The river corridor is probably the largest area of managed retreat in an urban centre worldwide. How can our experience inform processes of managed retreat elsewhere? The question is central to this project, which has developed a model of ‘retreat’, ‘relocation’ and ‘re-imagining’. Re-imagining asks how can the land be re-used for projects that further lower environmental and social risks.
Chrissie Williams

Chrissie Williams, former City Councillor, Chair of Te Tira Kāhikuhiku (red zone transitional committee) 2019-21
At the time of the earthquakes I was a Christchurch City Councillor. I resigned in September 2011, about six months after the February earthquake, so the red zone wasn't in place when I was still a Councillor. I then had time with Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu (TRoNT) on earthquake recovery as a science advisor and after that led the Natural Environment Recovery Programme. It was in both those roles I became engaged with the red zone. Initially after the September 2010 earthquake the land was to be repaired for houses to go back onto it, but after the February earthquake it was so badly damaged, it was red zoned. Later I worked for Regenerate Christchurch on ecological assessments of the red zone, and after that I chaired the red zone transitional committee, Te Tira Kāhikuhiku (TTK).
Could you say a little bit about those roles?
The focus in 2011 was more on the central city than on residential areas.
While at Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu I assisted in providing advice and information to CERA (Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority) who were managing the clearance of the red zone – e.g. cultural narrative, tree retention policy.
Then I led the Natural Environment Recovery Programme [based in Environment Canterbury] for about two years. The red zone was definitely part of the thinking around that. I organised quite a few public information sessions in 2015 and one was on the red zone. There was a strong interest in what was going to happen to the red zone. I also got involved with the Avon Ōtākaro Network with Evan [Smith] and Peter [Beck], so still had a community focus hat on despite working in a local body.
After I finished my working life, I was appointed to chair the body to advise LINZ [Land Information New Zealand], which held the land for the Crown after the red zone buyouts] around transitional uses. TTK was in existence from early 2020 until the co-governance group was set up in late 2022. TTK was a mixture of community members, and Ngāi Tahu and community board representatives. We would consider projects that were initiated by people in the community who applied to LINZ for transitional use. It was all transitional use supposedly, although some were clearly going to be permanent. We would give feedback and would offer suggestions for conditions on leases and licences for those activities.
TTK was a joint City Council/LINZ committee. There were two Ngāi Tahu representatives, and five community board people [two from the Waitai/Coastal-Burwood Community Board , one from each of Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū/Banks Peninsula Community Board, Waikura/Linwood-Central-Heathcote Community Board and Waihoro/Spreydon-Cashmere Community Board] because we were also considering applications for the Port Hills red zone. Then there were five people from the community: Ashley Campbell, Adam Parker, Hannah Watkinson, Bill Simpson and Jazmynn Hodder-Swain, a youth representative. It was a large committee with thirteen of us, and it was serviced by the City Council, but the LINZ officers would attend our meetings. We considered applications for community gardens, one for a flower garden, one for a dog park, quite a lot in the Port Hills area for horse grazing and those kinds of things. So quite small-scale ventures, nothing major: none of the big projects came through us.
They got 5-year leases from LINZ. But those were legally cancelled once the land was handed over to the City Council, although the Council did have an automatic roll over for those activities, with an opportunity to review as well. We met once a month, with probably two or three applications a meeting. Not super busy, and some of them were repeat applications or extensions of projects, especially around the Richmond Gardens. TTK finished at the same time as the co-governance group started.
Before we move to that, can you describe your time at Regenerate Christchurch?
I worked for Regenerate Christchurch on the Ōtākaro Avon River Corridor Regeneration Plan as a strategy advisor, but particularly to do with ecological assessment. My focus was to try and get some maps of areas where it would be good to establish ecological restoration, and then also to drill down into the detail about what kinds of planting could happen in the different parts of the red zone, depending on the underlying conditions. We spent quite a lot of time trying to work out the cost per hectare of doing proactive restoration. A focus of mine was for the wetland areas around Bexley to enable the estuarine water to come in and naturally regenerate those areas. That’s now starting to happen. We have to plant in other areas as there's not that much seed source, if you're talking about bush kind of vegetation. But certainly the estuarine sites will self-introduce if given the right conditions. And much cheaper obviously.
I had ecologists from the City Council, from Environment Canterbury, and some independent ecologists engaged. We had a small advisory group and then when we had the wider gatherings, more people came in. The outcome was much higher level than I'd hoped for. It did feed into the Regeneration Plan to an extent, but not in the detail that the Plan allowed for. The Plan was fairly high level. Identifying areas of ecological significance, and mapping them, did not occur specifically. I was quite aware of the work that Colin Meurk had done on the nodes approach, where you have a five-hectare node of bush every 5 kilometres, and so on. I was really keen to look at that in the red zone, so I was trying to get areas where we already had 5k hubs through the city and to work out how we could fill in between to get those corridors. Again, that didn't turn out perfectly, but when there were applications for large plantings, like The Press planting in Dallington that did fill a gap of one of those nodes. Then you had Travis Wetland, which was an existing node. I was trying to get the Council ecologists to map them, but it didn’t really happen.
