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Videos, UC QuakeStudies

A video about the demolition of buildings on Victoria Street. The video includes footage of an excavator demolishing the Daily Bagel building, and an interview with Paddy Snowden from City Salvage about his work after the 4 September 2010 earthquake. It also includes an interview with Api Agsorn-Worn, owner of Victoria Thai Foods on Victoria Street, about the status of her building which she acquired six months ago.

Images, UC QuakeStudies

A photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Pieces of iron fretwork from the entrance to the Warners Hotel carefully laid on the ground in front of the building. Thisshows the careful salvaging which has taken place during the demolistion of many heritage building in order to be able to re-use significant pieces later".

Images, UC QuakeStudies

A photograph of a flight of concrete stairs salvaged from a building and placed in a car park in the Christchurch central city. Steel reinforcement can be seen sticking out of the concrete.

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Personnel from the USAID Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) standing in Firefighters Reserve, in preparation for the two minutes of silence to honour the people who lost their lives in the 22 February 2011 earthquake. Just out of the picture is a sculpture fashioned from 5 tonnes of structural steel salvaged from the site of the World Trade Centre following their collapse on 11 September 2001 in terrorist attacks on New York City. The sculpture is now used as a tribute to firefighters in New Zealand.

Research papers, University of Canterbury Library

This is an ethnographic case study, tracking the course of arguments about the future of a city’s central iconic building, damaged following a major earthquake sequence. The thesis plots this as a social drama and examines the central discourses of the controversy. The focus of the drama is the Anglican neo-Gothic Christ Church Cathedral, which stands in the central square of Christchurch, New Zealand. A series of major earthquakes in 2010/2011 devastated much of the inner city, destroying many heritage-listed buildings. The Cathedral was severely damaged and was declared by Government officials in 2011 to be a dangerous building, which needed to be demolished. The owners are the Church Property Trustees, chaired by Bishop Victoria Matthews, a Canadian appointed in 2008. In March 2012 Matthews announced that the Cathedral, because of safety and economic factors, would be deconstructed. Important artefacts were to be salvaged and a new Cathedral built, incorporating the old and new. This decision provoked a major controversy, led by those who claimed that the building could and should be restored. Discourses of history and heritage, memory, place and identity, ownership, economics and power are all identified, along with the various actors, because of their significance. However, the thesis is primarily concerned with the differing meanings given to the Cathedral. The major argument centres on the symbolic interaction between material objects and human subjects and the various ways these are interpreted. At the end of the research period, December 2015, the Christ Church Cathedral stands as a deteriorating wreck, inhabited by pigeons and rats and shielded by protective, colourfully decorated wooden fences. The decision about its future remains unresolved at the time of writing.