If you’ve been through George Street recently, you’ll have probably noticed that something big is going down. You probably wondered to yourself why, as a driver, you have to strategise like you’re on fucking Mission Impossible to get from point A to B, or noting the bounty of road cones to come back for on the piss. This is the DCC’s ‘Totally Georgeous’ retail quarter revamp. Critic Te Ārohi had a yarn with project director Glen about what students can expect to gain from the upgrades, and how they’re tracking so far.
At its core, the retail quarter upgrades are a replacement of all our underground infrastructure for drinking water, storm water, and sewage (ahem, three waters) which has been there since the 1880s. Infrastructure upgrades may sound like a snoozefest, but that’s where your water comes from and where your shit goes. Pretty important. Glen said that, when making the plans to upgrade the infrastructure, the council at the time thought, “Well, if we’re gonna dig the whole thing up, we might as well not put it back exactly the same.”
Consultation for the project found passionate views on either side of the spectrum of what the new and improved street would look like: keep it exactly the same, or fully pedestrianise it. Glen said that, in his mind, the one-way system with broader pedestrian areas is “kind of a compromise position between two opposing views.” It was designed in partnership with local iwi and includes many elements representing ties between Māori and Pākehā, such as stencils of barracuda that were one of the first things traded between the two groups. The completed block just before the Octagon “seems to be working pretty well,” he said.
Student groups from the Uni, Polytech, OUSA, Polytech Students Association, and Generation Zero were consulted. Predictably, boomers didn’t want anything to change and thought that students shouldn’t get a say since most of us don't hang around that long anyway. “I think that’s a silly argument,” said Glen, “because there’s always going to be students. So while those students might move on, there’s always going to be more students to replace them.” Like shark teeth. Or road cones.
He said he’d like to look at it in a different way: “If we provide a really amazing place to live in with lots of street vibrancy and it's a place that people feel comfortable and safe to be, they might decide not to leave… That’s ultimately what we want.”
As one of the most prominent university cities in the country (not that that’s a long list), Glen also said that they wanted to make the city a place young people wanted to come to. “We had a lot of feedback from students who had come here from other places saying, ‘We see pedestrianisation, we see shared spaces elsewhere. Why don’t we have them here?’ And it’s a good question.”
One cool thing about the street upgrades is that they have retractable bollards at the end of each block, which will essentially enable the DCC to block off areas of the street on an as-needed basis. Glen said that the possibilities with this could be endless, with opportunities for things like small festivals or graduation ceremonies.
As a past Otago Uni student himself, Glen said he had a good idea of what the street needed in terms of “student-proofing” - namely, a “robust” built environment “that can be cleaned.” When they were planning an “interactive space” (a playground) outside Meridian Mall, he responded to concerns about students fucking with it with: “We don't see that as a reason not to do something… We would rather just put something that's robust that we recognize students are probably gonna use when they're drunk on a Saturday night, and that's okay because why should we not have fun?”
Construction for the project is currently on the block between Rob Roy and Knox Church, unfortunately for the residents of flats along this stretch. Many noise complaints? “Oh, yes,” laughed Glen. It’s been a constant challenge, he said, where “the businesses don’t want us to work during the day and would ideally like us to just work at night, and the people who live there obviously would rather us do it during the day.” They understand and apologise to those residents who are disrupted by the construction, saying they do their best to “avoid busy periods like exam time.” He encouraged anyone having issues to “reach out and chat to us because we can normally work around things.” You can get in contact through this email: gcasey@isaac.co.nz.
Other public frustration has come from construction on Great King Street, which “has been a real challenge for us,” said Glen, “but that is coming to an end at the end of April, beginning of May.” With the multi-level parking building, New World, and the fact that it is right next to the bus hub, they have been unable to completely block Great King St off to do the work that needs to be done. “It’s like the perfect storm of things to go wrong,” said Glen. “We, again, understand that it's causing some horrible delays to the buses and we apologise for that, but that should all hopefully come to any end at the end of this month.” And it sounds like we will all breathe a collective sigh of relief when it does (Glen in particular).
Overall, the project is currently tracking six months ahead of schedule, expecting to be done by April next year rather than the originally projected October 2024 finish. How’s the University’s hall work tracking?