
Photograph captioned by Fairfax, "Christchurch CBD was 'yarn-bombed' during the weekend using yarn and fabric pieces to brighten public areas and earthquake-affected spaces. Visitor Ann Rees and her husband Bernard from South Wales said when looking at the yarn-bombed busts at the Arts Centre (from left: Diana Isaac, Elisie Locke, Charles Luney and Margaret Mahy) that it didn't appear like the work of vandals, but looked quite homely and warm".
Highlights from Radio New Zealand National's programmes for the week ending Friday 9 September. This week .... New Zealanders getting savvy about price discrimination, sorting the News from the TV programmes, studying coral reefs to save them from extinction, we remember sports braodcaster Graeme Moody, the World of Wearable Arts travels to Hong Kong, and we have a series of features and interviews from a weekend of commemorating a year of earthquakes in Canterbury.
A PDF copy of pages 214-215 of the book Christchurch: The Transitional City Pt IV. The pages document the transitional project 'Christchurch: A Board Game'. Photo (top): Peter Walker, Three Chairs Photography. With permission from Volunteer Army Foundation. Photo (bottom): Irene Boles.
A PDF copy of pages 116-117 of the book Christchurch: The Transitional City Pt IV. The pages document the transitional project 'I Seem to Have Temporarily Misplaced My Sense of Humour'. Photos with permission: Gap Filler
A pdf copy of panel 7 of Guy Frederick's 'The Space Between Words' exhibition. The panel includes text from an interview with Colleen McClure about her experiences of the 2010 and 2011 Canterbury earthquakes. Above this is an image of McClure sitting in front of the 'gratitude wall' in her house.
A pdf copy of panel 5 of Guy Frederick's 'The Space Between Words' exhibition. The panel includes text from an interview with Jolene Parker about her experiences of the 2010 and 2011 Canterbury earthquake. Above this is an image of Parker sitting in the site of her grandmother's house, which was demolished after the earthquakes.
A PDF copy of pages 50-51 of the book Christchurch: The Transitional City Pt IV. The pages document the transitional project 'LUXCITY'. Photographs: Bridget Anderson and Douglas Horrell
A pdf copy of panel 10 of Guy Frederick's 'The Space Between Words' exhibition. The panel includes text from an interview with Dianne Smith about her experiences of the 2010 and 2011 Canterbury earthquakes. Above this is an image of Smith sitting in front of the rocks by the Waimakariri river in Kairaki.
I want to talk a bit about a media project that I started work on over the summer, which is part of a larger project the Faculty of Law at Canterbury is carrying out, investigating the many legal issues that have arisen from the earthquakes.
This paper reports on a service-learning public journalism project in which postgraduate journalism students explore ways to engage with and report on diverse communities. Media scholars have argued that news media, and local newspapers in particular, must re-engage with their communities. Likewise, journalism studies scholars have urged educators to give journalism students greater opportunities to reflect on their work by getting out among journalism’s critics, often consumers or citizens concerned about content and the preparation of future journalists. The challenge for journalism educators is to prepare students for working in partnership with communities while also developing their ability to operate reflectively and critically within the expectations of the news media industry and wider society. The aim of this project has been to help students find ways to both listen and lead in a community, and also reflect on the challenges and critiques of community journalism practices. The project began in 2013 with stories about residents’ recovery following the devastating 2011 Canterbury earthquakes, and aimed to create stories that could contribute to community connection and engagement, and thereby resilience and recovery. The idea was inspired by research about post-disaster renewal that indicated that communities with strong social capital and social networks were more resilient and recovered more quickly and strongly. The project’s longer-term aim has been to explore community journalism practices that give greater power to citizens and communities by prioritising listening and processes of engagement. Over several months, students network with a community group to identify subjects with whom they will co-create a story, and then complete a story on which they must seek the feedback of their subject. Community leaders have described the project as a key example of how to do things “with people not to people”, and an outstanding contribution to the community-led component of Canterbury’s recovery. Analysis of student reflections, which are a key part of each year’s project, reveals the process of engaging with communities has helped students to map community dynamics, think more critically about source relationships, editorial choices and objectivity norms, and to develop a perspective on the diverse ways they can go about their journalism in the future. Each year, students partner with different groups and organisations, addressing different themes each time the project runs. For 2016, the programme proposes to develop the project in a new way, by not just exploring a community’s stories but also exploring its media needs and it aims to work with Christchurch’s new migrant Filipino community to develop the groundwork for a community media and/or communication platform, which Filipino community leaders say is a pressing need. For this iteration, journalism students will be set further research tasks aimed at deepening their ‘public listening’: they will conduct a survey of community members’ media use and needs as well as qualitative research interviews. It is hoped that the data collected will strengthen students’ understanding of their own journalism practice, as well as form the basis for work on developing media tools for minority groups who are generally poorly represented in mainstream media. In 2015, the journalism programme surveyed its community partners and held follow-up interviews with 13 of 18 story subjects to elicit further feedback on its news content and thereby deepen understanding of different community viewpoints. The survey and interview data revealed the project affected story subjects in a number of positive and interesting ways. Subjects said they appreciated the way student reporters took their time to build relationships and understand the context of the community groups with which they were involved, and contrasted this with their experience of professional journalists who had held pre-conceived assumptions about stories and/or rushed into interviews. As a direct consequence of the students’ approach, participants said they better trusted the student journalists to portray them accurately and fairly. Most were also encouraged by the positive recognition stories brought and several said the engagement process had helped their personal development, all of which had spin-offs for their community efforts. The presentation night that wraps up each year’s project, where community groups, story subjects and students come together to network and share the final stories, was cited as a significant positive aspect of the project and a great opportunity for community partners to connect with others doing similar work. Community feedback will be sought in future projects to inform and improve successive iterations.
