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- [00:00]
A
If we go back in time far enough, people's sense of home wasn't just the house that they lived in. Their sense of home extended out their front door, out into the street in front of their house, down to the corner store, all the way to the center of town. And so what I wanted to demonstrate was the power of using your private land for public good. So I started by turning my front yard into a public park. I put about $2,000 worth of furniture on the back deck. And my daughter said to me, dad, you're going to bolt that down, aren't you? Because it's going to get stolen anyway. I go out one night and there's a lady sitting in one of the chairs and she said, you know, you've started a big debate in our neighbourhood. And 50% of people think this furniture is going to get stolen, and 50% of us think it won't. And I went, wow. That action has started a conversation about the nature of our community. And prior to my building the park, at least 50% of people believed they lived in a neighbourhood full of thieves and robbers. And seven years later, that furniture is still there. So what I've demonstrated, I've changed the neighbourhood story.
- [01:13]
B
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Homing Today. It's a foundations episode and my guest is David Engwich, who believes that home doesn't stop at your front door. It extends out into the neighbourhood beyond. David is a placemaker, so he explores how the design of our towns and cities can either bring us closer or push us further apart. And he isn't quite what you'd expect. With his cowboy boots, heavy frame glasses and Pat Cash hairdo, he's more like a rock and roll philosopher than an urban thinker. As a child, he lived in 30 different homes and went to 26 schools. He describes himself as a vagabond, someone who learned to feel at home almost anywhere. That experience led to the idea that home isn't something we find, it's something we create. In this conversation, we explore how that creation happens. And it's often through small, everyday gestures. From turning his own garden in Brisbane into a public park to traveling the world with a folding throne in a suitcase, David's work is about reclaiming shared spaces and rethinking how we use them. At the heart of it all is a simple idea. Everything we build carries a story. It might be a bench bolted to the ground or endless street signs telling you what not to do. And over time, these choices start to dictate whether you want to pass through or stick around for a while. And that's exactly what creating a community is all about. I think David has some really, really interesting perspectives and. And I hope you enjoy listening along. Hi, David.
- [02:55]
A
Hi, Matt.
- [02:56]
B
Thank you so much for joining me all the way from Brisbane. I would love to start by trying to define this word home with you. So when you hear the word home, what does it mean to you personally, would you say?
- [03:10]
A
That's a very interesting question, because as a kid, I moved from town to town. My dad was an itinerant gospel preacher, and I went to 26 different schools. And the school bullies loved my turning up at their school. And so as a kid, I had no sense of home. And what I often say to people is, don't ask a fish to describe water. It's only the people who haven't experienced something that have some kind of inkling of what it might be. So for me, I think home is where you belong. It's where you psychologically put roots down and feel connected to a sense of place and a sense of home.
- [04:01]
B
That's interesting. So you see it as a geographical thing somehow or a social thing, rather than a sort of physical construct. Is that fair?
- [04:10]
A
I think it's a psychological thing. It's not physical per se, although it's often rooted in a location. Although there are people like myself who are, you might describe as a vagabond. And I think vagabonds have the ability to make themselves feel at home in a whole range of locations.
- [04:37]
B
Well, that's really interesting. So just to pick up on that, how many different places did you live in as a child then?
- [04:43]
A
Probably getting close to 30.
- [04:45]
B
Okay, so what. What does that really teach you then, about this idea of rootedness and how's it fed into your sense of place as an adult, I suppose. Have you carried on that itinerant life or have you settled somewhere very deliberately?
- [05:02]
A
I have carried on the itinerant life, but I do have a home base and I become somewhat of a hermit when I get back from travels so early in my career. Like, I started this part of my career in my early 40s, and I probably traveled the world for solidly for 15 years after that. Then I decided I would just stay in Australia and New Zealand. And so I still traveled a lot in Australia and New Zealand. And then when I get home, I become something of a hermit.
- [05:41]
B
Okay, you've told a really great story about your daughter when she was two years old and she cut her finger. So would you mind just recounting that for me and telling us what you learned from that.
- [05:51]
A
Sure. So my daughter came to me one day and she, when My granddaughter was 2 years old and she relayed the following story to me and asked me what was happening. She said that Nikita had badly cut a finger. And every time she changed the bandage on her finger, Nikita would cry and say, mummy, I want to go home. And my daughter would explain to her that she was home, she was standing in the lounge room, and that would make Nikita even more upset. And she would stamp her feet and say, no, I want to go home. And my daughter said to me, dad, what's going on? Why can't she understand that she's at home? And I said, well, for a two year old, home is a feeling. It's not a location. It's a place where there's no pain. It's a place where you can grow into your fullest potential. And so she didn't feel at home because she wasn't feeling that sense of safety, of no pain.
- [06:59]
B
Yeah, I love that. And I think that's really what this podcast homing is all about, to be honest. I mean, do you think that the human body is a home of sorts as well?
