Waiting for the neighbours in new suburbia

Friday, 20 January 2017

New homes fan out across the plains on the western fringe of Christchurch. Wigram Skies from the air.

Philip Matthews wonders what is taking shape in Christchurch's new subdivisions.

Scientists will tell you that time travel is an impossibility but the actual future is already happening in empty fields to the west of Christchurch. There are slips in time, or wrinkles. Strange tricks of technology.

New homes line up in Knights Stream Park in Halswell.

I park the car in a partially built suburb near Halswell. Some houses are finished but look unoccupied. I am lost somewhere within the usual boundaries of the city and have an approximate sense of north and south but not much else. Maps have become useless. There is a street name on a sign nearby but when I punch the name into my Google Maps app, nothing comes up. Nothing in Christchurch anyway.

There is a street with this name in Auckland and at least one in Australia. But I am still, I think, in Christchurch. The creation of new streets for new houses in new subdivisions seems to be moving faster than the software updates.

New houses sit under a blue Canterbury sky in the Knights Stream Park subdivision in Halswell.

All this newness has a science-fiction quality. You think of the carefully manicured, uniform streets and homes in films like The Truman Show and Her or the third series of Black Mirror, where calm, anonymous suburbia is the highest aspiration. People are shifting into these new streets and houses and waiting for the neighbours.

It makes a pleasant change. We used to be about disaster tourism in Christchurch. For about three summers in a row, I took the same visitor from Auckland on melancholy tours of the residential red zone to look at the steady return to nature. Each year, the trees would be bigger, more houses would have disappeared and roads would have become even less distinct. I wanted to show him a particular cul-de-sac in Avonside but we couldn't find it. There were only skeletal outlines of streets, fences and lawns.

The monotony of new housing is broken by the occasional playground as in this Halswell subdivision.

The red zone made for great photos. The last house standing. The people who refused to leave. The once-loved gardens and the fruit trees that haven't noticed that the people have gone. Maybe a garage full of sad junk that signified decades of family life. You were tripping over profound meanings wherever you went.

But there is nothing left to see in the east. Disaster tourism has exhausted itself and can be replaced by future tourism, so you drive west, to suburbs and towns like Halswell, Wigram, Lincoln, Rolleston and West Melton, where replacement streets have been laid out and new homes keep spreading, swallowing up farmland and lining the edges of new motorways that reduce traffic times to the busy south-west.

Pedestrians are largely absent from new suburbs such as Faringdon in Rolleston.

The city's centre of gravity has shifted with it, across the plains and away from the sea. The confusing Halswell intersection, with its variable speed limits and tricky layout, is about to get much busier and even more confusing. A new swimming pool and library complex is built for crowds of children. It felt like a country town just a few years ago.

Sometimes the new Christchurch hides inside the contours of the old one. It can still seem like an optical illusion when you turn off from the busy, light-industrial Main South Rd at the familiar Harvard plane, drive along quieter, sedate streets to the Air Force Museum and suddenly, vast new tracts of suburbia open up. The Wigram Skies subdivision was planned before the earthquakes but it was accelerated afterwards and houses are spreading fast.

A playground and basketball court in the Faringdon subdivision are eerily quiet at the height of summer.

There is a radial layout of streets from a supermarket in the centre, a high point visible across the flat land. You can see the World War II-era Air Force control tower as well, thoughtfully left intact in the development. There is a retirement home, which is a village within a village.

The Wigram Skies subdivision mixes Ngai Tahu mythology and Air Force history. On one hand there are streets named Corsair, Skyhawk, Squadron and even Contrail. On the other, there are Ngai Tahu bird motifs scattered around the Landing shopping centre, designed by artist Priscilla Cowie.

