Renewing Christchurch & Rethinking Resilience: 1

This and the next 3 posts contain extracts from a research report investigating the Christchurch Central City area bounded by the 4 Avenues post earthquake. It is in the form of a Cultural Plan. You can have the whole report if you are interested. It looks at the Draft Central City Plan prepared by Christchurch Council, and contains original material and photographs drawn from site visits....

Ideas that drive this plan…

Katrina killed 1300 people. Also lost were people and places at the heart of New Orleans’ cultural economy. A Cultural Plan was agreed with stakeholders on how that cultural heart would be renewed, rebuilt, and attracted back home again….

The 1995 earthquake in Kobe killed 6,400 people and destroyed more than 100,000 buildings. To remember and learn from this savage experience the city adopted the theme “making the invisible visible” and celebrated places where the living who survived had found safety.

A thousand years ago Ngai Tahu came to Canterbury, living lightly upon it, respecting the life force of land and living things, making and telling stories about this relationship in wood and in words.

English colonisers of Christchurch laid out their dreams and buildings on the land assuming it would support and sustain their cultural symbols as reliably as back home in England. Regular earthquakes shook that faith for 150 years, shaking those assumptions, but not seriously till now.

The wise man builds his house on rock, but the man who builds his house on sand the same way risks seeing it fall. Renewing Christchurch and minimising risk requires the reality of the landscape to be recognised and embraced. Seismic realities can be ignored no longer. They need to be built into Christchurch culture.

Culture is about more than writing and music and art. It includes the shared beliefs, customs, rituals and values of people and communities in a given place at a given time. Christchurch is the place and the time is now, recovering from earthquake, eyes wide open to those realities, and gaps in its cultural landscape.

Experiences and feelings in poems, pictures, dances, songs and plays expressed by those touched by the earthquake can be integrated into the life and plans of Christchurch, rather than being embalmed in the hidden memories of an earthquake. These cultural expressions can be harnessed to build a new belief.

Ngai Tahu’s cultural relationships with Christchurch have also been marginalised by European culture. Now is the opportunity to find a new cultural balance.

It is understandeable that the people of Christchurch yearn for certainty in this time of disruption. But low confidence in public planning will be justified and deepen if authorities persist with the status quo rather than grasping the nettle of adaptive planning needed to deliver the resilience and flexibility that will satisfy insurance industry risk assessors.

Rigid symbols of stone gallery buildings and unbending oak trees need to relax into a consciously renewed and resilient culture redolent of a responsive occupation of a moving land by a diversity of people.

Renewing Christchurch on sand requires a fundamental change of culture, a planned rebuild of its cultural landscape, by means of a cultural plan that can point the way while changing over time, so that development and planning and public life is constantly informed and reminded of forces that are beyond human control. The city must learn from its experience and move in step with the land and its people.

Christchurch has the opportunity of cultural renewal from the inside out, as a tool of adaptive transformation, and as a beacon for travellers seeking inspiration. It needs a new belief in itself.

This report contributes to that process…

(This is the short introductory section of my report: Renewing Christchurch & Rethinking Resilience - A Cultural Plan. If you want the whole thing - please contact me.)

Renewing Christchurch & Rethinking Resilience: 2

WHAT IS A CULTURAL PLAN?

Christchurch is like every city in that it has a personality that reflects its history, diversity, “sense of place”, and the values, needs, and dreams of its residents. Many things contribute to how people experience their city and local community: traditions, neighbourhoods, weather, landscape, natural environment, schools, leadership, businesses, parks, housing, and the ebb and flow of events and activities.

One thing is essential in shaping a city's personality – and that is how people see, feel, and connect with its cultural life. A community's culture is expressed in many ways - through art, music, theatre, dance, and film – but also in food, architecture, urban planning, public places and institutions, cultural traditions, media, and new ideas.

Why plan?

Arts and cultural activities do happen on their own through the energy and dreams of creative individuals and organisations, and in times of crisis like post-earthquake in the efforts of people and organisations as they try to make sense of the new reality and get on with life in a changed and changing environment. Sometimes these activities are helped by providing spaces, funding, collaborations, and other resources. And sometimes there needs to be a much greater public engagement with cultural activity – for example when it is at the heart of any transition or change process.

Planning can map out Christchurch's arts and cultural assets, needs, opportunities, resources, and priorities to help create strategies and guide actions for the community to further develop the cultural sector. But planning can and must go further than that if Christchurch wants the sort of renewal that is needed now – which is not really a “post earthquake” renewal, rather it is a “seismic reality” renewal.

Why plan now?

