A Decade of Disaster Experiences in Ōtautahi Christchurch: Critical Disaster Studies Perspectives [1st ed. 2022] 9811668620, 9789811668623

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A Decade of Disaster Experiences in Ōtautahi Christchurch Critical Disaster Studies Perspectives Edited by Shinya Uekusa Steve Matthewman · Bruce C. Glavovic

¯ A Decade of Disaster Experiences in Otautahi Christchurch

Shinya Uekusa · Steve Matthewman · Bruce C. Glavovic Editors

A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch Critical Disaster Studies Perspectives

Editors Shinya Uekusa Department of Sociology and Anthropology University of Canterbury Christchurch, New Zealand

Steve Matthewman School of Social Sciences University of Auckland Auckland, New Zealand

Bruce C. Glavovic School of People, Environment & Planning Massey University Palmerston North, New Zealand

ISBN 978-981-16-6862-3 ISBN 978-981-16-6863-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Naeblys/Alamy Stock Vector This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Contents

Part I Introduction 1

2

Contextualising the Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch: The Critical Disaster Studies Imperative Steve Matthewman and Shinya Uekusa Critical Disaster Studies: The Evolution of a Paradigm Anthony Oliver-Smith

Part II 3

3 27

Critical Framings of Disasters

Elite Panic and Pathologies of Governance Before and After the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence Roy Montgomery

4

The Ruptured City Ten Years On Katie Pickles

5

Critical Indigenous Disaster Studies: Doomed to Resilience? Simon Lambert

57 87

107

v

vi

6

7

CONTENTS

Rethinking Community Resilience: Critical ¯ Reflections on the Last 10 Years of the Otautahi Christchurch Recovery and On-Going Disasters Shinya Uekusa and Raven Cretney Every Last Drop: The Freshwater “Disaster” in Canterbury Matthew Wynyard

Part III 8

9

10

125

143

Critical Voices in Disasters

Hazardous Times: Adversity, Diversity and Constructions of Collectivity Rosemary Du Plessis M¯aori Community Response and Recovery Following the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence Suzanne Phibbs, Christine Kenney, and T¯a Mark Solomon ¯ Asian Migrant Worker Experiences in Otautahi Christchurch Arlene Garces-Ozanne, Maria Makabenta-Ikeda, and Shinya Uekusa

11

Minutes of Shaking: Years of Litigation Jeremy Finn and Elizabeth Toomey

12

Sustainability Through Adversity? The Impact of the Earthquake on the Greening of Death Ruth McManus

167

187

211

237

253

¯ Part IV Otautahi as a Laboratory for the World: A Prelude to the Future 13

14

Why Don’t We “Build Back Better”? The Complexities of Re-constituting Urban Form Steve Matthewman and Hugh Byrd

277

Turn and Face the Strange: Reflections on Creativity Following the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence Trudi Cameron

299

CONTENTS

vii

15

Planning, Governance and a City for the Future? Eric Pawson

317

16

Lessons for Democracy from a Decade of Disasters Bronwyn Hayward and Sam Johnson

335

17

Concluding Reflections: Making Social Choices in Turbulent Times Bruce C. Glavovic

353

Glossary: Te Reo M¯aori Words and Translations

379

Index

383

Notes on Contributors

Hugh Byrd is an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Architecture, Unitec and Professor of Architecture at the University of Lincoln, UK. His research interests are in the future form of buildings and cities around the world as we enter an era characterised by resource depletion and climate change. These interests have led to funded research, publications and projects in four main areas: (1) The environmental performance of buildings, (2) The environmental performance of cities, (3) International energy policy and (4) Humanitarian response to settlements hit by natural disasters. Trudi Cameron is a Senior Tutor in the University Studies and English Language Division of Lincoln University. She was awarded her Ph.D. degree in 2021 for her thesis on Between the Cracks: The intersection of individuals, social processes and creativity after the Canterbury earthquakes 2010–2012. While continuing to work as an educator, Trudi has recently expanded her research interest into the area of the well-being economy. She has participated and been involved in the establishment and development of a range of social and other enterprises with creativity and sustainability at their hearts. Raven Cretney is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Planning in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Waikato. Her research focuses on the politics of disaster response and recovery, the theory and practice of effective citizen engagement and participation, and

ix

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

community-led approaches to environmental management and conservation. Her work spans the disciplines of human geography and political science. Rosemary Du Plessis is a feminist sociologist with a strong interest in personal narratives. She taught at the University of Canterbury and has been involved in earthquake related research for the last decade. She was research coordinator for the “Women’s Voices Ng¯a Reo o Ng¯a Wahine” project conducted by the Christchurch Branch of the National Council of Women between 2011 and 2013. She is also a member of the “K¯orero Mai: Tell Us Your Earthquake Story” project team, based in Digital Humanities at the University of Canterbury. This project, funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund, asked people who told their quake stories in 2012 through the QuakeBox Project to talk again about their earthquake experiences in 2019 and 2020. Jeremy Finn is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Canterbury, where he taught in the Law School from 1978 to 2017. His teaching areas included natural disaster law, criminal law, criminal justice, contract law, intellectual property, search and seizure and legal history. He is a co-author and co-editor (with Elizabeth Toomey) of Legal Responses to Natural Disasters (Thomson Reuters, Wellington, 2015) and has written or co-authored a number of articles on legal issues arising from natural disasters and responses to them. He has also written widely in other fields, particularly criminal law and procedure, contract law, legal history and sentencing. Arlene Garces-Ozanne is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Economics, University of Otago. Arlene obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Otago, and Master’s in Economics from the University of New England. Her current research centres on two main themes: community empowerment, economic growth and resilience, and the economics of worker migration. She has recently published on children and female labour force participation, charitable donations, overseas-born care workers and the resilience of migrant communities in times of natural hazards. Her teaching at the University of Otago includes Principles of Economics, the World Economy and Labour Economics. Bruce C. Glavovic is a Professor in Resource and Environmental Planning at Massey University. For much of the last decade his research has focused on the role of governance and natural hazards planning in

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xi

addressing vulnerability and risk in a changing climate. He is Senior Editor for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science and co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Ocean & Coastal Management. He was a Coordinating Lead Author for the chapter on sea level rise in a 2019 IPCC Special Report, and is a Lead Author and Cross Chapter Paper co-lead in the IPCC’s forthcoming Working Group II Sixth Assessment Report. Bronwyn Hayward MNZM is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations and Director of The Sustainable Citizenship and Civic Imagination Research Group at the University of Canterbury. Her research focuses on the intersection of sustainable development, youth, climate change and citizenship. She is a Coordinating Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR6 report (cities & infrastructure) and was a lead author for the 2018 Special Report on 1.5. In 2019, she won at New Zealander of the year Kiwi Bank Local hero award for her work on democracy, earthquake recovery and climate change. In 2014, she was co-winner of the inaugural University of Canterbury College of Arts conscience and critic award for her work on democracy and earthquakes. Sam Johnson is Chief Executive of the Student Volunteer Army and is most well-known for founding the SVA and turning the student movement into a widely recognised model of student community engagement. Each year, the SVA has over 65,000 young people aged 6–26 engaged in their volunteering programmes across New Zealand. His work has focused on enabling students to self-organise projects and understand impact by tracking it to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Sam is an Adjunct Fellow in the School of Education and Leadership at the University of Canterbury, a member of the Westpac Bank Sustainability Panel and is on the board of Prince’s Trust New Zealand. Prof. Christine Kenney is a M¯aori social science researcher in disaster governance, risk reduction, recovery and resilience. She is the Professor of disaster research at Massey University and Director of the EQC M¯atauranga M¯aori disaster research centre. A frequent collaborator with United Nations and WHO initiatives, she chairs the joint UNDRR/ISC/IRDR Indigenous science caucus and has conducted research and policy development with Indigenous peoples and governments in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Christine is also a

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contributing author to the GAR, and a government appointed advisor to the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage Simon Lambert is a M¯aori scholar who has worked in the Indigenous DRR space since the 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch. His tribal affiliations are to T¯uhoe and Ng¯ati Ruapani mai Waikaremoana. Since 2017 he has been based at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, as an Associate Professor in Indigenous Studies and is currently the Executive Director of the National Coordinating Centre of the Canadian federallyfunded Network Environments of Indigenous Health Research. He is also a member of the Pan-American Health Organization’s Indigenous Knowledge and DRR Advisory Board. Maria Makabenta-Ikeda is Associate Professor of Economics at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan. Maria obtained her Master’s and Ph.D. in Economics from Kyoto University. She previously taught Economics at the University of Hyogo in Kobe, where she also served as co-editor of the Japan Social Innovation Journal, Japan’s first peer-reviewed online journal on social innovation. She currently teaches Asian Economics and Principles of Economics, among other courses. Her main research interests are on regional development, poverty, disaster risk reduction (DRR) and sustainable communities. She recently published on disaster risk perception and building back better (BBB) with vulnerability in the context of the Philippine post-Haiyan experience. Steve Matthewman is a Professor in Sociology at the University of Auckland. His last book on disasters was Disasters, Risks and Revelation: Making Sense of Our Times (2015). He also co-edited Exploring Society: Sociology for New Zealand Students (Auckland University Press, 2019) with Ruth McManus, and the third edition of Being Sociological (Red Globe Press) with Bruce Curtis and David Mayeda. His current research project is a three-year Royal Society of New Zealand-funded work ¯ “Power Politics: Electricity and Sustainability in Post-Disaster Otautahi (Christchurch)”. The broad focus of this research is on how we build sustainability into the city. The narrow focus is on the place of renewable energy in this process. Ruth McManus is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury. She researches on social aspects of death and dying, and is inaugural President of the New Zealand Society for Death Studies. Her

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xiii

recent projects include disaster memorialisation, including NZ shipwrecks, new technologies for body disposal and the greening of death. Her books include Death in a Global Age (Palgrave Macmillan 2012) and Death Down Under (Cambridge Scholars 2019), and Exploring Society: Sociology for New Zealand Students (Auckland University Press, 2019). Roy Montgomery is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Environmental Management at Lincoln University, Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Russian, a Master of Science in Resource Management and PhD in Theatre and Film Studies from the University of Canterbury. Roy currently teaches courses in urban and regional planning, risk and resilience, and resource management policymaking at Lincoln University. Roy’s experience as a volunteer firefighter ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch before, during and after the earthquakes and his foundation role in Greening the Rubble afforded him the unique position of being a ready-made participant observer or a dual social scientist/first responder. Anthony Oliver-Smith is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Florida. He held the Munich Re Foundation Chair on Social Vulnerability at the United Nations University Institute on Environment and Human Security in Bonn, Germany in 2005–2009. In 2013 he was awarded the Bronislaw Malinowski Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society for Applied Anthropology for his work in disaster research and displacement and resettlement research. He has done anthropological research and consultation on issues relating to disasters and/or displacement and resettlement in Peru, Honduras, India, Brazil, Jamaica, Mexico, Japan, Colombia, Panama and the United States since the 1970s. His current research focuses on the intersection of climate change, natural hazards, disasters, displacement and planned resettlement. Eric Pawson is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Canterbury. In the wake of the earthquakes, he developed communitybased research courses for university students and since 2017 has also had various regeneration roles with public agencies and community groups. He was awarded the Distinguished New Zealand Geographer medal in 2007 and is a former president of the Ako Aotearoa Academy of national tertiary teaching award holders. He has authored or edited a dozen or so books, including Environmental Histories of New Zealand

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(Oxford University Press, 2002); The New Biological Economy (Auckland University Press, 2018); and Seeds of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2020). Dr. Suzanne Phibbs is a health sociologist, Senior Lecturer in Public Health and M¯aori researcher at Massey University. She has published extensively in the field of disasters with her research contributing to a focus on M¯aori and disability in the 2019 Ministry of Civil Defence National Disaster Resilience Strategy. She has completed work for the WHO and the UN through co-authored conference presentations, contributions to Global Assessment Reports and providing case studies to inform evidence-based practice. Suzanne has extensive experience as a Kaupapa M¯aori doctoral research advisor and mentor for M¯aori students. Katie Pickles is Professor of History at the University of Canterbury. A recent Royal Society of New Zealand James Cook Research Fellow, her current research and teaching interests include Christchurch’s cultural heritage, Kiwi culture and heroines in history. Exploring themes of landscape, hegemony, culture, ecological imperialism and sensory history, she has written extensively on Canterbury’s history. She is the author of Christchurch Ruptures (Bridget Williams Books, 2016) and is currently completing a monograph, Heroines in History: A Thousand Faces (Routledge). Her next project is a new biography of Kate Sheppard. T¯a Mark Solomon was the elected Kaiwhakahaere (Chair) of Te R¯unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu from 1998 to December 2016 and he represented Te R¯unanga o Kaik¯oura from 1995 to December 2016. In 2013, he was awarded Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to M¯aori and business, and he received an Honorary Doctorate in Natural Resources from Lincoln University in April 2015. T¯a Mark sits on a range of science boards including the governance groups for MBIE’s National Science Challenge research programmes; Sustainable Seas and The Deep South, as well as QuakeCoRE, New Zealand’s research centre for seismic resilience. He is a strong advocate for the M¯aori economy and was instrumental in setting up the Iwi Chairs Forum (2005). Elizabeth Toomey is a Professor of Law at the University of Canterbury. She specialises in the areas of natural disasters, real property law, resource management law, public works and sports law. She is a co-author and co-editor (with Jeremy Finn) of Legal Responses to Natural Disasters (Thomson Reuters, Wellington, 2015). She is currently conducting

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xv

research on the legal issues that arise with regard to the future development of the residential red zone. She publishes widely in her areas of expertise both in New Zealand and internationally. She is the General Editor of New Zealand Land Law (3 ed, Thomson Reuters, 2017). Shinya Uekusa is a disaster sociologist and has recently joined the University of Canterbury as a Lecturer in Sociology. His main research interests are in (im)migration, the sociology of language, and disaster sociology, particularly focusing on how the socially disadvantaged groups such as (im)migrants, refugees and linguistic minorities experience and cope with cultural, economic, environmental, political and social challenges. Matthew Wynyard (Ng¯ati Maniapoto, Ng¯apuhi) teaches Sociology at Massey University/Te Kunenga ki P¯ urehuroa in Manawat¯ u. His research focuses on capitalism, colonisation and the capture and enclosure of Indigenous lands and natural resources, agriculture and the environment. Before joining Massey University, Matthew worked as a Senior Historian at the Office of Treaty Settlements, researching the Crown’s historical breaches of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Abbreviations

ACC AvON BBB BLM CALD CanCERN CBD CCC CCDU CDEM CDHB CDS CEIT CEITA CER CERA CERC CERR CETAS CFR CIDS CMC COVID-19 CPIT CRI DKKV

Accident Compensation Corporation ¯ akaro Network Avon Ot¯ Build Back Better Black Lives Matter Culturally and linguistically diverse (community) Canterbury Communities’ Earthquake Recovery Network Central Business District Christchurch City Council Christchurch Central Development Unit Ministry of Civil Defense and Emergency Management Canterbury District Health Board Critical Disaster Studies Canterbury Earthquake Insurance Tribunal Canterbury Earthquake Insurance Tribunal Act 2019 Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act 2011 Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Commission Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act 2010 Canterbury Earthquake Temporary Accommodation Services Community First Responders Critical Indigenous Disaster Studies Canterbury Migrants Centre 2019 Novel Coronavirus Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology Crowne Research Institute German Committee for Disaster Reduction xvii

xviii

ABBREVIATIONS

DoC DoH DRC DRM DRR ECan ECC ENZ EOC EQC FESTA FORIN FR FRN GCCRS GCRA GFC GNDR GSA IK IMF INZ IRDR LGA LINZ LiVS LURP MAF MBIE MCDEM MfE MP MRN MSD NCWNZ NEMA NGOs NZILBB NZTA OAG OARC OIA

Department of Conservation Department of Health Disaster Research Center (at University of Delaware) Disaster Risk Management Disaster Risk Reduction Environment Canterbury Emergency Coordination Centre Engineering New Zealand Emergency Operations Centre Earthquake Commission Festival of Transitional Architecture Forensic Investigation of Disasters First Responders Food Resilience Network Greater Christchurch Claims Resolution Service Greater Christchurch Regeneration Act 2016 Global Financial Crisis Global Network for Civil Society Organizations for Disaster Reduction Global Settlement Agreement Indigenous Knowledges International Monetary Fund Immigration New Zealand Integrated Research on Disaster Risk Local Government Act 2002 Land Information New Zealand Life in Vacant Space Land Use Recovery Plan 2013 Ministry for Agriculture and Fisheries Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Ministry of Civil Defense Emergency Management Ministry for the Environment Member of Parliament M¯aori Recovery Network Ministry of Social Development National Council of Women of New Zealand National Emergency Management Agency Non-Governmental Organizations New Zealand Institute for Language, Brain and Behavior New Zealand Transport Agency Office of the Auditor General ¯ akaro Avon River Corridor Ot¯ Official Information Act 1982

ABBREVIATIONS

PAR PEARL PPE PTSD QCA RAS RMA RONS RRCA RRZ RSNZ SDGs SIC SMC SNA SNE STS SVA TIPI TNZ TRoNT UDS UNDRR UNISDR USAR WDC WeCAN XCHC ZOR

xix

Pressure and Release model Preparing for Extreme and Rare events in coastal regions Personal Protective Equipment Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Quantitative Comparative Analysis Residential Advisory Service Resource Management Act 1991 Roads of National Significance Risk and Root Cause Assessment Residential Red Zone Royal Society of New Zealand UN Sustainable Development Goals South Island Contribution (visa) Skilled Migrant Category Social Network Analysis State of National Emergency Science and Technology Studies Student Volunteer Army Ten Item Personality Inventory Transit New Zealand Te R¯ unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu Urban Development Strategy (Greater Christchurch) United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction Urban Search and Rescue Waimakariri District Council Wider earthquake Community Action Network Exchange Christchurch Zero-Order Responders

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3

Fig. 1.4 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

¯ Central Otautahi, lots of gaps to fill (Photo by Steve Matthewman, 2017) “The future is just around the corner” (Photo by Steve Matthewman, 2017) ¯ Points of interest in the CBD, wider Otautahi and Canterbury region mentioned throughout the book (Map data sources: Christchurch City Council [CCC], Land Information New Zealand [LINZ], Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority [CERA], NZ GeoNet project and its sponsors Earthquake Commission [EQC], GNS Science and LINZ, earth.org; map created by Tim Nolan, 2021) “Where we gather together, extraordinary things happen” (Photo by Steve Matthewman, 2017) Norwich Quay, Lyttelton, March 2011 (Photo by Roy Montgomery) ChristChurch Cathedral, February 2012 (Photo by Roy Montgomery) Kahu Matarau at Te Omeka Justice and Emergency Services Precinct (Photo by James McCosker, 2021) Wh¯ariki and Robert Falcon Scott as companions in the landscape (Photo by James McCosker, 2021)

5 6

10 16 62 78 90 92

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4

Fig. 4.5

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 7.1

Fig. 10.1

Fig. 10.2

Fig. 10.3

Fig. 11.1 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4

Fig. 12.5 Fig. 12.6 Fig. 12.7 Fig. 12.8

One of two upright waka complements the Queen Victoria statue to strengthen the relationship between Ng¯ai Tahu and the Crown (Photo by James McCosker, 2021) Cathedral Square with Anglican Cathedral, T¯uranga and Crowne Plaza Hotel (Photo by James McCosker, 2021) ¯ akaro/Avon River Precinct. Steel eel net Te Papa Ot¯ sculpture and boat sheds coexist (Photo by James McCosker, 2021) ¯ Urban community garden in Central Otautahi (Photo by Steve Matthewman, 2018) This cairn is constructed of boulders from surrounding rivers and placed here by citizens concerned that democratically evolved protections of these waterways have been broken (Photo by Steve Matthewman, 2018) ¯ Otautahi reconstruction workers taking a lunch break and listening to a jazz band by the Riverside Market (Photo taken by Shinya Uekusa in 2017) The top five source countries of SMC applicants in Canterbury, 2009/10 to 2015/16 (Source MBIE [2016]) The top five source countries of Essential Skills workers in Canterbury, 2009/10 to 2015/16 (Source MBIE [2016]) Property owners protesting insurance settlement delay (photo by Steve Matthewman, 2018) Akaroa Cemetery (Author’s own image) Waimari Cemetery (Author’s own image) Akaroa Anglican Cemetary (Author’s own image) Walls tumbled but family ashes intact (Photo credit: Stuff Limited) Avonhead Canterbury Earthquake Memorial (Image Author’s own June 2016) Avonhead Canterbury Earthquake Memorial (Image Author’s own June 2016) Oi Manawa Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial (Photo by Kenjiro Fujita, 2018) Flowers in cones, University of Canterbury Campus (Image Author’s own, February 2016)

94

98

100 133

145

214

215

216 238 257 258 262 264 265 266 267 268

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 12.9

Fig. 13.1 Fig. 13.2

Fig. 14.1 Fig. 14.2 Fig. 14.3 Fig. 14.4 Fig. 15.1 Fig. 16.1

White chairs memorial, facing the cardboard transitional cathedral on corner of Hereford and Madras (Photo by Peter Simpson, 2019) Instagrammable #chchswing (Photo by Shinya Uekusa, 2020) Artist S¯emisi Fetokai Potauaine’s sculpture, Vaka ‘A Hina, denoting unity and moving forwards together (Photo by Peter Simpson, 2019) Gap Filler’s Dance-O-Mat (Photo by Peter Simpson, 2019) Post-Disaster Creative Opportunity Power Shift Model Creative Novelty Value Shift Model Non vs. Post-Disaster Creative Idea Implementation Model ¯ Otautahi residential red zone (Photo by Peter Simpson, 2021) Democracy denied, New Brighton (Photo by Peter Simpson, 2021)

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269 284

293 301 306 310 311 328 346

PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Contextualising the Decade of Disaster ¯ Experiences in Otautahi Christchurch: The Critical Disaster Studies Imperative Steve Matthewman

and Shinya Uekusa

Living with Disasters: A Decade of Disaster Experiences Ko ng¯a pae tawhiti wh¯aia kia tata, ko ng¯a pae tata, whakamaua kia tina. The potential for tomorrow depends on what we do today. (All Right? 2020)

S. Matthewman School of Social Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] S. Uekusa (B) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_1

3

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Ten years on from the first major earthquake in 2010, the process ¯ ¯ is slow and of recovery in Otautahi Christchurch1 (hereafter Otautahi) problematic (see Matthewman & Byrd in this collection). The red zone plan has only just been finalised and the area will take decades to develop (Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet, 2019; Pawson in this collection); Christchurch City Council (CCC) estimates that it will take another 20 years to repair all of the roads (Hayward, 2018); and there is no funding to (re)develop the Cathedral Square (Hayward, 2018). Plans for a Performing Arts Precinct and Ng¯ai Tahu Cultural Precinct have been abandoned. The convention centre (Te Pae Christchurch) has only just opened. The Metro Sports facility (Parakiore) will not be completed until 2022, and work on a replacement rugby stadium for Lancaster Park has not even commenced. Urban design expert Jim Lunday has been withering in his assessment of the government’s Christchurch Central Recovery Plan: “The legacy is failed anchor projects, few new jobs, poor housing stock in the inner suburbs, 40 per cent vacant sites [and] sterile precincts with little life after 6 pm” (Quoted in Harris, 2020; and see Williams, 2021) (Fig. 1.1). Compounding matters, the reconstruction has magnified the economic disparities in the region (McCrone, 2013), the working-age population is declining (Parker & Steenkamp, 2012; Stats NZ, 2017), mental ¯ health issues have been at a record-high in Otautahi (Blundell, 2018; Hayward, 2018; Rowney et al., 2014), and the Canterbury region has had to weather some of the worst economic predictions for Aotearoa New Zealand (McDonald, 2019). Cantabrians have needed to deal with waves of (sometimes related) disasters: the 2010, 2011 and 2016 major earthquakes; repeated floods (2014, 2017 and 2021); the 2017 wildland-urban interface wildfires in the Port Hills; the 2019 terrorist attack and mass shooting at local mosques that killed 51 people; the COVID-19 global pandemic; river and groundwater pollution (see Wynyard in this collection); and the perilous future faced by many coastal residents in the region ¯ due to sea-level rise. Indeed, Otautahi will be more impacted by sea-level rise than any other Aotearoa New Zealand city in terms of number of

1 Otautahi ¯ is nowadays used as the general M¯aori name for Christchurch. Tautahi was the son of a Ng¯ai Tahu chief and his name was used to refer to a M¯aori settlement in ¯ the area of the city by the Avon River (Taylor, 1952). However, as the use of Otautahi ¯ is contentious as it refers to an ancestor, some authors did not opt for Otautahi and preferred to use Christchurch (see Gates, 2020 for further discussion).

1

CONTEXTUALISING THE DECADE OF DISASTER EXPERIENCES …

5

¯ Fig. 1.1 Central Otautahi, lots of gaps to fill (Photo by Steve Matthewman, 2017)

people affected and amount of property threatened (Paulik et al., 2019, p. 47). In a piece titled “How is Christchurch now, after everything?”, T. Black (2020) summarised the situation in the following way: “We have the complicated, the messy, the hard-to-explain: insurance battles, the panic of aftershocks, evacuations, a struggling rebuild, mental health impacts, school closures, lockdown, road works, the sound of sirens, a generation of children stressed” (para.18) (Fig. 1.2). With the recent 10-year commemoration of the Canterbury earthquake sequence, this edited volume provides an overview of these concatenating events and critical analyses of the issues arising in the wake of these primarily urban disasters. Social scientists in Aotearoa New Zealand (and beyond) reflect on the experiences, responses and long-term impacts of the wave of disasters that followed the devastating earthquake sequence. The delays in, and challenges of, the recovery are important. Accordingly, this text explores both the earthquakes and the subsequent

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Fig. 1.2 “The future is just around the corner” (Photo by Steve Matthewman, 2017)

waves of disaster with a view to long-term community recovery, redevelopment and growth. Most previous research has conceptualised that the city as recovering from the Canterbury earthquake sequence, when, in fact, it is recovering from so much more than that. ¯ Otautahi’s recovery presents a unique case. It provides a once-ina-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 which have experienced a series of significant ¯ disasters like Otautahi. Disaster researchers are familiar with the concept of “second disasters”, in which disaster-stricken areas may also contend with the predations of disaster tourism and disaster capitalism following catastrophe (Lameire et al., 1997). How many iterations of disaster has ¯ Otautahi and its people gone through?

1

CONTEXTUALISING THE DECADE OF DISASTER EXPERIENCES …

7

Overview of the Decade of Disasters: ¯ Otautahi---Ruptured and Re-Ruptured The 2010–2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence started at 4:35 am on 4 September when the 2010 Darfield Earthquake (a magnitude 7.1 on the ¯ Ritcher scale) struck the town located 40 kms west of the Otautahi city. No death directly attributable to this earthquake occurred,2 yet it caused significant damage to land and infrastructure (e.g., building damage, visible deep fissures in farmland, road damages). This was followed by a number of disruptive shocks on Boxing Day, 26 December 2010. ¯ At 12:51 pm on 22 February 2011, Otautahi city experienced a 6.3 magnitude deadly earthquake, known as the 2011 Christchurch Earthquake, centred 6.7 kms south of the central business district (CBD). This time, it caused severe damage, including building collapses. This resulted in 185 deaths and several thousand injuries. The Canterbury Television (CTV) building collapse killed 115, and more deaths were associated with other building collapses in the CBD and falling rocks in the suburbs. The earthquake was caused by the rupture of a longhidden shallow fault line running under the Port Hills, along the city’s southern edge. Infrastructures (e.g., buildings, roads, electric lines, gas and water pipes) were severely damaged, and, due to liquefaction, the eastern suburbs were particularly hard hit, being inundated by silt. Many homes were without basic necessities (e.g., electrical power and running water) for a long time. Due to structural damage and liquefaction, several thousand homes needed to be demolished, and, due to the uninhabitable ¯ conditions and lack of basic services, 70,000 people left Otautahi. It is one of the costliest and most insured disasters, yet some residents were left without proper legal support, thereby having to deal with years of litigation while suffering from both limited and inadequate repairs (see Finn & Toomey in this volume). The 2011 Christchurch Earthquake was followed by a 6.1 magnitude earthquake on 13 June, and a 5.8 magnitude quake on 23 December 2011. Thousands of aftershocks shook the city for years, sometimes damaging buildings that had been repaired (Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority [CERA], 2016). Details on the Canterbury earthquake sequence have already been well-covered. See: Bannister and Gledhill (2012) and Potter et al. (2015). 2 One person died of a heart attack during the earthquake.

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¯ The Canterbury and wider Otautahi regions have also experienced water-related disasters. Major flooding occurred in 2014, 2017 and 2021, ¯ although some parts of Otautahi experience flooding whenever there are intensive rains as a result of silt in the rivers and changes in land-levels (Potter et al., 2015, p. 10). Furthermore, due to these land-level changes, ¯ some coastal residents in Otautahi are facing the increased risk of sea-level rise, and, as Wynyard discusses in Chapter 7, Canterbury is experiencing ground and fresh water pollution. This is a typical, albeit frequently less visible, slow-onset disaster triggered by human-induced hazards including neoliberal governance and exploitation of natural resources (see Young, 2021 for a recent report on the increase of nitrates in the already unswimmable Selwyn River). From 13–20 February 2017, wild fires swept the Port Hills located just a few kilometres south of the CBD, killing one firefighter, destroying nine homes, and scarring a large area of the hills. Several hundred people were forced to temporarily evacuate (CCC, n.d.). ¯ On 15 March 2019, a very different disaster occurred in Otautahi. An Australian terrorist attacked two mosques. 51 members of the Muslim community at prayer were killed, and 45 people were hospitalised. For many Cantabrians, these mass shootings have been more intensely traumatic than the other previous disasters, the earthquakes included. ¯ As with the rest of the world, Otautahi went into Level 4 lockdown in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. As of April ¯ 2021, the full, long-term, impacts of the pandemic on Otautahi are yet to be known. However, in the Canterbury region, there have been 168 COVID-19 cases, including 12 deaths (Ministry of Health, 2021). Due ¯ to the lockdown, significant business struggles and job losses in Otautahi have been anticipated (Law, 2020). Since April 2020, the New Zealand border has been closed to tourists and those on temporary visas; conse¯ quently, as the gateway city of the South Island, Otautahi’s tourism and hospitality sectors have been severely affected. Furthermore, as Bolger (2021) reported, “[c]hanges to the delivery of Christchurch’s major [recovery] projects due to Covid-19 have cost the Christchurch City Council approximately $6.5 million to date” (para.1). Both shortages of labour and construction supplies have been reported. On 31 May 2021, the entire Canterbury region was under a state of emergency. A “one in 100-year” flood due to extreme rainfall has caused significant damage to the wider Canterbury region. The actual impacts are yet to be known; however, it has forced mass evacuations (see, e.g.,

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the New Zealand Herald, 2021 for media coverage). With between 200– 400 mm of rainfall recorded on 30 May, river banks have been breached, houses have been flooded, and critical infrastructure (such as roads and bridges) has been damaged. A lot of towns and communities were cut off in the floods due to road closures. Farmers have experienced the devastation of their farms and are now weighing up the costs to property, crops and livestock. This flood event has added further damage to houses already hit by the quakes and caused more stress for the residents who had already gone through a whole series of disasters (Fig. 1.3). ¯ Otautahi is built on a drained swamp on a flood plain at sea level close to two of the world’s great tectonic faults. “The site is in fact on the unstable edge of the fan of a great river whose paths could sweep unpredictably across it. It was a strange place to build a new city”, Eric ¯ Pawson (2000, p. 65) concluded. Otautahi can therefore be framed as an “extreme city” (Dawson, 2017): it is the site of extreme seismic and hydro-meteorological risks and events, as well as socially produced vulnerabilities borne of extreme income inequality (Rashbrooke, 2013). For many commentators, Aotearoa New Zealand is the paradigmatic example of a neoliberal country (Gray, 1998, p. 39; Kelsey, 1995; Larner, ¯ 1996, p. 2). Otautahi presents a test case of the free market’s ability to lead recovery and regeneration (Farrell, 2015, pp. 322–323). Formerly regarded as the English settlement par excellence (Pickles, 2016, p. 9), the Indigenous Urbanism podcast noted that the earthquakes have also provided “a chance to build, more or less from scratch, a post-colonial city, inclusive of everyone; and with a strong recognition of the mana whenua of local hap¯u, Ng¯ai T¯u¯ahuriri” (Keene, 2013; see also Pickles in this volume). For all of these reasons, “Christchurch is in the spotlight as a place to look to the future in unique and urgent ways” (Pickles, 2016, p. 6).

