59, Joel Cosgrove

We speak with Joel Cosgrove, social geographer and core curator of Wellington’s Eyegum Music Collective.
We discuss their Welcome to Nowhere festival as placemaking, our urban 3rd spaces and collective public space. 
He suggests that much of what we worked on in the past shows more examples than the works of present development. It's time to think back as we think forward. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hi, This is Rosslyn Davy here and we have Joel
Cosgrove with us for about Summer Christmas special of Local
Architecture Our High Joel Cured. I invited you on the
program because I met you at your festival that you
create and coordinate.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
With a whole lot of people. I'm always there's always
a fixation on sort of like a person or an individual,
and I've always very really clear that I think we
have for welcome to know which we stopped running because
it was an incredible way of losing money. About eighty
crew of various shapes and sizes and levels of intensity,

(00:49):
intensity in terms of their involvement amazing. It takes the
village to put on a village.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
Absolutely. And the reason that I caught your attention or
that you caught my attention was I was arrived at
this festival. The only reason I went to this wonderful
music festival is it was in my valley where I
lon Land, and I was not going to miss a
festival that was happening in my valley. When it's that close,
When it's that close, I mean, it's so special and
it was very remote. And then I discovered that there's

(01:15):
a whole feel about this festival about kind of like
village architecture. It was working for me. I mean, you
had this incredible environment, which you'd obviously selected, but you
were doing placemaking and you were creating these pavilion spaces
and these stage spaces, but very subtly with the lie
of the land and the way the sort of features

(01:35):
of the land were And that's what struck me. And
we start and then you mentioned that you were your
field one of yours, your interests is social geography. So
it all made sense.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah, well, I think, well, a festival site, a festival itself,
ninety five percent of it is framed by your space. Yeah.
The space dictates how many people you can have. The
space dictates where you can do things and how you
do things. And so we sort of found it. And
I've worked on a number of festivals of shapes and sizes,

(02:08):
big ones, little ones, medium sized ones over the years,
so I had a pretty good sense of what a
festival can look like in the border sense. And so
we got there. I was like, wow, this is this
is just set up. There's this can do that, that
can do that, and these things can sort of flow
that way. But then a lot of it also comes
from which I also say is that your first year

(02:29):
is in doing anything. Really your first attempt at doing
anything is really just figuring it out. So it took
us maybe a couple of a couple of years. Each
year you go, oh, which way do people walk? You know,
you can try set up paths, but then you also
see where people just walk anyway. You see any sort
of thing where like there's well, there's the little outside

(02:51):
the Basement reserve and Wellington on Cambridge Terrace the bike
track the bicycle lane does the sort of like bump
loop sort of thing where it goes around them back in,
and then there's a brown patch where people across the
grass have just biked straight across the grass. Ye, So
there's you sort of quite organically react to how people

(03:11):
use a space. So you know, like in terms of
shade and that sort of thing, it's sort of like, oh,
these are the spaces that are just ruthlessly open and
we need to create shade. So how do we go
about doing that? Or you know, just watching how people
interact with the space and going this is what people did,
how can we react and turn to that? So you
set a space up, people interact with it, and then

(03:33):
you re engage with it from that point from the that's.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
The essentials of placemaking. It's actually working with what's there
and then responding to how people activate that space. And
it's a growing it's a continual sort of interaction.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah, and I think there's a certain amount of humility
that needs to be taken to place in the sense
of that you can't just force people to do it
your way. Yeah, it's very hard for usple to do
things your way. There's a sort of not whatever, the

(04:08):
opposite of coercion, you know, there's some cooperation has got
to be involved on both the attendee and the sort
of the host.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
Well, maybe that's what learning that over time, as you
said you did, Maybe that's what makes successful sort of
architectural space. Because when I got there, and I think
this is applies to those of us who are trying
to do sort of open place making temporary kind of
architectural spaces, is that I felt like it was serving us,
Like I felt, oh, this this is as as, this

(04:36):
is how I want to walk, this is how I
want to be in this place. It's kind of set
up for me and I appreciated that as a human
because I felt comfortable that this was a gorgeous environment
and where these places were set up together, they kind
of responded to the environment. So it's a two way thing.
I mean, you're you're responding to how people organically do things,

(04:56):
but then you're also offering us opportunities to hang out.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
Well, that's to go a little messa in a little
bit more philosophical, you know. That's where the whole concept
of well honore so bad at French honor has. Whole
concept of the production of space plays into that as well.

(05:20):
Is that it's that we're shaped by the spaces we're in,
and we shaped the spaces we're in, but that at
an individual level we have very little inability to shape
our spaces. It's only at the collective level can we
actually can we actively shape our spaces. That's where your

(05:40):
relationship between the government, the state and collective bodies residents associations,
homeowners associations, music festival collectives, those are all different sort
of collective entities that can proactively shape their their spaces.
So I think that's when we're coming to our conversation,
not that it's always necessarily as liminal as this, but

(06:03):
that we have based around our own desire to enjoy
ourselves and create spaces we enjoy. It's really important to
give people the sense that they have some sort of
ownership and agency over their space, and so that that
comes in both subtly and directly in terms of what

(06:25):
we do and how we do it, especially with something
like nowhere, which is in the middle of nowhere on
some isolated farmland.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
So you say, have a sense that people part of
the part of the mission is that you know that
people need to have a sense of agency over the space.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
Well, when people come into it, one part of it
is that you know they can see that the barrier
between the organizes, the bands, and the attendees doesn't exist.
You know, everyone is camping next which everyone else. So
I'm up on what we called old Man's hell, which

(07:04):
was a choke from a bunch of one year a
bunch of my friends who were in their forties and
me I would have been in my early thirties. We're
hanging out on this little ridge, little ridge, and they
were just joking about it being old man's hells a
whole bunch of oldness, old people you know, when you're
in the festival business, most people there in the early

(07:24):
mid twenties. That's the bulk of the audience. So you know,
I just I can't I tend on old man's hell
and any random person could be tending next to me.
And so people come in and they see that there's
it's just a bunch of regular people doing things. Almost
everything is like it's been built ourselves to a high standard,

(07:44):
to a high school high standard. But nonetheless it's not
a big everything hasn't been shipped in everything. It's not
the sort of professional distanced arrangement where people's social structures
is cemented in place. You know, it's not where we
are the professionals here as our professional environment. You're here

