Suva’s significance – Academic urges vote with your feet, be at the next consultation

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The vacant land along Nasese between Pacific Theological College and Fiji National University’s Catering School in Suva. The writer says this piece of land is earmarked for a $600 million project. A consultation which was supposed to be held last year, on Boxing Day, did not happen. Picture: SOPHIE RALULU

A public consultation was meant to be held at the Royal British Legion on Wednesday to consider the Tian Lun Square Development along Queen Elizabeth Drive.

Purportedly worth $600million, this construction is proposed on land between the Pacific Theological College and the FNU Nasese Campus, stretching from Ratu Sukuna Rd to the seafront, including a marina on the water.

It is reasonable for Suva residents to be suspicious of such an audacious plan. The initial meeting was proposed for Boxing Day in 2022, an unusual timing to choose given most were on holiday.

A new meeting was scheduled, but the newspaper advertisement did not specify a location; another red-flag. On Tuesday the meeting at the Royal British Legion was postponed due to a “sewage problem”.

The plan proposes to construct a number of high-rise offices, hotels and residential blocks.

Those on the daily commute to town have long become accustomed to the high-rise monstrosities on the Suva peninsula.

The WG Friendship Plaza work began in 2016 and has been marred by controversy — questions about the quality of the building’s steel structure in 2018; a stop-work order for allegedly breaking boundary laws in 2019; the death of a construction worker who fell from a fourth floor in 2020; a falling block of cement in high winds in 2021; and a winding up notice in 2022.

Additions to the MHCC building on Nubukalou Creek have also been controversial – in 2018, customers observed cracks and water pouring from the ceiling of the food court.

It is little wonder why ordinary Suva residents may be cautious about a plan to add more high-rises to the Suva horizon. There is also fatigue and frustration, understandably, from residents in Nasese who have endured protracted road works along Queen Elizabeth Drive.

This has affected parents who send their children to Veiuto Primary or Suva Grammar schools, and those who enjoy the local parks and footpaths each day, all of whom have observed the snailslow progress of the $66million project road upgrade that started in October 2019.

This upgrade was recently delayed by another eight months. Suva residents might reasonably ask, if a $66million roads project can run month over time, how long will a $600million project take?

The potentially disastrous environmental impact was outlined by the general secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches, Reverend James Bhagwan, who uploaded videos of the mangrove swamps that stand in the way of a proposed 500-metre marina.

Mr Bhagwan regularly draws attention to the pollution in our waterways and oceans as he rides his stand-up paddleboard along the coastline, and a recent USP study argues 68 per cent of fish in the Suva Coastal Area have some form of microplastic in them.

Tian Lun promises “an integrated urban community” that will provide “a gathering place for residents’ shopping” and “an ideal all-round city with high quality, making it the centre of the public life in Suva”.

Such a statement begs the question, what is the ideal city that Suva residents aspire to create? What do Suva residents value in their city, and how do they use the city?

Such questions have important historical significance, going back all the way to the first indigenous inhabitants who were relocated by the colonial government to make way for a new capital.

Those colonial officials had their own ideas of what an “integrated urban community” looked like, an image which has been challenged and modified over the twentieth century by ordinary people, both traditional landowners and migrants alike.

Last year, two books were published on the history of Suva. The first, by Robert Kay, updated the 1978 book by Albert Schutz titled Suva: A History and Guide. The second was an edited collection of different histories of the capital titled Suva Stories by ANU Press.

Both books do not mention the high-rises of Suva as its defining feature. The spaces for gathering that are most popular in Suva — the ivi trees, parks and ocean — are natural spaces where people can escape the hot concrete and steel of the city.

The most exciting spaces in Suva — the marketplace, the BBQ stands, the restaurants are not constructed for an elite shopping community.

For many Suva residents who are struggling to earn a living day to day, and who live in crowded informal settlements under threat of eviction, a half a billion dollar investment in urban real estate for the rich and famous may be difficult to justify.

I have only lived here a short while, but perhaps the best examples of an integrated urban community in the capital are in our informal settlements rather than our highest buildings and prime city locations.

On February 6, 2019 I wrote an article for The Fiji Times in response to a plan to build an embassy on land next to the Fiji Museum which was once part of the original village of Suva. Like this plan, the historical significance was one of many reasons why such a plan was fraught from the beginning.

Thanks to a strong push back by the residents of Suva, including a petition delivered from Suvavou, that plan was withdrawn.

We can take hope in this small victory that change is possible.

A new government brings with it new hope that ordinary Suva residents will have a voice in how their city is managed in the future. The promise of municipal council elections is one significant first step, but in the meantime you can vote with your feet by attending the next public consultation.

• Nicholas Halter is a lecturer in History at USP. Suva Stories: A History of Fiji can be downloaded free online from the ANU Press website, and Suva: A History and Guide by Robert Kay is available on Amazon.

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