The Last City of the 20th Century

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The Last City of the 20th Century
The rebuild from a devastating earthquake was Christchurch, New Zealand’s chance to reimagine what a city could be. What went wrong?
By James Dann

On a recent summer evening, the South Frame, a newly built pedestrianized corridor near the center of Christchurch, New Zealand, was eerily quiet. The only two living souls I saw were a couple of vulnerably housed people, using the park benches for quiet kip. Unlike much of the rest of the world, these streets weren’t empty due to lockdowns or stay-at-home advisories. After a strict national lockdown in March and April of 2020, New Zealand’s South Island—where Christchurch is the largest city—hasn’t had a case of community COVID transmission for close to a year. Downtown Christchurch isn’t empty because of COVID. It’s empty because of twin catastrophes: Ten years ago an earthquake leveled much of the city—and then the local and national government botched the rebuild, squandering a golden opportunity to transform Christchurch. How did it happen, and what can other cities trying to rethink or rebuild learn from our mistakes?

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But when the government did eventually get building, these human-scale activities were pushed to the side. Aiming to create the Blueprint’s more compact central city, the government bought up a number of city blocks. Restricting land supply did prevent a collapse in property prices, but those artificially high land values, combined with strict new building codes, restricted private development to a handful of rich developers. The result: overpriced housing and projects that spanned entire city blocks, instead of ground-up development reflecting the needs of the community.

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Plenty of the central city still consists of empty lots, used now as car parks with hardly any cars parked on them. In some parts of the city, there are still buildings waiting for either the repairer’s scaffold or the wrecker’s ball. In the historic center of the city, the crumbled Anglican church that gives Cathedral Square its name still sits with its west face open to the elements, the world’s most ornate and controversial pigeon coop.

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A 2019 survey of 30,000 Christchurch residents found that just 29 percent of them thought that the city was better than it was before the quake. I lived in central Christchurch for about a decade, both before and after the quake, and I have to agree with the majority. Rebuilding this city was an opportunity to make something great; instead, 10 years on, we’re still talking about Christchurch’s potential. What lessons can other cities, rebuilding from disaster or redesigning in anticipation of change, learn from Christchurch?

Firstly, don’t take too long. With the central city closed down and cordoned off for years, Christchurch residents learned to live without it. The suburban malls got even bigger, gorging on custom from a city devoid of a retail core. The boundaries of the city spread farther and farther out across the plains. When those thousands of families displaced by liquefaction needed places to live, there was no affordable housing in the CBD. So they went elsewhere. By the time the city started to reopen, the fundamentals had shifted even further in favor of the suburbs.

Plan, but don’t dictate. At times, the rebuild authority seemed to get bogged down by its own rules. The first building that was built in the CBD post-earthquake was pulled down a year later, as it didn’t fit within the Blueprint plan. It was leveled so a road could be widened by a few meters. The site still sits empty to this day. The Blueprint also tried to force similar types of activity to cluster together in “precincts.” Perhaps the most egregious example of this was the much-mocked “innovation precinct,” where visionaries and entrepreneurs and dreamers were expected to come together in a two-block area arbitrarily set down by government decree. The result is that Christchurch now has the dystopian-sounding Justice and Emergency Services Precinct and the truly inspirational International Rental Car Precinct, while the Performing Arts Precinct and Ngai Tahu Cultural Precinct have been quietly shelved.

These precincts are a perfect example of the greatest failure of the rebuild. They fundamentally misunderstood the organic, spontaneous nature of cities. Places evolve because of the people who live and work in them. You can influence a number of factors—economic, environmental, planning—but you can’t force people to do things that ultimately don’t make sense to them. The Blueprint looked to serve property, developers, and a few other vested interests. The result: a rigid plan that privileged out-of-town businesses and big-ticket projects but priced average people out of the city. The CBD now has twice as much space in buildings given to car parking as to residential living space. What kind of 21st century city is that?

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