How would you design your dream city? | James Rojas

Host Elise Hu introduces urban planner James Rojas’s argument that ordinary public-planning processes are democratic in theory but often ineffective in practice. Community members are confronted with unreadable maps, confusing surveys, and meetings dominated either by apathy or by a few aggressive voices. Rojas describes these meetings as either “an empty room” or “a combat zone,” with quieter participants staying silent. In the talk, Rojas says planners tend to treat the city as a deadline, measurement, set of data, or problem to solve through a polished presentation. They use technical words, maps people cannot read, numbers that confuse them, and surveys people do not complete. This approach can get the land use technically right while making the place feel wrong: planners may design streets for cars rather than humans and lack tools for capturing memories, sensory experiences, and emotional attachment to a neighborhood. Rojas says he communicates better with his hands than through public speaking, and he asks what would happen if people designed cities the way they played as children. His alternative is Place It, a hands-on method in which participants use small found and recycled objects to model memories, neighborhoods, and ideal communities instead of beginning with abstract language or formal planning documents.

Rojas traces the method to his childhood. He wanted a dollhouse, but his parents could not afford building blocks and, as he puts it, boys were not expected to play with dolls. He collected small objects such as bottle caps and popsicle sticks, received a shoebox from a governor, and built his first miniature house. He continued constructing streets, neighborhoods, and eventually cities, which led him toward city planning. As a planner, he later realized that professional practice had become too serious and analytical. Since children’s prefrontal cortexes are not fully developed, he says they explore through their senses and imagination, play without a fixed agenda, and share naturally. Rojas began laying out thousands of recycled objects in art galleries and asking visitors to build their ideal city. People stayed anywhere from five minutes to several hours, becoming creative and social in ways he rarely saw at public meetings. After hundreds of installations, he co-wrote a book to understand why the process worked. He says planners initially resisted because the method was not based on conventional measurement or data, and they worried participants might ask for impossible projects such as a launchpad to the moon. Eventually, city planners adopted the approach. Rojas’s workshops, or “play dates,” are designed for people of different ages, backgrounds, and languages.

Rojas describes the first exercise in a Place It workshop: participants have five minutes to build a favorite childhood memory with objects and are told not to explain it while building. Handling the objects helps them let go of analytical thinking and enter what he calls a creative flow state, similar to art therapy. Colors and shapes evoke personal experiences—for example, hair rollers can remind African-American women of doing hair with older relatives, while an orange maple leaf can evoke autumn in New England. Participants then explain their constructions. Their memories may involve summer camp, make-believe games, friends, or learning to ride a bike. Rojas asks what these stories share and finds that they are usually social, involving family and friends; multisensory; outdoors or connected to nature; and physically active. Nobody builds passive activities such as watching television or screen time, and nobody builds wealth, ownership, or simply getting to school on time. For Rojas, this discovery is important because people across age, income, race, and geography recognize shared desires that are hard to surface through surveys or debate. The room changes from a collection of individual opinions into a place of listening, empathy, and belonging. He argues that planning should begin with those feelings before participants discuss brick, mortar, streets, or land use.

After the childhood-memory exercise, participants work in teams for ten minutes to create ideal communities. They reuse or add objects while collaborating, negotiating, and compromising. Individual ideas intersect as objects are moved around the imagined landscape, allowing new possibilities to emerge that would be difficult to express through words, different languages, or maps. Rojas says the hundreds of visions he has witnessed are strikingly similar. People consistently build cities organized around relationships with nature and other people. Their models include walkable communities centered on family and friends, public spaces and plazas, public transportation, gardens, parks, trees, water, and varied physical activities. These features occupy the center rather than skyscrapers. Participants often turn freeways into gardens. By contrast, they do not build transactional cities dominated by office parks, freeways, or parking lots. They do not build giant suburban houses with long commutes, gated communities, or jails. Rojas says this happens because they are planning from joy rather than from fear, wealth, or survival. The objects make their values visible: people do not merely describe a preferred city but show, feel, and begin to claim it. That shift turns passive residents into active designers and gives planners a way to imagine something better instead of reproducing existing arrangements.

Rojas gives two examples of Place It influencing actual projects. In Tijuana, Mexico, many informal settlements, including Camino Verde, had been built quickly without basic infrastructure or sufficient public space. Rojas was invited to facilitate a grassroots meeting about a community center. The workshop produced ten pages of community ideas. Camino Verde received its community center, and the process also led to Casa de los Ideas, an integrated public space and library where people could read and give talks. His second example began at the Ability360 recreation and community center in Phoenix, a state-of-the-art facility used daily by people with disabilities. The nearest light-rail stations were about a mile away in either direction. Rojas notes that a mile under Phoenix’s hot sun can be dangerous for someone who cannot move quickly. He led a workshop in which people with different disabilities built stations that would work for them, then combined their proposals into shared designs. The participants became advocates, making calls and sending letters and emails to the mayor and a council member. In 2019, Phoenix built the 50th Street Light Rail Station. Its design incorporated elements from their models, including painted crosswalks, low-grade sidewalks, artwork, shade, and landscape buffers protecting pedestrians from traffic. Rojas says the process addressed specific mobility needs that traditional planning often overlooks and gave participants greater independence.

After the talk, TED curator Chloe Shasha Brooks says Rojas told her he does this work because urban planning often excludes women, people of color, and people with disabilities even though those groups are heavily affected by planning decisions. She describes him as earnest and humble. On their first call, he unexpectedly suggested that his partner, John Camp, give the TED Talk instead because Camp was more comfortable speaking publicly. Brooks spoke with Camp, a landscape and urban designer, but kept Rojas as the speaker because he originated the play methodology. At a post-event dinner in May 2026, Rojas told Brooks that his relationship with physical spaces began before his planning career. In high school, he took architecture expecting it to suit him, but disliked the technical, rule-focused instruction. He understood why those skills mattered, yet experienced buildings physically and wanted to understand their shapes “through his fingertips.” Brooks also heard a fuller account of the Ability360 workshop. Participants considered not only the station itself but the complete trip between the center and the two distant stations, including sidewalk height, crosswalks, and shade structures. She concludes that she had underestimated what could come from plastic bottle caps and hair rollers, but the project showed her that playful modeling can produce precise, real-world changes.