how I got involved with the Ōtākaro Avon River red zone project when Regenerate Christchurch was formed. It was because I had done that work for Waimakariri looking at their red zone and potential future governance arrangements.

How did your involvement with the Ōtākaro red zone develop?

Regenerate Christchurch was formed [in 2016] and then they had various projects within their portfolio, but one was the planning for the Avon river corridor. Regenerate formed a Technical Community Advisory Group (TCAG) for the regeneration plan. You were on it. I was on it. I was asked to provide an international perspective into that process. 

I had also worked with Professor David Johnston on research looking at the outcomes of governance and land use decisions, including the residential red zone decision following the Canterbury earthquakes. Bless his soul; David passed away this past year. David was Director of the Joint Centre for Disaster Research at Massey University. 

David and I contributed insights from Christchurch’s recovery into the 2015 Global Assessment Report (GAR) on Disaster Risk Reduction being prepared for the UN International Strategy on Disaster Risk Reduction.  Our team’s charge was to consider transformational pathways for disaster risk management to enhance development goals. And so in Christchurch I really wanted to document the whole lead up to the red zoning and how that decision was made, what the offers entailed, what happened to people, and just get as much as possible down to develop a case history of the red zone decision making and implementation. So, it was a combination of research funding for our book and projects like the GAR that gave me funding to be down here to attend some of the TCAG meetings in person and then to also interview people and add that perspective of the replanning for the red zone to my overall understanding of the recovery process. 

Policy in the United States for buyouts following floods is quite different. Our National Flood Insurance Program and other federal post-disaster hazard mitigation funding provides mechanisms to do managed retreat when a property is more than 50 percent damaged in a flood or if there's a decision to widen the floodplain after disaster. 

Generally, when flood-related buyouts occur in the United States, conditions of the government purchase restrict reuse of the land for active purposes. It is really supposed to be going back to nature. At most, active purposes that might be allowed are sporting and recreational activity things, with temporary but no permanent structures. You can have campgrounds, trails, sports fields, but not really permanent structures. The contrast with New Zealand for me was interesting to look at, as similar expectations were not in the legislation or in any of the conditions of the red zones’ creation. But they were in the personal views of the residents who were displaced from the red zones. And I was very interested in how that would play out in planning policy making here. 

Would that perception of the public influence the planning? And it did, as we saw in the end, that people just were not comfortable with housing propositions in areas where they had previously lived. They felt like they had given up their land so they should have first right to come back or someone else shouldn't be able to live there if they had to leave it. Thinking about this and providing an opportunity for visions for the future is something that came through that Regenerate process. It was rather distinct from what CERA had been doing, which in effect was just the first stage of managed retreat. Rather, the Regenerate process was concerned with the future. That's what interested me as a researcher: would that future accommodate reuse in a physical form, or would the communal view of the loss and the displacement limit policy options for reuse, the planning process and the visioning?

How did you come to see the regeneration process here? 

I think [the inability to take account of] the issues of governance and finance were impediments to visioning from the beginning. The Regenerate Christchurch approach to the regeneration planning process was actually quite strong.  I felt the planning process had a really strong community engagement component. It was very thoughtful. Various types of dimensions of analysis went into defining and doing the planning. For example, looking at topography, looking at opportunities for water catchments and what the drainage issues were and various things. I felt like it was a strong planning process that had a lot of good dimensions to it. But the issue of who makes the decisions and where the money would come from to do anything seemed to me to impede the ability to envision what the community really wanted. There was always this 10-ton gorilla sitting in the corner, which was, well, don't envision too much because we don't have the money. 

I think also there was a strong view of don't sell this land off to private developers, because it was combating the emotion of the communal loss. To me, the red zone in some ways symbolizes all the emotion around the earthquakes. In a way, it's a memorial in and of itself of the loss and the tragedy that happened. And it also has other aspects of coming together, having some vision of what transformation actually is, what could be possible, new ideas like the cycle path to the sea and sort of reimagining Christchurch from its traditional development and thoughts about the river. And I think that also inviting water into the story or the way Christchurch thinks about itself more in the Māori sense, more in the ecological sense, to me, that's been a big theme. I don't know quite how to put all the words to that, but I feel like it's been a theme that became stronger than it was to Christchurch before the earthquake. 

Coming back to governance and finance: those things featured strongly in the process in my opinion, but as impediments as opposed to facilitators. There wasn't a meaningful allocation by some form of government for the reuse. Going back to comparing and contrasting with our flood buyout policies in the United States, in a couple of post-flood buyouts that I've been involved with, there was another allocation of money that came from our federal government for community recovery, and parts of those pots were used to fund the redesign and reuse of buyout land. But with the Christchurch red zones, there was no budget to start with, and there was always a recognition of the other recovery costs that Christchurch had already incurred. Repair of the infrastructure, various public buildings, the town hall, all the community centres that were damaged. The city already had a huge cost and burden related to the earthquake. It wasn't something that the city was able to set aside money for and the national government had incurred so much with the buyout itself. 

One thing a planning process often will do is actually put forward the budget that's needed, right? I think some of that came out of the planning process. Like these are all the things that are envisioned, this is how much it would cost. But I think that also was a little late and so much had been spent already on the recovery that it was hard: there wasn't a commitment from the beginning to say, you know, we want to see this through to reuse in some way. 

