Lessons from the Garden City for the coronavirus rebuild

With family in Marlborough and a partner in South Canterbury, I’m a regular driver of SH1 from Blenheim to Timaru.

This means I pass through my old hometown of Christchurch on regular basis.

I’m biased, but I have a hell of a lot of admiration for Cantabrians’ ‘‘roll up your sleeves and get it done’’ attitude at a community level. Over the past decade they’ve had more than their fair share of challenges, none of their own making.

And while you can still see the cracks if you know where to look, you can’t help but be impressed by the new face of the Garden City.

Several anchor products have taken off, their hospitality ‘‘strip’’ is full of life and new property developments like Riverside Market are looking great. That, and the fact that the rush hour traffic congestion that plagued Christchurch for years after the quakes has gone.

Given Christchurch had to pick itself up and re-invent itself after a few massive localised disasters, you’d think it might have some lessons for the rest of the country as it pokes its head up in the postlockdown environment, and considers how to move forward.

Unsurprisingly, I’m not the first person to have this thought. My old mate and respected strategist Roger Dennis, who lost his home to the Christchurch quakes, focused his grey matter on this very thing. His views are worth digging into.

In April, Dennis published his findings and last week led a chief executive seminar hosted by Kerridge and Partners on the same topic.

Before focusing on the similarities between the Christchurch recovery and Covid-19 recovery, it’s worth focusing on the contexts. The Canterbury earthquakes were a massive disaster, but a localised one while the rest of the country functioned just fine, thank you very much.

By contrast, Covid-19 has been a national economic disaster, and a limited health challenge, but against a global context where the world is in meltdown.

So while it’s great that we have practically eliminated the disease, we are a unique spot of brightness in a world of darkness. They haven’t got our luxury of getting back to normal.

They are where we were three months ago, without the blessings of being an island state. Having hat-tipped that contextual difference, let’s take a look at the Christchurch recovery.

The big challenge there was how to go from a pretty coherent immediate response (evacuation, closedown, demolition and arterial transport corridors), to what to do next?

From my perspective the path seemed to split at this stage. On one hand, you had lots of ground up local initiatives that got stuff done in a hurry. The Student Volunteer Army and its 1000-odd projects is one example.

Another was the Gapfiller initiative, which harnessed Cantabrians’ creative eccentricity into dozens of funky initiatives, injecting light and love into empty sections and demolition sites. My favourite was the coin-operated DanceO-Mat on Gloucester St.

On the other, you had the government saying ‘‘don’t worry we’ve got this in hand’’ and taking centralised steps to theoretically fast-track the rebuild. In some cases, like the Margaret Mahy Playground, this worked. In others like the stadium, the convention centre and metro sports centre it didn’t go so well.

Meanwhile the local groups were left in the dust while the Government forged again with the big stuff.

David Skilling’s 2018 report for the

Productivity Commission noted the same thing, effectively saying that while it is government’s job to make big bets, for heaven’s sake don’t ignore local initiatives or voices while you are placing those bets.

So if that’s an example of what didn’t work, what did work?

One that comes to mind is a somewhat infamous meeting that the-then minister Stephen Joyce gate-crashed in 2012. Christchurch’s Central Development Unit had been given 100 days to prepare a ‘‘blueprint for action’’.

This saw a high-powered congregation of Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Christchurch City Council, Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, and architects creating a topdown rebuild plan. While there was theoretically an ability to ‘‘share an idea’’ channel operated by the city council for community groups to have input, I’m not sure these ideas got a lot of airtime.

The folklore is that Joyce attended a blueprint meeting close to the end of the process where the draft was shared, and snorted ‘‘this is all big boy crap, you need an innovation precinct where the little guys can can flourish’’.

Out of this came the Innovation Precinct (now known as the Salt district). Their first project was the Epic Centre, an eco-friendly building that went up blindingly fast and quickly housed 20 hitech Christchurch early stage companies and around 250 workers.

I’ve worked with many of the companies that kicked off life in the Epic Centre and can confirm it’s been a rich source of value for the region; and a handy use source of export dollars. And what made it work was the combination of top down and bottom up approaches being joined up, thanks in part to a bolshie minister.

Recently, the prime minister’s Business Advisory Council was wound up (as was always planned) in the lead-up to the election. In his final note to the PM, chairman Fraser Whineray made the point that the way out of disaster is a joined-up approach.

This leads me back to what Dennis has noted about the context for the current disaster – New Zealand is facing a crisis that dwarfs the Christchurch earthquakes. With this in mind there’s one critical question that springs to mind – what’s the equivalent of the Epic Centre, but on a national scale?

Whatever the answer is, it will need top and bottom up, and a collaboration between private and public sectors. Doing this requires goodwill and trust, and probably a bolshie minister.

Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is a professional director and strategy adviser. His Twitter handle is @modsta and he’s been know to have the occasional craft beer with Roger Dennis. Disclosure of interest – MOD worked with Cera and Epic to put free wi-fi in the Re:Start mall in Christchurch.