City Planners from Hell by Kakapo2
- Sometimes you just cannot believe how the City Council is wasting ratepayers? money. You get the impression they are spending days and hours thinking for which silly purpose they could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, just for the sake of changing something and making something new. I have given up to understand the purpose of inner city planning, as they demolish historic buildings, and renew other things that are perfectly fine. What I find offending, however, is that they lie to the public in the attempt to justify the latest craziness. They tell the people of Christchurch that the overseas trend in city centres is to get the traffic back into the centre and reduce the area of pedestrian zones. The opposite is the case as we got confirmed on our last trip to Germany. What, I wonder, is overseas? Is Germany not overseas in the eyes of Christchurch City?s Councillors? The story behind my anger is that they have made City Mall and Cashel Mall worse. Some business owners have not tired to tell us that it is necessary to get car traffic back into the pedestrian zone because people want to park right in front of the shops, and only by such mixed use of the streets people would come back to the city centre for their shopping and not go to the big malls in the outer suburbs where parking is free and convenient. So they have started their work of destruction. Stage one has been finished around Christmas 2007, and the result is horrible. The pedestrian part of High Street ? a diagonal road starting at the corner of Colombo and Hereford Streets ? has just got the new grey-in-grey look. At the start there is a one-lane service road ? but as this is only for a possible future use ? it is blocked by two planter boxes.- Some stainless steel benches invite the people to sit down. They are at the site of a former colourful tiled fountain, a real big piece of art, the tiles designed by children of Christchurch. The edges of the fountain served as seats, and in summer you could see many people sit around it and chat. Well, as the New Zealand Natural ice-cream shop right at this corner is just going to be replaced by a St. Pierre sushi shop we do not need such an nice, inviting and relaxing place to sit down anymore? ;-) Just dreadful! The second masterpiece of planning was to demolish a pedestrian overbridge over High Street. By using this you could walk to the Bus Exchange in heavy rain without the need to step out into the rain. The second overbridge, linking the two sides of Cashel Street, is still standing but will also be demolished in the next stage of the so-called revival process of the inner city. Right now, there are many hanging baskets attached to this overbridge, and the plants give the place a lively feeling, and people are sitting on the seats under the pillar of the overbridge. But sure, a service lane is much more important in the middle of a pedestrian mall than nice seats and flowers. And really, who would want to walk leisurely through Cashel Mall if the nightmare becomes true and cars are driving there in circles on the search of parking spaces? I wonder if they will even fell the nice trees in the second half of Cashel Mall, between Colombo Street and Oxford Terrace? Right now, this part of the mall is home to many buskers during the World Buskers Festival in January. What a piece of ignorance! I for my part will boycott the shops which have actively supported the construction of the service lane.