The Landing, which comes at the end of the Runway, logically enough, is the purest expression of a future that has not yet arrived. The carpark is never more than a third full. A fish and chip shop called Fush does well and there are left-of-field franchises like Hell Pizza and Joe's Garage, but many stores are empty. Ngai Tahu Property posters tell potential tenants what local shoppers still need: 'Could this be your shop? … We're dreaming of a florist here … The locals said they'd really love a dentist or an audiologist … Perfect for health and beauty, could this be you?'

Wigram Skies and other new suburbs tell you that the near future will still be car based. These are not pedestrian suburbs. You rarely see anyone walking. The monotony of housing is broken by occasional playgrounds and childcare centres but there are no corner stores and few community facilities. No churches. Shopping is the communal activity.

You drive to shared experiences: chain restaurants, chain stores, even chain preschools. I go twice to the Muffin Break at the Landing for coffee and there are no children there either time, but there are toys and high chairs in the corners. Again, this is a place built on expectation.

We have stopped mourning the disappearance of something, as we have done so often since 2010, and are now waiting for the appearance of something. There is the simplicity of hope and ordinary happiness. Signs that promise the 'lifestyle you can afford' invariably feature small, happy children running towards the viewer.

The safe feeling of a suburb as incubator is repeated in other subdivisions. Quiet streets, low expectations, leisurely weekends free of the drudgery that was a previous generation's curse. Small lawns and houses easily maintained. Many of these subdivisions have just one road in and out. No one is driving through and when you are home, you pull up the drawbridge on the world.

Are we building a child-friendly city in Christchurch? The Margaret Mahy Playground says we are, but otherwise we still move family life and child-raising to the outskirts and have an impression of the city as a place for business and a place somehow less safe. All the imagery says families want open space and greenery and sheltered neighbourhoods.

That word. 'Live in a neighbourhood, not a subdivision,' says one real estate sign. There is not much of either yet, but the 'you are here' circle on an artist's impression of a future neighbourhood says that people will gather in some open communal space on this very spot. Maybe in two years, maybe in five years.

Sometimes the suburbs tell you what you want from life, in case you forget. In the Faringdon subdivision at Rolleston, where the line of the Port Hills has disappeared from the horizon and hot, dusty winds remind you that you are on the plains, signs on median strips advertise Faringdon itself: 'Love the lifestyle', 'Love the smiles', 'Love the community', 'Love the weekends'. It is like living in a real estate brochure.

At Preston Downs in West Melton, the signage is more prosaic, like mission statements crafted by some agency: 'Extending the wider West Melton community', 'Extensive network of walks and cycleways', 'Preston Downs – a place to call home', 'Preston Downs – rich in history'.

These are just a selection of new places you may have to search for on future maps of Christchurch. Platinum Grove, Broken Run, Brusio Estate, Redmund Spur, Cole Fields, Devon Park, Beaumont Park, Halkett Grove. Call them micro-suburbs. The names have nostalgic echoes, suggesting something bucolic. At Delamain at Yaldhurst, a small collection of streets has a French theme: Roullet Lane, Jacques Way, Cognac Drive, Philippe Ave.

British science fiction writer and social visionary JG Ballard used to talk about suburbia as the end-point of western civilisation. He meant it in a good way, as the goal we all aim for. Some material comfort, some privacy. We are supposed to scoff at the square appeal of the suburbs. We are supposed to prefer urban living and should repopulate the centre of old cities. But Ballard understood that the suburbs are like a map of the inside of your head.

He wrote that, 'In the late 1960s the 20th century at last arrived and began to transform the Thames Valley into a pleasing replica of Los Angeles, with all the ambiguous but heady charms of alienation and anonymity.

'For me, this inter-urban landscape of marinas, research labs, hypermarkets and industrial parks represent the most hopeful face of Britain at the end of the century. We live in the suburbs, among the video shops, take-aways and police speed-check cameras, and we might as well make the most of them, since there is nowhere else to go.'

So it is in Christchurch. Video stores have mostly disappeared since Ballard wrote that but the untroubled uniformity of the new suburbs still feels hopeful. And where else is there to go?