2014 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS

REPORT

CHRISTCHURCH 23-24 OCT 2014

ADAPTIVE URBANISM

KIA ORA

On 23-24 October 2014, in the days leading up to Christchurch’s unique Festival of Transitional Architecture, a bevy of architects, planners, activists, developers, government officials, academics, artists and community advocates gathered in Christchurch to join forces at the first International Congress on Adaptive Urbanism.

Adaptive urbanism is a nascent term referring to the growing practice of residents, artists, community groups, and more getting actively involved in conceiving, designing, implementing, activating and maintaining flexible city spaces. This empowered mode differs from conventional public and private city-building where most residents are solely consumers of ‘permanent’ developments created for them – rather than active producers of, and participants in, evolving public space.

Christchurch is undoubtedly the per-capita world leader in adaptive urbanism since the devastating 2010/2011 earthquakes, with the still-ravaged city attracting accolades from Lonely Planet (2013) and the New York Times (2014) as a crucial place to visit to witness, and participate in, its incredible grassroots creative response of adaptive urbanisms.

This movement of adaptive urbanism – if it can be called such – has been widely embraced and is now prevalent in Christchurch. But now, as the large-scale commercial government- and developer-led rebuild starts heating up, these grassroots initiatives are having to rethink their strategies, justify their existence and better articulate their reasons for being.

This report summarises some key findings of the two-day congress, and its associated events, as edited transcripts, photos and summaries.

This is an abridged version of text that appears at adaptiveurbanism.org.nz.

WELCOME

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CONTENTS

1 INTRODUCTION

2 OPENING THINGS UP EMPOWERMENT PROPERTY ECONOMICS COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT BARRIERS TO INCLUSION EXPERIMENTATION

3 BOHEMIANS, OUTLAWS AND ANARCHISTS, OR TOOLS OF THE STATE?

4 (WHY) DID IT TAKE AN EARTHQUAKE?

5 TAXONOMY OF ADAPTIVE URBANISM

6 SCALING UP, OR SCALING OUT?

CITY TOURS

WELCOME

SPEAKER’S CORNER

CALENDAR

THEGRANDSTANDIUM

COLOPHON

POST-ITNOTES

FESTA

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GET READYOPENING UP

INTRODUCTION

Ryan Reynolds explains the importance of adaptive urbanism in the context of Christchurch. Photo: Richard Moreham

Deputy Mayor Vicki Buck from the Christchurch City Council welcomes congress participants. Photo: Richard Moreham

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GET READY

INTRODUCTION

Adaptive Urbanism projects, and the people behind them, above all else, are interdisciplinary. To learn about, analyse, and critique these projects – to make them better, to make our cities better, to make our lives better – we need to find new perspectives, multiple perspectives, to view them from.

So I’m incredibly happy that we have a gathering of people who iden-tify themselves as: lawyers, academics, architects, planners, landscape architects, activists, publishers, local state and national government officials, poets, biodiversity advocates, mental health workers, trans-port coordinators, international development consultants, awesomists, environmentalists, artists, developers, event managers, placemakers, entertainers, historians, storytellers, community advocates, environmen-tal technologists, cultural representatives, festival directors, commercial coordinators, producers, builders, human rights workers, medical profes-sionals, aid workers, gardeners, cyclists, walkers, parents, citizens. Thank all of you for being here. It’s going to be an interesting couple of days.

A BIT ABOUT WHERE WE ARE AND WHYThe Press Building was built next door in 1909, a beautiful building, with reinforced concrete to support weight of the presses. It was damaged in the Sept 2010 quake, repaired, recertified, and when the more violent Feb 2011 quake struck, the top floor collapsed and there was one fatality. Stories like this transpired all over the city. (We learned, or at least experienced, that what we often consider permanent is not: adaptive urbanism at a macro scale.)

Press staff spent 15 months in a portacom village out by the airport. In May 2012, this new building fit for purpose was opened. I don’t know the full details, but just in the last month there has been a shift or downsizing of call centre staff, and this floor is mostly vacant, in transition.

This is a functioning office; there are still some staff working on this floor. There is the café for all The Press staff. I see it as a metaphor for doing projects in the city; there are so many players that you can’t con-trol the space, the surroundings, or how people utilise it, so we have to be flexible. Big thanks to Josie for designing and fitting out the space for us. And big thanks to The Press, and especially Valerie and Sharon, who are being very adaptive in accommodating us.

Dr. Ryan Reynolds introduces the premise of the congress, including its origin, context and purpose.

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INTRODUCTION

Now, we are in The Press Building, but we have told the media that they’re not allowed in here. And some of them are rather upset about it. They struggle to understand that we have no desire to control who talks to the press or what they say. Please say whatever you want to anyone.

The principle for us is that everyone in this room, the two days of the congress, is a participant. There are no observers. We have a lot of help-ers: session facilitators, note takers, tour guides, etc. These are all amaz-ing people. They are not assistants or admin staff; they are participants who have offered to perform certain necessary jobs, and we are very thankful to them.

We wanted to create a safe space for open dialogue, conversation and critique without any fear of appearing in the headlines. We will be recording sessions, taking notes, and documenting everything, but this is all for our internal use so that we have those resources when we, as a whole, decide whether and how we want to present the proceedings or ‘findings’ of this Congress.

BACKGROUNDChristchurch is a strange and special place right now. An urban lab, a petri dish, a theme park, an exaggerated version of the complexities of city-building – where many of the problems and issues are more visible than elsewhere. There are major reasons to have this event here and now. But, contrary to yesterday’s newspaper, this is not meant to be an event about Christchurch and certainly not about Gap Filler or anything else so narrow – but about the incredible breadth and variety of adaptive urbanism projects here and around the world, and how gathering together in this strange place might influence our collective thinking and practice, wherever we might base ourselves.

That said, I do want you to understand a bit about the context. After the September 2010 quake: a group of people formed that became Greening the Rubble, another collective emerged that became Gap Filler, a couple other adaptive urbanism initiatives (though NONE of us used any term like it) got off the ground. To generalise, I’d say the primary thrust was healing and recovery.

After the shock of the much worse February 2011 quake dissipated, many more organisations were created focused on various temporary activities. Over time, I’d say, we collectively experienced a social shift, a resurgence of values, a realisation that the principles behind these tempo-rary activities are applicable in the longer term and that there was an opportunity to change this city ‘permanently’.

Terminology started to shift, from the word temporary to transitional – which, to many of us, meant trying to influence what comes next. But it’s a contested term. Christchurch City Council – our local government – and

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INTRODUCTION

Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority CERA (our central government power) – may mean something different when they use the term transitional, more like ‘interim’, here until they’re ready for it not to be here.

A year ago, I went to an Adaptive Metropolis conference in Berkeley, hosted by Blaine Merker and Ghigo diTommaso. More than anything what stood out was the use of terminology that we don’t have in Christ-church. Terminology is useful, but also reductive – it can close down discussion. A few times I was explaining Christchurch, or Gap Filler, to someone and they’d say something like “I get it, it’s a tactical urbanist group.” Nice to be able to use terminology as a shortcut to get on the same page, but identifying two things by the same term presumes a sim-ilarity not only in aesthetics but in process, intention, social impact, and so on, that’s often not the case.

