A bed of sunflowers growing in the garden surrounding the Coffee Zone kiosk, with some sweet peas behind. The garden was a project supported by Greening the Rubble.
A bed of sunflowers growing in the garden surrounding the Coffee Zone kiosk, with some sweet peas behind. The garden was a project supported by Greening the Rubble.
A bed of sunflowers growing in the garden surrounding the Coffee Zone kiosk, with some sweet peas behind. The garden was a project supported by Greening the Rubble.
Detail of a garden project initiated by Greening the Rubble in a vacant lot on Colombo Street. A branch is adorned with crocheted leaves and spiders.
Detail of a garden project by Greening the Rubble, with plants decorated with crocheted leaves and spiders. This was in a vacant lot on Colombo Street.
Between demolition and rebuild stands a time of opportunity in the earthquake ravaged city of Christchurch. Greening the Rubble and Gap Filler are temporary pockets of enterprise which began as early responses and have built in momentum to define the new city.
A copy of a document containing questions from members of Gap Filler, Greening the Rubble, the Christchurch Transitional Architectural Trust (producers of FESTA), and Life in Vacant Spaces, to candidates in the 2014 National election. The questions were sent to candidates from the Green, Labour, and National parties. They were also sent to Earthquake Minister Gerry Brownlee. This document contains the answers received from Labour candidates Tony Milne and James Dann.
A PDF copy of pages 322-323 of the book Christchurch: The Transitional City Pt IV. The pages document the transitional project 'The Hope Bear and Giraffing Around'.
Artist and landscape architect Bridget Allen wouldn't have known how appropriate the name of her gardening business was to be when she set it up, out of Ilam art school and working at the Christchurch Botanic Gardens. The name Regenerative Gardening Maintenance was prophetic given her city and its landscape was about to start regenerating. The 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquakes saw not only buildings turned to rubble, large tracts of land, including an area around Ōtākaro Avon River the size of two New York Central Parks, started to turn from suburbia back to nature. The red zone has been turning green ever since. In the wake of tragedy artists and gardeners came together to innovate and create new public spaces, with an eye on sustainability and community connection. Allen cofounded New Brighton sewing charity Stitch-o-Mat and retrained as a landscape architect. Since 2023 she has been the director of The Green Lab, which began after the quakes as Greening the Rubble, creating urban green spaces and events for connection, while also working with residents to make their own backyards more sustainable. Ever busy with working and planting bees, workshops to build habitats for plants and nature, and consultations to help people make their backyards more sustainable, on August 16 Bridget is running with The Green Lab Birds of Brighton printmaking workshops. It's at the Make Station in New Brighton Mall at 11am and 1pm. No experience is needed. She joined Culture 101's Mark Amery.
A Gap Filler submission to the Christchurch City Council Draft City Plan on behalf of the Gap Filler Trust, Greening the Rubble Trust and Life in Vacant Spaces Charitable Trust. The submission recommeded that the Christchurch City Council retain the funding levels for these intiatives at 2012 levels ($565,000) rather than reduce them to $400,000 as proposed, and that this funding be tagged for projects citywide and not restructed to the central city.
On September the 4th 2010 and February 22nd 2011 the Canterbury region of New Zealand was shaken by two massive earthquakes. This paper is set broadly within the civil defence and emergency management literature and informed by recent work on community participation and social capital in the building of resilient cities. Work in this area indicates a need to recognise both the formal institutional response to the earthquakes as well as the substantive role communities play in their own recovery. The range of factors that facilitate or hinder community involvement also needs to be better understood. This paper interrogates the assumption that recovery agencies and officials are both willing and able to engage communities who are themselves willing and able to be engaged in accordance with recovery best practice. Case studies of three community groups – CanCERN, Greening the Rubble and Gap Filler – illustrate some of the difficulties associated with becoming a community during the disaster recovery phase. Based on my own observations and experiences, combined with data from approximately 50 in-depth interviews with Christchurch residents and representatives from community groups, the Christchurch City Council, the Earthquake Commission and so on, this paper outlines some practical strategies emerging communities may use in the early disaster recovery phase that then strengthens their ability to ‘participate’ in the recovery process.
Creative temporary or transitional use of vacant urban open spaces is seldom foreseen in traditional urban planning and has historically been linked to economic or political disturbances. Christchurch, like most cities, has had a relatively small stock of vacant spaces throughout much of its history. This changed dramatically after an earthquake and several damaging aftershocks hit the city in 2010 and 2011; temporary uses emerged on post-earthquake sites that ran parallel to the “official” rebuild discourse and programmes of action. The paper examines a post-earthquake transitional community-initiated open space (CIOS) in central Christchurch. CIOS have been established by local community groups as bottom-up initiatives relying on financial sponsorship, agreements with local landowners who leave their land for temporary projects until they are ready to redevelop, and volunteers who build and maintain the spaces. The paper discusses bottom-up governance approaches in depth in a single temporary post-earthquake community garden project using the concepts of community resilience and social capital. The study analyses and highlights the evolution and actions of the facilitating community organisation (Greening the Rubble) and the impact of this on the project. It discusses key actors’ motivations and values, perceived benefits and challenges, and their current involvement with the garden. The paper concludes with observations and recommendations about the initiation of such projects and the challenges for those wishing to study ephemeral social recovery phenomena.