- [07:08]
A
Home certainly is within our mind. As I said earlier, it's a psychological attachment. So, you know, I'm called a placemaker. But I say to people, place making is 99.9% psychology. It's about how do I make people feel reconnected to their neighborhoods? So if we, if we go back in time far enough, people's sense of home wasn't just the house that they lived in. Their sense of home extended out their front door, out into the street in front of their house, down to the corner store, all the way to the center of town. And that sense of home has been slowly shrinking over time due to a whole range of social and cultural realities. So when you talk to older people who lived in a neighborhood for, you know, 50, 60, 70 years, they'll talk about how the meat cart used to come around and the butcher would carve the meat in the street and they'd all gather around the cart. And then somebody would say, somebody want to come back to my house for a cup of tea? And people would go back to the house for a cup of tea. And when you listen to those stories, get this palpable sense of how strong the sense of home or rootedness, connection to the neighborhood really was in those days. There's an interesting study done by Appleyard where he looked at streets with different levels of traffic on them. And what he found was that people with heavy traffic on their street had on average, three times less friends and acquaintances in the neighborhood than people who only had light traffic on their street. And it's example of the way the design of our cities, the way we manage them, has undermined this sense of home and place.
- [09:11]
B
So interesting, I know that, you know, you've done certain things at your own property there as well, haven't you, to try and connect to the neighborhood, including things with your garden. So can you tell us about that?
- [09:23]
A
Yes. So after working on these issues for nearly 30 years now, one of the observations I made was that what people are doing with their private land has more impact on the sense of home and place than anything a council or a government can do. So to go back to what I was explaining about, when you talk to older people in the. In the neighborhood, you know, you'll hear stories about how somebody would sit on their front steps and be shelling the peas and watching the kids playing in the. In the street. The parents weren't there. Everybody had the responsibility for managing the life of the neighborhood. So every time somebody puts up a high fence or, you know, fronts their property with a garage with an automatic door, they're undermining the sense of community and the sense of home in that neighborhood. And so what I wanted to demonstrate was the power of using your private land for public good. So I started by turning my front yard into a public park, a sculpture park. Then council obliged by building a bike track on three sides of my property, which opened up the back of my property to the public. And so I turned the entire backyard into a public park. And that's been featured on a national television show here in Australia. It was voted one of the three top attractions in Brisbane. You know, it's. But, you know, maybe one or two stories to explain the power of that. So I went down one day, and there was a lady sitting. So I have a large deck in the backyard. There's a lady sitting on that deck. And she told me the story about how she'd met a refugee in the park and they'd formed something of a friendship. But this, the lady who was the refugee was feeling very, very unsure about her new country and her new surroundings. And the only place that she felt comfortable talking to somebody was in the park. And it was like, wow, you know, you know, that's worth a million bucks to me now. One of the other interesting things that happened, which. Which underlines why these things are psychological in nature, is when I first built the park, I put about $2,000 worth of furniture on the back deck. And my daughter said to me, dad, you're going to bolt that down, aren't you? Because it's going to get stolen. And I said, no. Anyway, I go out one night and there's a lady sitting in one of the chairs. And she said, you know, you've started a big debate in our neighborhood. And I said, no, not aware of that. She said, Probably 50% of people think this furniture is going to get stolen, and 50% of us think it won't. And I went, wow. That action has started a conversation about the nature of our community. And prior to my building the park, at least 50% of people believed they lived in a neighborhood full of thieves and robbers. And every community is dominated by its underlying stories. And they're often unspoken. But those underlying stories will determine the quality, quality of neighborhood life in any community. And so what in my backyard up did was open a conversation about what is the true nature of our community. Are we a mob of thieves and robbers or are we responsible citizens? And seven years later, that furniture is still there. So what I've demonstrated and I've changed the neighborhood story that we are in a trustworthy neighborhood. And one of my sayings is, trust begets trust, distrust begets distrust. And so what the opening of my private space to the general public was about, both intentionally and unintentionally, was about changing the story of who we are.
- [14:02]
B
Yeah. Fantastic. I really appreciate that. That's really interesting. Where does safety come into it, though, David? Because obviously a lot of us would be quite suspicious of the idea that we could open our homes up in some way to passersby who we may not know. It might make us feel unsafe. So how does that feed into this idea, do you think?