(08:05):
to engage in a one way sense, you know, we're
here to communicate at you, to broadcast at you. It
sets up a space where there's more engagement and a
more of a two way space.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
Yeah, but you know, humans, people are intelligent beings, and
I think when you go into think into a place
like yours, it feels more professional in a sense that
to a human because you feel, oh this is working
as to how I see I want to be in
the place, so it feels even it feels professional to
the average layperson because I think people have a native

(08:40):
intelligence and if we're in the land and a built
structure is kind of meaningful to them and enables them
to enjoy that environment, they think, yeah, this is working,
and it feels almost more professional because somehow that subtle
thought has gone into it.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yeah, like I wouldn't don't. I don't like the framework
of professional no, no, because it sets up in us
and them, because to be professional is to have the
unprofessional or the unknown, the known and the unknown. And
so I think, you know, we're we're very organized, like
we we got we go quite deep on our Google

(09:17):
spreadsheets and the management of things and so. But that
that's the underlying so i'd I wouldn't say that shambolic,
But you know di Y, but there's a whole young
So there's di Y and there's d I T, which
is do it together. I quite like that framing of
it because di Y is a very individualistic. Which comes

(09:39):
back to what I was saying before is that people
will talk about like your festival, and you know, I
do a lot of work, but over the years, proportionally
I do less I still do as much as I've
ever done, but as we've gotten bigger and more skilled,
I proportionally do less and less and less, which is
very potent great things.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
Yeah, it was a you have all these different constants
back to back, and you go and there'll be some
wonderful woman racing between like the the sound or back
and forth to the equipment. All this is going on,
and we're just sitting there watching that. These bands were
all ready to go, but there was there's all these
there were these people who you knew what they were doing,
and they were running between the equipment and the and
the stage to make sure the sound was right. And

(10:21):
that was all part of it as well, that we
could see it. You could see it happening.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah, it's regular people who are very good at what
they do.

Speaker 1 (10:28):
Yeah, yeah, regular what they do.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah. And so that's you know, that's really important. So
you know, there's there's a different chat between professionalism and
the professionalization. And I think also the idea that you're
a passive pain consumer and that's not something that because
we can't you have to pay a lot more. Are
there are festivals in you I like, I don't have

(10:50):
a problem with them, But there are festivals around and
alter or where you do are a pain consumer and
everything is sorted for you. But that's not based on
our It would be much more expensive to do, I think,
much more inaccessible for people. And so that's that's the
reality of doing things, you know, as cheaply as we

(11:12):
can get away with.

Speaker 1 (11:13):
It, but it feels quality. It doesn't feel cheap, and
I think it's because there's sort of an intelligence behind
environment and people in place and that requires a will.
I mean as this is being our end of year
summer Christmas special because I met you in the summer
outside in the sun and it's about architectural of the moment.

(11:35):
Can you can you typ with what we're talking about here?
We're talking about well, one part of this is which
is this festival Nowhere to Festival of Nowhere.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
So it's Welcome to Nowhere, which was a festival we
set up seven well whatever. Twenty seventeen was our first one,
so three plus four seven So we did sex and
we had one cancer, which is the only one we
made money out of because we've got COVID grants. Yeah
it's yah. Every other one we lost money between seventy

(12:05):
five dollars and twenty five thousand dollars, which is that's
an issue itself, but we're working on slowly and we
won't do another festival and we've paid off our debt
our current debt. But it was really just a response
to a bunch of us to be going to other

(12:26):
festivals campbell Ohum and Cronaphonium, which had both within a
year or two of each other, had wound down, and
so myself my friends had said, if we don't do something,
we're not going to have something to go do. So okay,
the lack of a fest woman, we put on a festival,
and we've been putting on house parties and putting on
shows in Wellington, and I worked on a bunch of festivals,

(12:50):
and then a bunch of the rest of our core crew,
a bunch of room still involved now to varying degrees,
had also been involved in the last Cronafhonium. So we
sort of asked around talking to people about what they
want to see in a festival, and then ask people
who put on festivals how that worked, and then tried

(13:12):
to do ourselves. And I think we yeah, progressively, we
got better and better, and I'd say o our last
three we sort of plateaued at a relative level of
coordination and competence.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
Great amazing amount of collective collaborative work though.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, definitely. And that's the difference as well, when it's
something that people personally believe in and have a vested stake,
and you get a much deeper engagement and attachment than
something you know, everyone's paid and they have their jobs
and their professional and competent and whatnot, but they're not
necessarily emotionally attached to what they're doing.

Speaker 1 (13:51):
So how did you find the site and why? And
can you describe it? A women?

Speaker 2 (13:55):
Ha ha. So we we're at the last coronaphonium and
this was and that was in the far north neck
I tire and this one was halfway between Hunterville and

(14:16):
in the middle of nowhere and just peace of land.
And so we came back through Dave Merritt, who's a
veterant poet and raconteur, so he knew about it and said, hey,
I've got this land. There's a whole potentially defamatory conversation

(14:36):
about how it all unrolled with with Dave God bless him.
Turns out wasn't his land, but it was Monty.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
Who was so Dave. I've I just heard about Dave
American old time, Yeah, wrong, way back. Just name popped
up recently.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
He was involved with the Nawah Music Festival, which was
the New Zealands would stock. He's a publicity officer for that.
It's quite heavy involved with to a man it with
fly None in the eighties wrote the first book about
the Internet. And the late eighties or early nineties no
the South Taranaki. We fell out too, whether mild mildly

(15:12):
defamatory conversation comes into play or libelous one of those two.
But you introduced you to the land, to the land, yeah,
and we sort of rolled from there. And because I'd
been on quite a few festivals, I had a pretty
good sense of what one looked like, so I could
quite quickly visualize how things would sit and where it
would go. So it's function two layers of land. You

(15:38):
got effectively a big paddic the size of maybe three
rugby fields, and there's a little four x four track
that then goes down with heap and turn down about
fifteen meters to a smaller area that opens up, which
is where our original stage was set. And then there's

(16:01):
a big swimming hole behind the main stage, and so
all those and then the sound naturally through being in
this bowl just travels out into forestry land. So it's
very few people live there anyway, and even fewer can
actually hear what's going on quite naturally, and you know,
there's no way we could engineer that ourselves. And then

(16:24):
a swimming hole that clears itself. I've been involved in
spaces with swimming holes that don't clear themselves, and you
put hundreds, maybe thousands of people through a swimming hole
that doesn't clear itself, and it becomes quite bad quite quickly. Yeah,
But a swimming hole that clears itself, a natural amphitheater
for a stage, and more than enough space for people

(16:45):
to part their cars and pitch the tents. Yeah, that's
your basic Edmunds cockpok recipe for a festival site.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
Okay, so you've got a real grasp of that sense
of that site, and then you could people it and
you could actually manifest the whole technological side of it
as well totally. Would you call it like pop up architecture?
Would you call that a sense of understanding?