What are Critical Disaster Studies (CDS)? We adopt the lens of Critical Disaster Studies (CDS) to probe the underlying drivers and root causes of vulnerability and risk that predispose the ¯ people of Otautahi to a turbulent future. CDS builds upon, and critiques, traditional disaster scholarship. Traditional disaster scholarship has undeniable merits, being strong in practice and description. It has made significant contributions in terms of its focus on physical perils, risk quantification and policy prescriptions. However, this scholarship is “thin” in

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¯ Fig. 1.3 Points of interest in the CBD, wider Otautahi and Canterbury region mentioned throughout the book (Map data sources: Christchurch City Council [CCC], Land Information New Zealand [LINZ], Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority [CERA], NZ GeoNet project and its sponsors Earthquake Commission [EQC], GNS Science and LINZ, earth.org; map created by Tim Nolan, 2021)

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some domains, particularly those social science areas relating to theory, root causes and the often decisive operations of power (Alexander, 2013; Dombrowsky, 1995, p. 242; Kreps & Drabek, 1996, p. 136; Stallings, 2002, p. 282, 2006; Tierney, 2010, p. 660; Vollmer, 2013, p. 3, p. 7; Watts, 1983). As American anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith outlines in Chapter 2, CDS encourages critical theoretical engagement, multi/transdisciplinary approaches and community-oriented research that sheds light on the challenges and opportunities for translating disaster risk reduction (DRR) and resilience rhetoric into everyday reality. From this perspective, even the concept of disaster itself is critically deconstructed. A disaster is traditionally defined as the consequence of an extreme event that is concentrated in time and space such that it overwhelms the capacity of human systems, like a city and surrounding region, to cope using their own resources. Despite decades of profound change, definitions of disaster have remained relatively static for more than half a century (Fritz, 1961; UNISDR, 2009). Simply put, disaster research has not kept pace with social reality (Alexander, 2013). For CDS scholars, disaster is not a naturally occurring rupture; rather, it is a socially constructed process. Natural and human-induced hazards doubtless occur (and, in the era of the Anthropocene, the barriers between the two are increasingly conflated), but whether they trigger a disaster or not is dependent upon existing social arrangements. Here issues like inequity, poverty, sexism, racism and various forms of social marginalisation and oppression predispose some people to particularly adverse impacts. This holds for both sudden shock events (like earthquakes) and slow-onset disasters (like the current COVID-19 pandemic and climate change). In contrast to traditional disaster scholarship which mainly focuses on rapid onset natural hazards as disaster agents, CDS researchers argue that larger social forces, such as structural inequalities, drive “everyday disasters”—disastrous social conditions caused by poverty, institutionalised racism, sexism, conflicts/wars and other forms of marginalisation and oppression (Matthewman, 2015, pp. 95–148). “Disasters” faced by socially disadvantaged communities on a daily basis exacerbate their vulnerabilities in the wake of extreme natural and human-induced hazard events. Moreover, disaster risks and impacts are compounded by contagious disease such as COVID-19 and slow-onset disasters such as environmental pollution and sea-level rise, and a host of other interconnected

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slow emergencies—environmental, social, economic, cultural, political— that also need to be taken into consideration in navigating the present and preparing for a risk-laden future. CDS requires a multi-/transdisciplinary approach. We invited the world-renowned anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith to anchor the collection and set its theoretical context before reaching out to a broad range of Aotearoa New Zealand’s leading scholars working in architecture, disaster research, economics, English, environmental and urban planning, gender studies, geography, health science, history, law, M¯aori and Indigenous studies, political science and sociology. Additionally, we have contributions from the leaders in Ng¯ai Tahu and the Student Volunteer Army (SVA). ¯ The Otautahi response and recovery has been mixed. The Government-led, top-down, command-and-control recovery model overseen by a specialist agency—the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA)—was heavily criticised. Doug Ahlers, an international recovery expert based at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, castigated it as “global worst practice” (Quoted in Macfie, 2016; see also Hayward & Johnson; Glavovic; Matthewman & Byrd; Montgomery; Pawson; Pickles; Uekusa & Cretney in this volume). By contrast, local residents and communities, notably iwi have shown remarkable resilience (Kenney & Phibbs, 2015; Lambert, 2014, in this volume; Phibbs et al. in this volume). However, some marginalised groups such as (im)migrants and refugees (generally known as culturally and linguistically diverse [CALD] communities in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand), who were often not included in recovery efforts, meaning that their specific struggles and ¯ needs in post-disaster Otautahi were ignored (Uekusa & Matthewman, 2017). Exploring their experiences made us realise the need for both greater inclusivity and equity in building resilient and sustainable societies. The socially disadvantaged and isolated need to be able to take active roles in their own recovery rather than facing exacerbated cultural, economic, emotional, social and political challenges (e.g., Garces-Ozanne et al.; Lambert in this volume). This argument applies to all socially marginalised individuals and communities such as those with additional needs, the elderly, the poor, racial minority groups, and rural residents. ¯ In post-disaster Otautahi, feelings of being ignored, excluded, dissatisfied and further marginalised were prevalent among these groups. Those reporting a stronger sense of recovery were typically people who felt that

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they were being heard. This appears to have trumped more traditional social indicators such as race, socioeconomic status (SES) and gender (although these may be instrumental to people’s chances of actually being heard) (Davidson, C., personal communication, April 2021). Another way of phrasing the issue is to say that it is preferable for people to own their recovery. Unfortunately, some are unable to do so. Migrant and refugee groups, for example, continue to endure impediments as the disasters and the unequal recovery and redevelopment process have worsened their social vulnerability. ¯ Otautahi keeps being portrayed as Aotearoa New Zealand’s paradigmatic resilient community, a label that occludes deep divisions along the familiar fault lines of class, ethnicity and gender. Poverty, patriarchy and racism (including anti-immigrant/Asian sentiments) mean that recoveries are uneven (see Garces-Ozanne et al., Uekusa & Cretney in this volume for further discussion). Critical infrastructures are being rebuilt. A new city arises. The new normal emerges. But the powerless remain powerless. The Asian migrant workers who are literally rebuilding the city serve ¯ as a case in point. Essential for both the physical rebuild of Otautahi as well as its redevelopment and economic growth, many find themselves exploited at work and discriminated against in their everyday lives such that they feel like “second-class citizens” (see Garces-Ozanne et al. in this volume). Our aim is to provide a stage for critical reflections on the last decade of disaster experiences—not simply to be critical, but also to recognise the monumental and varied efforts made by so many towards the recovery (see, e.g., Glavovic; Hayward & Johnson in this volume). This involves discussion of enabling and countervailing forces that have at time helped and hindered recovery. And importantly, our discussions also provide resources for the future—leveraging experience to date to prepare individuals, households, neighbourhoods, communities, region, Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as those facing waves of perils in other parts of the world. Is it too much to say that Ulrich Beck’s prognosis of the Risk Society has metamorphosed into reality (see Montgomery in this volume)? Do we now live in the Disaster Society, with waves of disaster sweeping through our lives, communities and cities; compounded by the turbulence wrought by contagious disease, climate change, biodiversity loss and a host of other environmental cataclysms superimposed on the forces of (institutionalised) racism, impoverishment, inequity, populist authoritarianism, hate, over-population, ageing society, and so on. Traditional

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disaster scholars have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point of CDS, however, is to change it into something altogether more inclusive, just, sustainable and benign.

Overview and Book Structure This volume distinguishes CDS from traditional disaster scholarship, and reveals the global import of this perspective, particularly for understanding and addressing the human dimensions of disasters. By focusing ¯ on the last decade of experience in Otautahi, leading Aotearoa New Zealand (and international) social scientists share critical reflections on important concepts like social vulnerability, risk, resilience, social capital and the very notion of disaster itself, thus extending our understanding beyond the traditional framing of disasters. Disaster recovery is conceptualised as an emergent, deeply dynamic, uncertain, complex and contested process. Disasters, recovery, preparedness and DRR are positioned in the context of living in turbulent times—influenced by powerful social forces like neoliberalism, globalisation, anthropogenic climate change, authoritarian and post-truth politics, inequity, racism, anti-migration rhetoric, hate speech, extremism, rapid population ageing, infrastructure decline, rural decline, fast-paced technological change, global pandemic and so ¯ on. Critical reflections on the Otautahi experience not only reveal the root causes that lead to disasters in Aotearoa New Zealand, they contribute to international disaster scholarship by interrogating the concepts of vulnerability, risk and disasters, disaster preparedness, recovery governance, community resilience building, sustainability and social/environmental justice in the face of global change. Moreover, these critical perspectives help to unmask the challenges and opportunities for living with the reality (and ongoing prospect) of disasters. This edited book offers four clear distinguishing features. First, it will make a much-needed contribution to CDS—exposing the underbelly of disasters, rooted in social arrangements. We live on an intensively urbanizing planet facing unprecedented wealth disparities, the climate emergency, “peak everything”, and the prospect of mass extinction. Disasters are increasing in frequency, scale, cost and severity. Such work is urgent in our disastrous times. Indeed, this work is especially important because recovery is the most complex (Lonne et al., 2016), least studied (Mileti, 1999) and consequently least understood (Berke et al.,

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1993; Tierney, 2019) phase of the disaster cycle. Unsurprisingly, effective organisation and execution is hardest in this phase (Shaw, 2014). ¯ Second, the Otautahi is significant for understanding the human dimensions of disasters. The Canterbury earthquake sequence is Aotearoa New Zealand’s worst ever “natural” disaster. As a consequence, the ¯ central city of Otautahi had to be rebuilt, and many of the surrounding suburbs were permanently evacuated (“red zoned”). Some 20,000 people were permanently evacuated at an estimated cost of NZ$2.63 billon, which is approximately one per cent of GDP at the time of the disaster (Noy, 2020, pp. 18, 21). It was also one of the most insured disasters, which also contributed to it being one of the costliest disasters of modern times as well (Bollard cited in Brett, 2011). Additionally, it is arguably one of the world’s most complex disaster insurance events (see Finn & Toomey in this volume). In another development of global note, Ng¯ai Tahu, the tribe with customary authority in the South Island, made history following the earthquakes, being the first Indigenous group to be an official partner to recovery following major disaster. This situation has been described as “globally unique” (Keene, 2013). Third, there are best-practice lessons for Aotearoa New Zealand and the world. The creative ideas, transitional urbanism projects and Councilled community consultations garnered global plaudits (e.g., the Dutch Co-creation Association’s award in 2011 for its “Share an Idea” process of public “conversations” as to what the central city should look like, Viserums Konsthall’s esteemed Triennale for an Architecture of Necessity award in 2013 in recognition of sustainable community building, and the Guangzhou International Award for Urban Innovation in 2016 which recognizes “world-leading urban innovation”) (see Cameron in this volume) (Fig. 1.4). But central government quickly usurped local government. The “people’s plan” (Share an Idea), which veteran activist John Minto described as “the most important and biggest and most effective exercise in democracy that has ever happened in New Zealand” (Quoted in Matthewman & Goode, 2020, p. 80) was replaced by the government’s own blueprint (Christchurch Central Recovery Plan). Meanwhile, M¯aori practices of manaakitanga (hospitality) and wh¯anaungatanga (sense of family connection), bondings such as wh¯anau (extended family), the cultural institutions of marae (place of formal greetings and discussion) and kura (school), and tribal organisations have been seen to build

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Fig. 1.4 “Where we gather together, extraordinary things happen” (Photo by Steve Matthewman, 2017)

resilience post-disaster. Indeed, they were hailed as best-practice exemplars of recovery (Kenney & Phibbs, 2015; Phibbs et al.; Pickles in this volume). As noted, central government’s recovery activities have been roundly criticised for exemplifying worst-practice. Residential surveys consistently show that locals have huge levels of dissatisfaction with the government’s recovery priorities (Simons & Alvares, 2016). Walton (2020) reported Research First’s recent survey result: “only 29 per cent of respondents thought Christchurch was better now than before the earthquakes” (para.3). ¯ Fourth, there are profound senses in which Otautahi is a living laboratory for the future—what it means to live in a disastrous world. This ¯ edited volume will position Otautahi as a laboratory for learning how to navigate a turbulent urban global future, marked by complex interconnected stressors and shocks. Significant changes have already been

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institutionalised to account for the dynamic and compounding risks faced by residents and communities in the Canterbury region. Much is being ¯ and could be learned from Otautahi experiences over the last decade—in Aotearoa New Zealand and far beyond. In a sense, this turbulent urban future is already at hand: interacting, compound and cascading disasters ¯ have been faced and, inevitably, will be faced by the people of Otautahi. For example, the city has already had to reckon with managed retreat, something the Minister responsible describes as “one of the hardest public policy knots of the twenty-first century” (Woods, 2018). It is a present reality and future prospect facing so many cities and communities around the world. This book draws together state-of-the-art social science research to explore the interwoven cultural, economic, environmental, political, administrative, technological and social challenges faced by local communities in this risk-laden setting. ¯ The following chapters help us look at the Otautahi recovery and the waves of disasters through multi-/transdisciplinary social science, particularly anthropological and sociological perspectives. Before the main sections in which Aotearoa New Zealand social scientists present their critical reflections on the last decade of the disasters and recovery in ¯ Otautahi, in Chapter 2, anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith reflects on the emerging field of CDS, some of its roots and preoccupations, as well as a synopsis of trends and future possibilities in research and practice to orient readers. His analysis focuses on the development of CDS, touching on the core concepts of vulnerability, resilience and neoliberalism and discussing the current international trends in CDS. As outlined by Oliver-Smith, a CDS perspective is foundational for understanding and addressing the root causes and drivers of vulnerability that predispose people to disaster. Following his argument, the book attempts to respond to the following overarching questions: (1) what are the drivers and root causes of the vulnerability that so many people in ¯ Otautahi have lived with over the last decade, and will continue experiencing without transformational change to the social order? and (2) what will it take to move towards a more equitable (fair and just), democratic and sustainable future, given the turbulence of climate change and the raft of unfolding technological, environmental, economic, political, ideological, cultural and social changes and challenges?

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Critical Framings of Disasters and Responses The first section of this book consists of five chapters devoted to critically framing the Canterbury earthquake sequence, and identifying the factors that compound disasters and recovery. In Chapter 3, Roy Montgomery provides a critical and comprehensive overview of the ways in which central and local governments at different levels have positioned themselves in response to the Canterbury earthquake sequence and compounding disasters such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. His intention is not to simply describe how poor judgement has governed government behaviour, which is typically described as “elite panic” in the literature, but to critically discuss the impacts of neoliberalism on governments’ behaviour in disaster response and recovery. In Chapter 4, Katie Pickles revisits the five major ruptures identified in her 2016 book Christchurch Ruptures and reconsiders these five themes: landscape, people, gothic, heritage and heart. She discusses to what extent her predictions have come to pass and are still relevant after 10 years, and ¯ what other ruptures have since emerged in Otautahi. Simon Lambert’s Chapter 5 introduces critical Indigenous disaster studies and problematises the typical image of M¯aori being resilient. To tease out this apparent paradox of simultaneous vulnerability and resilience, his chapter unpacks the impacts of the Canterbury earthquake sequence and subsequent disasters on urban Indigenous peoples. He concludes that pan-Indigenous descriptions of Indigenous peoples’ disaster experiences gloss over the fundamental identities of Indigenous peoples, ignoring the diversity of communities and masking wider Indigenous societal dynamics that underpin the much-lauded resilience. Following Lambert’s argument, in Chapter 6, Shinya Uekusa and Raven Cretney attempt to further problematise and reconceptualise one of the key concepts in disaster studies, community resilience. Based on their empirical studies, they explore how official authorities, community ¯ leaders, NGOs and community residents have experienced the Otautahi rebuild. They provide radical reinterpretation and reconceptualisation of what community resilience has realistically meant and how we can foster and maintain this capacity. In Chapter 7, Matthew Wynyard analyses the slow-moving destruction of the waters of Canterbury, which may not appear to be a “typical disaster” to many. As he argues, to restrict “disaster” in space and time ignores slow-moving but wide-ranging environmental harms and human-induced

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hazards associated with structural factors past and present—from colonialism to contemporary neoliberal capitalism—being visited on socioecological systems around the world, including the freshwater ecosystems in Canterbury. Critical Voices in Disasters The second section of this book contains five chapters presenting critical voices in disasters from the field. In Chapter 8, Rosemary Du Plessis presents her findings from longitudinal large-scale empirical studies, including the “Women’s Voices”, “QuakeBox” and “QuakeBox2” ¯ projects. Her chapter provides diverse voices of how people in Otautahi experienced the Canterbury earthquake sequence and spoke about ongoing risk intensified by aftershocks, subsequent disasters and the necessity to “get on with things”. Her sociological analysis shows that while social scientists offer insights into the social, political and economic dimensions of disasters, the narrators from the field often articulate how organisational processes, national and local policy decisions, the interests of commercial businesses, and inequalities in income and housing status had disastrous consequences following the Canterbury earthquake sequence. In Chapter 9, Suzanne Phibbs, Christine Kenney and T¯a Mark Solomon comprehensively summarise the M¯aori community’s collective response to the Canterbury earthquake sequence and subsequent disasters. Their chapter documents how M¯aori have leveraged the response and recovery in order to implement programmes that address vulnerabilities within their community. Their responses to the disasters were effective and efficient, providing an example of how M¯aori cultural values augment disaster response and recovery. In Chapter 10, Arlene Garces-Ozanne, Maria Makabenta-Ikeda and Shinya Uekusa present marginalised voices in disasters by exploring the experiences of Asian migrant workers, partic¯ ularly Filipinos, in Otautahi. They are essential workers as they have filled ¯ significant labour market gaps in the Otautahi rebuild, redevelopment and further growth. However, instead of being welcomed for their efforts, they often find themselves discriminated against and relegated to the status of “invisible second-class citizens”. The authors explore the structural factors in their home countries and within Aotearoa New Zealand that shape migrant worker vulnerability and resilience. As with Lambert, in their analysis, they take a critical approach and take into consideration

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the paradox of marginalised groups being simultaneously vulnerable and resilient. They emphasize the importance of social capital yet, instead of solely focusing on individualised empowerment, call for structural trans¯ formation to develop a new Otautahi, which is a more inclusive, diverse, multicultural and just. In Chapter 11, Jeremy Finn and Elizabeth Toomey provide a detailed overview of the major long-term legal issues arising from the Canterbury earthquake sequence, particularly insurance claims. This chapter presents critical voices in disasters from a legal perspective. The frequently unsatisfactory and problematic legal procedures (and lack of legal support), which often delayed resolution, have caused some residential and commercial property owners to participate in “years of litigation”. Ruth McManus’s Chapter 12 presents an important work on death and memorialisation in disasters, which is unique and often overlooked in the ¯ Otautahi context. Her chapter explores some of the ways in which new meanings and practices of sustainability through adversity are considered in and through the on-going shifts in the socio-political positioning of the ¯ dead and memorialisation. Otautahi’s death management manifests the effects of outdated legislation linked to a specific political and neoliberal approach to disaster management and governance. ¯ Otautahi as a Laboratory for the World: A Prelude to the Future ¯ The final section of this book conceptualises Otautahi as a laboratory for the world. In Chapter 13, Steve Matthewman and Hugh Byrd argue that, although the “build back better” (BBB) narrative talks about the improvement of communities following disaster, successfully translating this narrative into practice is rarely observed. This chapter asks the allimportant question, “why don’t we build back better”? They argue that while you can design buildings and precincts, you cannot engineer urban life. Rebuilding a city involves more than physical reconstruction. It also entails rebuilding lives, neighbourhoods, affective communities, social relations, occupations and aspirations. Social conflicts also inevitably arise. Their chapter centres those between old and young, insiders and outsiders, and rich and poor. While commonly regarded as the textbook case in how not to build back better, the chapter nonetheless identifies significant resources for hope. Trudi Cameron’s Chapter 14 demonstrates how creativity per se ¯ ¯ “behaved” in post-disaster Otautahi. Otautahi had been commonly

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regarded as a conservative, traditional city, fond of its heritage which was well-protected by its stakeholders. Unique creative ideas such as transitional urbanism implemented in the post-disaster setting were lauded globally for their novelty and utility. She discusses the importance of recalling the value of embracing unconventional ideas in order to implement beneficial creative ideas in pre-/non-disaster periods for future events. In Chapter 15, Eric Pawson highlights Aotearoa New Zealand’s existing governance structures as being insufficiently anticipatory, espe¯ cially, in the context of post-earthquake Otautahi’s urban recovery. He traces links between new governance entities created for the rebuild and antecedent planning processes, and discusses the extent to which these new entities, in focusing on specific outcomes, have delivered a coherent or a fragmentary post-earthquake (and future) vision. Against the authoritarian governance of central government, Pawson advocates for forwardlooking, adaptive and participatory decision-making processes. Not only will they build trust and be more popular, they will likely be more effective too. In Chapter 16, Bronwyn Hayward and Sam Johnson reflect on the impacts of the Canterbury earthquake sequence and compounding disasters both on young people’s sense of social agency and on democracy in ¯ the Canterbury and wider Otautahi region. Their discussion offers some ¯ lessons for democracy from the way that Otautahi and its young people responded to the disruptions associated with the Canterbury earthquake sequence and subsequent disasters such as the terror attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic. In an increasingly chaotic and uncertain climate future, the question of how we maintain democracies during disruption is an urgent one and the meaningful participation of young people is vital. In Chapter 17, Bruce Glavovic reflects on how social choices ¯ have been made in Otautahi over the last decade. He underscores the pivotal role that CDS can play in deepening understanding about disasters. CDS is foundational for informing real-world decision-making about how to address the root causes and drivers of vulnerability and concatenated risk. This account contrasts experiences in which opportunities for authentic public engagement, deliberation and reflexivity were closed down or opened up. The central lesson learned is the imperative to create and sustain safe and fit-for-purpose “arenas of engagement” for local communities to make difficult and contentious choices in turbulent times.

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¯ akaro Avon River Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. (2019). Ot¯ Corridor Regeneration Plan. Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. https://dpmc.govt.nz/our-programmes/greater-christchurch-recovery-andregeneration/recovery-and-regeneration-plans/otakaro-avon-river-corridorregeneration-plan Dombrowsky, W. (1995). Again and again: Is a “disaster” what we call disaster? Some conceptual notes on conceptualizing the object of disaster sociology. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, 13(3), 241–254. Farrell, F. (2015). The villa at the edge of empire: One hundred ways to read a city. Vintage. Fritz, C. E. (1961). Disaster. In R. K. Merton & R. A. Nisbet (Eds.), Contemporary social problems (pp. 651–694). Harcourt Brace. ¯ Gates, C. (2020, September 19). Otautahi—The story behind Christchurch’s informal te reo name. Stuff. https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/te-reomaori/122813289/tautahi--the-story-behind-christchurchs-informal-te-reoname Gray, J. (1998). False dawn: The delusions of global capitalism. Granta Books. Harris, D. (2020, July 10). Critics scoff at Todd Muller’s ‘Gerry rebuilt this city’ call in Christchurch. Stuff. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/ 122103558/critics-scoff-at-todd-mullers-gerry-rebuilt-this-city-call-in-christ church?cid=app-iPhone Hayward, M. (2018, February 22). Seven years on: Seven challenges for postquake Christchurch. Stuff . https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/business/ the-rebuild/101478063/seven-years-on-seven-challenges-for-postquake-chr istchurch Keene, H. (2013, July 20). “Future vision”. Te Karaka. https://ngaitahu.iwi. nz/our_stories/future-vision/ Kelsey, J. (1995). The New Zealand experiment: A world model for structural adjustment? Auckland University Press. Kenney, C. M., & Phibbs, S. (2015). A M¯aori love story: Community-led disaster ¯ management in response to the Otautahi (Christchurch) Earthquakes as a framework for action. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 14(1), 46–55. Kreps, G. A., & Drabek, T. E. (1996). Disasters are non-routine social problems. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, 14(2), 129–153. Lambert, S. (2014). Indigenous peoples and urban: M¯aori responses to the 2010–2012 Christchurch Earthquakes. Australian Journal of Disaster and Trauma Studies, 18(1), 39–48. Lameire, N., Vanholder, R., Clement, J., Hoste, E., Van Waeleghem, J. P., Larno, L., & Lambert, M. C. (1997). The organization of the European Renal Disaster Relief Task Force. Renal Failure, 19(5), 665–671.

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Larner, W. (1996). ‘A means to an end’: Neoliberalism and state processes in New Zealand. Studies in Political Economy, 52(1), 7–38. Law, T. (2020, April 9). Coronavirus: Up to 36,500 Christchurch people could lose job in next year. Stuff. https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/120925621/ coronavirus-up-to-36500-christchurch-people-could-lose-job-in-next-year Lonne, B., McColl, G., & Marston, G., et al. (2016). Community recovery. In G. FitzGerald (Ed.), Disaster health management: A primer for students and practitioners (pp. 229–242). Routledge. Macfie, R. (2016, March 15). Shakedown of a shakeup. New Zealand Listener. https://www.noted.co.nz/currently/currently-social-issues/shaked own-of-a-shakeup Matthewman, S. (2015). Disasters, risks and revelation: Making sense of our times. Palgrave Macmillan. Matthewman, S., & Goode, L. (2020). City of Quakes: Excavating the future in Christchurch. New Zealand Sociology, 35(2), 77–98. McCrone, J. (2013, December 14). Is the rebuild worsening poverty in Christchurch? Stuff . http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/9517254/Is-the-reb uild-worsening-poverty-in-Christchurch McDonald, L. (2019, February 1). Canterbury economy ‘lacklustre’ as rebuild continues slowing. Stuff. https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/110322982/can terbury-economy-lacklustre-as-rebuild-continues-slowing Mileti, D. (1999). Disasters by design. Joseph Henry Press. Ministry of Health. (2021). COVID-19: Current cases. Ministry of Health Manat¯ u Hauora. https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-condit ions/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-data-and-statistics/covid-19-cur rent-cases New Zealand Herald. (2021, May 31). Evacuations under way, heavy rain warnings extended in Canterbury. New Zealand Herald. https://www.nzh erald.co.nz/nz/evacuations-under-way-heavy-rain-warnings-extended-in-can terbury/KEXTWX73NEHKBHP64L37WO2M7A/ Noy, I. (2020). Paying a price of climate change: Who pays for managed retreats? Current Climate Change Reports, 6, 17–22. Parker, M., & Steenkamp, D. (2012). The economic impact of the Canterbury Earthquakes. Reserve Bank of New Zealand: Bulletin, 75(3), 13–25. Paulik, R., Stephens, S., Wadhwa, S., Bell, R., Popovich, B. & Robinson, B. (2019). Coastal flooding exposure under future sea-level rise for New Zealand. Wellington: National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research Ltd. https://www.deepsouthchallenge.co.nz/sites/default/files/2019-08/ 2019119WN_DEPSI18301_Coast_Flood_Exp_under_Fut_Sealevel_rise_F INAL%20%281%29_0.pdf

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Pawson, E. (2000). Confronting Nature. In J. Cookson & G. Dunstall (Eds.), Southern capital: Christchurch: Towards a city biography 1850–2000 (pp. 60– 84). Canterbury University Press. Pickles, K. (2016). Christchurch ruptures. Bridget Williams Books. Potter, S. H., Becker, J. S., Johnston, D., & Rossiter, K. P. (2015). An overview of the impacts of the 2010–2011 Canterbury Earthquakes. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 14(1), 6–14. Rashbrooke, M. (2013). Inequality: A New Zealand crisis. Bridget Williams Books. Rowney, C., Farvid, P., & Sibley, C. G. (2014). ‘I laugh and say I have earthquake brain!’: Resident response to the September 2010 Christchurch Earthquake. New Zealand Journal of Psychology, 43(2), 4–13. Shaw, R. (Ed.). (2014). Disaster recovery—Used or misused development opportunity. Springer. Simons, G., & Alvares, C. (2016). Projecting failure as success: Residents’ perspectives of the Christchurch Earthquakes recovery. Cogent Social Sciences, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2015.1126169 Stallings, R. (2002). Weberian political sociology and sociological disaster studies. Sociological Forum, 17 (2), 281–305. Stallings, R. (2006, July 25). On sociological theory and the sociology of disasters. Presidential Address: International Research Committee on Disasters, World Congress of Sociology, Durban, South Africa. http://www-bcf.usc.edu/ ~rstallin/papers/presaddress.pdf Stats NZ. (2017). Local population trends. Statistic New Zealand. http:// archive.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/Maps_and_geography/Geographicareas/local-population-trends.aspx Taylor, W. A. (1952). Lore and history of the South Island M¯ aori. Bascands Ltd. Tierney, K. J. (2010). Growth machine politics and the social production of risk. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 39(6), 660–663. Tierney, K. J. (2019). Disasters: A sociological approach. Polity Press. Uekusa, S., & Matthewman, S. (2017). Vulnerable and resilient? Immigrants and refugees in the 2010–2011 Canterbury and Tohoku Disasters. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 22, 355–361. UNISDR. (2009). 2009 Terminology on disaster risk reduction. United Nations. http://www.unisdr.org/files/7817_UNISDRTerminologyEnglish.pdf Vollmer, H. (2013). The sociology of disruption, disaster and social change. Cambridge University Press. Walton, S. (2020, June 5). Survey finds 29 per cent of people prefer postquake Christchurch. Stuff. https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/121726 147/survey-finds-just-29-per-cent-of-people-prefer-postquake-christchurch

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Watts, M. J. (1983). On the poverty of theory: Natural hazards research in context. In K. Hewitt (Ed.), Interpretations of calamity from the viewpoint of human ecology (pp. 231–262). Allen and Unwin. Williams, D. (2021, February 19). A decade on, a tale of two cities. Newsroom. https://www.newsroom.co.nz/a-decade-on-a-tale-of-two-cities?utm_source= Friends+of+the+Newsroom&utm_campaign=a4930c4440-Daily+Briefing+19. 02.2021&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_71de5c4b35-a4930c4440-978 62399. Woods, M. (2018, July 13). Interview with the minister for greater Christchurch Regeneration. Young, C. (2021, May 10). Nitrates in Selwyn river up to 50% in 22 months, Federation of Freshwater Anglers says. RNZ. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/ national/442223/nitrates-in-selwyn-river-up-50-percent-in-22-months-federa tion-of-freshwater-anglers-says

CHAPTER 2

Critical Disaster Studies: The Evolution of a Paradigm Anthony Oliver-Smith

Introduction The emergence of a critical perspective in disaster research was announced by a 2018 conference entitled “Critical Disaster Studies Conference” held at New York University/Gallatin. The goal of the conference was “to evaluate the state of this emergent field and to chart pathways for future research” (Critical Disaster Studies Conference, 2018).1 This novel perspective was said to be evoked by such events as Hurricane Katrina (2005), the Haitian earthquake (2010) and Hurricane Sandy (2012). A

1 Subsequent to the completion of this chapter and its final submission to the publisher, a book entitled Critical Disaster Studies, co-edited by two of the three organisers of this conference, was recently published (Remes & Horowitz, 2021).

A. Oliver-Smith (B) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_2

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journal entitled Critical Disaster Studies is planning an inaugural issue for 2021.2 While these efforts are to be applauded, the intention of this chapter, as its title indicates, is to demonstrate that critical disaster studies (CDS) have a somewhat deeper history than is suggested by the dates of recent major disasters. While the label may be recent, the perspective is not. A considerable amount of disaster research on a diversity of issues has been framed from a critical perspective for decades. Moreover, CDS is not only an academic or scholarly paradigm, but one that is shared, participated in and supported by people working in national and international agencies, NGOs, journalism, architecture and many other fields, sometimes at some professional risk. What is actually meant by the word “critical?” The original application of the term in social theory appeared in the 1930s in the western European Marxist tradition of the Frankfurt School. A theory was said to be “critical” to the extent that it sought to achieve human emancipation from oppression and exploitation, providing a liberating influence “to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers of human beings” (Horkheimer, 1972 as quoted in Bohman, 2019). Since the 1930s, the term has broadened to apply to any approach that frames its goals in similar terms. Reacting to the ideological conservatism in mainstream social science and its failure to adequately address the upheavals of the 1960s, the critical perspective emerged in a variety of disciplines. Indeed, because critical research aims at identifying and overcoming the conditions that limit human freedom, it is inherently interdisciplinary (Bohman, ). As Horkheimer emphasises the achievement of human emancipation and the creation of a world which satisfies human needs, in addition to study and research critical theory is also oriented towards action. Therefore, while there is no formal or consensus definition of “critical,” most approaches that identify as such focus on the institutional or structural aspects of a problem or challenge to human well-being (Crotty, 1998). In CDS, “critical” refers to the analysis of systemic structural aspects of disasters as opposed to the purely technical, always recognising that the technical may in fact be the outcome of deeper structural causes. By the same token, I would contend that CDS also works to disclose how culturally patterned and socially generated behaviours and

2 http://journals-ddhr.utk.tennessee.edu/ojs-3.0.2/index.php/cds/about.

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practices such as racism or sexism function in the uneven distribution of risk, vulnerability and disaster impact, are equally generated by structural causes and associated practices. To borrow terms from linguistic analysis (Chomsky, 1964), mainstream disaster research generally addresses the “surface structure” of disaster occurrence, while CDS probes the “deep structure” of disaster causation.

The Emergence of a Critical Perspective in Disaster Research In the 1970s and 80s, many social scientists, largely working in or from the global south, found little in mainstream disaster literature to help them understand why disasters were so much worse in those regions. They saw that the enormous disparities in deaths and losses between disasters in the global north and the global south could not be accounted for by the frequency or intensity of hazards alone. They discovered that causes of losses were more to be found in the conditions of unequal distribution of risk than the geophysical features of location. In essence, they asserted that risk is socially constructed such that there are no “natural disasters” (Maskrey, 1993). In addition to the analysis of the event itself, disasters became a lens through which society could be critiqued for the ways it unequally distributed vulnerability, risk, and human suffering. While the vulnerability paradigm primarily addressed natural hazards and associated disasters, the field of disaster research in general also encompassed technological hazards and disasters. Indeed, the first social scientific study of a disaster involved the explosion of a munitions ship in Halifax harbour in 1917 (Prince, 1920). Disaster researchers of all stripes and disciplines have consistently researched technological disaster without necessarily developing an exclusive focus on one or the other and that tradition has more or less continued. Since the failure of technology can be readily attributed to human error, the issue of culpability in technological disasters has been rarely in question. However, in the 1990s, Science and Technology Studies (STS) as a distinct research specialty, adopted, partly in response to the major disasters in Bhopal, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, a perspective, similar to CDS, linking a traditional focus on industrial accidents to forms of structural violence embedded in the cumulative interaction of different socially based factors over time in generating risk and disaster in both technological function and dysfunction (Fortun et al., 2016). The focus on causation as embedded in the

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interaction of normal systems—political, economic, social, and technological frames—highlights similar concerns to those of CDS. While still analysing the issue of direct causality, the focus and scope of STS research has deepened to address more systemic underlying causes, particularly those involving standard practices and structural issues. The increasing occurrence of disasters that combine both natural and technological hazards, such as Japan’s triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster has also brought the concerns of both research tracks into a more interactive perspective. Much of what follows in this chapter can equally apply to the analysis of disasters that are being addressed by STS.

The Core Concept: Vulnerability… and Resilience In the context of disasters, vulnerability refers to the extent to which a community is either susceptible or resilient to the impact of the natural hazards of its particular socio-ecological system. Vulnerability is understood to be generated through a causal chain of root causes embedded in ideological, social and economic systems, leading to dynamic pressures of a demographic, socio-economic, or ecological nature that produce specific sets of unsafe conditions which, when combined with a natural hazard, produce a disaster. This approach is known as the Pressure and Release (PAR) model (Blaikie et al., 1994; Wisner et al., 2004). In situating disaster causality in society, researchers effectively established a new paradigm in which the study of disasters assumed a critical stance, framing local disasters in broader historical and structural terms (Hewitt, 1983; O’Keefe & Wisner, 1976; Wisner et al., 1977). The concept of vulnerability expanded the temporal and spatial scopes of research from the standard issues of preparation, event, aftermath, response and recovery to deeper historical analyses of the development of vulnerability through dominant social and economic processes over time, often centuries (Oliver-Smith, 1995, 2010). In like fashion, the spatial scope of research also expanded to encompass often distant social, economic, and political processes such as colonialism that drive the social construction of local risk. Research into the causation of disaster thus began to involve multi-scalar analysis with an emphasis on interaction across multiple spatial–temporal scales. While resilience was not a core concept, its emergence as the antithesis or perhaps solution to vulnerability situated it at the centre of highly contentious issues in CDS debates over the last two decades. At roughly

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the same time as disaster researchers saw the role of social forces in generating risk and disasters, ecologists began to look at ecosystems as dynamic and resilient (Holling, 1973). The concept of resilience soon migrated from ecology to the social sciences and was firmly entrenched in disaster risk management thinking by the first decade of the twenty-first century as the capacity to be able to withstand without substantial disruption the impact of a hazard whether of social or natural origins. Resilience is generally framed as a function of the levels of internal coherence, social solidarity, and the capacity of a social unit to organize and work on its own behalf. Resilience initially gained widespread acceptance since it restored the quality of agency to communities that many felt vulnerability tended to ignore. Resilience in its early iterations was seen as oriented towards maintaining flexibility and adaptive capacity at multiple levels to handle future stressors (Nelson et al., 2007). In the disaster community, resilience was hailed as the key to disaster risk reduction (DRR) (see Uekusa & Cretney in this volume for further details on, and discussion of, resilience).

