Take a tour through Addington, New Zealand, and learn about its heritage. In collaboration with Christchurch City Council’s Heritage Team and the Addington Neighbourhood Association, we developed a mobile app for Christchurch’s suburb Addington. In the app, heritage information is presented to both citizens and tourists. The heritage data is curated through a collaboration of the CCC’s heritage group with the Christchurch Library.

The mobile app is an opportunity to unlock and disseminate data from ongoing citizen consultations and heritage collections, and to promote Addington’s heritage to visitors and locals. The project promotes sustainability in serving as a model project of an app for disseminating previously-collected data that would be typically hidden from both visitors and locals. Engaging in the process of heritage information dissemination furthers the CCC’s commitment to open data access. It allows citizens and visitors to engage in a playful manner with the rich heritage of Addington, capturing the intangible aspects of heritage such as memories/stories which have the power to make mundane artefacts come to life. The app will serve both as a record of Addington’s history and an expression of its evolving cultural identity.

This project and the resulting app will serve as a pilot for the development of further location-based apps for Christchurch community groups. The project is funded by the Christchurch Innovation and Sustainability Fund. It was conceived in conversations about a related project with the CCC Heritage team, and is thus an offspring of the Urban Narrative project (funded by Building Better Homes, Towns & Cities National Science Challenge).

The Addington Neighbourhood Association provided many resources, among others the sources of their book ‘Local Lives: A History of Addington’. Special thanks go to John Wilson who generously shared his research with us. The book can be ordered form the neighbourhood association.

Addington Heritage app

The Addington Heritage will be available free — currently it is only available for registered test users from Google play store or the App Store.

Once you download it, you can:

• Explore places in Addington
• Explore stories and people connected with Addington
• Go for self-guided tours through Addington
• Learn about the CCC Heritage Strategy

Version 1.0 (launch late 2019)