The world’s first and only Festival of Transitional Architecture has boldly emerged from the flattened cityscape of Christchurch. With over 80% of the earthquake-affected city now demolished and with a rebuild time frame being measured in decades, a unique situation to experiment with new forms of urbanism has arisen. As an increasingly urbanised humanity deals with multiple and overlapping crises, there is need for new and creative modes of engaging with the city. Through the Festival of Transitional Architecture (FESTA) and other associated projects, Christchurch has what Festival Director Jessica Halliday identifies as ‘an unparalleled opportunity to be a global epicentre for creative urban renewal through transitional and experimental architecture, art and performance’. Through the vast damage to housing and infrastructure and the seemingly endless government attempts to control the rolling crisis (crisis is inevitable after such a significant series of events), new formations of peoples have emerged in response to the quakes. FESTA works with existing networks and these new groups to express the reconfiguration of the city after the deadly series of earthquakes that occurred from September 2010 till the end of 2011.

FESTA itself evolved from a new formation of people. A group of architects, performers, designers and artists formed around the idea of engaging with Christchurch as a transitional city – a place of transformational, liminal, inevitable and perhaps radical change – and thus brought about the inaugural ten day-long FESTA in 2012. As New York-based New Zealander Mark Wigley says, ‘Crises are ultimately productive. They force invention. Breakdowns incubate breakthroughs. Radical

The World’s First Festival of Transitional Architecture

destruction gives way to new forms of production.’ In a city overtaken by engineers, planners and a thousand different types of necessary experts, a festival such as this is an outlet for less determined and more experimental modes of city-building.

FESTA favours a tactical approach over a strategic one. Architect and Politician Jaime Lerner states that ‘The idea that action should only be taken after having all the answers and all the resources is a sure recipe for paralysis. The lack of resources cannot be an excuse not to act. The planning of a city is a process that allows for corrections, always.’ Acting with incomplete knowledge is sometimes necessary but comes with risk. FESTA presents projects that engage with alternative forms of urbanism and involve a diversity of stakeholders who make small or relatively cheap interventions. Through these moves risk is understood and shared, rather than hidden and shifted.

FESTA 2012 and LUXCITY: A City of Light

FESTA profiles new and visionary ways of interacting with the city and expresses both local and international visions of urbanism, architecture and performance. LUXCITY, the opening night of FESTA, illustrated the scope and breadth of this vision. Over 350 architecture students from around the country worked with dozens of local businesses, and scores of musicians and performers to produce a temporary city of light for one night only. LUXCITY was a collaboration between FESTA, Life in Vacant Spaces, the School of Architectural Studies at CPIT, the School of Architecture and the School of Design at Victoria University of Wellington, the Architecture Department at Unitec, the Spatial Design Department at Auckland University of Technology, and the School of Architecture and Planning at The University of Auckland. Sixteen

“Crises are ultimately productive. They force invention. Breakdowns incubate breakthroughs. Radical destruction gives way to new forms of production.” - Mark Wigley

Barnaby Bennett, May 2013

In Your Face, University of Auckland, LUXCity, FESTA 2012. Image: Brigit Anderson

Archrobatics, Unitec, LUXCity, FESTA 2012. Image: Kalana Dayaratne

large-scale installations illuminated two central red-zoned city streets, bringing light and life to a part of the city previously lost amongst the gradual demolitions of 1200 buildings. Around 20,000 people flooded into the city, many for the first time since the February 2011 earthquake. The innovative use of cranes from demolition contractors as a kind of sky-hook enabled the light sculptures to rise as high as buildings. The event showcased creative and exciting ways of enlivening public space, but also acted as part of the profoundly difficult yet important process of reintroducing Christchurch’s fractured urban environment to its citizens as the army-controlled cordon slowly receded. The 2012 FESTA programme presented a variety of public talks and workshops including: a citizen engaged workshop to reconfigure temporary street furniture commissioned by the Christchurch City Council and designed and constructed by local

design firm F3, designer-led tours of large scale temporary projects such as the Re:START shopping mall and the $30 million dollar temporary Stadium, and public lectures by national and international speakers in a variety of make-shift venues including a bus and a partially completed pallet pavilion. A Global Epicentre of Transitional Urbanism