- [14:22]
A
Okay, so one of the things I say to councils, but I do a lot of work with local authorities, is that you're either in a positive cycle of building trust or you're in a negative cycle of building distrust. So every time you bolt a seat down in the public space, you are telling your community that they're a mob of thieves and robbers. Everything we design, everything we build carries a story with it. Now, the problem is that what we do to increase safety in the public realm actually does the exact opposite, because every time we. We do something like bolt a seat down so it doesn't get stolen, we are. We're on a treadmill of building distrust. If we leave that seat seat loose, then we're on A positive cycle of trust. Now the issue is building trust ain't free. It does actually cost. I've had small sculptures stolen from my garden. I've had some antisocial behavior happen. I refuse to publicize that or draw attention to it because my job is building the positive cycle, the cycle of trust. And I count those small losses, those small, you might call them failures. I count them as the price that I need to pay to see kids laughing with their grandparents in my garden, having tea parties in the garden. Just this weekend I had people come and do a concert in the garden and all their friends were there enjoying the music. So the negative failures, you know, a lady slipped over and broke her arm once, you know. Yes. You know, this is not Utopia, but it, it's, it's a cost that we have to be prepared to pay. I'll tell you one interesting story about that. So I did some work with the city of Perth here in Australia to animate their town square, which was largely dead. They had two table tennis tables in this square. They were so scared that the bats and balls would get stolen that they gave them to a retailer. And if you wanted to play ping pong, you'd go and leave your ID with the business and you'd get the bats and balls and then you'd take them back and you'd get your ID back. And after the mayor did my workshop, he said, my God, I didn't realize that that arrangement is telling everybody in our town that there are th and a robber. Let's do an experiment. Let's leave the bats and balls out on the table 24 7. And about six weeks later, I got an email from him saying it's costing us about $20 a month to replace the bats and balls that go missing. It's the cheapest investment we've ever made in bringing our town square to life. And what amazes me is that we are prepared to spend so much on CCTV and all sorts of negative things that sen bad messages. We will spend hundreds of thousands on that. But we balk at spending 20 bucks on some bats and balls. You know, it just doesn't make sense.
- [17:57]
B
Yeah, yeah. I think, I think we can all identify with that. I think that's such an interesting case study that actually I was reading about something called Broken Windows Theory.
- [18:08]
A
Yeah.
- [18:08]
B
Have you come across this?
- [18:09]
A
Yes. Yep.
- [18:10]
B
They did a study where they took a mailbox on the front lawn and they put some cash inside it so that passersby could see the cash sticking out of it. And, and they took an identical situation in the mailbox, and they put graffiti on the mailbox. And what they showed was that the mailbox that had graffiti on it was far more likely to be stolen from than the one that didn't. The idea being that your surroundings tell your psyche somehow that this is a place where that kind of behavior is tolerated, which I think is so interesting.
- [18:48]
A
So this comes down to a really interesting fact. I would say that 99.9% of people have a really honest person inside of them, but we've also got a devious, thieving bastard inside of us. And this idea that we're either one or the other is so untrue. So, you know, I illustrate this internal conflicts when I talk about residents who'll go to their council and demand that speed bumps be put in their street because they hate people speeding in their street. Yet when they get in their car, they flip from wanting traffic to go slower to, oh, my God, why can't the government keep the traffic moving so their value systems flip 180 degrees? And we all have all these different Personas in our head, and our environment tells us which of those Personas we are acting out of and what our values are within that. I have another real story about what you just described with the mailbox. One of the things that I discovered back in 1996 was that the speed of traffic on residential streets is governed by the degree to which the residents have psychologically retreated from their street. As life is pulled away from the street, then the speed of traffic automatically rises. And we did a whole lot of experiments in North America where I would go in and read how residents had psychologically retreated from their street. And then we would reverse that in about a two hour period. And we would see the speed of the traffic drop to such an extent, the kids would be back out there doing chalk drawings in the middle of the street. Now, I was running a lot of public meetings about this, and one in Seattle, this gentleman stood up and he said, I came to one of David's talks a number of years ago, and he said he went home and he said to his wife, let's have dinner on our front lawn once a week. And he said, my God, it not only slowed the traffic, some cars stopped. People got out of their cars, came over and had a conversation, Some even stayed for dinner. And he said, we built more community in two months of having dinner on our front lawn than 20 years of bitching and moaning to council about the speed of traffic on our street. So he then did another Experiment where he started leaving valuables on his front porch. He said the guy or the people next door to him had barred windows, you know, burglar alarms, all of that stuff. Stuff. They'd been robbed twice in the time that none of the valuables from his front porch went missing. So it is absolutely what I was saying earlier. A lot of the things that we do to stop bad things happening actually do the exact reverse of that, because they call forth the bad angel on our shoulder rather than the good angel on our shoulder.
- [22:16]
B
Yeah. So interesting. I visited someone the other day, and she described the way that people sometimes decorate the outside of their houses on a terrace, like a Victorian terrace. The way that certain terraces in London have been gentrified means that you can obviously tell the ones that have been refurbished in some way and maybe have owners who care a bit more about their environment and so on, and a bit wealthier, potentially. And she describes this as burgle me gray. So she says, when you paint the outside of your terrace house in burgle me gray, it means that you're basically making yourself a target for people. What do you make of that? I mean, how do we choose how we present ourselves to the public through our homes? You see what I mean? It's a tricky one.
