Dust and Water from the demolition

Images, eqnz.chch.2010

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Photograph by Jennifer Middendorf 441

Images, UC QuakeStudies

A dust-covered table in Man's Bakery and Cafe on Hereford Street. On top sits the remains of a lunch abandoned on 22 February 2011.

Photograph by Jennifer Middendorf 366

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Dust-covered tables in Man's Bakery and Cafe on Hereford Street. Many of the tables still hold the remains of lunches abandoned on 22 February 2011.

Photograph by Jennifer Middendorf 364

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Dust-covered tables in Man's Bakery and Cafe on Hereford Street. Many of the tables still hold the remains of lunches abandoned on 22 February 2011.

Photograph by Jennifer Middendorf 365

Images, UC QuakeStudies

Dust-covered tables in Man's Bakery and Cafe on Hereford Street. Many of the tables still hold the remains of lunches abandoned on 22 February 2011.

BeckerFraserPhotos February 2013 photograph 088

Images, UC QuakeStudies

A view of Hereford Street, looking east. On the road is a sprinkler system, used to spray rubble carried by trucks out of the CBD, in order to keep dust levels down.

BeckerFraserPhotos February 2013 photograph 087

Images, UC QuakeStudies

The corner of Manchester Street and Hereford Street. On the right is a sprinkler system used to spray rubble carried by trucks out of the CBD, in order to keep dust levels down.

Lost Christchurch

Other, National Library of New Zealand

After the shock and dust settled from the earthquakes, two friends, Helen Solomons and Wendy Riley, felt so strongly over the loss of the city's historic heart, they decided to put their skills to use and create this living tribute to it on the web.

Fairfax Video, September 2011 (8)

Videos, UC QuakeStudies

A time-lapse video of New Regent Street, taken from The Press building, which accidentally captured the collapse of the Copthorne Hotel. A cloud of dust from the collapsing building can be seen in the top of the video. The hotel collapsed while it was being demolished.

Melancholy, memories and six nostalgias: Postquake Christchurch and the pr…

Research Papers, Lincoln University

The city of Christchurch, New Zealand, was until very recently a “Junior England”—a small city that still bore the strong imprint of nineteenth-century British colonization, alongside a growing interest in the underlying biophysical setting and the indigenous pre-European landscape. All of this has changed as the city has been subjected to a devastating series of earthquakes, beginning in September 2010, and still continuing, with over 12,000 aftershocks recorded. One of these aftershocks, on February 22, 2011, was very close to the city center and very shallow with disastrous consequences, including a death toll of 185. Many buildings collapsed, and many more need to be demolished for safety purposes, meaning that over 80 percent of the central city will have gone. Tied up with this is the city’s precious heritage—its buildings and parks, rivers, and trees. The threats to heritage throw debates over economics and emotion into sharp relief. A number of nostalgic positions emerge from the dust and rubble, and in one form is a reverse-amnesia—an insistence of the past in the present. Individuals can respond to nostalgia in very different ways, at one extreme become mired in it and unable to move on, and at the other, dismissive of nostalgia as a luxury in the face of more pressing crises. The range of positions on nostalgia represent the complexity of heritage debates, attachment, and identity—and the ways in which disasters amplify the ongoing discourse on approaches to conservation and the value of historic landscapes.