There’s the ‘showpiece’, the new rugby stadium, teleported to the CBD, with its ‘state of the art broadcast facilities’, corporate boxes and seating for 20,000 beneath a vast roof, because sitting in rain or snow or standing on some terrace is not for the contemporary New Zealand rugby fan: not when they can catch every close-up, instant-replay detail from the comfort of the living-room sofa.
Occupying the western edge of the CBD stands its giant twin, the convention centre: $284 million worth of capacity to host 2000 delegates in surroundings the minister promises will be, like everything in his plan, ‘world class’, with ‘state of the art facilities’, not to mention ‘multiple breakout rooms’ and, more mysteriously, ‘opportunities for the health sector and tertiary education’. (Will delegates collapse from all the excitement? Will university students be able to work as waiters at the gala dinners?) Its cost will be met by central government from the public purse.
To the south, there is the Metro Sports Hub, for which the city council is to pay $147 million. And next to it, the Justice Precinct, alongside the Emergency Precinct, which keeps the police and the law courts and the fire brigade all neatly in a row. And then there’s the Green Frame, which will constrict the land area of the CBD from 160 to a more manageable 53 hectares, keeping land prices solid and supplying the potential for expansion should the needs of commerce at some point in the future supersede the need for breathing space. On the largest-scale maps, where the detail is most obvious, the greenness is already studded with the little white rectangles of units and duplexes. The frame will cost $481 million and be paid for by central government.
There are areas set aside for retail development and no longer will they be the usual inner-city selection of businesses ranging from the tiny one-person operation to the international chain store. Under CERA’s regime they will be rationalised, for Mr Brownlee abhors what he calls ‘a hotchpotch’ of use. Instead, the minimum size for retail space will be set at 7000 square metres. Old dunger and hotchpotch have no place on the new map.
And through it all, the river loops on its way to the sea, transformed in CERA’s CBD to another precinct. The Te Papa Otakaro/Avon River Precinct will undergo a ‘revitalisation’ of its waters and banks. It will cost central government $89 million, with an additional $6 million from the city council.
Some things have disappeared. The town hall, for example has simply vanished, to be replaced by a $216 million Performing Arts Precinct, to be paid for largely ($158 million) by the council. All mention of a light rail transport system has also been deleted. The bench of Anglican bishoprics has become pale. They exist as no more than white ghosts, as the background to new ideas, new ideals and priorities in the designing of a city.
IN THIS CITY, IT IS easy to feel lost. Where once were straight lines north, south, east and west, I now drive about the grid in a series of knight moves, two up, one across, skirting roadworks and demolition. I come to an intersection, but I don’t recognise it. I don’t know where I am. Tuam Street perhaps? And Manchester? Or is this Madras? The buildings have come down. There is an expanse of white gravel covered in wild flowers, oxeye daises, purple loosestrife. Pink and white and gold, they wave in the wind. I can see all the way across the city to the Port Hills in one direction. I can see between the empty towers a gap that lets in the view of distant mountains, glossy under snow. The sky feels very wide, the land very flat, without the illusion of height that had been created by buildings.
I approach the centre tentatively. It is like one of those childhood games, creeping up in chicken steps on Wolfie. I join the little knots of people who gather to peer through the cordons as steadily, week by week, the buildings come down and the rubble is carted off to the landfills. A breeze stirs the white dust, covering our shoes with powder. We stand, looking through wire at buildings we hadn’t especially noticed before. They were just the background to a trip to the supermarket or to pick up fish and chips. But now, in their dereliction and abandonment, they take on a greater clarity, in the way of individuals who have become very ill, or suffered some extreme calamity. You see them differently. They’re no longer the good old friend, the mate you’ve hung out with for years. Suddenly, the essential structure is evident. Skull and bone, a manner of standing, of speaking. The person becomes in a strange way isolated, and noble in their isolation. You feel shy before the beauty of their separate individual suffering. You feel awe.
