Rob Kerr

Rob Kerr, General Manager, Residential Red Zone, Regenerate Christchurch 2016-19

Rob led the team at Regenerate Christchurch that was responsible for producing the regeneration plan for the former red zone. The Ōtākaro Avon River Corridor Regeneration Plan was finished 2018, receiving ministerial approval in 2019: https://dpmc.govt.nz/our-programmes/greater-christchurch-recovery-and-regeneration/recovery-and-regeneration-plans/otakaro-avon-river-corridor-regeneration-plan

What was your prior experience before joining Regenerate Christchurch?

My story starts on 5 September 2010, the morning after the first earthquake. That day, I texted the Chief Engineer of Waimakariri District Council asking if he needed a hand as Kaiapoi had been really badly hit. This led to immediate work helping with the recovery, and then later setting up a new business unit of council to coordinate the 

physical rebuild of the town, which included liaising with the team from the Crown making decisions about red zoning in the town. My office was next door to the one responsible for social recovery: and what we did on the physical side of recovery had to support social recovery. I left this role in late 2011 once Kaiapoi was red zoned to join CERA. After working on the housing recovery, I was appointed Development Director-Anchor Projects at the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA), and then Ōtākaro Ltd, before taking the role at Regenerate.

What was your role at Regenerate Christchurch, and how did you go about it?

Regenerate was established under the Greater Christchurch Regeneration Act 2016, which set up three agencies in place of CERA: Ōtākaro Ltd, Regenerate Christchurch and Development Christchurch Ltd (DCL). Regenerate was a joint Crown-city entity. I was hired by Ivan Iafeta, the CEO of Regenerate, to develop a plan for the residential red zone, which was one of Regenerate’s central responsibilities. I had worked with him a lot in Kaiapoi; he came from a social recovery perspective.

It was a very young entity, with not many staff, the majority of whom were seconded from other agencies or contracted. In the first weeks, my focus was on a process to develop the plan. This identified multiple components, starting with the requirements of the Act and the letter of expectations signed by the Minister and the Mayor. These effectively were the scope of work. Second, there was designing a process itself, of business case, technical studies, community and stakeholder engagement. The process that I developed (with some help, but there weren’t many others to help) was to design something that intertwined those workstreams robustly to consider the options for future use of the land. Third, after getting the Regenerate Board to agree with the process, I had to secure the staff and resources on which the more detailed programme of works would depend. Fourth, there were ongoing discussions with other agencies (like the city and regional councils) about how they could contribute. All through we sought guidance and direction from the Board as required: through workshops and monthly Board meetings: ultimately everything was a Board decision but effectively it worked by consensus.

Where there useful precedents for the plan process you set out to create?

In one sense, there were plenty of precedents in District Plan processes throughout the country, and area plans, like the Council’s for south west Christchurch. I looked at overseas examples, although there was nothing particularly useful. The work done in the US after Hurricane Sandy for instance was not ‘real’ in that it was based on design charettes but not founded in anything deliverable. But we needed to produce something that could be made real, and which was grounded in the world of public and private sector financing.

In our case, we wanted a level of stakeholder engagement that went well beyond what had happened in the city centre rebuild under CERA. Partly this was an expectation of the Act and letter of expectations, which had fed through the appointment process of the Board and who they engaged; more particularly it came from our social recovery perspective. In this sense, we did not want to copy the linear consultation process that councils usually use, of draft plans designed in-house being put out for public response. Rather, we were seeking genuine stakeholder engagement right through the planning process.

How did you design the plan process?

With a really big whiteboard, and keeping front of mind Jim Palmer’s view in Kaiapoi (he was CEO of Waimakariri District Council at the time of the earthquakes) that ‘the rebuild is not the recovery’. The recovery is a psycho-social process: this really matters. The process was step-by-step and iterative. There was the linked process of creating a vision, objectives, broad options for land use, to more refined, spatially specific options for land use to go into a plan. The process was designed to intertwine development of a vision and then the outcomes we were trying to achieve; what’s the balance between different land uses best able to meet the vison and objectives? What’s the flavour/character of the uses that best meet them? Ultimately, we wanted to know what the biggest difference this land could make to the future of Christchurch.

These were the questions that we asked during the community engagement process, as well as during the business case process; they were also the questions we asked during the technical studies. All of that provided a structure for the conversations. These conversations were not linear: they went back and forth. The process I designed was to intertwine those steps together, so for example the community engagement about the vision fed back into the Board’s decision about that vision. That in turn is dependent on values: what were the values that we (as a community) wanted to see reflected in the plan? Central to this was the belief that such engagement is part of the recovery: it was part of the healing of east Christchurch, and the city generally.

We had 17 points of public or stakeholder engagement along the pathway, without doubt excessive, but we exhausted every possible avenue, heard every possible voice. Everyone had a more than ample opportunity to be involved. We had specific market research to establish what the city really thought about the future of the red zone. We sought to understand the breadth of views, in addition to the many ‘form’ responses (and lobbying) we received from articulate groups such as the rowing fraternity and those favouring eco-restoration.

