GovLove - A Podcast About Local Government · Engaging Local Government Leaders (ELGL)

Dream Play Build - Hands On Community Engagement in Clackamas County, OR

·1 hr 3 min·1 clip

Lauren Palmer introduces John Camp and Leah Fisher and sets up the conversation around Dream, Play, Build. Leah Fisher brings the Clackamas County perspective as a built and natural environment analyst. John Camp is an urban and landscape designer, founder and owner of Prairie Form, and co-author of the book with James Rojas. The episode uses that book as a doorway into hands-on community engagement. It treats play as a serious tool for making engagement more engaging, and it keeps returning to the practical side of civic work. Camp traces an early thread through Critical Mass bike rallies. He recalls being in Paris, making a playful and satirical flyer, and turning that experience into part of his undergraduate thesis on Critical Mass as a social movement. That history opens into a wider set of ideas about public space. Jane Jacobs comes up as one of the influences that helped shape that thinking. The discussion then widens again to the way cities have been organized around the car. Camp argues that cities were reshaped around automobiles rather than around human beings on foot or on bikes. That gives the conversation a sharp civic edge. The episode also touches the environmental movement. Camp notes that, at the time, a lot of the greener ideal was imagined as suburban or rural, with a wood stove and a long drive treated as the normal shape of a good life. Lauren keeps the interview moving toward how these ideas connect back to local-government work, and the episode closes with a quick music exchange. The result is a conversation that treats engagement as something you design, test, and learn from. It suits listeners who want local-government stories tied to planning, public space, and community process.

As heard by us

Community engagement works better when it is hands-on, human, and tied to how cities actually function.

GovLove frames community engagement as something built, not just scheduled, and that gives this episode its shape. John Camp and Leah Fisher talk through Dream, Play, Build, moving from John Camp’s path through public-space thinking to the practical side of making civic…

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Why you'd press play

Youll hear how playful engagement can change how people meet public space and each other.

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