Dunedin not an IT city, compared

The Creators Project is a global network dedicated to the celebration of creativity, arts and technology: http://thecreatorsproject.com/

—

The Creators Project Published on Mar 23, 2015
Inside the Volume: Making the 2015 YouTube Music Awards Launch Film
A behind-the-scenes look at how Autofuss made the laser-filled launch film for the 2015 YouTube Music Awards.
Watch the YouTube Music Awards 2015: http://goo.gl/GRsv0H
The YTMA show features 13 brand new, innovative music videos from Action Bronson ft. Chance the Rapper, Cahoots, Charli XCX, Ed Sheeran & Rudimental, FKA twigs, Kygo ft. Parson James, Lindsey Stirling, Martin Garrix ft. Usher, MAX ft. Hoodie Allen, Migos, Megan Nicole, Nicky Jam & Enrique Iglesias, and Shamir.

—

In ReForm, a new franchise from The Creators Project, we meet the artists creating and re-appropriating the latest technologies in various areas of creative expression.

The Creators Project Published on May 19, 2015
ReForm | Hollywood’s Creating Digital Clones
In the premiere of our ReForm series, we explore the frontier of the 3D face- and body scanning technology used to create digital doubles for films, video games, and holograms. We meet some of the scanned humans, their avatars, and get to understand the challenges the Institute For Creative Technologies has had to overcome in their quest to create a photo-realistic virtual person, including the conquering of the Uncanny Valley.

—

The Creators Project Published on Jun 25, 2015
ReForm | Data Becomes Art in Immersive Visualizations
In the second episode of ReForm, we look at how big data and art have converged into a new visual culture. Six major data artists (Mark Hansen, R Luke DuBois, Kate Crawford, Jer Thorp, Fernanda Viegas, and Martin Wattenberg) discuss what it means to make art in the 21st century and how quantification and digitisation is completely changing the way we live and create.

—

Posted by Elizabeth Kerr

Dunedin Harbourside: English Heritage on portside development

By properly and logically establishing the significance of a historic port, plans can be laid that enhance and build on that significance and that incorporate difficult heritage buildings and structures.
–Simon Thurley, English Heritage

Dunedin Harbourside Historic Area
The New Zealand Historic Places Trust registered the Dunedin Harbourside Historic Area on 4 April 2008 (List No. 7767). The historic area takes in properties at 25, 31-33 Thomas Burns Street, Birch Street, Fryatt Street, Fish Street, Willis Street, Cresswell Street, Tewsley Street, Wharf Street, Roberts Street and Mason Street.

Image: Heritage New Zealand

The Dunedin Harbourside Historic Area is made up of the core of the port operations and associated businesses surrounding the steamer basin at the Upper Harbour in Dunedin which had developed by the first decades of the twentieth century. It includes a major portion of the land in Rattray, Willis and Cresswell Streets which was reclaimed by the end of the nineteenth century. It also includes the Fryatt Street and Cross Wharves, including the wharf sheds on Fryatt Street Wharf, as well as the former Otago Harbour Board Administration Building at the Junction of Birch Street and Cross Wharves, the former British Sailors’ Society Seafarers’ Centre, and the former Briscoe’s Wharf Store and Works on the corner of Birch, Wharf and Roberts Streets [since lost to fire], and the walls and bridge abutment on Roberts Street which are the remnants of the bridge which linked that Street to the city.
█ Read Registration report here.

Dunedin City Council has refused to list the Dunedin Harbourside Historic Area in the District Plan.

Image: ODT [screenshot]

### ODT Online Sat, 15 Mar 2014
‘Potential new harbourside developments ‘exciting’
By Chris Morris
Excitement is growing about the potential for fresh development of Dunedin’s harbourside, including a new marine science institute featuring a public aquarium being considered by the University of Otago. The Otago Daily Times understands university staff have already held preliminary talks with Dunedin City Council staff about a possible new marine science institute in the harbourside zone, on the south side of steamer basin. The Otago Regional Council has also met Betterways Advisory Ltd, which wants to build a waterfront hotel in the city, to discuss the ORC’s vacant waterfront site, it has been confirmed.
Read more

Potential for contemporary reuse – Fryatt Street wharfsheds
Images: 4.bp.blogspot.com; m1.behance.net

Historic ports are places that need intelligent interrogation before we start to reinvent them for the future: understanding their heritage significance is the first step.

