Public space is the new backyard. It's the new place where we as people carry out the
things we used to do privately. We're now doing publicly. We're meeting friends, we're
having dinner, we're playing sports, we're socialising. My view is that public space
really is a sanctuary and it's a sanctuary for the people who live and work and come
to the place as a destination. Great landscape architecture projects can
actually get people out of their apartments and going for walks. It can get them
engaging in a social way in their community. I think aesthetics is
important. People do look for that but it's more than that. It's about
comfort and it's about feeling secure. When you own something it has meaning and
you take care in it. I think that's the great part about public space. If we can
build ownership with the community then you have engagement and very enjoyable
spaces. Backyard experiment is Street Financial Australia's biggest research
project yet. There is a lot of talk about movable seats so we wanted to see if
they actually work. We play 60 movable seats at Greema Place. We installed
time-lapse cameras to observe what people do with them. The pop-up park was
there for eight days. The time-lapse cameras recorded four days before the
experiment and eight days during the experiment. So the idea behind the
backyard experiment was to see how we could take a public space that has not
been successful in the past that is rather dreary and dull and is not
providing a good setting for the surrounding kind of retail environment
and what are some of the simple methods we could use from a design
perspective to activate the space. I grew up pretty close to the city in
Canberra and Greema Place for the last 30 years that I've been here it hasn't
been a space that the public has really engaged with. It's a space that people
have walked through that the government has tried a whole raft of different
initiatives and festivals, events, programs to try and get people to the
space but it hasn't had a long-lasting impression on the community. Not a lot of
people spend much time in Greema Place just because there's not a lot of areas
that they can sit down and relax. Greema Place could easily be more family
friendly. I think lots of families are really looking for a version of Greema
Place that is more family friendly. It could definitely do with more people. I
think that it's long overdue for a facelift to this part of the city. The
idea behind Greema Place and how we would activate it would be to use minor
interventions things like flexible seating, colour by using colour on the
ground plane, within the trees, with yarn bombing, getting community groups
involved and student groups involved to provide a sense of ownership and the
other element would have been the lawn space. Oh I'm such a fan of moveable
chairs so having spent time in Europe and other places around the globe it just
changes the way that people engage in space in such a dramatic way. I just
think if things aren't bolted down they tend to disappear.
I think there will be a problem with drunks at night. Personally I was very
very scared that all the chairs would go missing within days. Everyone we talked
to said the chairs would go missing so it was quite worrying. The setup was so
fun. There were so many people involved. There were passer-by stopping to help us
paint the pavement.
Shahana, the CEO of ALO, was painting as well.
It was a beautiful local vibe. Volunteers helped.
There was quite a buzz.
After the first day, after we finished installing everything at Gareeva Place,
we were pretty keen for something to happen but nothing really happened right
away. I think it takes a little while for someone to break the ice. It takes a
little while for someone to sit down and then other people to see them sit down.
Eventually, after a few days, more and more people were making it their own.
Then I've seen the park and it was really nice and colourful so that's why I decided to go here.
We all go to ANU so we come to Gareeva Place all the time to just grab lunch and we were walking through.
We would have just gone straight through but because it was so colourful and nice
we thought we'd stop and we just took some pictures. It was a nice surprise because
we're used to what it looks like and to see it different.
We've got the blue uplighting in the trees. What that does is it creates a few things,
volume in the space so you can suddenly see it's like a cathedral up in the trees.
It's amazing that you wouldn't pick that up otherwise.
Secondly, the blue light creates contrast so with the white light that we're also using
you get that cool and warm contrast which is a really interesting thing.
It's a really warming kind of place. It feels like it's got more of a personality
than what most parks would.
My first thought when I came around the corner was, wow, this is fantastic.
It was full of people, people sitting in chairs, people that weren't normally there
and other people looking on and going, gee, what's this?
This is fun, this is exciting, this is a bit random.
We were really surprised by the increase of foot traffic overall.
We knew that there would be more dwellers due to the experiment
but we didn't expect the foot traffic to increase by almost 200%
over a very short period of time.
The other really interesting find was the increase in demographic diversity.
There were more friends, there were more couples, there were more retirees
and more families.
One of the biggest aims of the experiment was to make the area more family friendly,
turn it from something intimidating to something warm and inviting.
It was a much better outcome than we even envisaged
and I don't think we ever thought there would be that many people or that many groups of people
and that much interaction with the space as there was
and it was fantastic to see.
The final good news, of course, is that out of the 60 moveable chairs we placed out there,
none of them went missing.
Everyone said that they would all go missing or a lot of it will go missing
so we were surprised.
It looks like that the community said this is something special
and they've obviously said, well, we don't want to damage it.
It's good for our space and even those homeless people that were there
must have said, well, we like it better like this.
So rather than take a chair home and damage the environment,
they've said, we like it better like this, let's leave things as they are.
So that's a type of buying, isn't it?
I've never seen it like this for a long time with kids. Never.
So I think it's a great idea.
One of the great outcomes from the experiment was ACT Government
started coming out to site and surveying people as well.
They created a website to gather feedback from the community
about the future of Green Place.
Obviously the experiment was such an incredible success
in that it really did activate the place of bringing in double the numbers of people.
What I like about the project is that you've used design to change an environment
and the outcomes have really affected behaviours.
So design can do all sorts of things.
It can enrich people's lives in certain ways,
but there is absolutely positive proof now that by adding this cocktail that you've created,
you've changed behaviours.
So we know for a fact that in certain circumstances,
when you add these levels of vibrance, colour and let's say free-range seating,
you change the way people think about a space.
Now that's new knowledge.
That's new knowledge we can use to affect design outcomes in the future.
Thank you.