Speaker 2 (17:07):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (17:08):
Would you call it like a pop up architecture sort
of approach.

Speaker 2 (17:10):
To an extent. So we rent the land and we've
been renting the land ever since, and we're not putting
on a fest We're not putting on a festival this
summer because of the aforementioned debt, but we're still there.
I mean, for us, you really start tapping into the
idea of your two dung away Wi, you know, the
place where the place where your feet stand. As a kid,

(17:32):
my family had a family batch on the Lungatata River,
and you know, every summer we'd go there, and so
you really developed an attachment. And so with this land,
I've probably been there, I figured it out. I've probably
traveled up there once every six to eight months, six
to eight weeks since twenty sixteen. So you know, like
I'm very familiar with the land and.

Speaker 1 (17:54):
The So you were going up there even prior to
the festivals or do you have to think about it
as you're organized in the festival?

Speaker 2 (17:59):
Yeah, well at all. You're you're talking about maybe nine months, right,
nine months ahead of time starting to get things going.
Sundre various building, so.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
Very slight orientedd you're going up there every six weeks.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
Yeah, there's a lot of mucking around. Let's be very
clear about this. You know, we're definitely taking our time,
but you know, building the stage. When we first started building,
building long drops because we hated Portaloos. Sure, and we've
had a we had a really good relationship with the
local council. And there are only two real requests of us.

(18:35):
There quite firm requests were that any anyone is selling
food publicly or commercially needed to have food safety certificates,
which is quite a reasonable request, and that we didn't
have long drops, but that we had Portaloos. Those functionally
are there only requests of us, So everything else is
a mix of permanent structures. So we probably spent. So

(18:57):
we have our Mangamahu stage which is down the bottom?

Speaker 1 (18:59):
Are they?

Speaker 2 (19:00):
And yeah, I know?

Speaker 1 (19:01):
Are you constantly renting this the whole year? Yeah, I
got it.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
Just at one point someone wanted to put forty three
bee hives on the land and we're going to pay
Monty the landowner to do that, and we went we'd
rather not have beehives here, and so I said, hey, Monty,
if we just check some cash, can we just have
you know, alongside him obviously understood at use of the land.

(19:28):
He's like, yes, totally. So we've been doing that for
seven years. And so some things are permanent, like the stage.
So we probably spent the most recent stage of the
camp stage probably maybe fifteen thousand dollars, which for us,
has a lot of money. And that's four beams, four
hundred and fifty one hundred and fifty mill beams concrete

(19:49):
it into the ground, and then twelve pile piles probably
a meter into the ground, also concreted and then even
bolted together. It's compared to our first stage, which is
quite ramshackle. The second stage was I'm still very impressed.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
You've impressed. Okay, so that I didn't realize. I thought
these were temporary things. They had a great sense of
well occasion about them. I mean you could so they
were strongly built and they're there permanently.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
Well. Our first stage, our first stage was built on
top of pallettes, so you know, two layers of palettes
and then plywood on top. Got it. And so that's
that that, you know, semier that's semi well, semi permanent
for the period of time that we're using it. Other
things like so we have a mix of permanent and
temporary structures. So we have a green room that we

(20:36):
built which is six by four meters and that's just
for storing things like the various rickety fridges that we own,
because you're having about three or four fridges going over
the period of the festival is actually quite handy. You know,
the rest culture, the rarest coutures that we've accumulated. The rarest.
We have seven hammocks that we just collected over time.

(20:58):
People just abandoned them. Seven hammocks, about twelve camp chairs,
that sort of thing, So space for them. But then
you know temporary merch merch tents, temporary safer spaces, safer
spaces spaces. Yes, we had. We end up setting up

(21:21):
a buzzy we call it the buzzy tent, so you
have your safest spaces. You're dealing with either people who
are under various influences where the alcohol or illicit drugs,
and you're dealing with them, but they're not a problem,
but they're just kind of you just want to keep
an eye on them, so you want to give them
squishy things and pens and smelly things and just to

(21:42):
distract them keeping going. So if you have a serious issue,
you can deal with that. And then we found that
we were dealing with both sets of people at the
same time. So, you know, setting up a temporary space,
a buzzy space where you know people are all those poppers.
My daughter, my daughter loves them that, Yes, you pop them.
They're in the different shapes, unicorns and stars and stuff. Okay,
a collection of that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
And you'd give that a sort of like therapy tools
for people who are having a bit of a having
a good time, a good time, yeah, okay, and.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
So like, yeah, and you just want to you want
to keep an eye on them, be kind of want
to keep them away from the people having a bad time.
I see two different sets of people to deal with.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
Okay, and this is the safe space place.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
Yeah, it's a safe space. And then there's a buzzy space.

Speaker 1 (22:24):
I must have been. I walked gingerly past them, but
they were there very infinitely.

Speaker 2 (22:27):
Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
Interesting enough. I've got I've got to I've got someone
in interviewing about a book she wrote about town and
photography and things, and I was sort of doing some
research around it, and it brought me back to the
classic book that I remembered, you know, back in the
eighties written the architectural classic called the Elegant Shed. And
what you're talking about with these, with these, with these stages,

(22:53):
is reminding me of that sort of basic idea of
you know, what is the new you know, the elegant shed,
you know, the basic building space for people.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah, so non arrogant, i'd say, as a non arrogant building.
And it's a very functional building. It serves a purpose
and it does that purpose well, but it's not grandiose.
So if you're talking about it.

Speaker 1 (23:14):
Does a lot of work. Basically, it does what.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
It's meant to do, and it's you know, it's something
we're proud of you if you go with the old
school batch. So it was my family's batch. You got
three rooms, twelve bunk beds all up, you know, because
my good Catholic family, my dad's family. There was I've
got five aunties, one uncle and then my dad on

(23:36):
that side, so you got seven kids quite quickly, and
then you know, everyone spreads out from there. But it's
very much not not an impressive building, but a functional building.
That's definitely our line of way.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
So these these permanent stages, did you sort of draw
up a design or did you just kind of figure
it out in your heads?

