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I live in Dallington. We bought our house in February 2011. We were due to buy it on February 23. My husband has always lived in the area and so we wanted to buy there. Then the earthquake happened. We continued with buying the house, so we owned a house that was damaged, and surrounded by damaged houses. When the red zoning happened, we expected to be rezoned but we weren't. It was like they cut a bit of a jiggle around us. And then we experienced for what felt like an eternity, probably about three years, the kind of slow progress of demolishing our neighbourhood and everything around us. All the reasons that we were in the area went away. Our suburb got carved in half; half of the homes and most of the social infrastructure was lost. And watching that happen, and with my own experience with EQC [the Earthquake Commission], made me feel really strongly about wanting to have a voice in what happened next. I knew people who had walked away from their homes, and when CERA (Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority] came in, they demolished the houses, put fences up, put keep out signs up. It just felt so intrusive and almost violent to the people who lived there. 

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What was your role at Regenerate Christchurch?

 

In about 2017, I wanted a change of career. There was a job coming up at Regenerate Christchurch, which was fairly new at the time. I'm a programme manager, and they were looking for one. It felt it really aligned with what I was experiencing in my personal life, and I wanted to understand how planning worked, what was actually happening, and to be more on the inside. I wanted to have more influence in any way I could. I worked at Regenerate Christchurch for two years, mostly on red zone planning and actually talking to people like Hugh [Nicholson] and Rob [Kerr] helped them to understand that these were people, and people's homes, and loved places. Dallington was founded in the 1960s and people who left my neighborhood after the earthquake had lived their entire married lives. That was their only home: it was tragic and so disruptive for them. It was good to keep reminding people in Regenerate Christchurch that these were people's lives; you couldn’t just kind of play with this as it actually had meaning for people.

 

My role at Regenerate Christchurch was mostly keeping Jim Lunday [GM, Strategy and Regeneration] on track, which was an impossible task. I managed a team of landscape architects, designers, planners, to get regeneration plans done. We did one for Cathedral Square which didn't come to much, but also worked on the Ōtākaro River Corridor Regeneration Plan as well, seeing that to fruition. I helped with the final documentation; Chrissie Williams was working really hard on that as well. A programme manager herds the cats, corrals everybody, to get them focused on the goal and keep moving. This involved all of the planning work and behind that, all the District Plan changes. The Regeneration Plan was a document that had visuals in it: they all had to be signed off. We had to work with mana whenua to make sure that they had input into how the plan looked. We did a series of conversations and engagements around land use option discussions.

 

Can you say something about your work with the Dallington Residents’ Association?

 

In my non-work job, I was also the chair of the Dallington Residents’ Association, which I still am. We tried to organise some engagements ourselves. We found that when organisations like Council or the Crown try and organise engagements, they don't really reach the people that they want to talk to. They reach an audience that is known to them. So we were trying to gather the people of our community and provide feedback, because it was so important that they heard that community voice. And I was worried that they wouldn't. So I was kind of playing both sides. I ran, myself, three workshops that were really well attended, probably over 50 people, which doesn't sound like a lot, but you'll know that trying to get people together is a big deal. This was to provide input in order to write submissions for the options process before the Regeneration Plan was finalised.

 

I’ve chaired the Residents Association probably since 2014, 2015. It's one of those ‘because nobody else will do it’ jobs. We keep a really good eye on what's happening in the red zone. I'm surrounded by other nosy people like me, so we keep our eye on anything that's going on, and then make sure that we're doing submissions. When big things come up like the City to Sea pathway, Avon Park and the Dallington Landing and the bridges; there's lots of consultation going on, and we make sure that people know it's happening. We run our own consultation events that people are more likely to come to than Council ones. We'll door knock if necessary. Council staff are invited and they usually come but sometimes it's better they're not there. They tend to take things over, but they’ve become really good at providing support rather than being at the centre of it. They now trust that we're doing the right thing, not bagging them. We're just trying to run our own thing, because there's a lot going on in  Dallington.

 

One of the things recently is talking about road stopping. Avonside Drive is done. There's the top of Kingsford Street, on the other side of Burwood Park; Horseshoe Lake, suggesting some road stopping there, and also around Thames Street and Sutton Place. I've had lots of conversations with Council about that as they've created a street into a crescent that faces the red zone but away from the community that they live in, which separates out this little neighbourhood space. I had a street meeting with them and probably all but a couple of the residents turned up. We had the local Councillor there and Tessa from the engagement team.

