The Villa at the Edge of the Empire

by Farrell, Fiona

  ‘Centennial was small,’ she says. ‘It was accessible. People loved it and it would have cost only an additional $2 million to repair.’

  The pool has been demolished. It is to be replaced by a playground. CERA ran a competition for children to design their ideal and Simone went to see the resulting exhibition. ‘Most of the children had asked for a pool. Kids love water.’

  The architects’ designs include a fountain — a ‘zero-depth water facility’ of squirty jets where children might run about and squeal. But it’s not a pool. You can’t dive in and swim about. It seems a diminution, a poor substitute.

  ‘They exchanged a small community facility for the Metro Sports Facility and they are completely different things: one was for participation, the other is for spectators and big competitive events. It’s not in the end,’ she says, ‘about sport. It’s about money.’

  But then every decision in the redesigning of the city is fundamentally about money. And power, and aesthetic judgements and values and beliefs and all the impulses and personal preferences we bundle together and loosely label ‘politics’.

  Those things which are by most men thrown aside as common or unimportant are the very things which are of weightiest import.

  — Friedrich Froebel

  I WALK PAST THE SITE of Centennial Pool and its replacement playground on my way back into the central city. The playground was announced by CERA in December 2012. It will not be like other playgrounds, those little patches set aside for children in the suburbs of the city with their slides and swings and a bouncy horse on a spring. As the CEO of CERA explained, ‘We want to draw people back into the city centre with an outrageous playground.’ It will be part of a riverside park, but this park will not be like other parks. This park will be ‘grunty’. It will be like the waterfront spaces in Melbourne or Brisbane.

  An outrageous playground in a grunty park. In such a playground, no doubt, the swings will swing higher, the slides will be taller, the seesaws will be world beating. It will be the exact juvenile equivalent of the state-of-the-art stadium and the world-class aquatic facility that are taking shape nearby, another expression of the values determining the redevelopment of the entire central city.

  But then playgrounds have always expressed the values of their makers. They have been deeply political entities from the start, when they first took shape as outdoor gymnasiums in early nineteenth-century Germany. A philosophy of ‘natural’ child rearing had found ready acceptance among political leaders eager to create a strong citizenry in an era when poverty and overcrowding in industrialised cities were creating just the opposite: children whose constitutions were weak and compromised and vulnerable to tuberculosis and whole batteries of disease.

  The future soldiers of the fatherland, the future mothers of a vigorous nation could be created by educators supplying equipment that replicated the forms of nature: the arms and upper body would be strengthened by climbing and swinging as in nature children climbed and swung from the branches of trees. They would learn balance on narrow bars resembling the tree trunk laid down over a running brook. At play in the open air, children could observe the habits of birds and beetles. No longer would they play in crowded and filthy streets but in special areas reserved for their use, under the supervision of trained play leaders.

  In the 1880s, great piles of sand were added to playgrounds in Berlin, and soon after in parks across America, where one of their advocates, the psychologist Granville Stanley Hall, hoped that by digging and excavating and constructing, ‘boys up to the age of 15 would accomplish valuable training in industrial and mercantile pursuits, law, environment, topological imagination and civic training’. That’s what a sandpit could achieve. At least according to Stanley Hall, a racial eugenicist, who saw in the sandpit a means of creating a nation whose children would not be frail or sickly.

  Sandpits are not neutral artefacts, any more than stadiums or swimming pools. They possess political intention and, like swings and monkey bars and seesaws, a history that leads back to Rousseau and Froebel and the theory that, nurtured like little plants in a garden, children could discover that certainty of self, ‘the pivot point where my inner self awoke’, that Froebel had found when playing freely among rocks and streams and trees.

  The playgrounds of this city reflect the era of their construction. There are the swings and slides that date from my post-war childhood and further back to the German gymnasium. There are those 70s timber forts and flying foxes from a time that favoured authenticity and getting back to nature: the granola of playground development. There are the playgrounds of the fast food outlets and city malls with their mass-produced plastic cubes in brilliant primary colours, identical the world over, designed to keep the kids corralled and content while their elders shop.

