Other cities around the world could learn a lot from Christchurch’s decade of disaster, says sociologist Steve Matthewman. By Paul Gorman.
As someone who lives in Auckland, Professor Steve Matthewman hasn’t personally experienced too many natural disasters - until last month’s floods.
All he’s willing to say about that is although it’s been harrowing for many Aucklanders - and people in other centres who also got hit by the unprecedented deluge - it’s probably not been quite as harrowing as many other disasters in New Zealand’s recent history. It goes without saying, however, that strong leadership at such times is crucial, he says. “Ideally disaster communications should be early, authoritative and accurate. Delays, contradictory messaging and blame-shifting are all counter-productive.”
In his professional life, Matthewman knows quite a bit about disasters. The University of Auckland sociologist is a specialist in disaster studies, and recently co-edited and authored the book A Decade of Disaster Experiences in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
If disaster sociology is your thing, there’s probably no better place to go than Christchurch, says Matthewman. That might sound ghoulish, but it isn’t really, he insists - the point of disaster sociology is to make sense of events in order to be better prepared for the next ones.
Since the devastation wrought by the Canterbury earthquake sequence of 2010-11, Christchurch has become a living laboratory for investigating the resurrection and rebuilding of cities and communities.
The earthquakes kicked off a difficult decade of disasters in and around Ōtautahi, including the March 2019 mosque terrorist attacks which left 51 people dead, suburban flooding in 2014, 2017 and 2021, and the Port Hills wildfires in 2017.
The Kaikōura earthquake in 2016, the Covid-19 pandemic, the increasing threat of river and groundwater pollution around Canterbury, and the hazardous future coastal residents face from climate change-induced sea-level rise have added to apprehensions.
“Although we tend to fixate on the very visible, the spectacular, the sudden-onset disaster, there are also things like water pollution that are hard to see – a slow-onset disaster, an everyday disaster,” Matthewman says.
“Disasters are increasing in severity, frequency and cost. No one in the world is predicting fewer disasters in the future. That future has already arrived in Christchurch. The earthquakes led to 80 per cent of the central city having to be demolished. They’ve had to rebuild the city and they’ve done ‘managed retreat’.”
He says Ōtautahi’s recovery presents a unique case. “It provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn from a decade of disasters in order to prepare for the future. We do not observe many other disaster-devastated urban areas in the world that have experienced a series of significant disasters like Ōtautahi.”
Learning from adversity
Christchurch folk have had way more than their fair share of tragedy since the waves from the magnitude 7.1 Darfield earthquake raced across the Canterbury Plains at 4.35am on September 4, 2010. That quake and its many aftershocks paved the way for the magnitude 6.2 Christchurch earthquake on February 22 the following year, which killed 185 people.
One consolation of enduring such events is knowing others can learn from their experiences. This is why sociologists study other people’s adversities, to try to make the world a better place, Matthewman says. The book, by academics and experts from here and overseas, investigates why aspects of the city’s recovery have been slow, how it has magnified some inequalities across the region, and which parts have gone well.
Matthewman has been a frequent visitor to Christchurch during the past six or seven years. He and a team of researchers were recently awarded an $870,000 Marsden Fund grant to study the possible uses of the Christchurch residential red zone, about 600ha of former suburbs created by managed retreat along the Ōtakaro-Avon River Corridor since the second earthquake.
They want to know if this potential “democratic commons”, lauded as the city’s “field of dreams”, can become the country’s largest social infrastructure project and an exemplar for initiatives such as adventure tourism, community gardens and large-scale urban greening, the ultimate expression of which might be Ōtautahi making a successful bid to be a “National Park City”.
A different challenge
Sociology, says Matthewman, is about understanding “ourselves, our prospects and our times”. Disaster studies as a discipline is growing, and Aotearoa, “as one of the most hazard-prone, urbanised and unequal societies in the world”, is the logical place to build on this knowledge.
The first major disaster to generate serious academic interest was the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which caught the interest of several Enlightenment scholars, including Voltaire and Immanuel Kant.
Disaster studies began in earnest about 100 years ago, with Samuel Prince’s pioneering PhD study and subsequent book, Catastrophe and Social Change, investigating the explosion of the French munitions ship SS Mont-Blanc in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in December 1917.
But the field didn’t really take off until after World War II, Matthewman says, when disaster studies were largely bankrolled by the United States military. “They thought disasters might serve as a useful proxy for what would happen to societies after a nuclear attack.”
Christchurch’s experiences required a different approach because of the long and complex chain of events, he says.
Disaster studies often focus on the immediate event, but recovery is arguably the most complex and also least studied element of the entire disaster cycle. “The standard wisdom within the field is that it takes a generation or more to truly regenerate. Hence the need for sustained engagement with disaster-afflicted places. If you move on, you’ll miss what’s important.”
