‘Naive’ market faith sunk Breathe

A 2012 post-earthquake housing project called Breathe never become a reality in Christchurch’s central city because it required Government support that wasn’t forthcoming, a Lincoln University academic says.

Dr Lin Roberts published a study about the urban renewal programme in the university’s latest planning review journal.

Breathe was a flagship project started in 2012 by the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority with a design-and-build urban village competition, but was abandoned in 2015 and the land remains vacant. In 2018, the first nearby inner city residential development of 20 apartments is under construction by Fletcher Living.

Roberts said the government at the time was unwilling, or unable, to recognise that insistence on a pure market approach would not deliver. ‘‘This level of naı¨ve neoliberal faith that the markets could deliver urban regeneration to a badly damaged city was not seen even in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain,’’ she said.

Dr Roberts was a member of one of the Breathe competition teams, Viva, and one of four finalists.

‘‘The Government’s focus on recouping its costs and finding a model that could be picked up by other developers without any further financial input from it outweighed the aspirational sustainable urban design criteria.’’

Roberts said the Government wanted a developer to take on all the risk, pay an elevated price for a liquefaction-prone piece of land, and then to enter a contract to deliver an agreed development on the land by an agreed date, tying the developer’s hand on what it did on the site.

‘‘International experience would suggest that the sheer scale of the area of empty city land in the Christchurch inner city presents a high risk to the first developer seeking to turn an empty wasteland into a vibrant community.’’

If the project had been successful there would have been significant benefits to the city and wider community, so a contribution of local or central government money would have been entirely appropriate, she said.

‘‘There are many ways such contributions can be made. Options included tax incentives, contribution of land by gift or lease, subsidies for land costs or land value write-downs, and loans for land purchase.’’

Internationally, regeneration projects have usually been dependent upon some form of publicsector intervention to stimulate market activity, she said.