  And then there is an outrageous playground in a grunty park, the ‘attraction’ to which children will be transported from around the city and further afield, bypassing the timorous little suburban seesaws. Perhaps they will have to pay for admittance. It doesn’t sound like the place for the quiet child, swinging dreamily to and fro, finding the pivot point and the awakenings of the inner life. It sounds big. It sounds whizz bang. It sounds like the fitting setting for the little citizens of a new world order. A pleasure dome fit for the children of Brownleegrad, in this, the province of Rugbistan.

  I WALK ALONG THE RIVERBANK back into the central city. There’s a couple in a punt on the Avon being propelled by a young man in a straw boater, drifting between the cleared spaces and the snaggletooth remains of the city. A scattering of buildings stand, like isolates, like glacial erratics, left behind after a landscape has been scraped to the essence. The punt drifts past Edwardian brick shored up by scaffolding and the cranes of the building site that will be the Entertainment Precinct.

  The river carries them along, though it is no longer simply a river, but a precinct: the Te Papa Otakaro/Avon River Precinct, a $100 million project that will, an engineer in CERA’s shiny tower tells me, ‘revitalise’ its banks and water, returning the whole ‘to how it wants to be’ after years of degradation and silt build-up.

  He talks rapidly, his legs jigging, fired up by the future that is also a loop back to the past, to purity and authenticity, to that sunlit vision, that point of perfection that draws us always in our planning of the future, back to Eden, before we fell and mucked things up.

  But the River Precinct is planned as more than ecological restoration. It is also to serve a social purpose, as the focus of the ‘fantastic public realm’ that will be the central city, because ‘People don’t come together in the corridors of an office. They come together outside…. The river makes the brand of Christchurch. It’s what people enjoy when they visit.’

  So this precinct will be a ‘catalyst’. Its footpaths and cycleways and places to gather will supply the base from which ‘businesses can leverage’. People will be drawn to live here too. Before the quakes, around 7000 people called the central city home, but CERA’s hope is that more than 22,000 might do so.

  ‘What kind of people?’ I ask and the engineer says, ‘Just people. It’s all about diversity, it’s about having options … some will want to live here because there’s a café on their doorstep. We anticipate the first to move in will be empty nesters and young professionals.’

  He cites as models the ‘great urban waterfronts’ of Melbourne, and Brisbane, and London. The area in front of Christchurch’s Entertainment Precinct will be ‘like London’s South Bank, but if you go along between Colombo and Manchester, it will be more like Fulham: lazy pub on the waterfront rather than hard urban bar … while down in the Avon Loop, it’ll be more natural with lots of big trees, away from the hustle and bustle of the central city proper so we’d see that as just a simple, beautiful, ecologically rich area of our city.’

  The river is as it always has been, going about its simple business of flowing from springs to the sea. But we understand what it is through the words we use to name it. It has ac
quired a new language, one that blends ecological restoration with branding and leverage.

  Captain Thomas’s map expressed in concrete mathematical form the ambitions and values of colonisation and occupation. This new map is equally expressive. In this city, tourism is a driving force. The river was once conceived of as a way home, a route to the place to gather kai. Then an industrial waterway, a means of transporting goods to and from a port. In this century, however, it is an ‘attraction’, something to draw visitors and their wallets to the centre.

  CERA plans to include an Arts Trail as part of the Avon River Precinct. It has called for artists to submit their ideas. Interestingly, the brief for this art makes no mention of a hope that it should express something of the heart of its creator, or display their virtuosity, idiosyncrasy or technical skill. Nor is its primary purpose to lift the spirit of the people who live here. Rather, the plan is ‘to see Christchurch develop as an artistic destination by showing visitors Christchurch’s distinctive character through art’.