- [23:07]
A
I think it is, to me, the biggest movement that has happened. So we're kind of getting big picture thinking at this point is that when towns and villages were first founded, they were founded on a citizen model, which is that everybody put their gifts and their talents into the pool, and by magic, everybody got to take more out than what they put in. The magic of cooperative living. And the human species is a cooperative living animal. Now, when towns in Europe, for example, were founded, this sense of citizenship ran so deep that people were actually allowed to put buildings wherever they liked. But they had a civic duty not just to design the inside of the building. So it worked for them, but they had to place the building in a way that added to the emerging magic of the public realm. And so everybody in that town was making a contribution to the vibrancy of the public realm. And that's why we like to go to an Italian hill town or village in the south of France, or those places were established on a citizenship model. What has happened in the last 20 or 30 years has been an acceleration away from the citizen model to the customer model, where people go, I pay my rates and taxes. I want the council, the government, to provide me with a quality sense of home and connection. Now, I say it's impossible. For any authority figure to give you a sense of home and connection to your neighborhood, that's the role of us as citizens, not as customers. It's not something that can be bought. So in many places I'm asked to deal with antisocial behavior that might be happening in a town centre. You know, so for example, the people might be complaining that youth gangs have taken, they've colonized the town centre. And my response is always the same. I say it's not the people that are there that are the problem, it's the people who aren't there that are the problem. My job as a placemaker when I'm dealing with antisocial behavior is how do I bring back the people who have now psychologically given up on that space? Because in giving up on the space, they've handed it over to those groups. My job is not to move those groups on. It's not to play them classical music so that they get frustrated and leave. It's how do I surround them with all the people who are missing from this space. And that's what's going to humanize it. That's what's going to bring life back into the space. That, that's what's going to get them to behave themselves. I'm not sure I answered your question.
- [26:26]
B
No, you've led us into something that I really want to talk to you about actually, which is this idea that you have of doing seven day makeovers of town centers and things like that. Because I think you think that with quite. It seems to me that quite quickly you can make a public space like that feel a lot more welcoming to a lot more people. So just tell us about that project you've been doing.
- [26:50]
A
So what we do as part of our seven day makeovers is we give people a crash course in place making. What are the basics that make a place operative? We take them for a walk through their town centre and we go, this is working, this isn't working. Here's an opportunity. And then we say to them, look, the budget you've got to work with is 30,000 bucks or whatever. We put them into small groups and we go, okay, now that you've got that foundational knowledge, how would you spend, spend that $30,000, generate some ideas. And then the magic part of our process is we say to people, and this takes up probably three quarters of the first day, we are just generating as many creative ideas as we possibly can. And then we say to people, if you only had 10 minutes to give to your town centre, what Idea. Did you hear today? Would you give your 10 minutes to. It's not about me as the expert saying that idea, that idea and that idea are the best ideas. There's a great idea without a doer is a dead idea. The biggest big fallacy in the way people look at their town centres is that they think that big problems require big solutions. So they start discussing the silver bullets. Whereas I can tell you that every problem in a neighborhood or a town centre started from something incredibly small and it snowballed. Now, the classic example of that is that when kids played in the middle of the street, traffic went slow even when there weren't kids in the street. Because there might be the first parent who said to their kid, I don't want you playing in the middle of the roadway. I want you to play in the footpath, didn't understand that what they were doing was giving all of the motorists that drove down their street a permission slip that said, please drive faster on my street. And when the motorists went faster, the nervous parent said to their kid, don't play on the footpath, play in the backyard or at the park. And I've documented how that one simple decision to tell the kid not to play in the middle of the street has these consequences of high fences, people not sitting on their front steps anymore, et cetera. It sets off a chain reaction. So what we're interested in is what are the small actions that can set off a positive chain reaction? Like my backyard. It has an influence on the whole neighborhood. I'll just give you a very simple example to come back to your whole theme of homeliness. So we use home as the whole model of how we make Overtown Santa. We go, what are the things that make. If you visit somebody's house, what makes you feel at home? What makes you not feel at home? The very first thing that we focus on is removing the things that don't make people feel at home.
- [30:08]
B
Okay?
- [30:09]
A
Things like bollards, signs, don't do this, don't do that. There are a whole lot of negative things in every space that are sending a message that make people feel less at home, not more at home. And a lot of people don't realize this, but what we take out is more important than what we put in. And that's where we always start. What do we need to take out to start making people feel more at home in this space? And then it's, what can we do to make people feel more at home in this space? So, for example, nobody in their right mind would put a park bench in their lounge room, your normal council park bench. So when we see a park bench in a street, in a town centre, if we can't replace that with something that is more homely, then we say to the participants, what could we do to make this park bench feel more homely? And people will go, oh, what if we put some cushions on it? Now I can show you photos in seven day makeovers where we've painted an ugly council park bench and put cushions on it and it instantly feels more homely. So that's the secret, is what are those small things? So the analogy would be that if your listeners have bought a house, what are the first things they're going to do to start to make it feel more homely? And it might be a rug in the lounge room, it might be a lamp in the corner. And one of the truisms I say to people is that poor people are often better homemakers than rich people because they have to use their creativity, their adaptability to transform ordinary items into something that makes them and their visitors feel at home.
