The Star: December 27, 2018

The Star Latest Christchurch news at www.star.kiwi
Thursday December 27 2018 15
after the earthquakes
What’s your favourite film?
Probably Fellini’s​ 8½ still,
although I haven’t seen it in a
long while.
I bet you get really sick of
people mentioning a certain
Hollywood movie star you share
a name with?
Burt Reynolds! Yeah, it’s a
shame about him dying and
all. That’s who you mean, right?
Okay, he’s the bane of my
existence.
How did Gap Filler come
about?
It was started up after the
September 4, 2010, earthquake.
Coralie was working at the Arts
Centre, running the artist-inresidence
programme, and the
Arts Centre made a really quick
decision when the buildings were
badly-damaged to halt all of their
public programmes.
So she was made redundant
almost immediately. I was
employed at the university at
that time, so we were in a really
fortunate position to say don’t
rush into anything, take a bit
of time and see what happens.
I think it was really Coralie
wandering the city and seeing
gap sites where buildings had
been demolished and who knows
how long they would be empty
for.
They were all of our social
gathering spaces, the cheap and
cheerful restaurants, the amateur
dance studios in the upper
floors, the cultural life of the city
had really been damaged more
than the infrastructure in that
September quake. So all credit to
Coralie for hatching the idea for
what became Gap Filler.
We lost our house in the
February quake and just about
everything we owned. The scale
of the disaster was so big. We put
out the message on Facebook –
that’s the end of our Gap Filler
experiment. But a bunch of
people got in touch saying, no,
all of the cinemas in the central
city are closed, so you need to do
an outdoor cinema project, the
libraries are closed, so let’s do
some sort of book project.
For the next year and a half,
everything we did was pretty
much someone else’s idea that we
helped facilitate.
What’s your favourite Gap
Filler project so far?
They’re all so different. I really
love the Super Street Arcade
project, the giant arcade game
on Tuam St. That’s been there for
two years, it still gets 300 games
played every day. Hopefully
we might have one going in in
Melbourne early to mid next year
and I think that would get a lot
of attention. So that’s definitely a
favourite. Every time I cycle past
and see the look on people’s faces
discovering it for the first time it
is pretty priceless.
What’s the most recent
project?
Stage one of the slack-lining
space went in on Tuesday last
week. It just finished up end of
last week. The soft fall and crash
area is going to be installed
end of January and that will be
complete. We’re working on a
huge project at the moment. It’s
along the edge of Rauora Park,
right by the Margaret Mahy
Playground, we’re building a
detour off the path with a lot of
berms and bumps that runs the
whole length of the track. It’s
about 110m long and you can
ride it on your commuter bike or
a Lime scooter or even if you’re
a pro-BMX rider, there’s still
enough there to be interesting.
That will be finished at the end
of the week. We’re struggling to
find a name, we’re going to put
it out on social media for some
help to choose the name. Both
this track and the slack-lining
park are part of our Placemaking
at One Central programme in
partnership with Fletcher Living.
Was the Gap Filler project
only supposed to be temporary?
In our minds, it was an
earthquake response thing. We
thought there would be six or
12 months of projects that we
would do. Then the February
earthquake hit so we thought
there’d be a couple of years of
work to be done. But then the
pace of the rebuild sunk in and
we realised it was going to be
a long haul. In 2013, we got a
call from the Auckland Council
and they said we love what
you’re doing in Christchurch,
can you come up here and help
design a programme of stuff for
us to do up here? We were like
what? We absolutely thought
of ourselves just as a disaster
response initiative. But through
people and getting invited to do
work in Auckland, Melbourne,
Copenhagen, Taiwan and others,
we’ve come to see that a lot of the
top rated cities in the world are
looking for this kind of activity
all the time, not just after a
disaster. Getting citizens more
actively involved in shaping the
places that they live is a huge
current trend and the way of the
future. It’s been a big learning
curve for us, along the way we
realised that gosh, if thriving
cities are wanting us to work with
them, then this way of thinking
can be part of the long term
Christchurch. You look at some
things like the new procurement
policy for the city council that
GAMERS:
Ryan
Reynolds
helped create
the giant
arcade game
on Tuam St,
which he says
was one of
his favourite
projects to
work on.
just came out. Now everyone who
gets a contract with council to
deliver goods and services has to
have a local benefit and social,
cultural and environmental
outcomes in mind. Those sort of
principals we have, empowering
locals and making sure locals are
benefitting alongside the massive
property developments, are now
becoming policy. It’s exciting.
What do you do to relax?
I’m not very good at it, I do
work a lot. The kids help. You
can’t be in two places with a
14-month-old and a toddler. You
can’t have split attention or be
trying to do other things, which
is nice. We like to go for walks
around Lyttelton, get out in the
garden, go for bike rides. A lot
of family stuff. One of the things
Coralie and I talk a lot about is
we both enjoy mountain biking
and part of what we like is that
you have to be so focused on
what you’re doing in the moment
that you can’t think about other
things. You can’t wonder what’s
going on at work. Parenting is
much the same.
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