Recovery Clinic: Is there a doctor in the house?

Freerange Press are running a “Recovery Clinic” this weekend, at Smash Palace, from 12 till 6pm. When we released the book – Once in a Lifetime, if you’re keeping score at home – part of our rationale was that we’d have a continuing dialog about the city and recovery. So almost a year on from the book’s release, we’re having this clinic. We’ll have our one Doctor, Ryan Reynolds, as well as our two almost-doctors, myself and Barnaby Bennett. Completing the editorial team, Emma Johnson, organiser extraordinaire, will also be in the building. Plus plus plus! We’ve got some of the authors who contributed to the book coming down at various times in the afternoon. The idea for the afternoon is that you can come down and have a conversation with one or all of us about the state of the rebuild. Maybe you’ve got some ideas. Maybe you hated one of the chapters in the book and want to admonish us personally. Maybe you just like drinking beer and hanging around in pubs.

We will be selling copies of the book at crazy discount prices! There’s more info about the event here, and the Facebook event here.

Hope to see some of you down there!

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Moore Power

I don’t know how he does it. Alongside running one bar, Smash Palace, and building another, Brick Farm, Johnny Moore still manages to find time to churn out a column for the paper every week. They are consistently some of the best analysis that gets printed in the paper. This week’s was on point:

In a town that has mountains of paperwork to climb before you even think about building, lumping a heap of extra rules into the mix is not the type of thing that excites developers or people wanting to build. Ask anyone that has built anything substantial since the earthquakes what portion of their total cost was consumed by paperwork and you will be staggered. Add to that the expense of foundations and it doesn’t leave much to throw at a building.

Then you get well-intentioned but ultimately idiotic planning in areas like the South Frame and it becomes clear that there is little incentive to build in the central city, let alone in any of the designated precincts.

If you want more insight like this, then pick up the paper every Thursday – or you could wait until our book, Once In A Lifetime: City Building after Disaster in Christchurch comes out in late August, as he has an essay in that!

(for updates on Brick Farm, check the Facebook page)