On the waterfront: culture, heritage and regeneration of port cities

HERITAGE IN REGENERATION: INSPIRATION OR IRRELEVANCE?
By Dr Simon Thurley, Chief Executive, English Heritage

I had better come clean at the start. I live in a port. As it happens, it is a port which was, in its time, and on a different scale, as successful as Liverpool was in its heyday. But that time is rather a long time ago now, in fact over four hundred years. In 1600 my home town of King’s Lynn was amongst Britain’s leading ports, bigger than Bristol in numbers of ships and with trading tentacles reaching into the Baltic and far into the Mediterranean. Lynn’s position as a port was destroyed by the railways and although it still has working docks today the tonnage that passes through is very small. Yet anyone visiting it can instantly see that this was once a port; the customs house, the old quays, the merchants houses, the big market places and the fishermen’s houses all add immeasurably to Lynn’s sense of place.

We not only ask developers to build new structures that respect the old, but we also require them to incorporate old ones that have value.

It is this sense of place, this character, that we at English Heritage will always say that needs to be understood. For us the first and most important thing is that any developer and the relevant local authority should have a full understanding of the place in which major change is are planned. Various tools have been invented over the years to try and help that process. These include characterisation, historical studies, view studies, urban analysis and more. But does this actually make any difference? What happens to the richly illustrated historical reports produced by consultants? Are they handed to architects who then use them as their bible? Are they taken up by the planners and turned into supplementary planning guidance? Or do they just get put on a shelf?

There can be a broad consensus about what constitutes successful development that preserves aesthetic values. The trick for planning authorities is finding a way to capture it.

The answer is that normally it just gets forgotten because for most developers and many local authorities heritage is just a hindrance. If a report on heritage is commissioned they will have ticked off a process that they need to say they have done, but once completed it can be set aside and everyone can get on with the business of making money. Ipswich is an example of this. Like many ports, it has refocused its commercial hub away from the historic centre leaving a lot of land in the historic trading heart for regeneration. The city decided to prepare what it called an Area Action Plan for the redevelopment of the historic port. This included some work on the history, archaeology and development of the area: all very useful. The process was then to take this forward to create a series of planning briefs and master plans to inform individual developments. This would reinforce general points in the action plan about storey heights, vistas and through routes as well as issues about historic character. Regrettably, this latter part was not done and what Ipswich got was lots of poorly designed high-rise flats built on a budget. And they got it with the heritage studies still sitting on a shelf.
Read more

—

Image: English Heritage – Tobacco Warehouse 1903, Stanley Dock LP

Liverpool World Heritage Site
Liverpool was inscribed as a World Heritage Site as the supreme example of a maritime city and its docks are testimony to that claim. Jesse Hartley’s Albert Dock, opened in 1845, is the finest example of a nineteenth century wet dock in the world while the nearby Canning Graving Docks and Waterloo and Wapping Warehouses are also of note. North of Pier Head with its magnificent ‘Three Graces’, Stanley Dock, Victoria Clock Tower and Salisbury Dock lie derelict, awaiting re-use. Link

—

Contemporary development — Shed 10 and The Cloud, Queens Wharf, Auckland
Images: (from top) conventionsnz.co.nz; queens_wharf.co.nz; queens_wharf.co.nz; upload.wikimedia.org

█ For more, enter the terms *loan and mercantile* or *harbourside* in the search box at right.

—

Posted by Elizabeth Kerr

DCC: Councillors delegated street furniture decisions to staff

Peter Entwisle says “some principles need teasing out: CONTEXT, AUTHENTICITY, FLEXIBILITY and TRUE EXCEPTIONALITY”

[transpressnz.blogspot.com]

### ODT Online Mon, 11 Nov 2013
Opinion
Rearranging the street furniture
By Peter Entwisle
Dunedin is adopting a new generation of street furniture. It’s happened before with varying results and we should try to do better this time.
Read more

—

Dunedin City Council – Media Release
Free Parking – for Cycles
This item was published on 19 Jun 2012.
The rollout of 56 new cycle stands around the city is almost complete. The sites are high demand and high profile areas that were identified in consultation with community boards and cycling groups.
There are two types of stand – 46 basic U-shaped stainless steel stands, and two sets of five stands that, when installed, spell ‘cycle’. The stands were designed in-house and manufactured by local business Identimark with some parts of the manufacturing process undertaken in Auckland.
Read more

16.7.11 ODT More cyclists than a year ago: survey
Dunedin will spend $20,000 on 70 cycle stands for central city sites over the next two years.

