10 things Regenerate Christchurch can learn from CERA
In April 2011 the government passed the Christchurch Earthquake Recovery Act. This powerful legislation has guided the past 5 years of recovery. It was a difficult time but frankly the success of CERA has been mixed. The 5 year window for the original CERA legislation is about to lapse. New legislation has just unanimously passed through parliament (after significant public and private lobbying) and a new, much smaller organisation, is being created that is run by an independent board jointly appointed by central and local Government. It has been given the lead on making new plans for the greater Christchurch region including the critical areas of the central city, the residential red-zone, and New Brighton. Regenerate Christchurch is being formed over the next few months and I think this is a critical time to have a conversation about the culture and character of the organisation. Here are a few of my thoughts about the lessons we might learn from the past 5 years under CERA.
(Please feel free to make comments on this article — this is a conversation)
1. Stop managing things like we are still in the 20th Century
When CERA was reviewed last year one of the main criticisms was that it was not efficient enough and not business focused enough. I think this analysis couldn’t be more wrong and it signals a terrifying misunderstanding of why CERA and CCDU failed in many areas. Organisations need to start thinking in terms of efficacy in relations to broader outcomes, not just streamlining tasks so they can be ticked off.
As an organisation it became focussed on the projects it thought would deliver the outcomes it was seeking, rather than monitoring its progress against the outcome itself. This is a classic project management fallacy in which the outputs (the things that are made) are confused with the outcomes (what one is actually trying to achieve). The classic example of this in Christchurch is the anchor projects. They created them to develop certainty and build economic growth, but the slavish pre-occupation with these projects ended up creating quite the opposite effect.
I think this is mistake is symptomatic of a bigger problem. We need to realise that a lot of ‘expertise’ at corporate, governance, and management levels is actually not up to facing the problems of our time. (In fact they are hangovers from an age that created so many of the challenges we now face.)
Many people in the community understand this (and battle it daily). It’s the role of leadership to transform this, not get overcome by it. One of the failures of Brownlee’s leadership is that he keeps creating institutional monsters such as EQC and CERA which he in turn loses control of, and then won’t and can’t take responsibility for because of the associated political damage.
We live in a time of stress, uncertainty and change. Cold war management systems, project management approaches, and governance forms that lead most contemporary government institutions are no longer fit for purpose. I think the greatest challenge for Regenerate is to challenge the momentum that these systems have and create more open, adaptive, and responsive structures. In this regard the relatively small size of Regenerate may be a positive compared to the costly and ineffective juggernaut that CERA became.
2. Develop better, and more open, understandings of engaging with citizens
When the Regenerate law passed last week I had a rare moment of completely agreeing with Minister Brownlee. He explained why they did not prescribe the types of consultation required for Regenerate Christchurch saying that different types of project require different forms and types of engagement. He is right, and yet this is exactly the thing we did not see from CERA who seemed terrified of engaging with the public meaningfully — I think because they associated any public interface with big campaigns like Share an Idea and associated them with political risk.
A large amount of the problems that CERA and CCDU had with public engagement was based on the first point above about management approaches. In this view the public is largely understood as a kind of resistance to the real work of ‘getting things done’. Experts do the real work, while the public gets in the way. In reality, what we’ve seen again and again in Christchurch is that publics are quite knowledgeable and sensitive to what is going on. If you want to find out how EQC is doing, who do you ask, one of the claimants? or Ian Simpson? That should answer the question. People at the coal face of an issue (whether it be flooding, insurance, heritage, transport, ecology, food) ARE the experts.
When I say publics I mean it in the sense developed by John Dewey and Walter Lippman in the 1920s. Dewey and Lippman argue that the public is not a single mass of popular opinions but rather a series of groups that emerge and disappear around particular issues and concerns. I’ve written about this in relation to design here. It is these publics that carry forward the knowledge and intelligence of a problem until it is institutionalised. A healthy public system takes advantage of, and works with these groups, and doesn’t exclude them from the processes. If nothing else this is cheap consultation.
Regenerate has a great opportunity to alter this relationship and to become embedded and supportive of the various communities and publics that drive issues along in Christchurch.
As Brownlee indicated the challenge is to find new ways of doing this. Outside of Maori culture we don’t have a great history of innovative consultation in NZ. But there are significant opportunities: internationally there is burgeoning movements, the local transitional scene illustrated and tested new skills, previous organisations like Gehl Architects (who have completed projects in New York, Sydney, London, Copenhagen and elsewhere) have experience here, and CCC is developing new and more nuanced systems. There is fertile ground, it just needs a bit of faith and open-mindedness.
3. Support local experts
Following on from the last point I’d say that one of the great failures of CERA and CCDU was to lock out local knowledge and to favour ‘experts’ — often from the wrong domain. (the biggest mistake was appointing Warwick Isaacs as the head of CCDU - a nice guy with almost no understanding of urbanism or cities).
