disneyesque faux historic
Sorry this is prehistorically old, but it’s a good explanation on on why the themepark by the big new road always looks so empty as you whizz past it….
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13 Responses to “disneyesque faux historic”
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July 26th, 2007 at 8:48 am
Just a clarification: most of the buildings are actually the originals, painstakingly restored, though at least one is a “reconstruction” - so it’s not really “faux historic” so much as an unhealthy fixation on the surface appearance of physical heritage at the expense of actual history and lived experience. It’s telling that the notices in the windows that tell the history of the buildings concentrate almost entirely on the late 19th and early 20th century: I guess the later history is too contentious to recount, and the charming tales of settler life sit much more comfortably with the target audience of a “heritage precinct” than a true retelling of the complexities and struggles of Te Aro’s recent past.
July 26th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
I find this word ‘precinct’ a bit weird - it doesn’t reallly have any historic resonance in Aotearoa. It feels like a way of glossing over the fact that much of the history around these buildings happened in a living, used streets, rather than inside some quaint old buildings.
July 26th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
looks bad for yous fwwog becaus the next mayor of christchurch gonna open up roads,
my opinion is this,
Bob Parker will be the next Mayor of Christchurch,
and I see him as mayor elect.
so all green people and all people of energy, I urge that you should meet him now and make good things for your city and your region.
It is good that we have a leader.
end this farcical pretence from the 2021 thing,
July 26th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Funny how a two lane one way 50 km/h street is a “big new road” yet nary a peep is mentioned about:
- two four-lane motorway extensions either side of SH20;
- Waiouru peninsula extension;
- four lane motorway from Orewa to Puhoi;
- four lane motorway from Albany to Hobsonville;
- four-six lane Grafton Gully motorway extension in downtown Auckland;
- four lane bypass in western Hamilton;
- duplication of the Tauranga Harbour bridge without a toll (when a toll would have paid for it and reduced congestion).
I’m hardly arguing against most of those, but really it does show a bit of an obsession for a few hundred metres of urban one way street while Labour has been building big 100km/h multi lane highways all over (except Wellington).
July 26th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
I’m with libertyscott on this one. Which may be the only time we agree on anything.
But even if we just look at Wellington, the work to increase daily traffic flows into and out of Wellington by widening and extending roads up the Kapiti coast are far more important and far-reaching for increasing traffic congestion in town, and for increasing carbon use and other pollutants by increasing car-commuting. Yet protest against that is practically nonexistant.
The obsession with the bypass has always seemed a simple matter of NIMBY by those fashionable enough to be able to afford an Aro Valley flat rather than a real response to the problems we see with obsessive car use, or with congestion in Wellington.
July 27th, 2007 at 1:06 am
The notices in the windows have to omit the post WWII period otherwise Labour’s slum clearance “Te Aro Flat Replanning” would have to be mentioned. House of Representatives Journals 1947 appendix D1.
Subsequent National and Labour governments seem to have concurred that replacing these slums with a motorway would kill two birds with one stone.
July 27th, 2007 at 9:09 am
“Funny how a two lane one way 50 km/h street is a “big new roadâ€? yet nary a peep is mentioned about … while Labour has been building big 100km/h multi lane highways all over”
I can’t speak for the Greens on that, but I can speak about my own city, and the bypass certainly is “a big new road” in an area characterised by relatively narrow streets. The intersection of Karo & Victoria is particularly bad, getting up to four lanes wide and exacerbated by turning lanes and lots of the sort of pointless left-over space you get when forcing a curved arterial through a city grid.
“But even if we just look at Wellington, the work to increase daily traffic flows into and out of Wellington by widening and extending roads up the Kapiti coast are far more important … Yet protest against that is practically nonexistant.”
I wouldn’t agree with that: I’ve certainly written against that a lot, and other groups such as Option 3 have been having their say. But the response hasn’t gathered the same level of media attention yet, partly because it’s much further from actual construction (and may never get there).
“The obsession with the bypass has always seemed a simple matter of NIMBY by those fashionable enough to be able to afford an Aro Valley flat rather than a real response to the problems we see with obsessive car use, or with congestion in Wellington.”
There are a few things wrong with that statement. First, the word “NIMBY” should be applied to those who agree that something is good in itself, just not in their own neighbourhood, whereas I don’t think the bypass opponents have ever said that “new motorways are good, just please build them somewhere else”. Second, there’s the nitpicking difference between Aro Valley and Te Aro flat, and I’d hardly describe many of the long-term residents of the latter as “fashionable”. It certainly hadn’t been an expensive part of town to live in, and that has been part of the argument against the bypass: by removing a lot of old buildings that were cheap to live and work in, it has cut a hole in one of the most interesting and diverse parts of town. As for not being a real response to car use and congestion, I’d have though that the calls to save the thirty-odd million dollars and spend it on public transport instead would be exactly that.
July 27th, 2007 at 9:36 am
“The obsession with the bypass has always seemed a simple matter of NIMBY by those fashionable enough to be able to afford an Aro Valley flat”
In case you didn’t notice, the bypass didn’t go through Aro Valley. It cut through an area described by an archeologist as New Zealand’s last area of historic inner city working class dwellings. It’s also an area surrounded by council flats and generally run-down housing stock and cheap commercial buildings.
The people involved in the campaign were, as usual, noticeably low-income. The media slur of presenting activists as wealthy chardonnay socialists has almost no relationship with reality (I do know ONE leftist on a good salary who drinks chardonnay, who I guess could be described as an activist).
July 27th, 2007 at 9:37 am
Oh, BTW, I live in Te Aro an pay $40 a week rent. Is that fashionable?
July 27th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
# libertyscott Says:
July 26th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
> Funny how a two lane one way 50 km/h street is a “big new roadâ€? yet nary a peep is mentioned about…
part of the problem with the Te Aro bypass is that it gets in the way of other modes of transport. It’s harder to walk or cycle across the path of the bypass now than it was before, thus making the suburbs behind the bypass more cut off from the city centre, encouraging car use and discouraging the growth of high density accomodation or shopping south of the bypass. And that’s actually less to do with the actual road than it is to do with the way they’ve had to configure things like traffic light sequences to make in function like a bypass despite cutting right through the middle of the area it’s supposedly bypassing.
July 27th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
# Sam Buchanan Says:
July 27th, 2007 at 9:36 am
> In case you didn’t notice, the bypass didn’t go through Aro Valley. It cut through an area described by an archeologist as New Zealand’s last area of historic inner city working class dwellings.
Surely the Cannongate / MacLaggan st area of Dunedin would fit that description?
July 27th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
kahikatea, The bypass ceased to be a bypass once Transit was forced to compromise it’s plans. I can understand how the original plan achieved a decent BCR, even as a cut and cover tunnel, but I can’t see how the compromise could have achieved a BCR much greater than zero. Eliminating the grade seperation with the cross streets also eliminated the time savings on those cross streets which was one of the main original objectives. A motorway should free up local streets for local traffic, as Auckland’s motorways do by catering for regional traffic. If it doesn’t do that then its a waste of time and petrol taxes.
August 2nd, 2007 at 9:36 am
Did anyone see an article about a new type of biofuel that needs 65% less energy to produce as it uses genetically modified microbes?
This is where the Greens (blanket) all genetic engineering is wrong, is wrong, I think.
jh