Speaker 2 (23:55):
A bit of both. So we've got friends who are builders,
and so we went and had a yarn to them
and said, if you're going to do this, how would
you do it? And we've got various drawings from them,
just mocking up how they do that and then sort
of winging it from there over time, so we a
bunch of us became tradees.

Speaker 1 (24:14):
Yes, really yeah, And the building process of this festival,
you've become.

Speaker 2 (24:19):
Trades in parallel.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah, okay, you've become traderes and your professionally.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yeah. So by the time we built our second stage,
we were far more competent than we were at the
time of our first stage, just the terms of skills
and knowledge and understanding.

Speaker 1 (24:34):
So you've got this trades process of building and construction,
and then you're over it. You've got this whole sort
of music, spiritual philosophy then going on. So it's a
it's a real event and the whole thing, the whole
whole whole way.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
Definitely.

Speaker 1 (24:49):
Yeah. So you're talking about with this whole social geography
and how do you get these festivals, you know, having
to speak to councils all of that. So you've done
it okay in a very temporary way. But I think
we're now just trying as architecture practitioners to look at

(25:10):
ways of how we can activate public spaces ourselves as
sort of pop up architecture spaces and all that sort
of thing, and we find, I mean, it's very hard
because we're asking for public space to be utilized in
a way that's not sort of development, permanent development and things.
So I'm just just sort of trying to think how
we can how the work that you're doing is a

(25:33):
validation of this of this this vision that we're sort
of trying to promote.

Speaker 2 (25:37):
Well, there's there's two parts to it. Trafflic is really
the challenging part, and God blessed counsels. They're doing their
best and they're trying their hardest, but the minute you
work within their space, you're constrained by by their rules.
And you know, they broadly speaking, have rules for good

(25:59):
reasons most of the time in most places. But you
know the same thing that for us in our on
our private land, you know, we had long drops until
the council we're like, we just don't want that, and
we looked around for alternatives, and there are alternatives, but
we would have had to have convinced counsel it was

(26:21):
a good idea. So there's a certain amount of like
councils and bureaucracy and bureaucratic structures. They really like it
when things are easy and simple and have a good
chance of working and making them look good. And so

(26:44):
that's that's part of the challenge when you're trying to
do something that hasn't initially been done before or not
been done with them, trying to convince them that they
should go out on a limb, because going on a
limb is when you get in trouble potentially, and so
working through from there. So at times it's sort of
like what can you do in that in the gray

(27:09):
spaces to build that back catalog or reputation or sort
of like critical mass of sort of experience and that
you can point to saying we've done this, this and
that and this. They've been really good and they've worked
and here's a process. Part of it is also learning

(27:29):
how their language. You know, there's two different angles that
I think any sort of public space we've seem to
engage the public, you've got to talk with people not
at people. You've got to create things in spaces that
people want to engage with in a way they that
suits them and giving people the space. There's a great

(27:50):
example I always had that always makes you chuckle is
on the waterfront, an artist had made these reflective panel
not Hexagon's, but it must have been like thirty panels
or forty whatever that number is of whatever gone that is.
That was, you know, forty panel hexagon type thing. Yes,
and drunk people were running into it and smashing into

(28:15):
it and um misshaping it, you know. So every time
someone smashed into it, it would reshape this thing, and
the artist was complaining about people doing that. I'm just like, well,
you can't just put these things, this shiny, flashy things,
these shiny reflective things, in the middle of the waterfront
and not expect drunk people to have a go at them. Yeah,

(28:37):
and I really enjoyed it, you know, because these things
are constantly changing as people would smash into them and
around with constantly changing shape. And so you know, like
you can go and say, hey, this is this art,
respect and engage with it. And I think, you know
that's a real you can't stop people engaging with.

Speaker 1 (28:58):
Engaging with it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
Yeah, yeah, that they do. Yeah, you put that in
an art gallery, you're less likely have drunk people smash
into it. You put down the waterfront, you're much more
like drunk people smash into it. I guess that conceptualizes
a much wider framework that I.

Speaker 1 (29:16):
So, public art has a whole lot of real you know,
real things around it you have to meet, like.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Like public public space, you know, public public building, public architecture.

Speaker 1 (29:29):
Public art has a whole lot of general.

Speaker 2 (29:33):
There's a two way communication you've got to have maybe
the three way, with the bureaucracy being the third part
of that communication.

Speaker 1 (29:39):
Yeah. So, I mean this is quite exciting that you've
done it for seven years and okay, you're giving yourself
a break for obvious reasons, but do it again.

Speaker 2 (29:46):
I mean we've stopped for financial reasons.

Speaker 1 (29:48):
Yeah, and you've you've still been.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
The desire is still there.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
Yeah. I mean it shows that it's a sort of
very it's a very kind of loose forerunner of what
we could sort of say, where as a profession can
sort of step into that space and do and say, well,
look this is work, this is how it's worked. From
people who are artists and musicians. You usually step in
first anyway in these sorts of arenas, and then after

(30:11):
that you might come.

Speaker 2 (30:13):
Of gentrification as the artists and their creatives come in.
So it's a it's a double edged short. I've seeing
that with a new town.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
It's a double edged sword.

Speaker 2 (30:19):
You're right, But I think if you look in so
for example, within the cycle of the development of cycle
ways within Wellington, which that's a really interesting question in
terms of the use of public space, in terms of
reimagining those spaces around us, what the best practice shows
is that you need a fast and flexible way of

(30:42):
doing it that just gets it in, gets people used
to it, allows you to try these spaces out and
then allows you to come back and reflect and build
on those. You know, you build a cycle path, people
use it, you learn from it. You go, this is
what people have used, learned from it. This is how
we adapt and build and develop it. It's the cycle
ways that are ponderous and onerous and take a long

(31:06):
time to build and develop to get it perfect. The
search for a perfect plan from the get go as
a real barrier, as opposed to when where you start
off with an idea, do it, allow people to engage
with it and then continually revamp it and build on it.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
I love that. I mean, that's what I would like
to think that we can talk about these public space works,
is that you're saying they're not permanent. Were saying, we
introduced this and people are trying people interact with it,
and then they inform how we may actually more solidify
it over over a period of time.

Speaker 2 (31:37):
We got dict your dialectical framework of you know, a thesis,
thesis and an anti synthesis and synthesis. OK, try something out,
people engage with it, you come up with something new.
I love that. Try it, people engage with it, come
up with something new.

