Why Doesn’t Where You Live Feel Like Home? — with Urban Designer David Engwicht

29:08David Engwicht: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, 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, you know, it has an influence on the whole neighbourhood. 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 over town centre we go. What are the things that make, if you visit somebody's house, what makes you feel at home?

29:56David Engwicht: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. Okay. 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 realise 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?

30:40David Engwicht: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?

31:30David Engwicht: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 um and 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. So interesting. I love that idea about making public spaces feel homely. If someone watching or listening lives in a block of flats or on a terrace somewhere, in your experience, what's the kind of most profound thing that they can do to elicit some kind of change in behaviour?

32:38Somehow 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?

32:48David Engwicht: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. No. And in the window is a display of something that reveals something about the character, the personality, the passions of that person. It might be a display of antique dolls or whatever. I'll 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.

33:50David Engwicht:and I went, oh, my God, I've got to take a photo of that. That is, 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 presentation. so I went back and by this time there were a couple of two people standing on the footpath in front of this um 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 Okay.

34:50David Engwicht: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 it was really, really interesting about how our underlying stories dictate what we can and we can't do. But I think it's a 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 are you good at?

35:47David Engwicht: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 as written organising 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?

36:39David Engwicht: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 can what what's my way of contributing that like if you 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 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 So for those people that are not aware of that, just tell us about that.

37:36What was that and what were you trying to achieve with it?

37:40David Engwicht:So remember I told you about it 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 and had me sit in this chair with, you know, traffic streaming pass.

38:38David Engwicht: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, you know, 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 falls out of a suitcase and I took that all over the world. I think I 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 in, you know, whether it was Times Square or Thomas Bridge in Prague or the Champs-de-Lise in Paris and want to sit in my chair and then I would take photographs of these people sitting in my chair.

39:45David Engwicht:I never solicited it. It was just the most unusual random people who would come and ask to sit in the chair. So, yes, it was an act of reclaiming public space. So you would basically go to the Champs -Élysées as an example and you would get out your suitcase, put your throne up in the middle of the highway, right? In that case, on the traffic island in the middle, yes. So you do this and then you just sit there for a bit and see what happens? 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, yeah.

40:31So you call this street reclamation, right?

40:36David Engwicht:Yes. Why is that important to you? 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 centre, 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 multi-million 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 you know 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 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.

42:23That'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.

43:04So I love this idea that it's about reduction, you know.

43:07David Engwicht:Yeah. I'll give you one quick example of that. So we did a makeover in a town called Tunkari. 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 centre 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 authorities.

43:53David Engwicht:So we have a workshop and we will ask things like, can we take the yellow fence away during the seven-day makeover? And they go, no. And I go, why? What's it there for? And they say, oh, 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 a ledges than to have a yellow safety fence. And somebody goes, oh, I guess we could have planter boxes or 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.

44:38David Engwicht:Now for that entire block, we replaced that yellow fence with a series of seats tables and chairs, planted 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 removed 100 bollards. I said, what are the bollards there for? Oh, they stopped ram raiding. 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.

45:33David Engwicht:And how do we turn it into something positive that says, please enjoy your time here, feel connected to the space, et cetera. 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 it you know 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.

46:14So 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 yeah yeah yeah um so what would be the advice for um for that sort of scenario what what what could he have done rather than put up the fencing you know what what is the issue he's trying to solve and what's a better way of solving it would you say i mean one strategy

47:10David Engwicht:that i would suggest um and incidentally i'm facing a similar issue with my park uh so yesterday's success always becomes today's problem yeah that's a truism of life but one approach they could have taken would have been uh to solicit all of the uh 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 1 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 the furniture's kind of thrown around the place.

48:03David Engwicht:I know it wasn't you guys, but if you see it happening, could you please intervene on my behalf? Look, the other top secret I would give, and this happens all the time with antisocial behaviour, and here's a classic story. So I was asked to do a street makeover in Christchurch in New Zealand. The council had allocated 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 to 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 hoons I don't know what you call them there kids that like doing burnouts yeah there were kids doing burnouts in the street at two 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 and 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 fifty thousand dollars yeah yeah yeah very good right now I then met a gentleman in uh 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 love doing burnouts in the street as well 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-seated jet ski anchored in the bay which of you would like to drive my jet ski tomorrow and 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.

50:23David Engwicht:The number one problem I find with people who are grappling with antisocial behaviour is that they don't talk to the people who are the precipitators of the bad behaviour and they don't ask what do we need to change in order for you to start behaving yourself. 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 in to try and to solve it collectively. I think that's really good advice actually. Yeah. I'll see what I can do with the landowner. Yes. 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.

51:07Is that fair to say? You did this thing called the Neighbourhood Pace Car Program as well. Tell us about all that kind of stuff.

51:14David Engwicht:This is the number one placemaking trick that we teach people when I say trick.

51:22David Engwicht:So if I can get everybody that is in a town centre or a neighbourhood 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 revolutionised 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 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 centers is they've 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.

52:36David Engwicht:So the traditional role of town centres and, for that matter, neighbourhood streets have been the social and cultural epicentre 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 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? Oh, no way. I didn't know that. Yeah. I'm actually coming to Wales.

53:25David Engwicht:We're going to be doing a series of one-day makeovers in three Welsh towns. All of that to demonstrate 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 becomes a lingonode. A lingonode can be as simple as a chalked hopscotch square on the street, you know, bubble wands. The simplest example I can give of lingonodes, and, you know, this is the way my brain works, is I go to one town and there were low brick walls on every corner.

54:21I'm assuming to stop people crossing at the wrong spots but I said everybody go home

54:28David Engwicht:get the foreign coins that are in 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 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 of the coins. So that brings us back to none of this stuff is rocket science. When we teach retailers how to do this, you know, 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. So, you know, kids are standing there playing the game in the window.

55:15David Engwicht:And I can give dozens of examples of really simple things that retailers can do to create these Linga nodes. Interesting. 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 drove at the speed limit, nobody would be able to speed in your street.

55:55David Engwicht:So we created this sticker called the Neighbourhood 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.

56:34David Engwicht:and to me that was the whole success of that idea was that I forced people to stop externalising 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. 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.

57:14So 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 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

57:43David Engwicht:where to stop interesting because i would classify classify myself as 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.

58:55David Engwicht: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 that gives to you. So there's a wonderful book called Quiet, which is all about introverts and extroverts. Yeah, it's a great book. Yeah. 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.

59:57David Engwicht: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 then share with the general public. And what you're seeing on this, I'm in 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 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.

1:00:55David Engwicht: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 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.

1:01:48David Engwicht:Why don't instead of working overtime you go out and find one homeless man, bring him home for dinner? So him working overtime 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 I guess that's the genesis of the seven-day makeover how do we start making over town centres 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 to drag that future that we want into the present moment it's brilliant I love it thank you so much David I've I've really enjoyed this it's been fascinating meeting you and I think um 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.

1:03:16So I've really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Final word, what you want for yourself,

1:03:24David Engwicht: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. makes so much sense thank you 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 at homing with matt 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