By Bridget Gourlay
Napier, February 3, 1931. Students are bent over schoolbooks. Shoppers meander the streets. A harsh summer sun beats down. There is nothing unusual about this serene Kiwi scene, except that it’s about to be pulverised. When the 7.8 earthquake strikes, nearly the entire CBD collapses. The following days are biblical in terms of the scale of disaster; fires rage, the earth shakes and the body count climbs.
It was predicted the city would never recover. But it did… and then some. In a Listener article a decade later, a school headmistress said Napier was now a “far lovelier” city than it had ever been.
Why? Because it had been rebuilt so enthusiastically! Far from being wiped off the map, it morphed into an Art Deco (the contemporary building style of the time) shrine that is now a magnet for architecture fans far and wide.
Seventy years later and the big one strikes again. This time, on a drizzly February afternoon, an aftershock opens a faultline only a few kilometres underneath Christchurch’s central city.
Memories from ‘that day’ will never leave us. Many of us have not entered the red zone and by what we can see from the cordons or images on the news, the city is unrecognisable. Empty sites and broken buildings stand on what was, for more than 150 years, our city’s heart.
Within days of the disaster, talk turned in Christchurch to what we can build from this calamity. Much like Napier, we too could build a city for our time. Share An Idea has been filled with suggestions of green buildings, pedestrianised roads and modern structures which reflect and compliment our Gothic Revival past.
Bringing it back
Turning our devastated city back into a thriving centre of commerce and leisure is no easy task. One of the people at the helm of this is Central City Business Association head Paul Londsdale.
A proud Cantabrian since he was 11 years old, Lonsdale came from a background in shopping mall management when in 2007 he was employed by the recently formed Central City Business Association, after an unsuccessful marketing campaign of the centre city by the Chamber of Commerce.
That campaign failed, he says, because before you market anything you need to get the environment right — safety, cleaning, parking and consistent shopping hours. He felt there was a lack of cohesive communication between the stakeholders such as the council, business owners, property owners and the police. And he quickly set about putting it right.
“It was challenging,” Lonsdale remembers. “The suburban mall has one thing that gives it a competitive edge, and that is centralised management.” It dictates opening hours, uses a portion of rent for marketing and operations such as cleaning, and pays for parking to make it free for customers.
“A central city is very different. There were hundreds of different business owners — from national chains which had set opening hours to smaller boutique places that can basically open and close whenever they want.”
Within a few years, Lonsdale had achieved more results than expected. He produced a city map and directory so people could find what shops they wanted to visit quickly. Classical music started playing in Cashel Mall, which delighted shoppers and successfully controlled “antisocial” behaviour. A team of city ambassadors monitored the streets during the day to assist visitors to the city and enhance safety.
Early on in his job, while working on a city mall upgrade, Lonsdale discovered some business owners who worked side by side had barely spoken since the last upgrade 23 years ago.
“As soon as I heard that I thought — that is the key issue in the city, no one communicating.”
Once he persuaded more and more businesses to join the association, the community joined together. It began talking about issues they had in common.
Due to lack of funds, Lonsdale taught himself how to build websites and got one going. Weekly newsletters keep everybody informed. Things were looking up. By September 3 last year, Lonsdale says the city was in much better shape than it had been for years.
Seismic shifts
The past year has been a tumultuous time for all of us. After the September 4 quake, Lonsdale remembers working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, trying to get as much of the city open as possible and support businesses with damaged properties. Thanks to the communication already established, retailers got through the Christmas shopping season. Exhausted on Boxing Day morning, Lonsdale says “I remember lying in bed thinking I had three days off!”
Thanks to the shallow 4.9 aftershock, retailers lost the biggest day of the year after a rough three months. But Lonsdale sped into action once more, and organised the Boxing Day Replay. On a warm summer’s day in early February, crowds gathered and enjoyed the sales. “We made back all the money we lost on the 26th,” Londsdale remembers.
“After that I was feeling pretty comfortable. Everything was back on track. Then of course, there was February 22 and that’s the day Christchurch changed forever.”