I guess we could run a bunch of counterfactuals on this, like central government could have come in and said, okay, we are going to redevelop this. I know there was talk of people wanting certain types of pet projects. But there could have been some statement at the time the buyout offers were announced, for example that, yes, the red zone will be reused, or not. An upfront commitment to reuse might have discussed the land repair needed to support housing reconstruction there and that allowing for x number of housing units to be developed as part of reconstruction would help to finance the land repair, public amenities and other features within the red zone going forward. But that was never there. Instead it’s been left without a mechanism or without even an owner in a way. Regenerate Christchurch was a partnership of central and local government, but it didn't really have standing in the form of funds, or even longevity given the five-year mission of the [Greater Christchurch Regeneration] Act. 

It's sad to me personally because the Regenerate process really wrapped up right when COVID hit. It was a lot harder to stay in touch. I was unable to come back for a number of years. And then I got pulled into other activities, wildfires in California in particular. So when I came back to Christchurch for the first time after COVID, in April 2023, I was so pleased to see that some projects had moved forward like the cycleway. There was at least some activation of the area. That's one thing I've always been concerned about is that we can't just leave this area barren forever. People should have access to it. There should be some reuse, even if they're low cost and low intensity uses, some thoughtfulness around activation of all the spaces over time. I was pleased to see some of that had happened, but was also surprised and not surprised that things like the governance and the financing still had not sorted themselves out. 

If you look forward 10 or even 50 years how do you see the opportunities for red zone regeneration? 

My concern for the red zone has always been the time it will take to sort out the governance and financing for reuse and the other clocks that are ticking like climate change and sea level rise. The eastern end of the red zone is quite ecologically sensitive. How will that change people's perceptions or its potential uses as that moves forward and things haven't been used? This is just speculating, but there may be at some point some need to reuse that land because there will be other areas that need to be retreated from that have become even more vulnerable and the red zone land is available and nearby. So maybe it'll become more acceptable to the community. Yeah, and I think also as generations pass and those owners, that history and connection to a specific property, will decline over time. I think that also will open up possibilities that were not possible at the time the planning was happening. 

I've had a lot of questions recently looking at disasters around the world: when is the right time to do post-disaster recovery planning, like big planning, reuse, transformative planning? Sometimes, post-disaster there's a need for transformative planning, because reuse in the same configuration with the same uses is not possible without some mitigation and added resilience, or due to a lack of money or all the other constraints that come into play. But, if you start that planning process too soon after a disaster, people have not yet gotten to the place where they can think about the future and that change. It's too painful. But if you wait too long, then you can miss the opportunity to align political will, and in some cases, get the financial support. A lot of other decisions get made that begin to narrow your options for how you can add resilience or be transformative. 

I think the optimum time for post-disaster recovery planning for a community’s physical reconstruction, varies by event and by scale of damage and by culture. I don't really have an answer to this: it's just a question I'm asking. We could have this discussion around the Central City plan versus the Avon River plan. I think you had to do the Central City plan soon because you had so many parties, so many decisions that needed to be made. Just the complexity of the environment, decisions around infrastructure restoration, all of that necessitated that the planning process for the central city get underway quickly. And it was possible to some extent to allow the river corridor to be a planning process that took place later. So in terms of sequencing, I think that is quite reasonable how that all worked out. Now we could sort of nitpick, did we wait too long to do the replanning for the river corridor or was it too soon? Maybe two more years might have made things a little different. Maybe a different government would have made a difference. You can debate those things. 

And you can also debate timeframes from different cultural perspectives. Working in New Orleans after Katrina, the mayor got the business community together right away and started a planning process, like a day after the storm had finished practically. It wasn't, but it was a few months after and they had a draft plan ready within five or six months. There would be some who would say: check, that’s done. I wasn't involved. I had a corporate job at the time, but I remember watching from afar going, wow, that's pretty impressive. We had one of the top planning companies in the country, very well established, very well respected, involved in that. But then it was so obvious later that it was the wrong time for planning because so many people had been displaced by the storm, and the process was very locally centred. By nature of time compression, it involved the people who were still in the city. It turned out the people who were in the city were the people who lived on the drier ground, not the people who had been on the wet ground who had been displaced. So most of those who were most impacted didn't have a say in the planning. So there was a backlash against the plan and the planning policies and proposals. And it makes total sense with hindsight, but at the time you thought, wow, that's so efficient: it's a very comprehensive plan and it's got all the right technical aspects of it. Check, check, check, check, check. 

So like I said, I think the Ōtākaro regeneration plan had, you know, checked all the boxes. That was sort of my role, you know, being on the TCAG. Have you covered all the things that should be done in a proper physical planning process and have you properly engaged the community? I think the big challenge really, again, was governance. Who was really owning that plan? Who were we giving that plan to, with the configuration of Regenerate Christchurch being half and half, central and local government? Were we giving that plan to the council? Were we giving that plan to central government? Were we giving it to them together? Would they talk? Would they make a decision? What happens with the plan? Or is it the people's plan? 

I'll just say in closing that I remain curious. We're now at 2025. So we're thirteen, fourteen years on. I'll be curious over another 10 to 15 years how this evolves, whether any aspect of the plan is picked up, and implemented over time. What we have typically seen in doing these longitudinal recovery studies is that plans do inform future policy. So I think there will be a legacy for the Ōtākaro regeneration planning process, and I'm curious to see how that unfolds. 

Interview with Eric Pawson at the Mount Pleasant Community Centre, 30 August 2025

 

Transcribed with cockatoo