Future of filling the gaps to be explored

16 October 2014

Future of filling the gaps to be explored

A Lincoln University planning expert sees the temporary and transitional projects which caught the public’s imagination in central city spaces post-earthquakes becoming a permanent part of Christchurch.

Lincoln University lecturer in Urban Studies, Dr Suzanne Vallance, said the transitional spaces had helped embed the idea “it’s okay to experiment – to give things a go.”

Dr Vallance, who is also a board member of Greening the Rubble, which creates parks on cleared sites, is one of the organisers of the International Congress on Adaptive Urbanism taking place onOctober 23 and 24 in Christchurch, where the pros and cons of temporary projects and transitional places will be explored.

While the spaces, and what has been installed in them would always be changing, Dr Vallance said the idea of empowering and enabling people to have input over what happened in these small parts of the city had proved a success – by promoting community development, economic rejuvenation, biodiversity, arts and culture - and needed to be continued.

“There’s a sense that these temporary projects are just filling gaps until something more permanent and presumably better comes along, but they actually have value in themselves because they allow people to play a more active role in managing their environment, “ she said.

“That’s useful at any time, not just after a disaster.”

Lincoln University is one of the Congress sponsors, and she saw good alignment between the event and the University’s Faculty of Environment, Society and Design planning and landscape architecture programmes.

“We teach our students about the ‘what’ of planning, as well as the ‘how’, where different ways of engaging and consulting with residents are explored,” Dr Vallance said. “The Christchurch City Council’s support of groups like Greening the Rubble and Gap Filler is a really innovative style of engagement.”

A stated aim of the Congress is to classify adaptive urbanism and develop a “user guide” that will help activists, developers and governments from other cities around the world.

Dr Vallance said this would allow the skills and lessons learnt in Christchurch to be passed on. She said the future of the transitional movement depended on keeping spaces “fluid and flexible” and hoped similar projects could go ahead in the suburbs as well.

She would like the Congress to answer a number of questions around the role of the groups creating the spaces - if they were filling a job the government should be doing, how to engage better with the community, whether these projects lead to gentrification that then displaces those who seeded these initiatives, and how to connect informal and formal planning.

Dr Vallance was sure projects like the Pallet Pavilion, Nature Play and FesTA were worth the time and money spent on them and had made a huge difference to people. They had drawn international attention but she did not want to quantify their value in an economic sense as “some things are just priceless”.

ENDS

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