development of the Council’s draft Christchurch Central Recovery Plan, which used these ideas as a broadly agreed structure and direction: https://ccc.govt.nz/the-council/how-the-council-works/reporting-and-monitoring/share-an-idea

 

These roles built on my experience working in a publicly-engaged design process for Wellington City Council developing a framework for the redevelopment of its waterfront in 2001. (https://wellington.govt.nz/-/media/your-council/plans-policies-and-bylaws/plans-and-policies/a-to-z/waterfrontframewk/files/framework.pdf?la=en&hash=BB0F3D4B3C19163C0A4D83E9913B0CF0EB442C5F  After the earthquakes, I was also responsible for facilitating the activities of the transitional organisations for which Christchurch became well known: Gapfiller, Greening the Rubble, Life in Vacant Spaces (LiVS) etc. And working on the rebuilding of Christchurch with developers and private investors, and the Central City Development Unit (CCDU) where possible, once the central city planning was taken out of the council’s hands and became the responsibility of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA).

 

What attracted you move to Regenerate Christchurch?

 

I was looking round wondering what to do next. It seemed to me that when parts of Christchurch subsided by over a metre after the earthquakes in what became known as the ‘red zone’, it was the equivalent of a metre rise in sea level overnight. I felt that this was an enormous problem but also an amazing opportunity – one that many cities around the world are likely to face in next century. How do we deal with this change in sea level, how do we figure out what to do about it and address it in a positive and integrated way? This is what attracted me to the role.

 

The red zone had always been a very strange beast. It was an incredibly brave move by the government to buy out thousands of properties, and to do it largely without resorting to compulsory acquisition, through bluster, threat and persuasion. But then nothing happened: in the years I was at the Council, the Crown cleared and maintained the red zone but made no long term plans. My understanding is that this was partly due to concern about insurance: they’d done a deal with the insurance companies, whereby the companies paid for the damage that they would have been liable for if the properties had been rebuilt. Maybe the Crown did not want to get into legal difficulties if the insurers then saw the process as acquiring land cheaply for a park. And the city council did not have the interest or capacity at the time to put design resources into the red zone.

 

So there had been no thinking about what would happen to the red zone lands, what their future would be. I was attracted to working on what in my perception will be a massive global problem: how to deal with sea level rise. What do we do? I just think to be able to tackle that kind of problem is fascinating. And tremendously important for the people of Christchurch.

 

What was your role at Regenerate Christchurch?

 

My role was initially described as ‘Master Planner’ but I’ve never been a fan of master plans: they imply the ‘hand of god’ and we never seem to be in a position to exercise that kind of authority. So we settled on ‘Design Lead’ as a better description of the sort of collaborative process that was intended, and which reflected my prior experience and preferences as an urban designer. I was part of the red zone team, headed by Rob Kerr, and my job was to develop a design for the red zone which would be incorporated into the regeneration plan.

 

When I say ‘design ‘, I don’t mean a pattern-making exercise, but something that responded to the various imperatives: the geomorphic processes, legal boundaries and the red zone stayers, drainage and hydrological issues, ecological values, cultural values, iwi relationships, economic opportunities, and not least the attachments and memories of those thousands of residents who had lost their homes. So there was a whole series of layers, and it was the role of the design team to understand the layers and weave these together in search of a spatial solution. The layers in effect encapsulated a history of Christchurch, the sort of perspective embodied in the work of Ian McHarg. It was my job to take the work of each member of the team, each of the layers and express these in a design that wove them together.

 

How did you go about this?

 

It’s best to think of this at a couple of levels. At the very high level, the intention was to draw together the key players. We had land largely owned by the Crown, which didn’t know what to do with it, and the City Council who didn’t want a bar of it, because the potential costs. We needed to draw Treasury into it and persuade them that no economic return was possible, that the land was essentially valueless in that respect. And to persuade the council that they needed the land to create wetlands for stormwater treatment, to provide flood protection for the neighbouring suburbs, and to create recreational and ecological opportunities. We tried to get Ngāi Tūāhuriri involved in a co-governance role but were told to back off by DPMC (Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet) and by senior management within Regenerate. But this sowed the seeds for a co-governance discussion later.

