New Brighton: Power to the People
By Sylvia Smyth. This article was originally published in The Press on the September 5 2016.
Sylvia is the Coordinator at Renew Brighton, a charitable trust that facilitates collective action in New Brighton.
It was 2011 and the first day of my new job in New Brighton. Having spent most of my 20s overseas I had just arrived back to my hometown of Christchurch, inspired to be a part of the recovery. I found a park for my car near New Brighton Mall but it was a tight one. As I attempted to back in, two different people stopped and directed my course — smiling and waving me in. It was a wonderful welcome and a sign of how I would come to know the area.
Fast-forward five years and I have remained working here. I see daily evidence that New Brighton has somehow managed to hold that radical sense of togetherness experienced after the earthquakes — that time when ‘law’ subsided and ‘lore’ took over. The area is one of, if not the, most engaged in the city. At Renew Brighton, we have found that there are over 150 community groups in the area.
Becoming adaptable is nothing new here. When we pause and take stock the New Brighton people have already learnt to live with an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, from the economic decline of the last 30 years, to school closures and red zoning. And still the change keeps coming — shops are still closing, there will be serious repairs of the library and pier over the next two years and the impacts of climate change loom very large.
Perhaps this is why people in New Brighton are so connected. The current feeling is that New Brighton looks after her own. The phenomenon that is the ‘Peoples’ Independent Republic of New Brighton’ Facebook group sums the situation up nicely. The group has over 6,500 members and is the most lively I know of. It is humanity laid bare — both the best and worst of our human condition, all rallying around the area they know and love.
Two new recovery agencies are now focusing on New Brighton. This is the latest change and it is a significant one. Both Regenerate Christchurch and Development Christchurch Limited are centring on New Brighton as one of their few and first priorities. They bring with them extraordinary powers, staffing and resourcing, the like of which has never been seen before in the area. I can sense they genuinely want to get it right. But how will this change be navigated? How can this community form a functional relationship with these new agencies? There are thousands of decisions to be made in New Brighton. How can the 17,000-odd people of New Brighton harness this opportunity?
There will be a temptation amongst decision-makers to skip the complex and messy discussions and just get on and do it. Indeed, there is a feeling that New Brighton has been waiting for years and that many past plans for renewal have failed. The community is prudent to feel wary of more talk, however, skipping the discussion is a recipe for further disillusionment and poor choices. We will never have this opportunity again. Without putting the people who live here at the centre of renewal decisions, the resources will not be directed to the right places.
The process must begin with an acknowledgement that the spirited and rambunctious nature of the New Brightonites is not to be sidelined but fostered. The task of the decision-makers is not to fix New Brighton. Their task is to harness the community’s extraordinary energy to do so. The more people moving forward, the further forward we will collectively move. We just need to work out how to have useful conversations.
There are plenty of models from elsewhere that we can learn about and adopt. In Melbourne the council randomly selects a jury of 40 and resources them to make recommendations on the city’s budget. In Seattle panels of local community leaders — police, school principals and others — are well resourced and fully empowered to make decisions for neighborhoods much smaller than our current wards. In Adelaide, council culture was reoriented to think of locals as place experts and people were asked their opinions via photo booths and audio recording stations. There are new and better ways out there, we just need to be brave enough to find what works for us and the particular challenges we face.
Making decisions together may not be easy given the liveliness of the New Brighton community. But, as soon as the real and respectful discussions begin, so will our futures. In a sense, the harder it is, the more fabulous the results will be. Afterall, a buzzing, alive, and engaged organism called community is exactly what we want.