 

It keeps me pretty busy, but I love it. And I feel really strongly about it, that we need to continue to remind Council that we exist and that they're working for us. There's been this transition that's happened. When the red zoning first happened, there was a real closed door with LINZ [Land Information New Zealand, which managed the red zone land for the Crown]. They were not easy to talk to about the land because they felt they owned it, and we felt we owned it. It was our land. It was in our neighborhood. And it took a long time for them to really start to understand that we collectively own it.

 

So this led to your involvement with the Community Board and TTK?

 

Yes, one of the other things I did is I sat on TTK, the red zone group that managed red zone leases for a couple of years because I got elected to my local Community Board, because I wasn't busy enough. My reason for getting elected, and I was really clear about this, was because I wanted to be able to have a voice around the table when those things came to the Community Board and to have some influence over the local Councillors and the decisions that they were making. At the time it was the Coastal Burwood Board, now it's Linwood Coastal. I put my name up to be involved in the TTK as a Community Board representative. I did this until it wound up in 2021 when the land was coming back to Council. And I have to say, thinking about your questions, there's been a real shift in how it feels to be engaged around the land between the Crown and Council. The Crown, as much as they tried to consult, it still felt like we own it, we'll consult you, but consultation's really telling you things. 

 

Council feels much more consultative and having specific red zone rangers has made a massive difference to the ability to engage with a group of people because it's like a tangible person you can find. They know the land, they walk it every day. I know I can ring them if I've got a question, or something I want, and they will at least have a discussion about it, which is really good. There’s definitely a shift, from Crown to Council, from completely closed to a crack opening in the door when they started doing the leases. I hold two leases in the red zone as well, on behalf of others. One is for a person who lost her land and house unwillingly. The Crown bought her land and house; her family had lived there for over 100 years. The Dallington Residents Association got the lease of that land back so that she could feel the ownership of it again and we've retained that lease. We have a community garden as well on red zone land in Banks Ave, a lovely thriving little garden.

 

So from your red zone experiences over the years, what are the positives?

 

I think the willingness for the Crown to start to think about letting people back into the red zone was really good. Having really strong groups like AvON (the Avon Ōtākaro Network), with Evan Smith, without people like that we wouldn't have got as far as we did, as fast as we did. So having some really good community activation was a real positive. And it did more than just create a sense of identity around the red zone; it created a sense of identity around the people as well as the neighbourhoods. Richmond feels much more cohesive than it did before that. Before it was just a neighbourhood but now it feels like a community because it had some things that they rallied around. If you look at where we're sitting at Avebury House, these community assets adjacent to the red zone that people have been able to create, really nice community spaces, that is a real positive. And people like Hayley [Guglietta], who's worked tirelessly with Evan initially and now continuing to roll with it and keep the conversation going. Sometimes it's really hard. Hayley sits in a really difficult place that I've also sat in. You're having the conversations with Council and you understand what their drivers are, but you also understand your community and you want the best for them. You sit in between and you're pushed and pulled in both directions all the time. But having those people there is really important. I think it's been a real positive that those people have emerged and they have stayed, or when they haven't stayed, others have been able to step up and replace them. 

 

Then I think the Crown's willingness to start the conversation about what to do in the red zone, and the involvement of mana whenua in the discussion, has been really important. I don't think we could have moved forward without that. The fact that there is a Regeneration Plan, which I understand is quite unusual, and without that plan it could potentially have been a free-for-all in the red zone. Because there's quite strict rules about what you can and can't do, it creates a set of guidelines. Regardless of what people thought about Regenerate Christchurch at the time, it was built very much with a community voice in it. And so when I hear Council saying, as they do all the time, that they still follow that plan: I know then that they're following the wishes of the community, which I feel really good about.

 

And now that the land has moved to Council, I think that they are very willing to have conversations about what's happening in the red zone, which is gratifying. Council gets a really bad rap for things like engagement, but in this instance they worked so hard to make sure the community is involved. They sometimes don't get it right, but that's why people like Hayley and myself and others are there to say, excuse us, and actually do what we need to do as well. We have to all work on it together. I feel really positive about it.

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Any negatives, apart from the difficulties with LINZ?

 

I also think that if I have to say anything about Council that they also do forget sometimes that it's a partnership and not just with the community but also with mana whenua and I do get accused of always bringing it back to the earthquake. But it will never go away, because the hurt that people experienced, both from the earthquake, which was a horrible event, but actually what happened next was worse. People lost everything from what CERA did. We can't ever forget that people were unwilling participants in the removal of their land. And just be mindful of that. And I think that most people in Council that I work do understand that and are very mindful and careful. 