The Neoliberal Context of Contemporary CDS Vulnerability and resilience and their interrogations emerged in a period in which changes in the role of the market and the state were in turn changing the dynamics of the global economic system. Known currently as neoliberalism, it is seen as an economic model, but that reading is too narrow. Neoliberalism is an economically oriented concept, but it emerges from much deeper political and cultural frames in both its origins and its effects (Harvey, 2007) (see Montgomery in this volume for a discussion of neoliberalism’s impacts in New Zealand). In cultural terms, neoliberalism is an ideology that guides the way people interpret and frame the circumstances of their lives (Oliver-Smith, 2015). Like its classical predecessors, neoliberalism purports to represent something that is virtually isomorphic with human nature, more or less a text about the kind of society it intends to create, in which efficiency, competitiveness, individualism and freedom from interference in the use of resources are privileged. In fact, in such a society, like Aotearoa New Zealand, the values of the private and individualistic domain pervade the public sphere, resulting in the penetration of mercantile and individualistic forms of conduct and values into social life at all levels (Sunkel, 2005). Indeed, the entire question of risk and disasters has become monetised

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in, for example, financial instruments known as catastrophe bonds, essentially securities that manage the risks of catastrophic natural events which are now traded like other derivatives in stock exchanges (Cooper, 2010). The outcome of this transition has been an enormous concentration of wealth and power achieved through the relatively unrestrained exploitation of human labour power and the natural environment (see Wynyard in this volume). According to Ortner (2011), two fundamental shifts in key political economic relationships have been altered. The first shift changed the relationship between capital and labour to one in which labour lost power, and capital assumed a stringent and strict disciplinary capacity. Government monetary policies strengthened financial capital, privatised state institutions, enhanced technological changes and automation, enabling the transfer of capital to locations with cheap labour which resulted in job losses and informal sector expansion with its lack of contracts, precarious work, low and inconstant wages, illegally extended work hours, and dangerous working conditions (Vera-Cortes & Macias Medrano, 2020). Recent research from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), one of the chief proponents of this model, reveals that “instead of delivering growth, some neoliberal policies have increased inequality” (Hickel, 2017; Ostry et al., 2016, p. 38). The second shift changed the relationship between capital and government to one in which the role of government is limited to ensuring strong individual private property rights, the rule of law and the institutions of freely functioning markets and free trade. The result has been a reduction of social policies and safeguards, and the consequent deterioration of living conditions leading to reduction of services and/or the privatisation of health, education, and other social programmes along with higher costs to local populations (Vera-Cortes & Macías Medrano, 2020). However, despite installing these general changes, neoliberalism has proven to be discontinuous, inefficient and violent, resulting in widespread ecological and social transformation (Tsing, 2005). Neoliberalism can only be framed in general terms because its local manifestations actually produce or enact many “neoliberalisations” according to context (Castree, 2008). These shifts towards neoliberal capitalism are also reflected in the major changes in the pattern of disasters: greater monetary loss in rich nations, although the poor of both poor and rich nations absorb far greater risk and far greater, proportionate losses. While

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there is greater mortality overall in poor nations, the rich of poor nations fare as well as the wealthy of the rich nations. Neoliberal Environments and Neoliberal Disasters The shift in focus to the social construction of risk and disasters did not necessarily divert attention away from environmental issues. In the 1980s, critical geographers began to frame their research in terms of the environmental impacts of emerging neoliberal economic models and practices. While not generally focusing on disasters, their findings are relevant to CDS particularly as regards to the construction of vulnerability and resilience in the context of environmental degradation (see Wynyard in this collection). As David Harvey asserts, the material practices of engaging the natural world, and their supporting cultural value systems are enacted and expressed in and through social relations that are themselves inscribed in the natural world. Thus, contradictions in social relations are expressed through material practices as contradictions within the environment (Harvey, 1996, p. 185). Disasters are perhaps the most graphic expression of those contradictions. Ecological features and processes, such as earthquakes or hurricanes, are easily recognised as affecting social life, but also social and cultural elements, such as racism or religion, or commodities, land markets and currency circulation, undeniably function ecologically (Harvey, 1996, p. 392). When a society is incorporated into the global capitalist system, neoliberalism begins to organise nature, and nature puts it to work through neoliberalism, creating what Moore calls a “World Ecology,” namely a synthesis of “economy making” and “environment making” (Moore, 2015, p. 41). When combined with a natural hazard, it often results in what critical geographer Neil Smith in his analysis of Hurricane Katrina called “disastrous accumulation” or, in other words, a neoliberal disaster (Smith, 2007). Neoliberal States and Disaster Risk States possess authority over a particular territory and the people living there (Wisner, 2001). They assume the role of exclusive grantor and guarantor of rights, particularly in the relationship of people to territory (Sassen, 2006, pp. 1, 6). A fundamental component of such governance is the social contract. In theory, a contract is drawn between government

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and a civil community that defines the rights and responsibilities of each party. In exchange for accepting certain obligations (taxes, obeying rules and regulations, etc.), citizens are afforded certain benefits and protections (maintenance of order, safety, well-being, etc.) by the state (O’Brien et al., 2009). As mentioned, neoliberal states transfer public assets to private interests as well as to deregulate social, political and economic processes, allegedly to improve efficiency and productivity and reduce costs and taxes (Harvey, 2007). Further, the state’s contract regarding the security of the citizenry is alleged to be most efficiently performed through the functions of the market and individual solutions to structural problems (Lampis, 2016; Zeiderman, 2016). The current authoritarian turn, in such states as India, Hungary, Brazil and, perhaps just narrowly avoided, the US, will likely strengthen the grip of the neoliberal model. Over the years since its inception, CDS has provided an ever more detailed map of the states of exception in which the fundamental rights of welfare and security of specific vulnerable people are ignored or suspended in a de facto fashion (Agamben, 1998). Neoliberalism in a de facto fashion includes this category of people as one of the acceptable costs of development. Nevertheless, despite neoliberal withdrawal of the delivery of social services generally, a state centred view of governance still relies on national governments for DRR projects (Covarrubias & Raju, 2020). In effect, as Zeiderman (2016) argues, disaster risk management becomes a feature of governance through which the state establishes and maintains authority and legitimacy and intervenes in the lives of citizens in the city and how they in turn address the state.

Trends in Current CDS As disasters are “totalising processes,” involving and affecting virtually every dimension of human life across time and space, critical disaster researchers have ranged far and wide across the field, addressing a variety of issues and problems. However, the complexity of disasters does not permit anything approaching a comprehensive treatment of the wealth of studies in CDS that have appeared over close to half a century. This brief review will highlight some of the major interrelated themes addressed by CDS over the last two decades.

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Vulnerability and Resilience Revisited Debates on vulnerability and resilience continue to be central to disaster studies in general. In CDS, interrogations of vulnerability and resilience emerged within a few years of their introduction and continue to this day, probing the terminology and language used to frame the concept and often drawing on insights from other fields of critical research (Chmutina & Von Meding, 2019; Chmutina et al., 2020; Kelman, 2018; Staupe-Delgado, 2019). Many of these perspectives focus on achieving a finer-grained analysis of these terms, particularly as they are framed for underserved populations (see Uekusa, 2018). Initially paired as opposites, vulnerability and resilience soon began to be interrogated for the unstated assumptions embedded in their initial formulations. Some researchers argued that the uncritical application of vulnerability may obscure the existence and exposure to specific hazards (Mansilla, 2000). Others criticise the concept for homogenising communities, placing groups of people who may be internally diverse in terms of capacities under one overarching category of helplessness (Bankoff, 2019; see also Lambert in this collection). Still others criticise the conflation of vulnerability with poverty, pointing out that many poor communities have high levels of social organisational capacity for dealing with environmental threats (Laska & Peterson, 2013). Vulnerability has also been seen as a profoundly disempowering concept for local populations (Cannon, 2008). Even assessing a particular group as vulnerable can further their marginalisation (Marino & Faas, 2020). Resilience also came under considerable scrutiny and debate, largely about the goals of resilience thinking and discourse, particularly in its distortion of local priorities (Lizarralde et al., 2020). In addition, if resilience is about the capacity to absorb disruption without loss of function, for human communities, it appears resistant to change, particularly of a structural nature. Many systems erosive of social and environmental sustainability have been remarkably resistant to change. Resilience can actually contribute to the maintenance of a system that constructs vulnerability rather than reduce disaster risk (Barrios, 2011; Lavell & Maskrey, 2014). Resilience research is critiqued for the lack of attention to political factors that can affect local vulnerabilities and capacities (Cretney, 2014). In addition, resilience has been further critiqued for its isomorphism with a neoliberal agenda of defunding the social contract in favour of a policy of individual solutions to structural problems (Tierney, 2015).

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The embrace of resilience by the development sector often links it to development processes that can actually drive the construction of risk and disasters (Cannon & Müller-Mahn, 2010). Ultimately, the widespread acceptance and use of these concepts, particularly in policy contexts has led to their dilution and distortion. Where vulnerability was once a critical concept, it is now in danger of becoming simply a term to describe a set of immutable conditions. By the same token, where resilience was once aimed at recognizing the agency of even poor communities, it is now seen both as a quality which, when lacking, comes close to blaming the victim, thus further marginalizing them. It can also function as part of neoliberal policy to privatise social services. Methodology While the standard social science and historical research toolkit can be used in CDS, recent research has been informed by specific themes that frame the research questions as much as provide methodological innovations. Three interrelated themes that have received increasing attention in CDS are decolonisation, intersectionality, and a questioning of the Western epistemological orientation of disaster research. These themes all have important implications for the development of specific research methodologies (Smith, 2012). Decolonisation as both theme and method sharpens the focus of earlier studies of the historical construction of vulnerability (Oliver-Smith, 1995). Theories of coloniality trace legacies of those past institutions often expressed in racist, classist, religious, sexist or caste terms are often reiterated in past and contemporary policies and practices in disaster causation and contexts, revealing the slow violence of colonialism persisting in current conditions of vulnerability in all phases of disaster (Rivera, 2020). Indeed, there is an enduring coloniality in contemporary global capitalism as a major producer of vulnerabilities, suffering and death in regions of minorities living under permanent forms of oppression and exploitation. This violence of development can be seen in mass displacements of communities for infrastructural projects and widespread toxic contamination by industrial effluents (Checker, 2005; Garcia Lopez, 2020). Such “zones of sacrifice” are common in areas associated with colonised populations within nations, such as the US Gulf Coast, as well as in post-colonial nations (Maldonado, 2019).

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Coloniality is also perpetuated in contemporary humanitarian interventions in disaster contexts in which social workers communicate neoliberal values and practices at the individual level, undermining collectivist responses to advance neoliberal recovery strategies. This creates “a second colonisation” (Adams, 2013; Bonilla, 2020; Pyles, 2017). Moreover, a coloniality of disaster also considers how historically embedded concepts of class, gender, local politics, and other categories of difference within colonised populations intersect and generate different vulnerabilities (Garcia Lopez, 2020). As the concept of vulnerability began to be more closely analysed, it was soon recognised that not everyone in an exposed group is vulnerable in the same way. In CDS, a finer grained analysis now deconstructs vulnerability in terms of the intersectionality of a person’s multiple identities on the basis of such axes of differentiation as caste, sex, race, class, sexuality, religion, disability, physical appearance, and status, each of which in interaction with other aspects may affect how the array of disaster processes will affect an individual (Chavez Rodriguez, 2016; Vickery, 2018). This approach intersects directly with activism as manifested in such organisations as the #MeToo or Black Lives Matter (BLM) movements. In underscoring the importance of intersectionality, Andharia (2020) also calls for framing disaster work in terms of transdisciplinarity for full representation of the diversity of perspectives in disaster work. Transdisciplinarity refers to both a perspective and a process that recognises multiple sources of knowledge and expertise, from all disciplines as well as practitioners and affected people, who must be included in the co-design and co-production of scientific knowledge (Mauser et al., 2013). Recently, the idea of transdisciplinarity has been taken a step further towards a fundamental re-ordering of disaster research epistemologically, socially, and politically in the form of a manifesto (Gaillard, n.d.). Gaillard (2018) faults the field for failing to fulfil the promise of the original political agenda of the vulnerability paradigm, calling for encouraging local researchers to study “their own disasters,” move away from Western sources, concepts, methods, and epistemologies. Intellectual and moral reform is needed to resist the hegemony of Western science and scholarship as well as to restore the original political agenda to disaster studies.

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Risk Analysis and Management The vulnerability paradigm helped to shift the focus away from the simplistic view that risks are immanent in life towards viewing risk in terms of its active creation and allocation. Rather than disaster probability being considered as objective, quantifiable and knowable, CDS has explored the roles that different social actors such as social movements, businesses, government entities, and professions have in shaping the characterisation of risk, the science of risk assessment, and appropriate risk management strategies (Tierney, 2015). Disaster researchers adopting a CDS approach to risk focus on how political power, economic interests, and institutional agendas drive the science of risk assessment, largely controlled by government and industry. The tools of formal risk science assess risk on the basis of degrees of probability and tend to disguise or elide sociopolitical causes and solutions by foregrounding technical solutions instead (Tucker & Nelson, 2017). Local people, on the other hand, must take into account a host of variables that comprise the resources and risks of their total environment. For example, the environmental justice movement has documented the situating of toxic disposal sites within or near minority communities in the US (Bullard, 1994; Checker, 2017). The profound environmental destruction of the Mississippi delta chiefly by the gas and petroleum industries, supported by the state government of Louisiana has generated increased risk from coastal storms and sea level rise, particularly for Indigenous communities. Many of these communities are facing displacement and resettlement to inland areas, disrupting traditional lifeways going back centuries (Maldonado, 2019). Indeed, the role of the state in risk creation and distribution is linked to its role in the reproduction of the neoliberal political economy. Root Cause Analysis The vulnerability concept, despite the varied critical assessments, continues to inform much research, including a number of frameworks to guide root cause analysis. As such, the vulnerability model was originally developed precisely to be the basic tool for a critical analysis of disasters and has been foundational for a number of frameworks developed to guide root cause analysis. Several approaches to addressing this task are now in use. All are based on the premise that a problem cannot be solved

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by simply addressing the immediately obvious symptoms, but rather by understanding and correcting or eliminating its root causes. All see disasters as more a symptom of an on-going global process than as singular, one-off events. However, differences arise regarding the scope and level of analysis as well as what constitutes a root cause or a risk driver and the specific purposes and goals to which the approach may apply. The Forensic Investigation of Disasters (FORIN) provides a conceptual framework and guide to research on root causes (IRDR, 2013; Oliver-Smith et al., 2016). FORIN research focuses on identifying underlying root causes and dynamic processes, requiring a more structural, deeply rooted causal analysis to address why unsafe conditions exist as such (Burton, 2010, 2015). This analysis inevitably involves a consideration of governance and governability concerns, resource exploitation, the organisation of production, culture, institutional history, practice and norms, ethical, moral and behavioural aspects. FORIN remedies to vulnerability require fundamental changes in the development paradigm and its ideological foundations. Both the approach of the German Committee for Disaster Reduction (Witting, 2012) and the Preparing for Extreme and Rare Events in Coastal Regions project (Fraser et al., 2016) aim to support agencies and stakeholders involved in disaster risk management to identify efforts and intervention options to address root causes and drivers of disasters and disaster risk. The DKKV approach generally limits analysis to the institutional level and critiques FORIN research for dealing with more political economic root causes and underestimating context specific and local root causes. The PEARL3 Risk and Root Cause Assessment (RRCA) analyses the production of risk and vulnerability in coastal regions and develops tools for forecasting, prediction, early warning systems and adaptive management strategies for policy makers and emergency services. The RRCA extends the FORIN approach by refining the scaled analysis of disaster causation, including the response and reconstruction periods generating impact. However, unlike FORIN, neither the DKKV nor the PEARL analyses of root causes advances a direct critique of the fundamental structure and organisation of the state and the global

3 Preparing for Extreme and Rare events in Coastal Regions.

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political economic system that is constructing risk. The difference lies perhaps in advocating and working towards structural change rather than organisational change. Emergency and Humanitarian Aid The delivery of humanitarian assistance and resources for reconstruction has been actively scrutinised from the CDS perspective, focusing largely on the array of hidden agendas that are implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, embedded in what purports to be unalloyed altruism. Humanitarianism, as the act of saving and protecting lives of people impacted and endangered by extreme events of multiple identities, is a complex phenomenon, both intent on rescuing and protecting the injured, but, in many cases, at the same time, acting as a vanguard for global governance and neoliberal capitalist penetration (Donini, 2008). The ideology and practice of humanitarianism are part of a new form of sovereignty that frames the global order and hierarchically situates nation-states, global institutions, corporations and civil society organisations. Freire’s contrast between humanitarianism and humanism is illuminating here (1970). In the domain of actual practice, on the ground personnel, regardless of humanitarian or altruistic intent, unwittingly often reproduce dominant western forms of social relations, interaction, and imposition of values made concrete in the delivery of emergency aid as well as the design and implementation of transitional projects between emergency and reconstruction (Pyles, 2017). This means that humanitarianism and globalisation go hand in hand (Donini, 2008). A humanist approach, as articulated by Freire, positions the aid worker at the level of the oppressed and is not elitist or paternalistic.4 Reconstruction While specific studies of reconstruction by critical disaster researchers are framed in terms of local risk drivers and unsafe conditions, the overarching perspective references the concept of disaster capitalism (Sandoval et al., 2020). Journalist Naomi Klein coined the term for the processes of “reconstruction” she saw unfolding after Hurricane Katrina in New

4 I am indebted to Jason von Meding for calling this distinction to my attention.

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Orleans that enacted wholesale transfers from the public sphere into private hands (Klein, 2007, p. 6). Disaster capitalism refers to a process in which the destruction and loss and resultant social disruption of the disaster provide the political and economic space for furthering the neoliberal project (Gunewardena & Schuller, 2008; Schuller, 2008). Disaster capitalism primes the response of global and national institutions to the opportunity for insertion, often by various forms of coercion, of neoliberal policies and practices. While neoliberal forms of reconstruction may not destroy local cultures, the fundamental goal, like many forms of development, is often to make the reconstructed community and its members more accessible to and compatible with the larger political economy (Garcia Canclini, 1993). However, coloniality researchers fault the concept for ignoring the circumstances that make nations or regions susceptible to such intrusions or interventions. For disaster capitalism happens where it can happen, that is, where the disaster affected society has been rendered vulnerable by past impositions of colonial policies and practices and their current iterations in post-colonial governance. Development One of the fundamental tenets of root cause analysis is that development, as currently theorised and implemented in both rural and urban contexts around the world, is a main driver of risk construction (Cannon & Müller-Mahn, 2010; Oliver-Smith et al., 2016; Wisner et al., 2004). Neoliberal (and other past conventional) models of development with their agendas of economic growth through intensified production stimulated by modern industrial market economies assert that such approaches are the best means to combat poverty and raise standards of living on a global scale. Any costs occasioned by development are generally externalised, to be absorbed either by the environment in terms of resource exploitation and waste processing or by the general population when social, cultural and economic disadvantages, such as increased risk and disasters, occur. Moreover, the power of the state to limit the processes accentuating vulnerability and disaster risk has been severely curtailed under current neoliberal dictates. CDS researchers have critiqued the deliberate policies constraining agendas of nations around the world, regardless of levels of development, from dealing specifically with risk from natural hazard events as a development issue. In effect, intentional international actions have created a theory and practice of disaster risk

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management (DRM) that is seen as either contradictory or tangential to economic development (Bender, 2021). Neoliberal approaches to development have compounded the social vulnerability of large numbers of people who are increasingly exposed to an expanding number of hazards, many now exacerbated by climate change, often in a cascade of linked calamities issuing from misuse of the environment and the labour force. Moreover, social vulnerability to climate change is largely concentrated in the developing world. However, even in developed countries, reduced social vulnerability is distributed in unequal ways. Hurricane Katrina revealed that much of the flooding, death, destruction and dislocation of minority communities was due largely to strategies of urban development going as far back as the 1920s that privileged economic gain over environmental security and sustainability (Colton, 2006). Applied Perspectives: Policy and Practice In one sense, all disaster research is applied research in that it aims, explicitly or implicitly, to reduce loss from impacts of natural and technological hazards. Since the main goal of CDS is to address the systemic features of society that create risk, construct vulnerability, and compromise recovery and reconstruction in the interests of power, the practical use of such research to effectively diminish the impact of such features is a crucial question. Certainly, one form that CDS scholar activists take is in proposing pragmatic steps towards improving both policy and practice (Gunewardena & Schuller, 2008). Another step may be towards political action, which has taken a variety of forms in resistance protests over the imposition of risk, inadequate or inappropriate aid and its distribution, over the lack of transparency in reconstruction plans, or over the displacement and resettlement of populations at risk, among other forms of political action (Checker, 2017; Oliver-Smith, 2021). Here the power of affect, a somewhat under-theorised aspect in disaster research in general, is revealed as a crucial element in the success or failure of such interventions (Barrios, 2011). Although NGOs have been most actively involved in humanitarian emergency assistance, some, guided by CDS, have taken up the challenge of community-based DRM. For example, the recent report of the Global Network for Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction (GNDR) details how people at risk of disasters are consistently ignored

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when it comes to making decisions about disaster prevention in their own communities. Although governments and international organisations have repeatedly pledged to channel a larger share of resources to local actors for humanitarian response, as Bender (in press) reports, they frequently fall drastically short on those commitments as well as those for DRR. In addition to political action, the application of knowledge gained through CDS research begs the difficult question of whether to work with and/or within the system that is being critiqued. Moreover, the degree to which important concepts or findings in CDS can be co-opted or appropriated by powerful sectors to advance their own interests, as revealed by the transformation of critical concepts such as vulnerability when adopted by these sectors, presents difficult questions to scholars and practitioners coming from a CDS perspective. The inner workings of large national and international organisations and institutions involved in disaster work are often the site of significant battles over the nature, priorities, goals, and management of DRM (Lavell & Maskrey, 2014).

Future Directions In speaking about future directions that, of course, do not unfold in purely linear fashion and are not entirely predictable, CDS might adopt a methodology that is creative about possibilities of resistance against the neoliberal logic that not only continues to generate and naturalise risk, but denies the viability of any other possible future (Garzón, 2020). In the contemporary globalised world, the present is framed as hegemonic, the past is consigned to oblivion, and any envisioned alternatives for the future are discounted by neoliberal claims of perpetuity (Baschet, 2003). CDS thus must tap into the full array of resources, past, contemporary, and imagined, for guides for making alternative futures beyond the current relentless construction of risk. The current state of the world seen in increased exposure of ever more vulnerable populations, hazards intensified by the existential threat of climate change, growing inequality, and continued environmental destruction, has generated a wide array of analyses of many aspects of risk and disasters from many disciplines associated with or informed by many fields employing critical theory. Such conceptualisations offer potentially useful frameworks for consideration by CDS research. For example, Agamben’s previously mentioned concept of “states of exception,” suggests a productive framework for addressing global and national

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postures that result in basic social protections of specific populations, creating forms of bare or disposable life in the imposition of vulnerability and exposure. Judith Butler’s feminist research has also proven valuable in disclosing unperceived dimensions of vulnerability (Butler, 2016; Von Meding, 2021). Another area of conceptual relevance is the recent literature pertaining to issues of catastrophe, much of it associated with the COVID-19 pandemic or climate change in philosophy, epistemology, and cultural critique. Critical theorists from these fields, generally employing a fairly standard critique of neoliberalism, engage issues of exposure and vulnerability from perspectives potentially useful for CDS researchers, particularly on questions of environmental justice (e.g., Nancy, 2015; Povinelli, 2011; Stengers, 2015). In terms of hazards, the planetary processes of pandemics and climate change have now replaced the danger of nuclear war as principle global threats. Future research in CDS must guard against allowing the acuteness of each of these hazard processes to divert attention from the basic understanding that risks and disasters are socially constructed. Recognising that risk will never be reduced to zero, CDS must resist the temptation to assign responsibility for risk and disaster to climate change or the pandemic. By the same token, care must be taken to avoid attributing an all-encompassing causality at the risk of missing locally specific drivers of risk. Going forward, CDS must continue to probe and disentangle the structural and institutional expressions of social, technological, economic, and political drivers of risk at the local level within the context of global processes and pressures (Wisner, 2019). One of the main challenges of root cause analysis, for example, is empirically establishing the complex causal links in the chain of the social construction of risk from global processes to local risk and disasters in specific cases. Another important theme that could benefit from greater CDS attention is the effect of nationally driven risk reduction and adaptation policies on local populations. In that context, CDS should continue to scrutinise the foundational concepts of vulnerability and resilience, particularly as framed by the concept of adaptation in the formulation of such policies. Such nationally driven policies and projects have been known to subject specific populations to circumstances that actually accentuate risks rather than mitigate them. For example, CDS can reveal that what might be adaptive at one level may actually endanger in some contexts. Socially constructed conditions of vulnerability will actually be made worse by policies that do not take into account the intersectionality of

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socially inscribed characteristics of specific populations. Moreover, given the increasing investments being made in national risk reduction and climate change adaptation projects, financial interests in such enterprises should evoke questions similar to those posed by Naomi Klein about disaster capitalism. As noted earlier, in addition to research and analysis, a fundamental aspect of all critically informed study is oriented towards action, a fruitful avenue for future directions could aim towards actions and projects that work to reduce risk and minimise impacts in local contexts, but also strategise addressing the associated risk drivers and the root causes behind them. Such projects can also work towards the inclusion of historically disenfranchised communities and balancing the distribution of public resources towards sustainability and justice (e.g., Hendricks et al., 2018). At the ground level, applied projects on risk reduction informed by CDS provide important proving grounds for productive collaborations for empowerment and provide potential empirical validation for strategies for addressing deeper structural issues.

Conclusion: The Message of the COVID-19 Pandemic The on-going and cascading global COVID-19 pandemic can serve both as an example of, and as an apt metaphor for, an equally on-going and cascading global process of disaster risk construction. Referring to a pandemic of disasters helps to shift the focus from single triggering events, such as earthquakes or hurricanes, to the set of similar longstanding, deeply embedded processes that are economically motivated, socially organised, politically enforced and culturally validated at multiple scales, privileging economic growth over social and environmental values and priorities (Alcántara-Ayala et al., 2020). The current neoliberal iteration of this set of values and priorities has produced in “pandemic” fashion colossal but highly concentrated wealth and power, enormous inequality and vast environmental destruction, achieved through the relatively unrestrained exploitation of human labour and the natural environment, with profound implications for the construction of risk and vulnerability to natural and anthropogenic hazards globally (Dickinson & Burton, 2015). Approaching the pandemic from a CDS perspective makes apparent the social origins of what first appears as a natural process of contagion. The pandemic lays bare the interdependence, complexity, and inequality

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created by the global system, linked in driving the catastrophe (Lavell et al., 2020). As in all disasters, the pandemic represents the materialisation of underlying risk conditions. In that regard, the concept of a “syndemic,” developed during the AIDS epidemic, is a useful framework for conceptually grasping a common identity with disasters associated with natural hazards (Singer, 1996, 2009). In a format that will seem familiar, syndemic theory asserts that large-scale political economic forces over time result in marked social, economic, and political inequality that affect the distribution of health risks and resources. The risks and resources in turn are sorted into social and spatial clusters of disease, the synergistic effects of which are derived from biological interactions between disease states and social, economic, and power inequities that shape the distribution of health overall (Gravlee, 2020). The key point, according to Singer (1996) referring to the AIDS epidemic, is that these conditions did not simply coincide; the synergy among epidemics exacerbates both. In that context, in addition to the specific COVID-19 pandemic, disasters in general now constitute a pandemic because a global population is facing a set of similar social and economic processes, coupled with systemic environmental hazards, generates disasters. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my colleagues Astrid Wigidal and Jason Von Meding for their helpful comments and suggestions for an early draft of this chapter.

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Singer, M. (1996). A dose of drugs, a touch of violence, a case of AIDS: Conceptualizing the SAVA syndemic. Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology, 24(2), 99–110. Singer, M. (2009). Introduction to syndemics: A critical systems approach to public and community health. John Wiley & Sons. Smith, N. (2007). Disastrous accumulation. South Atlantic Quarterly, 106(4), 769–787. Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). Zed Books. Staupe-Delgado, R. (2019). Analysing changes in disaster terminology over the last decade. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 40, 101161. Stengers, I. (2015). In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism. Open Humanities Press in collaboration with Meson Press. Sunkel, O. (2005). The unbearable lightness of neoliberalism. In B. A. Roberts & C. H. Wood (Eds.), Rethinking development in Latin America. Pennsylvania State University Press. Tierney, K. (2015). Resilience and the neoliberal project: Discourses, critiques, practices, and Katrina. American Behavioral Scientist, 59(10), 1327–1342. Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton University Press. Tucker, B., & Nelson, D. R. (2017). What does economic anthropology have to contribute to studies of risk and resilience? Economic Anthropology, 4, 161– 172. Uekusa, S. (2018). Rethinking resilience: Bourdieu’s contribution to disaster research. Resilience, 6(3), 181–195. Vera-Cortes, G., & Macías Medrano, J. M. (2020). Disasters and neoliberalism: Different expressions of social vulnerability. Springer Nature. Vickery, J. (2018). Using an intersectional approach to advance understanding of homeless persons’ Vulnerability to disaster. Environmental Sociology, 4(1), 136–147. Von Meding, J. (2021). Framing vulnerability as a condition of potential. Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society (in press). Wisner, B. (2001). Risk and the neoliberal state: Why post-Mitch lessons didn’t reduce El Salvador’s earthquake losses. Disasters, 25(3), 251–268. Wisner, B. (2019). Disaster studies at 50: Time to wear bifocals? In J. Kendra, S. G. Knowles & T. Wachtendorf (Eds.), Disaster research and the second environmental crisis. (pp. 47–68). Springer Nature. Wisner, B., Westgate, K., & O’Keefe, P. (1977). Global systems and local disasters: The untapped power of people’s science. Disasters, 1(1), 47–57. Wisner, B., Blaikie, C., & T. & Davis, I. (2004). At risk: Natural hazards, people’s vulnerability and disasters (2nd ed.). Routledge.

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Witting, M. (2012). Detecting disaster root causes. A framework and an analytic tool for practitioner. DKKV (German Committee for Disaster Reduction): DKKV Publication Series, 84. Zeiderman, A. (2016). Endangered city: The politics of security and risk in Bogotá. Duke University Press.

PART II

Critical Framings of Disasters

CHAPTER 3

Elite Panic and Pathologies of Governance Before and After the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence Roy Montgomery

Introduction In April 2021, a cover story appeared in The New Zealand Listener entitled “We’re not learning any lessons” in which former chief science advisor Sir Peter Gluckman and others claimed that risk management systems in Aotearoa New Zealand were flawed and still dependent on a “she’ll be right” attitude (Chisholm, 2021). This chapter is a reflection on that claim and on the behaviours of central government and local governments here in the ten-year period following the Canterbury earthquake sequence. Because other disasters have occurred in Canterbury over those

R. Montgomery (B) Department of Environmental Management, Lincoln University, Lincoln, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_3

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ten years, arguably providing further object lessons in the ways governments tend to behave in such events, my narrative takes in emergencies ¯ ¯ that have affected Otautahi Christchurch (Otautahi hereafter) over the last decade such as the 2017 Port Hills Fires and the 2019 Christchurch Mosque attacks. Furthermore, in response to the challenge laid down in Chapter 2 of this volume by contributor Anthony Oliver-Smith, I consider these events in the historical context of a neoliberal governmentality in Aotearoa New Zealand that began in earnest in the mid-1980s and which saw the dismantling, deregulation and privatisation of many central government functions. This created a paradoxical situation where, on the one hand, government sought, along with cuts to social welfare services and user pays policies for health and education, to allow a range of everyday commercial activities such as building design and construction, mine operations and heavy vehicle transport inspections to be more or less self-regulated. On the other hand, and especially in the past decade, a cascade of emergency events has forced central government to act quickly and decisively, both in terms of direct emergency, social and economic recovery interventions but also in terms of the re-regulation of commercial activities which, in hindsight, have people and communities unnecessarily exposed to harm. Lastly, the effects on government that have occurred here during the global COVID-19 pandemic, especially in terms of traditional leadership styles, are also discussed. My intention is not to show how poor judgement has governed government behaviour in each and every case, although the track record until very recently has been relatively consistent in that respect. My aim is to enlarge the discussion on what has changed and why in terms of behaviours in governance regarding disaster events in Aotearoa New Zealand.

A Liberal New Order Followed By a Neoliberal New Order The European colonisation of Aotearoa New Zealand, as seen through colonial eyes in the mid-nineteenth century, was to be a model of private planned settlement rather than imperial annexation. As envisioned by members of the influential Wakefield family, who drove the settlement initiative ahead of Crown sovereign claims under the auspices of the New Zealand Company and later variants such as the Canterbury Association,

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planned colonisation was intended to be the epitome of a liberal new order. A laissez faire or “less is more” ethos, in terms of government interference in the pursuits of small farmers and small capitalists, was to prevail (Wakefield, E. G., 1849; Wakefield, F., 1849). The signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) in 1840 between the Crown and tangata whenua (people of the land, the M¯aori people) was to some extent a move forced by the rogue actions of the New Zealand Company and equivalent plans by a French private settlement organisation the Nanto-Bordelaise Company. Except for T¯amaki Makaurau Auckland, the “main centres” of European or p¯akeh¯a settlement were established by joint stock or private companies. The Canterbury Association settlement was promoted as the most efficient and refined experiment in colonisation with its emphasis on a decentralised network of small market towns anchored only by modest port and capital town facilities (Montgomery, 2006, 2010). Provincialism, parochialism and an averred distaste for controls imposed by the British Crown in the 1850s gave way in the 1860s and 1870s, particularly after deadly armed conflict with tangata whenua, who were disparaged and discriminated against for their communal or collectivist ownership views on land and other taonga (natural resources) to a “nation-building” or ambitious infrastructure development phase in the 1870s under the Liberal government of Julius Vogel. This project, which ebbed and flowed throughout the late nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth century, recast the New Zealand experiment in a more social democratic light, culminating in the creation of a so-called “welfare state” in the 1930s under the auspices of the first Labour government and the leadership of Michael Joseph Savage. Aotearoa New Zealand was viewed at a distance as some kind of social laboratory for testing largely benign albeit socialist ideas. Again, these policies ebbed and flowed over the next few decades, with oscillations between left wing and right-wing governments, but up until the early 1980s the country was seen as one governed by highly interventionist administrations. More recent discussion of the so-called “New Zealand Experiment,” a label popularised by Jane Kelsey and others in the 1990s, has centred on the application by successive governments of neoliberal ideas and policies since 1984 (James, 1994; Kelsey, 1995; Larner, 1997). In essence, it is claimed that a newly elected and ostensibly social democratic

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Labour government rapidly embarked on a Treasury-led, Chicago Schoolinfluenced transformation of the economy. Over the next few years, this process reached into the core of the social welfare system and “neoliberalised” housing, health and education achieving its apogee or nadir, depending on one’s political orientation, with the “Ruthenasia” budget of the Minister of Finance Ruth Richardson under a National government in 1991. Although relatively few have drawn direct parallels with the overt influence of the “Chicago boys” in the bloody neoliberalisation of Chile under the Pinochet regime and what happened in Aotearoa New Zealand, it appears that the latter situation differed only in the sense that actual torture and bloodshed was absent (Challies & Murray, 2008). For the purposes of this discussion on how governments have responded to disasters such as the Canterbury earthquake sequence, there are several important background points to consider. Firstly, Aotearoa New Zealand was founded as a colony on strong liberal principles of individualism and private responsibility stitched together by voluntary community associations and functions. It still comes as a shock to many visitors or new migrants that some of our emergency services such as fire and ambulance depend substantially on unpaid volunteers to carry out their functions.1 The vast majority of civil defence personnel in Aotearoa New Zealand remain volunteers although it is extremely difficult to find actual figures since the National Emergency Management Agency does not appear to want to publicly disclose the number of paid versus volunteer staff throughout the country. It is also difficult to identify emergency volunteers since many of them are not aligned to any formal government organisation (Grant et al., 2019). Secondly, the privatisation, deregulation and corporatisation of government functions that permeated almost all spheres of government, including health and safety and building regulations during the 1980s and 1990s, affected disaster management since, under neoliberal ideology, private insurance was seen as the first line of defence, so to speak, for so-called “natural” disasters. So successive governments may not have visibly erased or compromised civil defence and emergency management capacity but these functions, at an administrative level at least, languished in a central governmental miscellany of portfolios, the Ministry 1 For example, typically the ratio between paid and volunteer fire personnel is 20 and 80% respectively. The ratio for ambulance staff is approximately three to one in favour of volunteers.

