Building Back Better: Learning from the Christchurch Rebuild

Rarely does a city find the opportunity to comprehensively reinvent itself. Following a spate of devastating earthquakes in 2010-11, the city of Christchurch in New Zealand has been presented with just that. With the city thrown into physical and emotional turmoil, the rebuild has been slow to gain traction. Indeed, many people still live in houses that remain unrepaired. Seeing the enormous opportunity, the local council quickly launched into a process of planning the shape of the new city. International experts were consulted, as were local residents and others. The Share an Idea campaign, an intensive public consultation, generated more than 100,000 ideas for how the city could be rebuilt better and these became the basis for the aspirational draft city plan. This plan was then taken by the government minister through a top-down refinement to create the Recovery Plan or Blueprint.The paper discusses key attributes of the Blueprint along with the context for its development and implementation over time. The slow speed with which the recovery has unfolded in the central area can be attributed to lack of certainty for investors, many of whom have chosen to take their funds elsewhere, a receptive environment in surrounding suburbs that enabled business activity to continue and expand, difficulties with insurance settlements and continued residential development around the fringes of the city. The paper concludes with comments about leadership, emphasizing the importance that accurate and consistent communication with all parties plays in a successful recovery.