There is some of that feeling in regarding the city. Walls have fallen away, exposing the internal structure. You notice the beauty of their proportion, or some detail of their appearance that seems in this context very valuable. You notice the relationships between them, how that hotel is leaning perceptibly over its neighbours, curtains flapping from broken windows. Coffee cups gather dust on café tables, documents and records remain stored in inaccessible offices, meat rots in the restaurant freezers. Flocks of gulls and magpies screech and squabble. Beside you, on this brilliant morning, a man is kneeling on the footpath dabbing oil paint at a large canvas, capturing the scene before it vanishes. As it will.
It’s easy, in this tumble of feeling and fact, to lose the way. I find myself casting about, standing here at the corner of two streets, for points of reference, as people have always done here, since they made their way home by looking up from the plains to the reassuring bulk of the Port Hills, looking out for the snowy crown of the ti kouka that signified home.
I study the maps. I look at the blueprint that is to show the way forward. I try to understand how it is, and how it came to be as it is. I look at it closely. I walk my fingers down this street, past this building, along this riverbank, trying to find my way through, trying to find my way home.
AND NOW IT’S SPRING AGAIN. 2014. Four years after that initial jolt, two years after the blueprint invited me to be part of the vision to inspire the world, though I doubt the ‘you’ being addressed was in fact me or anyone like me. That ‘you’ was not simply someone who lived here, but a developer, a business owner, an international investor. But here I am and it’s a sunny day and I’m not imagining the map, I’m in it. Right in it, at the centre of the grid. I’m walking towards the bridge on Worcester Boulevard. Above my head there’s the glitter of windows on the upper floors of the two towers: the council offices, now with a new mayor in charge, Lianne Dalziel, a former Labour Party minister, elected in 2013 in a landslide after prolonged criticism of the former council and its overpaid chief executive. And next door, the CERA offices. Their upper floors, the highest in the city, glint above the centre of its own creation as I turn into Cashel Street.
The cordons have come down, the spaces have been cleared and the demolition companies have moved on, having taken around $90 million in government contracts. And now, as one contractor says, ‘The boom is well and truly over.’ The central city is to be known henceforth, says Mr Brownlee, not as the Red Zone but as the ‘Rebuild Zone’, though rebuilding is evidently not proving to be quite as straightforward as demolition. For months it has been oddly quiet, and in The Press there is talk of a ‘doughnut city’, with a hole at its CERA-controlled centre while all the action takes place around the perimeter.
The newspaper reports confusion and changes of plan. Westende House, for example, the first building to be rebuilt in the central city after the quakes — the building that survived the seven-second implosion of a neighbouring tower — is to come down after all. It’s to make way for a six-lane arterial road to be built along Manchester Street as a border to the proposed Green Frame. That frame is also changing, steadily shrinking to become a site for intensive residential development. Amid confusion, The Press reports flights of capital to other centres: to Auckland or Melbourne or anywhere but here, and a general reluctance on the part of former tenants of CBD offices to return from the suburban locations they now occupy, a phenomenon one developer terms ‘a total disaster’.
Other developers are reportedly unhappy with the compulsory government buyouts of commercial properti
es at their post-rather than pre-quake valuation, one terming it a ‘land grab’ on national television, and CERA ‘a den of thieves’. Another, who owns a nightclub that is to be compulsorily purchased, complains about CERA’s highhandedness: ‘They don’t need to give us a reason for demolition: they’re CERA, they’ve got total power. If you complain about your land being acquired, you’re just carpers and moaners’ — an expression used by Mr Brownlee to describe those who are critical of CERA. The compulsory purchase of 53 hectares of inner-city land for an estimated $636 million is, the Herald reports in September 2012, ‘generating outrage’. Some of the land is required for buildings like the convention centre or sports hub, but the majority — 29.5 hectares — is intended for that already shrunken and not-terribly-Green Frame. The most ideologically free-market government in New Zealand’s history is nationalising land. It is an irony not lost on local business.
