Creativity Follows Catastrophe

By Timothy Beatley

Few cities have been tested in the ways that Christchurch, New Zealand, has. A 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit the city on September 4, 2010, causing significant damage, and then a late aftershock followed on February 22, 2011. Although smaller (6.3), the aftershock caused even more destruction and it killed 185 people.

But despite the immensity of this disaster, the city has come together, its people drawing emotional sustenance and hope from actively engaging and reimagining what Christchurch could be like in the future. There are many lessons to learn here, and during a week this past August, a small team of us sought to explore and capture some of these compelling stories through a documentary film. Over the course of several days, my colleagues, Curtin University sustainability professor Peter Newman and filmmaker Linda Blagg, and I heard about and visited a number of impressive and unusual initiatives by which this city is healing and reimagining its future.

There is much that is innovative and different in the rebuilding here:

A tenacious group of residents and community leaders is working to restore the Avon River, which through liquefaction wrought tremendous devastation to the homes along it. The vision is to bring back its full ecological functioning and recreate the flora, fauna, and sounds of this riparian ecosystem as it existed before Europeans arrived to the area.

There is the new, vibrant pop-up commercial district downtown made from shipping containers. And there is the spectacular Shigeru Ban-designed cathedral made from recycled cardboard tubes, intentionally designed for a 50-year lifespan. There are also poignant and moving expressions of commemoration and tribute to the victims and heroes here, including a stirring field of white chairs, one for each of the earthquake victims.

Filling gaps

But what is most impressive is the way that individuals and groups have sought to heal and recover, and recapture their city, from the bottom up. The organization Gap Filler has been an important catalyst, tackling the challenges of reactivating and reimagining vacant spaces around Christchurch. More than 40 projects have been undertaken already, and the group now receives funding from the city.

Cofounder Ryan Reynolds talked on camera about the important role of Gap Filler in engaging people and in providing a critical voice in the rebuilding process. We interviewed Reynolds at its makeshift headquarters at a heavily damaged site, where an unusual wood archway sits, along with the so-called Palette Pavilion, a public space and outdoor eating and meeting venue constructed from painted shipping palettes.

The site was home to a hotel, which the earthquakes destroyed. The hotel had blocked a key pedestrian access point to a major public square, and its absence now offers the hope of restoring that connection. "We wanted to make a sort of symbolic statement that we liked the fact that there is pedestrian entry into Victoria Square from this side of the city," Reynolds explained. The arches, he said, invite pedestrians to walk through and, hopefully, will inspire city planners to preserve that important link: "We're trying to have an impact on the long-term development."

Many of the projects are directly aimed at replacing amenities lost in the quakes. But others are intended to help foster connections to place. One of the more whimsical is Gap Golf, a cross-city miniature golf course, with nine holes scattered around the city's downtown (there is even an iPhone app for locating them). As Reynolds explained, it invites people back to the central city, offering something "positive and fun."

These many creative projects seem to share a few common features — they are small-scale, experimental, sometimes off-the-wall, and meant to be temporary and provocative and to bring new life, spirit, energy, and hope to the city. They show what works and what doesn't, what might be possible. And they are marvelously grassroots and volunteer-based.

An interesting offshoot of Gap Filler is the organization Life in Vacant Spaces. From its office in one of the small outbuildings at the Palette Pavilion, the group helps individuals and organizations interested in reusing the city's many vacant sites, facilitating the process of obtaining permits, working through the bureaucracy, dealing with property owners and insurance, and doing other tasks. Already some 32 projects have been enabled in this way, including an art gallery. Anybody with an idea is encouraged, suggesting that renewal and healing from disasters can be aided immensely by the propagation and fostering of new thinking and creativity. This is surely one way to support a resilient city.

Reynolds's favorite Gap Filler project is something called Dance-o-Mat. The earthquakes damaged many dance studios and nightclubs. But today, a dance floor on a vacant lot, complete with a coin-operated washing machine that has been converted into a jukebox, brings people back into the city. It was only intended to be up for a few months, but the Dance-o-Mat has been operating for a year and a half.

Another group, Greening the Rubble, inserts small parks and gardens into struggling areas. Intentionally short term, with planters moved from one site to another, the project offers a kind of mobile greening, explained trustee and past program coordinator Rhys Taylor. These many projects and creative installations on vacant lots are whimsical and challenge us to stretch our thinking. They introduce an element of control in circumstances that seem largely out of control. And as Reynolds pointed out, they serve as an important counterbalance to the top-down structure of much of the reconstruction process, including the larger activities and projects of the official Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority.

Christchurch has a strong and visionary recovery plan, which calls for the creation of a greener, more compact central city and identifies a number of large anchor projects that will help bring it about. All good and necessary, but Christchurch also shows the importance of investing in, and empowering, the many forms of creative expression, structures for grassroots city building and nature growing, and mechanisms for giving full expression to many small voices that together ought to shape recovery. These are as essential to the creation of resilient and creative cities as anything.

Timothy Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities at the University of Virginia, where he directs the Biophilic Cities Project.

Resources

Image: A wooden archway and other temporary structures inhabit a destroyed site, showing the potential to create a new public space. Photo by Timothy Beatley.