 

But there's a sense of the red zone being an open space that anything could happen in. And people are really nervous about that. People in my neighbourhood are nervous about what will happen, like there will be new houses put in the red zone. That would be painful for people who lost their homes in the red zone, and for people who live there: they have this lovely park and they don't want that to happen. I think sometimes Council, the machine of Council happens without slowing and thinking carefully about what they're doing. that's negative. I mean, we've created this amazing green space and it has become a bit of a rubbish dump at times. And anti-social behaviour. I think the rest of the city sees it as just this big empty thing that they can do whatever they want with, and it's not. The people who live close to it feel a sense of ownership to it, and we welcome people in, but they have to be respectful and it doesn't always work. This is where the Rangers are making the difference because they get it, they understand.

 

If you had asked me five years ago, I would have had a lot of negatives because I think things were going slowly, decisions weren't getting made, I didn't even really understand how decisions would get made, how were mana whenua being involved, where was Ngāī Tūāhuriri in the discussion, what about co-governance? We haven't talked about co-governance but that's a big question mark even now. The red zoning was finished by 2014 so why are we still talking about co-governance, why isn't it not in place 10 years later, why couldn't we have done this faster? Until we resolve how the land will be managed going forward, you can't do anything in it. There are people who have energy and want to see things happen, but that energy doesn't last forever. And when you constantly are frustrated and being told no, so if somebody's been working on something since 2014, they want a cafe in the red zone, for example, and they're told they can't, for 10 years, people give up and they walk away. And we don't want to lose that energy and enthusiasm. But we can't start to put down permanent new things into the red zone until co-governance is sorted out and why has it taken so long?

 

What would you say are insights from your experiences for people in equivalent situations elsewhere?

 

You need to know who to talk to and who's responsible. Start the conversation about co-governance straight away. It was hard because the land was owned by the Crown and the Crown wasn't prepared to get into a discussion about it. I think we've moved on in terms of our politics around iwi and iwi partnership. It's a bit difficult at the moment but we now understand how to have those conversations. So that's one of the insights I would have. Start early so people don't lose interest. And invite everyone around the table, don't be scared of that. No-one suggested anything outrageous when we were having those blue-skies thinking conversations with AvON that Council hasn't since considered. You can always moderate the discussion. But Crown and Council were both really scared to have an open conversation and they needed to because they were happening anyway. The parallel now is starting to think about climate adaptation and how we retreat from areas that are no longer habitable, which is effectively what happened with the earthquake.

 

Those conversations are happening about climate adaptation. I know it's happening in Christchurch, forming a group that has all the right people at the table to start the conversation. They are learning the lesson, I think, from the red zone process when they're setting that up. But is that what's happening in other places? I'm not sure. So go into those conversations, early and often, and make sure everyone's around the table. And plan in advance. You can't plan for what you don't know, but we know climate adaptation has to happen. With our coastal communities, we know what we have to do. And having decision-making frameworks so that you have something in place to start from when the shit hits the fan, at least.

 

I've thought about what activates communities and its people. You have to have a very enthusiastic, energetic and dedicated group of people to keep it going and if they don't exist, then it doesn't happen. New Brighton has a very strong parochial community, but they haven't been involved in the conversation about the red zone, even though they have red zone land. And I don't know why but you can't do it on their behalf. So as a community board member I had a go at trying to start a conversation in their community and there wasn't anybody to talk to because there wasn't anybody interested. I've talked to Hayley about why is it that Richmond and Burwood and Dallington are so involved and it is because of the people. You have to have nuts like me who just won't give it up. 

 

But thinking about the future, thinking about for other people, for Council to identify those people and rather than trying to shut them down, give them some space. That is what they have done with Hayley particularly. You fund them, trust them and give them some space to create their communities because community comes from within. You can't make it but if you make space for it, it will happen. Physical spaces are also really important too. One of the things we struggled with when we were going through the Regeneration Plan consultations is we had nowhere to meet because all our community facilities had been destroyed. There was nowhere really in Dallington so we ended up meeting at Avebury House but it didn’t feel great. But we have our landing now, which is great, so we have consultations there. The landing could have more use, but that's an ongoing discussion. It doesn't have power, or covered space, or parking and it’s quite a walk. If you're trying to create a community space, think about what the community does when it meets. A barbecue is something that Kiwis do, so we bring a barbecue every time we're down there. Feeding people when they're coming to talk to you is part of what you do. Council says it’s for the locals but it's actually quite distant from our neighbourhood, like a 2km walk and that's a big ask for an older person.

 

Interview with Eric Pawson, in Avebury House garden, Richmond, 23 December 2024

Transcribed with Cockatoo

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