Little City Project

We wanted children to do the real thinking — take a problem from around them, break it into pieces small enough to carry, notice what repeats, work out what has to happen first, build it, then think again. Grown-ups call that computational thinking and we found a way to let children experience this through what they already enjoy doing. So we handed them string, clay, cardboard and a whole city to put their hands on.

Plots of land, tied out using strings

Hand a child a board full of pegs and a length of string, and watch a piece of ground appear out of nothing. It is hands-on from the very first minute — children loop the string around the pegs, pulling shapes out of open space until the ground is divided into plots — and it plays like a game long before anybody says the word design. Then comes a park. Then a tower with its windows drawn on in crayon. And at the end of it, a whole city that lights up.

Which is when the good question arrives. You have your land — so which part is green? Where do the buildings stand? Where does the factory go? Children start filling in what they think belongs where: a forest over here, a garden there, water running between them, and towers rising exactly where they decided towers should rise.

String around pegs, and a plot of land appears.

What kind of city is yours?

Once the ground was laid out, every team got a bigger question to chew on: what kind of city is this, exactly? One built on its economy? One that people travel to? An industrial one? That is when the talking really starts, a whole group of children working out together what their city is actually for.

Ideas came out of those conversations, and each one arrived with a name, a character, and a problem it had chosen to take on. Nakha Si Thammarat was a tourism town, and it went after energy. Neo town was built on economy, and set out to fix the economy. 90's town chose culture, and took on traffic. Nobody handed them those briefs. They wrote them.

Then its time for some hands-on. Green clay rolled into trees and pressed flat into parkland. Paper cut, folded and coloured into houses, a clock tower, a shop with its name written right across the front. We lay out plenty of materials on purpose: deciding what a building ought to be made of is already a design decision, and it is one small hands are very good at making.

One house, one park, one river — a town, at the scale a child makes it.

The city starts asking questions back

This is the part we love most. A city that has just gone up starts putting questions to the people who built it. Is there enough green left in here? How does anyone get from one side to the other? Where do the deliveries come in? Nobody has to say any of it out loud — it is right there on the board, the moment the buildings are standing.

So back in they go. A road shifts. A park gets bigger. A tower that looked brilliant in the first five minutes finds a better home somewhere else. Nobody stops to give any of it a name — you simply keep fixing your city until it works. And that, right there, is the loop the whole workshop was built around.

And because each city is designed by a group, they lean across one another's plots, comparing, borrowing ideas, and working out together how to make the whole city the best it can be.

Not enough green? Roll some more.

And then the lights come on

When the towns were finished we pushed them together into one long model, dropped the lights, and switched on the projector. The children had designed what it would show. Light came pouring across the paper roofs and ran away down the roads, and a model made of cardboard and crayon suddenly had a night sky of its own.

A skytrain runs through the city. A plane comes in to land at their airport. A film is playing on a cinema screen the size of a fingernail. The river moves. This is the wow moment every child waits for, and it belongs completely to them, because they drew it.

Designing a city is a properly grown-up job. Give children a process that fits their hands, though, and they will want to finish it — want to see their own city standing, want to solve its problems better than anybody. What goes home with them is bigger than a model: a real sense of what a good city has in it, and the feeling that they are exactly the sort of person who could build one. If you are dreaming up a children's workshop, an interactive installation, or a kids event that works like this one, we would love to hear what you have in mind.