Subscribe to RSSChristchurch’s Visionary Re-Build
Those shell-shocked by the damage in quake-hit Christchurch need to dig out from the rubble, the inspiring report of a year ago by Danish urban designer Jan Gehl (of Auckland’s “Shared Space” fame) and his team.
That major report on Christchurch’s future said that Christchurch has potential to be a truly vibrant and liveable city.
When released, I talked enthusiastically about how it also recommended a strong public transport network as an alternative to cars and pushes cycling as a desirable alternative mode of transport in the city. I called it a great refreshing report that all mayors and civic officials should read.
Gehl looked at how people use Christchurch’s Central City spaces and streets.
The report concludes: “It takes time to develop a good city and putting people first should be the core principle for any planning process.”
We know how depressing and unliveable those streets look today.
But a year ago, before anyone thought of Christchurch as a major quake zone, Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker called the report “a vital health check to ensure we get the best out of our natural and built assets, while providing great public spaces.”
And, as thousands Christchurch citizens reportedly flee the city, fed up with the shocks and too fearful and depressed to face their current situation, it’s time to start talking up a document that would take Christchurch through to 2020 - a manageable time-line in post-quake reconstruction.
Christchurch is still potentially a beautiful place. Once the silt is gone and the rubble cleared and we have been able to move on from the grief of those we know killed, injured or displaced, it’s time to rebuild.
ChCh is a beautiful place for a city | @sue_wells
With the city’s heritage iconic visible heart, the Cathedral, damaged, possibly beyond repair, the Gehl report included a “glow” map that showed how the “heart” of the city could be under his plan.
The report calls for:
- A city with human pace - an inviting environment for pedestrians and cyclists
- A garden city that celebrates its amenities, making the best use of public spaces like Hagley Park and the Avon River
- A city with “a wide range of people and activities” - lots of things to do at day and night getting rid of what as an unsafe feeling at times when nothing was happening in the CBD
- Creating public spaces in the CBD which was seen too much as a place for offices, bars and restaurants.
Like Auckland, traffic was seen as dominating the Christchurch’s City Centre. The streets were dominated by car parking and relatively high traffic speeds contributed to the unpleasant environment for pedestrians and cyclists. The report said the city lacked an attractive, safe pedestrian/cyclist network connecting important destinations and the Central City suffered from heavy through traffic, resulting in a decline in the quality of public space.
And then last June, Bob Parker, and the top council officials, the CEO and the strategy and planning manager spent a fortnight visiting to San Francisco, Vancouver, Seattle and Portland.
As a result, they got passed at a council meeting that the CEO be allowed to start a full investigation into the scope, opportunity, scale and costs of “developing a rail based (including streetcar, light rail and heavy rail) to facilitate and support urban regeneration, in concert with existing and future public transport tools and mechanisms.”
Mayor Parker buzzed about light rail in his report to the council on the trip.
“All of the transit authorities spoken to ran buses, rail (some ferries) and all had mixed systems. Buses were often identified as the backbone services but generally conceded to be a social service.
“In contrast rail (both light street rail and heavy rail) was credited with generating a positive shift in public transport behaviour.”
So Jan Gehl’s report is a great starting point, a blueprint along with Mayor Parker’s light rail project.
And while we are looking around our own city of Auckland, let’s review that plan as well to make sure we are ticking all the boxes beyond the great start Gehl and the former council gave us with own own Shared Spaces in places like Fort St.
Meanwhile back to the reality of today and John Key today launched a global appeal. We all need to rally around.
10 Comments
Christchurch re-build plan approved by Cti Council - Featured - AKT…
Here at World Spinner we are debating the same thing……
Excellent idea.
As unfortunate as it is ( and it really is terrible), this quake actually gives Christchurch a huge opportunity to build one of the most liveable cities in New Zealand.
The tram network could be expanded, a rail link built from the mainline into the city.. things which could not be contemplated until now.
I would love to see Christchurch come back as the city everyone wants to live in.
San Francisco rebuilt their city within ten years after their major earthquake and made most of that opportunity, I wonder how long the Government/council expect Chch to take.
Fantastic idea! it would be a chance to clean the city and make it better, i Love Christchurch, but i just think it has too much of an industral feel to it.
This will completely change that, It would turn it into Brisbane Central.
I say reserve a (heavy) rail corridor through the city, one which links the lyttleton line up through to the CBD then across the edge of the park and to the north line to rangiora.
Amidst the tragedies of the earthquake in ChCh there is an opportunity in the almost blank slate of its CBD to plan and build a fantastic new centre that could make for a successful rebirth of what was in many ways a declining economic area. Instead of defining itself by its past so much ChCh should, I believe, take this opportunity to grow an new core like a smaller scale new world city from the emerging economies. Napier is surely a model here. It will require an effort of will by Cantabrians to see the possibilities in a new definition of their self image and it will require help from the rest of the country, and some very clever pricing/rating/tax policies to incentivise this. But especially a new Christchurch will need a new idea of itself to be really successful.
