'The vocal – but rarely the most visionary – voices are the ones that get heard'
Understanding ‘the enemy’
The multi-disciplinary design team for the redevelopment of New Zealand’s Christchurch City Mall area included a retail specialist who ‘understood the enemy’ – big box retail and hyper-malls, says Shonagh Lindsay
Christchurch City Mall was once the city’s prime shopping destination, attracting rural and town visitors. Situated in the heart of this attractive ‘garden city’ on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island – the country’s second largest city – City Mall had deteriorated to the point where $2 shops had begun to replace its ‘high street’ style retail.
At the same time, Christchurch City Council acknowledged that the city had surpassed its retail potential. With 10 per cent more enclosed retail per person than the Australian average, it was estimated that it would take the city 20 years to fully utilise its retail expansion. In the meantime, the heart of the city was left needing much more than a bricks and mortar regeneration.
Developers Isthmus Group took the bold approach of describing the Mall as ‘stuffed’. Alan Gray, Isthmus urban designer on the Mall’s ongoing redevelopment project, says of key importance was the decision to form an ‘alliance’ of the design team, the council and the contractors, committed to the project until its conclusion. This multi-disciplinary design team included from its outset a retail specialist who 'understood the enemy – big box retail/hyper-malls.’
The Mall’s shopping area had been allowed to develop in an ad-hoc manner with several key retail animation opportunities – prime corner sites, important sight lines and vital connection spaces – either lost or obscured and underutilised. In addition, it suffered from overpedestrianisation, described in Lonely Planet’s ‘A Journey Through the Best Cities of the World’ (2006) as 'excessive…much of the city is pedestrianised, but little of it is busy.’
In an era when the city is being reclaimed from cars, any argument for bringing traffic back into pedestrian space is bound to run into opposition. However as the retail specialist, David West of Premier Retail, pointed out, Christchurch’s CBD – with a population of around 300,000 - simply did not have enough street traffic to make full pedestrianisation work. Current research suggests that a CBD needs at least a million people to make a fully pedestrianised shopping precinct successful, an unknown fact when malls were first created in the 70s and 80s (of the 250 malls developed in the USA over this time, only 20 successful examples remain).
Movement corridors
Instead, the urban designers put forward a plan to create movement corridors for delivery and emergency vehicles as well as taxis and cycles, which would bring rationality to the existing service lanes and allow for increased traffic flows around events. These movement corridors would also be integral to creating legible retail opportunities and connections, both within the Mall and to surrounding
cultural, arts and civic precincts.
An extensive design and consultation phase – January through to December 2006 – began with a visual ‘Sense of Place’ study. Presented as a graphic research document, it looked specifically at the City Mall site against Christchurch’s design traditions, built fabric, view corridors, distant views and relationships of public space in the city, as well as its landscape context.
A comprehensive study of the Mall’s retail potential was undertaken. International research has found that shopping represents 60-70 per cent of the motivation factor when it comes to visiting city centres. But to compete with hypermalls, city centres need to maximise their every aspect – enlivening the public realm of the street by fully utilising its advantages of views, air, light, nature, and connections
through to other areas.
Christchurch City Mall suffered from traffic congestion, poor parking management, inactive edges and static spaces, along with unsafe and threatening areas.The retail analysis was influential from the earliest stage of the designers’ conceptual thinking, supported by the Sense of Place study and a further series of spatial studies, each with a set of design considerations: access and obstacles, connections and precincts, heritage and memorials, and opportunities for narrative interpretation of the Mall’s history.
Community input
The key elements of the retail analysis that were translated into the urban design included good circulation for pedestrians, creating interesting shop fronts, clear sightlines, lively streets with movement and colour, making the most of the shopfront exposure with passing vehicles, and providing a pleasant environment with well maintained corner buildings and building facades along the Mall. Under local government law, consultation is implicit in any development and in this case, due to the project’s high public profile, it was a particularly robust process involving land owners, 600 retailers, schools, youth, emergency services, outdoor event programmers, transit centre strategists, shoppers, pedestrians, delivery services, tourists and locals.
From left to right: The Cashel Street Garden Promenade provides a designed response to the urban street. Along both retail frontages, wide footpaths are provided for window-shopping and movement. A service lane with street lights and parallel parking is oriented to the north side of Cashel Street, allowing pedestrian areas to be located in areas of comfortable solar gain. Several large existing trees have been retained in a six-metre wide strip. Along with new trees, this provides a range of spaces for outdoor cafes and events spaces
From left to right: There are two ‘Triangular Reserves’ in the City Mall project: Stewart Plaza and Cashel (aka Hack Circle or The Amphitheater). This area had become a subculture ‘hang out,’ alienating to some. Keeping this area as a youth zone, while ensuring others found the space welcoming, was an essential objective. The proposed plan looks to create a legible definition to the triangular reserves through the use of enhanced paving, lighting and furnishing elements. As the Triangular Reserves are also gateways into the City Mall site, these spaces are proposed to receive the highest quality treatments
From left to right: The detailing of the street will reveal the existing tramline for potential tram access in the future. Wide pedestrian areas either side of the service lane will facilitate movement, al fresco café uses, and a range of pedestrian amenities such as seating, bins, recycle stations, cycle racks, payphones and poster bollard. Paving and furnishings for High Street are proposed to have the ability to ‘roll out’ to future stages as upgrades become necessary.
A wide range of engagement techniques and devices were used, including web and print media. Three-dimensional models were used throughout the design process to accurately depict City Mall in all its complexity – urban density, historic buildings, public spaces and the tall office and hotel structures that bind the study area, as well as the potential environmental impacts of wind and solar. These were accompanied by numerous hand-drawn sketches, which gave the design proposals context for council, stakeholder and public review and comment.
In addition, animated computer simulations were generated at three stages in the project and presented for public review in a local department store. Isthmus staff and Christchurch Council officers ‘manned’ the project shop fronts to present plans and answer questions.
Three distinct streetscape concepts were proposed in the masterplan: High Street Processional, Cashel Street Garden Promenade and Triangular Reserves. Each was designed to encourage safe and robust pedestrian flow through from surrounding precincts and to re-establish historical links, while strengthening the Mall’s retail and business role in the wider city.
The indispensable feature of its redevelopment has been recognising that the redesign needed to be developed alongside a comprehensive retail analysis, supported by an ongoing retail strategy. This would enable the scheme to compete with the marketing clout of the hyper-malls, and is a pioneering step forward for city centre regeneration in New Zealand.
Yet to be fully developed, however, is the unique narrative history of the site, what Maurice Roers, council project manager, describes as ‘the interpretive elements that could make its spaces both richer and more subtle’. This could be attributed to insufficient council budget, or to what Roers thinks is ‘a subconscious pull towards functionality’, supported by the demands of consultation.
The vocal – but rarely the most visionary – voices are the ones that usually get heard. For example, design features such as sculptural lights specifically designed for Hack Circle and gateway markers at the intersection of Colombo and Cashel Streets were detailed in the conceptual phase, but could not be funded in the overall budget, and so have yet to be completed.
Shonagh Lindsay is a journalist living in New Zealand
