This article explores the scope of small-scale radio to create an auditory geography of place. It focuses on the short-term art radio project The Stadium Broadcast, which was staged in November 2014 in an earthquake-damaged sports stadium in Christchurch, New Zealand. Thousands of buildings and homes in Christchurch have been demolished since the February 22, 2011, earthquake, and by the time of the broadcast the stadium at Lancaster Park had been unused for three years and nine months, and its future was uncertain. The Stadium Broadcast constructed a radio memorial to the Park’s 130-year history through archival recordings, the memories of local people, observation of its current state, and a performed site-specificity. The Stadium Broadcast reflected on the spatiality of radio sounds and transmissions, memory, postdisaster transitionality, and the impermanence of place.

The radio signals transmitted by wireless technologies create a form of space that is pervasive but intangible to human senses. The multiplicity of radio waves is most commonly represented through the trope of ‘radio spectrum’, but this paper argues that this construct is too limited to communicate the extensive presence of radio waves in the environment, their relationship with human subjectivity, and the technical, economic, political and cultural dimensions of wireless transmission and reception. The space of wirelessness is conceptualised in this paper as a ‘spectrumscape’, a dynamic presence in the environment that is also a dimension of global flows, imbued with relationships of power and financial interests.

Local independent radio stations in Christchurch, New Zealand, had their operations severely disrupted by major earthquakes in September 2010 and February 2011. This article examines the experiences of three radio stations that were shut out of their central city premises by the cordon drawn around the city after the 22 February quake. One of the stations continued broadcasting automatically, while the others were unable to fully get back on air for several weeks afterwards. All of the stations had to manage access to workspaces, the emotional needs of staff and volunteers, the technical ability to broadcast, and the need to adapt content appropriately when back on air. For the locally based radio managers decisions had to be made about the future of the stations in a time of significant emotional, physical, and geological upheaval. The article explores how these radio stations were disrupted by the earthquake, and how they returned to air through new combinations and interconnections of people, workspace, technology, content and transmission. Keywords disaster independent radio New Zealand radio Christchurch earthquake Iwi (Maori) radio local radio

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The radio signals transmitted by wireless technologies create a form of space that is pervasive but intangible to human senses. The multiplicity of radio waves is most commonly represented through the trope of ‘radio spectrum’, but this paper argues thai this construct is too limited to communicate the extensive presence of radio waves in the environment, their relationship with human subjectivity, and the technical, economic, political and cultural dimensions of wireless transmission and reception. The space of wirelessness is conceptualised in this paper as a ‘spectrumscape’, a dynamic presence in the environment that is also a dimension of global flows, imbued with relationships of power and financial interests.