About Gap Filler

Gap Filler is a globally acclaimed creative social enterprise that works with communities – and the public and private sectors – to design and deliver placemaking strategies and programmes that are the foundation for long-term community outcomes. We create installations, events and processes to make places more memorable, fun, participatory, surprising, equitable and sociable. Our testing ground is Ōtautahi Christchurch, where since 2010 our prolific and diverse output has invited people to experiment, engage in and reshape a place undergoing vast and rapid change. Our work has helped shift the identity of our conservative Garden City to “a city where anything is possible” (Christchurch City Council Strategic Framework, 2018). Drawing on this evolutionary experience, we deliver strategies, installations and support services all around Aotearoa New Zealand and the world.

Our Reasons For Being

Gap Filler invites people to have ‘everyday’ encounters outside their everyday selves and habits, and in so doing imagine and experience a different possible world that is more fun, participatory, surprising, equitable and sociable. A world in which they might play a new part. We get strangers dancing on street corners, workmates making music together, and grandparents and grandkids jumping on giant video game controllers.

Gap Filler conducts our experimental interventions in highly visible and public ways, to be accessible and inclusive, to add vitality to places, to demonstrate possibilities to the world and to inspire others to have, and try, their own experiments.

Gap Filler takes a holistic approach, designing unique public installations whilst also exploring and promoting novel legal agreements, organisational processes, financial mechanisms, governance structures and policies that underpin strong communities.

We are engaged and responsive, and help grow wider public awareness of civic issues. We give people (implicit) permission to become active citizens, and create opportunities for people to find their own voices and avenues for participation beyond the traditional and sanctioned modes on offer.

 We invent safe ways around the obstacles that prevent positive social change and will often act as an intermediary or guarantor: we are happy to do some of the risk-taking that government agencies and large institutions aren’t set up for.

 As we all face the global environmental challenges of the present and future, we must continually reflect, reimagine and redesign our systems, processes and actions to meet the needs and new potentials that arise. Gap Filler makes systemic social change feel desirable, eminently possible and a natural evolution from the global placemaking work already underway. We strive to make the act of reimagining the world joyful, tangible and infectious.

Gap Filler is a social enterprise and registered charitable trust that works with all manner of community groups, companies, business associations, residents associations, local and regional governments, transport and development agencies, property developers and more.

Supporters

We are grateful for the many companies – big and small -, trusts, philanthropists and more who have supported and believed in our work over the years. THANK YOU. There are too many to list. 

We currently receive funding from Christchurch City Council’s Enliven Places Fund to support the delivery of five charitable projects in Christchurch city each year. We are grateful for CCC’s support of our work since the very early days of Gap Filler.

We have also received funding over the years from the Rātā Foundation, Creative New Zealand, , Lotteries, MSD, the TIndall Foundation, the Todd Foundation and the Red Cross. Kia ora and thank you all.