- [32:14]
B
So interesting. I love the idea about making public spaces feel homely. If someone watching or listening, lives in a block of flats or on a terrace somewhere, what in your experience, what's the kind of most profound thing that they can do to elicit some kind of change in behavior? Somehow distancing yourself from the traffic a bit more? Is that the main thing or is it about engendering social connections with your next door neighbour? What have you experienced there?
- [32:49]
A
I think the best example of this is what the Dutch do. Okay, so if you go through a Dutch village or even in the city, you'll notice, or you might notice that a lot of houses have a huge display window usually opening onto their living area, and it has no curtains. And in the window is a display of something that reveals something about the character, the personality, the passions of that person. Might be a display of antique dolls or whatever. And I tell you an interesting story that illustrates something very powerful and why this is about psychology. So I was in a Dutch village and I was walking down the street and in one of these open windows I saw a sculpture of a half finished pregnant woman. And I went, oh my God, I've got to take a photo of that. That is the, to me, the ultimate expression of this, putting your passions and whatever and making it as a gift to the wider community. But I somehow felt inhibited about standing there on the street taking this photo. So I walked on, I got down the street a bit. And I went, I've got to have a picture of that for my presentations. So I went back, and by this time there were a couple of two people standing on the footpath in front of this lady's house having a conversation. And they said, can we help you? And I explained that, you know, I lecture in urban design, and, you know, I'd love a photo of that window. And this woman said, oh, no, you can't do that. That's her private art.
- [34:49]
B
Okay?
- [34:50]
A
And I went. I walked away. And I was thinking, what the hell is happening? Why would. If it's her private art, why is she putting it in the window? And it was then that I worked out that there's an unspoken rule, which is you can peek, but don't stare. And it's a piece of social logic or a social boundary that allows them to then share their gifts and their talents with the wider community. And I thought, there's really, really interesting about how our underlying stories dictate what we can and we can't do. But I think it's really, for me, one of the most powerful examples. So for somebody living in a flat, you know, a high rise, to me it's always, what. What are you good at? What is your gift? So I saw the most amazing presentation in Edinburgh once, where this lady stood up and she got everybody to write on a piece of paper what it was that gave them most joy in life and what was their gift to the wider community. And then she went around the room. There's about 600 people in this conference, but she picked people at random, and she wrote on a whiteboard what people had written down. And then she stood back and she said, I don't see anybody has written. Organizing public meetings, collecting petitions, lobbying politicians. Why are we doing things that we're not good at or is not our gift to the community to try and create a better world? And that has become a cornerstone of my approach, which is, what am I good at? What is my gift to the wider community? And how do I. What's my way of contributing that? Like, if you're a fantastic party organizer and you love organizing parties, organize a footpath party once a month. That will build a sense of community. So whatever your. Whatever gives you joy in life, whatever your gift is, work with that, not with what you wish you had, wish you could tap into. But. But what is it that you have to work with?
- [37:17]
B
Yeah, I think that's really good advice. I love that. On the subject of things that one is good at, you personally are Obviously very good at what you do. And I love this notion of you and your pop up throne that you had, that you took around to different cities with you. So for those people that are not aware of that, just tell us about that. What was that and what were you trying to achieve with it?
- [37:40]
A
So remember I told you about, in 1996, I made the discovery about how traffic speeds govern by the degree of psychological retreat. So I wrote a whole book about that called Street Reclaiming. And when the publisher in America wanted to take me on a publicity tour, I said, look, I'm not interested in just going around doing talks and flogging my book. I'd like to do something that people would remember. And they said, oh, what would that be? And I said, look, I remember this time the Los Angeles Times did a feature story on me and they sent a photographer out to take a photo and he put a kitchen chair in the middle of a six lane arterial freeway. Had me sit in this chair with traffic streaming past. And I always, I loved that photo. I said, why don't I create a chair that I take around the world with me and I'll just sit in streets and public places and whatever. So, yes, I started looking at what kind of chair I could fit inside my suitcase. Anyway, long story short, it took me six months, but I eventually came up with the idea of that the suitcase would become the throne. And so I created this very elaborate throne that folds out of a suitcase. And I took that all over the world. I think it did two or three world trips. And what was fascinating, and I have a whole series of photographs of people who would just come up to me at Random Inn, you know, whether it was Times Square or Thomas Bridge in Prague or the Champs de Lysees in Paris and want to sit in my chair. And then I would take photographs of these people sitting in my chair. I never solicited it. It was just the unusual random people who would come and ask to sit in the chair. So yes, it was an act of reclaiming public space.
- [40:01]
B
So you would basically go to the Champs Elysees as an example and you would get out your suitcase, put your throne up in the middle of the highway, right?
- [40:11]
A
In that case, on the traffic island in the middle. Yes, yes.
- [40:18]
B
So you do this and then what, you just sit there for a bit and see what happens?