There is an argument that a disaster begins and never really ends anyway, because the world is always changed irrevocably. But Christchurch has faced an extraordinary number of challenges. “I’m struggling to think of anywhere else in the Western world that’s been through quite what Christchurch has.”
Trauma redoubled
Although the 2010-11 earthquakes came as a shock to Cantabrians, some experts had warned of the risk. The March 2019 terrorist attacks on worshippers at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre, however, were unprecedented in their violence, and seemed to propel the region down a disturbing and dark path.
Matthewman says he contacted a colleague in Christchurch at the time to see how they were faring. “She said, ‘Well, we were already at peak PTSD and then this happens.’ It was a terrible, terrible thing in and of itself, but terrible in a city that’s trying to recover when most of the population growth is going to come through immigration and the city has a comparatively older demographic compared with others and needs to attract young, energetic, smart people.”
Nevertheless, the response from Cantabrians was world class, he says, including memorial and other events, and support for grieving families. “[It] was really amazing. It needed a good response, and it got one.”
Incidents such as the mosque shootings underline the ethical considerations that disaster sociologists need to be aware of, he says. “I’m not a trauma specialist, so it makes no sense to ask people to relive awful things. I’m trying to do something more positive and think, ‘All right, what are the problems, what are the barriers, how do we do a better job next time?’”
But not all disaster researchers exhibit such sensitivity, he says, citing a “famous” American disaster sociologist at a conference where he presented on the mosque shootings. “I said we had to add this to the trauma that Cantabrians had already experienced. She basically said 51 victims wasn’t that many – that that many get shot in America all the time. She was totally dismissive of what something like this means in the context and scale of a country like New Zealand.”
Rebuild positives
The negatives of living in a disaster-plagued city are easily quantifiable – the family tragedies, the mental health toll, the damage to homes, the loss of jobs, the general disruption, loss of routines and familiar places, loss of heritage, loss of control of destiny, insurance and building scams, the depressing financial realities of rebuilding, huge rates rises, and the fear of the future.
But Matthewman and his co-authors also see many positives from the rebuild and the experiences of Christchurch people.
Communities taught themselves a lot about the power of collective, grassroots organising, for example. Gap Filler, Greening the Rubble and the Student Volunteer Army were some of the initiatives that blossomed from the disaster.
“If the Student Volunteer Army had listened to the authorities, they wouldn’t exist. And you think what they’ve done subsequently – the Kaikōura earthquake response, the Covid-19 response. I don’t think anyone at the time would have imagined they could achieve what they have.”
It was also unprecedented internationally to have indigenous groups involved in the recovery in an official capacity, he says. The Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (Cera) partnership with Ngāi Tahu was a historic first that helped pave the way for a greater role for Māori in their local community.
“That’s huge. And now you’re seeing the impacts of that – people call it the Ōtakaro-Avon River, they call it Ōtautahi-Christchurch. The convention centre is Te Pae. You’re seeing it actually embedded in the urban fabric now. This was the most English of English settlements, this quintessentially English place, and now it’s slowly indigenising. If you go to downtown Auckland, which is supposedly the capital city of Polynesia, it’s a less recognisably Māori city than downtown Christchurch now, which is quite remarkable.”
He says the Christchurch City Council’s “Share an Idea” community consultation (see ‘Building back’ below) was another huge positive for the city that gained international attention. Temporary, transitional urbanism projects also provided a blueprint for others.
“They genuinely created levels of social capital and excitement and interest in a city that was suddenly devoid of interest.”
In the book, a nurse makes what the authors call the “simultaneously saddest and most optimistic statement” about Christchurch: “She was overwhelmed by pity for the city’s elderly, who would never get to see their [former] city ever again. At the same time, she reassured her children that they were lucky. For they would get to inherit a brand-new city.”
Because regeneration can take at least a couple of decades, some older people might never see it rebuilt. The young, meanwhile, feel as though they have only ever known a broken city, or feel their prime years have been stolen while regeneration occurs.
A common factor internationally when disasters occur is a desire to “build back better”, says Matthewman. “It’s an aspirational thing that we’ve seen generally everywhere, since at least the Southeast Asian tsunami in 2004 … But there’s generally a consensus that no one ever does. What’s better? Who decides it? What are your metrics? If we look at more earthquake-resilient buildings, or better housing stock, we could definitely say we’re better. But we have lost some beautiful world heritage buildings, some unnecessarily that really could have been saved.”
The book quotes Doug Ahlers, a recovery expert at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, criticising as “global worst practice” the government-led, top-down, command-and-control recovery model overseen by Cera.
