Cardboard Cities and Big Ideas
How a Group of Middle Schoolers Reimagined Cities One Piece of Tape at a Time
By Ryan Leighton, Communications Director | Maine Arts Commission
On the second floor of the Lewiston Public Library, a city was under construction.
Not the usual kind of city with zoning boards, public hearings, and budget meetings. This one was being built with cardboard, duct tape, markers, glue sticks, and the kind of imagination that only seems to flourish when adults step aside and let kids take the lead.
Welcome to the Spatial Design Academy.
Originally developed through the University of Southern Maine by landscape architect and urban planner Addy Smith-Reiman and architect Gretchen Rabinkin, the program introduces young people to architecture, planning, and the built environment through hands-on design challenges that encourage curiosity over perfection.
The Lewiston workshop was one of five Maine Creates pilot projects funded through a partnership between Side x Side and the Maine Arts Commission. The initiative supports community-based arts experiences that strengthen connection, creativity, and belonging while helping communities imagine new possibilities for the future.
The premise is simple: ask middle schoolers to design a city.
The results? Slightly chaotic. Highly creative. Occasionally brilliant.
And somewhere in the room, someone inevitably proposed a giant slide.
From City Planning to Cardboard Cities
Addy didn’t arrive at this work by accident.
Before launching the Spatial Design Academy, she worked in landscape architecture and urban planning and served as executive director of the Portland Society for Architecture. Along the way, she noticed something surprising: many adults struggled to participate in conversations about how communities are shaped.
Public meetings can feel intimidating. Planning documents can feel inaccessible. And discussions about growth often become polarized before anyone has a chance to ask deeper questions.
What if those conversations started earlier? What if young people learned not only how cities are built, but that they have a voice in shaping them?
That question eventually became the foundation of the Spatial Design Academy.
“What’s important to your place? What’s important to your neighbors? Where do you live? How do you get where you need to go?” she asked the students.
Big questions. Especially when you’re holding a hot glue gun.
The workshop encouraged participants to think beyond individual buildings and consider how entire communities function. Where would people gather? How would they travel? What would make a city feel welcoming?
As cardboard towers began rising across tables, students talked about everything from transportation systems to public spaces. A few carefully measured and planned. Others embraced a more experimental approach that could best be described as architectural jazz.
Both methods were equally valid.
Thinking With Their Hands
At a time when so much attention is focused on screens, algorithms, and whatever new technology arrives next Tuesday, Addy wanted students to reconnect with something more tangible.
“If we keep chasing technology and don’t go back to what can you make with cardboard and what can you make with duct tape, and how do you then ask why, I think that’s the critical piece,” she said.
The room reflected that philosophy.
There were no perfect answers. Just students building, questioning, revising, and occasionally discovering that a structure they were absolutely certain would stand upright had other ideas.
More Than Model Cities
The goal wasn’t really the cardboard city. It was what happened afterward.
Addy hopes students leave the workshop looking at the world differently.
Why is that building there?
Who decided where the road goes?
Why does a park belong in one neighborhood and not another?
How do communities get made in the first place?
Those are the kinds of questions that transform young people from observers into participants.
As the afternoon wrapped up, miniature city blocks stretched across the floor.
Some featured soccer stadiums. Some featured trains. Some featured ideas that would almost certainly give a city planner a mild headache.
All of them reflected something important: imagination.
And for a few hours inside the Lewiston Public Library, imagination was doing exactly what it does best—helping young people envision a future and realize they might have a hand in building it.