- [40:22]
A
Basically, yes, yes. But very soon there'd be like a party going on. There'd be just people all around all wanting to sit in it, have their photo taken.
- [40:32]
B
So you call this Street Reclamation. Right. Why is that important to you?
- [40:40]
A
Going back to what I said earlier, all of the issues that we deal with in public spaces and whether that's a residential street or a town center eventually go back to this psychological retreat, people giving up on the space. Now what most people in my profession try to do is to fix that through design. So, you know, they'll commission a multimillion dollar makeover of the space or, you know, more parking, or, you know, and I say that that in itself is useless because getting people to psychologically reclaim public space is a psychological task. It's not a design task. Now, I'm a passionate designer. I created a throne that comes out of a suitcase. When we do seven day makeovers, my job is the, is the artistic director. So, for example, we would never put seats around a tree, we would always build a deck around the tree because the deck is much more flexible and allows for a whole lot more activity than what a simple seat would. So design is important. But I say design is the carriage at the back of the train. It's never the engine driving the train. So while I'm passionate about design, my core task is a psychological one, which is how can I use the design elements to get people to reclaim their sense of connection to this particular space?
- [42:24]
B
That's really interesting. And I love the idea that a lot of it's just about reduction and about taking away. It makes me think of, I'm sure you had this in Australia as well, but when you travel on the rail network here or on the London Underground, there's such a barrage of announcements over the public Tannoy. I always find about really just pointless things and it somehow really compromises your experience of being in that space. And I think to your point, let's say there's someone standing next to you on the platform and you might want to talk to them about something. You've got all this noise in the background that's stopping you doing it. So I love this idea that it's about reduction.
- [43:08]
A
Yeah, I'll give you one quick example of that. So we did a makeover in a town called Tuncurry. And when I arrived, I observed that there was a yellow safety fence that ran for a full block in the main street right in the center of town. I could also see why it was there. It was there because the footpath had two levels to it and the safety fence was to stop people falling off the top level. But that safety fence was telling potential customers to stay away, that there was danger. The psychological message right so one of the things I haven't explained is that we work on what we call permission statements with the local authority. So we have a workshop and we will ask things like, can we take the elephants away during the seven day makeover? And they go, no. And I go, why, what's it there for? And they said, yeah, stop people falling off the ledge. I said, so I've got a room full of really intelligent people here and none of you can imagine any other way of stopping people falling off of ledges than to have a yellow safety fence. And somebody goes, oh, I guess we could have planter boxes, we could have seating. So long story short, our permission statement says you can remove the yellow fence, providing you replace it with something that stops people falling off the ledge. Now, that entire block, we replaced that yellow fence with a series of seats, tables and chairs, planter boxes, et cetera. And suddenly the whole street came alive. So that's a classic example of how you take something that's negative. So I always ask, like in one town we, we removed 100 bollards. I said, what are the bollards there for? Oh, this stop ram rating. Okay, so there's no other way to stop ram raiding than a bollard. Yeah, we built nature play areas with great big rocks in them, for example, you know, so what's your original purpose? Let us be creative about how we can turn that from something that sends a negative message because bollards just stand there all day going, no, no, no, no, no. And how do we turn it into something positive that says, please enjoy your time here, feel connected to the space, et cetera?
- [45:42]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's making me think of where I live in the countryside. I live near a lovely chalk stream river and during the COVID lockdown, wild swimming became a bit of a phenomenon. Right. So lots of people started converging on this particular wild swimming spot in the river. And as a result, I think probably someone posted it up online and it got discovered by increasing numbers of people. And of course some of those people didn't treat it as you want them to, so they would leave some rubbish behind and things like that. So of course the local landowner who owns that piece of land decided that he'd had enough of this and he put up huge, very aggressive looking riot fencing all along one side of the river, so you cannot get to it. But of course, this beautiful piece of countryside is now completely blighted by this fencing. And so what started as a few people, you know, not quite behaving as they should do has now meant that so many of us that live locally can no longer use that spot for swimming. And it's just so depressing.
- [46:53]
A
Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah.
- [46:55]
B
So what would be the advice for that sort of scenario? What could he have done rather than put up the fencing? You know, what is the issue he's trying to solve and what's a better way of solving it, would you say?
- [47:09]
A
I mean, one strategy that I would suggest and incidentally, I'm facing a similar issue with my park. So yesterday's success always becomes today's problem. That's a truism of life. But one approach they could have taken would have been to solicit all of the users of the space to help manage the space. So, you know, I do that with my park. So if I have a group of noisy teenagers down there at one o' clock in the morning, which happens from time to time, I might go down to them and say, you know, I had a group in here the other night that left all their rubbish and, and the furniture kind of thrown around the place. I know it wasn't you guys, but if you see it happening, could you please intervene on my behalf? Look, the other, the other top secret I would give. And this happens all the time with antisocial behavior. And here's a classic story. So I was asked to do a street makeover in Christchurch in New Zealand. The council had allocated a quarter of a million dollars to this street makeover. Long story short, when I was chatting with the residents about why they had lobbied council for spend quarter of a million dollars putting speed bumps in their street, they said that it was to solve the problem of boy races or hearns, I don't know what you call them there, kids that like doing burnouts. There were kids doing burnouts in the street at 2 o' clock in the morning. And I said, how many of them are there? And this old gentleman jumps up and goes, five. And I can tell you where every single one of them lives. And I said, has anybody been knocked on their door and asked them what needs to change in order for them to behave themselves? I think they'll do it for less than $50,000.
