How would you design your dream city? | James Rojas

James Rojas argues that conventional community meetings can miss what residents know about a place. Maps and surveys may be hard to interpret, while a few outspoken participants can dominate discussion. Planners may gather measurements and data without hearing residents’ memories or sensory experiences. His “place it” method gives people another way to express what they value and what they want a community to become.

The method uses thousands of recycled objects, from bottle caps to popsicle sticks. Participants first spend five minutes building a favorite childhood memory, then share the story behind it; they next spend ten minutes creating an ideal community. Rojas says working with their hands helps people communicate beyond words and enter a creative flow, including across differences in age, background, and language. The childhood memories are often social, multisensory, outdoors, and active. Sharing them encourages listening and empathy, and establishes common values before planning starts.

Across hundreds of workshops, Rojas says people from different regions and backgrounds repeatedly imagine cities organized around relationships with other people and with nature. Their visions commonly include public spaces, transit, gardens, parks, trees, water, and opportunities for physical activity. Some participants put gardens or public spaces at the center of a city, or transform freeways into gardens, rather than centering development on office parks, parking lots, large suburban houses, or jails.

Building together can also help people negotiate differences and combine ideas into a shared vision that may be difficult to reach through discussion or maps alone. Planners initially hesitated, Rojas says, because the process did not use their usual measurements and could produce proposals they could not deliver, such as a launchpad to the moon. The method’s open-endedness can surface ambitious ideas, while also presenting a practical challenge for officials responsible for turning proposals into projects.

In Tijuana’s Commuter Verde, an informal settlement lacking infrastructure, particularly public spaces, a grassroots meeting used the method to design a community center and generated ten pages of ideas. The community later gained a center and Casa de los Adidas, a public space or library for reading and talks. The example shows how residents’ ideas can inform projects addressing needs they identify in their own community.

At Ability 360, which serves hundreds of people with disabilities each day, the nearest light rail stations were a mile away in the Phoenix heat. Workshop participants designed a station around their needs, including painted crosswalks, low-grade sidewalks, artwork, shade, and landscape buffers separating people from traffic. After years of calls, letters, and emails to officials, the Phoenix infill station was built in 2019. The case connects participatory design to practical access concerns, while showing that realizing a vision can require sustained advocacy.

As recounted by Chloe Shoshop-Rooks, Rojas says urban planning often excludes women, people of color, and people with disabilities, although these groups are strongly affected by planning decisions. His interest in how buildings feel began with wanting to understand their shapes through touch; he found architecture instruction focused on technical rules unsatisfying. His approach centers people’s lived experience as a form of knowledge that conventional planning processes can overlook.