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of Internal Affairs. Delivery of services or management was repackaged if not devolved largely to newly created units of local government after 1989 (Ministry of Civil Defence, 1990). As in the past, civil defence drew on community volunteers and the commandeering, at certain crisis moments, of community assets such as schools, halls or churches. Thirdly, this neoliberal surge took place during a relatively quiet phase in natural hazard events. The principal shocks or disasters of the 1970s through to the early 2000s in Aotearoa New Zealand were either financial, such as the stock market crash of 1987, or they appeared to be natural insofar as there was no apparent lapse of collective human judgement (i.e., government incompetence or, if it was, it was very localised) such as the Erebus crash of 1979, the Abbotsford landslide of 1979 and the Edgecumbe earthquake of 1987. In hindsight, this now appears as an unusually quiet period across a range of hazard areas and risk management is now firmly embedded as a preoccupation of governments, corporations, communities and individuals alike in this country.

Nervous Governments A seemingly relentless stream of unrelated disaster events in the twentyfirst century has led to a situation where governments, corporate entities and publics are permanently preoccupied with risks in various forms. This cascade of events, including economic shocks, appears to confirm contemporary views on the increasingly human manufacture of risk and the so-called “risk society,” a term coined by German sociologist Ulrich Beck (2009) to describe the world that almost all of us now seem to inhabit. To complicate matters further, any disaster event tends to cause “aftershocks,” so to speak, for governments, and are manifested in a myriad of reviews, commissions of inquiry and inquests that typically lead to short and long-term “corrective action plans” if not immediate legislative reforms. To some, this flurry of activity may seem odd since government has traditionally been associated with cool, detached control and management of public affairs akin to a kind of benign paternalism with reform normally moving at a measured pace. Yet any past complacency in Aotearoa New Zealand about governments always being in calm control when faced with untoward events was irreversibly shaken in 2010 and 2011 after the Canterbury earthquake sequence (Fig. 3.1). Not only did government feel forced to pass laws and create new ministerial portfolios virtually overnight but they had to

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Fig. 3.1 Norwich Quay, Lyttelton, March 2011 (Photo by Roy Montgomery)

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launch, amongst other reviews, a lengthy Royal Commission of Inquiry process (Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission, 2012) and a 243page Ministerial Review of the Civil Defence and Emergency Management Response to the February 22nd Christchurch Earthquake (McLean et al., 2012) and a consequent “Corrective Action Plan” (Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management [MCDEM], 2012). A rapid succession of major local disaster events in the latter half of 2016 and early 2017 once again raised great concern about central and local government responses and capabilities. These were the Hawkes Bay gastroenteritis outbreak in August 2016, the East Cape earthquake and tsunami in September 2016, the Kaik¯oura earthquake and tsunami in November 2016, and the Port Hills fires of February 2017. Such were the public complaints around these events that in an act of evident frustration central government set up a Technical Advisory Group to review this cluster of events and make recommendations for change which eventually resulted in the replacement of the MCDEM with the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) in December 2019 (Technical Advisory Group, 2017). Since then, as if to show how jumpy government bodies have become, pre-emptive declarations of local states of emergency are now not unusual. Christchurch City Council (CCC) and Selwyn District Council made such declarations in February 2018 following heavy rain warnings from excyclone Gita, but very little flooding took place leaving the councils open to accusations of them overreacting. However, nervousness in government about getting things wrong by failing to pick up on warning signs and then being held to account in public was proved justified in the following year. The Whakaari White Island Gas Explosion event, which occurred on 9 December 2019 and which caused the fatalities of 22 tourists and guides and severe injuries to another 25 people, led to criminal charges being brought in November 2020 against GNS Science, a Crown Research Institute (CRI), and NEMA, the country’s principal disaster management body. This loss of faith in government ability to both handle and learn from emergencies has a lengthy pedigree and speaks to a time when governments expected the public to be quiet and let experts handle all aspects of government including emergency response. The Air New Zealand Flight TE901 Mt Erebus disaster of November 1979 appears to have set a particular pathological pattern that continues to this day. Following

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a perfunctory and controversial air accident report, a Royal Commission of Inquiry was set up. The Commission’s findings that a central government-owned airline had engaged in a cover-up, and the government’s rejection of those findings, led to lesser rather than greater public trust in the workings of central government and Crown entities. Several post-disaster inquests, Commissions of Inquiry or Royal Commissions, including those generated after the November 2010 Pike River Mine Explosion, the collapse of the Canterbury Television Building (CTV) in the 2011 Christchurch Earthquake and the March 2019 Christchurch Mosque Attacks, have followed a similar trajectory of a deep sense of betrayal amongst victims’ families and the public at large who were expecting or hoping for accountability being instead met with failed prosecutions and weak, protracted and ambiguous legal and financial outcomes (Bayer, 2020; Church, 2020; Hunt, 2021; Roy, 2019).

Elite Panic Theory and Research The received wisdom in disaster management organisations up until the late twentieth century was that strong government or strong policing is needed precisely because an irrationalist public will always panic in disasters. The Hillsborough stadium disaster of April 1989 is a case in point. It took decades of inquiries and petitioning to convince government that it was the pre-emptive and flawed thinking and behaviour of the police that caused the large loss of life, not the actions of the crowd. Research has shown that survivors behaved remarkably calmly (Cocking & Drury, 2014). This paranoid view of the public was partly due to the effects of two so-called “world wars” where large-scale bombings, bombardments, invasions, genocide and oppression were indeed traumatic and overwhelming at times. The notion of peacetime “civil defence” was in effect an adaptation of the defence of civilians in the face of hostile external forces to organising and controlling civilians so that they did not harm themselves or each other or each other’s property in an emergency. Emphasis was placed on crowd control and the avoidance of looting as if the main concern in disasters was property damage or theft. More deeply, policy advisors and officials and military organisations along with a number of academics, appear to have been influenced by the highly spurious social psychological propositions of late-nineteenth and early twentieth century

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French polymath Gustave Le Bon (1897) with regard to crowd or mob behaviour. How and when did this conceit or paranoid attitude begin to falter? Ironically, the most substantive research which shows that: (a) public panic in disasters is extremely rare; and (b) official panic is relatively routine came from U.S. Cold War research programmes of the 1950s and 1960s. A number of investigations were predicated on the expectation of widespread public panic and disorder following a nuclear attack. In the absence of such attacks actually taking place, the U.S. government encouraged sociologists and psychologists to hasten to the sites of major disaster events to record how people behaved. Snowstorms, earthquakes, chemical explosions and floods often provided what governments and researchers thought might be excellent proxies for tracking public hysteria, “moral panics” and other irrational disturbances of behaviour by citizens under shock or stress. Learning how to best control such behaviour and achieve containment was at the heart of government interest in such events and produced what by present standards seem perverse outcomes such as the de-urbanisation of major American cities in anticipation of nuclear strikes by foreign powers (Farish, 2003). In fact, the research yielded interesting and largely counterfactual results including one by Charles Fritz and his colleagues at the Disaster Research Center (DRC) carried out in 1958 which showed that hundreds of people confined in a restaurant during a snowstorm in Pennsylvania were very good at self-organising and did not panic unduly during the event (Fritz et al., 1958). Another notable study, carried out under the auspices of Enrico Quarantelli by staff from the DRC, tracked the immediate response behaviour by both officials and volunteers following the M9.2 earthquake that occurred near the town of Anchorage, Alaska in March 1964 (Yutzy et al., 1969). Fritz’s findings that in fact people are often at their happiest and best after disasters, ran so counter to government assumptions and expectations that a key study from 1961 was effectively embargoed and not published until 1996 (Fritz, 1961/1996). Yutzy et al.’s Anchorage study showed that the official civil defence response was weak or non-existent and pivotal roles were played spontaneously and successfully by a university social scientist and a radio announcer. Subsequently, through countless field studies, Quarantelli and his colleagues established that altruism, not anarchy, is the norm (Quarantelli, 1988; Quarantelli & Dynes, 1977; Stallings & Quarantelli, 1985).

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This has been reinforced in other field work and syntheses of case studies (Clarke & Chess, 2008; Kendra & Wachtendorf, 2003; Matthewman & Uekusa, 2021; Solnit, 2009; Tierney et al., 2006). In recent times, we have moved from debates about the pros and cons of the actions of “spontaneous volunteers” in emergency events to a call for explicit recognition of immediate first responders who are simply responsible and ordinary passers-by. The new proposition is that, in general, people who are on the scene first do not panic and act swiftly and rationally before the arrival of official first responders (FR) or community first responders (CFR). Briones et al. (2019) argue that these people are “zero-order responders” (ZOR) in that they either live or work at ground zero of an event and are vital to both emergency response and recovery and thus should be given the same standing as official responders. Similarly, the notion of moral panic has been shown to reside, as a social construct, largely in the minds of journalists and those in government (Goode & Nachmann, 1994; Horsley, 2017). More overt political critiques of both authoritarian state control or predatory disaster capitalism which embrace the argument that governments routinely intervene following disasters in either clumsy and repressive ways have been articulated by Solnit (2009) and Klein (2007). It is noteworthy that such critiques are being written as much by investigating journalists and public commentators as by academics at the present (Kilgallon, 2020). The most recent book-length addition to this public critique is Jon Mooallem’s revisiting of the 1964 Anchorage earthquake where he blends archival research and new interviews with people such as Kathleen Tierney and Rebecca Solnit whilst at the same time drawing attention to the painstaking work of Quarantelli and the DRC in their study of disasters (Mooallem, 2020). Bearing in mind the exhortation by the author of chapter two in this volume, to index a more interrogating critical approach to disasters against the relevant background political context, in this case neoliberalism, academics who may not regard themselves as neoliberal in outlook may nevertheless feel a reluctance as publicly funded researchers to criticise the governments that fund them. Or we may simply have lived so long with the rhetoric of neoliberalism as the “only alternative,” and its “gaslighting” effect, in models of political economies over the past four decades that some of us, myself included, have stopped asking larger and more difficult structural questions about underlying patterns in disasters and have instead focused narrowly on particular events. In

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any case, this understanding now shared widely by disaster researchers and those involved in on-the-ground responses to emergency events— that governments tend to mistrust the public and over-react with clumsy interventions—sets the scene for the discussion below.

Interventionist Neoliberalism A few months before the September 2010 Darfield earthquake, Cantabrians were subjected to a different kind of shock, an intervention by central government in the local democratic political system, when the government believed there was some kind of governance crisis and inability to function within Regional Council. The Environment Canterbury (ECan) Commissioners (Improved Water Management) Act was passed in April 2010 by the National Party-led coalition government. The then Minister for the Environment (MfE), Nick Smith, replaced all fourteen elected councillors with six hand-picked commissioners in what was seen by political scientists and many members of the public as an abrogation of constitutional law (Brower, 2010). In the past, National Party governments had relied heavily on the electoral and financial support of conservative rural interests and there was disquiet and protest throughout the 2010s about this action on the basis that enablement of widespread dairy farm conversions and irrigation schemes was what drove central government to intervene (see Wynyard in this volume). For example, artist and writer Sam Mahon created a sculptural piece in 2017 depicting the MfE defecating over a glass of water and this was temporarily installed ¯ outside ECan’s offices in Otautahi (Mitchell, 2017). Later judgements have been more equivocal (Williams, 2018). The legislation, with various extensions, was not fully repealed until 2019. The point here is not to debate the validity or justification for such actions nor to claim that this was primarily a panic move by government, although they may have felt pressured by farming and rural services lobby groups. However, it meant that Canterbury was already a political hotspot of central government mistrust before the earthquakes and that trust in central government had been lost in many quarters and the government was well aware of the extra scrutiny likely to be applied to any such moves in future (some see the dismal election results for the National Party in Canterbury in the general election of 2020 as the inevitable payback for such acts of interference).

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Another shock event which was nearby in space and time was the Pike River Mine methane gas explosion and mine collapse on 19 November 2010 on the West Coast of the South Island. The mine was owned and operated by Pike River Coal Limited, a private company. Twentynine miners lost their lives and because the West Coast, historically, has been very closely connected with Canterbury and there were close family connections in Canterbury with the miners’ families, this felt almost like a local event and it blunted the almost upbeat, near miss atmosphere that followed the 2010 Darfield Earthquake. It also focused attention on central government and its role in regulating, or failing to regulate, an industry that had until the 1980s been almost entirely in state control. Pike River Coal was put into receivership in December 2010 by a major shareholder and only meagre payments to victims’ families of $5,000 per family were made when Solid Energy, a State-owned Enterprise or central government company, bought Pike River Coal in 2013. Solid Energy itself went into voluntary administration in 2015 and then liquidation in 2018. When a Royal Commission Final Report was published on 5 November 2012, showing failures in regulation and monitoring by the Department of Labour, it cost the then Minister of Labour, Kate Wilkinson, her Cabinet post. The Department itself was disestablished in June 2012 and absorbed into a newly created Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) as if to head off the revelation that a government department had not done its job properly. Yet the disaster lacks closure for many since, despite changes to legislation and greater mine inspection and health and safety enforcement, no major defended prosecutions have ever been brought to trial. This Pike River event had echoes of the Cave Creek viewing platform collapse on 28 April 1995 on the West Coast on the other side of the Paparoa Range in Paparoa National Park, less than fifty kilometres from Pike River. Twelve students and one Department of Conservation (DoC) officer lost their lives as a result of faulty construction of the viewing platform. The building of the platform was overseen by a central government department that, under a neoliberal government philosophy, was on the one hand meant to be an advocate for conservation values and on the other hand a profit centre not unlike a private company. In some respects, DoC has never fully recovered from this loss of credibility and it has become extremely risk averse in its operations. Once again, the fall-out from a Commission of Inquiry produced in November 1995 was such that the incumbent Minister of Conservation, Denis Marshall, was

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forced to resign in May 1996. Governments are often right, then, to be nervous or worried about the threats posed to governing following disasters because there is a history of fall-out, either immediately or at a later date.

Government Actions After the 2010 Darfield Earthquake The key aspects of both the September 2010 Darfield and February 2011 Christchurch events have been outlined in the introductory chapter to the book. I will concentrate instead on how central and local government reacted. Six hours after the Darfield Earthquake, a State of Local Emer¯ gency was declared for Otautahi by the Civil Defence Local Controller at 9:33 am and confirmed for Canterbury by the Ministry of Civil Defence, John Carter, at 10:16 am. The CCC was in the process of moving from its old offices to refurbished facilities at this time. Both buildings were quickly identified as damaged and the decision was made to set up an Emergency Operations Centre in the Christchurch Art Gallery next door to the new offices. This meant closing the Art Gallery to the public and seconding or relocating gallery staff for the duration of the state of local emergency. (These temporary premises became more or less permanent and it was not until some seven months after the February 2011 aftershock that Civil Defence staff and other central government officials vacated the building). In other words, the major crisis management phase of the first earthquake (and the February aftershock) was run from makeshift facilities by both local and central government. Earlier in the morning of 4 September 2010, New Zealand Police had warned of looters in the central city and that dire consequences would follow for anyone found to be looting. Actual looting activity appears to have been negligible, and, in any case, businesses and private property owners in Aotearoa New Zealand were generally well-insured, so most stock and plant would have been written off and replaced under such cover. The Insurance Council of New Zealand said that the Canterbury earthquake sequence is the biggest insured event in New Zealand history and, at the time, the 4th most expensive insured, global natural disaster to ever occur.2

2 https://www.icnz.org.nz/natural-disasters/canterbury-earthquakes.

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Nevertheless, Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker requested help from New Zealand Defence Force personnel to help provide security and stability in the central city, and the New Zealand Police imposed a 7 pm to 7 am curfew in the central city for several days. This pales in comparison to heavy-handed responses in other countries following disaster events, as Solnit and others have observed, especially the shocking behaviour of the state and federal government in the U.S. after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. Yet it shows that there was a preoccupation by various levels of government with being seen to be in control of the situation and a knee-jerk fear of unruly mobs was as common here as it tends to be overseas. Of greater interest is the ensuing policy and regulatory response in the first event. Technically, loss damage assessment and loss adjustment processes were reasonably straightforward. Local building inspectors or Rapid Assessment teams, often made up of professionally accredited volunteer engineers, were deployed to the central city and to the suburbs to placard buildings according to a rapid survey of their structural safety and red, orange and green notices were affixed to buildings. Most businesses were covered by private insurance. Private property owners are generally required by law to have private insurance if they have mortgages on their property and from that a levy is automatically paid into a central government Earthquake Commission (EQC) fund to disburse after damage or loss from natural disasters. Below a certain figure, all claims were handled by EQC. Broken crockery, damaged appliances and burst water cylinders tended to dominate household claims. The permanent “red zoning” or exiting of people from residential urban land was not considered necessary at this time either by experts or politicians. The main challenges concerned repairing the city, the suburbs and outlying rural communities rather than getting people to permanently relocate to other areas in Canterbury. Prime Minister John Key appointed Cabinet Minister Gerry Brownlee, the most senior of the Christchurch Members of Parliament at the time, as Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery on 7 September 2010. In 2010, Brownlee was Leader of the House, Minister for Economic Development and Minister for Energy and Natural Resources but he was not the Minister of Civil Defence. He had no prior experience with earthquake response nor with any form of disaster management training. Prior to entering politics, he had been a builder and a high school carpentry teacher. Brownlee’s public style was often combative and he was regarded

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as a hard-boiled individual who was prosecuted and fined for assaulting a member of the public at a National Party conference in 1999.3 With similar haste the Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act 2010 (CERR) was drafted and passed on 14 September 2010 and did not expire until April 2012. A seven-member Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Commission was appointed although it barely had time to prepare advice to government before the February aftershock struck. The fact that special legislation was deemed to be required as opposed to, say, declaring a state of local emergency and then activating an existing and specific disaster management plan such as has happened in February 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic and the activation of the National Influenza Pandemic Plan (Ministry of Health, 2017) suggests that the government was caught off guard. Although the MCDEM had published several plans, strategies and guidelines during the 2000s such as the National Civil Defence Emergency Management (CDEM) Plan in 2006 and the National CDEM Strategy in 2008, there was no dedicated national earthquake response plan. The CERR , criticised by many lawyers and academics, transferred executive power from the legislature to parliament by means of Orders in Council. Similarly, although the Regional Council and Territorial Local Authorities had produced a CDEM Group Plan in 2005 as required under law, it was less a detailed guide to action and more a profile of hazards in the region. The priorities for preparing for disaster events and spending ratepayer money on it were highly variable across the participating local governments. Annual funding allocations for risk reduction work were often minimal within local authorities and very few dedicated CDEM staff were on the full-time payroll within local government. The default attitude was more that staff could be seconded or assigned to emergency management roles when disaster events occurred. There was also friction between local and central government as to who should be in charge of events as evidenced by the Canterbury CDEM Group’s criticism of the release of the National CDEM Plan in 2006. It seems fair to say that the rationale for the 2010 Darfield Earthquake legislation was based mainly on the principle of showing that government was prepared to be strong if needed whilst hoping at the same time that the effects of the localised disaster could be handled mainly through 3 https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/humbled-mp-accepts-ruling-on-assault-case/F2R 7NNREAD6WKEYQFHQ6YII5PI/.

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local government-controlled engineering solutions and EQC and private insurance company claims and settlements. In hindsight, this does not appear an unreasonable response. As someone who experienced both the September 2010 and February 2011 events, what appears to get missed in many discussions is the distinctly different moods or emotions associated with them. The first event was severe and traumatic but, save for one likely associated fatality, since damage was related largely to land, infrastructure and commercial private property, there was a sense that a bullet had been dodged. There was the festive imagery of the Student Volunteer Army (SVA) and spontaneous community volunteers at work digging silt out of properties in the eastern suburbs (see Hayward & Johnson; Phibbs et al. in this volume). Two new community groups, Gap Filler and Greening the Rubble, started up in October 2010 and began activating sites as early as November of that year. In mid-September, Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker was claiming that “business-as-usual” was within sight for the city (Anonymous, 2010) and CCC engineers were optimistic that the margins ¯ akaro Avon River in the eastern suburbs could be repaired using of the Ot¯ underground walls at a cost of $200 million allowing for the rebuilding of 3,300 homes (Anonymous, 2011; Gates, 2020). This atmosphere was to change markedly after the February aftershock. However, in the interim period of twenty-four weeks and after some initial panic and the hasty drafting of legislation specific to Canterbury and appointing of yet more commissioners, it seemed like only Canterbury needed some kind of intervention. In other words, elite complacency rather than panic dominated the attitudes of central and local government up to this point.

Government Actions After the 2011 Christchurch Earthquake The aftershock of 22 February 2011 caused far more destruction than the original tremor of September and it led to the deaths of 185 people, which was Aotearoa New Zealand’s biggest casualty toll since the Mt. Erebus event of 1979. In common language terms, it “changed everything.” A State of National Emergency (SNE) was declared the following day, the first time such a declaration had been made since 1951 when a waterfront dispute at Lyttelton and other ports triggered a repressive and punitive government response. In accordance with the CDEM Act 2002, the National Controller, John Hamilton, and MCDEM assumed responsibility for managing the incident. Although public perceptions at

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the time may have been such that people thought that there would be a large complement of MCDEM staff and a complement of personnel always at the ready for such events who could be immediately deployed to disaster locations this was not, and never had been, the case. As with the then New Zealand Fire Service (now Fire and Emergency New Zealand), the vast majority of civil defence personnel were part-time volunteers. Salaried Ministry staff numbered some 35 individuals in 2011 for the whole country and very few of them had operational experience of disasters in the field. Local authorities such as CCC had only a handful of dedicated Civil Defence staff. Paradoxically, perhaps, emergency management in Aotearoa New Zealand was then, and remains now, predicated on a faith in widespread altruism. The SNE, with extensions, lasted for a period of 66 days. Two parallel, and conflictual, emergency response centres were set up on 22 February. The CDEM Group initially set up an Emergency Coordination Centre (ECC) at ECan head offices only to discover quickly that its own building was at risk of being destroyed by a neighbouring multistory hotel which forced it to move to an office at the University of Canterbury. The CCC scaled up its staffing of the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) or “Christchurch Response Centre” as it was known in the Christchurch Art Gallery. So at odds, initially, were the two groups that the MCDEM National Controller felt it necessary, and against standard operating procedure, to leave the capital, Wellington, for Christchurch to sort out the differences between ECan and CCC. His immediate intervention resulted in the ECC staff moving into the EOC in the Art Gallery by 23 February 2011. This demonstrates some degree of panic across both local and central government (Greater Christchurch Group, 2017, p. 20; McLean et al., 2012, p. 33). Whilst this was taking place, central government in Wellington was prompted to consider whether new governance arrangements might be necessary to deal with this much more catastrophic event. Officials from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, State Services Commission, and Treasury were tasked with recommending an appropriate regulatory response. The result, contained within what appeared to be a fiscally-oriented piece of advice authored by New Zealand Treasury staff, was a view that more sweeping powers and limited oversight and rights of appeal were what was necessary at this time (Treasury, 2011). A new piece of legislation was required, the report said, and although some consultative bodies like a Community Forum were endorsed, the idea

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that the existing commission should be able to vet proposals was rejected. Instead, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) was to be created, the commission was to be disestablished and recovery plans, almost exclusively economic in nature, were to be a top priority. It was this advice, signed off on 22 March 2011 by both the Minister for Earthquake Recovery, Gerry Brownlee, and the Minister of State Services, Tony Ryall, which was passed more or less unaltered into law. The Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act 2011 (CER) was passed on 18 April 2011. It gave the Crown the ability to purchase land and property, and, in keeping with Treasury’s view, a Chief Executive was appointed in due course to oversee the development of an overall recovery strategy and multiple recovery plans. Roger Sutton, at that time CEO of electricity supply company Orion Energy, was appointed Chief Executive of CERA in May 2011 and, in the early years of CERA, enjoyed something of a “good cop” reputation in contrast to Minister for Earthquake Recovery Gerry Brownlee whose combative style often saw him at odds with local politicians. Sutton presided over very few concrete recovery achievements prior to his departure under an inappropriate professional behaviour cloud in November 2014, two years short of completing his five-year term of appointment. Opposition politicians and senior figures in local government who commented on his departure observed that Sutton’s abilities and good intentions had from the outset been constrained by regular interference from the Minister of Earthquake Recovery and from central government. The Act also required the Minister to appoint a Community Forum to give a voice to community priorities for recovery and this was done by June 2011. However, the 32-member forum had no power and was effectively just a symbolic gesture on the part of a government which appeared to ignore the fact that very effective community support and recovery groups, such as the Canterbury Communities’ Earthquake Recovery Network (CanCERN), had already started up after the September earthquake. Furthermore, the Act required the CCC to produce a draft Central City Plan within nine months of the passing of the legislation, and a Draft Central City Plan was presented to government in December 2011 (CCC, 2011). The Plan was notable for its “Share an Idea” or grass-roots participation methodology, generating more than 106,000 submissions and its focus on multiple small projects alongside key major projects rather than an emphasis on flagship or monumental projects only (see Hayward & Johnson; Matthewman & Byrd in this collection). The Minister chose to

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reject much of the content of that plan and appointed instead a handpicked Christchurch Central Development Unit (CCDU) in December 2011 which produced its own “100 day” Central City Recovery Plan in July 2012 co-opting both the CCC and Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu (TRoNT) as co-authors in its cover image branding (CERA, 2012; see also Pickles in this collection). Promoted as a “blueprint plan” at a time when neoliberal ideology still eschewed most notions of blueprint or highly directive master planning by any form of government, the plan identified seventeen (some sources cite eighteen) “anchor projects” to which central government and local government would be committed to completing within five years. These included such mega-projects as a convention centre, metro sports facility, sports stadium, cultural precinct and a performing arts precinct, only two of which were likely to be completed by 2022. Three points are worth noting here. The first is that, following a second aftershock that completely eclipsed the first earthquake event, the government still refused to accept that Canterbury was in anything but a recovery, and later, “regeneration” phase. It rushed its legislative response through within 30 days of the February aftershock using the rhetoric of recovery when in fact what was clear to many of those living in Canterbury who had to weather at least 10,000 aftershocks in the period between 2010 and 2012 and years of delays in home repairs and insurance settlements that it was still in a response phase (see Finn & Toomey’s chapter on the subject of years of litigation). The second point is that central government held the singular view that threats to the national, regional and local economy must come first, hence the reliance on Treasury and hand-picked consultants to lead policy advice and recovery blueprint plans. Community consultation, even when filtered through innovative local government initiatives such as “Share an Idea”, and social and cultural recovery were secondary considerations. Third, having intervened in an overbearing sense through the creation of CERA, which grew to be something of an organisational behemoth between 2011 and 2014 (CERA had 357 employees in 2014), the anticipated five-year exit strategy became something of an embarrassment to both central government and CCC. CERA was wound down in 2016, and, in another version of the shotgun marriage between central and local government created following the earthquakes, it morphed into a

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three-part structure: Regenerate Christchurch (a joint Crown and CCC ¯ akaro Limited (a Crown-owned company); and Development agency); Ot¯ Christchurch (a Christchurch City-owned company). These entities did not noticeably advance the recovery process and barely influenced the completion of anchor projects. They produced more consternation and complaint amongst local politicians, opposition Members of Parliament and local pundits than they did actual recovery outcomes. Regenerate Christchurch was disestablished in 2019, and Development Christchurch ¯ akaro Limited in has survived in vestige form until 2021, leaving only Ot¯ operation with any connection to earthquake recovery. Having ridden in with economic guns blazing when the earthquakes struck, central government presided over a relatively messy retreat several years later, and as anyone living in Canterbury can confirm, the earthquake recovery process remains far from complete ten years after the event. In summary, the CER, the CERA and the dogged insistence that ¯ Otautahi should play host to central city anchor mega-projects under an imposed Central City Plan all demonstrate a form of “elite panic.” At this point it is important to consider a fundamental proposition made by Clarke and Chess in their keystone article on elite panic in 2008: The image of panic is generally associated with large numbers of people, and elites do not congregate, making it hard to transfer the image of panic to them. One does not see collections of chief executive officers amassed in a stadium, and so it is highly unlikely that a story will ever appear about “CEO panic” in response to a soccer stadium fire. Still, this is not a sufficient explanation for “panic” to be so rarely attributed to people in positions of authority. For one could in principle explain the actions of chief executives, heart surgeons, Army generals or university officials by alleging that they panicked in certain situations. Yet such explanations remain rare. (Clarke & Chess, 2008, p. 995)

Against that rare tendency authors such as Klein, Solnit and Tierney have scrutinised the attention-grabbing actions of governments in the U.S., South and Central America in such a light. My aim in this chapter has been to direct attention to a smaller player on the global stage. I have attempted to provide an explanation and interrogation of the actions of government following disasters in Aotearoa New Zealand and to reconceive or recast them as collectives of nervous individuals situated

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within structures concerned with maintaining those structures above all else, irrespective to a considerable extent of the driving ideology. The authoritarian, brutal, military junta and the neoliberal, “less is more” administration are no different. They will get caught short in a disaster at some point. Although both may attempt to use a “shock doctrine” approach to reassert and extend their ideological position it always unravels in the long-run if not immediately. Central and local government in this country did not panic in the radically paranoid sense of issuing shoot-to-kill orders without any evidence of rioting or looting as has been well-documented in relation to Hurricane Katrina. However, it did become obsessed with a superficial form of the largely rhetorical principle of “build back better” (BBB), which ¯ in Otautahi was translated into “build back bigger” (see Matthewman & Byrd’s chapter). It also became mired for many years in its interventions in the residential property market (the red-zone buy-out), the EQC pay-out and managed repair and in particular the EQC Fletchers EQR home repair programme, and, reluctantly, in the insurance market through the rescue of the collapsed AMI Company and the creation of Southern Response by government because it saw the principal existential threat from the earthquakes as an economic one. The simple residential red-zone buy-out offer, for example, was vexed by the existence of socalled “quake outcasts”—uninsured property owners. Initially the Crown would only buy out property owners who were insured until court action directed them to do otherwise (Hayward & MacDonald, 2018). The mean-spirited and adversarial approach of EQC, which was driven by a neoliberal business model rather than “client” needs approach, led to dissatisfaction, recriminations and litigation and eventually, after several other internal Canterbury earthquakes reviews, a Public Inquiry into EQC itself (Cartwright et al., 2020; Meier, 2015). Southern Response found itself the appellant in a class action that has yet to be resolved at the time of publication (Coughlan, 2021). Now, some ten years after the earthquakes, the clumsiness and rigidity and panicky nature of the largely neoliberal economic response to the earthquakes, particularly for landowners, seems much more apparent (Fig. 3.2).

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Fig. 3.2 ChristChurch Cathedral, February 2012 (Photo by Roy Montgomery)

Conclusion: Be Grateful Vs Be Kind? So what have we learned, if anything, in terms of doing better at government intervention in disasters in Aotearoa New Zealand since the Canterbury earthquake sequence? There have been numerous changes to legislation such as the Earthquake Commission Act 1993 and the CDEM Act 2002 was amended in 2016 to command local authorities to appoint recovery managers and produce recovery plans. CCC has attempted to maintain better relations with existing community response and community groups in general rather than simply continue to promote civil defence training for community volunteers. Central government has produced Corrective Action Plans following reviews of other disasters over the past ten years. But it is important to remember, in light of Anthony Oliver-Smith’s remarks in Chapter 2 about the tendency of disaster management responses to be framed in narrow technical terms,

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that a “Technical Advisory Group” presided over the biggest government multi-disaster review (Technical Advisory Group, 2017). Still, some key emergency response agencies have been reconfigured or rebranded, such as Fire and Emergency New Zealand which was created in July 2017 and MCDEM which underwent a name change to the NEMA Agency in December 2019. The EQC has been overhauled. The “Four R’s” of emergency management “(reduction, readiness, response and recovery)” now populate almost all related central and local government plans and strategies as does the word “resilience,” a prime example being the National Disaster Resilience Strategy released in April 2019 (MCDEM, 2019). The strategy, as with many similar resilience plans, outlines many forms of resilience, all of equal importance. Labelled “sectors”, they are as follows: natural environment; built environment; economic environment; social environment; cultural environment; and governance environment (MCDEM, 2019, p. 10). It seems fair to say that, ten years ago, the first three sectors preoccupied central government almost entirely with regard to the earthquakes. The notion that “governance” was a potentially vulnerable sector was not considered with any degree of reflexivity i.e., strong shows of governance were necessary rather than a questioning of what types of governance arrangements best suited the conditions of the event. So, in that sense, it appears that government has learned. Yet we need to be cautious in seeing “resilience” and “vulnerability” talked up and embraced in official circles as Oliver-Smith has cautioned in this book. The word “resilience” can be easily parlayed back into a neoliberal paradigm as if individuals and communities simply need to better adapt to absorbing shocks when, in fact, what may be required is resistance, protest and rebellion. These latter terms may appear as archaic or threatening in academic and public discourses, but we need to be prepared to constantly worry at the latest rhetoric that connotes self-responsibility and lapses in good individualised choices which makes the term “well-being,” so liberally used in present times, so fundamentally suspect. Yet the current global COVID-19 pandemic and the government’s response in Aotearoa New Zealand vis-à-vis responses in other countries suggests that we have indeed learned something about managing disasters over the past decade. Internationally, most of the rhetoric and on-againoff-again openings and closing of borders and national lockdowns has been around rapid recovery and return to business-as-usual as soon as possible. In the case of Aotearoa New Zealand, central government

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acted swiftly to close the border and impose lockdowns, but there was a concerted effort by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and senior officials to make the process inclusive, hence the “team of 5 million” metaphor and the commitment to provide daily briefings and question and answer sessions over much of 2020. Rather than embarking on a panicked show of paternalistic central government force, the government split its public declarations of advice and authority with an existing Ministry, the Ministry of Health, and relied on the Director General of Health, Dr. Ashley Bloomfield, not Ministers or ministry officials to appear in a kind of double act, hence the “Jacinda and Ashley Show” label for press briefings. There was an existing Ministry of Health National Pandemic Plan that could be activated. No major new plans nor sweeping new legislation were drafted and passed under urgency. Furthermore, when a COVID-19 ministerial portfolio was announced in November 2020 after the government’s sweeping re-election in October 2020, it was very deliberately labelled Minister for COVID-19 “Response” rather than “Recovery.” There was no hasty suggestion of recovery following this disaster, which by international standards at the time of printing, Aotearoa New Zealand seems to have coped with relatively well. Throughout the current disaster response in this country, the key words have not been “be obedient” but “be kind,” borrowed, unfortunately, straight from the government’s official response in March 2019 to the Christchurch Mosque attacks which prompted central government and leaders of all kinds of organisations to remind us that tolerance and understanding rather than paranoia and defensiveness are the keys to our long-term resilience. Alongside this relative humility, the government’s own willingness to admit mistakes in the handling of, say, managed isolation and quarantine facilities, and its efforts to avoid the press and the public demonising any particular sections of the community when lockdown breaches by individuals or families have occurred suggests a significant shift away from traditional elite panic responses to disasters. This is not to say a completely new order exists in the ways in which governments and elites deal with disasters in Aotearoa New Zealand. The present government is still dealing with the fall-out from the Pike River Mine collapse, the Canterbury earthquake sequence, the Christchurch Mosque attacks and the Whakaari White Island Gas Explosion and these, together with the “leaky homes” crisis of the early 1990s and 2000s, all have associated elements of neoliberal manufactured risk about them: a

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deregulated regulatory framework allowed dangerous events to become disasters. Finally, there are still a multitude of aspirational plans and strategies that have flowed from disasters in this country, especially the Canterbury earthquake sequence, which are little more than what researchers such as Thomas Birkland and Lee Clarke have labelled as, in their view inevitable, “fantasy documents” (Birkland, 2009; Clarke, 1999). Clarke uses the term to describe plans that existed prior to disaster events that were naïve or inadequate, often trying to convince publics that dangerous systems were safe, whereas Birkland applies the label to post-disaster documents, especially those that include “lessons learned” in their title. In my view many “recovery plans” fall into this category, and the CCDU Blueprint Plan is perhaps the biggest fantasy document to come from the Canterbury earthquake sequence. There have been enormous cost overruns with the few that have been started, some have been abandoned. There is very little certainty that the anchor projects that have been built will ever pay their way. This tendency towards “magical thinking,” a term popularised by Joan Didion in her memoir about her childlike belief that she could somehow reverse her husband’s death if she believed it strongly enough (Didion, 2005), the proliferation of untested “lessons learned” publications by central and local government (see Montgomery, 2017) and academic-authored BBB monographs (Mannakkara et al., 2019) show that there is still a tendency amongst elites to try to maintain an air of authority via largely symbolic publications. Both Clarke and Birkland argue that it would serve society better if governments stopped indulging in such activities and showed more humility and honesty. We have yet to see real expressions of truth and reconciliation or co-operation between local (CCC) and regional (ECan) government in regard to disaster management, so it is not merely central government that needs to be less defensive. It will be interesting to see what types of initiatives, legislative change, plans and documents follow in the wake of the most recent major disasters that have occurred in Aotearoa New Zealand and whether a more open discourse such as that displayed during the COVID19 pandemic lead to less “she’ll be right” attitudes and more authentic learnings.

