A damaged brick wall around a courtyard garden on Ash Street, seen from Madras Street. The Alice in Videoland building can be seen in the background.
A photograph of a fire-damaged building in High Street. The photograph is captioned by Paul Corliss, "Tuam Street and High Street shops, CBD. By Alice's".
A photograph of a fire-damaged building in High Street. The photograph is captioned by Paul Corliss, "Tuam Street and High Street shops, CBD. By Alice's".
An aerial photograph looking north-west over High Street with the damaged McKenzie & Willis store in the centre, and Alice in Videoland to the left.
A photograph of steel bracing supporting the McKenzie & Willis building. The photograph is captioned by Paul Corliss, "Tuam Street and High Street shops, CBD. By Alice's".
A photograph of steel bracing supporting the McKenzie & Willis building. The photograph is captioned by Paul Corliss, "Tuam Street and High Street shops, CBD. By Alice's".
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Foundations for the EPIC technology centre Manchester Street".
An aerial photograph of Kingsford Street in the Horseshoe Lake area, Burwood.
An aerial photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "High and Tuam Streets intersection".
Knowing how to rapidly rebuild disaster-damaged infrastructure, while deciding appropriate recovery strategies and catering for future investment is a matter of core interest to government decision makers, utility providers, and business sectors. The purpose of this research is to explore the effects of decisions and outcomes for physical reconstruction on the overall recovery process of horizontal infrastructure in New Zealand using the Canterbury and Kaikoura earthquakes as cases. A mixed approach including a systematic review, questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews is used to capture perspectives of those involved in reconstruction process and gain insights into the effect of critical elements on infrastructure downtime. Findings from this research will contribute towards advancements of a systems dynamics model considering critical decision-making variables across phases of the reconstruction process to assess how these variables affect the rebuild process and the corresponding downtime. This project will improve the ability to explore alternative resilience improvement pathways and test the efficacy of alternative means for facilitating a faster and better reconstruction process.
An aerial photograph of Viscount Place in the Horseshoe Lake residential area. The photograph has been captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Viscount Place and Alice Street are leading off Kingsford Street, Horseshoe Lake".
An aerial photograph of Viscount Place in the Horseshoe Lake residential area. The photograph has been captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Viscount Place and Alice Street are leading off Kingsford Street, Horseshoe Lake".
An aerial photograph of the Horseshoe Lake area, with Queensbury Street in the centre.
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Jeremy Stewart standing in his lice in Videoland store which is just awaiting the cordon to be pushed back so that customers can come calling".
A photograph of street art on the side of a building on Manchester Street, facing onto High Street. The artwork is signed by Jacob Yikes.
Objectives • To develop a system dynamics model of Christchurch post-quake reconstruction process that captures all the critical dynamics influencing its pathway • To investigate the implications of current rebuild pathway • To build a reconstruction module to be integrated in MERIT (Measuring the Economics of Resilient Infrastructure Tool)
The level of destruction from the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes led to changes in the New Zealand seismic building code. The destruction showed that the NZ building codes did not fully performed to expectation and needed Improvement to ensure that impact of future earthquakes would be minimised. The building codes have been amended to improve buildings resilience to earthquake and other related extreme loading conditions. Rebuilding Christchurch with the new modifications in the seismic building code comes with its own unique challenges to the entire system. This project investigates the impact of rebuilding Christchurch with the new seismic Building codes in terms of how the new changes affected the building industry and the management of construction.
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Clarendon Tower (left), Westpac Bank (centre), Grant Thornton building (white right of the Westpac in the distance), ANZ Bank (white with vertical stripes below the Grant Thornton), BNZ bank (red), and Holiday Inn (right) all under demolition, viewed from Alice in Videoland".
An aerial photograph of High Street. The photograph has been captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "A detail of High Street between the Lichfield and Manchester Street intersection and the Tuam and Poplar Street intersection".
An aerial photograph of High, Lichfield, Manchester, and Tuam Streets. The photographs has been captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "High Street can be seen running from the bottom left to the top right of the photograph. The old Majestic Theatre is prominent halfway up on the left. The prominent streets are Lichfield Street (on the left) and Tuam Street (on the right)".
An aerial photograph of the Christchurch central city. The photograph has been captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "High Street runs across this photograph in the top third from the old Majestic Theatre at the intersection of Manchester and Lichfield Streets to the intersection of Madras and St Asaph Street which is just beyond the edge of the photo".
An aerial photograph of the Christchurch central city. The photograph has been captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "The central city, with the Majestic Theatre in the centre of the photograph. Lichfield Street runs from bottom left diagonally up the photograph to the top right. The City Council building is prominent in the bottom left corner and Latimer Square in the top left corner".
The rapid classification of building damage states or placards after an earthquake is vital for enabling an efficient emergency response and informed decision-making for rehabilitation and recovery purposes. Traditional methods rely heavily on inspector-led on-site surveys, which are often time-consuming, resource-intensive, and susceptible to human error. This study introduces a machine learning-supported surrogate model designed to streamline the assessment of building damage, focusing on the automated assignment of damage placards within the context of New Zealand's post-earthquake evaluation frameworks. The study evaluates two key safety evaluation protocols—Rapid Building Assessment (RBA) and Detailed Damage Evaluation (DDE)—and integrates corresponding databases derived from the 2010–2011 Canterbury Earthquake Sequence (CES) in Christchurch. Six ML classifiers—Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN), Gradient Boosting Classifier (GBC), and Gradient Bagging (GBag)—were rigorously tested across both databases. The results indicate that the RF-based surrogate model outperforms the other classifiers across both RBA and DDE protocols. Two distinct sets of critical predictors have been further identified for each protocol, allowing for the rapid retrieval of essential data for future on-site surveys, while retaining the RF model's predictive accuracy. The developed surrogate model provides a pragmatic tool for practising engineers to rapidly assign placards to damaged structures and for policymakers and building owners to make informed recovery decisions for earthquake-affected buildings