So I – and many of us in this room – are both blessed and frustrated by the island that is Christchurch. It’s a city that would be called a town in many other countries. It’s on a separate island from the more urban and cosmopolitan cities of Auckland and Wellington, which are ‘in conversation’ with major world cities, get the same touring bands, operas, gallery shows. Christchurch not so much. It is, or was until very recently, a city created to service the surrounding agricultural sector. So this ‘urban movement’ has developed here with very little awareness of worldwide urban trends.

What we might call ‘rural pragmatism’ is strong here. The appeal of the Do-It-Yourself attitude embodied in many of these adaptive urbanism projects is not necessarily the common left-wing community involve-ment and empowerment thing, but equally a Libertarian hatred and mis-trust of government. I can’t wait to learn more about how the situation here relates to other places around the world.

You are about to go on city tours, where you will inevitably feel ab-sence. We are in the city centre. There is not much here. Roughly 70% of the downtown buildings have been demolished. But there are already many layers of absence:

Many of the iconic temporary projects in Christchurch that would be of interest to this group are already gone – such as the Pallet Pavilion or Temple for Christchurch – or have already evolved and are quite differ-ent, like Re:START Mall. How to explain this all to guests from out of town? How to understand it ourselves?

But it’s not just the iconic projects. Christchurch is notable as much for the quantity and variety of urban experiments here as for the scale. And most of them have been and gone. We’re discussing, evaluating and analysing things that are ephemeral.

I’m filled with joy at this event. Like this city, it’s an experiment. We don’t know how it will go. I ask that you be willing to have the experience. And know that you can shape the event to be what you want it to be.

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INTRODUCTION

Te Marino Lenihan from Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu, the tribal council of the Ngai Tahu people,

welcomes congress participants. Photo: Richard Moreham

The Press Room was decorated with bunting for the congress. Photo: Richard Moreham

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TWO-HOUR

CITY TOURSAt the commencement of the Congress, there was a two-hour guided tour of some of the varied

adaptive urbanism projects in the city: Cathedral Junction, Nature Play Park, Transitional Cathedral, Agropolis, RAD Bikes, ArtBox, Oversize Street Furniture, Dance-o-Mat, Treehouses for

Swamp Dwellers, EPIC and Re:START Mall. Projects range in duration from days to years, with budgets from $5 to $5 million. They are led by government, businesses, NGOs or individuals,

with all manner of processes, structures of collaboration, and intentions.

The tour includes a stop at a Life in Vacant Spaces (LIVS) shop at Cathedral Junction. Photo: Richard Moreham

LIVS project manager Brie Sherow explains her organisation’s role as site brokers for vacant land and built space.

Photo: Richard Moreham

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HIGHLIGHTS

1The Reading Room (Oversized Street Furniture)Speaker: Hugh Nicholson (Christchurch City Council - Urban Design Unit)

A ‘pocket park’ Transitional City Project designed by F3 Design as part of the Tran-sitional City Work Programme initiated by Christchurch City Council. Called the Read-ing Room, located on the site where the new city library will be built.www.ccc.govt.nz/cityleisure/projectstoim-provechristchurch/transitionalcity/index.aspx

2Cathedral Junction/Transitional stores Speaker: Brie Sherow (Life in Vacant Spaces, Project Manager)

LIVS is a local organisation that brokers access to vacant spaces and enables hun-dreds of temporary activations of vacant sites and buildings. Cathedral Junction is a central city ‘mall’ with lots of vacancies. See some of the pop-up projects LIVS has enabled here.livs.org.nz

3Nature play park Speaker: Sarah Campagnolo (Greening the Rubble Coordinator)

A natural and educational play space, es-tablished by Greening the Rubble in collab-oration with the government Department of Conservation. GtR is an organisation creating temporary public parks and gardens on sites of demolished buildings.

4Re:START MallSpeaker: Paul Lonsdale (Christchurch City Councillor, Hagley Ferrymead Ward; former chair of the Central City Business Association)

A high-end shopping mall constructed out of shipping containers, located where the main inner-city retail precinct used to be. It’s the brainchild of the city’s Property Owners and Building Group, aiming to breathe new life into the Christchurch central city. Today it houses more than 50 businesses.restart.org.nz/contact-about

5RAD Bikes - Recycle A Dunger Speaker: Richard Sewell (Gap Filler - Project Coordinator)

A Gap Filler project in collaboration with ICE-Cycles (Inner City East Cycles), RAD Bikes is a community bike shed, a workshop space where anyone can get guidance from on-site mechanics to build or repair bicycles and/or help restore bikes.www.radbikes.co.nz

6Agropolis Speaker: Annelies Zwaan (Agropolis - Project Coordinator)

An urban farm within Christchurch’s inner city, growing food for, and composting organic waste from, central city cafes. Agropolis is a collaborative initiative between FESTA, Garden City 2.0, AECOM, A Local Food Project, Juliet Moore, Andreas Wesener (Lincoln University), Liv Worsnop (Plant Gang) and Rosie Brittenden (Christchurch Youth Council).festa.org.nz/agropolis

7EPIC InnovationSpeaker: Colin Andersen (EPIC Innovation - Executive Director)Enterprise Precinct and Innovation Campus is a two-stage process to create a world class campus for innovation-based Canterbury companies in the heart of Christchurch’s rebuilt CBD. A very substantial structure, but temporary, with a 5-year lease on Council-owned land.www.epicinnovation.co.nz/about-epic

8Art Box/Boxed QuarterSpeaker: Martin Trusttum (CPIT - Te Matapuna o Te Matauraka - Student Project Manager)

A unique community collaboration, led by CPIT in collaboration with creative industry partners, dedicated to providing temporary exhibition and retail spaces for the arts community in Christchurch.www.cpit.ac.nz/industry-and-research/indus-try-and-partnerships/capabilities-and-technol-ogies-for-industry/artbox

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Kilmore St

Armagh St

Gloucester St

Worcester St

Hereford St

Cashel St

Lich�eld St

Saint Asaph St

High St

Durham

St

Colom

bo St

Manchester St

Madras St

New

Regent St

Oxford Tce

Cambridge Tce

Cathedral Square

The Commons

Avon River

N

X1

2

3

4

5

7

8

FOOD COLLECTIVE

THE AURICLE

SHOP 8

HUMMINGBIRD

STRANGES LANE

EPIC

ARTBOX

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CITY TOUR

Tour stops

1 Oversized street furniture2 Cathedral Junction/Transitional stores3 Nature play park4 Re:START Mall5 RAD bikes6 Agropolis7 EPIC Innovation8 Art Box

X The Press Building Other adaptive urbanism projects Lunch venues

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CITY TOUR

Agropolis is an urban farm located in central Christchurch. Congress participants Blaine Merker and Liz Ogbu learn more about its operations, including composting, harvesting,

cooking and distribution. Photo: Richard Moreham

Freerange Press publisher Barnaby Bennett talks with his tour group on the context of Christchurch. Photo: Richard Moreham

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POWER

OPENING THINGS UP

EMPOWERMENTWhat does empowerment mean in this context? What sorts of projects and levels of participation are empowering, and for whom? Where does power typically lie, and how and where can it be relocated?

