Lithuanian backpacker Liga Stopniece
casts off for a flying-fox ride down
Christchurch’s all-age Margaret Mahy
Playground (named for a well-known NZ
children’s author). At 1.6ha it’s the biggest
playground in the Southern Hemisphere,
and credited with “bringing theheartbeat
back into the city”.STORY BYGEOFF CHAPPLE PHOTOGRAPHY BY MIKE LANGFORDWhen a
city risesThe fatal earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand,
on 22 February 2011 killed 185, wrecked
the city’s CBD and undermined its eastern
suburbs. Ten years on, Christchurch has learnt
some valuable lessons in city planning.    THAT FEBRUARY 2011 earthquake, which struck during the city’s lunch hour, was the most destructive in a series. It was the one that broke so many of the Central Business District’s verticals and horizontals – its buildings and the roads, sewers, water and gas pipes. It was shallow and ferocious. Its peak vertical ground acceleration of 2.2G (more than twice the acceleration of gravity) momentarily lifted parts of Christchurch to the sort of face-distorting speeds astronauts experience when they ascend into space.
    It wasn’t the biggest quake in its series. Five months earlier, there’d been a 7.1-magnitude tremor centred 45km west of Christchurch that damaged the city. But 22 February was different. It was magnitude 6.3, smaller than the previous quake, but the epicentre was just 6km south of the city and even on an international scale it was very violent. Two multi-storey buildings in the CBD pancaked and the low-rise masonry in older parts of the city centre cascaded onto the streets.
    The steeple and bell tower of Christ Church Cathedral collapsed into the square, and its whole front face and beautiful rose window – the spiritual and symbolic face of Christchurch itself – teetered, and would later collapse onto the entrance portico, opening the nave to wind and weather, and the pigeons of Cathedral Square.
    The February quake killed 185 and triggered an immediate state of local emergency that gave top-down control to civil defence. Then emergency legislation in April 2011 changed it to a state of national emergency that shifted top-down control to a Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery, Gerry Brownlee, and appointed a Christchurch Earthquake Recovery
Authority (CERA).
    That absolute control by the minister and his department proved to be right and proper, for as the years went by, the government would spend more than $14 billion of New Zealand taxpayers’ money on the Christchurch recovery and rebuild.
   Yet it was the people of the city, not its appointees, who’d laboured by the thousand amid wreckage to help each other in those post-quake days. It was therefore equally right and proper that the emergency legislation of April 2011 didn’t just set up the top-down authority of a minister and his department, but decreed a bottom-up approach. It called for the people of Christchurch to be given 90 days to prepare a draft plan for building their new city.