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CHAPTER 4

The Ruptured City Ten Years On Katie Pickles

Introduction In both physical and human terms, the Canterbury earthquake sequence of 2010–2011 was an abrupt moment of change. Tragically, 185 people lost their lives as a result of the 22 February 2011 Christchurch Earthquake, and many more were injured, casting a long shadow on health, socio-economic and cultural well-being. From a critical disaster studies (CDS) perspective, my book, Christchurch Ruptures (2016), identified five major ruptures (landscape, people, gothic, heritage, heart) that guided five suggestions on how the city might regroup and move on. This chapter considers to what extent my predictions have come to pass. It assesses whether they are still relevant on the 10th anniversary of the earthquakes and ponders what other themes have emerged in the meantime.

K. Pickles (B) Department of History, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_4

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Decolonising the City In Christchurch Ruptures , I warned of thinking being trapped in the past and of attempting to put things back as they were (also Matthewman & Byrd in this collection). Symbolically, on 22 February 2011, statues of the city’s founding father John Robert Godley, colonial politician William Rolleston and imperial hero Robert Falcon Scott were damaged, all falling off their pedestals. Interpreting the statues as markers of power and identity, I argued for the opportunity to leave behind the colonial attitudes and practices underlying them. I suggested focusing on local inhabitants and building upon the city’s historically moderate political streak where conservative and radical opinions often found equilibrium. My concerns have become both a global and national priority since, triggered by events such as the removal of Edward Colston in the UK, the John Hamilton statue in Waikato, and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) ¯ ¯ movement. Significantly, Otautahi Christchurch’s (Otautahi hereafter) response to the new wave of international activism revealed that the earthquakes had enabled the city to already address how it acknowledged its past. For example, in June 2020, Mayor Lianne Dalziel and Ng¯ai T¯ua¯huriri Upoko (head) Dr. Te Maire Tau issued a joint statement focused on the city’s statues of Queen Victoria and James Cook. Their words indicated that the post-quake city had entered a new era of seeking balance, biculturalism and partnership. The statement highlighted that “The Treaty of Waitangi is the founding document of our nation and it is important that our public statues and monuments reflect the history of mana whenua and the colonial settlement in this region.” Yet, rather than seeking the removal of the Queen Victoria statue, on the contrary, as signatories to the Treaty, Tau stated that “All of our tribal elders have always endorsed Queen’s Victoria’s descendants as representatives of that relationship” (Christchurch City Council [CCC], 2020). Following the earthquakes, Ng¯ai Tahu accelerated its partnership in making the city, a role that had gained in strength through the Treaty settlement process that culminated in the Ng¯ai Tahu Claims Settlement Act 1998. Phibbs et al. (2015, p. 74) argue that “the earthquakes affirmed Ng¯ai Tahu identity and sense of place.” That sentiment was also expressed in Te K¯ owatawata/The Dawn of a New City (2015) where T¯a Mark Solomon, then Kaiwhakahaere (chairman, manager), Te R¯ unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu (TRoNT) wrote that:

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However, beyond the trauma and suffering, the earthquakes provided a unique opportunity for Ng¯ai Tahu and Ng¯a M¯at¯a Waka to come together, identify what individually and collectively we had to offer and link up with other services in the community to provide a substantial support network. We stepped closer to a more meaningful Treaty partnership, with Te R¯ unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu being made a statutory partner to the recovery … This legislative change saw us at the top table in planning the recovery of Christchurch and resulted in an improved understanding of the partnership process, Ng¯ai Tahu and Ng¯a M¯at¯a Waka representation at all levels and the opportunity to leave behind an enduring footprint for future generations. (p. 2)

Importantly, TRoNT worked in partnership with the Canterbury ¯ akaro Limited and the city Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA), Ot¯ ¯ and regional councils, in planning the recovery of Otautahi. As Te Maire Tau put it in Grand Narratives (CERA, 2016, p. 3), a set of histories intended to be woven into “the fabric of our new city,” the earthquakes had provided “an opportunity to recognise, embrace and acknowledge our shared history and a shared future. From that, recog¯ nition has emerged a new narrative for Otautahi, one that recognises the heritage of settler culture, and the mana whenua of Ng¯ai Tahu hap¯u, Ng¯ai T¯u¯ahuriri.” Moderate, bicultural partnership was to the fore. One example of Ng¯ai Tahu leadership in the city rebuild was the Matapopore Charitable Trust, first formed as a steering group to represent the interests of Ng¯ai T¯u¯ahuriri as they related to the Christchurch Central Recovery Plan.1 Seeking a new urban form, Debbie Tikao, landscape architect and general manager of the Matapopore Charitable Trust, wrote of the dominant “traditional English aesthetic” in forming the dominant identity of “the Garden City.” She considered that however “charming” that aesthetic had “all but smothered and degraded the prior layers of cultural identity, values and traditions associated with this landscape” (Tikao, n.d., p. 5). A Trust brochure stated that although there were “permanent and temporary k¯ainga and p¯a, or habitation sites within the greater Christchurch area” before European settlement, that history “was nearly invisible and went largely unrecognised, with settler culture and values dominating the city landscape” (Matapopore, 2020a). The post-quake city would move beyond that colonial construction.

1 https://matapopore.co.nz/.

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Advancing “Kia atawhai ki te iwi” (care for the people), the Trust developed narratives for the city’s emerging precincts that has led to an environment that visibly evokes a shared present and future. All post-quake anchor projects are consciously imbued with meaning. For example, Te Omeka Justice and Emergency Services Precinct includes Lonnie Hutchinson’s Kahu Matarau, a protective 36 metre long aluminium k¯ak¯apo feather cloak designed to offer protection for the city (Fig. 4.1). It “orients towards Tuahiwi, the heartland of Ng¯ai T¯ua¯huriri.” At its foot is a garden “that depicts a wh¯ariki (woven mat) with a zigzag t¯aniko pattern emerging through clever use of native planting” (Matapopore, 2020b). The naming of the precinct captures the connections between the Treaty, justice, power, culture and partnership. Demanding a place for the Treaty in the post-quake city and nation, Matapopore (2020b) explains that:

Fig. 4.1 Kahu Matarau at Te Omeka Justice and Emergency Services Precinct (Photo by James McCosker, 2021)

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The name Te Omeka comes from the Biblical terms Alpha and Omega. Both terms were deployed by Tahu P¯ otiki Ra e South Island would see the resolution of the Treaty, exclaiming that “the Treaty will be realised when the hearts and minds of all peoples speak as one.” Te Omeka is a legacy that asks that our hearts, minds and different faiths be bound as one to the law of the Crown and Queen, so that the Treaty may speak to us all.

Actively decolonising space, the new narratives appear around the city. For example, the Margaret Mahy playground includes swinging posts and a painted splash pad depicting native eel and a pathway etched with illustrations of Ng¯ai Tahu stories. The bus interchange includes ceiling images of the constellations used by early Ng¯ai Tahu navigators. The New Brighton playground has a waka instead of the originally planned sailing ship (Matapopore, n.d.). In the city’s new library, Matapopore cultural advisers worked with the library’s leadership team and “ensured that cultural values, aspirations and narratives were woven holistically into the conceptual development of the architecture and spatial experience of T¯uranga.” Features such as an “urban carpet” of welcome and the golden façade that “reflects the changing colour and interplay of shadow and light on hills and ranges that have always surrounded the plains.” These “design and artworks that translate traditional m¯atauranga into contemporary form” are intended to “add a rich and dynamic layer to the experience of place” (Matapopore, 2020c). As with Te Omeka, naming is important. T¯uranga was named for the homeland of the Ng¯ai Tahu ancestor, Paikea. It is held that Ng¯ai Tahu descend from the union of Tahu P¯otiki, Paikea’s son, and his wife Hemo (Matapopore, 2020c). Signifying the decolonising landscape, along the Te Papa ¯ akaro/Avon River Precinct, the promenade that reorients the centre of Ot¯ the city as the river, is a series of 13 Ng¯a Wh¯ariki Manaaki (woven mats of welcome). Designed by Reihana Parata, Morehu Flutey-Henare and with technical support from Wayne Youle, each wh¯ariki is an arrangement of natural stone pavers of varying shades and colours up to 5 metre by 5 metre in size. In sequence, they reference the p¯ owhiri process of ¯ welcome for people visiting Otautahi. The overarching k¯orero or concept for the artwork is drawn from the key founding kaupapa—Kia atawhai ki te iwi—Care for your people, words from Pita Te Hori, Upoko Ng¯ai T¯u¯ahuriri R¯unanga, 1861.

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The Ng¯a Wh¯ariki Manaaki are an important part of weaving “Ng¯ai T¯u¯ahuriri/Ng¯ai Tahu values and stories into the fabric of Christchurch’s urban environment.” Significantly, further evidence that a unique postquake, moderate, bicultural landscape is emerging: wh¯ariki appear next to colonial stone features such as The Bridge of Remembrance, and the Robert Falcon Scott and James Cook statues (Fig. 4.2). They serve as companions, re-contextualising the past. For example, post-quake, decolonisation has played out in the reshaping of Victoria Square. Considered the historical “Cradle of Christchurch” (Rice, 2014, p. 7), it was the first centre of the colonial city, serving as the civic and commercial hub, and including the post office. For Ng¯ai T¯u¯ahuriri, “In its earliest days it was recorded as the site of Puari, a Waitaha p¯a which stretched along ¯ akaro, close to Victoria Square, and was a mahinga the banks of the Ot¯ kai site where food gathered included tuna (eel), inaka (whitebait) and

Fig. 4.2 Wh¯ariki and Robert Falcon Scott as companions in the landscape (Photo by James McCosker, 2021)

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kokop¯u (native trout). Pora (turnip) and aruhe (fern root) were cultivated, and the site was where Ng¯ai T¯u¯ahuriri gathered “to meet and engage in practices associated with mahinga kai” (Matapopore, 2020d). With colonial settlement, “Market Square” emerged as a trading site for Ng¯ai T¯ua¯huriri/Ng¯ai Tahu and settlers. That vital contact zone diminished as the province grew, and Cathedral Square became the centre of the city. Renamed “Victoria Square” in 1903, the site came to symbolise dominant 20th-century civic and imperial prowess, including featuring statues of Queen Victoria and James Cook, and the Town Hall from 1972. Recognising its changing morphology, Lois Cairns (2015) wrote that “Each change has been accompanied by controversy but since the last revamp 26 years ago, Victoria Square has been held up as in icon of the Garden City and thousands of visitors have paraded along its curvaceous paths” (para. 7). Unsurprisingly, when the Christchurch Central Development Unit (CCDU) planned a new post-quake round of redesign there was vocal opposition. The CCDU wanted to “make the square more event-friendly and bring to the fore its rich history as a site of early trading between European settlers and Ng¯ai Tahu” (Cairns, 2015, para. 3). It sought to foster markets and recapture the partnership of early contact. Rather than being overtly ideological, opposition to the plans, that included moving the 1950s Bowker Fountain and Victoria and Cook statues, highlighted redevelopment as a waste of $7 million, and resented central plans being made for a local place. Instead, Victoria Square has gently re-formed in a way that demonstrates re-contextualising the past and employing bicultural partnership in making the post-quake city. Along with three wh¯ariki, new mana whenua markers include two upright waka (carved canoe) by Fayne Robinson that join Riki Manuel’s 1994 Poupou (Fig. 4.3). Robinson’s Mana Motuhake was intended as a new element that offers balance to the bicultural narrative of our city and it is a celebration and reflection of our shared cultural heritage. The work will complement the existing statue of Queen Victoria and emphasise the enduring relationship between Ng¯ai Tahu and the Crown. (Matapopore, 2020d)

Decolonising the city extends to a shift in overall notions of heritage, place, landscape and hegemony. For example, in 2019, the CCC launched

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Fig. 4.3 One of two upright waka complements the Queen Victoria statue to strengthen the relationship between Ng¯ai Tahu and the Crown (Photo by James McCosker, 2021)

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a new heritage strategy “that sets out how we intend to work in ongoing partnership with Ng¯ai Tahu and in collaboration with our communities to identify, protect and celebrate heritage.” Unlike in the past, “Ng¯ai Tahu taonga is acknowledged and integrated, and the heritage of the city’s diverse cultures and distinctive communities is respected and provided for” (CCC, n.d.). Alternative Communities In Christchurch Ruptures , I suggested that past alternative ways of living in the city have much to offer the present. From the late 19th Century, the city had been a hotbed of early feminism, as well as home to movements promoting health and fitness, scenic reserves and communal living. Influenced by other cities’ recovery after disasters (Solnit, 2009), there was the sense of a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to make a new progressive city (Bennett et al., 2014; Matthewman & Byrd in this collection). That spirit appeared to flourish in the energetic and original Gap Filler projects, led by Coralie Winn and Ryan Reynolds. These involved numerous inventive civic installations aimed at forming strong communities, including a pallet pavilion on commons space, book exchanges and a “Dance-O-Mat”.2 Other initiatives that continued the city’s creative and quirky traditions included Greening the Rubble,3 and a public festival of architecture, design and food (FESTA),4 directed by Dr Jessica Halliday. Life in Vacant Spaces (LiVS)5 emerged as a “brokerage service for project partners and land owners,” that is “dedicated to inspiring Christchurch to activate our many vacant sites and spaces with creative, intriguing and entrepreneurial temporary projects.” Scholars have studied these projects as “transitional activities” that involve creativity, “informing new senses of place, belonging, imagination and social encounter” (Cloke & Conradson, 2018; see also Cameron in this volume). Cloke and Conradson (2018) argue that transitional activities involved “the psychological affects of ‘being-in-common’”, enabled transitional creativity and

2 https://gapfiller.org.nz/project/dance-o-mat. 3 https://www.livingstreets.org.nz/node/4738. 4 https://festa.org.nz/. 5 https://livs.org.nz/.

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alternative uses of urban space that overall “are provoking a new imagination and understanding of what the city can become.” The success of these projects was in stark contrast to disappointment citizens felt at the lack of attention given to the “Share an Idea” consultation and the dominance of top-down planning (Carleton, 2013; also Montgomery and Pawson’s respective chapters in this collection). Swaffield (2013) expressed that sentiment thus: While the “bottom-up” ideas were being generated, a different “topdown” agenda was emerging in Wellington, the seat of government in New Zealand. The agency established by government to lead the recovery program, CERA, effectively controls the Central City, including access to the exclusive core red zone, demolition, and now reconstruction plans. (p. 15)

As Dionisio and Pawson (2016) have argued, government has “often marginalised community engagement in decision-making processes” (p. 107). Frustration at unfinished anchor projects such as the stadium and sports facility only fuelled calls for alternative transport, swimming pools and collectivism in general. The Margaret Mahy Playground and T¯uranga library were welcomed, but constructing a large convention centre, when COVID-19 had stopped tourism in its tracks, means it faces a challenging future. In the meantime, a new “youth quake” (Nissen, 2019) further evoked the city’s radical spirit (also see Hayward & Johnson in this collection). Students marching for climate change action seemed to echo those before them who had protested over nuclear energy and weaponry, South African rugby tours and various foreign wars. As Bronwyn Hayward (2020) has argued, taking action against the climate crisis involved economic and social injustice, colonialism and racism. Valuing and Fostering Diversity On the eve of the earthquakes, there were anti-racism rallies in the city and, as I raised in Christchurch Ruptures , visiting academic Audrey Kobayashi (2009, p. 60) had critiqued “established cultures of whiteness.” Likewise, Paul Spoonley (2015, p. 650) wrote of the complex identity politics of Aotearoa New Zealand as a “superdiverse” society. He argued for “a recognition that indigeneity and majority identities are part

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of a local politics of diversity alongside those that are associated with the presence of ethnic minority and immigrant communities.” The post-quake rebuild led to a new wave of migration from elsewhere in Aotearoa New Zealand, and both Britain and Ireland and a variety of countries including the Philippines and Brazil (see Garces-Ozanne et al. in this collection). I advocated respect for all peoples, regardless of race or ethnicity and length of residency in the city. With hindsight, the events of 15 March 2019 make this a chilling suggestion. Spoonley (2019) wrote immediately after the mosque attacks that: The earthquakes and subsequent rebuild have significantly transformed the ethnic demography of Christchurch and made it much more multicultural – and more positive about that diversity. It is ironic that this terrorism should take place in this city, despite its history of earlier far right extremism.

Although the murderer was Australian and living in Dunedin at the ¯ time of the crime, his act brought Otautahi’s ugly 1980s extreme right wing groups, skinhead and neo-Nazi groups in particular, to mind. Gilbert and Elley (2020) argue for transformation from locally connected forms of white supremacy, to an “international ‘alternative right’ movement that had taken at least some root in New Zealand long before, but had gone largely unnoticed up until that point” (p. 286). In the wake of the terror attack, there was an outpouring of support for breaking down barriers between the city’s diverse communities. Perhaps a new sense of community, born of coping with the quakes, had fostered a more united approach to adversity. While progressive sexuality was officially invisible in the planning of the new city, Gorman and McKinnon argue (2018) that “there was at times an implicit queerness to the artworks produced among the ruins” (pp. 247–248). For example, “Gay Pride” and “One Love” were spray-painted on the Gap Filler project installation “Words of Hope,” and a rainbow was drawn. However, rebuilding the central Anglican Cathedral, symbolically reasserting an Anglo-Celtic dominance of the past, seemed at odds with the new climate (Fig. 4.4). Restoring imagined Englishness goes against a diverse, multicultural city. Restoration was slow and controversial. The former Bishop Victoria Matthews considered the financial cost too high, and I quoted her in Christchurch Ruptures for writing that buildings “however dear to our heart and beautiful, are secondary to our concern for people” (Pickles, 2016, p. 140). Its potential as a tourist destination is

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Fig. 4.4 Cathedral Square with Anglican Cathedral, T¯uranga and Crowne Plaza Hotel (Photo by James McCosker, 2021)

currently suspended and the cathedral’s symbolic place as the city’s heart and hope has faded. In April 2019, I wrote an opinion piece suggesting that rebuilding the cathedral as an interfaith hub would. For those who view the Cathedral as symbolic of the heart of the city, it is time to make sure that it reflects the new climate. An interfaith hub could capture the decolonising present and make all of Christchurch’s citizens feel at home. (Pickles, 2019)

Actor Sam Neill joined in the call, but Bishop Peter Carrell replied that the decision was already made. The restored cathedral would, however, “welcome people of all faiths and none” and that it would be “a place of welcome for all people, to gather, to connect, to build relationships, and to talk through the issues that affect humanity” (Gates, 2019). With plans for a new Catholic Cathedral bordering Victoria Square, and completed restorations of the central Presbyterian and Methodist churches, the

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status quo, rather than interfaith spirit, is manifesting in the post-quake landscape. The Decentred City ¯ Ten years on, there is still lingering attachment to Otautahi as the “garden city,” a sentiment I argued had ruptured. Influenced by overseas trends that emphasised community, there were new conceptions of gardens, including for “an immense inner-city food-producing area.” From 2013, The Food Resilience Network (FRN) included the CCC, Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB) and a variety of non-government organi¯ akaro Orchard sations. Claiming an 11,000 membership by 2016, the Ot¯ opened and there was the dream of being the “best edible garden city in the world” (Morris, 2020, pp. 208–209). The future of the vast eastern red zone remains evocatively problematic. It includes the remains of private gardens, offering food foraging ¯ akaro Avon River Corridor opportunities. The official plans for the Ot¯ (OARC) are slowly emerging. Much effort has gone into thinking about ecological regeneration options (Orchard et al., 2017). Instead of rewilding it, however, vast tracts of domestic grass currently keep it tame. I suggested the “city centre” would continue to decline, as it had done, along with many others globally, before the earthquakes. I argued that it was time to think smaller in scale and not to restore what was there before. A decade on, there are some exciting signs of new urbanity such as the ¯ akaro/Avon River Precinct with a promenade that takes its Te Papa Ot¯ lead from the river and draws in a diversity of features, both old and new (Fig. 4.5). But the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted large, unfinished anchor projects, rendered precarious in hard global times, and thwarted visions of a vibrant centre. For example, despite funding from taxpayers and ratepayers, the Breathe Housing Community collapsed in February 2021. It was to be an “urban demonstration village” that would “inspire and shape modern urban living in Christchurch.” A 2013 competition to choose the project team attracted 58 entries from 15 countries and the judging panel included Kevin McCloud from the British television programme Grand Designs (McDonald, 2021). Rather than live downtown, people are moving to new homes outside of the city boundary— let alone the suburbs—leaving urban regeneration a work in progress (see also Pawson in this collection).

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¯ akaro/Avon River Precinct. Steel eel net sculpture and Fig. 4.5 Te Papa Ot¯ boat sheds coexist (Photo by James McCosker, 2021)

I saw the rise of new suburbs and exurbs as worrying evidence of a de-centred city. Growth in the Selwyn and Waimakariri Districts to the south and the north of the city has continued unabated. A problem prior to the earthquakes, in 2007, the CCC, the Waimakariri and Selwyn District Councils had founded “Greater Christchurch” to co-ordinate their growth plans. Rolleston, Lincoln, Prebbleton, Kaiapoi, Woodend and Rangiora were growing and causing traffic congestion. The foundation of “Pegasus Town,” north of Woodend triggered the collaborative Greater Christchurch Urban Development Strategy (UDS) (McCrone, 2020). Pegasus Town went into receivership in August 2012 (McDonald, 2012) but, in the wake of the quakes, has bounced back. In 2021, there was media coverage suggesting that the Waimakariri urban areas might join up to become a super city, “the Monaco of the South Pacific” (1 News, 2021).

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In 2020, Selwyn had the largest net internal migration in the country. Millions of dollars have been spent on the new expansive Northern and Southern transport corridors that effectively by-pass the city. New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) predicts increasing congestion over the next decade and considers that the southern corridor project “will reduce congestion and improve safety, health, travel times and quality of life” (NZTA, n.d.-a). The Northern Corridor claims to bring benefits to “the Christchurch and Canterbury community by unlocking space to provide safe solutions for all travel modes.” Encouraging walking, cycling and the use of public transport is part of the plan (NZTA, n.d.-b). To that end, 11 storyboards by Liz Grant and Ng¯ai Tahu Whakapapa unit manager, Arapata Reuben, tell the history of the area as an “ancient trail” marking “culturally significant sites” and advocating environmentalism along the corridor’s shared path. The steel artworks and information panels were designed by Morgan Mathews-Hale of Kaitiaki Studios. According to Mathews-Hale cited in Otago Daily Times (2021), The design reflects the Taurapa (canoe stern post) of a great waka (canoe) and traditionally represent elaborate narratives such as that of T¯awhaki and his ascent to the heavens. For us it tells the stories of whakapapa of the motorway and also indicates a journey, travel and direction of our ancestors and future generations. (para. 5)

And so it is through a new transportation corridor to the north of the city that mundane commuting and traffic congestion have gathered up the Ng¯ai Tahu past and re-purposed it to form a “shared path.” In the face of a global environmental crisis, new exurbs rely on fossil fuels, with lip service to alternative forms of transport. Ironically, in post¯ quake Otautahi, it is motorways uniting those who travel on them, mostly privately, yet in common purpose. It is the new transportation corridors that have had funds poured into them, creating a landscape that disables alternative and diverse communities. It is the highway including all.

Conclusion ¯ As I predicted 10 years ago, Otautahi has largely left behind its colonial past. Evocatively, the shift of name away from Christchurch, as standardised through this volume, captures the new era. Importantly, Ng¯ai Tahu’s values gaining a partnership and re-contextualising place in the post-quake

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city provides a local model of moderate decolonisation. Significantly, in common with previous colonial “settler culture” narratives, Ng¯ai Tahu’s central place at the “top table” positions it as part of the establishment. In that way, the city’s unique moderate streak involving collaboration between those of different ideologies, that I also signalled, has endured. And it has led to a rapidly emerging and unique place. Ironically, in the post-colonial city, Ng¯ai Tahu is part of dominant forms of urban development and planning that Dombroski et al. (2019) point out are “premised on property ownership and ‘permanent’ timeframes.” In contrast, transitional activities, with their focus on “community empowerment” and intervention into “local–global relations” (Cloke & Dickinson, 2019) look outwards for ideas. In an advanced capitalist climate, such activities need to fight hard for a place in the new city. So far, local people’s plans for alternative ways of living have largely lost out to exurbs and highways. ¯ When Otautahi ruptured in 2011, 185 people lost their lives, and many more were injured, creating a huge and lasting impact on the city. Unfortunately, in the years since, adding to the struggle and strain, are the 51 deaths, and many more injuries, from the Mosque attacks. Most recently, 12 of the 26 national first wave of COVID-19 deaths and the 2021 floods have been in Canterbury. Here, Rebecca Solnit’s observation that “Disasters begin suddenly and never really end” (2020, para. 1) is particularly relevant. Disasters extend in time and space. This is because, while, on the positive side, there can be increasing “resilience”, as greatly evidenced in ¯ Otautahi, new events are often counted “on top of” a history of disasters, while retaining the stress of the old (see Uekusa & Cretney in this volume for further discussion). Rather than mimic elsewhere and expect to push on through to how things were, a post-colonial city expects ongoing environmental extremes as a consequence of being located astride the colliding Pacific and Australian tectonic plates. It works with its geography, rather than attempting to tame and control it, embraces local difference and makes all of its residents feel at home.

References 1 News. (2021, March 2). Should a brand new city be built in New Zealand to take pressure off housing market? 1 News. https://www.tvnz.co.nz/onenews/new-zealand/should-brand-new-city-built-in-zealand-take-pressure-offhousing-market-v1

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Bennett, B., Dann, J., Johnson, E., & Reynolds, R. (Eds.). (2014). Once in a lifetime: City building after disaster in Christchurch. Freerange Press. Cairns, L. (2015, February 3). ‘Hands off square’ says Christchurch. Stuff. https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/business/the-rebuild/65751922/ hands-off-our-square-says-christchurch Carleton, S. (2013, Autumn). Share an idea, spare a thought: Community consultation in Christchurch’s time-bound post-earthquake rebuild. Journal of Human Rights in the Commonwealth, 2, 4–13. CCC. (2020, June 12). Discussion needed on how we acknowledge our history. Christchurch City Council Newsline. https://newsline.ccc.govt.nz/ news/story/discussion-needed-on-how-we-acknowlege-our-history CCC. (n.d.). Heritage strategy. Christchurch City Council. https://ccc.govt.nz/ culture-and-community/heritage/heritage-strategy CERA. (2016). Grand narratives. CERA. https://matapopore.co.nz/wp-con tent/uploads/2019/10/GrandNarratives_InternalPages-Copy-small.pdf Cloke, P., & Conradson, D. (2018). Transitional organisations, affective atmospheres and new forms of being-in-common: Post-disaster recovery in Christchurch, New Zealand. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 43(3), 360–376. Cloke, P., & Dickinson, S. (2019). Transitional ethics and aesthetics: Reimagining the postdisaster city in Christchurch, New Zealand. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(6), 1922–1940. Dionisio, M. R., & Pawson, E. (2016). Building resilience through post-disaster community projects: Responses to the 2010 and 2011 Christchurch earthquakes and 2011 T¯ ohoku Tsunami. Australasian Journal of Disaster and Trauma Studies, 20, 107–116. Dombroski, K., Diprose, G., & Boles, I. (2019). Can the commons be temporary?: The role of transitional communing in post-quake Christchurch, Local Environment. The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, 24(4), 313–328. Gates, C. (2019, April 6). Anglicans respond to Sam Neill’s call to dismantle Christ Church cathedral. Stuff. https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/ 111847360/anglicans-respond-to-sam-neills-call-to-dismantle-christ-churchcathedral Gilbert, J., & Elley, B. (2020). Shaved heads and sonnenrads: Comparing white supremacist skinheads and the alt-right in New Zealand. K¯ otuitui, 15(2), 280–294. Gorman, M. A., & McKinnon, S. (2018). ‘Does it matter?’: Relocating fragments of queer heritage in post-earthquake Christchurch. In W. Grahn & R. J. Wilson (Eds.), Gender and heritage: Performance, place and politics (pp. 239–252). Routledge.

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Hayward, B. (2020). Children, citizenship and environment: #Schoolstrike edition. Routledge. Kobayashi, A. (2009). ‘Here we go again’: Christchurch’s anti-racism rally as a discursive crisis. New Zealand Geographer special issue (65), 60–70. Matapopore. (2020a). P¯ahekohekotanga me te awenga: Engagement and influence. Matapopore. https://matapopore.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2020/ 11/1047_CRCL_MP_SSetter.pdf Matapopore. (2020b). Te Omeka: Justice & emergency services precinct. Matapopore. https://matapopore.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/PR OJECT-sheet-Te-Omeka.pdf Matapopore. (2020c). T¯ uranga—The new Christchurch central library. Matapopore. https://matapopore.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Final-Turanga. pdf Matapopore. (2020d). Victoria square. Matapopore. https://matapopore.co.nz/ wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Victoria-Square.pdf Matapopore. (n.d.). A matter of trust: Iwi voice in Christchurch rebuild. Matapopore. Available: https://matapopore.co.nz/a-matter-of-trust-iwi-voice-in-christchu rch-rebuild/ McCrone, J. (2020, October 3). Yet another go at defining Greater Christchurch’s future: Why the urgency of GC2050? Stuff. https:// www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/122954190/yet-another-go-at-defining-gre ater-christchurchs-future-why-the-urgency-of-gc2050 McDonald, L. (2012, December 6). Todd family takes Pegasus Town reins. Stuff. http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/8041851/Toddfamily-takes-Pegasus-Town-reins McDonald, L. (2021, February 18). Central Christchurch site up for sale as “sustainable village” anchor project finally abandoned. Stuff. https://www. stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/124273640/central-christchurch-site-up-forsale-as-sustainable-village-anchor-project-finally-abandoned Morris, M. (2020). Common ground: Garden histories of Aotearoa. Otago University Press. Ng¯ai Tahu & Ng¯a M¯at¯a Waka. (2015). Te K¯ owatawata/The dawn of a new city. Nissen, S. (2019). Student political action in New Zealand. Bridget Williams Books. NZTA. (n.d.-a). Christchurch Southern Corridor. NZTA. https://www.nzta. govt.nz/projects/christchurch-motorways/christchurch-southern-corridor/ NZTA. (n.d.-b). Christchurch Northern Corridor. NZTA. https://www.nzta. govt.nz/projects/christchurch-motorways/christchurch-northern-corridor/ Orchard, S., Meurk, C., & Smith, E. (2017). Restoration opportunities assessment ¯ akaro Red Zone using a local knowledge approach. Report for the Avon Ot¯ ¯ akaro Network, Christchurch, New Zealand. prepared for the Avon Ot¯

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Otago Daily Times. (2021, February 16). Karakia for storyboards along new Christchurch Northern Corridor. Otago Daily Times. https://www.odt.co. nz/star-news/star-christchurch/karakia-storyboards-along-new-christchurchnorthern-corridor Phibbs, S., Kenney, C., & Solomon, M. (2015). Ng¯a M¯ owaho: An analysis of M¯aori responses to the Christchurch earthquakes. K¯ otuitui, 10(2), 72–82. Pickles, K. (2016). Christchurch Ruptures. Bridget Williams Books. Pickles, K. (2019, April 4). Rebuild Christ Church Cathedral as an interfaith hub. Stuff. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/111765 160/rebuild-christ-church-cathedral-as-an-interfaith-hub Rice, G. (2014). Victoria square: Cradle of christchurch. Canterbury University Press. Solnit, R. (2009). A paradise built in hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in disaster. Penguin. Solnit, R. (2020, April 7). ‘The impossible has already happened’: What coronavirus can teach us about hope. The Guardian. https://www.thegua rdian.com/world/2020/apr/07/what-coronavirus-can-teach-us-about-hoperebecca-solnit Spoonley, P. (2015). New diversity, old anxieties in New Zealand: The complex identity politics and engagement of a settler society. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38(4), 650–661. Spoonley, P. (2019, March 15). Christchurch mosque shootings must end New Zealand’s innocence about right-wing terrorism. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/christchurch-mosque-shootings-must-endnew-zealands-innocence-about-right-wing-terrorism-113655 Swaffield, S. (2013). Place, culture and landscape after the Christchurch earthquake. Space, Place and Culture, 1–27. http://www.futureleaders.com.au/ book_chapters/pdf/Space-Place-Culture/Simon-Swaffield.pdf Tikao, D. (n.d.). The public realm of central Christchurch narrative. CERA Grand Narrative. https://www.otakaroltd.co.nz/assets/Uploads/ThePublic Realm.pdf

CHAPTER 5

Critical Indigenous Disaster Studies: Doomed to Resilience? Simon Lambert

Introduction Just as disasters are indissolubly social events, in settler colonial societies, vulnerabilities to hazards, and the impacts from consequent disasters, are inextricably racist. Are Indigenous disasters, like the Bible’s portrayal of the poor (Mathew 26:11; Mark 14:7), “always with us”? As Matthewman (2015) points out, disasters “lift the veil” on how a society works, or does not work, revealing what is tolerated, and who or what is privileged. The post-contact experiences of Indigenous Peoples can be read as a litany of disasters and yet systemic vulnerability does not stem from a lack of attention. As Dunbar-Ortiz (2014) argues, Indigenous Peoples are not peripheral to state legislation. Rather, the violent oppression and

S. Lambert (B) Department of Indigenous Studies, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

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discrimination against Indigenous Peoples by state and private forces situates Indigenous societies at the very centre of state philosophising and operations. Yet Indigenous communities are positioned (often by themselves) as the epitome of resilience. Indeed, “resilience” has become the default term for Indigenous individuals and communities who, despite the genocidal tendencies of imperial and colonising states, are not dead. Reid (2019) eviscerates this ascription of resilience as “a mantra being repeated by colonial states and deeply powerful western actors worldwide” (p. 262). Indigenous discourse elevates care for community and ecosystems as “a governing cliché” whereby neoliberal systems maintain their extraction of wealth from Indigenous and, of course, nonIndigenous subjects. To tease out this apparent paradox of simultaneous vulnerability/resilience, this chapter unpacks the impacts of a major disaster on urban Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous Peoples are increasingly urban (United Nations [UN] Housing Rights Programme, 2010); 85% of M¯aori are resident in towns and cities (Ministry of Social Development, 2010), and these built landscapes contain (and produce) complex risks (Mitchell, 1999). What is remarkable about so many modern disasters (including COVID-19) is first, their predictability, and second, how little was done to prevent or prepare for them.1 We could add a third concern: the slow, often limited, sometimes counterproductive support for Indigenous communities. I have previously ventured a proto-law in a field bereft of theory (Lambert, 2022) that states, in any given disaster, Indigenous communities will be more impacted than non-Indigenous communities, and their recovery will be slower and less effective. This chapter gives the genesis of this law.

