Life in Vacant Spaces – The Future is a Mystery
Non-profit organisation Life in Vacant Spaces (LiVS) is changing itself alongside the cityscape it has been helping to beautify and transform for more than a decade.
Since 2012, LiVS has facilitated creative projects and installations around the city, by brokering relationships between imaginative, ideas people and owners of ‘vacant’ land. The organisation is now refocusing its efforts.
“We have to ebb and flow with people’s lives and the city’s life,” says director Lydia Thomas.
The emphasis now is to ‘grow and go’ a project, by offering short-term help for projects with a limited lifespan or which are likely to become self-sustaining. Installations can also be located beyond the city centre.
“We have to be open to change. The future is a mystery and that’s the joy of it,” says Lydia,
who took up the reins of the organisation last September, after working there as a part-time project manager. She is LiVS’ sole full-time employee.
Lydia is keenly aware that the pandemic has affected how people congregate and interact with the central city, just as the earthquakes did. The organisation was established in 2012.
LiVS specialises in brokering robust, workable relationships with landowners – taking into account relevant city council regulations and requirements – to enable someone’s project to have ‘legs’. They are offering short-term help for projects with a limited lifespan or which are likely to become self-sustaining.
“It doesn’t mean we just kick you out of a location, it means nurturing a project and working with a person and giving them x amount of time to bring their project to life,” Lydia explains.
“If the project’s going really well, and they want to continue, then we might extend [the timeframe] a little bit more and give them stepping stones they can work towards to make their project more independent.”
Some of the more ecologically minded projects that LiVS helped establish include RAD (Recycle A Dungar) Bikes, which fixes up and donates old bikes as well as teaches people bike maintenance, and the tool library Tool Lendery, from which people can borrow tools for a small fee.
“Projects like those that have become on-going are an incredible asset to Christchurch,” says Lydia.
Lydia sees a key part of her role as assisting people to develop workable and implementable ideas, thereby limiting waste of resources and time. Environmentally, she also points to the stewardship factor of temporarily utilising land and buildings that would otherwise languish and deteriorate, or be underutilised, but still require the cost and effort of maintenance.
“If you are activating that space even temporarily, you’re looking after it,” says Lydia, acknowledging that it is the visitors to that space that ultimately beautify the space and create a sense of community.
That’s the ‘profit’ of the work we do, she says.
(February 2024)
