CHAPTER TWELVE
Art Over Nature Over Art
Matthew Galloway
(Re)Imaging Ōtautahi Christchurch
Place branding increasingly stands as both a visual practice and a modality of governance. That is what makes it slippery. There is much more to branding than a logo or style. It is a manifestation of power.1 On February 22, 2011, a shallow 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck Ōtautahi Christchurch, a small city in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. This earthquake – and the swarm of aftershocks that plagued the city in the months afterwards – severely damaged much of the city’s central business district, its Anglo-centric cultural heritage buildings, and low-lying coastal suburbs. In the weeks, months and years following this event, the political process of red-zoning and condemning entire suburbs – alongside much of the city’s key architectural monuments – has had major implications for how notions of place-making and identity are understood by both residents and visitors. At the very centre of the city, the Christchurch Cathedral was destroyed by the quake, in the process disrupting a sense of identity closely associated with the building, due to its strong link to the city’s English colonial heritage, and its symbolic representation as part of the city’s logo. The erasure of what seemed so permanent opens up questions of how we understand and define place. How does a city and its communities regain an understanding of place when the built environment and cultural fabric of that place has been erased? How can such a collective identity – built on histories and time – be understood and rebuilt? And what role does branding and design have to play in this process? Additionally, the hegemonic nature of branding a place leads to questions of power: who is controlling the message, and to what end? From this follows a further series of interlocking questions around Art Over Nature Over Art
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