The congress commenced with several parallel group sessions to explore key issues of adaptive urbanism. With such complicated and diffuse topics, consensus was never an aim. This report presents a collage

of different voices and viewpoints shared throughout the congress. Each paragraph break over the following pages signifies a new thought, idea or comment from a participant.

Empowerment is a process as well as a state of being. Being empowered is about having ownership, pride and responsibility. It’s about having the permission, responsibility and impetus to make decisions within your context, which assumes a collective purpose or directional goal. Agents of empowerment must be open in their approach to decision-making and must constantly re-evaluate the context within which they exist. Their decisions must be based on an understanding of the changing context and their purpose within that context.

Often organisations try to empower others as an overall objective but can end up simply consulting (because there’s still an agenda behind the project that counter-acts self-determination and empowerment).

Governments both local and central have built up a culture of permission, so now you have to come to Council for permission for everything. And councils are trying to work out why isn’t anyone doing anything? We have a highly empowered and ‘developed’ society on one level but then we have these structures that actually inhibit us taking action to address problems.

Sources of empowerment are clusters, proximity, perception, capability, and here, having an immense amount of money isn’t really relevant. People who have a lot of money typically want to make more money with their money, so adaptive urbanism is off their agenda. Not focussing on money feels like an alternative strength.

Trust is important. Often governments don’t trust the citizens to do a good enough job or they worry that they’ll be sued or liable but then equally the citizens don’t necessarily trust council to do the best job. If one institution trusts you, so might others. It can take time to build trust. Building trust can be about reframing connections and relationships between officials and communities and be facilitated by finding win-win situations.

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EMPOWERMENT

One real role for adaptive urbanism – and it’s kind of a source of empowerment – is that it really does bring things into this conversation about what we want and what are the ideals rather than what are the horrible things you’re trying to avoid.

Capability, knowledge, skills are sources of empowerment. Councils may not have the resource so they ‘empower’ communities by giving the freedom and leaving it for them to just get on with it. But that means that some communities can really engage in that process and other communities can’t. So ‘empower-ment’ at that level can mean that some communities are more marginalised and then disempowered.

Upskill others so that the end goal is to really make yourself redundant in a project or to leave the place better than you found it.

It’s doing the tiny little things first and that builds fast, enables the empower-ment, builds confidence and trust. That’s the trajectory which starts with tiny actions, it’s not sweeping revolutionary government change.

PROPERTYHow do these projects work with property: short-term leases or license agreements with private owners?; agreements with local government on public land?; guerrilla?;

or something else entirely? Do they own the land? How does the property relationship affect the process, outputs and outcomes?

Property relates to stewardship, which brings responsibility. Ownership is a legal concept and law is malleable, it can be challenged. If a property manager neglects their land, there should be provision for the community to take it over in stewardship if not in ownership. It’s in the best interest of local government to have strategic enforcement, especially if the policies that they choose not to enforce relate to the identity of the city. Unofficial stewards of land should initiate their projects with a strategy for defending their ideas rather than a process of asking permission. In places with a larger gap between the rich and poor there are more instances of informal settlement and communities using land without express permission.

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OWNERSHIP

There is a desire to incorporate the diverse cultural narrative of the city into the current projects. The key is in interpreting the cultural narrative as something more than an aesthetic, but as a process. Ngai Tahu has a role in encouraging an ecological approach to development. Christchurch used to be a swampland – a feeding ground and a gathering place. Historically, in Maori culture land was not owned; everyone had a right to occupy and use it, but along with that right came the responsibility of guardianship. Instead of changing the land to fit the needs of the development, it would be great to see a development change in order to fit the context of the land.

In Christchurch there are many visions of how the city will look in the future, but the reality is that it’s decades away. Adaptive Urbanism projects like Agropolis represent what the public asked for during the consultation process, it’s import-ant that these ideas and projects come through in future developments.

Public land is controlled through bureaucratic processes in the government and the public has a limited capacity to participate in shaping that land. Privately owned land is assumed to be developed to its most profitable end use. Private landowners are generally receptive to adaptive urbanism projects, but it can be very difficult to reach a decision-maker. This is especially prob-lematic with land that is managed by overseas trusts, or when there is no one with authority to make decisions (i.e. the person who manages it, owns it, and finances it are different entities).

In between government managed and private land, there is an exploration of common spaces, and how space behaves in response to the people in the community who use it. There are many unexplored possibilities for publicly owned developments in Christchurch. Crowd-funded land and developments are a next step from crowd-funded temporary projects. Part of the issue is that the legal frameworks and processes have not been set up for publicly managed property development, but the challenge is in preserving the character and the intent of adaptive urbanism as it is formalised. How do you formalise dynamism?

City centres are constantly changing and the focus should be on the emerging values around stewardship of the land, and what sort of property rights exist that can defend or even reinvent these values. The city should have a strategy of maintaining the values that are emerging within this scene.

Landowners want the best financial return for their property, but those that think long-term realise that social and environmental sustainability play a part in that. Currently, environmental sustainability is seen as an integral part of the development process, if it had been previously then many areas of Christchurch may never have been developed in the first place. Now, the challenge is to integrate social sustainability into the development process through adaptive urbanism interventions.

Buildings themselves do not make a city. The small-scale adaptive urbanism projects go a long way in fostering dynamism in our cities and creating demand for an urban population. In order for people to want to live and work in a city, you need the things to experience, the things to talk about, the things to enjoy.

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PROPERTY

ECONOMICSHow are, how can and how should these activities be funded? How important is financial sustainability,

contribution to wider economic development, or promoting alternative economies?

Economics relates to the challenges around sustaining adaptive urbanism initiatives and the ability to scale them up to more permanent infrastructure. Adaptive and iterative processes should be incorporated into large-scale projects, but the small-scale projects have value in their own right as experimentation.

Small-scale projects are funded more easily, largely through volunteered labour and materials, but to incorporate them within the permanent fabric of the city they must be connected into urban economics in regard to the cost of land and other factors. The key is in maintaining the values derived from the small scale projects and incorporating them into the larger scale funded projects.

Initial funding for innovation is key and local government support is a big boon. However, local government is answerable to the general public. Some of the projects may be contestable, so it is best to have support further from government as well. Banking institutions sit in a traditional development context where projects are expected to be proven and highly conserva-tive. Crowd-funding, social enterprise, and corporate support are alternatives. If the value is clear to the city, then the policy and public support should reflect that and be prepared to invest in a fund for innovation.

Quantification of the real economic value of adaptive urbanism projects could generate more political support. The ‘temporary’ must be recognised as a legitimate form in our urban environments, as many temporary projects spur tangible changes in process or design, and may last decades.

Traditional master plans are ruled by technical expertise but cities are fundamentally about exchange, people coming together in their life and work. Adaptive urbanism approaches allow that exchange fundamental to cities to be incorporated in the planning process. Financial models are also about exchange, engaging with the broader economy and finding ways to make things happen. Mega projects tend to benefit large-scale international developers and have the potential to destroy local economies and neighbourhoods, while adaptive urbanism projects focus on locally grounded solutions. The key is to inform the large-scale developments with the learnings from the locally grounded, iterative processes.

