UC Arts Digital Lab manager Kaspar Middendorf and Our Stories director Kris Herbert test the Earthquake Stories Walk. Photo: Supplied / Our Stories Trust
A Christchurch Trust hopes a new earthquake oral history walk will encourage locals yet to set foot in the city centre again to come back.
Twelve years ago today, the city was rocked by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake which claimed 185 lives.
Our Stories Trust and Canterbury University have created the Earthquake Stories Walk, a 30-minute trail based on the anonymous experiences of about 30 people.
Trust director Kris Herbert said it provided a link to pre-earthquake Christchurch.
"We have about 30 different voices, memories of people who were in the city on February 22, 2011. And it's their memories of these specific places that you hear as you walk through the city.
"The Earthquake Stories Walk literally brings history to the streets where it can be shared and understood in context."
Earthquake Stories Walk was developed to bring the CEISMIC audio archive to life in the central city. Photo: Supplied / Our Stories Trust
One person in the recorded audio said: "I was on the fifth floor of the Forsyth Barr building. We discovered that the stairwells were down ... We realised that we have to get ourselves out of here. The guys were trying to smash this plate-glass window with a coat rack. I remember thinking when I first looked out the window, I'm not going out there."
The audio had been hand-picked from the digital CEISMIC archive of earthquake footage, Herbert said.
"We don't want to re-traumatise people, but we do want to keep the memories alive. It's a big part of what defines us as a community, as a city and as individuals, so we want to honour those memories," she said.
"There are still some people who do not want to come back into the central city, because they can't really see the connection between the pre-quake and post-quake city. We hope that this might be a way that we can help people to make sense of their city."
Earthquake Stories Walk at Bridge of Remembrance. Photo: Supplied / Our Stories Trust
It also provided visitors with personal accounts of the earthquakes and an insight into the ongoing rebuild, Herbert said.
"We have a lot of visitors in the central city. I've personally noticed in the last few months, post-Covid, people wandering round the central city and being curious about the Cathedral.
"Quake City Museum has also been busy with lots of visitors, because it is something of interest to people ... We wanted [the experiences] to be accessible to them."
The walk begins at the Quake City Museum and the audio can be accessed via the Our Stories website.
If successful, further trails across the city could follow, Herbert said.
Watch RNZ's Fragments podcast series produced to mark the 10th anniversary of the quake.