You have to pay attention to those who are actively engaged with the process but not at the expense of more truly representative views. We worked with iwi all the way through, and also actively sought out those not usually heard, such as school children and English as second language speakers. This was all to help inform the choice of objectives and land use options, rather than the standard method of consulting on decisions already taken. Overall, the process was robust, and backed up by good technical studies, many with input from working groups, on topics such as ecological land use, housing potential, a rowing facility, including the trade-offs involved.

In 2018, we held a public exhibition of high level ideas (before the plan was drafted) in a building the City Mall. Pretty huge numbers of people came: we had someone on the door with a clicker but I can’t remember how many. It was the first big public occasion concerning the rebuild since the City Council’s Share an Idea process in 2011. It hadn’t been done since then. The exhibition was immensely valuable, allowing us to have 3-4 weeks of dialogue and debate: really a city-wide conversation of learning from each other. The dialogue helped to shape the plan, but it also helped shape individual and collective views about the potential for the red zone.

What difficulties did you face?

One of the lessons from overseas that hit me really hard was from the Scottish regeneration agencies, who have been doing regeneration for decades. This is that the success of a regeneration agency depends on other agencies ceding authority. But the Board of Regenerate Christchurch did not have that: rather, it was charged by statute with creating a plan with no financial or structural context. I didn’t appreciate this point when I first joined Regenerate. It did not own the land in the red zone. There were no long term governance or ownership arrangements even contemplated about how to deliver the plan.  

The concept of Regenerate Christchurch was a compromise, a pragmatic solution to what had been a very difficult post-earthquake relationship between the Crown and City Council. The three entity model was proposed by a committee led by former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, and was effectively an exit strategy, a pathway out of the city for the Crown. So although Regenerate was co-owned by the Crown and the Council, it lacked buy-in from their leaders and politicians. In the rebuild of the city centre, neither the Crown nor Council had wanted to cede authority to the other. The advantage to them of the Regenerate model was that it would avoid that friction in the red zone.

Both had major stakes in the red zone, in that the Crown owned the 5443 sections it had bought from their suburban owners from 2012 onwards; the city council however owned the river banks, streets and parks. So both had interests (meaning ownership and liabilities) in the 602 hectares of the river corridor. But the failure or reluctance to agree on a clear way forward in 2016 meant that with the production of the plan in 2019, all momentum was lost. And you shape a plan to the way it will be implemented: but we were effectively throwing the plan into a void. Creating a situation where this would occur was a massive failure of leadership that rests with the political leaders of the Crown and Council, and their advisers.

How might things have worked better?

One of the insights from the Scottish experience is that things should be set up so that there is momentum; other agencies ceding some authority is central to that. Ideally, in 2016 with the expiry of CERA’s mandate, consideration would have been given to the next stage beyond the plan – implementation – in order to maintain momentum and community/stakeholder confidence. Or Regenerate could have been empowered to make firm recommendations and prepare an implementation plan.

This did not happen in 2016 because politically there was a desire not to presume the outcome of the planning process, and there was not sufficient agreement between the key parties about what that future might look like. So there was a pragmatic thing about avoiding conflict. The draft and final plans were therefore very light on key issues such as implementation, land ownership, financing and governance. I would really have liked to develop the implementation programme/business case more robustly. But there was strong push back from both Crown and Council in relation to doing these decision-making aspects.

The Board chair wrote a foreword to the draft plan urging attention to these issues, and that was just the first public statement of the issue. I had originally written a paper about the need to address the governance issues back in 2017, certainly 2018. Informal advice, letters had been sent, but the Crown and Council had no appetite to engage seriously with the issues until they got into negotiation about the Global Settlement Agreement. In fact the chair’s foreword was significantly watered down for the final, approved version of the plan. And this was after the change of government in 2017, when the new Minister and the city’s Mayor were getting on substantially better. But it’s not easy to change direction: by then the ship had already sailed.

In retrospect?

We worked to design and implement a plan process that matched our belief that ‘the rebuild is not the recovery’ and that community engagement is a critical part of recovery. Although I’d like to say ‘yes’ there were models elsewhere on which we could draw, they really weren’t: but then every context is different. Further, due to the politics surrounding establishment of the agency, we were really working in a void, without any certainty regarding future ownership of the land, or governance arrangements, or what the implementation budget might be. In part this reflects an overwhelming political tendency to make decisions as late as possible, keeping things open for as long as can be, not moving ahead too quickly.

An example of this was that co-governance of the river corridor was originally in the draft objectives, but was removed at a late stage at the insistence of the two shareholders. The Global Settlement Agreement between Crown and Council in 2019 settled the issue of land ownership, in that the Crown’s share would transfer to the city. But it did not resolve the lack of any direction or mandate amongst senior government or Council officials to take responsibility for what was to happen to the plan we produced. So four years after the plan was approved in 2019, a co-governance establishment group has only just been set up by the city and mana whenua.

The importance of maintaining momentum, which we identified very early on, has not been realised. And this at the expense of huge transaction costs and lost opportunities and confidence. However failure to address ways to make plans happen is quite a common practice amongst local authorities. But in this case, every day you delay regeneration implementation is lost opportunity and delayed or lost psycho-social and economic recovery. Ultimately it is poor leadership at the political level.

Interview with Eric Pawson at 75 Watford Street, 24 February 2023