Starting again
Six months on from ‘that day’ and most of us have not re-entered the central city. We live, work, shop, play and dine in the suburbs. Seeing the central city, something he worked so hard to revive, in such a state must be devastating to Londsdale. But he’s been hard at work almost since its collapse, putting together the first stages of getting it back on its feet.
First up is Restart; 29/10/11. This is a Central City Business and Property Owner Group initiative. On Cashel Street, the area from the Bridge Of Remembrance to Colombo Street will be open for business in time for the annual Cup and Show Week, at the end of October. By then, the dangerous buildings will be demolished and new temporary containers will be set up for other shops.
Ballantynes, the heart of central city retail for more than a century, will be the anchor for the Restart. The building came through the quake without serious damage and the business is keen to start trading again.
Lonsdale says research shows if life doesn’t return to the city within six to nine months of a disaster then people’s routines become ingrained.
He is concerned that some businesses in temporary homes in the suburbs will never come back.
“Of course they have to get back and trading, they’re obligated to minimise their loss by their insurance companies. But I’m still worried. However, a number that have located into suburban areas still want to be part of the Restart, they want to come back into the city and we’ve just got to provide a platform for that to happen. It is about saving those boutique retailers, it is about keeping the fabric of our city so that when the rebuild happens they’ve got places they can go back to.
“The idea behind it is to provide an opportunity for businesses spread throughout the Red Zone who cannot open where they were. For most, it is an opportunity to open sooner than otherwise possible. Restart is not simply re-opening businesses that were already located in the mall area. It is hoped that the tenants will represent the wider Christchurch CBD retail and hospitality businesses and some national chains.”
Once the rebuild gets under way, the containers from the Restart can be moved. So when buildings are being constructed in Cashel Mall and it becomes a noisy dirty building site, the containers can be moved to another spot in the city with demolished buildings, creating a new temporary shopping precinct. This will allow the estimated five years of building work to go ahead but for the central city to still remain open in part and not shut away.
Lonsdale says in the short term, the new events centre in Hagley Park, the Arts Festival, Cup and Show Week and the Santa Parade will all keep vitality and commerce going near the centre city.
Positive changes
The best part of rebuilding a city centre means problems that previously existed can be rectified. Before the earthquake, the centre city had been fading for years. Most “damaging,” Lonsdale says, was the 1999 council decision to open up industrial lands to retail activity.
He says in the three years following this decision, retail floor area increased by 72,000 square metres and continues to grow, with virtually all of this occurring in out-of-town centres. Over the past seven years, less than 15 percent of new office space was within the CBD. Another issue, he says, was that the central city’s numerous heritage buildings were hard to modify because they were protected, leading to them becoming derelict and unused. Many of these have come down in the earthquakes.
Public transport
Envisaging a new city, Lonsdale wants to see an efficient and attractive public transport system with proper cycle lanes that will tempt people out of cars, and he likes the idea of light rail. However, he says cars are still the preferred mode of transport for the shopping experience and the new city will need parking spaces to compete with suburban malls.
He also believes the central city will need to have a smaller retail centre, because “spreading retail too thinly dilutes the vibrancy. That’s why shopping malls are so successful.”
And he wants facilities back into the centre city. “We need to bring the convention centre closer to the heart of the city, bring QEII Park back into it. I haven’t been to QEII since 1978 when Bowie came!”
More than just working and shopping, Lonsdale says a truly successful CBD has people living in it. He hopes the new city centre will achieve the council’s long-term aspiration of having 30,000 people living in the city centre by the year 2026. “This now can become a reality with the right incentives. There should be a good mix of housing within the commercial and retail precincts and they should integrate in a way that makes them attractive and desirable to live in.
“I have no doubt the city will come back; we need that city plan that carries with it a great vision. If you have a great vision, the rest will follow. People will come and they’ll want to be part of it. We are aging faster then other parts of the country, so we need to build a city that is sustainable in the long term. One we can pass onto future generations, one that inspires people. We want to attract young talented people into our city, so we don’t become a retirement village.”
Mother Nature, in her callous, indiscriminate way, has devastated our city. Just as Napier had to do before us, we must restore and rebuild. It’s entirely possible in 70 years time we could be New Zealand’s most iconic city, reinvented and fresh.