  So it is to be another ‘attraction’, like the tram circling the centre, going nowhere, ringing its little bell. The masters of the city are calling in the artists, and as masters always do, they are setting the political context. It’s as if a Medici were phoning up Michelangelo to say, ‘Hey Mike, we need some kinda attraction for that dead spot by the Cathedral Precinct, over by the Gelato Precinct. Something to stop the tourists shooting through to Rome. Got any ideas?’

  In the meantime, through the cracks, other kinds of art have emerged. The art gallery has been closed, but artists have covered walls newly exposed by demolition with imagery and colour.

  The principal auditorium in the town hall has been closed but the city’s symphony orchestra has carried on, performing in the Air Force Museum at Wigram, where for every performance — and there are perhaps a dozen each year — five aged aircraft must be painstakingly wheeled from the restored hangar to make room: Spitfire and Kittyhawk, Iroquois, Avenger and Skyhawk are wedged somewhere else, the hangar doors closed, a cyclorama hung over them and hoopla, a concert venue! And on the night, Borodin, Lilburn and Tchaikovsky echo and swirl about an audience that includes a silent Auster suspended overhead, a Hudson, a DC-3 Dakota. It is an extraordinary conjunction.

  A few months after the February quake, with much of the city still in chaos, a group of actors performed Macbeth amid the ruins of a Lyttelton bar, in beanies and thick jackets to keep out the very authentic cold. Skateboarders created a video of themselves leaping half-buried cars, rattling over gashes into a luminous sunset. Gap Filler, a volunteer group founded by Coralie Winn, has peopled demolition sites with improvisation: an outdoor cinema powered by stationary bicycles, a performance venue in a pavilion of recycled wooden pallets, a dance floor laid down on rubble where anyone can dance to music from an adapted coin-operated laundromat machine.

  A stand of cabbage trees created entirely from strips of recycled timber by the sculptor Regan Gentry reaches into the sky from dusty gravel, a woven hinaki by Lonnie Hutchinson snakes across the former site of the Crowne Plaza Hotel and behind the carcass of the cathedral rise Julia Morison’s spindly-legged Tree Houses for Swamp Dwellers.

  Such things are at their best not on a sunny afternoon, but on some dark winter night, rain seeping, and you’re walking through the empty centre watching your feet as it’s easy to trip on broken pavement and the old city rises as it can do at such moments, a phantom presence, and you’re beginning to feel mournful. But some girls are dancing, giggling and self-conscious on the Dance-O-Mat and there are lights illuminating the wooden cabbage trees. It’s dramatic. It’s different. You feel better. You feel in a weird way lucky to be here, walking through this newness, this difference.

  Somehow, art and music and dance break through as they always do, gritty and authentic and sprung not from some banal intention to create a tourist destination, but from the normal human impulse to create a temporary beauty, to play. And ironically, but unsurprisingly, it is this art — temporary, improvised, peripheral, spontaneous — that draws the tourists. Lonely Planet elects Christchurch as one of the top cities to visit worldwide in 2013.

  On this spring day, the River Precinct is taking shape. Footpaths and cycleways are being laid, the banks are being landscaped for those lazy Sunday Fulham afternoons and through it all the river sweeps along, though four years out from the quake, its waters are polluted, as are other waterways in the city. Thousands of litres of untreated sewage pour daily from broken pipes into the Avon and the Heathcote. Since 2010, 8 billion litres have entered the city’s rivers and creeks, a situation that officials say will continue for at least another ten years. The cost of repairs to the city’s infrastructure was divided more or less equally between central government and the city council: $1.8 billion from Wellington, $1.4 billion from Christchurch, but it’s a slow process, particularly when the council is faced with multiple commitments, including funding their contribution to CERA’s grand plan. In December 2014, the Medical Officer of Health describes the city’s urban waterways as ‘open sewers’. It is unsafe to fish, to take whitebait, to swim. And no amenity planting can paste over that.

