Translator: Tijana Mihajlović Reviewer: Ivana Krivokuća
This is my granddaughter Nikita.
When she was two years old, she badly cut her finger,
and every time her mother would change the bandage on her finger,
she would cry and say, "Mommy, I want to go home."
And her mother would explain to her that she was already home
- she was standing in the lounge room -
to which Nikita would get even more upset,
stamp her foot and say, "No, Mommy, I want to go home."
You see, for a two-year-old,
home is a feeling, not a location.
It's a feeling of no pain.
It's a nurturing place
in which she can flourish into her fullest potential.
Every human being is born with this inner ache for home.
It once extended out of their front door,
out into the street in front of their house,
down to the corner store, down to the center of town.
But that sense of place has been slowly shrinking
to the point where, for some people,
not even their house feels like home any longer.
I'm a professional place maker.
That means what I do is try to give people back
that sense of home in the public realm that I have lost over time.
I define place making as being a lot like home making.
You see, a home maker takes a house and they turn it into a home.
A place maker takes a space and turns it into a place.
Most place makers focus on design, that is, creating a location.
I focus on turning that location into a home
that gives people a feeling of rootedness and connection.
Some years ago, I built this suitcase, Segal's suitcase,
a little bit bigger than this one here, and out of that suitcase falls this.
(Laughter)
And just for fun, I traveled around the world,
and I set my throne up in famous locations.
Something very interesting happens
when you put a throne in the middle of the Champs-Élysée.
(Laughter)
People want to sit in it and have their photograph taken.
(Laughter)
And it constantly amazed me,
the people who not only wanted to sit in the chair,
but they wanted to put on the royal robes and get dressed up as well.
(Laughter)
I'd arrived in Los Angeles
and I selected a location to set up my throne.
It was a deserted car park, weeds growing up through the asphalt.
I put the gold suitcase down, I was setting my camera gear up,
when I spied a police car coming across the car park.
I knew they were coming for me
because I was the only person for miles around.
(Laughter)
The good officers pulled up, rolled their window down,
and said, "What are you doing here?"
So, I patiently explained
that inside my gold suitcase was a giant throne.
(Laughter)
I was going to take that throne out and set it up,
and I was going to sit in it, and take photographs of myself.
(Laughter)
And they said, "Well, you can't do it here."
And I said, "Why not?"
And they said, "Because as soon as it gets dark,
this is where all the homeless people in downtown Los Angeles come to sleep,
and you're not going to be safe,
and that expensive camera gear is not going to last very long.
And they drove off. And I disobeyed.
(Laughter)
As soon as it got dark, homeless people began emerging out of the shadows.
And guess what they all wanted to do?
(Laughter)
None of them were interested in stealing my expensive camera gear.
They all wanted to sit on the throne and have their photograph taken.
This particular picture is a snapshot of what place making is all about.
You see, when this homeless lady,
with all of her worldly goods packed in her lap,
sits on the throne, takes the scepter, puts the crown on her head,
something magical happens.
In that moment of time,
she is transformed from a homeless lady into the Queen of Los Angeles.
(Laughter)
And at that precise moment,
a crack appears in the wall of her reality,
and through that crack,
she spies potential for herself that she never dreamed possible.
It's true that my throne is no longer in that car park,
and yet, it is.
You see, every now and again, when this homeless lady
comes to bed down overnight in this deserted car park,
it is entirely possible that she remembers an evening,
a warm, muggy Los Angeles evening,
when for a brief moment of time, she got to be the Queen of Los Angeles.
And every time that memory resurfaces,
the same crack appears in the wall of her reality,
and through that crack, she spies that potential for herself.
The memory becomes like a beacon on the horizon,
calling her forth to a higher mode of being.
This picture illustrates for us two key aspects of place making.
The first is that place making
is the creation - or the art of creating - memorable experiences for people
that are potentially transformative.
The second is
that place is the antidote to our addiction to movement.
You see, we live in a very mobility-centric culture.
At the time of the Industrial Revolution,
we began believing that all progress requires movement.
An idle machine is obviously an unproductive machine.
Somebody sitting in a public space is obviously
an unproductive member of society,
unless they've got a cup of coffee in front of them.
(Laughter)
Do you know that in America your forefathers said
that each of you has the right to pursue happiness?
As Americans, you do not have the right to sit and be happy.
(Laughter)
There's a great tragedy in every mobility-centric culture,
and that is that our potential as individuals, or as communities,
always resides in a future destination that we are traveling towards.