- [49:33]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, very good.
- [49:35]
A
Right now. I then met a gentleman in Auckland who had the same problem and he had a different strategy. He went down at midnight, stood in the middle of the street, had a conversation with the young people. He said, look, when I was your age I loved doing burnouts in the street as well. He said, now that I'm 50, the only difference between you and me is I can afford more expensive toys than what you can afford. I've got a four seater Jet Ski anchored in the bay. Which of you would like to drive my Jet Ski tomorrow? He became the town troubleshooter for boy racers because he formed a relationship with them and he found a legitimate way for them to express their culture. The number one problem I find with people who are grappling with antisocial behavior is that they don't talk to the people who are the precipitators of the bad behavior and they don't ask, what do we need to change in order for you to start behaving yourself?
- [50:42]
B
Well, I think there's two fantastic ideas on there. One is exactly that, talk to the perpetrators of the issue. And the second one is draw the community into trying to solve it collectively. I think that's really good advice actually. I'll see what I can do with the landowner. It seems to me a large part of your work is about trying to encourage people to linger in a place rather than passing through it. Is that fair to say? You did this thing called the neighborhood pace car program as well. Tell us about all that kind of stuff.
- [51:15]
A
This is the number one place making trick that we teach people when I say trick. So if I can get everybody that is in a town center or a neighborhood street to stay three times longer, that street will have three times as many people in it and feel three times as vibrant. Now, some people find the following, the easiest way to understand this. So there's a farmer in Australia called Peter Andrews who's revolutionized the way degraded farmland is rehabilitated. And the first thing he does is he puts rocks in the stream, logs in the stream, builds contour banks, plants reeds. And he says his number one job is to make the water go seven times slower through the property. And it does seven times the work I hydrating the soil. And so the longer we can keep people in a space, the more value they're contributing. Now, the problem with most modern town centres is they become what I call essentials only shopping streets, that is people drive there, they want to park outside of the shop, they're going to race in, get the chops, get back in the car and go home. The traditional role of town centres and for that matter, neighborhood streets, have been the social and cultural epicenter of the community, has slowly evaporated out of these spaces to the point where we just use them as utilitarian spaces. So our first job, after taking out all the things that don't make people feel at home is to put things in that are going to slow the flow of people through, through the space. Now, just to be a little provocative about this, do you know that we've gone from doing seven day makeovers? We are now doing four hour makeovers.
- [53:21]
B
Oh, no way. I didn't know that.
- [53:23]
A
Yeah, I'm actually coming to Wales. We're going to be doing a series of one day makeovers in three Welsh towns. All of that to demonstrate that we're. That in four hours, you know, we only do one little project in say a four hour. But say in a town in Victoria, in the four hours, they created a whole nature play area in the middle of the street. And all of a sudden it's alive with kids climbing all over it. So that, that becomes a linger node. A linger node can be as simple as chalked hopscotch square on the street, bubble wands. The simplest example I can give of linger nodes, and this is the way my brain works, is I go to one town and there were low brick walls on every corner. I'm assuming to stop people crossing at the wrong spots. But I said, everybody go home. Get the foreign coins that are in the bottom of your drawer, bring them back. We'll buy one tube of super glue. We'll glue these foreign coins on the top of the walls and we'll get a retailer to hand out pieces of paper and lead pencils. And kids will be out there doing rubbing to the coins. So that brings us back to this. None of this stuff is rocket science. When we teach retailers how to do this. We had one retailer who put a computer monitor in the window and had a game on it with the controllers outside of their shop. Kids are standing there playing the game in the window. I can give dozens of examples of really simple things that retailers can do to create these linger notes.
- [55:26]
B
Interesting.
- [55:27]
A
The idea of the pace car that was in Boise, Idaho and that was around a group of residents who were again lobbying council for traffic calming, speed bumps, chicanes, et cetera. And I said to them, you know, that if you all, if you all drove at the speed limit, nobody would be able to speed in your street. So we created this sticker called the neighborhood pace car. And you know, the idea was they'd stick it on the back of their car and drive at the speed limit. What was fascinating about that whole exercise was that when I would present this concept to a group of people, you could see the instant response was, yeah, give me one of those stickers. I want to be in control of the speed of the traffic. And then about three seconds later, another part of their brain would click in and say, no way. We're putting one of those on the back of the car. That means we've got to drive everywhere within the speed limit. And to me, that was the whole success of that idea, was that I forced people to stop externalizing the blame for speeding traffic onto everybody else and say, I'm the problem. So the pace car was a way of getting the resonant part of their brain to communicate with the motoring part of their brain and go, look, we've got diametrically opposed values here. What's the compromise?
