About.
My Background
After the disastrous earthquakes in Christchurch in 2010, I co-founded and spent more than a decade immersed in Gap Filler, which began as a quake response initiative and grew into one of the leading placemaking agencies and consultancies in Aotearoa New Zealand. My work is always at the crossroads of community development, urban design, art and public intervention - creating the conditions for engaging, experimental and playful encounters to connect people to place. I have founded, run and supported numerous organisations and initiatives for getting people more involved in shaping the places where they live. I have played nearly every role including volunteer, CEO, board member, strategic advisor, business development lead and more. I'm a big picture strategic thinker with strong creative and analytical skills and a focus on creating momentum with tangible things delivered on the ground.
My first degree was in aeronautical engineering. I loved the practical problem solving and the collaborative, iterative approach of developing prototypes in the lab, trialling them, getting feedback, tweaking… But I struggled to find opportunities for work that felt meaningful to me.I overreacted, and decided to jump from the USA to Christchurch New Zealand to do a year of study in Humanities. Then they offered me a chance to get a BA degree in just one more year, so I took it. Then a masters scholarship and… well, I have a PhD on social change via arts interventions and have been living in Aotearoa for nearly 25 years now.I spent a decade working in the arts, as a university lecturer, in the alternative film distribution world and with an experimental theatre ensemble trying to provoke social and political change – as a writer, actor, musician and intermedial designer. Where engineering was practical but not meaningful enough, I often felt my artistic work was meaningful but not practical enough, tangible enough, immediate enough.The devastating Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 created a necessity and opportunity to bring these strands together. A small group of us founded Gap Filler, combining my background and interest in social change via arts with the public space expertise of urban design and (landscape) architecture - with the immediacy of community action.
Gap Filler transformed our quake-ravaged city with creative community-led projects popping up in the ruins, and rose to international prominence with plaudits in the New York Times, Guardian, Lonely Planet and films such as The Human Scale with Jan Gehl.I founded Life in Vacant Spaces as a service-based organisation (inspired by Renew Newcastle) to help grow the ecosystem and creative community movement in post-quake Christchurch, and supported the formation and growth of numerous other social enterprises.From 2014, I started getting approaches to help other towns and cities with urban regeneration and civic participation. Interestingly, the first places to get in touch hadn’t experienced natural disasters or widespread decay; they were already some of the most liveable places in the world – Auckland, Melbourne, Fremantle – and wanted to keep finding ways to channel the passions, skills and energies of their residents into growing better places.The calls kept coming and I’ve done work and given presentations in Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and outside the main Australian centres. And then Nepal, England, Taiwan, Sweden, Denmark, Hong Kong – whilst carrying on Gap Filler’s important work in Christchurch and supporting smaller New Zealand towns and cities like Timaru.
I kept close academic connections and research strands throughout. I hosted a dozen or more domestic and international interns and postgraduate students doing work with and about Gap Filler. And I have had postdoctoral positions and roles in Environmental Management, Landscape Architecture and Design in New Zealand, Australia and Denmark.All of this work in urban regeneration and community participation often gets called placemaking these days. But I’ve been working on applying this people- and place-centred approach to many things: book editing; property development; climate adaptation; and more.I started my own consultancy in 2023 and have been developing placemaking processes and resources for local governments; developing a curatorial framework for a national public art programme; helping finalise a city regeneration masterplan; developing a programme for community-led climate adaptation planning; and delivering online sessions on ‘urban prototyping’ for cities throughout Europe.I love applying community and participatory processes and principles to all sorts of spheres. If you think I might be able to help, please get in touch!