Hugh Nicholson

Hugh Nicholson, Design Lead, Ōtākaro Avon Regeneration Plan, Regenerate Christchurch, 2016-18

Hugh was the Design Lead in the red zone team that formulated the Ōtākaro Avon River Corridor Regeneration Plan at Regenerate Christchurch. The plan was finished in 2018, receiving ministerial approval in 2019.

What was your experience before joining Regenerate Christchurch?

I was Principal Urban Designer at Christchurch City Council during the earthquake period. My roles there included facilitating the development of Share an Idea, the publicly focused conversation that took place over some weeks in 2011

and gathered 106,000 ideas about how people wanted to see the central city rebuilt. I was the design lead for the development of the Council’s Draft Christchurch Central Recovery Plan, which used these ideas as a broadly agreed structure and direction.

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. After the earthquakes, I also helped to facilitate the activities of the transitional organisations for which Ōtautahi Christchurch became internationally renowned including Gapfiller, Greening the Rubble, and Life in Vacant Spaces (LiVS). As well I was working on the rebuilding of Ōtautahi Christchurch with developers and private investors. And working with the Central City Development Unit (CCDU), once the responsibility for 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?

After the intensity of the post-earthquake period I was looking around and wondering what I was interested in working on next. It seemed to me that when parts of Ōtautahi Christchurch subsided by over a metre after the earthquakes creating what became known as the ‘red zone’, it was the equivalent of a metre in sea level rise 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 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 a combination of bluster, threat and persuasion. But then nothing happened: in the years I was at the Council, the Crown cleared the structures and maintained the red zone but made no long-term plans. My understanding is that this was partly due to concerns about insurance: the Crown had done a deal with the insurance companies, whereby the companies paid the equivalent of the value that they would have been liable for if the properties had been rebuilt. Maybe the Crown did not want to create legal difficulties if the insurers perceived 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 do we address sea level rise. What do we do? I just think to be able to tackle this kind of problem is fascinating, and tremendously important for the people of Ōtautahi Christchurch.

What was your role at Regenerate Christchurch?

My role was initially described as ‘Master Planner’ but I’ve never been a fan of masterplans: 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 lead the development of 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 title and the red zone ‘stayers’, drainage and hydrological issues, ecological processes, cultural values, iwi relationships, economic opportunities, and not least the attachments and memories of those thousands of residents who had lost their homes. There was a whole series of layers, and it was the role of the design team to understand those layers and to weave them together in search of a spatial solution. The layers in effect encapsulated a history of Ōtautahi Christchurch, the sort of perspective embodied in the work of Ian McHarg. It was my job to ensure that the work of each member of the red zone team, and each of those layers was expressed in a spatial 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. Two thirds of the land was owned by the Crown, which wasn’t sure what to do with it, and and one third was owned by the City Council who were concerned about the potential liability. We needed to draw Treasury into the process and to persuade them that no economic return was possible on the the red zone land. And to persuade the council that they needed the land in order to create wetlands for stormwater treatment, to provide flood protection for the neighbouring suburbs, and to create new recreational and ecological opportunities. We discussed asking Ngāi Tūāhuriri to be involved in a co-governance role but were asked to back off by DPMC (Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet) and senior management within Regenerate. This did sow the seeds for a co-governance discussion later.

smoothly. We had a team of designers drawn from the City Council; Ōtākaro Ltd, Development Christchurch Ltd (an organisation set up through the Greater Christchurch Regeneration Act 2016); and Matapopore Charitable Trust (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; but a collaborative approach to design might be one 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 the way in which we had gone about developing the draft central city recovery plan. It allowed for some concentrated design periods, when we developed the core ideas. Most of the key design workshops 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, of developing creative ideas, and asking: what happens if we do this? You test the design options: does this work, does that work? With this approach, we were able to bring together the technical material, the cultural ideas and community responses, and the other layers. We could test our ideas by working between scales, by zooming in and checking whether they worked at a neighbourhood level, at a particular place. Then we’d take our ideas back to the experts and they would give us feedback – they might say that this idea would work, but this one was not a good idea.

At a more practical 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, for example the existing ecological habitats and the likely effects of sea level rise, based on the work of ecological 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 sphere, so it worked pretty

Ōtākaro Avon River Corridor design workshop with David Falconer (Regenerate Chistchurch), Hannah Lewthwaite (Christchurch CIty Council), Camia Young (Development Christchurch) and Debbie Tikau (Matapopore Charitable Trust)

What do you think worked well?

The collaborative approach had a range of benefits. For example, iwi values are difficult to incorporate into formal government processes - people speak different languages, have different values and work to different time frames. In the red zone design process Matapopore, the iwi designers, were delegated by Ngāi Tūāhuriri to design on their behalf. We literally worked side-by-side drawing on the same plans, which brings the

Mapihi Martin-Paul and Debbie Tikau from the Matapopore Charitable Trust, and Hugh Nicholson at Ngāi Tahu’s biennial hui-ā-iwi, Tuahiwi Marae, 2017

possibility of meshing ideas in a way that is not possible through formal consultation processes. Matapopore had used a similar process for the anchor projects in the CCDU’s Central City Recovery Plan. What’s special about these processes is that they have enabled the embedding of iwi narratives into the rebuilding of Ōtautahi Christchurch.