   THREE MONTHS. It wasn’t long but the population was already primed. The post-quake days watchword was “When a city falls apart, the people come together” and the people had done that.▼ Cashel Street Mall is the heart of the new retail zone. A regular tram service comes through at a sedate 8km/h, but otherwise it’s a pedestrian, bicycle, electric scooter and service vehicle precinct.   They’d formed neighbourhood teams to knock down each other’s chimneys. They’d hooked electrical feeds over neighbours’ fences, shared toilets and shovelled the product of liquefaction off each other’s doorsteps. Many had a wage subsidy but no job to go to and their kids had no schools to be taken to. They had time on their hands, and they’d bonded into adult groups that sat around drinking and gossiping
   Then came the invitation to “Share an Idea”. The newly social Christchurch population clinked its glasses, took another sip and clocked up the highest level of community response to city planning NZ had ever seen. The submissions were rendered down to 106,000 separate ideas, broken into themes by council planners and organised into a draft plan that was dispatched to the minister. The mythology of that time has it that the people of Christchurch redesigned their city on a visionary flush of alcohol.
   CERA took the plan, set down five-year confidentiality agreements for its planners to sign, then closeted itself for a 100-day rewrite. What emerged came to be called the Blueprint (see AG 113) and it specifically acknowledged the first plan of the city laid out in 1850 by surveyor Edward Jollie. Across Christchurch’s flat land the 25-year-old Jollie had laid out a uniform, regular street grid loyal to cardinal directions. At its centre was a cruciform square, with the Avon River – now the Otakaro/Avon – left to wind its own eccentric path across it all.
    The Blueprint channelled Jollie’s orthogonal spirit. It took the logic of the grid and enhanced it with a conceptual frame that defined straight-line boundaries to the CBD on three sides. The frames defined precincts – each as wide as a city block, and most six city blocks long. To the north lay the arts and culture precinct. The long inner-city residential precinct was east. To the south was the innovation and health precinct. Then, to complete the western precinct on what was otherwise a strictly rectangular template, the Blueprint gave itself over to the Avon’s meanderings and became the precinct for river-sitting, riverside strolling and on-river punting. ►Map reproduced courtesy of the Christchurch
Development Unit and Christchurch City Council▲ Anglican Bishop Victoria Matthews sought demolition of quake-damaged Christ Church Cathedral due to cost. Citizen groups pushed back and the Anglican Synod agreed to restoration in 2017.► Eighty per cent of the CBD was wiped out by the quake, giving space for a design-led recovery that tightened up the CBD with ‘frames’. The sinuous Otakaro/Avon River was le‹ to define the western boundary.▼ A gantry stabilised the western entrance while debate raged over the cathedral’s fate. A council offer of $10 million and a government offer of $35 million helped win the case for restoration, which began in 2019.The popular bars and restaurants of
The Terrace look across the newly paved
promenade and its step-down basalt
terraces to the water, all part of opening
up the CBD to the Otakaro/Avon River.  The Blueprint also proposed 13 Anchor Projects – new builds that would buttress the separate identities of each frame. There was a large playground, for example, at the end of the residential precinct and a huge indoor pool and sports complex alongside the health precinct. The Avon precinct would feature a 2km riverside walkway from the Christchurch Hospital through to the big playground, with dark basalt terraces en route that stepped down to touch the river. And just upstream of those terraces, curving gently to follow a bend in the river, there’d be the white marble wall of Oi Manawa Canterbury Earthquake National memorial, with the names of the 185 earthquake dead inscribed.
   The frame enclosed the 74ha space of the CBD, and within that space the Blueprint set out various specialist spaces. The locally beloved Ballantynes Department store would anchor a new retail mall. Justice and Emergency Services would be housed close together. There’d be a new library, a new bus exchange, a big space for a new Convention Centre right next to the Avon, and, at the centre as always, Jollie’s Cathedral Square.
   It would be a green city, a walking city, a living city, an intimate city, a market city, a city turned to the river, a city with a height limit of seven storeys – aside from those few high-rise buildings that survived the quake.
    These were all features of the draft plan, and Hugh Nicholson, the council’s design leader for the draft plan, was pleased with the Blueprint overall. As for many others, once it came before the public, he’d push back against the Convention Centre site.

By its nature it was an introverted building that would be better located further out, but they quickly found it was not their place to say so. “The issue is not what was done,” Hugh says now, “but how it was done. It was done to us. So rather than Christchurch people being invited into the rebuild after Share An Idea, they were cut out.”

    THE DAMAGED CHRISTCHURCH Town Hall didn’t figure in the CERA blueprint. It was a Brutalist structure of the 1970s, revered as an avant-garde architectural antidote to old Christchurch’s decorative gothic style. Its concert hall had the best acoustics of any performance space in the land. Its big front pillars stood in reflective pools of water right on the riverbank. In the 2011 quake its subsurface had liquefied as the quake struck, and those front pillars and other foundation columns had sunk at variable rates and twisted the superstructure above.
    CERA wanted the Town Hall’s performance functions transferred to two proposed theatres in the Blueprint’s arts and culture precinct. The council came under pressure to demolish the Town Hall and put its $68 million insurance money into those theatres. But at the end of 2012, the council voted to keep it.
    It was the first push-back against CERA’s control of the rebuild. The structure was strong enough to survive nuclear attack but not, suggested CERA and the minister, lateral spread, the slow slide of its unstable footings towards the river.

