This and the next 3 posts contain extracts from a research report investigating the Christchurch Central City area bounded by the 4 Avenues post earthquake. It is in the form of a Cultural Plan. You can have the whole report if you are interested. It looks at the Draft Central City Plan prepared by Christchurch Council, and contains original material and photographs drawn from site visits....Ideas that drive this plan…
Katrina killed 1300 people. Also lost were people and places at the heart of New Orleans’ cultural economy. A Cultural Plan was agreed with stakeholders on how that cultural heart would be renewed, rebuilt, and attracted back home again….
The 1995 earthquake in Kobe killed 6,400 people and destroyed more than 100,000 buildings. To remember and learn from this savage experience the city adopted the theme “making the invisible visible” and celebrated places where the living who survived had found safety.
A thousand years ago Ngai Tahu came to Canterbury, living lightly upon it, respecting the life force of land and living things, making and telling stories about this relationship in wood and in words.
English colonisers of Christchurch laid out their dreams and buildings on the land assuming it would support and sustain their cultural symbols as reliably as back home in England. Regular earthquakes shook that faith for 150 years, shaking those assumptions, but not seriously till now.
The wise man builds his house on rock, but the man who builds his house on sand the same way risks seeing it fall. Renewing Christchurch and minimising risk requires the reality of the landscape to be recognised and embraced. Seismic realities can be ignored no longer. They need to be built into Christchurch culture.
Culture is about more than writing and music and art. It includes the shared beliefs, customs, rituals and values of people and communities in a given place at a given time. Christchurch is the place and the time is now, recovering from earthquake, eyes wide open to those realities, and gaps in its cultural landscape.
Experiences and feelings in poems, pictures, dances, songs and plays expressed by those touched by the earthquake can be integrated into the life and plans of Christchurch, rather than being embalmed in the hidden memories of an earthquake. These cultural expressions can be harnessed to build a new belief.
Ngai Tahu’s cultural relationships with Christchurch have also been marginalised by European culture. Now is the opportunity to find a new cultural balance.
It is understandeable that the people of Christchurch yearn for certainty in this time of disruption. But low confidence in public planning will be justified and deepen if authorities persist with the status quo rather than grasping the nettle of adaptive planning needed to deliver the resilience and flexibility that will satisfy insurance industry risk assessors.
Rigid symbols of stone gallery buildings and unbending oak trees need to relax into a consciously renewed and resilient culture redolent of a responsive occupation of a moving land by a diversity of people.
Renewing Christchurch on sand requires a fundamental change of culture, a planned rebuild of its cultural landscape, by means of a cultural plan that can point the way while changing over time, so that development and planning and public life is constantly informed and reminded of forces that are beyond human control. The city must learn from its experience and move in step with the land and its people.
Christchurch has the opportunity of cultural renewal from the inside out, as a tool of adaptive transformation, and as a beacon for travellers seeking inspiration. It needs a new belief in itself.
This report contributes to that process…
(This is the short introductory section of my report: Renewing Christchurch & Rethinking Resilience - A Cultural Plan. If you want the whole thing - please contact me.)
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