  Elsewhere in the city, where the land has sunk and the creeks ride high on silt-laden beds, neighbourhoods have had to deal with the other less tourist-friendly reality of repeated flooding. Flooding has always been a risk in this low-lying place, but drainage and engineering had reduced frequency and intensity. Since the quakes, however, those once-in-twenty-year floods have become a feature of life for some families. Homes have been flooded five times, nine times in the past four years. Each episode another story of gathering tension as the rain falls, then the scramble to lift furniture and valuables to higher ground, the hurried evacuation, temporary relocation, mopping up, repair, lives interrupted. Protest is building, demand that something official should be done for those whose homes have become vulnerable, unsellable, uninsurable, but the government, says Minister Brownlee, remains ‘unsure’ if earthquakes have worsened the flood risk in the city.

  I FOLLOW THE RIVER BACK to the point where I began, across streets that will soon vanish beneath the building that will anchor this western edge of the city centre as surely as the rugby stadium anchors the east. The new convention centre will, like its twin, be big. Much bigger than its pre-quake predecessor, whose halls and glass-fronted foyer had before the quakes hosted expos — the Wedding Expo, 50+ Lifestyle Expo, an Armageddon Pulp Culture Expo, an Erotica Expo — and, less frequently, conventions.

  A feasibility study prepared in June 2009 for Auckland City Council, who were considering the expansion of their own convention centre, noted that, in 2008, the country as a whole had hosted just 38 conferences, with an average enrolment of only 467 delegates. Christchurch’s convention centre was the largest in the country but it was not large enough to draw the crowds. What was needed, the study argued, was a centre in this country that could host conventions of 1000–2000 delegates. Approximately thirty-five conferences of that size per annum, including twenty-five of international origin, would mean a centre could ‘operate broadly on a break-even cashflow basis’. There could be some problems, in this era of carbon footprints and air miles, in attracting such events to these shores, but such issues would be unlikely to influence the decision-making of ‘most conference organisers’. The crucial factor was that the venue itself should be large and that it should be surrounded by ‘a critical mass of appropriate-standard hotel rooms’.

  Post-quake Christchurch looks set to meet that need, with the state-of-the-art facilities and breakout rooms of the new convention centre and associated hotels for which the CBD height limit has been raised from a cautious seven storeys to a more commercial thirteen.

  Given the intention to create a city centre that will be ‘very much like Melbourne’, it is hardly surprising that a convention centre would take pride of place.

  Melbourne has an enormous convention centre, $1 billion worth of plenary hall, thirty-two me
eting rooms, a Hilton hotel, residential and retail space. It was one of Jeff Kennett’s major projects when he was premier of Victoria in the 90s and one of the two architectural practices responsible for its development was the Australian architectural firm Woods Bagot, whose personnel took part in the 100-day dash to redesign Christchurch’s CBD.

  Convention centres are another contemporary phenomenon: twenty-first century cathedrals, drawing pilgrims from far and wide with their promise of revitalisation, inspiration and the renewal of faith in one’s chosen life purpose. The problem is that they do not return a profit and must be subsidised by public money or casinos, poker machines and gaming tables.

  Another difficulty is competition. Google ‘world-class convention centres’ and Paris comes out top, followed by Singapore, Barcelona, Vienna. Their websites offer the inducements of shopping and theatre, national cuisine and the charms of historic architecture. The Melbourne convention centre promises ‘friendly locals, cultural creativity and fine wine’. Curiously, the site also makes special mention of the city’s ‘outstanding public transport system … that is clean, safe and efficient and rated by delegates a Melbourne highlight’.

  Interestingly, none mention ‘multiple breakout rooms’ as a reason to choose their centre above all others. Instead they promise the vibrancy of a city designed for the primary benefit of its own citizens. In Melbourne, a tram is for transporting ordinary citizens to and from work or school or the beach. In Christchurch, trams don’t go anywhere; they don’t convey the citizens from one place to another cheaply and efficiently. They circle the centre as another tourist attraction. In its blueprint adaptation, CERA deleted the light rail system proposed by the city council.