Renewing Christchurch

Making sense of it from a distance

After tragedy, life is transformed.  Existing plans, hopes and expectations are unhinged.  With loss, especially untimely loss, comes an unmapped corner on the path through life, leading to a future that can only look bleak by comparison with what went before. 

But for all sorts of reasons – friends, family, the will to survive, perhaps only instinct – you move on even through deep grief and despair.  Slowly, and despite a natural belief that maybe life doesn’t make that much sense any more, you learn to live a new one.  Time doesn’t really heal and the idea of closure is simply an attempt – usually by others – to distance tragedy that won't ever go away.  But we can learn to live with a new and sorrow-tinged reality.

As it is with individuals, so it must be with communities. 

Christchurch has turned a corner that was never seen, never planned.  The press is talking recovery, but these early days are the days of individuals plumbing the depths and a community sharing the despair.

It might feel too early to think about the future in this awful present.  But keeping moving is how we survive the grief. 

Kobe 1995

My attention was recently drawn to the way in which Kobe was rebuilt after the disastrous Hanshin earthquake of 1995.  The scale of the Kobe quake was unimaginable, even by Christchurch standards.

Kobe 1995 – Some figures

6,400 people killed, 15,000 injured

400,000 buildings damaged, 100,000 collapsed completely

200,000 housing units were partially or completely destroyed

85% of schools, many hospitals, and other major public facilities sustained heavy damage.

Widespread damage to water, gas, and sewer system, rail, road, and port facilities

845,000 households lost gas service for as long as 2.5 months

Restoration of water and wastewater systems to nearly 1.27 million households took as long as 4 months in some places

2,000 small and medium sized businesses failed

1995 Kobe Earthquake 10-year Retrospective Risk Management Solutions

Being told about others’ experiences doesn’t make your own grief easier. But it does tell you that life goes on. And it can offer lessons on how that might happen.

For example, rebuilding is inevitably long and slow.  Rushing into renewal is not an option.  Putting together lifelines is a drawn out process.  A city less vulnerable will take research, analysis, and thinking through. 

So the early urgency lies in providing a quality of temporary shelter and restoring fundamental services that may need to provide for years rather than months.

It is appropriate for a strong lead – and funding – for this to come from the very top given the enormity of this disaster, for the Cabinet and the government to work closely with the civic leaders of Christchurch through this time of rescue and restoration.

Among other things, we may just have to rewrite last year's National Infrastructure Plan even before the ink is dry, demonstrating statecraft by a capacity to rethink the country’s spending priorities and to focus now on the billions that must be directed towards Christchurch.

A time for civic renewal

David Edgington drew lessons from Kobe in his recent book Reconstructing Kobe: The Geography of Crisis and Opportunity (March 2010).  Among other things, planners were challenged by local citizens who felt vulnerable and disempowered following the earthquake. They had to win back community trust through local consultation especially among those facing the complete transformation of their neighbourhoods.

What disaster and recovery can do is meld communities, creating new relationships between the people and the governors.  Civil life comes to the fore, with strong, inclusive government action supported by widespread volunteerism.

It seems appropriate for civic leaders to take a lead in looking beyond recovery to renewal in Christchurch.  But it is equally important that the long-term is not contained – or constrained – in a rushed-out plan. Let’s hope that the earthquake is not seized on by planners as an opportunity for a super-sized urban development project. 

The people of Christchurch will need to be consulted widely, to play an active part in decisions about how their future will be reshaped and their communities renewed.  And that should happen bit by bit, project by project, street by street, suburb by suburb.

Whatever comes out of Christchurch's renewal, let us hope that like Kobe it is inspired by a stronger sense of community, and a heightened level of trust between councils, their constituents, and the development sector.

Subsidiarity: putting civil society in its place

Communities doing their own thing

An article in today’s New Zealand Herald reported on the progress being made by a voluntary association of residents of the Matakana area developing local walkways.  Businesses, residents, and donors have pitched in to work with council support to create off-highway links between the rural settlements of Matakana Village, Point Wells, and Omaha Beach.  This is a modest local initiative.  It is a sign, though, of increasing community interest in the quality and accessibility of the physical environment outside our cities.  The Tawharanui Open Sanctuary Society is in the same vein (and locality).  Here, a local community voluntary initiative has been encouraged and supported by local government (the regional council) to achieve conservation outcomes. 