- [57:01]
B
Okay, just. Finally, I'd like to just circle back to where we started, actually, with this theme of belonging, because you described your itinerant start to life, which I think is so interesting and obviously quite extreme in your case. So I think you're better placed than anyone, really, to try and highlight for the rest of us, I suppose for those of us who have had a bit of a life on the move or who have that urge to keep moving, how do we learn how to stop and where to linger? And more to the point, where we should belong because we have so much choice. Our families are much more fractured than they ever used to be. Friends live all over the world. How do we know where to stop?
- [57:45]
A
Interesting, because I would classify myself as a severe introvert. So one of the things I did when I created the sculpture park in the front yard is I put in a drinking fountain and a dog bowl for people passing by. Now, apparently, I'm not a very good plumber because every time somebody drank from my drinking fountain, the pipes under my house would go clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. So I'd know somebody was drinking from the fountain. But every time those pipes knocked, I went, I'm building community. I'm laying in my bed building community. So I think we've got to find ways that suit our personality, you know? So my yard is incredibly extroverted. It says to people, come on in. Enjoy yourself. But I'm hiding up in the house as a hermit, you know, and if I go down there and I'm working and people start talking to me, I'm like, oh, buzz off. You know, can't you see I'm trying to. You know, it's not quite that bad, but you understand what I'm saying is we have to find a way to give our gifts in a way that suits our personality, et cetera. And so if we are a kind of vagabond, introverted type. First of all, value the incredible gifts that gives to you. So there's a wonderful book called Quiet which is all about introverts and extroverts.
- [59:27]
B
Yeah, it's a great book. Yeah.
- [59:29]
A
I found it incredibly liberating that she explains why introverts make such a positive contribution to the world and to the community and how really severe introverts find a way to create an extrovert Persona that carries all of the wisdom that that introvert distills during their periods of introversion. So I say to audiences, I'd have nothing to say to you unless I spent an awful lot of time as an introvert because it's in that time that I distill the wisdom that I can can then share with the general public. And what you're seeing on this, I mean, my play the extrovert role right now, you know, where I'm like dredging up all the stuff that the introvert has come up with. So yes, value what it is you've got to contribute, you know, dig into that, don't be ashamed of whatever it is it happens to be and then find your unique way. The last bit of advice I would give is that so many of us get locked into, we think there's a way that we're going to make a contribution. And I'll illustrate this with a really quick story. It's a made up story, but I made it up to illustrate this point. So Doug came back from the war. He was a broken man. He spent a couple of years living rough on the streets with other homeless people. He met a young lady, got married, got a job, got his mind back together again. And he had a passion to start a soup kitchen for the homeless men that he'd spent those years on the streets with. And so he set up a bank account called the soup kitchen bank account. He'd worked double shifts over time, put any extra money that he earned into this account. And one night he explained to his wife that he was going to be working a double shift. And she said, for goodness sake, Doug, you know that we do have one extra kitchen chair that we're not using. Why don't instead of working overtime, you go out and find one homeless man bringing him home for dinner. So him working over time with his vision for the soup kitchen was all a means to an end that was taking years and years and years to implement. Instead of him going, is what I'm doing actually consistent with my vision, am I bringing the future into the present? Moment, using what I've already got, not what I wish I had or what I'm working towards. And for me, that's the secret of life. The secret of life is how do I bring whatever I envisage for the future into the present moment. And I guess that's the genesis of the seven day makeover. How do we start making overtown centers today, this week, with what we've already got, not with what we wish we had. Not more planning, not more dreaming, not more talking. Let's find a way to drag that future that we want into the present moment.
- [62:55]
B
It's brilliant. I love it. Thank you so much, David. I've really enjoyed this. It's been fascinating meeting you and I think your sort of origin story, if I can put it like that, and you describing yourself as an introvert in that way, it really does make huge sense in the context of what you do for a living and what you've spent your life trying to achieve. So I've really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
- [63:21]
A
Final word, what you want for yourself, you get by giving it to others. So my desire for a sense of connection comes out of giving other people a sense of connection. And that's. I probably should have explained that earlier in the piece, but that's what grounds me, is me giving other people a sense of home
- [63:45]
B
makes so much sense. Thank you.
- [63:47]
A
Not a problem.
- [63:50]
B
Thank you all for listening along today. I hope you enjoyed it. A reminder that you can keep up to date with homing on Instagram, watch the video version of each episode on YouTube, and also watch our house tours with some of our guests on Patreon. The handle for all of those is omingwithmatt. This episode was produced by Podshop with music by Simeon Walker. Take care and talk to you on the next one. Bye bye for now.