Help hand out Little Pots of Kindness (honey pots) on Satuday 1 September to people on Queen St around 10am. Contact Mik
City Centre Snippets THE MONTH OF AUGUST A few snippets of community information for people who call the city centre home August is upon us, the days are getting longer and thoughts to turn to kindness… Random Acts of Kindness – Saturday 1 September Kindness can happen any time of the year but Random Acts of Kindness Day on 1 September is a reminder of how important this universal way of being is, to creating postive communities and relationships with those we know and those we have yet to meet. Splice are putting the challenge to everyone this year to take action with a specific act, or acts of kindness. We’d love to hear about them too, so that the wave of kindness keeps reverberating like a well struck gong. Kindness is contagious, so you can expect what you do in kindness to ripple outward – your kindness creating further kindness…quietly flooding the neighbourhood. “Kindness is free – Sprinkle that stuff everywhere” INTERESTED in helping deliver kindness? “Tell us about kindness” Video – we are looking for people to answer this question, as part of a 5 minute neighbourhood movie on kindness. Short pieces of film from many people, edited together to capture kindness and used to reach out and encourage even more people, into acts of kindness. Help hand out Little Pots of Kindness (honey pots) on Satuday 1 September to people on Queen St around 10am. Contact Mik –
[email protected] if you are interested in either, or both of these options.
The Soon-to-Change Face of Quay Street Over the last couple of months there has been a lot of firming up of planning in relation to the reduction of lanes on Quay St, big bus turn arounds and an innovative public space. Commuters from the east of us, are going to have to get used to the notion that cutting along the face of the city centre, to get to the Harbour Bridge, may soon be a thing of the past. The general intention is that if you are driving into the neighbourhood of the city centre, then you are coming in for a purpose, as opposed to simply driving through. Here’s useful commentary and drawings from the good people at Greater Auckland from mid July and a NZ Herald article on the matter. Included in this content are some artists renderings of the public space intended between the elegant Ferry Building and Princes Wharf, using funds from the sale of QEII Square to the Commercial Bay development. There will be opportunities to provide feedback on some aspects of these significant changes. Splice encourages everyone to “have your say” whatever it might be, as your feedback does have influence. You can also connect with the City Centre Residents Group “CCRG” for a collective response on these proposals. For a broader international perspective this article from the Guardian entitled “This waterfront needs a highway: the huge mistakes cities keep making” speaks somewhat to city centre clangers we are trying to move away from and other pitfalls of design to avoid. HEAR YEA! – it’s a Community Noticeboard - There is a community noticeboard up at the Ellen Melville Centre on Freyberg Place. In a neighbourhood with few true noticeboards, it is great to see one so centrally sited.
Queens Wharf – securing a fine public space There is a lot of planning happening around the Queens Wharf area at the moment. The intended shifting of the ferry infrastructure to the western side of Queens Wharf and the volume of wharf permanently closed for the cruise ship industry, heightens the need and opportunity, to plan for the remaining public space (post-Cloud) on “the people’s wharf”. Take a stroll down Queens Wharf and you quickly realise that this is a brilliant people space. Away from the hustle and noise of the city, directly in touch with the water’s edge and a sense of distance not found amongst the tower blocks. This space, a space for the 55,000 residents and countless visitors, deserves as much forward planning as that for ferries and mooring dolphins. If you are interested in being part of a conversation around the public space on Queens Wharf (currently covered by the Cloud) and consider simple possibilities, such as the return of the Shed 11 roof to provide shade from sun and rain, then please get in touch
[email protected] NB: Sketch is a very rough approximation of where infrastructure might sit
DANCE! – because you can and you know that deep down, you really want to cut loose! Dancing, it’s a thing, we all know that but often associated with late nights and imbibment – things that aren’t for everyone. What if it were just for the joy of dancing? Whammy Bar up at St Kevins Arcade has been doing the whole, wake up and get down, at 6.30am in the mornings. There’s even a “movement”, the intriguingly named Conscious Clubbing. Not only funky but generating an amount of involuntary squwaking, there is this local silent disco on Sat 4 August Alternatively you could join the similar yet completely different, City Centre Tai Chi group – Thursdays 5.30pm at the Ellen Melville Centre in the hall upstairs, or Yoga for parents with under 5’s. “Plenty of Neighbourhood “ - going on Yates the Seed People on Albert Street and the Civic Trust Auckland Vacant for some years, there is now activity on the corner of Albert and Wolfe Streets and a building that once housed the largest seed company “in the colonies”, the Yates Seed Company. Check out this article that includes a photo of the Yates nursery, an early rooftop garden and views on facadism from Allan Matson current President of the Civic Trust Auckland. If heritage preservation is something you have an interest in then you may want to check out the Civic Trust their aims are – “Protection of natural landforms; Preservation of heritage, in all its aspects; Encouragement of good planning, for the City and Region; Removal of visual and environmental contamination; Publicising what we have and hope to achieve”. A very reasonable joining fee will connect you with a new layer of info’ and opportunity. Photo Credit: 'Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 1-W1866' Want to see more OLD PHOTOS of the neighbourhood courtesy of the collections held by the Auckland Library? A superb resource. The Lightweight “O” in O’Connell St and other installations Mentioned as “coming soon” in the July Snippets, the reflective Lightweight O is a fascinating watch offering differing perspectives. Check it out – simple but effective, as the sun changes and the wind blows. More detail HERE from Heart of the City on this artwork funded via the City Centre Targeted Rate. Are you one of those who have been asking what was happening behind the blacked out fences at the High Court? It’s a “garden” is a memorial to former High Court Judge, Sir Robert Chambers Sadly now mired in a level of controversy. Another art space = Tiramarama Way – a new and fascinating laneway in the Wynyard Quarter with stars lit from above and a pathway of the shoreline below, it’s also worth a wandering gander.
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