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MONEY

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENTIs community engagement always necessary? What are the different types, methods and philosophies

of community engagement, and how do you determine which is suitable in a given context? How can engagement be made meaningful and purposeful, for the community

and for the project in question?

Time and money put pressure on projects that cause stress to the community engagement process and can force decision-making preemptively. Rather than being mere buzzwords in a document, consultation and inclusion need to reflect actual engagement. It can be difficult to measure the outcomes of community engagement but if we can determine a working method for that reflection with the community, that’s a good way to gauge progress.

Projects in Christchurch are either extra-small or extra-large, the middle scale projects are lacking. Stage one of adaptive urbanism projects is often focused on creating energy in a certain place, stage two could be about focusing on edges and urban form. Existing initiatives could evolve in a way that’s informed by urban design values. Christchurch is at a point where the city can learn from the projects and scale them from interventions to pilots to models.

Adaptive urbanism projects should be assessed in terms of how they’re performing based on the shared visions at the beginning. Community engagement assumes a say in the beginning vision, design, delivery, and ongoing maintenance of a project. This isn’t just physical structures or spaces, but also non-physical things like policy and planning.

A gaming approach to the planning process could educate the public and model some of the complexities and trade-offs that policy-makers encounter. Mutual understanding between policy makers and the public fosters empathy and insight into difficult issues, hopefully finding some common ground.

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ECONOMICS

BARRIERS TO INCLUSIONHow can we lower the technical barriers to entry such as legal agreements, insurance, permits, resource and building consents? Who is best placed to do so? What technical, social, cultural, economic, ethnic or other barriers are there that we’re thus far failing to address? Can inclusivity be made systematic rather

than project-by-project?

We don’t know what the city will look like in the future, but we want to be able to participate in that process and enable others to engage with the city. This necessitates a level of planning, but also the flexibility to allow diversity to happen by its own volition. Instead of innovating through events or short term functions, we should aim to innovate by encouraging depth and diversity in our cities.

Disasters (whether natural, economic, or social) exacerbate existing problems within urban environments. Much of the positive impacts during periods of recovery come from citizen-based initiatives. Integrating that approach into everyday work can create lasting change in policies and in physical environments. Recovery in communities often comes from relationships and ideas as much as from physical developments. The key is in doing things with communities rather than for or to communities. How do we meet the needs of our cities through interaction and participation, and how can we engage the communities that have fewer networks and resources?

In Christchurch, challenges might be a better word than barriers as there seem to be many empowered people initiating a range of projects. We should re-evaluate the term ‘barrier’ and instead look at how we can challenge the status-quo. How do we create a space where people feel included, spaces that people take ownership of and feel like they’re a part of? One approach is to create a diverse range of access points for complementary projects. One example was a music programme alongside a contemporary arts event.

Community engagement and volunteerism are largely western concepts, ethnic communities are often involved in similar activities but have a different means of describing them. Instead of talking about ‘activating spaces’ maybe we should focus on gathering people and exchanging ideas. Adaptive urbanism doesn’t have to be a media release or a journal article for it to exist.

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PARTICIPATION

There are many different layers to inclusivity – are you concerned about economics, race, age, class? Who are your under-served populations and how can you co-develop a project with them? Widespread inclusivity is very difficult to achieve, and maybe not always needed. It’s always a concern, but it’s not always realistic to develop an overall response or methodology that gets it. At least with short-term adaptive urbanism projects you can be self-critical about the people you’re not reaching, but be flexible by taking steps to change what’s not working.

Inclusivity may start with tokenism as a first step, but you need some sort of intro-duction to spark people’s interest and their desire to be involved. Also, the people not included may already be very engaged within their own communities. The challenge is in how to structure our cities in order to shift the ways that people are operating so that they have more energy to put into public engagement. Beyond the importance of gathering, it’s important not to lose the focus on doing. Micro-communities may have their own spaces, but in cities it’s important to create communities that can speak across those boundaries.

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TESTING

EXPERIMENTATIONWhy and how can adaptive urbanism be used to foster a culture of experimentation? Can and should

experiments be purposeful, testing specific hypotheses – or is open-ended experimentation valid or even preferable? How can experimentation extend not just to delivered projects,

but also to the processes and social structures that surround them? How can the lessons derived from these experiments have a legacy?

Experimentation is a way to create new solutions, but also is liberating as self-expression, maybe sometimes with no clear purpose other than the goal to experiment. Sometimes the best way to achieve something that is yet unknown, is to try solutions with no clear outcomes to see what happens – that’s a purpose in itself. There is always a cost to experimentation and it is difficult to sustain. It is challenging to make a living from experimentation because it necessitates investment without a defined result. The time cost in thinking up new solutions is too often undercut with a ready simple solution that offers the same service for the same cost.

Temporary projects inform the permanent but also have value in themselves. Even if it’s just a brief event that changes the rules of the city for a day (week, month), it’s demonstrating potential as a resilient, flexible and adaptive model that can be incorporated into the permanent. Prioritising flexibility as a part of design allows the potential to be incorporated long-term.

Experimentation is public; government finds it hard to experiment because of public accountability. The relationship between adaptive urbanism and government institutions is unavoidable, but it can be positive or negative. Local government is usually more responsive because they understand the context and are interested in proactive collaboration.

Hopefully social interventions will become an expected part of the design process in the way that sustainability is now incorporated into standard design (at least in principle). In the future, adaptive urbanism could be incorporated into the design process rather than being an add-on or something that necessitates persuasion. That sort of incorporation would make life easier for citizens and make cities into places where people want to live.

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EXPERIMENTATION

Ciaran Fox facilitates one of the large group discussions. Photo: Richard Moreham

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COFFEE BREAK

Andreas Wesener and Ghigo DiTommaso.Photo: Richard Moreham

Matt Turner, John Lonink and Marcus Westbury. Photo: Richard Moreham

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CAKES TOO

Richard Sewell, Lee Stickells and Lucinda Hartley. Photo: Richard Moreham

Timothy Moore and Sophie Jerram. Photo: Richard Moreham

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BETWEEN

BOHEMIANS, OUTLAWS AND ANARCHISTS, OR TOOLS OF THE STATE?

A large group discussion about how public space in the city is – and ought to be – formed. Creating public space is generally the dominion of local governments. Increasingly, residents and community groups are

creating and transforming their own public spaces, and governments have responded by creating more adaptable public spaces of their own. This session aims to interrogate the wider social impact

of adaptive urbanism in its varied forms. Who is involved, and who should be involved? What are the present objectives and guiding principles, and what should they be?

What is the relationship between sanctioned and unsanctioned forms of public development? Which forms and processes of adaptive urbanism are rebellious and subversive,

and which support the status quo?

It’s about the community having a conversation with the governments, with the planning authorities, with the players about change.

It’s about social change, about environmental change, economic change, it’s about how cities actually move forward.

The adaptive aspect is about responding to the environment, to capture key thoughts and sentiments that are in community, to experiment, and to allow formal planning to recognise they are legitimate. It’s the integration of those two (change and legitimacy) that comes together.

The government is part of the community so it’s just about having a plan that allows other things to interact with it.