Speaker 1 (31:52):
It's just how the cycleway thing is actually up bruning.
Is that that kind of I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
It's it's complicated, but you know, they've moved from I
think ten kilometers of cycleway to about I think the
plans to get out to one hundred and sixty kilometers.

Speaker 1 (32:06):
And it is just this temporary sort of approach.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
Initially, well semi it's permanent, but it's not. It's things
that they've bolted into the roads as opposed to big
concrete bar large and you know, like like very serious
work as opposed to temporary stuff they've put up.

Speaker 1 (32:24):
It's not permano infrastructure. It's temporary and they can remove,
they can change them if they want, yeah, which is
what they've been sort of subtle, sort of treating themselves
through the streets in a kind of.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
Subtle way in extent. Yeah, but you know, i'd like
my daughter, we bike, she bikes five she bikes three
kilometers on the little training wheels down to her school
and you know, we've got the cycleway on Cambridge Terrace
and we move from the footpath onto the cycleway at
that point becase it's wide enough for me to go
with her, Yeah, and tagging the rest of the way
for school from there. And that's it's.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
The most positive thing I've heard about cycle ways. It's
ever because people do find them. I mean, a whole
lot just went up along the street where my sister lives,
in a kind of town shared thing, and it means
you could it was always impossible to park and visit anyway,
and now it's actually really impossible.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
But that's a real challenge of trying to reshape a
city in a space in a positive in a positive way, absolutely,
and that people, even though the status quo might not
be working, at least we've got the surety of what
we already know. And so it's the space at which
the idea has talked about, the space at which it's

(33:34):
being wrote. You know, your road works are coming and
your life is being disrupted, and then after that's what happened,
things normally die down, because it's not generally actually life,
life has continued on much the same that it has before.
And that's that real challenge. I think, you know, if

(33:55):
any sort of new project is really the fear of
the unknown and what could be. You know, the monsters
in the darkness, they're the scariest when you can't see them,
because you can imagine them, and they're always worse when
you imagine than what they actually are, which is often
negligible to nothing. And so that's kind of what you've
seen in Wellington. Within that, you know, I've obviously got

(34:17):
my own perspective on that, which is I cycle and
I think, you know, traveling overseas for me was a
big oh, this is how public transport can work, This
is how a pedestrian focused city can work, and it's
you know, you just compare to Courtney Place to Cuban Mall,
and you read articles from the sixties when Cuban Mall

(34:38):
was being put in place. I don't apologies to anyone
who's not familiar with Wellington, but you know Cuban Mall
is the lifeblood of the city in the evening and
the weekend in particular. And you know in the sixties
all the retailers, Oh, this is going to destroy us,
you know, taking out the roads, you know, how people

(35:00):
going to come to us, how people going to find
us is going to be the death of us. And
you know, no one who's situated on Cuban All now
would change that because it's that's where people go. As
you look around the rest of the city, which is
still constrained in a fifties road parking car framework, they're

(35:20):
not particularly enticing or enjoyable places to be. And I
think that's a real challenge for us who are trying
to think about these things to a imagine this future
and b bring people with us, because that's a real
challenge is that if you don't bring bring people along
and engage in a real sense, not in a sort

(35:42):
of tick box. Community Engagement Council thing, which again God
bless them, But you can do you can do engagement.

Speaker 1 (35:51):
You can do engagement well, but it's so hard to
break through and get the opportunity to do engagement well
because of the tikbox mentality.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
Totally, and it's easier to tick box.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
I mean, engagement's wonderful, but why is it so really? Actually?
And this is why it's interesting talking to you because
you you've had some experience with it, But why waste
time and money doing ticksbox when it's wasting everybody's time
and money.

Speaker 2 (36:12):
Oh, because it's required.

Speaker 1 (36:13):
It's because it's required. But I was going to go
back to the.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
Psycho waste that people don't have so much of what
so much of our lives involves us having no say
over what's done and how we exist. You know, in
our day to day lives, most of what involved whether
it's going to work or engaging in our spaces around us,

(36:40):
we don't actually get much say over it. And I
think that you know, engagement, consultation done wrong or done poorly,
it's just a continuation of that, you know, where people
don't feel that they're listening to even when they're not
what they're saying is not being taken on board, so

(37:02):
they're like, I like it as it is, you know, yeah,
I'm scared of these new things. I don't like them.
It's and it's had that challenge. Well.

Speaker 1 (37:10):
Well, for my thing, I think consultation and engagement is
actually a design process as well as architect as well
as the building. There's a whole architecture about about how
you're going to consult with with the user or with
people so that you're actually able to achieve what you
as an expert now is going to be good. But
you need to believe in the process of the communication

(37:31):
with people.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
But I also think within that there's a challenge there
as well, which is that the cult of the cult
of the experts and that you know, it's with that humility.
I think that comes into play in that conversation.

Speaker 1 (37:47):
Is But what I find as well is that because there's.

Speaker 2 (37:52):
Been so we need to listen.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
We need to listen. We also need to respect there's
been a lack of respect for design expertise. I think
because as much easier to have a tick, but it's
much easier to have a sort of management of this
and management of that, and the experts or the designers
are broad in and plugged in at a certain point
and then we're just not involved. But we could actually
understand because we know that the results we want is

(38:13):
like a mini folk fest, a rock festival. Is that
we want people to be able to be happy in
these public spaces. We know as designers that's what we
want our brief to be. But it's but it's we
don't get called in enough, I think.

Speaker 2 (38:26):
And that's the same thing. Is that when you're consulted
near once, all the major decisions have been made. Yes,
if you're brought in as a designer and plugged in,
you've already got wall set up that you can't get past.
You know, you've had your your constraints from a you know,
like from a critical critical faculty sense. Yes, you you've

(38:47):
the limitations have already been put in place. It's the
same thing with consultation. Here's this plan, A, B and C.
What if they all suck? What if they're all just
a different take on the same idea?

Speaker 1 (38:58):
It exactly, And it's exactly. You know, things are being
done to you you don't even have any control of.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
And I don't like this whole thing.

