Christchurch’s Central City Business Association manager Paul Lonsdale has told The Press that he is exploring plans to install speakers in Stewart Plaza, a part of the central business district, to play “nice, easy listening” music to calm behaviour, and in the words of Press reporter Charlie Gates “control intimidating youths”. The technique has been used overseas as a way to make places unattractive to young people.

Lonsdale has drawn the line however at using a device that makes a high-pitched noise that only young people can hear, something else that has been used in other countries to disperse teenagers. Such an idea was “too aggressive” and “not very PC”. The fact that such a device has been conceived, developed, manufactured, and utilised raises a number of questions about the global society we live in, but even the less “aggressive” idea should be a concern.

City centre community constable Nigel Heslop has called the plan a “classic example of how a local community can do something”. Heslop’s idea of “community” presumably excludes those of a certain age, or income. Solutions to percived social ‘problems’ advocated by the likes of the Central City Business Association (not to mention their allies on the city council) are not really about “community” at all, they are about retail and tourism (Christchurch and Canterbury Tourism chief executive Christine Prince also endorsed the plan) The retail and tourism interests in Christchurch want shoppers spending money, not the moneyless youth that congregate in Stewart Plaza.

In 2007, when a fountain on the current Stewart Plaza site was demolished, a number of young people protested, their spokesperson told The Press “Young people are being made to feel unwelcome. The hack circle [since then also demolished] and the fountain are not great places, but it is all you have when you have no money. They can’t shut us up and just drive us out of the city.” Years later and youth are still unwanted and unwelcome in Christchurch.