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.

A cruel blow to a beautiful city

Christchurch is reeling after the latest earthquake.  Most of us can just look on with the sense of helplessness that distance brings.  To see the centre of a modern city, one of ours, so devastated, its people so vulnerable and suffering is numbing.

Today, tomorrow, and for some time to come the search for survivors and the cleanup will go on.  We will hear stories of miraculous survival, heroism, and tragic loss.

And then, as the city looks once more to recovery and rebuilding, we might look for the lessons to be learned. 

We cannot resist the power of earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunami, and the like.  But we can perhaps limit the devastation that accompanies them.

The implosion of many of Christchurch’s beautiful heritage buildings is a tragedy on its own, the wiping from the landscape of much of the City’s and nation’s history.  But seeing the collapse of more modern buildings is sobering. 

What are the lessons of architecture and engineering that might be drawn from this?  How much resistance can we realistically build into our structures?  Or should we be thinking less rigidly, and explore designs that deflect or reduce the impacts when buildings are faced with irresistible forces?  Should we think more about the survival of the people in and around buildings and less about the survival of the structures?  Are there innovations in design that offer refuge, protection, and escape even if walls crumble and floors collapse?

And what can urban designers and planners take from this devastation?  What does it tell us about the importance of space in the central city, of wide boulevards, generous parks, and civic squares?  About the need for more space, not less.  The centre of Christchurch is still relatively open, and perhaps that has saved some lives.  It was possible to take refuge in the streets, the squares, and the parks. 

This event must surely erode planners’ resistance to the decentralisation that is the mark of a prosperous, modern city, that makes it that little bit more liveable, and so much more resilient in the face of disaster?  Perhaps we should be thankful that a diminishing share of Christchurch’s people actually works in the CBD – today just 26% of the total.  And that not too many dwellings – and residents -- had been crammed into retrofitted buildings or high rise apartments assembled in inner city precincts.

We might also need to rethink infrastructure and network utilities in vulnerable settings.  Do the economies of scale associated with large, integrated networks and single source headworks for water supply and wastewater treatment offer the resilience and recovery that dispersed or local plant might do?  Do we have the redundancy built into our energy networks that permit selective shut off and rapid recovery?  How vulnerable are our communication networks, and how easily overloaded?  Where are our fuel supplies?  Are they safe, accessible in an emergency?

Are we overloading old networks with new demands?  What are the costs of building resilience into infrastructure and what are the gains in terms of recovery and continuity of service in the face of destructive forces?

This has been and will be a life changing event for many people – life shattering in far too many cases.

 Out of tragedy people look for blame and for meaning to ease the grief.  We need to acknowledge the former and try to get past it in the interests of the recovery and healing that the city and its citizens must go through. 

But we owe it to the victims of the Christchurch earthquake to look hard, deep, and wide at how might we better shape our cities to cope with the unexpected and the unwanted.