Christchurch has always recognised the importance of the arts and culture. Around the world, creativity is touted as an indispensable resource for civic vitality and prosperity. Studies have measured the impact of the cultural sector Christchurch in annual economic activity in terms of jobs and revenues. Christchurch rightly wants to ensure that its community remains a hotbed of innovation, creativity and entrepreneurial energy, and the Draft Christchurch Central City Plan advocates initiatives that can underpin that aspiration.

But there is an unusual cultural change opportunity now, which is not being seized by Christchurch planners. That is the need to shift Christchurch culture from one of environmental certainty, to one of seismic uncertainty. That need is not being seized primarily because of the very human hope that the earthquakes will stop. And not come back for a very long time. Creative energy has hit an unusual peak in Christchurch following the sequence of earthquakes.

There is a grassroots recognition that things cannot be the same. There is evidence of cultural activity which brings the arts into urban planning and architecture. There is evidence of cultural events where science and art are coming together in new ways as people try to make sense of the unfamiliar landscape that Christchurch and Canterbury has become. Long term renewal of Christchurch requires a plan that engages with and influences the need for fundamental cultural change in Christchurch.

(This is a short section of my report: Renewing Christchurch & Rethinking Resilience - A Cultural Plan. If you want the whole thing - please contact me.)

Renewing Christchurch & Rethinking Resilience: 3

While it is not the purpose of this report to rewrite the history of Christchurch, it is important to appreciate the role of Christchurch institutions in educating and instilling the reality of earthquake risk in the past. Local institutions that might be entrusted with that responsibility could include: newspapers, the library, the museum, and the council. Schools might also provide locally specific education.

The Christchurch newspaper clipping (Shown here. Newspaper article. The Star newspaper, Issue 7417, 31 May 1902, Page 5. Obtained from “Papers Past”, National Library Archives. Click on it to enlarge it.) provides historic information about a number of things. It describes the fact that the Cathedral spire has been brought down before and “severely shaken” on another occasion. It also describes research:

“from almost all earthquake- ridden countries in the world” and found that “in no earthquakey country is there a spire nearly so high as that in Christchurch”. It also states that “to carry out the work in brick… is quite impossible…”

Newspaper archive research indicates that the top 40 feet of the Cathedral spire were knocked down by earthquake in 1888. The above report relates to the Cheviot centered earthquake in 1901. Reports also record the spire being damaged by earthquake in 1922 and 1929. Apparently there was another significant earthquake just off the coast of Christchurch in Pegasus Bay in 1987 – though it is difficult to track down archive information about this.

However it appears to have triggered research by the New Zealand Earthquake Commission (EQC) at the time (The Earthquake Hazard In Christchurch: a detailed evaluation, by Elder, McCahon and Yetton, 1991), which was largely corroborated by separate research conducted by the New Zealand Institute of Nuclear and Geological Science (NZINGS) which was reported in 1995 (Geology of Christchurch, Brown, R. D. Beetham, B. R. Paterson, and J. H. Weeber, Environmental and Engineering Geoscience, 1995).

This information cites four earthquakes that did severe damage in, and very close to the City of Christchurch (1869, 1901, 1922 and 1987). The NZINGS report (1995) states:

The geology, tectonic setting, and active seismicity of the Christchurch area indicate that future large earthquakes will occur which will have major impact on the city. Earthquakes are expected to produce liquefaction, landsliding, ground cracking, and tsunami. Planning and design to mitigate the consequences of these phenomena are an essential prerequisite for preparedness.... The identification and quantifying of geological hazards, and the implementation of regulation and planning designed to discourage irresponsible land use, should continue in the future as the geological knowledge and database is expanded....

Based on its research the EQC report had predicted a return period for another damaging earthquake in Christchurch of 55 years.

My research into the roles and responsibilities of the Christchurch City Council and the Canterbury Regional Council suggest that their actions have amounted to a conspiracy of silence regarding the risks to buildings and development posed by local seismicity. It has been suggested by many that there was a desire to protect the value of land and not threaten the city’s economic progress.

Estimates of the economic cost of the recent cluster of earthquakes range up $20 billion NZ, with those costs being met by the Earthquake Commission, Central Government, Insurance Companies, Local Government and private pockets. Suffice to note, the earthquake cat is now well and truly out of the bag, which is one reaspon why insurance companies are reluctant to invest in future risk in Christchurch, until the risk is better understood, and until all concerned build and adapt to the conditions. No longer will it be acceptable or appropriate to claim the tallest cathedral when that claim amounts to Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Or the foolish man building his house upon the sand.

(This is a section of my report: Renewing Christchurch & Rethinking Resilience - A Cultural Plan. If you want the whole thing - please contact me.)