Speaker 1 (39:05):
And so that's why I think that whole consultation discipline
needs to be really studied. When you're talking about the
cycle ways and this temporary thing, I was gonna ask you,
has there been like quite a sort of intelligence thought
about that that process to get it to that point
that you think is quite neat and its tempororial nature.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
Yes, and no, I think that we're in a wider
space where And I'm always interested in talking to people
who lived, you know, pre the nineteen eighties and neoliberalism
and whatnot and the collapse of social social infrastructure, you know,

(39:45):
in terms of groups, societies, organizations, you know, social organizations.
We have so much less now and people are so
much more alien, alienated and isolated from each other. And
so I think that's that gives people less space to
be engaged, you know, and just how less we know,

(40:10):
you know, how less we know our neighbors, all those
sorts of things, they will play a part to leave
us way more disconnected from each other and with our
spaces and environments. And that's what I'm saying. If you,
if you look at David Harvey is one of someone
I've really enjoyed. I enjoyed his writing. He's a social
he's a social geographer, and he as a big proponent

(40:34):
of the framework of a right. The right to the
city is that they refer to it, and that's this
whole idea of sort of like I guess that we
our spaces shape us, and we shape our spaces, and
democratic control of these decisions and these is integral to

(41:00):
being able to live a dignified and respectful life. And
what he talks about it says, the right to the
city is far more than the individual liberty to access
urban resources. It's the right to change ourselves by changing
the city. And so I think that we have far
less capacity and scope to do that while we maintain

(41:26):
ourselves as individualized citizens, because as an individual, you have
very little ability to do anything. You know, the road
outside you, the park across the road, the wandering Willie,
and the Nasturtian that's going in the council garden beds
across from your house, which has happened. I'm having to
be describing myself here. I think that's that all pays

(41:49):
a part.

Speaker 1 (41:50):
So interesting. You picked up you know, you're what if
you say, like thirties forties, and you've got an interest
in what people were thinking about in the seventies and
this sixties, because that's really interesting. It's almost like lost
institutional knowledge. Interested in the seventies, we were the sort
of post woodstock lot, and we thought we could do anything,
and we found that we went out and did everything

(42:11):
that we wanted to do as professional and we found
that the councils was a time when they had been
influenced by the sixties and seventies and they realized this
is what was actually the thing to do, was to
listen to these ideas and possibly enable them to be activated.
But that seems to have had its moment that was
in the seventies. Maybe it's interesting people like you are
revisiting that time, which sounds kind of a bit of

(42:35):
a glint of light.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
Well, I think that one of the things that comes
from in is that you know, not everything, not everything
that we do today, is this the best way of
doing it?

Speaker 1 (42:48):
Okay?

Speaker 2 (42:49):
And so if you go back to those people thinking
and writing and theorizing in the seventies, they're going back
to people thinking and writing in the eighteen hundreds, you know, Like,
that's right, And I think that's always something that we again,
the humility of being like maybe maybe we're not. You know,
society progresses in the broadest sense, but maybe in this
area they actually had smarter about it, you know, one

(43:10):
hundred years ago. Well, I think that's you know, engaging
with you know, indigenous knowledges and ideas. Is that the
humility that we might not be at an individual level
the smartest there ever has been. Yes, collectively, by drawing
from that past, that makes us collectively smarter. Maybe absolutely.

Speaker 1 (43:34):
When I'm doing this work, I'm thinking always about that.
In the seventies, like outside the City Council, outside the library,
which before the Civic Square in the seventies was this
absolutely pristinely beautiful little public kind of open park that
some city council architect or designer had had made happen,

(43:54):
and it was brilliant and we couldn't improve on it
as gone. But it was had like a series of
brick wall block walls here and there, and that had
sort of like timber kind of pergola rafters coming shooting across.
It was just a public path walkway, It had planting,
and you couldn't improve on it if you did it now,
you know, with all of the best urban design thinking.

(44:15):
So I'm thinking Yeah, like you say, it's very interesting,
we've over skipped things that were great.

Speaker 2 (44:22):
So I work with people I record bands as one
of my live sound engineer. That's one of my skill sets.
It's quite helpful running a festival is having a knowledge
experience in live sound. I'll definitely I'll definitely acknowledge that.
And so part of what I talk about with bands
is the use of space in an acoustic sense. You know,

(44:45):
do you really need to have that fifteen guitars playing
along in that or is actually is one guitar in
the space around it more dynamic and powerful than fifteen
muddying up the space and just totally filling your space
and give you no no sense of context. And so

(45:07):
you know, the same thing with with you know, design
is at a certain point it's this minimalist framework. Actually
the best you know, like a big open grassy meadow
with lots of flowers and bees and fruit trees and stuff. Actually,
you know, as opposed to some big crazy, you know,

(45:29):
arrogance of design over design sometimes thinks, you know, like
so the park across my from my house that was
originally a ceiling factory, the Carrara ceiling factory really it
was demolished most I remember that.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
I remember people talking about the carrara ceiling thing.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
Ceiling, so any sort of ornate like non just generic ceiling.
There's pretty much carrara ceiling in Wellington, and so that
factory was just it was demolished. It was before my time,
but it was demolished by the time my family moved
to Newtown in the nineties, and then it was turned
into an empty park and then a playground was put there.

(46:14):
But it's a playground that was very safe, safe, so
everything was slow. The flying fox sucked. It wasn't very fast,
but it was very safe, you know, there was that
rubber matting and stuff. And then so that was built
the year that we moved in in the early nineties,
and then the year that my daughter was born, the
council redeveloped the playground and then built it. So things

(46:39):
are a lot faster, they're taller, and there's a far
more capacity to fall off and hurt yourself. But it's
more fun. You know, you can't it's hard often to
have fun if there's no element of danger involved, especially
as a child, and so that's that. So that is
an example of you know what I think is objective
with progress because there's also a lot of green space.

(47:01):
There's there's a basketball court, there's a big green space
where people do this tyrope walkers set up even so
often between two trees. People play football in there. There's
also two free two free barbecues, which my friends and
I we have. We have get together, the celebrations we
do that. Multiple families have birthday parties, Locals just get

(47:25):
together and make dinner there, you know, And so it
really has made it. Each development of that park has
made it more multi use and more able to be
engaged with by more people. Because I think if there's
something that Harvey talks about, and that's possibly the limits
of the sort of the boomer sixties rebellion, is that

(47:50):
it was still constrained within within capitalism. And so he
talks about an urban and a contemporary urban experience of
an or of freedom of choice provided you have money.
And so he talks about shopping malls, multiplexes, box stores,
fast food, artisanal marketplaces, all these spaces and all these

(48:12):
choices that are constrained by money. And so in my
role running a community center, one of the things I'm
really aware of is the lack of third space. As
people talk about the first space is your private residence,
the second space is for profit commercial spaces, and the
third space is public, non nonprofit spaces. Your library is

(48:35):
your textbook. Example of that. You can go in there,
you don't have to pay anything to be there. And
it's been really interesting, you know, watching libraries change. I
think books are really important. I read to my Bubba
every night. They're encouraging and reading books. But I also
think that libraries have done really interesting work in changing
the way they engage with people, trying to maintain themselves

(48:58):
as spaces where people want to be, so you know,
having free Wi Fi, having you know, spaces where people
can work on their laptops and whatnot during the day,
where they don't have to go into coffee shops, and
these privatized public spaces you go to the US and
the lack of public toilets, it's amazing, you know, New
Zealand's not an amazing space on that. On that basis,

(49:22):
I was on the Hikoy with my bub and we
went into Taco Bell and I said, you know that
very stern sign, a very stern sign saying you know,
only customers and so I went to the front counter.
I said, my daughter's going to wear on your floor
if I if I can't get your key to go
to the toilet, and the guy just handed it over
because you know, obviously we can use a toilet or

(49:42):
we can make a mess in the in front of
the toilet. You know your choice.