An example of is this the use 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 the theories underlying parks and reserves in a pakeha paradigm, treat people and nature as separate, and restrict access to and use of natural spaces in order to ‘protect’ them from people. Mahinga kai provides a framework to invite local communities to be involved in the red zone, to use and take responsibility for the river corridor.

Overall, I felt there were exciting design outcomes, we have created a piece of green infrastructure that will serve Christchurch for the next 100 years, depending on the rate of sea level rise. The concept of a ‘green spine’ provides recreational opportunities as well as new 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 will provide for the removal of contaminants and retention of high volume stormwater flows.

Moving the stop banks back from the river creates an opportunity to restore native ecosystems on the resulting river terraces which can act as ‘ecological armour’ for the stopbanks in the face of sea level rise. The stopbanks will provide flood protection through 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 permanent solutions - the red zone is 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’ that provides exciting new recreational opportunities 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 can use the stop banks as a platform for example. But one of the key things we’ve shown is that we can work with natural processes rather than trying to engineer our way out of environmental problems. This is a fundamental design approach. The regeneration plan creates the opportunity to let natural systems do more of the heavy lifting.

What could have been done differently?

I’m a strong believer in community engagement and would have liked the opportunity for more open-ended engagement, similar to Wellington’s Waterfront Framework, or Christchurch’s Share an Idea. Consultation did happen through the Red Zone Futures Exhibition (https://www.newsline.ccc.govt.nz/news/story/exhibition-offers-glimpse-into-future-of-red-zone) and community outreach programmes but there was limited appetite within the Council or the Crown 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, to ask ‘is this what 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 involved showing people what would be in the plan rather than open-ended community engagement. I felt there were limited opportunities for the public to suggest changes.

Red Zone Futures Exhibition opening, Cashel Street Mall.

Hugh Nicholson (at right) talking to members of the public at Red Zone Futures Exhibition

Ideally I think there could have been an organisation responsible for taking the design and planning process for the red zone through to implementation: or at least an organisation or community 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 flawed. The red zone team at Regenerate was fantastic, but the day after the draft plan was delivered to the minister, the whole team was given notice. It was an unpleasant experience in a work environment that had become toxic.

The plan itself was subsequently diluted by senior managers at Regenerate, without a great deal of awareness of the processes by which it was developed. All the work that had been undertaken on implementation pathways was taken out. 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 was that it would not understand the integrated nature of the plan. I am glad to say that so far my concerns have been unfounded and the Council’s Parks team appear to be delivering thoughtful and well-integrated projects.

In retrospect?

I am excited to see progress on co-governance discussions between the Council and Ngāi Tūāhuriri with the establishment of the Ōtākaro Avon River Corridor Co-Governance Establishment Subcommittee and look forward to seeing this relationship develop.

A weakness of the voluntary land acquisition were the long-term stayers who were left living in houses within the red zone. Some of these houses present quite significant and expensive problems for the implementation of the Regeneration Plan. For example in some places new stop banks have had to be designed around houses. I think it may be necessary to buy these houses in the future: either through compulsory acquisition under the Public Works Act, or through a more compassionate process by negotiation. Meanwhile, the Council is obligated to continue to provide services to these remaining houses.

‘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 red zone, while others still returned and tended their old gardens. Acknowledging their stories could be done in a range of ways including memorials, story boards, books, or letter box sculptures. We were keen to allow the former roads flood forming a grid of canals in Bexley, as a tapestry of the past that’s no longer there. Acknowledging the people who were affected by managed retreat is an important consideration. Ultimately how we acknowledge the memories of these communities is probably best considered by our communities. I’ve always been 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 emphasise the importance of agreeing to political solutions for managed retreat on a national basis. How is managed retreat funded equitably and sustainably? Who will make key decisions about the location and extent of managed retreat? Who will own and manage the land / sea left after managed retreat? Is it just about strategic retreat, or is it an opportunity to enhance both ecosystems and our wider communities? How can we celebrate some of the memories of affected communities. I believe that it’s more than just an ‘engineering problem’ but that there are opportunities to work with natural systems, to improve water quality and to recreate the ecosystems that might sustain us – and to create new recreational and economic opportunities.

The red zone was not a blank canvas, but a place of great complexity and detail. Many layers of information, and a wide range of ideas and values were woven into the Ōtākaro red zone design in order to create an integrated and responsive plan for the benefit of the people of Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Interview with Eric Pawson at 75 Watford Street, 19 April 2023; revised August 2025

Mapihi Martin-Paul and Debbie Tikau from the Matapopore Charitable Trust, and Hugh Nicholson at Ngāi Tahu’s biennial hui-ā-iwi, Tuahiwi Marae, 2017