Major projects in the city centre have been abandoned: a $350 million precinct on Cashel Street, a $100 million office and shopping centre on Colombo Street, a project on land between Gloucester and Armagh. But the director of the CCDU is unfazed: other projects are taking shape, major commercial and retail tenants have been lining up behind the scenes, and all will be well.
The minister, too, is sanguine. ‘Some developers will find things more difficult than they had hoped but that is not unusual’ and meanwhile, other developers and proposals are ‘going gangbusters’. The schoolboy phrase from the 60s seems to have gained currency among the power elite who, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, adopt a deliberately relaxed demeanour, shirts untucked, hair tousled. The look is fresh and boyish, the language studded with adolescent ‘Yeah, well …’ and ‘Nope!’ When reprimanded for some misdemeanour — lying to Parliament, or concealing political donations — they are ‘told off’ by the prime minister. And when there is criticism of their policies they counter not with examples and figures, but with sunny boyish confidence. Things in Christchurch are ‘going gangbusters’. The pose is all. It calms the populace.
In the absence of private investors, in particular those from overseas with very deep pockets, who exist somewhere over the rainbow like the gods in some variant of a classic South Pacific cargo cult, the government intervenes.
In late 2013, it announces that it will relocate twenty of its own government departments from the temporary premises around the city that they have occupied since the quakes. Their leases will be terminated at a cost of $5.6 million per annum for twenty years, and they will move back into new offices to be constructed within the Retail Precinct in the central city. By 2016, 1100 public servants will be working in the CBD and their presence will be a ‘catalyst’ helping to revitalise the city.
You cannot, it seems, leave everything to the whims and vagaries of the marketplace.
ON THIS SUNNY AFTERNOON IN 2014, there’s a bit of thud and screech to signify that someone is at work somewhere reshaping the core, though at night it reverts to the dark hole that opened in the months following the quakes, when all the lights went out and the centre became that shadowland glimpsed behind the cordons on a winter evening. All the action has been taking place around the edges, where private business has been free to access the insurance payout, repair or rebuild and get on with it, beyond the fiefdom of CERA and its burgeoning bureaucracy — 300 plus and still recruiting.
The surviving buildings of the centre stand lonely in cleared space. Over on High Street, Edwardian shop frontages remain like some old Hollywood western set in the desert, supported by scaffolding and shipping containers stacked four deep. Behind them, nothing. Or just a torn brick and plaster remnant.
But look! There’s Alice’s! A miracle! A big Art Deco cube of a building, still home to the best video store in the country, its shelves crammed with movies and docos and musicals and sci-fi, and the people working there are experts and have seen everything, and there’s a café out front, C1, where the food is delivered in those little overhead canisters that used to carry invoices to department store cashiers. And you can sit outside on a sunny day, with the ruins of a furniture shop across the road and a wide expanse of white gravel where something or other, you can’t quite remember now, used to be, though the horrible little bronze corgis that some befuddled local politician donated to the city in memory of a royal visit are back, welded to the pavement, and the place is filled with people who look like they work across the road in EPIC — young IT types from the black and blue woolshed of a building erected as temporary shared office space by a couple of energetic individuals, Colin Andersen and Wil McLellan, soon after the February quake.
Twenty tech development businesses have been working out of that building. Sharing resources. Sharing ideas. I’ve met people who work there. It has been hugely successful. There were plans for expansion: an innovation village. EPIC Sigma. Permanent buildings, ten times the space, 2000 software developers and entrepreneurs, 100 businesses already lined up and waiting. Small, innovative businesses. The kind of smart, youthful energy this city needs at its centre.
And then the blueprint landed. In August 2012, CCDU designated the area around EPIC as another in its assembly of central city precincts. This one would be an ‘Innovation Precinct’, the catalyst for ‘creativity, increased export and productivity’. From that point on, it seems that things became more complicated.
