Celebrating the city’s civic heart
The problems caused by the Christchurch quakes have been addressed by different organisations and institutions in two fundamentally different ways. There are those responses that used preestablished solutions and adapted them to the situation in Christchurch. Physically this means cargo containers, portacabins, and temporary houses. Organisationally it’s the importing of useful ideas from elsewhere, such as SCIRT, TED talks, First Thursdays and noodle markets, as well as government institutions like CERA, important interventions that sustained the city when it was broken. Many are now embedded in the future city.
Alternatively, there are the new ideas, organisations and events tailor-made by and for the city. These include the many and varied NGOs and third sector responses, creative and arts practices and local political responses. The Festival of Transitional Architecture (FESTA) is a child of this approach.
Like other similar organisations, FESTA practises a kind of localism. It’s a localism of place, concerned with supporting and building partnerships, giving people the ability to participate in their city in new and unique ways, and in supporting the movement of people, food, materials in more local and sustainable ways. It’s also a kind of localising of time.
FESTA was created in 2012 in response to a desire to reintroduce public life to the broken and damaged city, as CERA was slowly opening up inner-city streets and sites. Rather than seeing the damage, repairs and new forms as an inconvenience to running a festival, FESTA celebrates each year as a moment in the city’s history that will never be repeated, as offering new opportunities, new relationships and a celebration of the now (with an eye towards the future).
FESTA 2018 (October 19-22) is a celebration of food and the city. Food is the ultimate local object. Each ingredient comes from some place, is grown in a particular season or time, and is consumed in singular and collective experiences, hopefully with pleasure and joy. The shared growing and consumption of food is a fundamental human and urban experience. The storage of food and associated festivals of food abundance are a critical part of the history of cities globally, and more locally the quakes created, and demanded, new opportunities for the sharing of food with family, friends and