While I said there was not much seed source, the Avon Forest Park people were looking at a micro level where there was seed source and trying to expand those areas. And to retain native plantings that some of the residents had done in their own backyards out of respect for what had happened before as well. Now I have just had a clean out of my papers and I probably threw away some of those ecological reports. And I think that's an issue: where is all the work that Regenerate Christchurch did, where it's been archived? I think it's in City Council, but to find it would be pretty hard. You'd need to know exactly what you're looking for as they’ve not been properly archived.
What are the positive aspects of your red zone experiences and how do you feel the Plan has worked out?
The Regeneration Plan is five years old now, as it was approved in August 2019. And it feels like it was a plan of the moment. It doesn't feel like it was a plan for longevity. And I say that for a number of reasons. One is it was very strongly focused on trying to have commercial return for the land. It was pre-COVID, so it made quite large assumptions about tourism and number of visitors and those kinds of things. I think also with COVID and the lockdown, local people started using the red zone differently from what they had before and so that raised their expectations about freedom to roam. And we found that with TTK, there was a strong reaction to proposals wanting to fence off areas because people had just become accustomed to going anywhere.
Things like the large projects that were proposed, like the Eden Project, have now gone. To me, that was quite a hopeful sort of project. It was a bit of a dream, and didn't really make sense in lots of ways. Things like the Kura Kaupapa Māori - Te Pā o Rākaihautū - was going to move into the Burwood area, but they're now looking at a site in Diamond Harbour. With many of the commercial ideas, I think people would now be much less happy with them. The focus of the community is on ecological restoration and room for the river, allowing the river to spread. Although I think some people don't understand quite what that means: they're still going to have stop banks. One of the things that has frustrated me is that the Plan had no legal status after 2021 when the Greater Christchurch Regeneration Act 2016 ended its life. So there really isn't, legally, a plan for the river corridor anymore. But the Council have said that they're still following the Plan.
And there's some frustration for me because I know that some of the things that were put in the plan were almost random. The landings are random, haven't been thought through that well, but the Council's going ahead with them and they're not willing to re-consult with the community about where they think they should be and what they should look like. So we're getting things like the Dallington Landing which is out of place and huge and not what anyone anticipated. Avon Park is again a large park in an area where there's not a lot of community around it. So the Council's following the Plan to the letter, not re-consulting because ‘the consultation happened back in 2018’, so they say they don't need to reconsult, which is probably not a valid argument. And we're getting things that I don't think there’s community mandate for anymore.
A real positive, I think, is the City to Sea Path. It is of a high standard and costing a lot, but it really will bring people to that area, people will go and use it. I think we'll be amazed at how many people go and either do the whole length or do bits of it and hopefully feed into the local communities. That would be my preference, that we somehow connect the local communities. I'm worried about how it connects into South New Brighton and New Brighton.
So those are good things.
And some of the difficulties?
The Christchurch Earthquake Appeal Trust put $15 million into the red zone. And Evan [Smith] and I protected that from people who wanted to take it to do feasibility studies, and because it was designed for putting in on-the-ground projects that weren't Council projects. But it got used for Council projects anyway, despite it wasn't meant to be for that. Some went into bridges: the Council argued that they wouldn't do the bridges without the funding, so I guess they were saying the bridges weren't their function. But they really are. I imagined it going more into projects driven by the community like cultural trails, community gardens, some of the things that are happening around Richmond.
I was also quite upset about the lack of reflection of Ngāi Tahu and manawhenua values in the ŌARC Regeneration Plan. They're there in the design, but we had quite a lot of problem towards the end of producing the Plan with Ngāi Tahu wanting specific wording in and near the front of the Plan. The Regenerate Christchurch Board chose not to take on those recommendations. I was fighting hard for Ngāi Tahu to try and get those things in there. So the Plan doesn't reflect the partnership with Ngāi Tahu and the Crown, or the Council as a representative of the Crown. And who was Regenerate Christchurch engaging with? Was it Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu [TroNT]? Was it Ngāi Tūāhuriri? Was it Matapopore? was it Mahaanui Kura Taiao (MKT)? That was never really clarified. When the Plan was getting towards finalisation, it went back to the partners which included TRoNT. It was at that point that TRoNT came in and wanted to change things.
