Late last year we asked Hugh Nicholson, Head of Urban Design for Christchurch City Council, to reflect on his personal experiences of the earthquake and the significance of the recovery plan. This is the second of two blog entries where we present his answers to the questions we asked him, together with photos we took while working on site.

Q2: Could you describe what a ‘recovery plan’ is and what the process of producing one has meant for Christchurch?

A: A recovery plan is both a vision for what the rebuilt city will be like and the tools or projects that will take it along the path to recovery.  It provides a programme of infrastructure repair, public investment and transitional projects to stimulate recovery and provides a framework for private investment including incentives and regulation.  The Christchurch City Council was required to prepare a recovery plan for the central city in nine months by the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act.  We delivered it to the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Minister in eight months.  We had a team of more than sixty people working on the Plan in the drafting stages. The team included Council staff and a number of external consultants including Gehl Architects.

One of the most inspiring parts of the project was the public engagement through Share an Idea.   We included a weekend long public expo with exhibitions, public speakers, virtual tours of the red zone, and a great interactive website where people could see their ideas alongside everybody elses.  Check out Share an Idea.  It generated 106,000 ideas and themes and gave us a powerful community vision to underpin the Plan.

Papawai Otakaro

 Q3: Which project from the plan are you most looking forward to implementing?

As the design leader for the development of the Central City Plan I have been focused on maintaining the overall coherence of the Plan and integrating the wide range of projects to best enable recovery – so of course I am most looking forward to delivering the whole recovery plan…but I do have my favourite projects of course. 

• Papawai Otakaro, the new Avon River park will be a new waterfront for the people of Christchurch and offers the opportunity to weave new values, both ecological and indigenous through the central city.   A ‘green’ bridge over the Avon will provide a centre-piece for the park.
• The new metro-sports facility offers the chance to develop a range of sporting facilities in a sporting precinct and celebrate Christchurch’s proud sporting culture.
• A redeveloped hospital will offer modern high quality healthcare in safe and resilient buildings in case Christchurch ever has to face another disaster like this one.

Late last year we asked Hugh Nicholson, Head of Urban Design for Christchurch City Council, to reflect on his personal experiences of the earthquake and the significance of the recovery plan. Over two blog entries we will present his answers to the questions we asked him, together with photos we took while working on site.

Gehl asked: Hugh, what did the earthquake mean to you personally?

A: People often say what a ‘great opportunity’ it must be to redesign a city but it comes at a great cost.  It’s hard to describe the fear and loss of security when the ground you are standing on shakes and tears the city apart around you, not once but five times with more than 7,000 smaller aftershocks.  My house has collapsed and we do not know yet whether we can rebuild on our land.  In my neighbourhood approximately 20% of the houses are still occupied and many of our local shops and our local supermarket have been demolished. We have rented a house nearby but it has been damaged also with plywood covering broken windows, propped walls and cracked internal lining.  Of our six immediate neighbours two are still occupied, two are unoccupied and two have been demolished.  I have helped to demolish seven chimneys on various houses to make them safe.

We have been working out of temporary offices at the City Art Gallery which became the Emergency Operations Centre since the earthquakes. Working out of an art gallery sounds quite romantic but actually they don’t make very good offices – they don’t have windows in the galleries and this one was either too hot or too cold. The gallery was within the cordoned off central city for some time and we had to pass through several army checkpoints just to get to work. The ‘safe’ route in or out would sometimes change so quickly as dangerous buildings were identified that we would end up leaving the office by a different route than the one we arrived on that morning. Last week one of the local cafes which we had been frequenting for more than six months was closed and evacuated when engineers found that a neighbouring block of apartments was dangerously unstable.

More than half of the buildings in the Central Business District will be demolished. More than 6,000 houses cannot be rebuilt and whole communities will have to relocate and find new places to live.  Another 6,000 households including my family are waiting to find out whether we can rebuild.

My work has completely changed since the earthquakes.  Initially the urban design and heritage team were involved in the emergency response authorising the demolition or emergency repairs to heritage buildings as the search & rescue teams searched for bodies and tried to make areas safe.  Subsequently we started to think about recovery and have spent the last eight months preparing the Central Recovery City Plan Our work has been characterised by uncertainty and working in parallel.  There is never enough information to be sure you are making the right decision, and there is nobody who knows how to do it or what the answer is. We are always short of time and having to work in parallel in order to make progress.  The final geotechnical report confirming that it was possible to rebuild safely in the central city only arrived one week before we published the draft Central City Recovery Plan to be approved by the Minister.

Looking back I still wonder at the dedication and support of Gehl Architects and particularly David, Simon and Ewa who came halfway round the world to live and work in a natural disaster area and to help the people of Christchurch to develop a vision for what the city might look like as it rebuilds…

Next week we will present the other half of his response, considering the significance of the recovery plan.