How this works
chch.live is the public record of Christchurch, kept readable: what the city is doing right now, what it has been doing for a decade, and what stood on the ground before any of it.
Who makes this
Kia ora, I’m Merlin Stemmer. I live in Christchurch, and I love this city. chch.live is me trying to make a really cool site about it: one place where what the city is doing, what it has done, and what stood here before can all be found and read.
It’s one person’s project, made for everyone who calls this place home, and it’s not the only thing on the bench. I also made feedthecat.xyz, where a dollar a day puts your web address on a cat’s bowl; marly.studio, which cuts a long video into shorts worth posting; and outbid.nz, where the top bid puts your site on a New Zealand region. If you’ve got an idea, spotted something wrong, or just want to say hello, I’d genuinely love to hear from you, stemmermerlin@gmail.com.
What the site is
Three records, joined up.
- The live feed. Everything the city is doing, water shutoffs, roadworks, resource consents, new licences, earthquakes, weather warnings, civil defence, plus the problems people report, archived every ten minutes after they file them. The front page updates itself.
- The suburb and address archive. Every report since 2015, kept. A suburb page is a decade of its own record; an address page is everything ever reported at one spot, with its valuation, school zones, hazards and bin day alongside.
- The historical record. Christchurch’s heritage register, the papers, and the photograph collections, searchable as documents, and slowly being read into claims and short articles about what stood where. The newspapers get their own shelf at /papers, one page per masthead.
- The calendar. Every day of the year and every year on record is a page, what the archive holds dated to it, next to the reports the feed filed on the same day or inside the same year.
Where the records come from
- Council reports, the Christchurch City Council feed behind Snap Send Solve: dumped rubbish, graffiti, potholes, water leaks. Reported by the public, photographed by the public.
- Council open data, valuations, school zones, flood and hazard layers, bin days, wards and community boards, read live from the council’s ArcGIS services when you open an address.
- Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga and the district plan: the register of scheduled heritage places.
- Papers Past, DigitalNZ, Canterbury Stories and partner collections, the documentary record. The originals always live at the provider; this site keeps the reference, the search and the reading.
- The Ministry of Education’s school directory, every school in the country at /schools: the final 2022 decile, the current Equity Index, and enrolment zones. The ratings describe the community a school draws from, they are not a measure of how well it teaches, and the site says so wherever they appear. Refreshed monthly; a renamed or closed school keeps its page.
- Environment Canterbury’s open map layers, the parks and reserves a suburb page lists, each matched to the suburb its centre falls inside, and the civic shelf, libraries, halls, cemeteries, toilets and the rest of the facility layers, matched by point or centroid the same way. The track network joins the four sibling track layers (walking, bike, horse, off-road) by shape, a line’s capability is which layers claim it, and it belongs to every suburb it passes through. The Cultural Heritage Sites layer stays off the shelf: Kāi Tahu material goes through rūnanga review before it publishes. Refreshed monthly.
- The wire, public posts about Christchurch from the feeds that are still public: r/chch, the fediverse (mastodon.nz tag timelines), NZ news via Google News, The Press’s own feed, Flickr’s christchurch tag, GeoNet’s felt quakes, iNaturalist’s Christchurch sightings, NZ Police releases that name Canterbury, and the council’s meeting diary. The wire relays; it does not endorse and does not verify, every line links out to the place that published it.
Everything above is also downloadable, /data lists every file the site bakes, what each holds and the licence it rides on.
The rules the site keeps
A document that a search ties to a place is something worth reading, not something the site asserts. The shelf and the place pages say so in words, and nothing on the site silently promotes a lead into a fact.
Every paragraph in an article maps to recorded claims, every claim names its sources, and the publish check refuses a piece whose claims rest on one document. When a piece is marked as machine-written that is said on the page, not buried in a footer.
Material about mana whenua history is held back until it has been reviewed with the rūnanga whose story it is.
Documents link out to the institution that keeps them. Rights and permissions recorded on a record are carried with it.
The gaps, said out loud
The report archive starts where the feed starts, there is no 1990 in it. The documentary archive is large and mostly unread: a suburb page can show a document exists without anyone having read it yet, which is why those rows are labelled leads. Suburb names come from the reports themselves, so the feed’s spelling is the site’s spelling.
If a page says something untrue, that is a bug and it will be fixed, the site keeps a public corrections log for exactly that, and the way to file one is a GitHub issue.
Questions, answered briefly
No. The site reads the council’s public feed and open data, and the public archive, but it is an independent project, not a council service.
Every number on them is a count of a public record, a report the council received, a register entry, a document in an archive. The source is named next to the number. What the site does not do is promise a document says something until a person has read it.
The site’s own writing and design, yes. The documents and photographs it links to belong to the providers that keep them, each record carries the rights field it arrived with, and the original is always linked.
Because a search found it, and nobody has read it yet. The site keeps the difference between "the archive holds this" and "this is what the archive says" visible on purpose.
Colophon
Static pages over a small archive API; a SQLite database of the city’s record; a reading desk where sources are reviewed before anything is claimed. No tracking beyond the host’s own analytics, no accounts, no paywall.
The archive API is open, every page on this site is built from it. api.chch.live answers JSON, and llms.txt lists the routes in plain language. Everything that moves can also be followed as a feed, the city, a suburb, or a single street each carry an RSS address, linked in the head of their pages.