I suppose my biggest frustration of recent times is the way the co-governance group is or isn't working. You're aware of all this history, but three years ago, I wrote a paper [attached] suggesting what a permanent entity could be, based on the work that we did in the case studies [after an initial workshop in May 2019, also attached]. And where the Council and the co-governance group are now sitting is exactly what I suggested three years ago. They've had thousands of dollars’ worth of legal advice, they've gone round and round in circles and just made no progress in the three years. And they had my paper, and obviously they had to think about it and get other inputs, but a decision about a long-term structure could have been made very quickly.
So that's frustrating. I don't know when they last met. It's really hard to find out when meetings are if you don't look on the Council's meeting agendas every few weeks. The other thing about the co-governance group is that there's five people appointed by Ngāi Tahu, there's five people appointed by the City Council, and there's not much ‘co’ about it. To me it feels like they're two separate committees that then meet to tell each other what they've been thinking. They haven't been working together to develop stuff. The five Ngāi Tahu appointees are quite tight, meet together, know each other well. The five others don't. And then the co-chairs don't seem to be co-chairing except at the meeting. There's not co-leadership of the group. So we've had a co-governance group for nearly three years and nothing's come out of it.
I imagined a co-governance group with people once appointed, it didn't actually matter where they were appointed from, they would then act as a whole and work together and that hasn't happened. Then advice from Council staff has just been all over the place and repetitious and they've got advice from one lawyer then another and another. So just lack of political awareness from the staff, but nobody's really been leading it from the staff, from City Council's side. I'll probably go offline to talk about how that's all not working.
So do you see as the river corridor as an asset for the city: what are the prospects?
I think where we sit now is that it's Council-owned and managed land. Council is doing their projects on it including stormwater and stop banks and a few other aesthetic things. There's a little bit of public involvement in some activities along the river. I don't see that there's any benefit of having a management group, a co-governance group around the river at all. I think what I'd like to happen is that Council reviews some of their projects and consults again with the community. Maybe not on a big plan, but at least on some things that they're going to do. I think they definitely have to go back to doing that. Getting an overall ecological restoration plan for the red zone would be a really helpful thing to have done, which we probably should have done when I was there.
I think it's just going to end up being a Council park. What concerns me about that and what a co-governance group might have been able to do was to prevent houses being rebuilt on the area. That's my biggest fear is that's what will happen: people will start applying to build as they already have, around the edges, and they'll forget the history of that land. People can do experimental housing anywhere , it doesn't need to be focused in the red zone. And housing has to be connected to a community, not just sort of plonked somewhere.
What would you say to people elsewhere about what we've learned, what to places that will inevitably find themselves in parallel situations at some point?
I think getting the land into single ownership has been a positive. Having something in the District Plan that says what can and cannot happen in there is useful. But the application of district plans is under review as it's an RMA document. You probably feel that I've kind of given up on it. But when I stopped being on TTK and then tried staying engaged with the co-governance group as I wanted to be an advisor to them, that didn't happen. Council didn't want me. As an observer, I've attended co-governance meetings when I've known that they’re on, but I just lost heart about them making any difference.
Another frustration I didn't talk about, is that Regenerate Christchurch spent millions and millions on justifying that a rowing lake wasn't a great idea. The Trust that was trying to push for the lake had some very early technical advice that said it's just not workable. But it just went on and on: it became a political and emotional issue, driven by desire rather than by evidence. Just imagine if those millions of dollars had been spent on stuff on the ground.
I do think our river corridors are a huge opportunity for ensuring that the water that goes into them is in a pretty good state. I think some advice for us and for other people is talking about the ‘what-ifs’ before they happen. So what would it mean for this community? If we're talking about a coastal area that has to retreat because of sea level rise, there's still going to be land there of some form, but it will get to the stage of having to shift people and houses out. That's really hard for people to do, because they can't visualize what that area would look like without the houses there. I think using that whole scenario thinking can help people visualize some of those things. I haven't looked closely at what they've done for Whakaraupō [Lyttelton Harbour] with the adaptation planning they've done, whether they've talked about what things will look like in the future and what would you like to happen to it now?
I think trying to think about these things beforehand. A part of the Natural Environment Recovery Programme was thinking about waste disposal. In planning for when we have a next event, where, what do you do with waste? Because we're very reactive, but the more that you can plan and think ahead, even if you never hit the exact scenario that happens. There are quite a few examples of areas under threat in New Zealand but not on the sort of scale that we've got. I was at a meeting the other day about the Port Hills red zoned areas, talking about the Port Hills plan or vision document. The people there feel like they've been neglected because of the focus that on the river corridor. I'd say the same for the Brooklands people.
Interview with Eric Pawson in Southampton Street, 16 December 2024
Transcribed with Cockatoo