The Canterbury earthquakes have provided the opportunity to reconsider the Christchurch CBD - and arts and culture have often led the discussion. No more so than during the bold biennial weekend celebration of urban creativity which is Festa, which first gave the public access to the red zone back in in 2012. FESTA returns this Labour weekend and joining Mark Amery this week are festival director and architectural historian Doctor Jessica Halliday and Kairaranga or weaver Benita Wakefield, who is part of FESTA project Kono for Kai.
A PDF copy of pages 206-207 of the book Christchurch: The Transitional City Pt IV. The pages document the transitional project 'Fulton Hogan BMX Pump Track'. Page 206 photos: Irene Boles. Page 207 photos: Peter Walker, Three Chairs Photography. With permission from Student Volunteer Army Foundation.
A PDF copy of pages 110-111 of the book Christchurch: The Transitional City Pt IV. The pages document the transitional project 'Here are the People and There is the Steeple'. Photo with permission: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu. Photo: John Collie.
A PDF copy of pages 112-113 of the book Christchurch: The Transitional City Pt IV. The pages document the transitional project 'On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer'. Image: Michael Parekowhai Chapman's Homer 2011. Bronze, stainless steel. Courtesy of the artist and Michael Lett, Auckland. Photo with permission: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu. Photo: John Collie.
A PDF copy of pages 210-211 of the book Christchurch: The Transitional City Pt IV. The pages document the transitional project 'St Luke's Labyrinth'. Page 210 photos: Irene Boles. Page 211 photos: Peter Walker, Three Chairs Photography. With permission from Student Volunteer Army Foundation.
A PDF copy of pages 282-283 of the book Christchurch: The Transitional City Pt IV. The pages document the transitional project 'Co-Location of Secondary Schools in Christchurch Post 22 February 2011 Earthquake'. Photo: Phil Arvidson. With permission: St Bede's, Marian College and the Ministry of Education.
In the aftermath of the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes, Christchurch, New Zealand is framed as a ‘transi- tional’ city, moving from its demolished past to a speculative future. The ADA Mesh Cities project asks what role media art and networks may play in the transitional city, and the practices of remembering, and reimagining space.
This statue of the Virgin Mary stood in the south tower of The Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament and had been facing inside from when she was placed there and through the September 2010 earthquake. That changed on February 22 2010 at 12.51pm when Christchurch was rocked by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake. During the violent shaking motion Mary was t...
There is a now a rich literature on the connections between digital media, networked computing, and the shaping of urban material cultures. Much less has addressed the post-disaster context, like we face in Christchurch, where it is more a case of re-build rather than re-new. In what follows I suggest that Lev Manovich’s well-known distinction between narrative and database as distinct but related cultural forms is a useful framework for thinking about the Christchurch rebuild, and perhaps urbanism more generally.
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The UC CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive contains tens of thousands of high value cultural heritage items related to a long series of earthquakes that hit Canterbury, New Zealand, from 2010 - 2012. The archive was built by a Digital Humanities team located at the center of the disaster in New Zealand's second largest city, Christchurch. The project quickly became complex, not only in its technical aspects but in its governance and general management. This talk will provide insight into the national and international management and governance frameworks used to successfully build and deliver the archive into operation. Issues that needed to be managed included human ethics, research ethics, stakeholder management, communications, risk management, curation and ingestion policy, copyright and content licensing, and project governance. The team drew heavily on industry-standard project management methods for the basic approach, but built their ecosystem and stakeholder trust on principles derived directly form the global digital humanities community.
Andre Lovatt grew up in Christchurch and completed a masters degree in Civil Engineering at Canterbury before taking up a position in Singapore working on, among other things, the $6.7 billion Marina Bay Sands waterfront resort. After almost 10 years in Southeast Asia he has returned to his earthquake ravaged home to take on a project with a much smaller price tag. Andre is the new CEO of the Christchurch Arts Centre and his job is to oversee the $290 million dollar project that will, if it's successful, return the centre to its former glory by the end of 2019.
