Posts by Hebe
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Sacha,
True. What does it take: a million people? Spread from Rakaia to Amberley; they won't all be going to a CBD for decades, if ever. Would have to be a spider's web design: concentric circles with radiating connections.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Sacha,
Mass is the problem: not enough people here to make fixed lines pay. Electric buses and bikes the answer.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to merc,
Gerry says sell.
Again. We don't want to. If he wants c convention centre and a stadium, he will have to save his pocket money
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Sacha,
Light rail is dumb: why build rail in a seismically active area. We need to sit lightly on the land. Three quarters of a billion up front would buy a lot of Amsterdam-style free bikes and a network of little shuttle buses going anywhere and everywhere.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Sacha,
Not much I would guess. The land around the Wilsons Road side looks like a blanket has been shaken and not smoothed out: it billows. Lots of liquefaction round there too. Can't see that anything big should be built there.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
it is great to have a lovely river park, but wouldn’t it be better to line that river park with high density residential housing so that it is actually practical for someone living there to punt their beloved down the river on a summers day?
The land is not viable for building on anytime soon. That's why we have a lovely river park. It's also why there are big questionmarks over whether the Town Hall is rescuable: the building could come back, but the land is unstable.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Barnaby Bennett,
we have two options, either I’m underestimating what it takes to get to this level of details, or there is a lot of decision making that has taken place that is not in this plan. I’ve seen small teams of architecture or design students produce as much as this in 100 days before, so I’m led to believe the gritty detail in this has been left out on purpose. I’m also inclined to belief that some big and controversial decisions have been made and not announced today to protect the good news of the delivery. The absence of any announcement on the town hall is characteristic of this.
That's the point of this"grand plan" surely; not to do details, but to make a general framework. Details -- such as the town hall - are problematic because each building is a separate decision to be made. Each of those decisions is unique because structural, land, insurance negotiations, planning, and existing use rights factors all come into play in a different form in each case.
If CCDU were to try to decide everything, the blueprint would take five years; the amount of work to do is incomprehensibly huge. The message that still is not easily communicated is how massive the destruction of the CBD of New Zealand's second-largest city actually is. The CBD is munted, it's buggered, it's not there any more, it's dead (think John Cleese thumping the dead parrot on the counter). Gone. It's a world-class disaster; one of the biggest destructions of a Western world CBD ever. Think Willis St to Mt Vic, Wakefield St to Abel Smith St with the big buildings gone and about 25 per cent of the smaller ones left. Or take out the same from the waterfront to K Road. Then you've just about got the scale of destruction.
So the Town Hall in that scheme is a detail, and where exactly housing is to go, and where the secondhand bookshops will wedge themselves etc etc. (I'm thinking east of the green frame to Fitzgerald, but most likely St Asaph to Moorhouse for the quirky). Some of those things will be decided, others will grow; whatever the people I talk to agree on 20 years for a mostly working CBD and 50 to have the city crammed.
It's billed as a blueprint, and I'm happy about that because I want space for things and people to develop and grow; a plastic totally planned CBD would be awful.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Emma Hart,
how this has been done, and how it will be. I mean, we had a plan for the Central City ages go,
And before that plan, there was another plan that the CCC buried because it wasn't the current mayor's plan. And so it went in Christchurch for years. Now at last a plan may be adopted and completed.
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Capture: The Night Time Is The Right Time, in reply to Islander,
Sometimes I have too vivid an imagination; or is it your words work? Speaking of which, are you going to the MM memorial? I have work to do unfortunately. Tales will be told and bold; I would like to hear them.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Gudrun Gisela,
The future? Posters of the Dear Leader, on demand video of Dear Leader. Reminds me of the North Korean bus trip a few months ago where a load of journos took the wrong turning and ended up in suburbs of spavined natives, grimy and unkempt houses and muddy tracks for roads…..