Dream City

Imagine Nashville is a collaborative effort to help the city identify and elevate shared values and priorities that will carry the city forward into the midcentury and beyond. The effort is purposefully inclusive by design and will involve all who have a shared interest in preserving what we love about our city while simultaneously dreaming about the future.

Central to this effort are youth, who are the future of our city. The Dream City workshop is designed to capture the input of young people in an engaging and educational way.

Carly Mecl, Y-Quest Program Director, YMCA

“The Civic Design Center's Dream City Workshop engaged all of our youth at Y-CAP Summer Camp! All of our campers were able to use their creativity through both brainstorming and hands-on creation. Youth valued the opportunity to use their voices to offer suggestions for improvement in their community.”

How It Works

The Dream City workshop is special because youth are the ones collecting their peers’ ideas. It is a youth-developed and youth-led research project to bring to light the importance of youth-centered city planning for the overall wellness of humans under 24.

During the workshop, students design and build a fictional “Dream City” that represents an ideal environment for youth. While participating youth can include anything in their Dream City, the workshop provides them with some spatial guidelines. The diagram below shows that there are specific districts they might choose to center useful resources around, like making sure to include a place to rest, sleep, and access food in the “neighborhood” section as well as incorporating recreational activities in the “park” section.

Dream by Theme

In their Dream City, the youth are instructed to choose 1 of 5 themes to focus their ideas on.

  • Opportunities for learning, being mentored, and discovering their interests

  • Art, music and creativity

  • Strong neighborhoods that each have their own unique identity

  • Inclusiveness, where people feel included, supported, and belong

  • Connectedness, where there is a perfect transportation network for youth

Once they rank and choose a theme, the youth use modeling clay and craft supplies to build their Dream Cities in 3D.

Data Collection

After the participants share their Dream City with the group, they take a survey where they give input about the current state of Nashville and what they would like to see in the future. Some of the concepts they are asked to think about during the design portion reappear in the survey, which gives students a chance to reflect on their exploration before giving their final opinion.