How would you design your dream city? | James Rojas

0:03James Rojas: You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. City to city, we have design 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.

0:41James Rojas: James Rojas, who has spent his entire career as an urban planner, thinks the whole process is kind of broken. Community meetings are directed both by the planner that has to facilitate them and the planner who has to attend them. It's either an empty room where nobody cared about the issue or it's a combat zone, where a few aggressive people with very strong opinions will dominate the conversation and everybody else stays silent. 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.

1:14James Rojas: 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. And from the hundreds of religions 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. 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.

1:47James Rojas: And stick around after the talk for our Curator's Corner, where TED Curator Chloe Shawshap Brooks digs into what happened when a group of differently abled people sat down with James's bottle caps and hair rollers and ended up completely reshaping their own city. This is all coming up right after a short break.

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4:05James Rojas: That's what you'll hear on Season 6 of Planet Visionaries, stories from the explorers, scientists, and conservation leaders whose work addresses research, biodiversity, and conservation issues in specific locations. Planet Visionaries, hosted by environmental advocate and professional climber Alex Honnold, brings you real stories of discovery, determination, and research and initiatives relating to environmental change. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

4:43And now, our TED Talk of the day. Today, we're going to learn about how to build your idol city to play. I wanted a dollhouse 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 polycapped popsicle sticks. And my governor gave me a shoebox, 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 career in city planning. But over the years, as a city planner, I realized that we take our work way too seriously.

5:17We 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 directed 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 it's a combat zone, where a few aggressive people with very strong opinions will dominate the conversation and everybody else stays silent. But like most people, I hate public speaking.

5:51And 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. Planters have very few tools to capture these kind of intangible qualities. So for planters, we get the land use right, but they're feeling wrong. We can design streets for cars, but not for humans. So I thought, what if we designed cities like we did as children through play, or at least how I did? Because as children, our brain's command center, our prefrontal cortex, is not fully developed. So we used our senses and imagination to explore the world.

6:28and we played and we shared without any kind of agenda. So I went back to my childhood and developed a place where people used 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 a 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, they 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.

7:06And it was a hit. People were creative, and they were social, and they would stay for five minutes or a few hours. I saw a happy sight of people that I would not see at community meetings. So after facilitating hundreds of hands-on art installations, I co-wrote a book to understand why this process worked. And how many of you here are under the age of 26? Raise your hands. Well, your brains aren't fully formed yet. So you have capacity to think big and think creatively. After 26, your people in the cortex is formed. And now you worry more about survival and that. So people think more about parking than their imagination.

7:48So through play, we can figure out survival mode and think about the city as an imagination and with creativity. So eventually city planners took notice of them again and embraced my method. My city workshops or play dates are accessible to people of all ages, background, and languages. They go with a very simple prompt. Build your favorite child memory in five minutes using objects. Don't talk about it. Build it. Because once you build that memory again, it becomes real and inspires you to build cities of the future. As people start to the objects, they let go of analytical thinking and enter a creative flow state.

8:21It's like art therapy. They start thinking differently. The colors and the shapes of the objects remind people of activities and places that they love. For example, hair rollers will remind African-American women the importance of doing hair with their elders, while an orange maple leaf will remind people from New England about fall. Everybody builds and everybody shares their memory, and these stories vary from attending summer camp, creating make-believe games, you know, hanging out with friends, or learning how to ride a bike. After everybody shared a story, I asked, what do some of these memories have in common?

8:53Most of them are social with family and friends. They're also multi-sensory and often take place outdoors in nature. Children are physically active. They never build passive activities like watching TV or on screen time. And no one builds ownership or wealth and having a lot of toys. And most importantly, no one ever builds getting to school on time. So people then realize at that moment that across ages, income, race, and geography, they have more in common than they thought. So suddenly the room transforms from a place of individual opinions into one of listening, empathy, and shared values.

9:30So before we start to plan or lay out the brick and mortar, we have to begin our meetings with these feelings of belonging. So now people are ready to play and plan. So we ask people to work in teams to create their ideal community in 10 minutes. Use the same objects or more because they can collaborate, negotiate, and compromise. So their ideas begin to intersect with each other as they place objects on the table and they move them around in their imagined landscapes. Individual ideas become collective with the help of others, and new possibilities emerge. And this would be difficult to do through words, languages, or maps.

10:06So once time is up, all the teams share their values, share their visions. 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. So to illustrate this, the teams build walkable and walkable communities that are focused on family and friends. They build public spaces, plazas, and public transportation and gardens that dominate the city centers, not skyscrapers. And like the childhood memories, they're multi-century places filled with parks, nature, trees, water, and range of physical activities.