Adaptive urbanism projects could be democratised, not done by the 1% of the experts doing all the design. We probably want less red tape so we can get on with what we really want to do and be unleashed. Non-experts have a right to express themselves… When non-experts do things like the free library in the fridge, we could never do that, we’re actually too expert.

Let’s question this idea that it’s anarchism versus stateism. Adaptive urbanism can be an experiment as to what other ways of political organisation on the ground are possible. It’s about learning. It’s about the politics, in the sense of how people get together to make decisions and do stuff on the ground, more than the grass covered seats or other stuff. Is that the point of adaptive urbanism? What is the effect we’re trying to create? Is it to create a sense that people have an

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TOOLS OF THE STATE

ownership of the planet, not just their town square and their city and then their wider city? Essentially that’s done through very small practices, but that’s where the effect is: that we sense a greater ownership.

Let’s question whether adaptive urbanism is about grassroots versus government… Or is it more appropriate to say grassroots communities versus capital, multinational capital. Government can still be a semi- functional expression of the community, so the government can be enabling, but can communities have such a relationship with capital?

With adaptive urbanism, the motivation behind these projects is usually for some common good, and not necessarily motivated by economic purpose at its core. It’s constructive to borrow from the realm of adaptive urbanism and start to address some of the world’s really big problems because if we have 50 people or 50 teams trying to solve energy problems in our city we’re going to get some experimentation there that we can’t come up with with five experts.

It’s also direct, it’s an exploration of the common good but it’s not a trickle-down common good, it’s right there.

You wouldn’t want to start framing adaptive urbanism as austerity urbanism which plays to the idea that you don’t have to have government support, you don’t have to have a lot of funding, you can kind of pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Communities around the world are facing a lot of change and the ways in which people and whole communities engage with change depends upon the kinds of models that they’ve got in their heads, and the ways in which they’re able to imagine how communities can operate, how things could be different. So temporary stuff and experimental stuff are really important in terms of putting a whole lot of ideas out there that the community are actually able to encounter and engage with which give them a sense that there’s multiple possibilities for ways of operating.

Adaptive urbanism is about laboratory and testing and, as an architect, it’s being able to go along to a developer and saying this worked.

From a motivation and process perspective there’s an important difference between engineering, innovation and design, traditionally run on a scientific and reductive basis, and adaptive urbanism. Are you seeking a defensible design that ticks all the boxes for community consultation, engagement and funding and everything else or are you seeking to do something that’s really exciting and forward focused and safe to fail? Is it a 40 foot ship-ping container which moves around the city where people talk about what’s going on in the city, and the conversations are slow, or is it about beautifully printed glossy brochures with a lot of information? If we were standing there with a questionnaire they’d be out the door in

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BOHEMIANS OR TOOLS

two minutes but when we give them time to think and digest and reflect they come and they stay and they come back again and come back again so 70,000 people have now had that experience and yet we still struggle to justify the expense of this kind of engagement.

There’s a thread going around about decentralising authority or dispersing authori-ty, giving more people access into public space… Let’s think about consensus based decision making and one of the most important aspects is that a) the real agendas are on the table and b) the people making the decisions are in the room (or you have access to those people). The adaptive urbanism projects tend to have this consensus base, you have access to the people who are delivering the projects and a truthful-ness and responsiveness for the context there.

To bring it back to the question, you often find in the most guerrilla actions that they have to come back to the government at some point for funding, for the buy-in or scale-up they need. Scaleability and sustainability… government institutions are the ones that have these abilities. Governments also have a structure that can bring the many publics out there together.

There are citizen experts and expert citizens. Expert citizens are like pretty much all of us in the room, trained in some form of expertise but partnering with citizens. But the citizen experts are those who know about living in these communities – nobody knows more than they do about this. So it’s about creating that opportunity for learning and empowering them in that way, and about an exchange that I as an expert have something to give and they as an expert have something to give and really the best projects are a combination of those.

Are other approaches to urbanism radically different from ours, or have different purposes from ours? Actually urban planning historically has tried to achieve good cities, liveable, more just, more resilient. Isn’t adaptive urbanism more defined by the way we’re working rather than our purpose?

The value in the adaptive urbanism approach is on par with any of the bold, powerful, master planning frameworks or any of the other more established ways of doing things. And adaptive urbanism can sit alongside and work well with other approaches.

There’s possibly something deeply radical about at least some adaptive urbanism projects. If you talk about politics directly and problems with democracy and representation and whatever, you turn a hell of a lot of people off. But if you create a nice collective space where people can get their hands dirty and build something you start to politicise them through that process, through the aesthetic without once using the word politics or saying anything about radicalism or whatever.

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BOHEMIANS OR TOOLS

The centre city, it’s the domain of the rich one way or another… Is there any intention or interest in getting away from the centre of the city and going out to the margins and dealing with people, whether it’s homeless people or people on the outer edge of the city, immigrant communities, anybody who is marginalised and see how adaptive urbanism works there? We’re spending money on adaptive urbanism and it’s great for middle class suburbs with their nice little parklets but there may be a problem when you get to the poorer parts of town. They need access to lawyers and to finance and business startup advice. I don’t know if they need little bits of urbanism.

Often poor communities are dealing with problems that are long and intractable and that have years of planning behind them. The whole point of adaptive urbanism is the trialling and testing, which actually lends itself to dealing with some of these larger problems.

We shouldn’t just think that the only thing that has some response in poor communities are things that deal with problems. Some successful projects have been things that are about joy and laughter because that is never done in these communities, and yet they’re very desiring of those kinds of things, so a little bit of play with those things that can actually make a difference.

It’s essential to get into the suburbs and to be practising there because otherwise how accessible is adaptive urbanism? How participative is it? We’ve been learning from ourselves, we’re not learning from the community.

A study of different transitional groups in Christchurch looked at what their motivations were and one of the insights was that the groups were all motivated by social change, so there was a political thread to the motivation. So, were the agendas and outcomes actually different? The agenda of the people who are practising it who are the specific demographic in this room are motivated by social change (and adaptive urbanism might be a term to describe the strategy employed by this demographic), but real outcomes (although you may say social change is an outcome) is about recovery, (re)development of community, sense of place, built form, business. So we could establish a framework around those and have conversations that do articulate the full value of what the movement can achieve.

Community development, without oversimplifying, is what it’s about. The activation of communities to realise their potential.

It can be dangerous setting a bunch of yuppie architects and designers with good intentions into poor areas if there’s little understanding of the people you’re working with, unless it’s really carefully thought out and really carefully engages with local people.

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BOHEMIANS OR TOOLS

Adaptive urbanism can be applied at different scales. Some work involves visiting small country towns where someone built a shopping centre and killed the main street, or where technology has passed them by. And you can put in place simple strategies to get local communities to nurture and incubate and grow local busi-ness, projects, community initiatives. Working with those communities – more so than working in large cities – these approaches get traction very quickly because people identify with it, they have a geographical sense of community… So it’s dangerous to look at everything through that top down prism of big urbanism.

We’ve got lots of little experiments but how do you reframe the big problems? The little things are great because they actually enable you to think and begin to address the big problems.

There have been many successful projects in very small towns and places where there’s actually quite a bit of poverty. And in those places sometimes it’s only at that small scale and low cost approach that it is possible because you’re not going to get the $10 million new square in the middle of town.