In May 2014, EPIC’s founders announced that they would be moving out. ‘We have given up on the innovation precinct. We have lost confidence that government processes would lead to land being made available at an acceptable price.’ They are still on site on this sunny afternoon, and have extended their lease for a further seven years. But clearly being a key component of Christchurch’s revival has not proved straightforward.
The city centre has had for months a curious suspended temporary life. Its very evanescence has become an attraction, drawing the tourists to a pop-up mall of shipping containers, painted in primary colours and adapted to sell coffee and shoes and hot dogs. Ballantynes remains on its corner, and once inside on the ground floor you could think all is as it once was: the same tinkly cabinets filled with glass and china, the same sensible menswear section, the same make-up counters and ladies’ handbags, and the echo of the glory days when such department stores anchored every city centre, staging the annual Christmas parade and selling, as the Harrods’ motto goes, ‘Omnia omnibus ubique’. All things to all people everywhere. Or at least a lot of things to a lot of people.
People browse the clothing racks and make-up counters at Ballantynes, where the lights are bright and the windows are shuttered from the exterior reality of demolition. But for the most part, the city’s shoppers are off buying what they need in the suburban malls. And soon the pop-up shops, too, will be carried away and that old inner-city hotchpotch will disappear beneath the 7000 square metre retail outlets as the centre moves ever closer to its objective: to be a bit like Melbourne.
Curiously, the aspect of Melbourne’s central city most often referred to by the CCDU planners is the lanes: the network of alleyways that were once that city’s slums, then became cheap and grimy retail premises, scrawled with graffiti, then funky, desirable, a tourist attraction, its old buildings now ‘heritage buildings’ of increasing value while the graffiti scrawled on the walls is ‘street art’, something the city officially encourages as a ‘tourist attraction’.
British artist Grayson Perry defined this thoroughly predictable process when he called artists in the twenty-first century ‘the shock troops of gentrification’. It is they who recognise beauty or power in something dismissed by the mainstream. They move into a cheap area of town, they mark it, the tourists come, the money men notice, the cheap shops give way to cafés and galleries and that part of town swings steadily upmarket. Then the developers arrive and begin demolishing the buildings that gave the area its style and attraction in the first place. Christchurch is replicating Melbourne’s lanes. But it has demolished the heritage buildings — the ‘old d
ungers’ that gave the original their identity. New Zealand’s lanes will link glass and steel frame to glass and steel frame.
The ground has been cleared, and what lies all around is ‘opportunity’, that dog-eared mantra of the free-market 90s. One of the central city developers explained his vision for the area in a handout in a weekend Press in September 2014. Around the world, cities were trying to rejuvenate their tired old inner cities. ‘But most of the time when it comes to redevelopment, those cities are lucky if they can knock one whole block over. When you look at Christchurch with its many empty lots around the city, you quickly realise the unique opportunity to create something special.’ He imagined a population of ‘nurses, doctors, police officers and court staff’ who would want to live in the central city, close to work. He envisaged the facilities required by these urban professionals. He envisaged cafés, bars and restaurants in an inner-city network of lanes.
The lanes are still to come, along with their population of happy nurses and police officers. On this sunny afternoon, the tourists have it to themselves. They wander about snapping photographs. They visit Quake City: The Christchurch Earthquakes Experience, with its displays of photographs and its recorded voices, describing how it felt, how it was, the shakiness still audible in a catch in the throat. They buy a keyring or a pen at the gift shop and emerge into the sunlight, and all of us wander together through the centre like children at play among big brightly coloured cubes in a sandpit.
WE WALK THROUGH CORDONS DECORATED in a brilliant woven tekoteko of coloured plastic strips to the Square and the cathedral. It’s still there, behind a protective wall of shipping containers piled three deep, devoid of the spire that had survived earlier brushes with destruction in the quakes of 1881, 1888, 1901 and 1922, but fell before the vertical force released in February 2011. This has always been a jumpy place, unkind to steeples. The nave looms like a grey Leviathan washed up on wind-blown shingle, a gaping hole in its flanks of masonry and scales of ornamental slate.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 9