Regenerate can start this afresh and develop new ways of engaging with local professionals and experts such as Di Lucas and Evan Smith who know this land and its people so very well. I think it’d be a far smarter use of limited funds to put people like these on retainers or to pay them to lead processes instead of getting outside planners and project managers to write expensive reports that misunderstand basic local knowledge.
I don’t mean this in a parochial sense that no one from outside can contribute or be part of regenerating the city, or that external knowledge and expertise is not critical. In fact I think we have been far too parochial so far and not studied and employed lessons from other post-disaster areas. For example the Shipley review of CERA had no international disaster expertise. This is crazy. We aren’t the first developed country to have these problems. However, any study of post-disaster literature shows that for it to have long lasting integrity local people and local expertise needs to be leading it.
4. Be wary of gods eye planning
Christchurch has long been ruled, divided, and planned from above. The original 1850s plan imposed a British grid on a swampy and vibrant landscape. The more recent CCDU blueprint did much the same with its precincts and anchor projects.
Plans are powerful, useful, and important documents but they are problematic if considered the main tool for organising a city. They imply, too strongly, the lines on the ground are meaningful markers of actions, activities and the flows of goods and peoples. One of the early mistakes of the post-quake process was to isolate the planning of the central city from the broader problems of the city, as if recovery problems could be neatly resolved in isolation from the housing, food growing, transport, and commercial activities of the rest of the city.
There are two techniques to avoid the dominance of the plan in planning:
Firstly, when making designs for an area consider not just the land ownership and land-use, but also the flows and movements through a place with just as much importance. Where do people come from? How do they move? What goods and objects are needed and how do they move? What ecological flows exist, where does water come from, where will it goes when it floods, what about the animals in the water, and other migrations? These questions need to be at the centre of thinking about the city.
All of these things inform a place, its experience, and its function. The lesson is not to plan in isolation, but reach out to the other nodes and connections when thinking of places. If the CCDU plan has been conceived this way the city may have been better considered as series of movements through the place, as streets with different characters that invited different types of behaviour and vibe, instead of understanding it as large blocks to be developed and sold. CCDU always saw the city as a construction and development problem, not an urban one.
The second useful approach is to think about the city in sections. As cuts across the landscape through layers of lived experience, hills, plains, streams, rivers, and the sea and to understand the shifts between these different things as places of occupation and importance. The late Ian Athfield would often talk about the foreshore and the stream edge in this manner. An essay by Urbanist Chris Moller (which was printed in our book Once in a Lifetime here) explores this idea and its application for Christchurch. Sections are important planning tools because they reveal information about depth and height in ways that plans do not register. This is especially important in a city built on a swamp with dodgy soil and a rising tide. Also different sections are needed to understand different parts of the city, across the rivers, down the valleys, cutting across the beach, each adding another later of information.
NOTE: If there is one request in this article it is to please please please resist the urge to use the Regenerate plan to make one strong masterplan for the residential red-zone and then to start implementing that. Instead use the powers to sketch out a vision, work with the community to develop this set of ideas. Then start on a few small parts. This might involve selling part of it for development, but keep the vision and the master plan open for change. Thinking in section and about flows will help this.
5. Understand ecological urbanism properly
I’ve been reading through the summary of the comments from the Share an Idea campaign and it is amazing how many of them were about wanting a greener, more sustainable, and ecologically engaged city. It’s important to understand these as different things. Green often means the experience of lawns, parks, and amenable spaces. These are great, but don’t really indicate any environmental performance — in fact they can be worse than buildings. The planning authorities have taken this request reasonably seriously and developed green pathways through the city. (expanded Avon and east frame). The second is sustainability. One of the first things the CCDU did when they took over the central city plan was to reduce the requirements for sustainability the CCC was trying to implement in the city. While some buildings are relatively mature in this regard, we have not seen the type of across the board transformation of the built environment that was envisioned by people. It’s a tragic lost opportunity as this could have been one of the main selling points/narratives of the rebuild.
Both of these are important for future projects, and need to be done better. However, it is the third that has been most misunderstood and needs the most attention — especially in the residential red-zone.
When buildings, places and ecologies are considered as part of the same entangled systems and not separate things development shifts from a model (above) of ‘doing the least damage possible’ and instead becomes an opportunity to make regenerative changes and improvements to all the systems. Buildings can introduce capital to improve ecologies, they can produce clean water to return to streams, ecological capital like clean air and biodiversity can help things grow and build ecosystems for other things to use. In her recent book Christchurch Ruptures historian Katie Pickles picked up on this “The way to a new start is to reject the imperial mentality of conquering the environment, and instead to work with the surrounds.” (p27).
I’m confident in 20 years we will look back at the post-quake city and see a rich successful and sophisticated piece of infrastructure and amenity in the residential red-zone. This will be the thing we will be most proud of. But to really flourish it needs to reject the thinking that dominated the central city. Thinking ecologically is the first step in this.