It’s also about looking at how you fit into a context and how that will actually start to inspire the change in that area, so it’s not like we move to this area and we’re going to make sure that everybody around us is informed by our work. It’s actually very, very different from that.

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BOHEMIANS OR TOOLS

Participants are greeted by the 6.3 metres high The Arcades Project at The Commons during a lunchtime excursion.

Photo: Richard Moreham

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THE COMMONS

Congress participants gather at The Commons. Photo: Richard Moreham

The Commons, location of the former Crowne Plaza.

Photo: Richard Moreham

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AT LUNCH

Coralie Winn, director of Gap Filler, explains the transitional project The Commons.

Photo: Richard Moreham

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EMPOWERMENT

EMPOWERMENT

Lunch break at The Commons. Photo: Richard Moreham

EVOLUTION

(WHY) DID IT TAKE AN EARTHQUAKE?

Christchurch has had an amazing surge in civic participation in many forms since the earthquakes here – including, or especially, those making use of adaptive urbanism. Cities around the world now look on the

activity here with interest and admiration. And they consistently say: ‘We haven’t had an earthquake; what will it take to shake people out of their complacency here?’

In this session, we investigate different contexts and strategies of civic engagement that have been suc-cessful in other cities, and also unpack the Christchurch situation to see what transferable characteristics

we can unearth. Several years on from the earthquakes, as Christchurch returns to ‘normal’, we must also ask what the future of this movement is, and should be, here and now:

Is it still relevant? Must it evolve, and how?

WHAT IS ADAPTIVE URBANISM?It’s a celebration of life that suits the needs of the community enacting the project.

Some adaptive urbanism projects are short term; others last longer – and their flow-on effects can be different.

It has the potential to scare developers – because if people love adaptive urbanism too much, it poses a risk to traditional urban development design.

It’s symptomatic of a big cultural shift away from the industrial age and a rehumanisation of life and work.

CONTEXTAdaptive urbanism is often quite selfish in terms of really focusing on the needs of the particular community that’s doing the project. But selfish doesn’t necessarily make it a bad thing. It depends on context.

Context can mean having access or permission, there’s space within a place, and there’s clustering around that, and celebration of life… Context addresses our questions of what is a good life. We talked about that in terms of energy and flow and sets of constants and change which doesn’t really sound like context but that’s what we kept talking about.

The context can be physical spaces (often used with permission) or a situation like a crisis or conflict of some sort (although sometimes this conflict arises from the daptive urbanism project rather than the project being constructed in response to conflict).

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AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE

An adaptive urbanism dilemma is: Do you approach the problem by first talking with suit-wearing developers in boardrooms or addressing the space?

COMMONALITIESIt was suggested that there is an ecology of adaptive urbanism that helps explain the variety of the kinds of projects that are involved. Some might be short term and might fade pretty quickly and others might be much longer term and develop painfully or be some sort of structures which mean it lasts much longer and evolves into something much bigger.

We thought that the only real commonality was the approach. It’s about the approach to what you do within the context. The thing that’s valuable is the ‘why’: why are we talking about this, why do we want to do this, what’s the passion behind this thing and then that why informs, well who else should we be talking to about this? Who else is involved in this? Then you can ask how might we actually start to address this burning passion that we’ve got, what are we going to do? So we act from the centre out, why, who, how, what but when we look at these things we see it from the outside in. So adaptive urbanism is just approaching place making or space making in a reverse order.

One possible commonality is that unlike projects where you do it and then there’re re-percussions and conflict, adaptive urbanism goes through stages that alleviate conflict.

Another commonality is that it seems there were just a few people driving these projects, often in some sort of vacuum (either a need, a lack of something). And there are catalysts, both individual catalysts and wider social catalysts and what is required is some sense of shape and purpose to make the link. Individual catalysts cannot always be predicted.

Often a public arises around an idea or a problem, including failure of governance, that leads to a desire for change.

It may have skipped a few generations but one commonality is that communities have been directly involved in creating the built environment around them instead of leaving it to technical professionals. What’s different is that we now have the internet, a global decentralised network of information, so ideas and knowledge can spread much faster now, and that also creates new ways to organise.

REPLICATIONIn terms of how they can be replicated, some said that the context can’t be replicated but that maybe the process or approach could be. There were concerns that following someone else’s templates shifts what you’re doing compared to just starting your own thing.

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AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE

How wide will it go? People might think adaptive urbanism is too good, they’re going to love it too much, it’s going to be too great. So CERA are actually scared of giving people a taste, they want to keep The Blueprint easy and clean and keep the project moving forward.

Another commonality was some sort of privilege which related primarily to time and money – at least spare time. Most of these individual catalysts didn’t have to worry about meeting basic needs so then we got to talking about what’s replicable about that. We talked about things like that Vodafone World of Difference grant where you just back a person for a year to do good things.

How to sort of fabricate the crisis or create the vacuum or at least the sense that there’s one there? Very hard. We talked about just sharing information (around climate change or waste) which can make a crisis seem more tangible.

The replication is being responsive to cultivating publics and engaging people in every day decision making in the city. And how to do that earlier, before a problem or a crisis, so being more responsive in decision making.

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TRANSITIONAL

FESTA

RAD hosted a Bike Light Disco at FESTA’s CityUps, where bikes powered the dancefloor. Photo: Timothy Moore

Over 10,000 people attended FESTA’s CityUps, a street party contained within architectural installations that envision a future city. Architecture students from various New Zealand

universities with Studio Christchurch transformed two city blocks in order to bring life back into the city. Photo: Timothy Moore

The congress was held in the lead up to the annual Festival of Transitional Architecture (FESTA). FESTA is a free public event that engages with the City of Christchurch by exploring urban regeneration through large-scale collaborative projects and urban interventions.

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VOCAB

TAXONOMY OF ADAPTIVE URBANISM

Presently, there is a wide range of activity in Christchurch that gets referred to under the umbrella term ‘transitional’. In other parts of the world, we hear about ‘popups’ or ‘tactical urbanism’ or ‘instant’ or

‘participatory’ urbanism. These are all overarching terms under which a wide range of activity is housed. (We might say these terms identify the ‘class’ or ‘order’ of the activity, but there’s a long way to go to

identify the particular family, genus and species.) These existing terms all focus on some particular aspects of the creation of outputs: the duration or time to create (instant, transitional), the methodology of creation (participatory, tactical), or in some cases the intent behind the project (radical or ecological urbanism, say).

These systems are, however, unable to tell us much about the actual outcomes: the social, economic, or political impact regardless of intent.

If classifying according to impact is our aim, then the metaphor of biological taxonomy is problematic, because no project can be definitively categorised according to outcomes (which is presumably why

we tend to focus on more superficial characteristics that allow for more definitive pronouncements). So, we need to create new and more adaptive methods of categorisation. The goal of this important session is to develop a meaningful taxonomy – or taxonomic method – of adaptive urbanism. By what terms and

criteria can we evaluate projects? If the taxonomic tree from biology is an unsuitable parallel, what visual forms might our taxonomic system take?