10:40They turn freeways into gardens. The teams don't build transactional cities with office parks, freeways, parking lots. No one builds a giant house in the suburbs and the commute to work. And no one builds gated communities or jails because they're planning from joy. That makes a big difference. So here are two of my favorite projects, Commida Verde and Casa de Los Cedillas in Tijuana, Mexico. Most informal settlements in Tijuana, like Commida Verde, were built very quickly, and they lacked basic infrastructure and especially public spaces. So I was invited to facilitate a grassroots community meeting to design a community center down there.

11:18It was a big success. We gave the city 10 pages of notes, ideas from the community. The community got a community center, but they also got Casa de los Salidas, which found these two houses of ideas. It's an integrated public space or library where people can read and give talks. The second project is the 50th Street Light Rail Station in Phoenix, Arizona. In 2008, the city of Phoenix helped fund the Ability 360 Center, which is a state-of-the-art recreation center and community center. It's used daily by people with disabilities. But across the street is a light rail station. At that time, it was a closer station where a mile apart in either direction.

11:54And into the hot Phoenix sun, a mile walk with persons with disabilities can be life threatening. So we did a workshop where it had individuals build their ideal station based on a disability. It would work for them. So after they did that, they worked in teams and merged their ideas to create their ultimate rail station designs. So these solutions they created kind of helped solve their mobility challenges. So they became the advocates for this potential infill station. So for many years, they made phone calls, wrote letters, sent emails to their mayor and the council person. Until 2019, they finally got a station built, which gives them a lot more independence to get to the center.

12:33Plus, they saw their designs in the stations. Painted crosswalks, low-grade, low sidewalks, artwork, twinkly shade, and landscape buffers to protect them from the street. So through play, city planning becomes human again. People don't just describe it. They show it, they fill it, and they own it. And that moment, something shifts. They stop being passive participants, and they start being active designers and visionaries of their own communities. And this gives planners and the public a new way of shaping cities, not just repeating what we already have, but imagining something better. And sometimes the most powerful tool we have to do this is to play.

13:11Thank you.

13:17James Rojas: That was James Rojas speaking at Play at TED in 2026. And now here's TED curator Chloe Shasha Brooks on getting to know James, including the moment he tried to hand his TED Talk to someone else and why this work means so much to him. Hi, thanks for listening to James Rojas' talk. I'm Chloe Shasha Brooks speaking to you from New York City. As I think you've just sensed from his talk, James is one of the kindest, most earnest people I've ever met. As we prepared for his talk, he once turned to me, shrugged, and with a genuine smile said, I really love what I do. He told me that he does this work because much of the urban planning world excludes women, people of color, and people with disabilities, and yet these are the people most affected by urban planning decisions.

14:04And as he mentioned in his talk, he has always loved playing with toys and building structures out of found objects. It's pretty cool that he found a way to turn that into a career that fosters inclusion and that leads to the betterment of communities. And he's humble. On our first call together, within a couple of minutes of meeting, he actually suggested that his partner, John Camp, should give the talk instead. John was sitting right next to him in the video frame. I didn't even know that John was going to be on the call. James explained, John is more of the public speaker. So I asked John about his work.

14:38John Camp is a landscape and urban designer. He told me all about his work, which was really compelling. But I stuck with my original plan, and I told James, we'd really like for you to do the talk at this play-themed TED event. You're the originator of this play methodology. He nodded and he said, okay, he would do his best. After the event in May of 2026, we had a celebration for all of the speakers at a nearby rooftop restaurant. James and I sat together over small plates of french fries and crudités, and he told me more about his life, the community he's a part of in Los Angeles, new place-it workshops he was about to lead, and how in high school he took an architecture class thinking it would be perfect for him, and instead he was miserable because architecture was taught in a very technical way with a major focus on the rules.

15:24He understood why those skills mattered, but he had always experienced buildings in a very physical way. He wanted to understand their shapes through his fingertips. He also told me a longer version of the story he shared in his talk about the Ability360 Center in Phoenix, Arizona. This is the community center designed for folks with disabilities. He invited a group of people with different disabilities to participate in a workshop that he led where they were able to play and design in order to imagine what they would need for this community center. One of the main topics of discussion at that workshop was how these folks would get from the two closest light rail stations to the Ability360 Center and back.

16:05Each station was a mile away from the center. A mile is a long trip if someone can't move quickly, especially under the hot Arizona sun. So the outcome of this workshop helped shape the height of the sidewalks, the crosswalks, and the shade structures to protect people from the sun between the Ability360 Center and the two closest light rail stations. James shared that these kind of specific, nuanced needs are rarely considered in traditional urban planning. I believe that. Before meeting James, I would have never guessed that a pile of hair rollers and plastic bottle caps would actually lead to real change.

16:38I'm so glad I was wrong about that.

16:44James Rojas: If you're curious about TED's curation, visit TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sungmarnivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Faze-Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening.

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