Approaches to Indigenous Disaster Studies Indigenous Peoples have lived in the most interesting times for the last 500 years and the lay down misère for any critical sociology is to insert “Indigenous” in the title. At the level of community and neighbourhood, household and family, many Indigenous peoples are experiencing the physical, economic, social and cultural collapse of their space and place. This has happened while non-Indigenous spaces and places have 1 Several reports modelled the damage to Otautahi ¯ Christchurch city from an earthquake. See Lamb (1997).

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continued their expansion. The two trends are directly connected with colonisation the epitome of Smith’s (2007) “disastrous accumulation”. Urban Indigenous communities add to the difficulty of understanding this modern riskscape as their proportion of Indigenous populations grows, and the hazards they face multiply (Albala-Bertrand, 2003; World Bank/UN, 2010). How do Indigenous communities navigate multiple systems during cascading and overlapping disasters? Do past events provide any lessons, or is the current situation so much more complex that we need to abandon or at least dilute tradition and the value of Indigenous Knowledges (IK, plural)? At heart, what do Indigenous Peoples need to know to survive? And how does critical disaster studies (CDS) support critical Indigenous disaster studies within the complexity of intersectionality and transdisciplinarity? Indigenous Knowledges IK is increasingly accepted as important and sometimes fundamental to addressing environmental and other issues (Ataria et al., 2018). For this chapter, I interpret IK as a form of expertise, admittedly one primarily accessible from within self-identifying communities of practice (that practice being the corollary Indigenous culture). In this, I follow scholars of knowledge who question the impacts of codifying previously tacit knowledge in the service of new economies based on intellectual property, innovation, and digital technologies. The separation of knowledge as a “unit of analysis” came out of the realisation by capitalists that knowledge needed to be managed, just as land and resources, labour, and capital were managed, if economic growth was to continue (Chumer et al., 2000).2 By centring expertise, I intentionally ignore the boundaries of what Hull (2000) called “any particular understanding of the nature and characteristics of knowledge or information” (p. 50). As can be seen in Indigenous interpretations of the environment, of relational narratives beyond the merely human, hazards are personified as familial features of land, water, animate and inanimate companions whose names are still known and exploits still retold. 2 Gramsci (1971) saw the elevation of knowledge as emerging from medieval Europe where “education” reflected two dimensions. At the level of the individual, “intellect” could be both broadened and deepened; at the scale of society, specialisations were simultaneously multiplying and narrowing.

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The myth of R¯uaumoko, the clinging ever-turning unborn child of Papa-tu-a-nuku, provides a cultural framework for M¯aori to appreciate a fundamental geophysical characteristic of our land (the whenua, a word that also stands for the placenta). This wilful child will never be born, will never cease his turning, and must be accepted as a part of the extended family. Similarly, Inuit scholar Sheila Watt-Cloutier (2015) notes the Inuit term uggianaqtuq describes a friend who is behaving unexpectedly or in an unfamiliar way. “The weather, which we had learned and predicted for centuries, had become uggianaqtuq. Our sea ice, which had allowed for safe travel for our hunters and provided a strong habitat for our marine mammals, was, and still is, deteriorating”. One informant (Scott, 2019) offered the proverb: Harahara aitu, harahara te tai. This translates as complete devastation on land and on sea, a destructive loss of resources.3 I recall a conversation with a Ng¯ai Tahu scholar on the 2011 ¯ Christchurch Earthquake which had devastated areas of Otautahi Christchurch (unironically called the most English city outside of ¯ England) (Otautahi hereafter). We were discussing the traditional knowledge—the m¯atauraka—of Ng¯ai Tahu, on whose territories the city was ¯ located. Otautahi was built on land that was historically comprised of extensive wetlands, a fantastic resource for the tribe who actually settled on more solid ground to the north as well as several coastal sites and many temporary sites (Tau, 2003). Drained by European settlers for farming and the new city, the soils were prone to liquefaction, a phenomenon where the land literally turned to liquid when violently shaken as in an earthquake. This geological phenomenon was a significant factor in the damage and disorder wrought by the earthquake. When I asked what this m¯atauraka4 said of building a settlement on the chosen location, he laughed aloud and answered “Don’t”! QED. Indigenous communities continue to assert the validity of their knowledges in the face of ongoing, and still violent, racism. This includes the assertion of their sovereign rights that empower them to decide how any knowledges are to be integrated into, inter alia, disaster risk reduction (DRR). Policy-makers and scientists increasingly see IK as important and perhaps fundamental to how Indigenous and possibly non-Indigenous

3 See Mead and Grove (2001, p. 60) who records this as “Calamity on land, ruination at sea” and cites the scholars Ngata and Williams. 4 The Ng¯ ai Tahu dialect for m¯atauranga.

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communities can better manage a complex and interconnected world. But is there a risk that when we are allowed to talk of “IK”, we follow not in the footsteps of our ancestors but in the wake of imperial and colonial attempts to wring evermore wealth out of people and places? Political-Economies of DRR As Latour (2007) said of actor-network theory, the hyphen is important, and, for Žižek (2011), the “political/economy” dyad serves to signpost the site of a political struggle. Dismissing any disputes over processes, people, power and so on in disaster management as “politics” depoliticises that space as a possible site for contending outcomes. COVID19 merely provides the latest examples: the British government awarded a £250 million (US$332.3 million) contract for personal protective equipment (PPE) to a US jewellery company, with no PPE manufacturing or government contract experience. A middleman evidently pocketed $50 million for their role (Mahase, 2020). Of $11.7 billion awarded to new contracts by the US government, $7.7 billion was excepted from “full and open competition” (Boyd, 2020). Of course, regulators do identify and punish gross corporate negligence and malfeasance, albeit haphazardly. Naomi Klein (2007) presented disaster capitalism in all its naked logic although, as Rivera (2020) points out, Klein’s thesis began with the disaster whereas the risks were created many years earlier, embedded through colonisation. Žižek (1994, p. 1) points out it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than then end of capitalism”, a concern first raised by Jameson (1994, p. xii).5 For Žižek, most people see liberal capitalism as more “real” than any alternative, “even under conditions of global ecological catastrophe”. The default critique for Indigenous Peoples is to argue, at minimum, for the enrolment of Indigenous voices in state processes and the integration of IK in research. The goal is of course the acknowledgement of collective Indigenous rights (as reiterated in the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007). Beyond this remains the tantalising and often treasonous aspiration of Indigenous sovereignty.

5 “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism” (Jameson, 1994, p. xii).

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Let us circle back to Žižek. His critique of capitalism provides a teasing glimpse of what relationality looks like when reduced to an economic framework. And so when the New Zealand Minister of Earthquake Recovery, 13 months after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake and in the midst of residents struggling to function and rebuild their broken homes, expressed untrammelled confidence that the market will provide solutions (Berry, 2012), he was absolutely correct. Ongoing seismic activity delayed a quick rebuild, but ultimately the market simply priced out a comprehensive recovery; delay and obfuscation were successful tactics by the insurance sector that was contractually committed to the majority of the estimated $40 billion costs (Miles, 2012). One of this market’s first moves was to increase premiums, to cover “losses”. Dare we say, the rich got richer, and the poor got poorer? The COVID-19 pandemic shows that the extremely rich get nauseatingly wealthier, and the poor get ridiculously poorer (Neate, 2020). Thomas Picketty’s thesis (2014) has the inequities of this current age resulting from the rate of return on capital exceeding the rate of growth in output and income, a phenomenon last seen to this extreme in the nineteenth century when Indigenous territories provided an easy fix for capitalism’s hunger (Lenin, 1916). Perhaps we need to look again at disaster studies and wonder why it might not be more critical of this society. Disaster Studies The 2015–2030 Sendai Framework (UN, 2015) saw important advances for Indigenous Peoples as their knowledges were accepted within the broad church of disaster sciences, “complementing” and “contributing” to DRR (Lambert & Scott, 2019). This is a belated advance from disaster research in the 1970s that sought engineering societal resilience to “exceptional” events, such as floods that would come once in a hundred years (Smith, 2000). The legislative equivalent is the use of emergency powers; McCormack among others note the significance of German jurisprudence scholar Carl Schmitt’s statement that “Sovereign is he [sic] who decides on the exception” (McCormick, 1997, p. 163). A defining feature of sovereignty being the control leader has over a sovereign territory and people, what comprises an emergency, and what can be done in response to it.

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When newly-minted US President Biden spoke with the slogan “Build Back Better” (BBB) from his lectern, some might sigh in relief that the White House has at least one staffer familiar with the UN’s Sendai Framework. More cynically, we might read the first two thirds as a real estate ad, and the last third as a floating signifier: disasterologists have achieved meme status. (This is not to be mocked, for how else is the science to influence the taxpayer?) Yet the 46th US President’s appearance was framed by the second wave of COVID-19, with the third wave evident in just the third month of his term. The COVID-19 health crisis repeats the scratched record of historic failures of environmental management, local planning, state investment, and industry profiteering. It is a short journey to authoritarianism, devaluation, and printing money as enablers of capitalism. Do not forget that in response to what became known as the global financial crisis (GFC), the global political and financial elite was to coordinate the bail out of multiple banks with hundreds of billions of dollars, euros and whatever else was needed in a matter of hours.6 To show the ease with which Indigenous voices can disrupt discourse, Indigenous Peoples challenge the legitimacy of state and private structures, societal controls, and the methodologies that might be used in researching, inter alia, disasters. I argue that Indigenous communities occupy a post-disaster world by definition. As inhabitants (and often traditional owners) of these post-disaster landscapes, Indigenous Peoples are still responding, and barely—if at all—recovering from colonisation, the uber-disaster that provides a template for ongoing capital accumulation. Therefore, although they have important technical support roles, it will not be the geophysical sciences that solve the challenges of DRR. With ¯ that in mind, what can we say about Otautahi and its still rumbling landscape?

¯ Ru whenua a Otautahi My personal experiences of the Canterbury earthquake sequence were mild and non-dramatic. In fact, I wasn’t even in the city for the two 6 Lest this be used to support a conspiracy theory, we should not necessarily be surprised that in a pandemic that has depressed all economies, several vaccines appear within months of the initial shock. Coronavirus research was well-advanced before this current manifestation.

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biggest tremors. On 4 September 2010, I was with 30 M¯aori researchers in Wellington, participating in a professional development programme (Ataria et al., 2013). During the 22 February 2011 Christchurch earthquake, I was being hosted by Waikato-Tainui who kindly put me up an extra night in their new hotel in Hamilton until the Christchurch airport reopened the following day. My strongest memory from that night was being implored by a (long) retired Australian cricketing star to “take my chances” in a black jack promotion at the local casino, also part-owned by the local iwi. One further scene I offer is the day after, at Auckland airport, as I was flying back to a clearly devastated city, two uniformed US military personnel sat at a desk over which hung a sign as simple and as loaded as “US Citizens”. This image is the epitome of modern geopolitical power, namely the ability, responsibility, and need to repatriate roaming citizens in the midst of a foreign disaster. Given the growing demands for Indigenous sovereignty, the disaster serves as a particularly powerful case study of urban Indigenous communities “behind the veil”. Initial snapshots provide important insights. On the one hand, cultural approaches underpinned a rapid and cohesive response through a recognisable M¯aori recovery network (MRN) (Kenney et al., 2012; Lambert et al., 2012). On the other hand, inequities soon became apparent. Potangaroa et al. (2011) identified the inequitable distribution of portable toilets to poorer suburbs, where M¯aori are a significant minority. Yanicki (2013) described socio-economic differences in recovery with the networking of poorer/browner Aranui organisations coordinating important resources into their neighbourhoods, while wealthier/whiter Sumner accessed their already existing, and considerable, resources. M¯aori media publicised many positive “response” experiences of M¯aori. A bi-monthly news magazine published by the Ministry of M¯aori Development featured M¯aori response efforts in the April 2011 edition (Te Puni Kokiri, 2011). Headlines included “First team in”, “Ng¯ai Tahu kicks in”, “Getting it right culturally”, and “Marae helping out”. Help came from other tribes, notably medical personnel from Te Arawa, Raukawa, and Tainui, three prominent North Island iwi (Phibbs et al., 2015). The quarterly magazine produced by Te R¯ unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu (TRoNT), did the same (Triegaardt, 2011) and included a prescient

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warning by one elder that despite Ng¯ai Tahu’s significant residential property developments, housing was increasingly difficult for M¯aori to access, either as owners or renters. Local newspaper The Press presented updates on the emergency response and recovery, although M¯aori input and perspectives were minimal. A December 2013 article (McCrone, 2013, p. c5) described the ongoing hardship experienced by many residents and quoted a former Ng¯ai Tahu strategy manager who criticised “vested interests” that were being consulted “behind closed doors” as part of a “stakeholder democracy” approach. The Chairman of TRoNT thought the early commitments to a “sustainable city” were diluted: “[I]f you go through the subdivisions, including our own, it’s the same old, same old”. Yet the tribal asset portfolio continued to grow significantly, helped by the residential rebuild (Waatea News, 2016). The market for New Zealand property remains perhaps the country’s most resilient edifice. My own research revolved around three projects examining the M¯aori response and recovery experiences to the disaster. In interviews with M¯aori participants, many noted the distinction between traditional Indigenous owners, Ngai Tahu, and outsiders or “visitors”, even where those visitors are M¯aori and resident as a second, or third generation. This fact offers one of the rare dichotomous variables in Indigenous disaster studies as the distinction noted was between those M¯aori who had an ancestral right to the territory affected (what we term mana whenua) and those visitors from other tribal territories, most often North Island, (ng¯a maata waka) like myself. This was teased out by Hauauru Rae (2013) who compared post¯ disaster planning in Otautahi after the 2011 event, and Taiwan after the 1991 earthquake. The Taiwanese approach was somewhat participatory, and included Indigenous voices, but was not as extensive or as formal as Ng¯ai Tahu’s key stakeholder role in the rebuild through the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act 2011 (CER), enacted within two months of the disaster. Yet a corollary role for those M¯aori who do not trace their lineage through Ng¯ai Tahu (and who comprised a majority of M¯aori in the city) relied on ad hoc community and committee representation. Let me declare this is absolutely within Ng¯ai Tahu’s traditional (that is cultural) and modern legislated authority and was never questioned by participants. However, too many studies, including the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) surveys, framed the “M¯aori” response and recovery to the disaster as a somehow pan-Indigenous experience,

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as if M¯aori identities were irrelevant. The nuances of tribal membership were not lost on M¯aori and would be noted and respected by any Indigenous group occupying any other Indigenous territories. Indigenous statistical data is poor and rarely disaggregated. The interplay between Indigenous rights holders, exemplified by Ngai Tahu’s tribal corporation being formally included in recovery strategies, and the vulnerability of those Indigenous community members who have migrated onto another People’s land, is a barely acknowledged dynamic that can only escalate as Indigenous diasporas increase in number and mobility. As the recovery stalled and residents became frustrated, I started to interpret resilience through a more fundamental, if less romantic, framework of endurance.7 In an effort to better understand this endurance within urban M¯aori, I analysed pre- and post-disaster well-being across economic, environmental, social, and cultural contexts. I drew on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) that identifies causal configurations and accepts equifinality, that is, there is often (in fact usually) more than one causal pathway to any particular outcome. Resilience was calibrated according to participants’ self-reported increases, or at least the maintenance, of their well-beings across the four contexts of environment, economy, society, and culture (Lambert, 2014). Resilient individuals— those whose self-reported well-being improved or was maintained—fell into two groups. The first was comprised of those who experienced no impacts from the disaster, did not have to move house, had high household incomes, and also had strong pre-quake economic well-being. The second “pathway” were those individuals who did experience significant impacts from the disaster, including having or choosing to move, but still had high household incomes and strong pre-quake economic well-being. All I can say is that, in a small sample of urban M¯aori, they indicated their overall well-being had improved, or at least not significantly declined, in the first year after a significant disaster, their pre-disaster economic well-being had more explanatory power than their pre-disaster cultural well-being. Who reading this chapter does not recall when simply having more money (or credit) would have solved some rather pressing issues? So it is with disasters, to an extreme degree. These results are easily disputed, have not been replicated, and beg more questions than they answer. The preponderance of studies, most 7 M¯ aori scholar Mason Durie made this connection between resilience and time in his 2005 “Ng¯a Matat¯u: Tides of M¯aori endurance.”

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of them qualitative and revolving around oralcy, dominate the citations. I would say such findings follow a proud history of research that recognises the central role of the state, private capital, and the nexus of ill-gotten colonial power as the key causal factor in Indigenous vulnerability. Anthony Oliver-Smith (1994, p. 86) foreshadowed Naomi Klein’s political-economic tagline for post-disaster recoveries in recording Peruvian earthquake survivors’ experiences of corrupt recovery/rebuild practices: “first the earthquake, then the disaster”. While Indigenous communities are usually the most sidelined and ignored, those individuals who begin a disaster with more economic security might be expected to do better than those who are economically insecure. The importance of economic security was threaded throughout the series of seven well-being surveys conducted by the CERA (2020) from 2012 to 2015 provide a particularly important set of data. The six surveys saw over 2,500 residents participate, of whom 100–150 were M¯aori, with about half of these Ng¯ai Tahu (Morgan et al., 2015). M¯aori participants were disproportionately reporting experiences of stress and anxiety, financial hardship, and a declining well-being over the recovery period. The third study I participated in, funded by the M¯aori Centre of Research Excellence, Ng¯a Pae o te M¯aramatanga, was a collaboration with a M¯aori mental health provider. This project involved a series of interviews with managers, staff, and “clients”, a terrible term that was eschewed in favour of the M¯aori term of tangata whaiora, an individual or group “seeking health”. Their often harrowing accounts were of trauma, pain, suffering, and poverty, but there was also survival, joy, and personal growth (Lambert et al., 2014). As well as recording their stories, we undertook a social networks analysis (SNA) of whaiora support, and found older participants to be less connected than younger, and managers and staff (most of whom were also whaiora) being more connected than their “clients”. Many whaiora would not access primary response services such as police or hospitals and were primarily and sometimes solely reliant on M¯aori service providers such as Te Awa o te Ora. But this engagement does not necessarily extend to their own tribal communities. Indeed, many were not in any direct or regular contact with tribal institutions. Again, assuming that traditional M¯aori cultural institutions are fundamental to the “M¯aori response” as our own earlier work did (see also Paton et al., 2014) risks ignoring the diversity of M¯aori, many of whom remain physically, socially, and culturally distant from these networks.

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Further, although many whaiora drew on wh¯anau support, a significant minority deliberately excluded wh¯anau from their support network. The success of the organisation was in filling this void by providing localised and individualised attention. What can be seen across the disaster experiences of M¯aori is the overlapping response and recovery efforts to past and present disasters; individuals, families, and communities are primarily reactive in the face of urgency. The resources (not least time) to understand and implement longer term DRR strategies are rarely available.

Discussion IK certainly deserve, and increasingly receive, positive attention in the research literature, including the ever-promiscuous disaster studies. But assumptions that the knowledge to resolve this is solely Indigenous is as circumspect as the presumption that Western science (alone) will do the same for non-Indigenous people. ¯ Resilience became a trope for Otautahi residents, including M¯aori, who were coping with the most destructive disaster in Aotearoa New Zealand since the 1931 Napier earthquake. However, as Hayward (2013) and ¯ others point out, many residents in post-disaster Otautahi struggled with grief, trauma, anxiety, economic loss, and cultural isolation (McCrone, 2015; Spittlehouse et al., 2014). What is more, this suffering continued for years after the event and many of those most vulnerable (to an earthquake) remain the most vulnerable (to a pandemic) (Campbell et al., 2021). And yet a decade on, these same neighbourhoods and communities are struggling to deal with ongoing poverty, discrimination (racism and the stigma of mental injuries). Housing ownership is beyond the reach of many New Zealanders, and mental health services remain under resourced. The racism in Aotearoa New Zealand continues, and indeed was livestreamed globally by one of the world’s most successful companies as the murder of 51 Muslim New Zealanders by a white supremacist in 2019. Surely nobody, let alone people suffering mental injuries, should have to be resilient to the level of fear, degradation, and isolation of whaiora? Haami Piripi (2011) reinforces that while the intent of public policy and services has varied considerably for M¯aori, the “methodology, focus and delivery” always served the government in office. This reality is

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echoed around the Indigenous world: when Indigenous Peoples suffer, such as shown by Razack (2015) with the increasing rate of Canadian state incarceration of Indigenous Peoples, the system is not broken but merely functioning as it was intended. Indigenous communities have had their sovereign status, including the right to practice what we now label DRR, systematically and violently taken from them. ¯ Kensinger (2019, p. 48) argues that the Otautahi rebuild “acted as a temporal nexus, opening a window onto the multiple spatio-temporal regimes” that were embedded in the city. The colonial and pre-neoliberal pasts were effectively erased by the disaster event “rendering the natural hazard the source of all social problems the city experienced in its recovery”. This erasure “rendered the longer history of colonial domination and capitalist expansion that characterized Christchurch’s past as inconsequential to the social vulnerability experienced by Christchurch residents, creating a misrecognition of the causal links between the deeper structural issues that contributed to Christchurch’s social vulnerability”. At the heart of a critical Indigenous disaster studies (CIDS) is not a cultural revelation but the dismantling and reversal of transfer between both public and private organisations who merely continue the imperial and colonial extraction of wealth from collective Indigenous worlds. While traditional M¯aori institutions and practices were deployed to great effect in the Canterbury earthquake sequence, disaster studies rarely acknowledge that culture can also present as fault lines, of ancestry, knowledge, and access. M¯aori communities provide the same challenges and rewards through “fine grained” analyses, disaggregating relevant data from existing approaches remains an aspirational goal, a flaw not necessarily solved with the latest digital research platforms (Kukutai & Cormack, 2019). Indigenous Peoples are not to be included in intersectional approaches as a uniform autochthonous presence. A decolonising agenda in CDS need not default to a cultural lens to understand how social relationships are inscribed in Indigenous lands, waters, and peoples. But if poverty and marginalisation are the key indicators of vulnerability, then M¯aori and other Indigenous Peoples will remain the most vulnerable, and more vulnerable than their ancestors, until they are economically secure.

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Conclusions Indigenous vulnerabilities are the flip-side of non-Indigenous resilience. But pan-Indigenous descriptions of Indigenous disaster experiences gloss over the fundamental identities of Indigenous Peoples, ignoring the diversity of communities and masking wider Indigenous societal dynamics that theoretically underpin the much lauded resilience. For Indigenous Peoples and their myriad communities, while sovereignty is vital to their security and well-being, this sovereignty is very specific to particular groups and locations, and not others. Disaggregating these experiences in a way meaningful to Indigenous Peoples is the sine qua non of recognizing and responding to their disasters. While IK have much to contribute in DRR, the sheer mobility of Indigenous communities in the twenty-first century and their growing urban demographics challenge how knowledge is conceived and utilised. If we see the ongoing vulnerability of Indigenous Peoples as not a failure of neoliberalism but the epitome of its success, then opening discursive space for IK runs the risk of diluting efforts in transferring political-economic power. CDS can, indeed must, do more than attach “Indigenous” as a sign of critique. However, by beginning with the original risk managers of a hazardscape, perhaps disaster studies can agree on a unifying ethic.

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CHAPTER 6

Rethinking Community Resilience: Critical Reflections on the Last 10 Years ¯ of the Otautahi Christchurch Recovery and On-Going Disasters Shinya Uekusa

and Raven Cretney

A City Responding to a Decade of Compounding Disasters How does a city recover from a decade of compounding disasters?1 The ¯ ¯ city of Otautahi Christchurch (Otautahi hereafter) has experienced waves 1 Please see Chapters 1 and 2 for the definition of disaster used in critical disaster studies.

S. Uekusa (B) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] R. Cretney School of Social Sciences, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_6

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of disasters since the Canterbury earthquake sequence, including repeated floods, the 2017 Port Hills bushfire, the 2019 white supremacist terror attacks and then, as with the rest of the world, the recent COVID-19 ¯ global pandemic. Some Otautahi communities are also facing slowonset disasters such as river and groundwater pollution (Wynyard in this volume) and unfolding sea-level rise. Exacerbating the impacts from these disasters, the city has suffered from (consequent) social and economic challenges such as working-age population exodus, limited economic growth, higher unemployment, widening income inequality, business closures and increased mental health issues (i.e. heightened depression, substance abuse, domestic violence, PTSD among adolescents) (Bakema et al., 2017; Beaglehole et al., 2019; McClure, 2016; McCrone, 2013; McLennan, 2016; Rowney et al., 2014). Communities, like individuals, have responded to these disasters in a myriad of ways, representing a diverse array of capacities, risk and vulnerability. In this chapter, we seek to explore how these responses to the earthquakes intersect with ideas of community resilience and the nature of consecutive and on-going crises.

¯ Otautahi as a Unique Laboratory for Understanding and Rethinking Community Resilience ¯ Otautahi has experienced more than just a typical “second disaster” ¯ (Lameire et al., 1997). As noted, what makes Otautahi a unique laboratory for understanding community resilience and collective responses to disaster is that the city has experienced waves of disasters. Consequently, the news media has reported that “chronic toxic stress” and other mental health issues (including related domestic violence, substance abuse and ¯ suicides) have significantly increased in post-quake Otautahi (Beaglehole et al., 2019; McClure, 2016; McLennan, 2016). Indeed, the change in tone from the post-earthquake mental health wellbeing campaign, known as the “All Right?” Campaign2 —from “be strong, Christchurch!” to “it’s 2 The All Right? Campaign is to support the psychosocial recovery of Canterbury ¯ and Otautahi residents and is a collaboration between Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB) and the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand (please visit https://www. allright.org.nz/ for more details).

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OK not to be OK. It’s OK to ask for help in down times”—captures ¯ the reality of the Otautahi recovery over the last 10 years. There was once the dream of a “new beginning” to build back better (BBB) (see Matthewman & Byrd in this volume). Nonetheless, it is unrealistic to ¯ expect Otautahi residents to be resilient for such a long period of time and to so many adversities. This shift in framing sheds light on the problematic dynamics of community resilience campaigns and prompts the need for a radical re-conceptualisation of what community resilience means and how we foster and maintain this capacity. The call for resilience is a common refrain in policy for disasters, hazards and social issues in many countries (Frerks et al., 2011, p. 106). The concept is broad, widely applied, and has been subject to extensive critique for a lack of attention, clarity and nuance when integrating and considering complex environmental, social and political dynamics (see, e.g., Manyena, 2006; Tierney, 2014). The contested nature of resilience emerges from the concept’s history in multiple disciplines, and thus multiple epistemological standpoints of the world, politics and power (Alexander, 2013). Thus, resilience is mobilised and enacted in numerous contexts, be it engineering, ecological, psychological, social, socio-ecological, community or urban. The success of resilience as a concept is due, in part, to this malleability and fluidity. However, from this arises challenges, both in the application of resilience, as well as the political and social implications of such a diffuse concept. Community resilience is widely considered and utilised within the disaster context, with buy-in across different scales of response and recovery (Aldrich, 2012; Berkes & Ross, 2013; Cretney, 2014; Uekusa, 2018). However, as with other forms of resilience, there is frequently a lack of clarity and consistency in how the concept is understood and applied (Alexander, 2013; Manyena, 2006; Tierney, 2014). Broadly, community resilience refers to the ability of localised areas to respond, cope and adapt to disturbances in a collective manner (Berkes & Ross, 2013; Magis, 2010). The history of resilience thought, however, raises challenges for how we understand the politics of disaster response and recovery, particularly at the community scale. Critics of resilience have noted that the origins of resilience thought in the disciplines of engineering and ecology have constrained the ability for resilience to critically

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consider and operationalise ideas of social and political theory (Alexander, 2013; Tierney, 2014). Central to this critique is the absence or lack of consideration of dynamics of power, justice and politicisation (Cretney, 2014; Uekusa, 2018). However, resilience has proven a malleable concept that has also seen extensive uptake at the grassroots-scale through organ¯ isations aiming to achieve social and political change in Otautahi such as Lytteleton Timebanks, community gardens and Transition Towns (Carlton & Vallance, 2017; Thornley et al., 2015). We do not intend to exhaustively cover critiques of the many variants of resilience. This has been done elsewhere (see, e.g., Chandler & Reid, 2016; Manyena, 2006; Tierney, 2014). Instead, we want to build on this work to critically explore how discourses and practices of community ¯ resilience were specifically experienced in the city of Otautahi following the Canterbury earthquake sequence and subsequent disasters. We are particularly interested in future of community resilience in the city and the potential hope or pitfalls of the continued use of this framing for policy at a local scale. We begin by briefly outlining the diversity of communityled responses to the Canterbury earthquake sequence before turning to a discussion of how communities engaged with ideas of resilience. Through this discussion, we explore how, in these contexts, the concept has been resisted, reclaimed and re-worked at the grassroots-scale before concluding with a discussion on the limits of resilience and the possibilities going forward. Throughout the chapter, we make reference to our own empirical qualitative studies conducted as part of our doctoral research projects: in total, our two separate studies conducted in the last 10 years, included personal observations and in-depth interviews with 45 community leaders, local residents and official authorities involved with ¯ the Otautahi rebuild.

Community-Led Responses to the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence Community-scale responses and emergent solidarity are frequently recognised in post-disaster contexts (Aldrich, 2012; Cretney & Bond, 2014; Vallance & Carlton, 2015). Following disasters, experiences are shared,

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and adversities contribute to collective bonds. Neighbours and communities are often the first port of call for support and assistance, and these shared-identities, collective responses and activism are well documented (Jencson, 2001; Klinenberg, 2003; Solnit, 2009). Contradicting the disaster mythology of mass panic (Fischer, 2002), research shows that disaster situations do not conform to media stereotypes of chaos and violence. Instead, disaster altruism, solidarity, spontaneous social bonds, high levels of mutual help, resource sharing, community action, community spiritedness, volunteerism and humanitarianism are commonly observed (Aldrich, 2012; Jencson, 2001; Matthewman, 2015; Matthewman & Uekusa, 2021; Solnit, 2009). These sorts of spontaneous community-led responses to immediate ¯ disaster were widespread across Otautahi following both the 2010 Darfield earthquake and the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, as well as subsequent large aftershocks. One of the most well-known examples of this was the Student Volunteer Army (SVA) (led by then-university student Sam Johnson), as well as the Farmy Army, who organised and coordinated volunteers to respond to immediate needs on the ground, such as the removal of silt from liquefaction (Carlton & Mills, 2017; Hayward & Johnson in this volume). In the longer term, a number of creative and political organisations and initiatives sprung up to meet the (temporary) needs of communities, which were unmet by economic and social services (Wesener, 2015; see also Phibbs et al. in this volume). This included the experimental and iconic transitional urbanism projects of Gap Filler that took empty city lots and transformed them into interactive public spaces and sites for meeting and interacting with others. Iwi and hap¯u were central to the community-led response, both in the immediate aftermath and through longer-term recovery and regeneration. Marae were central to offering support and care for communities impacted by the earthquakes (Lambert, 2014; Phibbs et al., 2015). Kenney and Phibbs (2015; see also Phibbs et al. in this volume) discuss how these approaches show the value of culturally informed approaches to disaster management and the important role of M¯aori risk management through the M¯aori Recovery Network (MRN) that was shaped by the kaupapa of “aroha nui ki te tangata (extend love to all people), united and directed action” (p. 48). However, Phibbs et al. (2015) have also noted that these organisations faced challenges when interacting with the top-down immediate response led by the government which combined

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with a “lack of attention to M¯aori networks and resources, operated to marginalise and exclude” (p. 74). Like these Indigenous communities, (im)migrant and refugee communities are generally believed to be more vulnerable to disasters than the general populations due to existing social oppression (see, e.g., Blaikie et al., 2014; Cutter et al., 2003; Donner & Rodriguez, 2008). Migrant ¯ and refugee groups in Otautahi were not an exception to this statement; following the earthquake, they were socially marginalised and physically isolated, particularly, because of language and cultural barriers (Christchurch Migrant Inter-Agency Group, 2011; Garces-Ozanne et al. in this volume; Marlowe & Bogen, 2015; Uekusa & Matthewman, 2017). However, research shows that these communities self-organised and generally demonstrated remarkable collective responses (Marlowe, 2013; Osman et al., 2012; Wylie, 2012). Uekusa and Matthewman (2017) critically investigated the source of these communities’ successful self-organisation and community resilience and argued that, as with the example of the M¯aori communities’ response, these socially disadvantaged communities had durable social networks already embedded prior to the Canterbury earthquake sequence. This is because these social bonds were built as their main support system to rely on, and collectively cope with, the everyday social oppression in their pre/post-migration. Thus, although there were aspects of resourcelessness in these communities, their remarkable collective response was neither contingent nor surprising; they had dealt with “everyday disasters”—social disadvantages resulting from racism, sexism, economic inequalities and other forms of structural discrimination (Matthewman, 2015, pp. 129–132)—and they relied on each other to get by even before they migrated to Aotearoa New Zealand. These examples demonstrate that their community resilience did not emerge in response to the unique disaster situations triggered by the earthquakes; their communities were collectively responding to adversities on a daily basis. Thus, community-led responses are not a unique disaster phenomenon observed only in disaster contexts; they may be founded on community resilience that has been a long-standing everyday norm for some.

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“A Word That I’ve Heard Used Many Times Over, Mainly by Political People”: Re-working Resilience from the Grassroots ¯ In our work in Otautahi during the recovery from the earthquakes, we encountered many perspectives on the idea of resilience. Resilience was frequently seen as a deeply politicised concept by many members of the community. Resilience was considered as being a “buzzword”, “overused” and having a “cringe factor”. For groups with experience of marginalisation, such as migrant and refugee communities, resilience may be a challenging and confusing idea as they are resilient because of their experience of vulnerability. There was also the concerning experience of people who found the push from government and authorities for resilience in the city as disempowering, and something that undermined their ability to seek help and admit to struggling. As one study participant recalled, “it almost puts pressure on you to feel like you can’t say, ‘I’m actually not that strong. I’m not coping’” (see Du Plessis in this collection for more examples). This participant’s comment also reminds us of the tendency that a strong emphasis on “community” in community resilience-thinking can easily obscure members’ individual-level experiences, struggles and needs. In other words, within remarkably resilient communities, voices of the disadvantaged and excluded, who are less resourced to be as resilient as their counterparts, often remain unheard (see also Lambert in this volume). Others, especially those working in the community sector, acknowledged the issues with resilience as overused and frustrating, but felt like the term had value for recognising the importance of collective responses and community capacity. For these people, resilience was about coping with challenges: it creates “opportunities for positive emotions and experiences” and provides “people with alternatives” such as building better physical and social infrastructure in response to the disasters (see Klinenberg, 2018 for “social infrastructure”). Resilience as a concept also enabled some people to see their community as an ecosystem, which connected people to each other and the environment. However, aspects of the government approach to resilience were also questioned, particularly in relation to the appointment of an engineer as the Chief Resilience Officer for Christchurch City Council (CCC) and whether this would reinforce the idea that resilience was just about physical infrastructure, and less about social infrastructure—ideas of collectivity and community.