Ravenscar House Museum holds an extraordinary, previously private art collection. The new building has been gifted to Christchurch by art collectors Susan Wakefield and her late husband Jim. The art remains in the ownership of the Ravenscar Trust. Artists in the collection include Colin McCahon, Bill Sutton and Frances Hodgkins. The treasures were previously in the Wakefield's Christchurch home which suffered irreparable earthquake damage. They're now displayed in the purpose-designed and built Ravenscar House Museum in the city's Arts precinct. The story of the art and artefacts is told in in the book - Ravenscar House: A Biography, written by Christchurch journalist and writer Sally Blundell.
A photograph of Graeme Kershaw, Technician at the University of Canterbury Department of Physics and Astronomy, sitting among the damaged parts of the Townsend Telescope. The telescope was damaged during the 22 February 2011 earthquake, when the Observatory tower at the Christchurch Arts Centre collapsed. Kershaw has been given the task of restoring the telescope. In this photograph he is holding the telescope's clock drive. In the foreground there is a plaque reading, "The equatorial telescope and accessories in this observatory were presented to Canterbury College by James Townsend Esq. 1891. A large contribution towards the erection of the tower was made by the Canterbury Astronomical Society".
A photograph of Graeme Kershaw, Technician at the University of Canterbury Department of Physics and Astronomy, sitting among the damaged parts of the Townsend Telescope. The telescope was damaged during the 22 February 2011 earthquake, when the Observatory tower at the Christchurch Arts Centre collapsed. Kershaw has been given the task of restoring the telescope. In this photograph he is holding the telescope's clock drive. In the foreground there is a plaque reading, "The equatorial telescope and accessories in this observatory were presented to Canterbury College by James Townsend Esq. 1891. A large contribution towards the erection of the tower was made by the Canterbury Astronomical Society".
The UC CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive was built following the devastating earthquakes that hit the Canterbury region in the South Island of New Zealand from 2010 – 2012. 185 people were killed in the 6.3 magnitude earthquake of February 22nd 2011, thousands of homes and businesses were destroyed, and the local community endured over 10,000 aftershocks. The program aims to document and protect the social, cultural, and intellectual legacy of the Canterbury community for the purposes of memorialization and enabling research. The nationally federated archive currently stores 75,000 items, ranging from audio and video interviews to images and official reports. Tens of thousands more items await ingestion. Significant lessons have been learned about data integration in post-disaster contexts, including but not limited to technical architecture, governance, ingestion process, and human ethics. The archive represents a model for future resilience-oriented data integration and preservation products.
The University of Canterbury CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquake Digital Archive draws on the example of the Centre for History and New Media’s (CHNM) September 11 Archive, which was used to collect digital artefacts after the bombing of the World Trade Centre buildings in 2001, but has gone significantly further than this project in its development as a federated digital archive. The new University of Canterbury Digital Humanities Programme – initiated to build the archive – has gathered together a Consortium of major national organizations to contribute content to a federated archive based on principles of openness and collaboration derived directly from the international digital humanities community.
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Research in the governance of urban tourist spaces is characterized by a lack of argumentative inquiry and scant use of critical theory. This is evident, particularly, in the study of tourism and post-disaster urban recovery, with very few contributions assessing the phenomenon from a social theory perspective. This thesis examines the complex phenomenon of planning and governance for urban tourism spaces in contexts facing physical recovery from natural disasters. It does so by looking at the governance dynamics and the mechanism of decision- making put in place before and after triggering events like earthquakes and tsunamis. This thesis provides evidence from Christchurch, New Zealand, by focusing on the policies and strategies for the regeneration of the city centre put in place before and after the disruptive earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. The thesis looks at power relations, structures and ideologies through a Lukesian appraisal of pre-and-post disaster governance from two relevant urban tourist spaces located in the Christchurch central city area: the Arts Centre of Christchurch and the Town Hall and Performing Arts Precinct. The research strategy adopted for the study combined archival research, interviews with key stakeholders and fieldwork notes over a period of two years. The research deployed a comparative case study methodology that focuses on projects taking place within a spatially defined area of the city centre where special legislation was enacted as result of the earthquakes. The findings from the interviews and their triangulation with documents retrieved from national and local authorities suggest that the earthquakes affected the engagement among stakeholders and the mechanisms of decision-making. Also, the findings show patterns of disaster capitalism in post-earthquake governance for urban tourist spaces in the Christchurch CBD, with episodes of exclusion, lobbying and amendment of rules and legislation that directly benefited the interests of a narrow group of privileged stakeholders. Overall, the study shows that the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 accelerated neoliberal practices of site development in Christchurch, with the seismic events used as a pretext to implement market-oriented site projects in the CBD area.
Blended learning plays an important role in many tertiary institutions but little has been written about the implementation of blended learning in times of adversity, natural disaster or crisis. This paper describes how, in the wake of the 22 February Canterbury earthquake, five teacher educators responded to crisis-driven changing demands and changing directions. Our narratives describe how blended learning provided students in initial teacher education programmes with some certainty and continuity during a time of civil emergency. The professional learning generated from our experiences provides valuable insights for designing and preparing for blended learning in times of crisis, as well as developing resilient blended learning programmes for the future.