 

At the next level, we needed to draw up a spatial plan to incorporate within the regeneration plan. We’d draw up plans for each of the layers, like where are the existing ecological habitats and what happens to them with sea level rise, based on the work of the experts. I had a team of two or three designers within Regenerate Christchurch, but the bulk of the design work at this level was done by a cross-organisational design team. I managed to get each of the partner organisations to nominate designers. It was a formal arrangement but operating at an officer level below the political level, so it worked pretty well. We had a team of designers drawn from the City Council; Ōtākaro Ltd, Development Christchurch Ltd (an organisation like Regenerate set up through the Greater Christchurch Regeneration Act 2016); and Matapopore (the mana whenua voice in recovery, responsible for ensuring Ngāi Tūāhuriri/Ngāi Tahu values, aspirations and narratives are realised within the recovery of Christchurch: https://matapopore.co.nz).

 

This collaborative approach to design recognised that friction between organisations might be a weak point; it was also a way of easing relationships at the political and management levels. The establishment of this collaborative team took place within the first six months, and it mirrored a bit the way in which we had gone about the central city design plan. It allowed for some concentrated design periods, when we came up with the core ideas. Most of the key studio workshops which shaped the design took place at Matapopore’s offices, in a shared studio. The shared space and workshop process were essential, and the location was symbolically important. We had two week-long studio sessions and a series of half day workshops at other times. Design is an iterative process, bringing up creative ideas, and asking: what happens if we do this? You test it: does this work, does that work? With this approach, we were able to bring together the technical material, community responses, all the different layers. We could test our ideas, including between working between scales, by zooming in and checking whether they worked at a local level, in this particular place. Then we’d take our ideas back to the experts and they would give us feedback - they’d say this would work, but this never would.

 

What do you think worked well?

 

The collaborative approach had a range of benefits. For example, iwi values are remarkably hard to incorporate into formal government processes - people speak different languages and work to different time frames. In the red zone design process the iwi designers were delegated by Ngāi Tūāhuriri to design on their behalf and we worked literally side-by-side, which brings a meshing of ideas which is not possible through a consultation process. Matapopore adopted a parallel process for the anchor projects in the CCDU’s Central City Recovery Plan. What’s special about these processes is the way they have enabled the embedding of iwi narratives.

 

An example of is this the embedding of ‘mahinga kai’ as an organising principle for the red zone.  In Te Ao Māori people are seen as an intrinsic part of the natural world, and mahinga kai emphasises our responsibility to safeguard the mauri (life essence) of the natural environment, in order to ensure its health and capability to provide for us and our children. In contrast western parks and reserves treat people and nature as separate, and restrict access to and use of natural spaces to ‘protect’ them from people. Mahinga kai invites local communities to be involved, to use and take responsibility for the river corridor.

 

Overall, I felt there were really positive design outcomes, they are exciting and potentially we have created a piece of green infrastructure that will serve Christchurch for the next 100 years or so, depending on the rate of sea level rise. The concept of a ‘green spine’ provides recreational opportunities as well as ways of working with nature. For example there are extraordinary opportunities to improve the water quality of stormwater from approximately one third of the river’s stormwater catchment (2,600 hectares) which is currently untreated. New wetlands outside the stop banks provide for treatment of contaminants and retention of stormwater.

 

Moving the stop banks back from the river creates an opportunity to restore native ecosystems which can act as ‘ecological armour’ for the stopbanks in the face of sea level rise. The stopbanks provide flood protection to the end of the century for eastside suburbs that would otherwise be vulnerable to sea level rise in the shorter term. It is important to remember that there are no final solutions - the red zone is merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of vulnerability to sea level rise.

 

The city-to-sea pathway and landings will reconnect the central city to the estuary and New Brighton, and will give access to a rejuvenated Ōtākaro Avon River along a ‘green spine’ providing an exciting new recreational opportunity for locals and visitors.

 

The ‘green spine’ provides hazard protection, stormwater treatment, ecological and recreational benefits, these are catchment and city wide benefits, not just red zone solutions. We can use managed retreat to deliver something back to the wider city. The design outcomes that we sought are multiple and integrated: the city to sea pathway uses the stop banks as a platform for example. But one of the key things is that we’ve shown is how to work with natural processes rather than trying to engineer our way out of the problems. This is a fundamental design approach. The regeneration plan has been an opportunity to let natural systems do more of the heavy lifting. It was one of the things that attracted me to this project.