This is a sign that working together communities can deliver projects with a public benefit.  They do not need simply to join the queues contesting government delivery of taxpayer funded projects.

Volunteering, the foundation of civil society

Of course, community focused voluntarism has been with us for a long time, especially in urban areas.  The Māori Warden Association is an excellent example we are all familiar with in New Zealand.  The NZ Federation of Voluntary Welfare Organisations includes around 130 member organisations, which among them employ 11,000 paid staff and represent 41,500 volunteers. The Federation is committed to building strong and equitable communities.

Volunteering New Zealand is an organisation that provides resources and support to organisations in emergency services, health, welfare, education, culture, faith based services, community support, ethnic interests, sport and recreation, conservation, special interests, advocacy and international volunteering.  It provides a strong framework of volunteering centres throughout the country. It  estimates that around 34% of the population aged over ten years is involved in volunteering. 

A high rate of volunteering is confirmed by recent research by Massey University and the Ministry of Social Development.  This puts New Zealand number seven among nations when measured as the share of the economically active population in the not-for-profit workforce.

This is all evidence that New Zealand enjoys a strong civil society, made up of the range of organisations and associations of individuals (and businesses) that contribute freely to the effective functioning of communities without relying on the strictures of the state to do so. 

Civil society, the state, and the market

Civil society has long played a role in getting underprivileged communities moving in developing nations.  For them it may be the main means of group survival, and a force against anarchy.  Often non-government organisations arise from the ground up and become important organising agencies for infrastructure and services in poor communities which depend more on social capital than state direction and resources.  

Now, it seems, civil society may have a more visible role to play as developed nations move into a new, fiscally challenged phase of slow growth and development.

An active civil society can underpin social progress and build stronger communities, ideally supported by the state.  Even better, civil society, the state, and commercial organisations (those regulated by the market) can come together to achieve beneficial social and economic outcomes.  

It’s interesting that a growing awareness of the potential of civil society has triggered some rethinking even in conservative quarters.  Think Tank Res Publica with its emphasis on a more inclusive form of democracy has informed the British government’s thinking about new ways of advancing the social programme, ways less dependent on welfare and more on capacity building. 

There is a risk that moving more towards a society based on voluntarism is no more than a means of running down central government, undoing hard-fought for welfare programmes.  Some equate it with inserting the market where the state has traditionally operated. But this thinking risks confusing the elevation of civil society with corporatisation of services that no longer fit comfortably into the state’s mandate. 

Sure, the relationship between state, civil society and the market needs to be debated.  But that should not prevent us exploring what is potentially a much more effective and balanced form of government (and governance) in which communities, business, and governments act in partnership.

Subsidiarity – a better form of governance?

I have recently been involved in a project looking at subsidiarity in Lombardy (population 9.9m ) in northern Italy.  Subsidiarity is the principle that responsibilities for governing should be allocated from central to decentralised agencies wherever practical.  This is the vertical subsidiarity that features in much of the literature about democracy and governance.  The rationale is that decisions are best taken as close as possible to where they will have most effect.  This arrangement helps communities relate to different tiers of government while providing for more effective governance.

In Lombardy the related principle of horizontal subsidiarity is also important.  This sees functions allocated to the agencies most suited to implementing them.  These may be voluntary or commercial organisations.  Functions that have traditionally been the role of government might move out under these circumstances.  It goes without saying that if the government does allocate responsibility to an outside agency it needs to be accompanied by public funding and monitoring to ensure the best return on the taxpayer investment.  The point is, though, that government need not take direct responsibility for delivery  to get the best outcome.

A suggestion: endorsing subsidiarity in the constitution

Built on our strong and growing civil society, an established and transparent market place, and sound agencies of government, the forthcoming review of the New Zealand constitution might consider vertical and horizontal subsidiarity as potential governing principles, and in doing so acknowledge and endorse the growing importance of community-based organisations in future New Zealand governments.