6. Be transparent to build trust
I have little doubt that most of the people in CERA were trying their best and had good intentions. Certainly everyone I met was honest, working hard in tough circumstances. But amongst its biggest problems was the governance structure that tied all decisions to a minister and cabinet. It’s a joke when people accuse the opposition of ‘politicising the rebuild’ because the structure they set up from the beginning made it political.
One of the consequences of this is that there was little transparency about decisions, negotiations, engagements or what was going on. It’s long been acknowledged that the large PR department of CERA was there to restrict access to information rather than provide it.
People in Christchurch can handle uncertainly, they can handle bad news, and they can handle decisions being delayed — as long as these are communicated in meaningful and respectful ways. Regenerate needs to build trust from the beginning if it’s going to work, and being transparent, meaningfully transparent, is key to this.
7. Use the power of government, but don’t let their agendas drive decisions
A big chunk of the old CERA is moving into the department of the Prime Minister (DPMC). This is good. In parliament the other day Brownlee was saying that the well resourced DPMC can be used as a kind of contracting agency for Regenerate to do more complex and difficult policy and research work. This is the perfect kind of relationship in which a local agency develops the agenda then uses the resources of central government to develop it out.
BUT Regenerate needs to make sure that it does not become captured by the logic of central government, by its bean counters, and by the expansive power of treasury and its thinking. Regenerate will work when it is understood as being owned by the community and people of Christchurch, and if it’s seen as another vehicle of central government I think it will fail. Developing and sticking to a shared vision for the residential red-zone is vital. This cannot be outsourced.
8. Frugality, not austerity
Following the comment above, I think a less well resourced but better managed set of plans is better for Christchurch than thinking too big and becoming bound to central government.
The political ecologist Jane Bennett makes an important distinction between the restrictive kind of centralised austerity thinking that occupies the minds of right wing governments — and that Christchurch has received through organisations like EQC and SCIRT where trimming of budgets has effectively broken the moral agreement between Christchurch and the government. She talks about frugality as being part of a true form of materialism that cares for things rather than about them.
Frugality is an approach in which resources are carefully considered and deployed. Things are tested, models made, ideas examined. Frugality is the essence of much of the transitional movement and its effectiveness in bringing parts of the city back to life with relatively small budgets.
The fact that Regenerate is small and has a small budget may be a surprise bonus because as an organisation it should aim to be frugal, to avoid big bold moves and instead develop projects and plans in steady iterative steps bringing different parties and communities along. So that when big plans are made they are well understood and have a sense of inevitability about them that makes investment compelling.
9. Interim, temporary, transition
I know people are sick of temporary objects. Of using small studios, temporary stadiums, and broken interim measures in the city. I know an aesthetic has developed that felt important and creative for a few years but is becoming tired 5 years on. Both of these are fair criticisms, but they risk overshadowing the real value of time-based thinking that this movement introduced into the city.
When we look at the residential red-zone it is impossible to think how it can all be quickly developed at the same time. In fact this would be disaster. It will only happen through iterative changing and growing plans for the place. So temporary and interim measures will have a huge role to play.
One idea is to create a range of five or ten year leases so that individuals or groups can use the red-zone land for growing food either for commercial or personal use. Like allotments in other countries. These are different to community gardens which also have a place here. The idea is that people can lease allotments to grow and develop food or flowers, but that public good is created by the activity, the improved soil and air. This will produce revenue, build social capital, develop the burgeoning local food movement, but still not affect the long term visions for the land.
If time frames are made long enough then everything can be considered as an interim measure. The residential red-zone should have a 100 or 200 years vision. In this context most of the development is temporary and part of bigger long term changes. One of the big lessons from the small temporary projects is that the materials from them always need to be considered as they exist at the end of the project, so pallets from the Pallet Pavilion were not thrown away but returned to supply, and the seats from an outdoor cinema we created were gifted and not lost. Similar thinking for 10 or 20 or 30 year projects changes the way we think about buildings and land, and is especially relevant in a place likely to face rising sea levels and flooding.
10. Embrace creative thinking
Highlighting the value of creatives, design-led thinkers, and artists, has almost become a modern cliche. The idea that there is a creative type of person that has access to different, alternative ways of thinking is now a common one and is used in all sorts of rhetoric around branding and the competition between cities. It is somewhat true that certain training enables fresh thinking. But I don’t mean this.
Everybody can think and act creatively if they are involved with the right kinds of systems and processes. I’ve been involved in FESTA (Festival of Transitional Architecture) since it was created in 2012 and this belief that everyone has the opportunity and right to creatively engage in the making of their city is at the heart of FESTA. It’s not just an opportunity for individuals, but leads importantly to stronger, richer, more meaningful places.
In 2009 I was lucky enough to visit the Butterfly Peace Garden in Batticaloa and experience this wonderful children’s playground and theatre experience in the middle of the beautiful but war torn town. I encourage the reader to look over this short article about the Peace Garden as it illustrates so well how creativity can play a powerful role in building communities and healing.
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I sincerely hope that a critical, creative, engaged, transparent, respectful and time-conscious culture can be at the core of this new organisation.
If it is, then we can watch it bloom.