▼ Gerard Smyth sits in the Isaac Theatre Royal on the day of his film premiere. The theatre, an icon of the recovery, was severely damaged then restored to its original 1908 splendour with $40 million of private funding, and reopened in 2014.▲ The Catholic basilica has lost the battle for repair. In 2019 the stone angels were lowered from the balustrade, and demolition continues. A new cathedral will rise beside the river on a triangular site two city blocks north of the Christ Church Anglican Cathedral.▲ Names of the 185 quake dead are inscribed along the curving riverside marble of the Oi Manawa Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial.CERA had not liaised well with the community during the rebuild.  “Broken and unusable”, claimed the minister in a June 2013 opinion piece in the Christchurch Press daily newspaper. And the minister, everyone knew, had power to override the council.
    Ten years on, Gerard Smyth, filmmaker, sits in the extensively quake-damaged then exquisitely rebuilt Isaac Theatre Royal. When the earthquake first struck, he grabbed his Sony EX3 and walked straight into the debris to film, one hand pressing into place a lens that had broken away from its mount. He filmed his approach to the fallen dome, shattered masonry, unstable pillars and stone angels of the Catholic Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, sobbing as he progressed. In the opinion of many, the basilica had been a finer building than the Anglican cathedral, though tucked away in Barbadoes Street, far from the CBD.
     Gerard produced the quake documentary When a City Falls. For the 10-year anniversary in 2021, he produced a follow-up documentary – When a City Rises.
    One of the film’s protagonists, mental health worker Ciaran Fox, divides up the 10-year recovery period so far into three distinct phases – first a heroic period of rescue, then a honeymoon period of participation, but now a period of disillusionment.
    It’s a big claim to make amid a $14 billion spend, but as CERA folded up its tent in 2016, the New Zealand auditor-general – the gold standard for unbiased government reportage – investigated CERA’s five-year record, and suggested why that might be true.
  The auditor-general reported CERA’s satisfactory performance on its initial demolition agenda and on its housing clearances from areas in the Red Zone (the hub of the damage to the CBD). It had not, though, said the auditor-general, liaised well with the local community during the rebuild, remaining too distant. Nor had it managed the anchor projects in its charge with sufficient rigour.
  True, the anchor projects had fallen behind. The Margaret Mahy Playground, named after a NZ children’s author, was the only anchor that hit its delivery date. Still, the bus interchange, the Oi Manawa memorial and the Otakaro/Avon River Precinct, though late, engendered such delight that it didn’t seem to matter.
    Other delays, though, had an effect on morale. The new sports stadium, originally slated to open in 2017, remains on hold. The Convention Centre’s opening has been put back four years to 2021. The Metro Sports Facility’s opening is deferred by six years to 2022.
      The eastern frame’s medium density residential living is paced according to demand – 172 apartments to date, with another 68 under construction with prices ranging from $399,000 for one-bedroom apartments to three-bedroom terrace designs at $1.25 million. Three-quarters of the estimated build – 660 units – still lies ahead. The eastern frame doesn’t impress Gerard.   ►

▲ Mayor Lianne Dalziel in the Town Hall’s renowned 2500-seat concert hall. Costs ballooned, but the council saved its beloved Town Hall.⯈ Local developer Richard Peebles built the Riverside Market, and after the hard quake years, it’s been an instant success.The City Tour is a
tourist circuit and handy
transport for locals who
hold annual passes.Trams and traumaVeterans of the streets that see it allPETER SALVESEN was driving his tram on 15 March 2019 when sirens began to wail and police cars darted through the streets. Something was wrong. Radio messages came through calling him to return to base. An Australian white supremacist gunman had opened fire with semi-automatic weapons at two Christchurch mosques, killing 51 and wounding 40.
    In the days after, Peter watched
Christchurch react: “You could see in
people’s faces a real sense of shock, of
fright. Pinched faces, no laughter. It affected the body language. People were unsure. It was like a mist came over the city. It was very strange.”
    If the Christchurch trams don’t run – even if only briefly – it signals a city in trouble. They shut down for three hours during that March rampage. They shut down for two and a half years after the 2011 earthquake. And they shut down for two months during the COVID-19 lockdowns. “The trams are so iconic in Christchurch, so much a symbol of normality, that [their running indicates] the city itself is open again for business,” Peter says. After the COVID lockdown ended he observed “a wonderful atmosphere return to the city”.
    The success of that lockdown nationwide, the determination of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and the so-called team of 5 million to halt the spread of the virus, mean that New Zealanders now travel freely across the country, and the government has put in place programs to encourage domestic tourism. ▲ During Peter Salvesen’s running commentary, he gestures here at the historic Gothic pile of the Christchurch Arts Centre.The numbers of NZ tourists coming into the city, particularly from Auckland, Peter observes, are not a replacement for the thousands of missing international tourists, but they help. 
   As he commentates the City Tour now, Peter notes in passing that the Christ Church Cathedral has bird poop ankle-deep in the nave right now, but that’ll pass. He notes that the ANZ Centre between Cashel and High streets, though 25m high, has foundations 30m deep and that the city is now re-engineered and as safe as it can be, with the highest standards of quake-proofing.
   “We didn’t ask for the earthquake sequence to happen but we’ve been presented with this chance by Mother Nature to just get it right,” Peter tells his tramful of attentive travellers as he clangs the bell and the tram sways forward.
The more you know, the more you can carry away with you.
______as it always was. She saw to that herself, for years, and now pays others to keep it. The cherry tree planted to celebrate her 10th wedding anniversary still holds central place in the garden and, like so much else around here, a central place in her memory.

