Conservation in the City: Turning Ideas into Reality

Re-imagine a green city. Share your views and visions for urban conservation and liveable cities in a vibrant, hands-on workshop - free booking here...

Mon 27 October 2014 1-5pm. Enterprise Precinct and Innovation Campus (EPIC) 76/106 Manchester St, Christchurch 8011

Wood from the Trees - Department of Conservation sponsored sculpture in front of C1

As part of the Festival of Transitional Architecture 2014 (FESTA) the Department of Conservation WikiHouseNZ and Space Craft Systems are uniting to explore and challenge how conservation and urban living can come together. If you are in a field that empowers you to green our cities; if you see opportunity to transform our built environment through human and nature centered design; as a future change maker, we invite you to bring inspiring ideas to help us build a place for nature in your own life, workplace and communities.

Last year WikiHouseNZ took 12 ordinary people with no formal training or construction skills and armed only with rubber mallets and constructed a high-tech WikiHouse prototype - in just two hours. This year we’re continuing our theme of enabling ordinary people to be directly involved in shaping our urban environment for the better and taking up the challenge of how conservation and urban living can come together. The Department of Conservation and WikiHouseNZ are inviting people to begin/on an exciting journey - discovering how we can best share our ideas and visions for urban conservation and livable cities, work with others to make our ideas better, and then take advantage of/accelerate using a range of tools and approaches to bring them into reality.

Free booking via Meetup

See more on the FESTA 2014 website...

The annual Festival of Transitional Architecture is a free, public event that engages with the city of Christchurch (New Zealand) by exploring urban regeneration through large scale collaborative projects and urban interventions. It is the first and only festival of its kind in the world.

FESTA provides focus, momentum and greater urban scale to this transitional movement and invites a cohesive exploration into the potential of urban life. By curating local, national and international responses to the unique situation in Christchurch, FESTA offers expressions of the city which have a wider relevance – they present pragmatic and flexible ways to engage with the global

FESTA responds to the conditions and possibilities of an extraordinary situation: after a devastating earthquake on 22 February 2011 and a swarm of seismic events in the months that followed, 80% of inner city Christchurch was demolished.

A new culture dedicated to grassroots urban recovery has emerged in response to the challenge of reviving New Zealand’s second largest city. This movement has adopted the label ‘transitional’ to reflect the intention that these projects should not only offer immediate renewal but also inform and influence the long-term ‘permanent’ recovery of the city.

More informtion here: http://festa.org.nz/