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Perspectives on community resilience in the city were shaped significantly by the political response to the earthquakes and the approach taken by the government to public involvement and participation in the wider processes of recovery in the city. Many residents and communities felt side-lined and marginalised by the top-down, command-and-control approach which saw a centralisation of power with the government agency, Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Agency (CERA), through legislation that also resulted in an unprecedented transfer of parliamentary power to the executive (Gjerde, 2017; Pawson in this collection; Simons, ¯ 2016). As Hayward (2013) has noted in the Otautahi context, resilience is closely linked to the ideological drivers of this sort of centralised disaster response and recovery. In this sense, resilience can be utilised to depoliticise and justify urgent action that sacrifices democratic participation for the sake of bouncing back and ensuring “certainty”. Such a focus on the bounce back discourse of resilience was reflected in comments by community members who found it difficult to articulate their sense of loss and frustration in the face of a barrage of messages about resilience. One of the local community members described their frustration: The definition of resilience changed and it became a political word to prop us up. We’ve got all these problems, “Oh you’re so resilient,” and like, “No, actually we’re up to our ankles, we’re up to our waists in water and that’s not resilient.” Okay we’re still alive. We’re surviving but we’re certainly not thriving.

Other study participants also shared a similar sense of frustration and anger for being labelled resilient without having access to adequate resources, or being given the option to not be resilient in the face of adversity. Such valorisation of individuals and self-reliance is a common criticism of resilience discourses more widely (Joseph, 2013; O’Malley, 2010) and particularly contributes to the depoliticisation of disaster recovery (Sovacool et al., 2018; Wood, 2016). The top-down approach to earthquake recovery initiated by the government, compounded by pre-existing social marginalisation of many groups, posed further challenges to community resilience ideas for those who faced exacerbated vulnerabilities, which were sometimes obscured by the exemplary image of the city as resilient. However, as we have touched on, resistance to these ideas and discourses of resilience as selfreliance and centralised government control were numerous throughout

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the initial response and recovery in the city. Much of the resistance to resilience featured approaches that focussed on empowering communities and enabling people to collectively respond to the disasters and participate in their on-going recovery. In this way, resilience was sometimes reclaimed as a focus for grassroots transformation and even a normal response to wider societal and environmental issues such as systemic racism and climate change. This type of resilience at the everyday scale took many forms, from the role of timebanks and community gardens mentioned earlier, to projects that specifically aimed to build community resilience for urban food production (Fig. 6.1). One of the hopeful challenges to the dominant framing of resilience was the way in which everyday scale community projects provided space for community empowerment and the visioning of alternative futures. ¯ akaro Projects such as the Food Resilience Network and associated Ot¯ Orchard provided avenues for exploring ideas and practices for building

¯ Fig. 6.1 Urban community garden in Central Otautahi (Photo by Steve Matthewman, 2018)

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transformational alternatives to the status quo (Cretney, 2019; Waretini, 2016). As discussed widely in the disaster literature, crises can shed light on previously obscured dynamics of society and politics, creating opportunities for activating community potentials and social change (Solnit, 2009; also Cameron in this volume). Everyday scale, grassroots recovery projects that drew on ideas of resilience provided further space to explore these opportunities for creating a different society in the present. These examples represent the potential for a more radical political project that aims to build on the ideas of transformation and inclusiveness which sit at the core of some conceptualisations of resilience. In this sense, different articulations of resilience can both foreclose and open space for politics in the disaster response and recovery.

Waves of Disasters and the Limits of Resilience It is important to recognise that the use, and reality, of resilience in the ¯ Otautahi context has not been static. Over time, the use of resilience ideas in the city has shifted, changed or disappeared. As Langer and Wegner (2018) noted, community response to the 2017 Port Hill wildfire “were dominated by outpourings of empathy for those adversely affected with themes of rallying and uniting support” (p. 79); increased volunteerism and support system were partly due to the city’s history of resilience following the Canterbury earthquake sequence. However, resilience has more recently become a less common feature in the land¯ scape of Otautahi. Particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic, we saw the term resilience used less frequently throughout the media and academic discussion, especially, as Aotearoa New Zealand went into a strict Level 4 lockdown in 2020. At the beginning of responding to the pandemic, we witnessed remarkable global resilience and some positives coming out of this adversity (Monbiot, 2020). However, we soon saw evidence of the limits of resilience ideas and discourse. Indeed, an interview we conducted in 2021, the All Right? Campaign community health promotion strategists never mentioned the term resilience (or even vulnerability) in their reflections on the last eight years of their work. ¯ Harris (2020) reported that Otautahi, the city of resilience, needs to embrace the tiresome burden of the tag again: “The moniker that was once a badge of pride has now grown tiresome, a wearying arm around the shoulders that no-one wants anymore” (para. 1). In fact, technological

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disasters and contagious diseases like COVID-19 can not only create outgroup antagonism, they can also weaken the bonds of social integration within a group or community (Rao & Greve, 2018). As some of the community members we spoke to commented after the earthquakes, ideas of resilience can act to narrow space for dissent and feelings of discontent. People in the disaster-affected communities might not have the “option B” of not being (or taking a break from being) resilient. It is not uncommon for community residents to sometimes exhibit “burnout” as they need to remain resilient in the face of perpetual crises (Donoghue & Edmiston, 2020). Making matters worse, ¯ many Otautahi residents have been fatigued due to the years of litigation (e.g. insurance claims for damage to buildings and the lack of the legal process to support claimants) (see Finn and Toomery in this collec¯ tion). Indeed, these experiences with the waves of adversity in Otautahi for the last 10 years pose significant voids in resilience-thinking. As such, in conceptualising community resilience more broadly and critically, the notion that there are limits to resilience has been missing. Individuals and communities may be resilient until their resilience reaches a “tippingpoint”. It is an important argument, yet few in the social science context have, so far, explored and clearly conceptualised such a theoretical notion (see, e.g., Folke et al., 2011; Payne et al., 2019; Wilson, 2012). Partici¯ pants from the Otautahi refugee communities commented on how others in the community had moved away to other parts of Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia where they had families, relatives and/or friends in order to avoid further traumatic experiences and seek better economic opportunities (see also Marlowe, 2015). This was even more evident ¯ following the 2019 terrorist attacks: many refugees in Otautahi experienced heightened anxiety and the feeling of constant terror (Emhail, 2019). The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and consequent lock¯ down on Otautahi communities are yet to be known. However, some early quantitative psychological studies have already shown a significant increase in distress, anxiety and family violence among New Zealanders during the lockdown, particularly for young people (e.g. Every-Palmer et al., 2020). Resilience tipping-points may vary, depending on individuals’ and communities’ multi-layered coping/adaptive capacities and contextualised resources (and obstacles) to be resilient (Uekusa, 2018). However, while resilience as a form of transformation and adaptation facilitates

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¯ grassroot-level activism and community engagement, the Otautahi experience particularly shows that, especially without proper distribution of resources and support, limits to resilience are likely when communities go through the delayed and limited recovery from a single event and cope with subsequent disasters. Thus, community resilience is commonly misconceptualised; we started with a false promise. As Manyena (2006) stresses, although communities and individuals do not cease to adapt to the new normal, “resilience is arguably about people’s capacity far beyond the minimum of being able to cope” (p. 438). Then, as critical disaster studies (CDS) scholars, to develop community resilience as a transformative ability in a more practical, realistic and sustainable way, we need to carefully consider the challenges, dynamics and politics of resilience discourse and practice as experienced by communities affected by various forms of, and waves of, disasters. Disregarding the limits of resilience is another way of mystifying the power of community and human resourcefulness in order to justify the neoliberalisation of community resilience and the consequent responsibilisation of communities and individuals (Chandler & Reid, 2016; Vilcan, 2017).

Conclusion In this chapter, we explored how community responses to the Canterbury earthquake sequence have intersected with ideas of community resilience, wider political dynamics and the nature of on-going crises. In many ways, ¯ Otautahi has been, and will continue to be, a laboratory for understanding and rethinking community resilience. Resilience has been overused and is commonly seen as frustrating, but the term has value for recognising the importance of collective responses and community capacity. Indeed, ¯ consistently experiencing and responding to on-going disasters, Otautahi has transformed, and its residents have been adapting to the new normal. We agree with Ciaran Fox (2021), a mental health promotion strategist at All Rights? Campaign, who stressed that, after the decade of disaster ¯ experiences, people in Otautahi are logically more resilient than ever to the future adversities (see Uekusa & Matthewman, 2017 for this logic of “earned strength”). In fact, due to Canterbury earthquake sequence experiences, its responses to the bushfires, terrorist attacks and COVID19 pandemic crisis have been unsurprisingly remarkable and exemplary. However, as emphasised in this chapter, such a positive narrative can also obscure the complexity and limits of community resilience, and

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the increased social vulnerability that some people and communities in ¯ Otautahi have faced, and will continue to face. Thus, the CDS lens (see Chapters 1 and 2 for details) is crucial to enable us as disaster researchers to carefully reconceptualise community resilience, incorporating critical voices from the field (see Chapters 8–12) and taking into consideration the larger social forces and the complexity of disaster governance. The term “community resilience” should be used to respect and to understand how communities can cope with, and recover from, disasters. However, ¯ as the community members in Otautahi remind us, there is a need for all experiences of disasters and recovery to be present and heard, not just those that reinforce a positive message of resilience without limits.

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CHAPTER 7

Every Last Drop: The Freshwater “Disaster” in Canterbury Matthew Wynyard

Introduction The field of disaster studies has, until recently, fixed its focus on the very sorts of “immediate”, “visible” and “spectacular” disasters that are explored throughout the chapters of this volume. Much less attention has been paid to the kinds of slow-onset and extensive environmental disasters that are caused by the plundering and degrading of natural systems and resources (Matthewman, 2015). Indeed, amid Canterbury’s decade of spectacle and excess, of “hyperbole” and “rupture” (Matthewman, 2015, pp. 6, 130), another slower disaster has also unfolded, the systematic and ongoing degradation of the region’s freshwater resources associated with the rapid conversion of agricultural land from sheep and wheat to highintensity dairy. Slow violence can often take the greatest toll (ibid.) and

M. Wynyard (B) School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_7

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indeed, the contamination of freshwater in the Canterbury region ranks among the worst environmental disasters in the history of Aotearoa New Zealand (Joy, 2019, p. 35). On 30 March 2010, New Zealand’s then Minister for the Environment, for Climate Change and former Minister of Conservation, the Hon Dr Nick Smith, took the extraordinary step of removing from office the 14 democratically elected councillors responsible for protecting and managing Canterbury’s vast and, until quite recently, pristine freshwater resources (see Gorman & Watkins, 2010). Under the powers of the Environment Canterbury Act 2010, the elected members of the Environment Canterbury (ECan) board were sacked, future elections in 2010 and 2013 were scrapped and the rights of Cantabrians to appeal to the Environment Court were removed (Environment Canterbury Act, 2010, pp. 7, 11, 21). It was an unprecedented affront to the democratic process in Aotearoa New Zealand, breaching Article 25 of the United Nation’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1966) and drawing condemnation from the Human Rights Commission (Fig. 7.1) (Young, 2012). Full democracy and regulatory oversight were not restored to the people of Canterbury until 2019 (ECan, 2018), by which time significant damage had been done, hundreds of thousands of additional cows were grazing on newly irrigated Canterbury pastures, and the region’s freshwater quality was in steady decline (Wynyard, 2019a, p. 37). The Canterbury region’s decade of spectacle and excess was also a decade of diminished environmental regulation and rapid agricultural intensification leading to an ecological and human-health crisis (Joy, 2019), an environmental catastrophe driven by industrial agriculture and the relentless pursuit of profits from the land (Wynyard, 2016, 2019a). This chapter details the comparatively “slow” disaster of freshwater degradation in the Canterbury region. It begins by developing a theoretical lens with which to view the freshwater crisis in Canterbury that draws on Marx’s (1976) theory of primitive accumulation. Next, it catalogues the rapid shift from sheep and wheat to intensive dairy farming and highlights the devastating anti-democratic, environmental and human-health impacts associated with this shift (Wynyard, 2016, 2019a). Finally, this chapter situates this “disaster” among other “low visibility” catastrophes that have, until very recently, escaped the attention of disaster scholarship (Matthewman, 2015, pp. 129–148).

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Fig. 7.1 This cairn is constructed of boulders from surrounding rivers and placed here by citizens concerned that democratically evolved protections of these waterways have been broken (Photo by Steve Matthewman, 2018)

Back to the Beginning: Neoliberalism and Primitive Accumulation It is perhaps misleading to suggest, as I have above, that the sacking of the ECan board precipitated the freshwater “disaster” in Canterbury. Rather, the removal of regulatory oversight and the prioritisation of the economic over competing imperatives can best be viewed as part of a much wider and longer process of neoliberalisation that has, in recent decades, fundamentally altered the social, economic and political direction of Aotearoa New Zealand including the ways in which agricultural land is used. This relentless process of neoliberalisation has also impacted on the shape and pace of the response to and recovery from the Canterbury earthquake

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sequence. Indeed, the real disaster is capitalism itself, its most destructive tendencies sharpened and laid bare by decades of commodification, enclosure, deregulation and the removal of protections. The systematic degradation and enclosure of erstwhile unowned or collectively owned freshwater resources can be explained through reference to Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation. Marx recognises that nature provides people with much more than economic utility, it gives sustenance, safety and security. Indeed, Marx argues that the entire capitalist system hinges on the separation of people from nature and with it, any means of subsistence or survival other than wage labour. Marx concludes the first volume of his magnum opus with the observation that the capitalist system comes into being “dripping head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx, 1976, p. 926). In part eight of Capital, Marx outlines the various forms of “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder” and “force” that are required to severe the connection between people and land (Marx, 1976, p. 874). For Marx, the capitalist system requires a point of departure, an initial shock of violence to create the preconditions necessary for capital accumulation. Primitive accumulation describes the often bloody processes through which long-settled peoples are “suddenly and forcibly” stripped of their communally owned lands and natural resources. These processes have a dual effect: they create a class of workers divorced from any means of subsistence other than wage labour on the one hand, while simultaneously incorporating land, soil and other natural resources into the capitalist system on the other (Marx, 1976; Wynyard, 2019a, p. 13, 2019b, p. 3). Marx treated primitive accumulation as a predominantly historical process, a burst of violent dispossession that characterised the genesis of capitalism and that would recede as the system matured. This violence would not disappear altogether, but would only re-emerge “in exceptional cases” (Marx, 1976, p. 899). In recent decades and in the context of relentless neoliberalisation, marketisation and the commodification of everything and everywhere, many scholars have followed Rosa Luxemburg in her contention that the blood and dirt of capitalism’s nascence are ever present (Luxemburg, 1951, p. 456). Indeed, a number of contemporary scholars have shown that many of the features of primitive accumulation that Marx describes, the commodification and privatisation of land, the capture and enclosure of natural resources and the exclusion of Indigenous populations have remained persistent features of capitalism

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throughout its history (see de Angelis, 2001; Federici, 2004; Harvey, 2005). Viewed this way, neoliberalism marks a return to the conditions of predation and avarice that characterised the dawn of the capitalist system. The neoliberal project is a large-scale reorganisation of the accumulation process, underway globally since the mid-1970s, predicted on the restoration and proliferation of enclosure, of primitive accumulation, as a central strategy of accumulation (Midnight Notes Collective, 1990, p. 3). The enclosure of erstwhile unowned freshwater resources for massive irrigation schemes in Canterbury and for the private benefit of those with a stake in the dairy industry is a clear, contemporary example of primitive accumulation. So too is the systematic degradation of freshwater such that it is not fit for any purpose other than intensive agriculture. As Harvey notes, “[t]he escalating depletion of the global environmental commons (land, air, water) and proliferating habitat degradations that preclude anything but capital intensive agricultural production have…resulted from the commodification of nature in all its forms” (Harvey, 2003, p. 148). As will be shown below, the waters of Canterbury are increasingly unsuitable for drinking, for contact recreation or as a source of mahinga kai (food resources). What were once pristine freshwater environments are now polluted, their aesthetic qualities diminished, the myriad species dependent upon them imperilled. What were once the taonga (treasures, prized resources) of Ng¯ai Tahu, preserved and passed on for future generations are now eutrophic, turbid and increasingly dangerous to human—and other—health.

Neoliberalisation and the Canterbury Dairy Boom For much of its post-colonial history, sheep and grain remained the mainstays of the Canterbury economy, with wheat, barley, oats, lamb, fine wool and merino being major sources of revenue for local producers (Dynes et al., 2010, pp. 1–3; Wilson, 2015, p. 8). Indeed, the Canterbury region was long thought unsuitable for dairy farming owing to relatively low rainfall (Willis, 2001, pp. 58–59, 2004, p. 68). This all began to change in the mid-1980s when the fourth Labour government implemented the most wide-ranging deregulatory reforms in the history of the New Zealand economy. Before 1984, the agricultural sector was protected by a raft of governmental interventions including price supports, production subsidies, interest rates concessions and state control

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of research, finance and marketing (Cloke, 1989; Wallace, 2014, pp. 11– 14; Wynyard, 2016, pp. 236–244, 2019a, p. 22). When Labour took office, this complex framework of supports was suddenly and unceremoniously withdrawn leaving farmers in “pain, anguish and misery”, “battered and bruised” (Wallace, 2014, pp. 11, 12) and totally exposed to the icy winds of global capitalism (Wynyard, 2019a, p. 22). Farmers found themselves trapped between rising costs and falling incomes (Wallace, 2014, p. 9). Indeed, net incomes for many farmers declined by close to a third (Cloke, 1989, pp. 41–42; Wynyard, 2019a, p. 22). This was increasingly true for sheep farmers who, from 1990 onwards, were also contending with declining real wool prices (Statistics New Zealand Tatauranga Aotearoa [Stats NZ], 2011; Willis, 2001, pp. 55–65; Wynyard, 2019a, pp. 22–23). Without the protection of subsidies, large areas of what was once sheep country became uneconomical to farm. The total number of sheep, of sheep farms and of land given over to sheep farming all declined markedly between 1983 and 1993 (Willis, 2001, pp. 57–58; Wynyard, 2019a, p. 23), establishing a lasting trend that has continued until the present day (Stats NZ, 2018, 2019a). Correspondingly, the number of dairy cows, dairy farms and total land used for dairy farming increased steadily between 1983 and 1993 (Willis, 2001, pp. 57–58), a trend that has accelerated significantly since then (Stats NZ, 2019a). The impetus for this shift to dairy lay in its greater profitability and in the regular cash-flow provided by (twice) daily milking, an attractive proposition given the “pain, anguish and misery” of neoliberalisation. Between 1994 and 2019, dairy cattle numbers have increased nationally from 3.8 million to 6.5 million, much of that growth has occurred in the South Island, Canterbury in particular, where approximately, 1.1 million dairy cows have been added to the land since 1994 (Stats NZ, 2019a; see also LIC Dairy NZ, 2018/2019). Dairy farmers in Aotearoa New Zealand, without the aid of subsidies and other protections, were forced to compete in global markets and against subsidised producers in the EU, the US and Canada. As such, they were left with very little choice but to turn to increasingly intensive production. The massive surge in dairy cows and dairy farms was accompanied by an even more massive surge in the use of inputs including water, feed and synthetic nitrate fertiliser. Between 1990 and 2015, nitrate fertiliser use in Aotearoa New Zealand increased by 627%, from 59,000 tonnes to 429,000 tonnes (Joy, 2019, p. 34). In the Canterbury plains, a region with low rainfall—intensive dairy farming also

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requires irrigation on a scale unprecedented in Aotearoa New Zealand. Many Canterbury dairy farmers have turned to enormous pivot irrigators with rotating arms hundreds of meters in length in order to irrigate their fields. This has necessitated the removal of thousands of tree shelterbelts which had been planted to prevent the prevailing northwest winds from drying out the soil. Without the shelterbelts, strong northwest winds can dry the moisture from the soil faster than the irrigators can replace it (Joy, 2019, p. 33). “From 1999–2006, water use increased by around 90%, and Canterbury now uses around 35 times more water than the national average…the water footprint for dairy production in Canterbury is eye wateringly large: many tens of thousands of litres for every kilogram of milk solids” (Joy, 2019, p. 33; also Hamilton, 2008). Indeed, around 10,000 litres of water is required per-cow, per-day on many of the irrigation-dependent dairy farms in Canterbury (Hamilton, 2008). Prominent Ng¯ai Tahu rangatira (chief), T¯a Tipene O’Regan, has suggested the economics of exporting water make more sense than exporting commodity dairy products (McCrone, 2018). Animal stocking rates and herd sizes are also significantly larger in Canterbury than in any other dairying region in Aotearoa New Zealand. The average size of a dairy herd in Aotearoa New Zealand is 435 cows. In Canterbury, the figure is much higher, almost double, at 804 cows in North Canterbury and 785 cows in South Canterbury. In North Canterbury, the stocking rate or average number of cows per hectare is 3.44, in South Canterbury it is 3.41, this too is markedly higher than the national average of 2.84 cows per hectare (LIC Dairy NZ, 2018/2019, p. 16). The environmental and human-health impact of this push to increasingly intensive dairy farming in the Canterbury region can only be described as catastrophic. Canterbury soils are stony, light and very permeable—large dairy herds, intensively stocked on such soils means that a large amount of nitrate in the form of cow urine is rapidly leached through the soil and into aquifers and rivers (Joy, 2019, p. 33), this is particularly problematic in an arid region such as Canterbury which lacks the requisite rainfall to dilute leached nitrates to a safe level. Indeed, Joy (2019, p. 33) notes, at least 25 times more rainfall would be required to adequately dilute the current nitrate levels. Worse, nitrate can take decades to travel through soil and groundwater, meaning a significant lag between pollution activity and detection. Nitrate levels may continue to rise for decades before any improvements to contemporary farming practices or water safety take effect (ECan, 2020b).

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Scientists have long known the potential ill-effects of intensive dairy farming on freshwater ecosystems. Indeed, in the mid-1980s, a number of studies pointed to agricultural runoff as a significant source of water pollution in Aotearoa New Zealand (White, 1982; Wilcock, 1986). By the early 1990s, this was well known to both the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) and the Ministry for Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF).1 A joint report published in 1993 found that many lowland rivers and streams in agriculturally developed catchments were in a poor condition with excessive concentrations of dissolved inorganic nitrogen, dissolved reactive phosphorous, suspended sediment concentrations, turbid baseflows and faecal contamination. Many waterways were found to be unsuitable for recreation, water supply, irrigation or even industrial use, their aesthetic value greatly diminished (Smith et al., 1993, p. vii). One notable exception to this rather stark assessment was the Canterbury region, where, at the time, dairying was largely concentrated in the Ellesmere District near ¯ Otautahi Christchurch (Smith et al., 1993, pp. 32, 182). Major Canterbury rivers including the Waiau Toa, Waiau Uwha, Hurunui, Rakahuri, Waimakariri, Rakaia, Hakatere, Rangitata and Opihi all have their headwaters in the Southern Alps, their catchments covered in native bush, the lower reaches, at the time, flowed through areas used predominantly for sheep farming, cropping and horticulture. Nitrate, phosphorous and faecal coliform concentrations indicated that the water quality in the upper reaches of the Waimakariri2 was very high, the concentrations of each did increase downriver but the overall water quality in the lower reaches was not believed to have deteriorated substantially (Smith et al., 1993, p. 183). Groundwater quality in the extensive Canterbury aquifers was also shown to be very high. According to guidelines for safe drinking water published by the then Department of Health (DoH),3 the safe level of nitrates in drinking water, based on the health of bottle-fed babies, was 10 g m−3 or 10 mg/1000 ml (Smith et al., 1993, p. 70).4 Canterbury

1 In 2012, MAF became the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) Manat¯ u Ahu Matua. 2 Water quality information from the Regional Council was only available for the

Waimakariri River. 3 Now the Ministry of Health (MoH) Manat¯ u Hauora. 4 The MfE/MAF joint report uses grams per metre cubed (g m−3 ), I have opted to use

milligrams per litre (mg/1000 ml) for clarity and consistency with more recent studies.

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aquifers can be subdivided into three zones: river recharged groundwaters, shallow groundwaters5 and deep groundwaters. In both the river-recharged and deep groundwaters, nitrate levels were shown to be less than 1 mg/1000 ml, in shallow groundwaters, nitrate levels were mostly in the range of 4–8 mg/1000 ml except in the IslingtonLincoln-Burnham area where agricultural land use was most intense (Smith et al., 1993, pp. 78–79). Even there, though, nitrate concentrations did not exceed the level deemed safe by the DoH. This contrasted sharply with areas in which intensive dairy farming was more prevalent such as in Waikato, where the median value of nitrates in groundwater was 14 mg/1000 ml and maximum concentrations ranged from 33– 35 mg/1000 ml in the Hamilton-Cambridge area to 28–67 mg/1000 ml in Te Kowhai (Smith et al., 1993, pp. 72–73). The authors of the MfE/MAF joint report did note that agriculture was the most likely source of nitrate likely to affect groundwater quality and that intensive irrigation on the Canterbury plains had the potential to raise nitrate concentrations beyond the safe level of 10 mg/1000 ml (Smith et al., 1993, p. 79). The MfE/MAF report was published in 1993 before the dairy boom took effect. As noted above, Statistics NZ estimate that an additional 1.1 million dairy cows have been added to the land in Canterbury since 1994. Water usage for irrigation has increased exponentially over the same period and, in 2017, the South Canterbury District Health Board began to advise families, and pregnant women in particular, to monitor their drinking water in the light of potentially dangerous levels of nitrates recorded in a large number of Canterbury wells (McPhee, 2017).

A Decade of Disaster: “Dirty Dairy” and the Waters of Canterbury In 1994, there were 212,492 dairy cattle in the Canterbury region. By 2004, that number had more than doubled to 599,643, and by 2014, it had more than doubled again to 1,333,220. The steepest increase was in the period immediately after the ECan board was sacked, an additional 394,767 dairy cows and heifers were added to the land in Canterbury between 2010 and 2014 (MfE, 2018). Among its core functions, ECan is tasked with processing resource consent applications. Under

5 Down to 60 m below the water table.

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New Zealand’s Resource Management Act (RMA) 1991, individuals and organisations must apply for a resource consent for any activity that might negatively impact on the environment. With regard to freshwater, no individual or organisation is allowed to take, use, dam or divert any water without an approved resource consent from a local authority such as ECan. Nor can any individual or organisation discharge any contaminant into water or onto land in such a way as might allow that contaminant to enter water (RMA, 1991, Sections 14–15). In the years leading up to the sacking of the ECan board, the body had shown some reluctance in processing a large number of consent applications associated with the dairy boom and associated irrigation schemes. This reluctance was at odds with priorities of the then National government which was committed to “unlocking resources” and, where necessary, removing “regulations that may be preventing natural resources”, including Canterbury freshwater, “being used most productively” (Key, 2010). In keeping with these priorities, National had former deputy Prime Minister, Wyatt Creech, launch an investigation into ECan’s handling of consent applications. Creech was director of a Matamata based dairy company, Open Country Dairy that had, at that time, been twice prosecuted for contaminating farmland and freshwater in Waikato (Wynyard, 2019a, p. 35). Open Country has subsequently been prosecuted an additional three times and has incurred the largest ever fine imposed in the Waikato region under the RMA (Piddock, 2019). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Creech et al. (2010) found that further expansion and intensification of dairying in Canterbury would be beneficial for “national well-being” and that an “enormous and unprecedented” gap existed between the capability of ECan and what is required for it to adequately manage freshwater issues (p. i). The National government took heed of Creech’s findings and, as noted above, Minister for the Environment, Nick Smith moved to sack the ECan board on March 30, 2010. At the time of the sacking, Smith’s younger brother was facing 21 charges, brought by ECan and relating to the discharge of contaminated water (Van Beynen, 2010). Without regulatory oversight, the systematic degradation of Canterbury freshwater only hastened. A 2018 study of nitrate contamination in Canterbury drinking water showed that nitrate levels in many locations exceeded 3.87 mg/1000 ml (Fish and Game New Zealand, 2018a). The 3.87 mg/1000 ml figure is significant as a recent and wide-ranging Danish study found statistically significant increased risks of colorectal cancer at drinking water levels

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above 3.87 mg/1000 ml (Schullehner et al., 2018, p. 73). Of the 114 sites tested in the Canterbury study, over half exceeded 3.87/1000 ml and, worryingly, 46 samples were above 6 mg/1000 ml (Fish and Game New Zealand, 2018a). Nitrate contamination of freshwater is also associated with Methaemoglobinaemia or Blue Baby Syndrome, a potentially fatal condition affecting newborn infants. Increased nitrate levels in the drinking water of pregnant women or when mixed with infant formula can starve newborn infants of oxygen leading to blueness around the mouth, hands and feet (Canterbury District Health Board [CDHB], 2016). World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines and New Zealand’s current Drinking Water Standards now suggest a Maximum Allowable Value (MAV) of 11.3 mg/1000 ml (see MoH, 2018). Data collected by Regional Councils and aggregated by Stats NZ shows 19% of 433 sites tested nationwide failed to meet the nitrate/nitrogen standards for drinking water. Many of the sites with high nitrogen concentrations and where concentrations are “very likely worsening” are located in the Canterbury region (Stats NZ, 2019b). Indeed, recent testing of the Waikirikiri (Selwyn) River has found polluting nitrate levels have increased by as much as 50% in the space of just 22 months (Young, 2021). Stats NZ also found that, nationwide, 68% of sites tested failed to meet the Escherichia coli drinking water standards. A number of the sites where median concentrations of E. coli in groundwater are “very likely worsening” are located in the Canterbury region (Stats NZ, 2019b). Testing of the Rakahuri, Waikirikiri and Rangitata Rivers, popular for fishing and swimming and as a source of mahinga kai for Ng¯ai Tahu, also showed “disturbing” and potentially harmful levels of E. coli contamination. Results showed the presence of E. coli, antibiotic resistant E. coli and shiga-toxin producing E. coli or STEC, a strain of E. coli that can cause severe disease including bloody diarrhoea and renal failure—particularly in children (Fish and Game New Zealand, 2018b; Gudsell, 2018; Massey University, 2018). The testing showed that the contamination of Canterbury freshwater is primarily due to intensive dairy farming, the two most common strains of E. coli found in the testing only come from ruminants such as cows. As head of Fish and Game New Zealand, Martin Taylor put it, “[t]he scale of dairying in Canterbury is staggering. The region has 1.3 million cows and each of them produces around 68 litres of effluent

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a day. This means 32 billion litres of effluent is introduced into the environment each and every year” (Fish and Game New Zealand, 2018b; see also Gudsell, 2018). Many awa (rivers) in Canterbury show worsening trends not just for E. Coli but also for nitrogen and suspended sediment. When nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous accumulate in rivers, they stimulate the excessive growth of algae, water weeds and cyanobacteria leading to algal blooms that degrade rivers and reduce their cultural, aesthetic and recreational values (MfE & Stats NZ, 2019, p. 47). Algal blooms can also be toxic, blue-green algae or benthic cyanobacteria can produce toxins that are harmful to humans and animals, dogs in particular. Symptoms in dogs include panting, lethargy, muscle tremors, twitching and convulsions and can prove fatal. Adverse reactions in humans include: asthma, eye irritations, skin rashes and blistering around the mouth and nose, gastrointestinal disorders, nausea, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, liver damage and possibly the development of cancers (ECan, 2016). In recent years, Cyanobacteria warnings have been put in place for several Canterbury rivers including the Rakahuri, Opihi, Waihao and Hakataramea (Dangerfield, 2020; ECan, 2020a; Mohanlall, 2019, 2020), all of which were once important sources of mahinga kai for local M¯aori. Fine particulate matter like silt, mud and organic material can reduce water clarity and increase turbidity. High turbidity in rivers can affect the habitat and food supply of fish, birds and invertebrates. When settled on the river bed, fine particulate matter can also smother entire riverine ecosystems. Excess sediment, such as that associated with the grazing of livestock along riverbanks or in areas denuded of trees and riparian plants, also impacts the cultural, aesthetic and recreational value of awa (MfE & Stats NZ, 2019, p. 47). The irrigation of the Canterbury plains is also placing a severe strain on the awa of Canterbury. As noted above, the water footprint for dairy production in Canterbury is extremely high, the over-allocation of water to irrigation schemes, when coupled with already low rainfall, is causing some rivers to, quite literally, dry up (Mitchell, 2016a; Wynyard, 2019a, p. 39). This is only likely to get worse with climate change and the increased likelihood of regular drought (Clark et al., 2011). The Waikirikiri (Selwyn) River flows 60 km across the Canterbury plains before entering Te Waihora (Lake Ellesmere). A notable feature of the Waikirikiri is its intermittent flow, as it traverses the plains, the water drains through the porous riverbed into the aquifer below

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leaving stretches of the river dry (Kelly et al., 2006, p. 18). The river reemerges about 15 km upstream from Te Waihora, a stretch of water too polluted now for contact recreation (Mitchell, 2016b). In recent years, the scale of the river’s periodic “disappearance” has increased and in 2016 was “unprecedented” (Gibson, 2017; Mitchell, 2016a; Salmon, 2016), indeed, even stretches of the river that did not typically dry up, did so in 2016 (Mitchell, 2017). Many fish and eels, including endangered long-fin eels, each up to 70 years old, have perished on the dried-out bed of the Waikirikiri. In 2017, thousands of fish and eels had to be rescued from the drying Waikirikiri, many others perished as the waterway dried up around them (Mitchell, 2017). At that time, the amount of groundwater allocated for irrigation in the Selwyn district was 134% (Mitchell, 2016a; Wynyard, 2019a). Ng¯ai Tahu iwi member, Liz Kereru, told TVNZ that the Waikirikiri once fed her people and gave them “spiritual essence”, but, “that’s now gone” (TVNZ, 2020). While in Aotearoa New Zealand, many are fond of the notion that “nobody owns the water”, one firm, Hydrotrader, facilitates the sale of thousands of millions of litres of water from the Selwyn-Waimakiriri and Selwyn-Rakaia areas every year (Gibson, 2017). Indeed, the firm’s website boasts that it brokers trades of over 17,800,000,000 litres of Canterbury water per annum (HydroTrader, n.d.). Perhaps “nobody owned the water” will become a part of our collective mythology alongside the notion of “a fair go” and other once-cherished ideals. For Ng¯ai Tahu, water is a taonga left by t¯ıpuna (ancestors) to provide and sustain life. As kaitiaki (guardians), present generations are obligated to ensure that taonga are protected for future generations (Te R¯unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu [TRoNT], 1999, p. 5). In addition to the wai (water) itself, many species of plants, birds, fish and shellfish that are dependant on the waters of Canterbury are also considered taonga species for Ng¯ai Tahu—this relationship is recognised in the Ng¯ai Tahu Deed of Settlement, the extensive list of taonga species includes important mahinga kai such as w¯aik¯oura (freshwater crayfish), k¯akahi (freshwater mussles), paraki (common smelt), k¯owaro (Canterbury mudfish), taiwharu (whitebait) and kokopu (another species of whitebait) (Ng¯ai Tahu DoS, 1997, Attachment 12.148). In 1999, TRoNT released a freshwater policy statement outlining four areas of priority: the total protection of waters that are of particular spiritual significance to Ng¯ai Tahu; the restoration, maintenance and protection of the mauri (life force) of freshwater resources; the maintenance of vital and healthy populations of, and habitats for

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mahinga kai; and the active participation of Ng¯ai Tahu in freshwater management (TRoNT, 1999, pp. 29–41). Since then, and as detailed above, the number of dairy cattle in Canterbury has increased from 245,296 (LIC/Dairy NZ, 1999/2000) to well over one million (Stats NZ, 2019a)—and the rest, as they say, is history. In November 2020, Ng¯ai Tahu announced that it would take the Crown to court, the iwi were seeking rangatiratanga (the right to exercise authority) over all of the freshwater in their takiw¯a (territory). The action was taken after generations of Ng¯ai Tahu were excluded from their role as kaitiaki. Customary leader Dr. Te Maire Tau told reporters that the action was taken because the awa of Canterbury had “virtually been destroyed” (Johnson, 2020; Maxwell, 2020). As Mike Joy (2019) notes, while the earthquakes left a terrible scar on the land and people of Canterbury, they were an event resulting from natural hazards. The contamination of Canterbury’s freshwater is a human-made disaster, involving not just the removal of regulatory oversight, but also the dereliction of duty by environmental protection agencies and, crucially, the relentless prioritisation of economic interests over all others (p. 35). Even before the dairy boom, central government agencies were well-aware of the potential risks to Canterbury’s then pristine freshwater resources posed by intensifying agriculture and large-scale irrigation. Yet, successive governments have facilitated and encouraged the rapid intensification of dairy farming on the Canterbury plains. The end result, one of the worst environmental catastrophes in the history of Aotearoa New Zealand. The human health and environmental impacts of the Canterbury dairy boom are difficult to overstate and, like the earthquakes, the 2017 Port Hills wildfires and the 2019 white supremacist terror attacks at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre, will leave deep scars on the people, the land and the waters of Canterbury.