  THE OTAKARO/AVON flows past what was once her front door en route to the sea. The eastern suburbs of Richmond, Bexley and Dallington all flourished along this river corridor before the 2011 quake. The liquefaction sand beneath these suburbs is weight-bearing when it’s stable, but any earthquake acts like a giant pump. The river corridor sank during the 2011 earthquake by about a metre, and the silt burst through and ruined, or put at risk, 6000 homes.
  CERA’s response was to Red Zone wide swathes of land on both sides of the river, buy out the homeowners and demolish their houses. That left an apocalyptic landscape serviced by damp roads to nowhere with leaning lampposts and cul-de-sacs of silted neglect. The sections they served are still populated by backyard fruit trees and delineated by border hedges, but the houses and people have gone.
  Diana Madgin was a gardening columnist. Her staple weekly column was a “caulis and cabbage” affair, discussing what vegetable suited what season, but after the quakes she wrote about what supplements and growing techniques suited what types of soil – the differences perhaps between the alluvial soils of this eastern delta and the clay of the Port Hills – because people were shifting around en masse and wanted to know. Then she started to write about trees, and what they meant for the people who’d had to leave them behind. The fruit trees that marked the seasons, the trees planted to mark an anniversary, or to mark a buried pet, or the trees that guarded the ashes of a cremation. “It was all written on the garden page – a whole collection of those memories,” Diana says. “People would say I can’t bear to leave this because Dad’s ashes are under the trees in the corner of the garden, or under the beech tree by the river. And they’d express their feelings, and why they felt like that. In a way it helps you to know, and it also helps you to leave, because the more you know, the more you can carry away with you. Not that it’s easier to leave but you need to be better informed because leaving is also an act of courage.”
   The Crown (the national government) spent more than $1.5 billion acquiring 8000 properties in the various Red Zones of Christchurch. In 2019, when the government negotiated its final global agreement with Christchurch as part of handing all rebuild control back to the city, it sold this 640ha of river corridor to the council for $1.

▲ Diana Madgin (above) stands in the garden she fought to preserve, now recognised as a public Peace Garden. Hugh Nicholson (below) also managed the green design for eastern Red Zone land, for flood control mainly, he says, to protect the suburbs beyond Red Zone boundaries.  Volunteer groups use it now for community gardens. Those who know the location of the fruit trees use it for foraging. Fitness trails have emerged and plans exist for further recreational development, but fundamentally it’s being given over to flood control, protecting another 20,000 suburban houses on its borders.
  The 2011 quake was unusually violent. The filmmaker who embodies a city’s determination to retain its spirit, the mayor who embodies the city’s political will and the gardener who embodies a love of place are characters arisen from a city’s extraordinary travail. And all are pleased, after a year-long vacillation between retaining or demolishing Christ Church Cathedral, that restoration is at last underway. Cranes pick away at it and engineers figure how to quake-proof without compromising the heritage. A restored cathedral seems likely to be the final capstone of the recovery, but it’s still many years off, and perhaps the man who most closely embodies the reality of it all is Hugh Nicholson.
  “With any major city in the world if you do one major work in 10 years you’re doing okay. Big projects take a long time and we were trying to do 10 of them, probably more when you take into account all the repairs at the same time. It was madness. Occasionally I get to show people around and suddenly I see gaps
and think, ‘My God, they’ll think we’ve been doing nothing. But remember maybe 80 per cent of the CBD came down. It was huge, and I’m really proud of what we’ve done.”