How would you design your dream city? | James Rojas

Elise Hu (0:03)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. City to city, we have designed processes for community input on local planning. The idea being that of course people should have a say in shaping their neighborhoods, whether it's housing, businesses, transit, or parks.

This is a clear, well-meaning, democratic idea. If only it were that easy in practice. If you have ever sat through a community meeting about a new development in your neighborhood, you probably know the feeling, the unreadable maps, the confusing surveys, the handful of loud voices while everyone else stays quiet. James Rojas, who has spent his entire career as an urban planner, thinks the whole process is kind of broken.

James Rojas (0:48)

Our community meetings are driven both by the planner that has to facilitate them and the public who has to attend them.

It's either an empty room where nobody cared about the issue or the combat zone. We're a few aggressive people with very strong opinions. We'll dominate the conversation and everybody else stays silent.

Elise Hu (1:04)

So James tried something different. What if we planned cities the way we played as kids? In his talk, he shares a method he calls Place It, where instead of talking, people play. He hands them thousands of recycled objects like bottle caps, popsicle sticks, and hair rollers, and asks them to build things like their ideal city.

He has found that something remarkable happens. No matter who's at the table, people tend to build the very same things.

James Rojas (1:30)

And from the hundreds of visions I've witnessed over the years, no matter who they are, people want the same kind of city. They want a city of relationships with nature and other people.

Elise Hu (1:39)

James makes the case that play isn't just for kids. It might be one of the most powerful tools we have for building cities and communities that actually feel like home. And stick around after the talk for our Curator's Corner, where TED Curator Chloe Shawshaw Brooks digs in to what happened when a group of differently abled people sat down with James' bottle caps and hair rollers and ended up completely reshaping their own city. This is all coming up right after a short break.

And now our TED Talk of the Day.

James Rojas (2:13)

Today we're going to learn about how to build your ideal city to play.

I wanted a doll house growing up, but in those days, boys didn't play with dolls. And my parents couldn't afford to buy me building blocks. So I started collecting small bottle caps and popsicle sticks, and my governor gave me a shoe box, and they built my first mini house. I was so motivated by it that I kept on building streets, neighborhoods, and eventually cities. So that led me to curing the city planning. But over the years, as the city planner, I realized that we take our work way too seriously. We use the city as a deadline, as a measurement, as data, or a problem to be solved by a really fancy presentation. We use words people don't understand, maps people can't read, you know, numbers that confuse people, and surveys that people don't fill out. And our community meetings are dreaded both by the planner that has to facilitate them, and the public who has to attend them. It's either an empty room where nobody cares about the issue, or at the combat zone, where a few aggressive people with very strong opinions will dominate the conversation, and everybody else stays silent. But like most people, hate public speaking. And myself, I communicate better with my hands. So I thought, and for a lot of community members, the city is a place of memories and sensory experiences. Planners have very few tools to capture these kind of intangible qualities. So for planners, we get the language right, but they feel wrong. We can design streets for cars, but not for humans. So I thought, what if we designed cities like we did as children to play, or at least how I did. Because as children, our brain's command center, our preaffirmative cortex is not fully developed. So we use our senses and imagination to explore the world. And we played and we shared without any kind of agenda. So I went back to my childhood and developed a place where people use objects to build their urban planning solutions.

I introduced this approach to planners at that time, and a lot of them were hesitant because it wasn't based on their measurement or data. And plus, they were worried that people would build things that the city couldn't deliver on, such as a launching pad to the moon. But instead of inventing this idea, I took a different path. With friends, I opened up an art gallery, where I could put my method into practice. I would lay out thousands of small recycling objects on a table and have people just build their ideal city from them. And it was a hit.