It also highlights former Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu chief executive and member of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Review Panel Anake Goodall saying: “What we’ve done, very perversely, is we’ve gone and built a brand-new last-century city.”
Building back
When former Christchurch mayor Lianne Dalziel vacated her office last year, she left her successor, Phil Mauger, proof of the city’s ability to tackle disaster. In 2011, the city was given an award by the Netherlands-based Co-Creation Association for its “Share an Idea” community campaign.
More than 10,000 residents had jotted down their visions for post-earthquake Ōtautahi on vivid Post-it notes in a mood of optimism, before the Key government grabbed hold of the recovery by the scruff of the neck.
It was the first time the Co-Creation Association had given the award to an initiative beyond Europe.
In an interview with the Listener at the end of her mayoralty, Dalziel said the award was the first thing she saw hanging on the wall in the mayor’s office when she began her tenure in October 2013. She had fond memories of her own experience of attending the workshops that were part of the campaign.
“It was an inspirational environment. I went along and listened to some of the speakers, and I filled out some little Post-its like everyone else.”
However, she remains bitter about some of the responses to the disaster and the attitudes of some in power.
“Sometimes, I think that our experience has been completely ignored. I don’t know how many times at meetings they were listing all the ministers of significance to local government and they didn’t mention the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery. They simply couldn’t see how many of the council’s roles had been subsumed into Cera.
“I’ve also still been dealing with government departments which have absolutely no concept of what Christchurch has been through, and the complete rewriting of our district plan as a result of the earthquakes.”
Obviously, nothing could bring back the lives that were lost and much of the pain will never be forgotten, says Dalziel. But she hopes lessons may still be learnt.
And in some ways, the city has improved. “There are so many elements of the new central city that are so much better. We now recognise our pre-European history, which has been embedded in the landscape and buildings, and we are getting to know the stories of Ngāi Tahu and their early interactions and relationships with the European settlers. We’re all learning, which is a good thing.”
A lot of lessons have also been learnt about the environment, including liquefaction and lateral spread. “And we’ve learnt a lot more about the importance of community leadership in a post-disaster environment. We’ve also learnt that with every crisis comes opportunity, as long as you look for it and take advantage of all that it offers. And that’s why I can say that, on many levels, we’ve built back better.”
The Share an Idea award still hangs in Phil Mauger’s mayoral lounge.
Lessons for next time
Matthewman’s view is that the perception of success in disaster recovery is partly a function of time. “These things do take time. If you look in the early periods, of course, it can appear like a worst-case recovery. But I think the longer you give it, and the more you think about it, the more reasons for hope there are. There is a sociology of megaprojects. They always overrun. They always under-deliver and they always blow the budget.”
He agrees there have been missed opportunities in Christchurch’s recovery, especially around sustainability, housing and public transport. “It’s the only place I’ve been in New Zealand where I’ve heard locals refer to buses as ‘loser cruisers’. I’ve talked to lecturers at the University of Canterbury and some of them said their students, particularly female students or students of colour, often find the drivers are really hostile to them and the passengers are often quite threatening, too, so they don’t feel safe on public transport. So, safer and better public transport is another big issue still to address.”
The recovery had also offered the chance to try something different with affordable inner-city living for people of all backgrounds, he says.
“If you really want people to live in the city, you’ve got to bring them in, and you can’t have the price point so high that the only people who can afford to live in your city are retired farmers.”
He would also like to have seen more social infrastructure projects following the success of initiatives such as the Margaret Mahy Family Playground, and Tūranga, the new central library.
“I would have done more and maybe smaller social infrastructure projects and scattered them around the city, such as free swimming pools, and libraries, parks and community gardens, which should permit diverse groups to interact with each other as well as foster tolerance and inclusivity.
“Libraries are so good, and probably one of the only places homeless people are welcome. You see the security guards in Tūranga and they’ve got good rapport with the homeless. But you try being homeless anywhere else in the city and you’re deeply unwelcome, including in so-called public space.”
Watching Cantabrians cope, move on and recover, and seeing first-hand the slow revival of the city, has been humbling, he says. Initially, his colleagues joked that the only people in central Christchurch were tourists and social scientists. Then Covid got rid of the tourists. But these days, the city is pumping.
“So, there are lessons for Christchurch, first and foremost, from what has happened, and definitely for New Zealand, because we’re one of the most hazard-prone countries in the world. But if we think about the fate of coastal cities in the Anthropocene [the present era], there are clearly also lessons for the world.”
- A Decade of Disaster Experiences in Ōtautahi Christchurch, edited by Shinya Uekusa, Steve Matthewman and Bruce C Glavovic (Palgrave Macmillan, $200.00)