Is it a process of identifying or creating common value, whether that’s in small pockets or in large spaces or in specific systems, or a process of creating common value so that we can build desirable relationships that we’re invested in, that we have ownership of, that we feel responsible for,

Participants write down key terms associated with adaptive urbanism. Photo: Richard Moreham

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TAXONOMY

that we have permission to use, where we feel that we belong? Is it the build-ing of desirable relationships that help us define our identity? Well that could be adaptive urbanism or it could be a political system, it could be all kinds of things. What’s the difference between adaptive urbanism and anything else? What’s unique about adaptive urbanism?

Is it about doing cool shit every day or die trying? A common theme through a lot of this is that a few people are actually employed to do this cool stuff every day, and many are doing it from a heartfelt voluntary position.

Is adaptive urbanism about two essen-tial things: First, today most of our cities

are 99% controlled by experts and adaptive urbanism opens the door for ordinary citizens to get together and step out and change their environment directly without going through the bureaucrat-ic channels. Second, adaptive urbanism recognises that we can’t foresee everything and therefore to find out the future sometimes you just have to try things and see how it works.

And there’s something about money and investment and the scale of investment that has a rela-tionship with power and how much power we concentrate in certain places. So the crowd funding model would be one of looking at how to generate investment to make something happen without getting it from a single source, from a single investor or a single government entity. It’s adaptive when it’s diffused. Adaptive urbanism is different in that it’s a different relationship to the scale of investment, it’s about making investment that is proportional with what you actually know and so making small investments at the beginning, knowing more and when you feel like you know a lot more and you have more certainty, you can assimilate and make larger investments.

Adaptive urbanism creates cities or dynamics or communities where people, regardless of their access to capital, expertise, resources, networks, privilege, those sorts of things, can influence the trajectory of their places through their actions. They can be part of making their city or their community, and feed into that process.

And it’s about trial and error, that process of experimentation and allowing for serendip-itous discovery of what works by lots of people doing it and recognising that along the way that process inevitably involves dead ends. There’s no risk of failure in that process because the sheer breadth of ideas and participation provides a framework in which lots of things can flourish and succeed.

Common terms are grouped together to form overarching themes. Photo: Richard Moreham

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TAXONOMY

We define tactical urbanism through scale and intent. So the intent is always about what is the longer term approach for change, and use the short term tactics to catalyse that change.

What are the different kinds of actions adaptive urbanism involves? Are they intuitive, purposeful, spontaneous to strategic, citizen led versus expert led, short term and long term and sort of disruptive, small but catalytic or complete?

Or you could plot different projects along least creative and with the least participation (that’s ostensibly closest to the norm) to most creative and more participative; then challenging, traditional, learning, ownership, leadership, communication, threatening, experimental.

Or challenging, energising and provocative over a four stage process: The first one was the rea-son why we’re doing it and we wanted something that was going to be energising, experimental, provocative, challenging and disruptive, and its main purpose was to make a change. Second, to deliver the change we had to somehow devise a quantifiable methodology. Third you’ve got to validate it and give a clear purpose and from there we can achieve the idea very easily and sell the idea, and from there it will be scaleable.

Or intentional and purposeful versus intuition, sanctioned to unsanctioned, something along the lines of whether it’s an end in itself or seed to other things, something along the lines of reactive to proactive, something along the spectrum of measuring impact, helping to doing or enabling to enacting, speculative versus more known.

We had the question who is it for as a way of questioning the politics or the value but then said actually that’s still asking about the intention, who is it for? Who are you doing it for? And maybe the question needs to be more who benefits?

Collaboration, action, idea, creation or purpose… these effectively turn the dials up and down and move these things along as you go.

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TAXONOMY

Different groups explore each major theme that emerges. Photo: Richard Moreham

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TAXONOMY

Christof Mayer and Christina Pachaly wrap Timothy Moore in red tape as he reports back from his group on the constraints of bureaucracy.

Photo: Richard Moreham

Andrew Just presents his group’s graphical taxonomic system. Photo: Richard Moreham

Suzanne Vallance and Amelia Thorpe work through the taxonomy of adaptive urbanism projects.

Photo: Richard Moreham

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TAXONOMY

Collaboration and consultation were performed as a balloon toss, as juggling different relationships is literally like keeping a dozen balloons

in the air. Collaboration and consultation is like a game: everyone may be invited to play, but it is only workable when clearly defined rules are set

out beforehand. Photo: Richard Moreham

Bree Trevena reports back from her group on collaboration and consultation.Photo: Richard Moreham

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TAXONOMY

PLACE

DESIGN NATURE IDENTITY

COMMUNITY/PEOPLE

TIMERELATED

ENVIRONMENT/CONTEXT

VALUES

WAYS OF ACTING

POST-IT NOTES

Participants were asked to write down five important themes that relate to adaptive urbanism. These notes were placed on the wall, and then grouped together in similar themes. A collective vocabulary emerged from this exercise. Photos: Richard Moreham

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TAXONOMY

COLLABORATION

PRAGMATIC/ACTION

VALUES

CREATIVITY

BOTTOM-UP

PROCESS/APPROACH

EXPERIMENTATION

CRITICAL/RADICAL

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SCALING UP

SCALING UP, OR SCALING OUT?

Many adaptive urbanism projects seem intimately related to scaling down from normal modes of city-build-ing: smaller bureaucracies, operating via consensus, low risk, low cost. Perhaps it is the case that adaptive urbanism is intrinsically unable to operate at a larger scale; as we jump scales, the problem becomes qual-itatively different. In this short session, we ask whether these adaptive urbanisms can and should be scaled up to provide viable alternatives to traditional models of city-building. Is the synergy of bottom-up, every-day urbanism and top-down planning possible? If scaling up is unfeasible, can we scale out – and how?

What will happen if the temporary and unplanned are made more permanent and formal? What are the futures of adaptive urbanism?

To encourage learning and sharing that enables small projects to move around where places are available, even after the city rebuild, requires a transitional city strategy that retains a focus on this and other opportunities.

Besides CCC strategies (governance structures) there are opportunities to promote adaptive urbanism in finance structures, legal structures and other realms.

A clearer articulation of the movement would help provide a ‘real’ and visible counter proposal to CERA’s top-down approach.

At present adaptive urbanism is a bit like Wikipedia where we all get to consume Wikipedia but very, very few actually create it, so one goal may be to have 1%, 5% or 10% of your city involved in these projects.

Another goal may be to move beyond projects (which are great and they might solve a particular problem or a need) to how you get the people who are driving these projects into systems and into processes and the city fabric.

Transitional movement needs to transition from ‘heroics’ (individual visionaries) to heuris-tics (guidelines for others to follow) to the culture of how things are done.

Resist becoming a fossil which relates in an interesting – oppositional – way to the previous point about becoming the culture. Maybe the early stage where there are no rules is part of remaining adaptive.

Sometimes you don’t know why but it works anyway – fact: there’s now some young ballerinas that feel like they can do a dance in the middle of their city.

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SCALING OUT

The body of built work in Christchurch has brought a lot of international attention.

There’s a real need for a very clear vision and a big picture and that needs to be articulated clearly and communicated clearly to get buy in.

Adaptive urbanism is not opposed to master planning per say, with the whole concept of the core and some structural elements that you can build some things around [this is called a strategic plan] but it was felt that the Christchurch blueprint was a last century plan, with separated use of individual precincts and that was sort of artificially trying to create something.