—

Bicycle Management
Dunedin City Council: Cycle stands, hitching rails and facilities
http://www.dunedin.govt.nz/services/cycling/cycle-stands

University of Otago, Property Services: Cycling & Cycle Racks
http://www.propserv.otago.ac.nz/services/parkingcyclerack.html

—

Related Posts and Comments:
8.11.13 Dunedin Separated Cycle Lane Proposal
5.11.13 DCC, NZTA: Cycle lanes controversy
19.10.13 Cycle lobby games and media tilts
24.9.13 Mediocrity and lack of critical awareness at DCC [council reports]
8.7.13 Bloody $tupid cycleways and Cull’s electioneering . . . [route maps]
28.3.13 DCC DAP 2013/14: Portobello Harington Point Road Improvements
26.2.13 DCC binge spending alert: Proposed South Dunedin cycle network
22.2.13 DCC: Council meeting agenda and reports for 25 February 2013
31.1.13 Who? 2010 electioneering
21.11.12 Safe cycling -Cr Fliss Butcher

—

Posted by Elizabeth Kerr

They’re doing it everywhere

I came across this gem in the wonderful website Fast Company (yes of the magazine fame).

New York’s Architectural Eyesores Become Public Art

“Starting last week, the Alliance for Downtown New York’s Re:Construction project has been dressing up five sites around Lower Manhattan with work by artists like Katherine Daniels and Maya Barkai. It’s a follow-up to the first phase of Re:Construction, started in 2007, which covered ten sites.”

A very short article but nice to see our ‘problems’ are universal.

Link to Fast Company website article

{Author – Paul}

“Tradition in architecture conveys the kind of practical knowledge that is required by neighbourliness.”

Thanks to ro1 for the following article, published by The Journal of the American Enterprise Institute:

### http://www.american.com Sat, 19 Dec 2009
The High Cost of Ignoring Beauty
By Roger Scruton
Architecture clearly illustrates the social, environmental, economic, and aesthetic costs of ignoring beauty. We are being torn out of ourselves by the loud gestures of people who want to seize our attention but give nothing in return.
In Britain, the state, in the form either of local or central government, will tell you whether you can or cannot build on land that you own. And if it permits you to build, it will stipulate not only the purposes for which you may use the building, but also how it should look, and what materials should be used to construct it. Americans are used to building regulations that enforce utilitarian standards: insulation, smoke alarms, electrical safety, the size and situation of bathrooms, and so on. But they are not used to being told what aesthetic principles to follow, or what the neighbourhood requires of materials and architectural details. I suspect that many Americans would regard such stipulations as a radical violation of property rights, and further evidence of the state’s illegitimate expansion.
Read more

Roger Scruton is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a writer, philosopher, and public commentator, and has written widely on aesthetics, as well as political and cultural issues.

—

Posted by Elizabeth Kerr

Dunedin’s kerbside waste collections

On… plastic boxes get too much.

First we heard:

### ODT Online Wed, 2 Dec 2009
Rubbish costs set to double
By David Loughrey
Dunedin residents will have two recycling bins if the latest city council “preferred option” is adopted.
Read more

Council responses to the question posed by ODT – ‘why the cost had increased so much with no extra service and better sorted waste’ – suggest the Council is over exposed to prices contractors might set through the tender process. The conditions attached to the successful tender bid had better be positively demanding!

Then, momentously, the bad news got closer:

### ODT Online Sat, 5 Dec 2009
Two-crate recycling adopted
By Hamish McNeilly
A recycling crate with a lid has been adopted by the Dunedin City Council, but how much it will cost and even its final colour have yet to be determined.
Read more

****

From the sublime to the ridiculous.
I’m not sure if that’s a description of DCC or myself.

I protest. I won’t have another recycling bin on my property and if served one, it will be trashed. In preference I’ll continue with the black bags and blue bin (for glass) only – and not recycle most of my household waste, which is not great.

I submitted to Council that while in favour of recycling my apartment can’t take another bin, and certainly not a wheelie bin. Well, they seem to have got the second point.

The two-bin system (about to be adopted by Council) altogether constitutes another piece of furniture my apartment can’t take. Further, they are unsightly, made of plastic and something to trip over. External storage of bins on a tight property of six apartments is not possible. I suggested to Council that the small-home owner or apartment dweller might prefer using the blue bin to recycle different waste products (glass one week; plastics, cardboard, paper and aluminium the next) since the total output of waste is relatively minor each month; besides, people should be able to customise kerbside recycling services according to their need, given there is a wide variance across Dunedin. The design of the yellow bin featured in the ODT doesn’t look to be stackable with the blue bin. What the hell is Council up to? All this and a likely doubling in price of collections.

So I’m abandoning ship. Black bags and (note my generous concession) glass recycling using the existing blue bin is all I’m going to do. The cost of my occasional use of black bags (despite price increases) is neither here nor there if, logically, the preference is my convenience not Council’s. As it should be.

My existing eco-footprint is very very small – the deliberate concessions I’ve made to live inner city are easily more than most residents would ever achieve living in the city suburbs or countryside. Why throw more plastic at me, DCC.
(the stadium is a plastic-coated box too far already)

—

Posted by Elizabeth Kerr