A story submitted by Candy Green to the QuakeStories website.
A photograph of a sign about the Victoria Green public park.
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Looking east along Beach Road towards Bower Avenue. Machine is pumping out groundwater and filtering silt. This piece of road is zoned orange on the left and green on the right".
A photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Gap Filler Chess set on Colombo Street, Sydenham".
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Belmont Street".
A photograph of Wayne Youle's mural 'I Seem to Have Temporarily Misplaced My Sense of Humour' (2012). The photograph is captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Art installation at an empty site on Colombo Street, Sydenham".
A photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Gap Filler Chess set on Colombo Street, Sydenham".
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Glenrowan Avenue".
A photograph of the photocopy template for the Christchurch City Council's green sticker. The sticker was used by the Civil Defence after the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes to indicate that a building had been inspected and that 'no structural or other safety hazards' were found.
A member of the Wellington Emergency Management Office Emergency Response Team team attempting to enter the City Care building on Antigua Street. A green sticker on the door indicates that the building has been inspected and is safe to enter.
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Corner of Salisbury and Victoria Streets - Greening the Rubble".
This paper analyses the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, which has been through dramatic changes since it was struck by a series of earthquakes of different intensities between 2010 and 2011. The objective is to develop a deeper understanding of resilience by looking at changes in green and grey infrastructures. The study can be helpful to reveal a way of doing comparative analysis using resilience as a theoretical framework. In this way, it might be possible to assess the blueprint of future master plans by considering how important the interplay between green and grey infrastructure is for the resilience capacity of cities.
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Niven Street".
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Belmont Street".
A photograph of street art by DTR on a factory wall depicting two green blob monsters. There is also tag writing in shades of green, blue, and brown, as well as orange text that reads "So live". In front of the artwork, there is a car parked in a parking space.
A banner for Telecom Green is attached to the front of a shipping container on Hereford Street.
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "A big Australian sucker truck in Newport Street".
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Belmont Street".
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Glenrowan Avenue".
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Glenrowan Avenue".
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "An aerial photograph looking across North New Brighton to the QEII Stadium".
The increase in urban population has required cities to rethink their strategies for minimising greenhouse gas impacts and adapting to climate change. While urban design and planning policy have been guided by principles such as walkability (to reduce the dependence on cars) and green infrastructure (to enhance the quality of open spaces to support conservation and human values), there have been conflicting views on what spatial strategies will best prepare cities for a challenging future. Researchers supporting compact cities based upon public Transit Oriented Development have claimed that walkability, higher density and mixed-uses make cities more sustainable (Owen, 2009) and that, while green spaces in cities are necessary, they are dull in comparison with shopfronts and street vendors (Speck, 2012, p 250). Other researchers claim that green infrastructure is fundamental to improving urban sustainability and attracting public space users with improved urban comfort, consequently encouraging walkability (Pitman and Ely, 2013). Landscape architects tend to assume that ‘the greener the better’; however, the efficiency of urban greenery in relation to urban comfort and urbanity depends on its density, distribution and the services provided. Green infrastructure can take many forms (from urban forests to street trees) and provide varied services (amended microclimate, aesthetics, ecology and so forth). In this paper, we evaluate the relevance of current policy in Christchurch regarding both best practice in green infrastructure and urban comfort (Tavares, 2015). We focus on the Christchurch Blueprint for rebuilding the central city, and critically examine the post-earthquake paths the city is following regarding its green and grey infrastructures and the resulting urban environment. We discuss the performance and appropriateness of the current Blueprint in post-earthquake Christchurch, particularly as it relates to the challenges that climate change is creating for cities worldwide.
An aerial photograph of a residential area in Burwood. The photograph has been captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "New Brighton Road and Avonside Drive with the Avondale Road bridge. This area is red-zoned on the right-hand side of the river and green-zoned on the left-hand side of the river".
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "The Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament on Barbadoes Street, missing its distinctive green domes".
A photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Stagnant water in Waygreen Avenue leads to green algae in all the puddles".
Within four weeks of the September 4 2010 Canterbury Earthquake a new, loosely-knit community group appeared in Christchurch under the banner of “Greening the Rubble.” The general aim of those who attended the first few meetings was to do something to help plug the holes that had already appeared or were likely to appear over the coming weeks in the city fabric with some temporary landscaping and planting projects. This article charts the first eighteen months of Greening the Rubble and places the initiative in a broader context to argue that although seismic events in Christchurch acted as a “call to palms,” so to speak, the city was already in need of some remedial greening. It concludes with a reflection on lessons learned to date by GTR and commentary on the likely issues ahead for this new mini-social-environmental movement in the context of a quake-affected and still quake-prone major New Zealand city. One of the key lessons for GTR and all of those involved in Christchurch recovery activities to date is that the city is still very much in the middle of the event and is to some extent a laboratory for seismic and agency management studies alike.
Outdoor seating and the garden outside the Coffee Zone kiosk in Sydenham. This garden was a project supported by Greening the Rubble.
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "17 Foster Terrace in Lyttelton. The land on this side of the street is green zoned".
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "15 Foster Terrace in Lyttelton. The land on this side of the street is green zoned".
A photograph captioned by Paul Corliss, "Man in green snake skin shoes - Gough the Property Investor. Looking towards Southwark Street and Colombo Street".