We will fly when we get a doctorate,
when we get the job promotion,
when we find the perfect partner,
when we get rid of the person we thought was the perfect partner.
(Laughter)
As cities, we will fly when we get the stadium.
Place breaks our focus on that singular future event
and plugs us into the infinite possibilities
that reside all around us, right here, right now.
You see, the problem with always seeing our potential
as something that resides in the future is that we get mired in the means.
We find ourselves going to endless committee meetings,
or creating master plans, or collecting petitions,
all of the means to some future vision,
and often we get lost in myriads of detours.
I met a guy in Seattle some years ago,
who had been fighting his City Hall for 20 years
to have something done about the traffic problems
in his home street.
He came to one of my presentations, and he went home, and he said to his wife,
"Let's have dinner on our front lawn twice a week."
I met him some years later,
and he said not only did having dinner on his front lawn
slowed the traffic in his street,
(Laughter)
some people actually stopped, and got out of their cars,
and came over, and had a conversation.
Some even stayed for dinner.
(Laughter)
He said, "David, we built more community
in having dinner on our front lawn in two months
than in the previous twenty years
of bitching, and moaning, and fighting City Hall.
Paihia is a little town in the north of New Zealand,
of population of 1,700 people.
They'd spent a lot of time creating a master plan for their town center,
and they asked me to help them realize their 25-million-dollar dream
in a town of 1,700 people.
(Laughter)
So, I instructed them
to scrape together whatever resources they could lay their hands on:
money, even the junk laying around in their back yards or in their garages.
Now, in three days, and with just $5,000,
and some old rotting seats out of an old ferry,
we converted this dead bit of the town center
into this civic space.
The town got so excited about the new life
that had been injected into this dead solar space,
that this lady set up an op-shop
to raise money for future place making projects.
In essence, what she was doing was taking the town's crap
and recycling it into money,
which then got invested into place making project.
(Laughter)
In four years,
she has raised $300,000 recycling crap.
(Laughter)
One of the spaces this community wanted to makeover was this toilet block;
this is where all the tourist buses pulled up.
It wasn't a very good introduction to the town.
When I saw it,
it was probably the worst toilet block I'd seen in a long time,
but I got wildly excited,
(Laughter)
so excited I almost wet myself.
(Laughter)
I am a great believer
that our deficits are always our greatest potential asset.
So, I gave the town nine days of my time.
We established $15,000 budget, all of that raised in the op-shop,
and we turned their toilet block into a tourist attraction.
Have you seen this many tourists standing around,
looking at the toilet block before?
(Laughter)
They've completed over twenty of these place making projects,
and recently one "Community of the Year"
in New Zealand.
I tried to replicate what we had done in Paihia in other towns,
but inevitably, the process would get bogged down
in endless committee meetings.
So I created the seven-day makeover.
This is where we do a project from beginning to end,
from conception to completion in just seven days.
This is the main street in Mildura in Australia,
where the city had spent 4.2 million dollars
renovating this space into a soulless display home.
One of the key aspects of a seven-day makeover
is that the community must limited self to the resources that it has access to.
We found this old bridge, languishing in the council depo,
and it was recycled
into one of the key centerpieces of this makeover.
We had access to 15,000 old tires.
This piece of old agricultural pipe was turned into a sculpture piece.
This old fridge was turned into a mini library.
All in seven days,
and starting with just $5,000,
and the junk that we could lay our hands on.
My father was a vagabond street-corner preacher man.
We drifted from town to town in this caravan,
and here is the supreme irony in my personal story.
You see, the little boy on the right never got to experience
a sense of home or place.
His parents were too busy getting people ready
for the big mansion in the sky.
He was the perpetual outsider,
beat up every single day of his life by the school bullies
at every new school that he went to.
How is it that this little boy with no sense of place or home
grew up to be a world expert on place and the establishment of place?
Well, don't ask a fish to describe water.
(Laughter)
You see, in the supreme act of alchemy,
this little boy turned his greatest deficit, no sense of home,
and turned into his greatest asset:
the ability to give other people a sense of home and place.
And that little boy has a gift for you today.
You see, poor people are often better homemakers than rich people.
The reason is that they are forced to furnish their home
with soul and with the generous spirit.
Friends, you already have every single asset you will ever need
to bring magic to a public space near you.
All you need to do is stop dreaming, stop planning,
for god’s sake stop going to committee meetings,
(Laughter)
and just start creating.
Thank you.
(Applause)