 

What could have been done differently?

 

I’m a strong believer in community engagement and would have liked the opportunity for more extensive engagement, similar to Wellington’s Waterfront Framework, or Christchurch’s Share an Idea. This did happen to a certain extent through the Red Zone Futures Exhibition (https://www.newsline.ccc.govt.nz/news/story/exhibition-offers-glimpse-into-future-of-red-zone) but there was no appetite within Council or Treasury at that point for more extensive community involvement. I’d have liked a process that started with something like Share an Idea, and then went back to the community, for example with open days, to ask ‘is this the sort of thing you meant?’ Something that could have led the design process. This might have enabled us to have incorporated more cultural values for example. We did a pretty good job with the Red Zone Futures Exhibition held in Cashel Mall in 2018. But this showed people what was in the plan, it was more about delivery of a finished product rather than community engagement. I did not feel that community had many opportunities to suggest changes.

 

The second thing is that ideally there should have been an organisation responsible for taking the design and planning process through to implementation: or at least an organisation or trust that was tasked with implementing the plan in an integrated way. The idea that Regenerate Christchurch was just there to draw up a plan was fundamentally flawed. The red zone team at Regenerate was fantastic, but the day after the draft plan was given to the minister, we were all given notice. It was an unpleasant experience. The situation within the organisation by that point had become toxic.

 

The plan itself was subsequently diluted by senior managers at Regenerate, without much awareness of the processes we’d developed. All the work that had been undertaken on implementation pathways was taken out by senior managers. The regeneration plan was the most significant outcome of Regenerate Christchurch that I’m aware of. Subsequently responsibility for the implementation of the regeneration plan passed to the City Council, and one of my concerns is that it does not understand the integrated nature of the plan. Like most councils it works in functional siloes and does not have the budgetary or staffing structures to deliver an integrated solution.

 

In retrospect?

 

What I’ve seen of Council’s implementation is concerning, and it seems to be occurring in separate packages. There’s no overarching design delivery. For example there’s not much point in constructing the city to sea pathway if the location and building of the stop banks hasn’t been finalised. You then end up with the stop banks in sub-optimal locations. It would have been nice also to have been able to build on the iwi relationships that we’d developed through the design process. But it is great to see progress with co-governance with the Council.

 

One of the weaknesses has been the long-term stayers who are left in the red zone. Some present quite significant and expensive problems, for example where stop banks have to be designed around houses. It needs a form of governance strong enough to go and buy the houses where necessary: either through compulsory acquisition under the Public Works Act, or through a more compassionate process where someone does a deal with them. Meanwhile, the council is obligated to provide services to the households that remain, even if it’s now only a dozen or so.

 

‘Managed retreat’ is not just a physical retreat but a social or community retreat also. Some of the former red zone residents did not want to know anything about the redevelopment of the area while others still tended their old gardens in the red zone. Acknowledging their stories can be done in a range of ways including memorials, story boards, books, letter box sculptures. We were very keen on letting the roads flood as a grid of canals in Bexley, as a tapestry of the past that’s no longer there. Acknowledging those people who had to retreat: it was a huge thing for them. Ultimately it needs to be a community answer: the memories of communities are probably best delivered by communities. That’s why I’m glad that CERA left many of the trees and shrubs that outline the extent of former gardens in the red zone as a poignant memorial for those who lived there. 

 

I would really stress the importance of getting the political solutions for managed retreat lined up. Who funds managed retreat? Who makes the decisions? Who owns and manages the land / sea? Is it just about strategic retreat, or is about capitalising on opportunities for creating nature-based and community-derived solutions? We tried to celebrate some of the memories of communities. We need to think about the different facets of managed retreat. It’s not just an engineering problem but a problem of how to tell the stories of those who had to move, to improve water quality and recreate the ecosystems that might sustain us – to create new opportunities. The red zone was not at all a blank canvas, but a place of so much complexity and detail. So many layers were woven into the red zone design to try and create a holistic and responsive plan for the people of Ōtautahi Christchurch.

 

Interview with Eric Pawson at 75 Watford Street, 19 April 2023