Gap Filler — Community-Led Temporary Reuse of Earthquake-Vacant Sites in Christchurch

The September 2010 and February 2011 Canterbury earthquakes destroyed much of central Christchurch, leaving hundreds of vacant lots as buildings were demolished faster than they could be rebuilt. Gap Filler, a community organisation founded after the first quake and expanded after the second, began temporarily activating these empty gravel sites with music, art, markets and public installations — low-cost, low-risk experiments that could double as placeholders until permanent redevelopment arrived.

Gap Filler worked alongside Life in Vacant Spaces (LiVS), which negotiated directly with landowners to match community projects to empty sites. Notable projects include the Dance-O-Mat, a coin-operated outdoor dance floor opened in 2012 that is still a regular fixture of the city, and the Pallet Pavilion at 'The Commons', a temporary venue built from shipping pallets that won a BEST Design Awards Silver in 2013 and was a finalist for the International Award for Public Art in 2014 before The Commons became a lasting space for markets and events.

Academic case studies (published in an IntechOpen collection on urban resilience and in peer-reviewed urban-studies journals) documented the wider transitional-urbanism movement Gap Filler helped anchor: The Conversation reports that over 700 transitional projects were implemented across Christchurch in the decade after the quakes, and researchers found the projects fostered more socially and ecologically connected communities and gave residents a low-stakes way to test new uses for the city before permanent investment.

A fair caveat: this evidence is largely qualitative case-study and journalistic documentation rather than a controlled impact evaluation, and Christchurch's formal, centrally-led rebuild plan running in parallel to these grassroots projects has itself been criticised (including in mainstream press) as slow and underdelivering — the transitional projects are best understood as a resilient community response operating alongside, not a substitute for, that troubled formal process.

Read the full analysis: https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/66155