Location of projects in the CBD vs. suburbs: One option is to move out of the centre of the city where there are other communities that were affected here and some work needs to be done in these other communities. Can you move out and start work with ordinary people with ordinary concerns especially in the poorer suburbs where there are social justice issues? A lot of the projects in the centre are self-generated, they were generated on your own passions, and you shift to a point where you start drawing into these other communities and finding their issues and taking the passion about helping them mobilise and deal with their issues based on their experience in mobilising.

But the CBD is a very special unusual place within Christchurch, also it’s a place where there’s some big money at work and so forth. You’ve got that valuable asset basis, support, as you move strategically, you don’t lose that asset base because the reality on the ground is what really gives you credibility.

The overbearing national government is helpful in one sense because it’s a common enemy that helps you form alliances but in the longer term you might need to expand what we call vertically and start getting to know them, finding allies at a political level and the upper levels of hierarchy.

The built environment of adaptive urbanism gives Christchurch a new identity, but the built environ ment is really only the tip of the iceberg. Underneath this tip is your social environment, so how does the built environment help create a new social or cultural identity? Does that reflect all this other stuff underneath it? Probably not. So can we change the built environment to reflect correctly this stuff below the iceberg?

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FESTA

Barnaby Bennett

Liz Ogbu

Lee Stickells

Blaine Merker

Jennifer van den Bussche

Christina Pachaly

SPEAKER’S CORNER

As part of the Festival of Transitional Architecture, Speaker’s Corner gathered citizens, architects, urbanists, developers and government officials from the Adap-tive Urbanism Congress, and from Christchurch, on the grassy green of The Com-mons. The participants spoke about how flexible and temporary spaces are be-coming increasingly important in the creation of cities. Although Speaker’s Corner turned around the soapbox tradition (as the speaker spoke at the same eye-level as the audience) - the floor was open to all to ask questions, present potential answers and provocations. The speakers rotated every ten minutes, giving all a chance to talk, listen and question. Photos: Timothy Moore

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FESTA

Ghigo DiTommaso

Mike Lydon Stella Gwee Liam Nolan

Marcus Westbury Bree Trevena

MC Timothy Moore (SIBLING/University of Melbourne)The Commons, corner Durham St and Kilmore StSaturday 25 October 2014, 11am - 1.30pm

Supported by Athfield Architects and the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne

“Welcome to speaker’s corner. The longer you stay with us, the more it will make sense. Please. Welcome...”

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FESTAFESTA

(sticks up finger)

BOOO! BOOo!

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THE GRANDSTANDIUM

FESTA

BOOOO!

OOooh!

(sticks up finger)

BOOO! BOOo!

BOOOOYeaahbooobooo!

Over 60 Cantabrians and congress participants attended the launch of The Grandstandium at The Commons on October 25, 2015. From the portable mini-grandstand the crowd witnessed the re-enactment of past sporting moments to live commentary by MC Ciarán Fox.

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CALENDAR

TUESDAY 21 OCTOBERFrom 6pm

Flow City/Dr Susan StewartWhat kind of city do the grassroots grow?/Blaine Merker

WEDNESDAY 22 OCTOBERFrom 6pm

Introducing the Templehof Project in Berlin/Christof MayerDemocracy, The Commons, Adap-tive Urbanism/Dr David Week

THURSDAY 23 OCTOBER8:30 – 10:00am

Registration / Opening

10 – 12pm

Christchurch Transitional City Tours

12 – 2:30pm

Opening Things Up

3:00 – 6:00pm

Bohemians, Outlaws and Anar-chists, or Tools of the State?

From 6pm

Thoughts on Agency, Utopia, and Property in Contemporary Archi-tectural and Urban Theory/Prof George Baird

FRIDAY 24 OCTOBERFrom 7:30am

Coffee, Cake and Conversation

8:30 – 10:00am

(Why) did it take an earthquake?

10:15am – 12:30pm

Open Session

12:30pm – 2:00pm

Lunch at The Commons

2:30 – 5:00pm

Taxonomy of Adaptive Urbanism

5:00 – 5:30pm

Where to from Here?

5:30 – 6:30pm

Scaling Up, or Scaling Out?

From 6:30pm

FESTA/Opening Night

SATURDAY 25 OCTOBER11:15-1:30pm

FESTA/Speaker’s Corner

6pm-12am

FESTA/CityUps

SUNDAY 26 OCTOBERFrom 6:30pm

Designing for the Commons/Liz Ogbu/Dr Ghigo DiTommaso

CALENDAR

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COLOPHON

MATERIALISED BYThis summary of the International Congress on Adaptive Urbanism was prepared by Suzanne Vallance, Ryan Reynolds, Timothy Moore, Brie Sherow, Sally Carlton and Darren Davis

CONTRIBUTORSAmelia Thorpe, Andreas Wesen-er, Amiria Kiddle, Andrew Just, Barnaby Bennett, Blaine Merker, Bree Trevena, Brie Sherow, Camia Young, Chloe Waretini, Christof Mayer, Chris Reddington, Christina Pachaly, Ciaran Fox, Coralie Winn, Darren Davis, David Week, Debbie Tikao, Di Lucas, Erica Austin, Evan Smith, Frith Walker, Gaby Montejo, Gerald Carter, Ghigo DiTommaso, Grant Wells, Helen Kirlew Smith, Hugh Nicholson, Huia Lambie, Ian Tucker Peach, Jason Pemberton, Jen Margaret, Jennifer Esterman, Jennifer van den Bussche, Jessica Halliday, John Lonink, Jon King, Julia Morison, Justin Leadbetter, Katie Smith, Katja Lietz, Keri Whaitiri, Lee Stickells, Liz Ogbu, Lucinda Hartley, Marcus Westbury, Mark Lusis, Marta Tomasiak, Matt Turner, Michael Fisher, Mike Lydon, Molly Ward, Pauline de Gorostarzu, Richard Sewell, Richard Moreham, Ryan Reynolds, Sally Airey, Sally Carlton, Sam Morrison, Sarah Campagnolo, Sophie Jerram, Sue Bagshaw, Susan Stewart, Suzanne Vallance, Sylvia Smyth, Te Marino Lenihan, Tim Church, Tim Taylor, Timothy Moore, Uwe Rieger, Waikare Komene

PHOTOGRAPHYRichard Moreham, Timothy Moore. Image of The Gap Filler Summer Pallet Pavilion by Maja Moritz

AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHYLand Information New Zealand (LINZ) and licensed by LINZ for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand licence

REPORT DESIGNTimothy Moore, SIBLING

WEBSITEwww.adaptiveurbanism.org.nz

THANK YOUWe gratefully acknowledge funding support from the Royal Society’s Marsden Fund (Vallance; Rehumanising Sustainability in the Contingent City) and would also like to thank Emma Hall for her excellent transcribing of original recordings. A special thanks also to Ryan Reynolds for thinking this Congress was even possible (but since when did no time and no budget ever stop you).

CONVENED BY

SUPPORTED BY

COLOPHON

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EMPOWERMENT

EMPOWERMENT

EMPOWERMENT

EMPOWERMENT

EMPOWERMENT