Speaker 1 (49:47):
Yeah, getting through a hikoy with a child without being
able to go to the loo.

Speaker 2 (49:50):
Yeah, oh goodness, gracious, that was. We had our moments.
But you know, not like I think. You know, that's
a real thing, the lack of public toilets, you know,
the lack of public spaces, and so, you know, as
someone involved in you well, and smallest community center a
blood link up with our other community centers, and they're
all different. You know. Some community centers have after school
care programs, some community centers have one has a rec center.

(50:14):
They've all sort of developed and grown organically in their
own different ways to sit their communities, and you know,
based on funding and all that sort of thing. But
I think the lack of third spaces, you know, we
can just be, we.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
Can just be and and they are given to us,
you know, parks and whatever, they're given to us. They're
given to us. So it's this idea of but they're
not the place.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
They're given given to rules, and you know, they can not.

Speaker 1 (50:39):
Serve, they don't save, they don't do the vibe.

Speaker 2 (50:43):
That wed by the community.

Speaker 1 (50:45):
And we now right, you know, and when you see
a space where who I am right now feeling the
space and the set up there is actually responding to that,
that's the joy and it should and we hope that
with these experimental works that you're doing in others that
we can multiply that.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
And that's the challenge. And so that's where like the
real engagement the community comes into play and you'll see it.
And so I see it in my line of work.
I do things that don't resonate with the with the community,
you know, and you see it and turn out you know,
or people's engagement, and then I do things that do
resonate with the community and you know, you can hear
the difference straight away.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
Yeah, and that's what we want to be doing.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
And so that's the challenge. You know, it's constantly going
within that. But and that's the challenge of you know,
the collapse of third space is a collapse of collective
social organization. It gives people less chance to actually be
part of collective decision making about our spaces that we're in.
So you know where we're given space. You know you

(51:43):
said that, I don't think you meant that intention in
that way.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
Well, I mean, I mean, we're given these spaces, but
we want we want, but.

Speaker 2 (51:49):
Space not our spaces. You know, we've given them and
we should be stoked that we have them, but they're not.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
We're not.

Speaker 2 (51:56):
There's that the black fashion brand Fuboo for us by
for us by owned by black. It's owned by black
entrepreneurs in the States and reflects as when I was
going up, that was you know, the coolest, the coolest gear.
That's what everyone was after. So you're for us by us. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:17):
Right, So you're at this point, you're one of your
other roles is the community the Newtown Community Center, mountvet
Community Center, Mountvit Community Center, and so what So you're
talking about community centers and for them to be successful
or they're always successful, or they're depending on funding, or
they depending on the sort of stuff, or the mission.

Speaker 2 (52:34):
Always depending on funding. Because you know, like at its core,
it needs to be accessible, whether people can afford to
or not, so they're funded primarily by by council and
it's an ongoing conversation in court at all. But and
they all do their they're all different every single Like
there's twenty eight or twenty seven community centers in Wellington,

(52:55):
six of which are directly run by council and the
rest are run by private trusts or charities. So mine
is run by a charity with a board. I've got
to put up my my monthly report. Actually it's my
next job I'm doing after this. You know. Accountability is
a good thing. But you know, everyone is trying to

(53:19):
engage with the communities as they can, which is actually
really tough because people don't necessarily have time and people
are very weary of being engaged in something of their thing.
It's a waste of their time. So you know, it's
a constant challenge. Mmm.

Speaker 1 (53:32):
And some people just think, oh, it's it's community, it's voluntary.
I'd rather go to the morning and pay for something.

Speaker 2 (53:40):
And that's fine because sometimes we don't want to make dinner,
you know, we just want to go buy it, you know,
and that's see people maybe yeah totally, but you know,
you know, and that's so we do like you know,
I'm running next Friday is the last day of school,
and so I'm running pikeot day that morning. It's gonna
got an electric fry pan, and I've got a bunch

(54:01):
of volunteers who are coming coming on board. I'm going
to make an immense amount of piplot better the night before,
and we're just gonna like hurl out pikelets at a
phenomenal rate, hopefully with some cream and some jam and.

Speaker 1 (54:15):
Some absolutely yeahlemon.

Speaker 2 (54:17):
My girlfriend touched wood where she said she's keen to
make lemon honey, and she well, she realized that lemon
honey actually doesn't have any honey in it. There was
the first thing that can confused you. Else in the
world calls it lemon curd or lemon honey. Have that happened?

Speaker 1 (54:31):
Yeah, it was living honey when I grew up.

Speaker 2 (54:33):
I know there's no honey and it's not lemon care.

Speaker 1 (54:35):
A lot of eggs and.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
A bit of butter, eggs and sugar and butter.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
Yeah, nice and lemon and it tastes good.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
I love it.

Speaker 1 (54:41):
Yeah, great, And it's a change from you know, fruit
jam with cream on. So yeah, so we do think
so we did. You're excited about this community center? Can
you make it just measure up to your kind of
aspirations that achieved in the film festival, in the in
the music festival arena.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
Different, But it's you know, like it's it's you're always
judged about how how well you serve your community, you know.
So it's in part and that's an ongoing question and challenge.
It's not how happy I am with it, it's how happy
is everyone is everyone around in the neighborhood happy with it?

(55:17):
How relevant is it? How how does it resonate does
that's the big question for you know that you need
to come back to and you know it's challenging, you
know when people come and go, and especially with with
with you know, the flatting generation. You know, like my generation.
You know, my friends, you know, in our thirties, we're
all flatting. You know, I'd say a minority of my

(55:39):
friend's own houses. And that's you know. I lived in
the Ardor Valley for six years at the same house,
and I never grew a garden. And I had a
respiratory illness that went away when I moved to Mount Vick.
And it was only when I moved to Mount Victor.
I realized I had it because I had it inspiratory

(56:00):
illness for six years. You just take that as the standard.

