ABSTRACT
In Chapter 5, “A City of Gaps,” I examine how Christchurch’s High Street Stories aims to restore a sense of place to a neighbourhood levelled by devastating earthquakes in 2010–2011 (and by subsequent redevelopment). The locative app in Christchurch is at once a mourning of what has been lost and an attempted reclamation of the social character of the city’s downtown core. It patches together a fractured cityscape, allowing the city to re-mediate the ruin while it waits to rebuild. High Street Stories offers an opportunity to consider how a locative app helps reinstate the normative aesthetic ordering of a tourist destination where there is “nothing to see” and where the streetscape is being rapidly transformed. This chapter examines the sensory experience of exploring post-earthquake Christchurch through High Street Stories, including the parallel narratives and urban imaginaries which the app encounters amidst the gaps in the city’s streetscape.
