Walking Memories: From the Red Zone to the City on the Tenth Anniversary of the Canterbury Earthquakes

Abstract

SummaryThis piece of creative nonfiction prose explores memory, landscape, and materiality in the “Red Zone” of Christchurch (Ōtautahi), New Zealand—a formerly residential area devastated by an earthquake in 2011 and subsequently turned into a public green space. The writing is informed by my intermittent ethnographic fieldwork in Christchurch—a European settler‐colonial city established on Ngāi Tahu (indigenous Māori) lands—which has spanned ten years. In recent trips, influenced by a phenomenological lens and sensory methodologies, I began to incorporate walking into my research practice. The walk described in this piece took place on the tenth anniversary of the deadly quake. It begins at the earthquake memorial site in the middle of the urban center, then moves from the Otakaro River Corridor in the Eastern suburbs back towards the city. The journey enables thinking about ruins, hauntings, and the tension between official and alternative narratives of progress—acknowledging the material agencies of the more‐than‐human world as part of this. I reflect on the accesses granted by walking, connecting grief and trauma to dis/oriented movement, materiality, and texture; considering the possibilities for people to work on, as well as walk on, these collective landscapes of memory.