Speaker 1 (56:04):
Terrible.

Speaker 2 (56:04):
It's only when it leaves you realize you had it.
So that's I'd always what to tell the people, you know,
trying to understand.

Speaker 1 (56:11):
Don't go to ARI because it's got mold related respiratory.

Speaker 2 (56:15):
Affordable, Yeah, yeah, which is you know.

Speaker 1 (56:19):
It's affordable, it has no sun and it's got lots
of mold.

Speaker 2 (56:21):
What a fousty and bargain that is, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But you know, I'm lucky to be living in my
parents rental fifty meters down the road. They get a
five year old granddaughter's perfect. They're quite happy I paid
the same rent that I pay.

Speaker 1 (56:38):
That generational kind of situation. And you're and you're occupying
the street, you know, you're making space in the street.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
But I've got a garden. You know, I've been here
since last September and I've had two crops. I've got
my second crop of tomatoes. I'm going at the moment.
You know, when we cleaned out, me and my flatmate
cleaned out the back guarden. We cleaned out, you know,
in a small, small space we cleaned out one hundred
and seventy four. A GE's a green waste, you know which,
because it's just grown over, because you don't have a

(57:04):
connection and a stake in your community. You why would
you invest in something if in six months time to
a year's time you just have to leave again? Why
would you? Why would you grow your garden bed? Why
would you make connections with your neighbors if they're partially
going to move out next month? For you're all moving
out next month, Well you're both moving out next month.

Speaker 1 (57:27):
But that's the case for this whole rent to own idea,
and we don't all have to own houses forever. And
now that I mean, you can.

Speaker 2 (57:32):
Have security, security, that's all I'm after. I don't care
about owning house. I'm lucky that my parents are.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
But if we could have like long term rentals like
they set up this new building thing there these new
new housing common in Germany and other parts, and people
live there and they live there generationally, and they're still
renting and they still and they still create.

Speaker 2 (57:49):
Guard grandparents lived in this south and that was the promise.
And I think the real problem of you know, state
state housing, of that being turned into ghettos and whatnot. Yes,
being treated as you know, the last, the last, the
last cab off the rank, you know, like only the
space where the worst in society go, as opposed to

(58:10):
know it was a Germany, I think Austria. For people
in Austria live in council housing and so you know,
the stigma's not there. I remember when I campaigned.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
Singapore live in state state owned housing exactly.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
You know, I remember when I was campaigning for a
political candidate in put it to a and just the
idea that you know, you can either build state houses
in a big bank or you can spread them out
all over the place. So you know, I was going

(58:45):
up in Titahi Bay with legitimate million dollar views on
both sides, just amazing views of the poetry, Hindui Inlet
and then of you know, the ocean, Tasman Sea. I
think it was amazing and it really harks back to
you know, a much more holistic sense of housing and
people's right to dignity.

Speaker 1 (59:06):
Yeah yeah, yeah, and so that they've got these million
dollar rus in a state home and so every right
to be and so maybe like this as opposed.

Speaker 2 (59:15):
To in the you know, the some marsh Land area
that no one else wants to live in. How do
you think people feel, you know, when they're treated like that.

Speaker 1 (59:22):
Yeah, yeah, but we can maybe have to move now
that we can't all afford people can't afford to own
a house, that we have to start looking at permanent
rentals as being an honorable and as being a reasonable
way for developers to start to rethink it shouldn't.

Speaker 2 (59:34):
Be come down to whether you can afford to engage
in civic society, you know, like that civic society needs
to incorporate people where they have the money to or not,
and that we're a much better society when we have
spaces that aren't commercialized and reliant on If your quality
of life is based on whether you're rich or not,

(59:55):
you know, it's a very uneven society, and I think
it's a much poorer societ in a cultural sense.

Speaker 1 (01:00:01):
I think you mentioned that point that if people are
in this democratic space, they end up making decisions, able
to make decisions about things long term. And the more
times people are in a community space and they're in
they're sort of stimulated and together, I think decision making
becomes become they're able to make decisions bat all sorts
of things because because they're given ideas and they're stimulated,
and therefore you can start to make decisions about your

(01:00:22):
life and people can start businesses and.

Speaker 2 (01:00:25):
All that sort of living in a space where you
can only make short term decisions or living in a
space where you can make both short and long term decisions.
And it's that security, you know, knowing that in two
years time, five years time, you could, if you choose
to be you can still be in the same situation
you're in now. You know, that gives it much more
stable foundation to plan from. You've got to build that

(01:00:46):
base of social engagement where people feel the capacity to engage,
and then we build spaces to engage on top of
that is that you can build all the most amazing
spaces in the world, but if people don't have the
capacity to engage with them, what have you done apart
from making you know, you know, playgrounds for the middle

(01:01:08):
class and the wealthy.

Speaker 1 (01:01:10):
And it hasn't changed people's experience of the place, no totally,
which is what so we need, I guess more. Coming
back to that idea of understanding civics as being a
whole arena of urban experience, understanding civics and actually yeah,
which seems to be that well.

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
You know, and that the decisions we make around what
and what why and how we build affects us for
the next hundred years. You know, like a house last
fifty years, one hundred years. A building, yeah, fifty to
one hundred years. So the minute you made that building, yeah,
you've made.

Speaker 3 (01:01:44):
You've used resources, you've us used resources, but you're you're
influencing the next fifty to one hundred years of decisions
made within and around that space.

Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
You know. So the decisions we've we made in the
fifties around you know, mode ways, ripping up tram wrapping
up tram lines, you know, various decisions on public transport
and housing. You know, we live with those consequences now
because that's a massive titanic. That is a very slow
moving ship to change.

Speaker 1 (01:02:16):
But there is now big ship coming into doc about
the idea of creative adaptive reuse and looking at these
big motorways and this big brutal of stuff and how
we can reuse them. And that's interesting, reusing lumps of concrete.
Joel Cosgrove, a master of place making for Christmas Summer
Special twenty twenty four.

Speaker 2 (01:02:35):
Thanks Joel, slipslop and slap everyone.

Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
This program was made with assistance from New Zealand on
Air for radio broadcast and through the accessmedia dot nz website.
Thank you New Zealand on Air.