heidelberg, Germany, and in Vicenza, Italy. During this time I visited many other cities by train and spent hours exploring them by foot. Woodburys interior design education had actually prepared me well to examine the effects of geography and urban design on how I felt in various European cities. The natural light, weather, and landscape varied from city to city, as well as how residents used spacefromHeidelbergs pink sandstone buildings to Florences warm-colored buildings. I was also fascinated by how European streets and plazas had been laid out like outdoor rooms with focal points and other creature comforts. I felt very much at home within the Italian piazzas in particular, as they recalled the boisterous public life I had known in East Los Angeles.

The backdrop to my entire experience in Europe was the liberation of not having to drive. As such, I could feel the different public spaces through my senses. It was in this way that I realized public spaces could be experienced in intimate sensory waysmuch the same way that Americans experience the private spaces of their homes.

When I ultimately chose to come back to the United States, I knew a complete 180 awaited me: Id once again be driving everywhere. Perhaps as a coping mechanism, I told myself to embrace driving like I had done with walking in Europe. However, what sounded like a convincing idea from afar proved difficult to execute once back home. Stuck in LAs traffic, my body craved the sensory-rich experiences I had had in Europe. Never being able to recreate what I had felt and experienced there, I decided to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to study urban planning and try to understand what I was not just experiencing but also feeling.