A book launched on the closing weekend was specially produced for the festival. Christchurch: The Transitional City Pt IV documents over 150 transitional projects that have emerged in Christchurch since the first earthquake in September 2010 and profiles the public response to the destruction caused. Its success in telling the story of Christchurch illustrates that in the depiction of a specific time and place there are global elements. The issues faced in Christchurch, while particular, are not unique. As the climate changes and humanity

moves to increasingly perilous places for survival, the number of manmade and natural disasters will continue to increase. We are now an urbanised species. Our relationships with the land and each other are increasingly played out in dense, busy, and predominantly artificial environments. Christchurch offers important lessons for future urban disasters, and how to intelligently respond to them. The transitional approach that FESTA explores creates opportunity by avoiding the risk of massive capital investment without insurance, by developing small, cheap projects and engaging with other risks such as weather, arson, and theft. These projects sidestep the heavy capital expenditure normally associated with urban development; the transitional moves in units of tens of thousands of dollars rather than hundreds of millions. This challenges traditional roles and expectations within urban development and finance in the city. Furthermore it designates citizens as the drivers of urban change. This provides for better use of our precious resources and a more sophisticated feedback system for planning. The projects, books, exhibitions and festivals emerging from post-quake Christchurch speak to a very specific and difficult time in a city’s history. 80% of the urban centre is now empty and dominated by flat sites, and 8000 residential houses are to be demolished. The city’s infrastructure is still on expensive life support and the people - while resilient - endure constant reminders of lives lost and places erased by our limited capacity to resist nature’s forceful ways. In consideration of this (crisis situation?), the transitional response is not an intellectually isolated one.It looks less towards the rare and exceptional capital explosions of New York, Dubai or London and rather seeks lessons from other places of rupture and crisis such as Detroit, Newcastle or Berlin.

The new new urbanist approaches of guerrilla urbanism, tactical urbanism, improvised planning DIY urbanism, participatory processes and texts such as the Right to the City (David Harvey) that are emerging from the dominant centres of discourse in Europe, Australia, and coastal United States are tested in local spatial and temporal contexts. By confronting the illusion of permanence that most of the architecture and design fields assume, the creators of the projects are forced to critically engage with different types of problems. While safety always remains paramount, long-term concerns with issues like weather tightness, reliability and maintenance are replaced by problems such as material re-use and efficacy of programming. The attention to the immediacy of the use of a space creates promising architectures of events and constructed performances.

FESTA 2013: The City within the City In response to a rise in temporary urban interventions in current global city planning and design practice, FESTA seeks to explore the possibilities of transitional design through its temporary city located within the city of Christchurch. From Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City to Le Corbusier’s Villa Radieuse and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, twentieth century urban planning was largely a clean-slate process, or as the Academy of Urbanism puts it, it was ‘conceived of as beginning afresh through comprehensive development and guided by big visions’(2012, para. 8). This type of thinking has driven the Government led Christchurch City Development Unit’s Blueprint. However, as the Academy of Urbanism also suggests, in light of the 21st century’s contracting economies, major environmental challenges and climate change, the global trend for urban planning and design could be driven more by transitional or temporary urban interventions that may or may not permanently transform a city. Through this transitional thinking, identities of place will be shaped in a more open-ended and incremental fashion.The main event in the programme for FESTA 2013 (25-28 October) is a large-scale urban project inspired by the carnivalesque of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This integration of performance, art, architecture and urbanism is a three-night processional exploration of the city at a unique time

Summer Pallet Pavilion, Gap Filler, 2012.Image: Nick Sargent

The Arcades Project, 2013Image: Nick Sargent

- Christchurch is nearing the end of its demolition programme just as large scale schemes for the city begin to be rolled out. FESTA’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ is an opportunity to reflect on changing identities of place as expressed in the planning, fabric, use and experience of Christchurch.

The earthquakes have forced a consideration of many things previously unexamined, and the group behind FESTA remains aware of the ephemerality of the festival, performances, buildings, cities, and people’s lives. As Manuel DeLanda aptly puts it, all things are ‘born at a particular time, live a life, and then die’. These realisations are difficult but force a certain creative response. In 2013 FESTA will embark on another brave and adventurous programme for its second year, extending and exploring the notion of the transitional, and continuing to engage in a very immediate way with the ever-strange and compelling context of post-quake Christchurch. The team behind FESTA are a committed bunch and will continue to offer new spaces and places for the people of Christchurch to rediscover their city while also pushing the city to create world-class and globally relevant works of art, architecture, and performance.

Works Cited

Academy of Urbanism. (2012). From Transitional to Transformative Urbanism. Retrieved 16 April, 2013, from Academy of Urbanism website: http://www.academyofurbanism.org.uk/from-transitional-to-transformative-urbanism/

Mark Wigley. Space in Crisis. Volume Magazine. Bootleg Edition Urban China (C-Lab). 2009.

Manuel De Landa. The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Public Open Video Lecture at European Graduate School EGS, Media and Communication Studies department program. Saas-Fee, Switzerland 2007.

David Harvey. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. 2012.

Jaime Lerner. From the forward to the report: State of the World 2007: Our Urban Future. 2007.

The Arcades Project, 2013Image: Nick Sargent

The Scholar, Canterbury Tales Puppet, FESTA 2013. Image: Ed Lust