By Jonathon Taylor, editor for Magazines Today
Last year we profiled the Central City Business Association head Paul Londsdale. He was one of the drivers behind the Restart initiative to get the Cashel St container mall up and running.
Leading up to the October 2011 opening Paul said time was of the essence and the need to get the mall open was immediate. The reason was because it doesn’t take long for behavioural changes in people to stick.
I can’t remember what the time frame was, but the bottom line is if someone changes their behavioural patterns and sticks with them, then after time, they become permanent and/or very difficult to reverse.
So the need to get people returning to Cashel St as soon as possible was self evident.
This was prior to October 2011, so you’d imagine the deadline for behavioural entrenchment has come and gone and this “known unknown” might well be another stumbling block facing our city; one the best laid plans simply can’t account for.
These best laid plans have finally been revealed and in terms of reviving Christchurch’s commercial heart they look promising. The proposed green frame around a compact inner-city core just seems to make sense, especially as it looks to create new life and liveability around the Avon.
Now while a roofed state-of-the-art stadium, performing arts precinct and new convention centre are all things to look forward to, perhaps, in the interim decade or two before everything can realistically come together, the best way of breathing life into the CBD is by doing just that – breathe life into it.
Take those depressingly vacant spaces, the ones where you knew what used to be there but can’t quite picture it in your mind any more, and green them. At this point, before grand plans have time to take shape, the best and arguably only way of bringing our CBD to life is with a multitude of mini-parks. Plant grass, shrubs and trees and watch the people arrive.
Yes, in the fullness of time these green spaces will make way for buildings, some not yet conceived, but for now, is there any better way of reinvigorating downtown to attract people back to it and hopefully turn the “known unknown” into a forced absence and nothing more?
What we do now know is the Olympics arrived with much fanfare and, as they tend to do, disappeared from view without much ado. What was noticeable is how the Olympic spirit, on more than the odd occasion, seemed to get lost in translation.
From scowling silver medallists, to the eight badminton athletes ejected for throwing matches and onto British track cyclist Philip Hindes suggesting he crashed on purpose, “faster, higher, stronger” seemed more like “petulant, stroppy, dishonest”.
Hindes’ obviously ambiguous comment that “We were saying if we have a bad start we need to crash to get a restart,” was explained away by British officials as being “lost in translation”.
Now that is a classic case of Rumsfeld’s other little gem – the “Unknown unknown”. I don’t know what he was thinking and I’ll never know how any Olympian, or the officials rushing to their defence for that matter, could contemplate such palpable disrespect to their fellow athletes and the Games themselves.
