Rhythms and Repetitions
Regular repeating events occur in both temporary and permanent projects. This is a kind of experience created by periodic events. These are created by bringing together certain objects and people at regular intervals. Entities might include people, tools, building parts, plants, planets and tides. These different entities are often hidden in permanent projects and revealed in temporary ones.
Agropolis had one part-time employee, Annelies Zwaan, who managed the project. Site maintenance was carried out by volunteers who regularly visited to water plants and weed the planter boxes. The farm was also involved with a network of local cafés that provided green waste for composting. This material was moved by a cargo bike built by another project called RAD Bikes, which shared the site for a year in 2014–15. These kinds of daily rhythms and routines were part of its critical maintenance and ongoing activities, and had a sustaining and connecting experience that mixed human and non-human actors.
The growing of food introduced a range of entities that attended to particular rhythms. The relationship between the earth and sun gives rise to seasonal variation. Certain plants were grown at particular times of the year and this required organisation and communication. It brought seasonal changes such as day length, angle of light and temperature into the experience of the projects. Similarly, the taste and colour of food at different moments in the year helped articulate and differentiate the seasonal rhythms of time. A project like Agropolis introduced a more traditional set of entities into urban life. The rhythms of watering, planting and seasons are circular—they leave and return with a predictable rhythm, and because of this, knowledge and practices can be built from them.
Periodic time is the temporality of repetition, of habits turning into routine. Many of the temporary post-quake projects in Christchurch had repeating or periodic events. Saturday markets, rosters for watering the Agropolis urban farm, Tuesday night board games at a temporary venue called the Pallet Pavilion, open bike nights at RAD Bikes and motorbike Thursdays at a bar called Smash Palace. These became habitual and enabled the development of lifestyles and the formation of new habits. Agropolis was located in a visible central city location and these routines were experienced and witnessed not only by the groups of people that were attached to them, but also by users from the city’s surrounds. In this way, the daily rhythms of Agropolis created different kinds of syncopated, staccato and punctuated experiences of time in the city. These rhythms and patterns were created by particular relationships with other entities (plants, compost, seasons, calendars, events) and are not accounted for in the conventional temporal descriptors of permanent and temporary architectures.
Combining times – Spiral time, Percolation and Turbulence.
The final three temporalities describe how these kinds of rhythms and temporalities co-exist. They tend to describe the broader urban experiences of the city instead of individual projects. Latour talks about the experience of time as being the consequence of gathered entities. The post-quake city was awash with new kinds of assemblages, revealed networks and broken fragments of previously functioning systems and infrastructures. If we accept the notion that different configurations of actors produce different experiences of temporality, and different types of time, then it makes sense that the complexity of new broken and old post-quake systems and networks, would produce an unusual and often surprising set of temporal experiences—a clashing of different temporalities.
Pallet Pavilion by Gap Filler, Christchurch, 2013. Photograph by author
RAD Bikes by Gap Filler, Christchurch, 2013. Photograph by Erica Austin
Launch of Tunnel House Supper Club at FESTA 2014, Agropolis site. Photograph by Chloe Waretini
Installation Influx by architecture students from Unitec at FESTA 2014, Agropolis site. Photograph by Erica Austin
In 2014, Ryan Reynolds articulated this complexity and described living in a ‘post-city, the remains of a complicated, contradictory and post-colonial place’ and ‘a pre-city with three years worth of plans, consultations, ideas and designs that exist mainly as a massive set of aspirations to be enacted’.14 The time after the quakes was characterised by a range of incongruous mixtures of old and new, leading to a melding of:
–Broken things—80% of the central city was demolished over 4 years,15
–New things—this led to the design and planning of thousands of new buildings,16
–Normal things—that suddenly seemed older and more precious,17
–Provision solutions— such as the 180 temporary projects between 2010 and 2013,18
–Repaired old things—such as the city’s arts centre,19
–Demolitions of old things—such as heritage buildings,20
–Demolitions of new things—including buildings designed and finished after the quakes,21
–The competition between new plans22 and outdated plans.23
All these things co-existed, resulting in the mixing of objects and their temporalities. This particular urban setting is unique, but evidences the range of different types of temporal conditions that exist in any complex urban environment in which different projects, events and experiences are brought into being.
Spiral Time
As the city recovered, some of these rhythms were circular but formed as spirals. Spiral time is a circular time but with the perspective of change added to it. Political ecologist Jane Bennett writes that spiral repetition ‘is that sometimes that-which-repeats-itself also transforms itself. Because each iteration occurs in an absolutely unique context, each turn of the spiral enters into a new and distinctive assemblage— with absolutely local chirps, odours, herbs, thoughts, whirs, images, breezes, light waves, viruses, animals, machines, and minerals in its milieu.’24 The change can be personal, contextual or environmental. For example, climate change has shifted the seasons from a circular predictable mode to a spiral one, in which we do not know what will come next.
Each season in Christchurch would be greeted by a different city—a place with more demolitions, new buildings and shifting temporary structures, fitting Bennett’s description of spiral time in which ‘each iteration occurs in an absolutely unique context.’25
Percolation
Percolation is the combination of many times together, of the experiences of linear, circular, archaic and future all bubbling and shifting around. In a 1995 interview, Latour asked philosopher Michel Serres if he thought time passed and he responded, ‘Yes, it passes, and also it doesn’t pass. We must bring the word pass closer to passoir—sieve. Time doesn’t flow; it percolates.”26 The aforementioned description of overlapping and multiple times invokes Serres’ notions of a world in which time is not linear and instead people are understood to move through different bubbles, rips and percolations. The presence of Agropolis in the city for three years and its eventual removal contributed to this sense of seasonal and repeating return but with change, and eventually this change became a bubble. For a time, it was one of the few stable things prior to becoming a remembered part of the city’s history in 2015. The planter boxes were given to another project and the earth shed was flatted back into the soil.
Turbulence
Turbulence is the temporality of apparent chaos. There may be order but it is either impossible to see