Obviously new structures will be built to high seismic standards, but also should reach for the best environmental performance and offer vastly improved urban design qualities. There is is also the chance to create world standard architecture to attract the world’s visitors and businesses there. And here is the chance to ditch the failures of the past like the oneway system and greatly expand the tram network to create a great new fully sustainable, walkable, livable and connected CBD. As a symbol for this I would start by building a new spire on the cathedral in contrasting contemporary design to both commemorate the victims of the quake and also reach forward to a new future. The old spire has come down three times in quakes so is clearly an imported model that is simply not appropriate to this geography. Also, I humbly suggest, this insistence on sticking to this form can be seen as symbolic of a kind of failure to actually fully inhabit the city’s location in this country - a sort of failure to really leave the old country of the mind behind. It is time while retaining all that is good and able to be kept from Christchurch’s built heritage, to forge new and forward looking city, a city that could be truly great and truly new world and right for this country and the centuries to come.
Instead of only counting the costs ahead we all, and this is an Aucklander writing, should also be open to the possibilities ahead for the country’s second biggest city and the possibilities it has for helping all of us to both squarely face the challenges of this century and lead us forward.
@Patrick R Very helpful wise thoughts, thank you as always. Let’s hope people listen.
After the shock of the last week, it is kind of exciting to think about Christchurchs future. So many possibilities. Rebuilding/repairing the cathedral has to be top priority for me personally (after basic infrastructure is repaired), but after that, anythings possible.
We, the people of New Zealand, give the glass-fibre infrastructure along with a data-pipeline connecting it to the world to Christchurch.
This is the cap-stone of my idea to build Christchurch as an economically productive - high-tech, sustainable - green, and above all a new city.
The cost of the UFB - Ultra-Fast Broadband - network proposed for NZ is said to be in the vicinity of $6 billion, the product of a government partnership with Telecom. Without a serviceable data-cable connecting it to the world, an additional $400 million or so, the UFB is subject to existing data-caps on the single service New Zealand currently has connecting it with the United States.
I suggest we deal directly with the issue of Christchurch’s productivity by connecting it with an integrated civic-wide UFB network that has built into its cost the necessary international data-pipeline. The national UFB project and the need to think about the future of the city of Christchurch are opportunities for economic progress that can be brought together and must be thought of conjointly as an unprecedented opportunity.
Rebuilding Christchurch’s infrastructure should not be limited to restoring it. We ought to be looking at both future-proofing it and using the rebuild as incentive to encourage investment in the city. Restoration is not sustainable; innovation is.
What will sustain the city is what will build World City Christchurch: an environment that will inspire businesses to come is connected globally; an environment that will inspire people to live in it is connected locally and nationally.
I said that rethinking the national UFB without an international cable as a civic UFB with an international cable was the cap-stone of my idea for Christchurch. There are two further aspects to the vision that work in harmony with it.
A system of canals is built for the transportation of heavy goods throughout the city. The system would be woven in to the fabric of the city, joining it to the wider water-network of the Canterbury Planes: the Garden City linked to its gardens.
Such a system of water-ways has been considered before, at the period of Christchurch’s establishment. Since aquifers and subterranean rivers and streams are a feature of the Planes, it is a plan that deserves another look. Not only a Venice of the South but a city determined not to sink back into the swamp of liquefaction.
The third element to this plan already has widespread endorsement: the Copenhagenization of Christchurch; a network of cycle-ways connect the city, with ‘green corridors’ through parks, encouraging people to ride by taking cycle-paths away from roads, making them safe, and also enhancing the natural beauty of the city. (Perhaps Christchurch would then be helmet-free, in consideration of the fact that cities where cycle-helmets are mandatory clearly indicate they are not cycle-friendly.)
These architectures, of a glass-fibre infrastructure hardwired to the world, of a system of canals, and a network of cycle-ways, duly provide for the foundation of a new civic architecture. A new style of city. To start with the buildings and the houses is to recreate the past, to try and bring it back, rather than to discover in the middle of this crisis anything new. The city could again be beautiful, but it will never be as it was.
If the Christchurch earthquakes constitute a national disaster, then the nation ought to be doing more than being asked to pay up. If Christchurch’s disaster has had, as the Prime Minister has stated, a deleterious affect on GDP unparalleled in New Zealand’s history, then New Zealand ought to be encouraging the building of a productive city, a city that can pay back.
In its rush into public relations disaster, in the guise of disaster-control, I don’t think the prospect of economic growth has been seriously considered as a part of the so-called rebuild. Through building a city that will by the very nature of its civic architecture and infrastructure attract investors, entrepreneurs and inhabitants, Christchurch ought to make a greater economic contribution. The build needs to take on this vision of a city with the potential for real and sustainable growth.
Please contact me here if you support this plan and wish to promote its cause.
notes:
On Silicon Valley Christchurch:
“Christchurch has a window of opportunity” - here
Mention of the Venice of the South:
“The Venice of the South Pacific we might have been had the proposal gone ahead for the city to be connected to the sea via the Avon-Heathcote estuary to the south and the Waimakariri River to the North.” - here
On Copenhagenization:
“JG: We’re commissioned to rebuilding efforts in Christchurch, New Zealand, after the recent earthquake. They want to use the opportunity to get rid of many of the bad compromises from the 20th century, which are burdening all cities in the western world. They want to make a very good city for the 21st century, rather than just repeating all the errors from the past. Interesting…and humbling.” - here