Conclusion: The Canterbury Freshwater Crisis as “Slow-Moving Disaster” Within disaster studies, there is, Matthewman (2015) notes, a strong tendency to restrict the field of inquiry to those rapid onset and spectacular events, concentrated in space and time, and that result in immediate human casualties. The Canterbury earthquake sequence, Kaik¯oura earthquakes, and the white supremacist terror attacks are clearly disasters, but what of the slow-moving destruction of freshwater in Canterbury? Or,

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indeed, the climate change related sea-level rises affecting the coastal ¯ area of Otautahi Christchurch? For Matthewman, restricting the definition of disaster in this way denies reality (see also Chapters 1 and 2 in this volume). To restrict “disaster” in space and time ignores slowor slower-moving but wide-ranging environmental harms being visited on ecosystems around the world, including freshwater ecosystems in Canterbury. To restrict “disaster” to those events with immediate human casualties also ignores the unprecedented environmental harms associated with contemporary neoliberal capitalism, the commodification of nature and the relentless plundering of natural resources without thought of our collective future and all for private gain in the present (Matthewman, 2015, pp. 129–130). Matthewman also takes issue with the tendency to see disasters as spectacular and excessive, as “highly visible rapid-onset eruptions” that “stretch society beyond its own limits”. In the absence of such “spectacle”, “hyperbole” and “rupture”, all that is left is “business as usual”. “This”, Matthewman continues, “neither looks nor feels like disaster” (Matthewman, 2015, pp. 131–132). No indeed, the meandering pace and seasonal rhythm of dairy farming suggest rural idyll more than spectacle or rupture. Yet, the enclosure and systematic degradation of the freshwater commons in Canterbury is, emphatically, a disaster, albeit one caused by process rather than event (Matthewman, 2015, p. 136). In a few short decades, the pristine rivers and aquifers of the region have deteriorated such that they are no longer suitable as a source of sustenance or wonder or as place of play or contemplation. There are, of course, myriad difficulties in expressing collective ownership of natural resources in a settler-colony founded on the dispossession of M¯aori land and these can never be overstated (see Wynyard, 2019b). Yet, the waters of Canterbury long provided people, Ng¯ai Tahu first and foremost, but also P¯akeh¯a (those of European descent) and Tauiwi (non-M¯aori) with food, water, joy and solace. To some extent at least, the benefits of the freshwater commons accrued to all. Saskia Sassen described primitive accumulation as a “savage sorting of winners and losers” (Sassen, 2010), and indeed the recent resurgence of enclosure as a strategy of accumulation has produced both. Those fortunate enough to have a stake in the dairy boom are benefitting from the capture, enclosure and degradation of the waters of Canterbury. In keeping with the logics of neoliberalism, the human health and ecological costs of the dairy boom are, on the other hand, collectivised. They have become a burden borne by all (Wynyard, 2019a).

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MoH. (2018). Drinking-water Standards for New Zealand 2005 (Revised 2018). Ministry of Health Manat¯ u Hauora. https://www.health.govt.nz/public ation/drinking-water-standards-new-zealand-2005-revised-2018 (accessed 6 November 2020). Mohanlall, S. (2019, November 26). Potentially toxic algae at Bradshaw’s Bridge region in Waihao River. Timaru Herald. https://www.stuff.co.nz/timaru-her ald/news/117718895/potentially-toxic-algae-at-bradshaws-bridge-region-inwaihao-river?rm=a (accessed 12 November 2020). Mohanlall, S. (2020, January 9). Toxic algae warnings in South Canterbury rivers. Timaru Herald. https://www.stuff.co.nz/timaru-herald/news/ 118675761/toxic-algae-warnings-in-south-canterbury-rivers?rm=m (accessed 12 November 2020). Molyneux, V. (2020, September 4). Earthquakes, fires and a terrorist attack: How Christchurch kids have coped growing up alongside tragedy. Newshub. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2020/09/earthquakesfires-and-a-terrorist-attack-how-christchurch-kids-have-coped-growing-up-alo ngside-tragedy.html (accessed 10 September 2020). Piddock, G. (2019, October 22). Open Country Dairy fined a record $221,250 for discharging objectionable odour. Stuff. https://www.stuff.co.nz/bus iness/farming/116769769/open-country-dairy-fined-a-record-221250-fordischarging-objectionable-odour (accessed 27 November 2020). RMA. (1991). Public Act 1991, No 69. Parliamentary Counsel Office Te Tare Tohutohu P¯aremata. http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1991/ 0069/latest/DLM230265.html (accessed 30 October 2020). Salmon, M. (2016, July 12). Christchurch rivers lowest they’ve been in decades. The Press. https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/82007545/christchurch-riv ers-lowest-theyve-been-in-decades (accessed 12 November 2020). Sassen, S. (2010). A savage sorting of winners and losers: Contemporary versions of primitive accumulation. Globalizations, 7 (1–2), 23–50. Schullehner, K., Hansen, B., Thygesen, M., Pedersen, C., & Sigsgaard, T. (2018). Nitrate in drinking water and colorectal cancer risk: A nationwide population-based cohort study. International Journal of Cancer, 143, 73–79. Smith, C. M., Wilcock, R. J., Vant, W. N., Smith, D. G., & Cooper, A. B. (1993). Towards sustainable agriculture: Freshwater quality in New Zealand and the influence of agriculture. Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Ministry for the Environment. Stats NZ. (2011). Off the sheep’s back: A look at historical wool export prices and volumes. Stats New Zealand Tatauranga Aotearoa. http://archive.stats.govt. nz/browse_for_stats/economic_indicators/prices_indexes/historical-woolexport-prices-volumes-2011.aspx#gsc.tab=0 (accessed 19 October 2020).

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Stats NZ. (2018). Agricultural and horticultural land use. Stats New Zealand Tatauranga Aotearoa. http://archive.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/enviro nment/environmental-reporting-series/environmental-indicators/Home/ Land/land-use.aspx (accessed 20 October 2020). Stats NZ. (2019a). Livestock numbers. Stats New Zealand Tatauranga Aotearoa. https://www.stats.govt.nz/tereo/indicators/livestock-numbers (accessed 20 October 2020). Stats NZ. (2019b). Groundwater quality. Stats New Zealand Tatauranga Aotearoa. https://www.stats.govt.nz/tereo/indicators/groundwater-quality (accessed 6 November 2020). TRoNT. (1999). Freshwater policy. Te R¯ unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu. TRoNT and Her Majesty the Queen in Right of New Zealand. (1997). Deed of Settlement. Section 12. Mahinga Kai – General. https://www.govt.nz/ass ets/Documents/OTS/Ngai-Tahu/Ngai-Tahu-Deed-of-Settlement-Section12-Mahinga-kai-general-21-Nov-1997.pdf (accessed 13 November 2020). TVNZ. (2020, November 2). Ng¯ai Tahu taking government to court over water rights. One News, TVNZ . https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/ ng-tahu-taking-government-court-over-water-rights (accessed 12 November 2020). Van Beynen, M. (2010, April 20). Sacking ‘right decision’. Stuff . https:// www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/editors-picks/3599207/Sacking-right-decision (accessed 30 October 2020). Van Beynen, M. (2019, December 28). The decade of quake, massacre, explosion and fire. The Press. https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/118266008/the-dec ade-of-quake-massacre-explosion-and-fire (accessed 10 September 2020). Wallace, N. (2014). When the farm gates opened: The impact of rogernomics on rural New Zealand. Otago University Press. White, E. (1982). Eutrophication in New Zealand lakes. In Water in New Zealand’s future: Proceedings of the Fourth National Water Conference. Auckland: Institute of Professional Engineers New Zealand Technical Group on Water. Wilcock, R. (1986). Agricultural runoff: A source of water pollution in New Zealand. New Zealand Agricultural Science, 20, 98–103. Willis, R. (2001). Farming. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 42(1), 55–65. Willis, R. (2004). Enlargement, concentration and centralisation in the New Zealand dairy industry. Geography, 89(1), 83–88. Wilson, J. (2015). Canterbury region—Agriculture after 1900. Te Ara—The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/canterbury-reg ion/page-8 (accessed 19 October 2020). Wynyard, M. (2016). The price of milk: Primitive accumulation and the New Zealand Dairy Industry 1814–2014. PhD Thesis, The University of Auckland.

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Wynyard, M. (2019a). Dairying, dispossession, devastation: primitive accumulation and the New Zealand Dairy Industry. Counterfutures: Left thought and Practice in Aotearoa, 8, 11–41. Wynyard, M. (2019b). ‘Not one more bloody acre’: Land restitution and the treaty of Waitangi settlement process in Aotearoa New Zealand. Land, 8(11), 162. https://doi.org/10.3390/land8110162 (accessed 17 November 2020). Young, R. (2012, November 9). Axing ECan elections ‘undemocratic’. The Press. http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/7926305/Axing-ECanel ections-undemocratic (accessed 23 September 2020). Young, C. (2021, May 10). Nitrates in Selwyn River up 50% in 22 months, Federation of Freshwater Anglers says. RNZ. Available at https://www.rnz. co.nz/news/national/442223/nitrates-in-selwyn-river-up-50-percent-in-22months-federation-of-freshwater-anglers-says

PART III

Critical Voices in Disasters

CHAPTER 8

Hazardous Times: Adversity, Diversity and Constructions of Collectivity Rosemary Du Plessis

Setting the Context---Hazardous Times ¯ As outlined in Chapter 1, people in Otautahi Christchurch (Christchurch hereafter) have lived through hazardous times during the last decade. At 4:35 a.m. on 4 September 2010, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake in Darfield (40 kilometres west of the city) shook the region awake. On 22 February 2011, the city experienced a 6.3 magnitude quake, and this time there was loss of life—185 deaths, 115 in a single building that collapsed and then caught fire. This was followed by hundreds of aftershocks, a 6.1 magnitude quake in June 2011 and a 5.8 magnitude quake in December 2011. Flooding occurred in parts of the city whenever there were heavy rains as a result of silt in the rivers and changes in land levels (Potter et al., 2015; CERA, 2016). In February 2017, bush fires swept the Port Hills, destroying nine homes, scarring the hills and forcing several

R. Du Plessis (B) University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_8

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hundred people to temporarily evacuate (Selwyn District Council, 2017). On 15 March, 2019, an Australian armed terrorist filmed himself killing 51 members of the Muslim community at prayer in two mosques, and posted the carnage on Facebook (Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks on Christchurch Mosques 15 March, 2019, 2020). As Audrey Dragovich, former resident of quake-hit Brooklands, stated in an interview on her quake experiences in 2020: “Christchurch has copped a lot”.

Acknowledging Differences and Constructing Connections---Earthquake Stories While everyone in Canterbury has lived with these challenges, the impacts of the Canterbury earthquake sequence have varied among people in different locations and according to their circumstances. This chapter explores what people interviewed for two large-scale narrative projects had to say about these differences and the complexity of community connections following the quakes. How did they talk about the diverse impacts of these hazardous times? What stories did they tell about their connections with others, and the disruption of their communities? Insider vignettes on the experiences of difficult times are assembled from oral history projects conducted between late 2011 and the end of 2020. A hundred and fifty women were interviewed for the Women’s Voices Ng¯a Reo o Nga W¯ahine project1 (Women’s Voices project hereafter) by the Christchurch Branch of the National Council of Women of New Zealand (NCWNZ) between late 2011 and 2013 (Du Plessis et al., 2015; Gordon et al., 2014). The University of Canterbury QuakeBox project2 also had its origins in 2011 and generated 723 earthquake stories. A collaboration between the New Zealand Institute for Language, Brain and Behaviour (NZILBB) and UC CEISMIC (the Canterbury Earthquake Digital Archive), the QuakeBox project invited people to record their earthquake stories in a mobile shipping container converted into 1 See https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/collection/228 for stories recorded with women across the city, information about the project and research reports. Some narrators did not give permission for their stories to be publicly accessed, but did consent to the use of their stories for research purposes. 2 See https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/collection/235 for stories recorded in different parts of the city in 2012 and project information relating to QuakeBox.

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a recording studio that was located in different parts of the city during 2012 (Millar et al., 2018). In late 2019 and 2020, over 100 of the 700 participants came onto the University of Canterbury campus to retell and update their quake stories for the QuakeBox2 project.3 More women than men participated in both the original QuakeBox project and QuakeBox2, and the Women’s Voices project only interviewed women. As a result, women are predominantly the narrators in this chapter. The majority of participants in these projects chose to use their own names, but some participants opted to use a pseudonym or did not consent to records of their interviews being available on a public website. This is indicated when their comments are included in this chapter. While disasters are usually experienced in households that include both women and men, researchers have explored gender differences in the impacts of disasters. Women often experience higher levels of disaster related injuries than men, and this was the case following the February 2011 Christchurch Earthquake (February quake hereafter), partly because women were more likely to be working in the central city (Johnston et al., 2014). Globally gender differences in mortality and injury are most acute when there are high levels of inequality between women and men (Neumayer & Plümper, 2007). Women are also at risk when domestic violence increases following disruptions to people’s life circumstances (Parkinson, 2019; True, 2013). During disasters, women confront the daily challenges of providing food and shelter for children, those with disabilities and elderly relatives (Enarson, 1998). They are often at a disadvantage in access to paid work after disasters as jobs associated with reconstruction are more likely to be in male-dominated occupations, such as building and construction (Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 2013). At the same time, feminist researchers have documented women’s resourcefulness in disasters, their importance as first responders in their households, streets and neighbourhoods, and their involvement in community-based action directed at the well-being of others (see Enarson, 2012; Gordon, 2013). This is highly relevant to women’s stories

3 QuakeBox2 is the summary term for “Korero Mai: Tell use your earthquake story – a

longitudinal study of post-disaster narratives” funded in 2019 by a three-year Marsden Grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand (UOC1808). With the permission of the participants, video or audio recordings of interviews conducted in 2019 and 2020 are available from June 2021 at https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/collection/ 22108.

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about the Canterbury earthquake sequence. Even the women with least material resources constructed themselves as resourceful and effective agents rather than earthquake “victims”. Disasters expose pre-existing disparities between people, including differences among women (Reid, 2013). Awareness of these disparities, intertwined with heightened feelings of connectedness in a quake damaged city, is the focus of this chapter.

Post-Quake Collectivity---Community Connections A frequent theme in the earthquake stories recorded for these projects is intensification of community connections in the aftermath of the Canterbury earthquake sequence, but especially the 6.3 magnitude quake on 22 February 2011. Neighbours who only nodded to one another, spoke about closer relationships with people in their street and how important it was to give and receive support from those nearby. Roman, a refugee from Ethiopia, who participated in the Women’s Voices project, spoke about her relationship with elderly neighbours in a cul de sac in Sydenham.4 She did what she could to support them, but they were better prepared for the February quake and supplied her with water and milk. Guine Eves-Newport, a Samoan woman in her seventies, was on crutches after a fall during the September 2010 Darfield Earthquake (the September quake hereafter), but nevertheless went door to door in her Northcote street offering her neighbours “quake” pancakes on the afternoon of 22 February.5 One of the younger participants in the Women’s Voices project, Ella, spoke about how the quakes had prompted her to get involved in work with other young people. She became active in the White Elephant Trust, set up to organise music gatherings for young people in the city. Ella also trained DJs for these events.6 Nellie, a sole parent in a rental home in Linwood, began visiting the Waltham Community Cottage in 2012. It became a lifeline for her as she struggled emotionally and financially.7 But her home also became a hub for her daughter’s teenage friends who were

4 https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/object/14469. 5 https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/object/32499. 6 https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/object/14560. 7 https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/object/14466.

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living rough in nearby abandoned houses. Like many people, Nellie was both a resource for others, and someone who needed community support in the years following the Canterbury earthquake sequence. Nellie’s earthquake narrative illustrates a key feature of responses to disasters—the intertwining of vulnerability and capacities, including responsibility for others (Marlowe & Bogan, 2015, pp. 125–127). Tania (pseudonym), a central business district (CBD) resident interviewed for the Women’s Voices project, left the cordoned central city soon after the February quake to manage front of house earthquake response at Rehua Marae, Ng¯ai Tahu’s recovery hub that supported M¯aori and non-M¯aori and relatives of those killed or injured who arrived in the city from outside Aotearoa New Zealand (Kenney & Phibbs, 2015; see also Phibbs et al. in this volume). The marae provided her with three meals a day and a hot shower. For Tania, the marae “became like my welfare centre, as well as giving me the opportunity to be active in the recovery”. The value to people of doing something for others, while they were coping with their own damaged homes and disrupted lives, was a key component of many earthquake stories. This was particularly important for those in less damaged parts of the city. Jayne Rattray, another Women’s Voices participant and one of the founders of the Rangiora Earthquake Express, was struck by “the despair on people’s faces” as she was delivering food by helicopter to those in eastern Christchurch which was cut off by damaged roads and bridges. It was important for her to do something for people in the less affluent part of the city where she had grown up. Stories about responses to the February quake and ongoing aftershocks frequently illustrate the intersecting networks of support that enabled action at the level of streets, neighbourhoods, schools, churches, voluntary organisations, suburbs, the city and Greater Christchurch. They provide detailed illustrations of a key social dimension of disasters, communitas , identified by Steve Matthewman as, “a desire for purely human relations, to live communally with – and for – others” (Matthewman, 2015, p. 59; Matthewman & Uekusa, 2021). Ian, a QuakeBox2 participant, retold the story of how he and his son were among those who provided assistance in the CBD Cashel Mall immediately after the February quake. His teenage son had recently done a first aid course and was keen to help those who were injured. While Ian did not have these skills, he did not want his son to do this alone, so they rapidly accessed a first aid kit and spent several hours removing

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people from damaged buildings and bandaging wounds. He describes their response to the needs of strangers as immediate and crisis-focused, rather than the outcome of reflection on the risks as aftershocks shook the city. Their actions became public when photos of them appeared in The Christchurch Press. At the time, it was just what needed doing; they did not see themselves as “heroic”. Ian’s story is an example of the improvised and spontaneous acts of assistance to others that are often prompted when disaster strikes (Matthewman & Uekusa, 2021). The intensification of emotional connections with friends and neighbours was often a component of peoples’ quake stories. Kimberley Coleman, who retold and updated her earthquake story for the QuakeBox2 project in 2020, moved away from the seaside suburb of Sumner with her husband and two young children after the quakes because their house was badly damaged and her parents moved into the city. But while she lived in a comfortable rented home in Mairehau (a less damaged part of the city), she missed Sumner dreadfully. Eventually she found “a crazy weird house” in Sumner, negotiated a price they could afford, and the family moved back to their “home suburb” and reconnected with friends. Kimberley thought that “the sense of community is so much stronger now than it ever was before…. The sense of being OK, your family which are your friends will look after you – that is where we are at as a community”. Jasmine (pseudonym), a Women’s Voices narrator living in the Women’s Prison at Rolleston in 2013, said the quakes also had an impact on interactions among prisoners, even though they were not living in the damaged city. After the February quake, she was “talking more to people than I used to”. Prisoners, especially if they were from Christchurch, shared with one another their concerns for family and friends, and some volunteered for a work team to clear up earthquake debris in Rolleston. For Kimberley in her Sumner community and Jasmine in the Rolleston Women’s Prison, the challenges of hazardous times prompted an intensification of connection with those around them. Their post-disaster sense of community in these very different contexts illustrates what Matthewman and Uekusa (2021) identify as place specific forms of social bonding in crisis situations.

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Collectivity Disrupted---Differences Among Neighbours and Neighbourhoods While many people talked about the intensification of connectedness and the shared experiences of people in the city, they also discussed differences in the situations of individuals and households. Ina Wit, who retold her story again for QuakeBox2, said that the strong sense of connection among those in her neighbourhood was gradually undermined by differences that emerged over time: If everyone was in the same boat, that would be clear, but everyone seemed to have different stories, different insurances... different assessments... Other people got fantastic deals; they got what they wanted. The discrepancy between one and the other was just so big…

Ina’s reflections indicate that disaster induced communitas can diminish over time. Solidarity among those in the same vicinity can decline as the settlement strategies of insurance companies and the competence of building contractors produce very different outcomes for those living in the same community. Differences among neighbours and problems settling insurance claims were not confined to parts of the city where household incomes were low. Marcus (pseudonym), a QuakeBox2 participant who lived on Scarborough Hill and a businessman, also had problems settling the private insurance claim on his damaged home. After telling his earthquake story in 2012, he said that he did not expect that “it would take almost 10 years to sort things out with the insurance company”. He argued that there were “more tears over the insurance than there was over the earthquakes”. In his view, the stresses and frustrations “were more with the effects of the earthquake than the quake” (see also Finn & Toomey in this volume for discussion of the years of litigation). Marcus contrasted efficient and effective strategies to ensure the safety of people in Aotearoa New Zealand following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic with responses to the Canterbury earthquake sequence and policy relating to the current housing crisis. An immigrant to Aotearoa New Zealand, he saw the country as a place where people generally have a “fair go”, “but not in relation to this – earthquakes and housing”. In this respect, he shared with Critical Disaster Studies (CDS) scholars a keen perception that what people experience as

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most challenging following a disaster is frequently the outcome of social arrangements, bureaucratic processes and commercial decisions rather than directly the consequence of natural hazards (Matthewman, 2015, pp. 95–148; see also Garces-Ozanne et al., Lambert, Oliver-Smith in this volume). Sometimes people who were not prone to assert their individual needs had to adopt drastic measures after years of waiting for the resolution of issues relating to damage to their homes. Betty and Michael Knife, older QuakeBox2 participants living in St. Martins (a suburb to the south of the CBD), exhausted their insurance payment for emergency housing and paid rent for two years on a rented home while they waited for the insurance payout to put their home back on firm foundations. Finally, when they agreed to be interviewed on television about their situation, the insurance company paid for the repair of their home and the Christchurch City Council (CCC) gave consent for the building processes necessary to move the house and redo the foundations. While initially reluctant to focus on their personal situation, this was the only way in which they could ensure the action that got them back into their own home. Leanne Curtis was a Women’s Voices project participant, co-founder of CanCERN (Canterbury Communities’ Earthquake Recovery Network), and co-owner of a badly damaged home in Avonside.8 She spoke about the very different impacts of the quakes, even among those living in adjacent homes. She said that: … intuitively we [CanCERN) knew that there were going to be winners and losers and there would be gaps vulnerable people would fall through. The loud squawky people would get what they needed and the people that were quietly waiting, and often they were saying, “Oh, there are far worse off people than me”, would fall through the gaps.

Leanne argued that people “falling through the gaps” during the recovery process was the outcome of poor coordination and limited collaboration among powerful organisations at national and local levels: So we [CanCERN] go and sit with this one, and then we sit with that one, and then they sit with this one and they are all so busy throwing stones at the other one and pointing fingers at the other one...

8 https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/object/9954.

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Despite their attempts to find collective solutions to systemic problems, CanCERN struggled to address the social and organisational processes that intensified the physical impacts of the quakes and delayed recovery. Alice Ridley, one of the younger women who told their earthquake stories for the Women’s Voices project, suggested that levels of community connectedness varied across the city.9 She stated that there was “no real community in Merivale at all. There was no uplifting, ‘Oh the community all came together and did amazing things’. Nope – rich people just carried on being snobby rich people”. Her reflections are consistent with arguments that materially advantaged residents tend to be less bonded with their neighbours after disasters while having a wealth of broader connections (Rivera & Nickels, 2014). On the other hand, Rebecca Macfie, who lived in a hillside suburb where most people were financially secure, experienced high levels of community connectedness in her damaged neighbourhood.10 A social media link that had few interactions before the February quake started to buzz after she posted a couple of messages on the night of 22 February 2011. Most of the 60 households in her street started to be active online, and they organised several neighbourhood events in the year after the quake—a picnic, a potluck dinner and a sports afternoon.

Disruption and Construction of Community Residents in parts of the city that were red-zoned by the New Zealand Government and designated as no longer suitable for domestic housing (see Pawson in this volume for the process) articulated a range of views on whether community connections were enhanced or undermined following the quakes. Heather, a former Brooklands resident and QuakeBox2 project participant, mourned the Brooklands community she had lost. She said that: “I feel still, I feel something’s missing… I am happy and I am grateful, but I can’t get settled. I am sitting on the cusp, and I must get moving. I have lost my passion”. She saw herself as one of the “lucky ones” as she and her husband had received a rapid insurance payout on her property, accepted the government offer for the land and were able to purchase a new house in a different neighbourhood. However, grief at the

9 https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/object/14561. 10 https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/object/10172.

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loss of her Brooklands community network persisted. Jan, who remained with her husband in Brooklands when most people left, spoke about the initial “dismemberment” of the community as residents left and their homes were demolished.11 But connections among those who stayed in the red-zoned suburb intensified. “We know we can rely on them; we know that support is there”. Heather and Jan’s reflections on community bonds in their neighbourhood illustrate how communitas shifts and is reshaped over time following disasters and experienced differently as personal circumstances change.

Constructing and Disrupting Definitions of Who Is “Worse Off” Participants in the Women’s Voices project often spoke about others being “worse off”, even when they were sole parents with children with disabilities, living in damaged homes or pensioners in quake affected state housing. Emily, a grandparent of Cook Island, Tahitian and Chinese descent who was caring for her granddaughter in a quake damaged state house, said that “there are a lot of people out there who are worse off, a huge amount of people who are worse off than we are”.12 Those who told their earthquake stories usually saw themselves as survivors, whatever their personal circumstances or the challenges they had encountered. Stories about the difficulties of living in damaged homes, or struggles with government agencies and insurance companies, were opportunities to highlight their persistence, ingenuity, patience, tenacity and capacity to overcome adversity. They saw themselves as agents rather than victims, even if that meant they often went to sleep

11 Many (but not all) of those who stayed in their houses in parts of the city that were

red-zoned did not have home insurance at the time of the quakes. The “Quake Outcasts” challenged discrimination between themselves and home owners with home insurance with respect to payments available from the New Zealand Government for their redzoned properties. In August 2017, the Court of Appeal found for the Quake Outcasts and against the Minister of Earthquake Recovery and the Chief Executive Officer of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA). A month later, the government agreed to pay each of the 16 uninsured homeowners 80% of the 2007–2008 rateable value of their homes as well as a payment for the uncertainties and costs they had experienced (Quake Outcasts v Minister of Canterbury Earthquake Recovery and The Chief Executive, Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority [2017] NZCA 332). 12 https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/object/14558.

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fully clothed with a backpack on the floor beside them while aftershocks rocked their homes. Belinda Grant, a participant in the Women’s Voices project, lived with her partner and children in the hard hit eastern suburb of Dallington at the time of the February quake, but relocated to a relatively undamaged suburb to the west of Christchurch when they could no longer live in their damaged home.13 Interviewed in their fourth temporary home in six months, she was acutely aware of differences in the post-quake lives of residents in different parts of the city. I do believe Christchurch is like two cities now. I know everyone in Christchurch experienced the same level of trauma with the earthquakes and everyone has their own story and experienced their individual thing... But I do believe those on this (the west) side of town are a lot luckier. If you are not over there and not amongst it, you do not realise how severe it is.

However, those who were living in the east and defined as “worse off” by others often resisted these definitions of their situation. Tracey Waiariki, a QuakeBox2 participant who retold her earthquake story in 2020, struggled to find housing after she returned to Christchurch after time with wh¯anau (family) in the North Island. She lived with her children in a shed for three weeks because affordable rental housing was hard to find, but she insisted that: “There was people worse off than me”. Tracey and her family moved from the shed into a “bunged up” rental property in an eastern suburb with an uninhabitable bedroom that leaked when it rained, but Tracey’s narrative focused on how her T¯ uhoe grandparents had nurtured her capacity to deal with adversity. While her housing was not adequate, and she struggled financially, manaakitanga (extending love and compassion to others) was a cultural resource. M¯aori tikanga (customs and traditional values) constituted her not as a quake “victim”, but as a resourceful family member and active contributor to the well-being of others who she invited into her home for hot drinks and whatever food she could share (see also

13 https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/object/9789.

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Phibbs et al. in this volume). According to Tracey, “I’ve got everything sussed… The cultural side actually helped a lot”.14 Rebecca Macfie, a journalist and Women’s Voices participant, thought that access to information about others who were “worse off” made people feel that they “didn’t like to make a fuss” because “bad stuff” was happening to people all over the city. Collectively experiencing hazardous times meant that individuals and households were constantly assessing their situation relative to other people’s experiences. What sociologist C. Wright Mills would have identified as the “private troubles” of delays in getting an Earthquake Commission (EQC) assessment, or struggles with your insurance company, were recognised by many in the city as “public issues”—the shared circumstances of people at a particular moment in history (Mills, 1970). Talk about “gratitude”, assertions about others being “worse off”, and appreciation of the shared challenges of living in a quaky city, weave through the stories of multiple narrators. These were difficult and uncertain times, but people were conscious of sharing a unique time in the history of their city and, in that sense, exhibited what Mills referred to as “a sociological imagination”.

Doing It Hard---Living Through Difficult Times Those who retold their earthquake stories in 2020 sometimes commented on the impacts of a decade of challenges encountered by residents in Christchurch. Heather, a QuakeBox2 participant, considered that, while things had gone well for her personally: Christchurch has done it hard, when you think about the mosque attacks, the Port Hill fires and of course COVID-19. I know my own grandchildren have had mental health issues… While the younger ones may not remember, I am sure it has had an impact on them. But we get along and we have survived…

Refugees who had struggled to leave war-torn countries spoke about once again confronting risk, uncertainty and insecurity in a place that they had assumed was “safe”. Belaynesh Tegegen, who came to Christchurch

14 See Thornley et al. (2014) for discussion of the cultural resources that M¯ aori brought to the process of disaster recovery following the Canterbury earthquake sequence, particularly the significance of manaakitanga and community connectednes/whanaungatanga.

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from Ethiopia, was concerned that she could not ensure the safety of younger family members.15 Alia Afzali, a refugee from Afghanistan, experienced a seizure and several stress related health problems after the February quakes and was very concerned about her daughter and her small baby.16 Her anxiety levels were hard to manage when she was once again confronting risks and uncertainty. Her stresses increased when her family became the only Afghan family living in the Bexley and Brighton areas—parts of the city severely damaged during the earthquake sequence. As people told their specific earthquake stories, they often commented on what they had learned about others in their city as they coped with the impacts of the quakes. Thomas (pseudonym), a software engineer, interviewed for the QuakeBox2 project, said that: “It (the quakes) completely changed my image; my ideas of how people react to a crisis… I was impressed”. Katherine Ewer, a lawyer and one of the Women’s Voices participants, made a similar comment when she was interviewed in 2012. She thought that: “If you weren’t involved in it, it was an amazing experiment in how well people can cope and adapt”. Katherine spoke about her surprise at “how much you can take on board and keep going”. Thomas and Katherine’s comments are consistent with the tendency to identify “resilience” as a characteristic of individuals and communities confronted by disasters (Aldrich, 2012). However, expectations that people, communities and organisations will “bounce back” after disaster can also inhibit legitimate claims for support by individuals like Belaynesh and Afzali who had lived through previous traumas, and for whom English was not their first language. Afzali’s concerns about being geographically isolated from others in the Christchurch Afghani community relate to the vital role refugee and culturally diverse communities can play in supporting their members in disaster situations. While the vulnerability of such groups is recognised, refugee centres and the faithbased community networks of new immigrants are important resources for disaster recovery (Marlowe, 2013; Marlowe & Lou, 2013). The challenges of life in refugee camps and resettlement can generate the resourcefulness demanded during disasters while also undermining newly acquired assumptions about safety and security (Uekusa & Matthewman, 2017).

15 https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/object/190306. 16 https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/islandora/search/Alia?type=dismax.

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Several narrators commented on their own and other people’s capacity to “get on” with their daily lives. Libi Carr, a QuakeBox2 participant, highlighted the emotional effects on families trapped for years in damaged homes but also appreciated “seeing people survive” and “the incredible strength that people show”. But, like many disaster analysts (Cretney, 2014; Hayward, 2013; Uekusa & Cretney in this volume), she was critical of the use of the term “resilience”—“if resilience means you get up everyday and you just try to slog through the day because you have to, I guess we are resilient, but really we are just exhausted”. Libi’s resistance to the expectation that people in a damaged city would be “resilient” was also articulated by Leanne Curtis. She looked critically at her own resistance to acknowledging the personal impacts of living with her family in her damaged Avonside home, while also working to ensure that the most affected suburbs received emergency services—including portaloos—portable toilets. Like many others, she had embraced the expectation that she would “cope” and “get on with things”, but when the June 2011 Earthquake struck, she had to recognise that this was unrealistic. Leanne described herself as “completely broken by that June quake, quite unhinged… but we pretty much dug ourselves out because we were just the people who did this. This is what you did if you live in Avonside”. Leanne’s words about the need to “dig ourselves out” resonate with Libi’s comment about how people had to “slog through the day”, and her critical reflections on discourses about “resilience” as the ideal attribute of people in a damaged city. Uekusa and Cretney (in this collection) explore the reasons for resistance to the term “resilience” by Leanne, Libi and others. They also document how it was positively claimed by some individuals and groups engaged in grassroots action in the context of central government top down decision-making or neglect of local needs. This positive framing of resilience is illustrated by Marnie Kent’s earthquake story which is summarised below. Getting through the day after the quakes for QuakeBox2 participant, Marnie, included going back to her damaged home in Sumner to dig a hole in the garden for the thawed placenta of her daughter. It had been stored in the freezer for years, and this was not the ceremonial burial she had planned, but “we dealt with it”. After living in a tent in the grounds of Van Asch College for three weeks, she got busy in her community and organised a team to take down cracked and dangerous chimneys, set up a community school hub and initiated outdoor movie nights. A

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key challenge for her was “finding the positive in the negative”—for her, this was becoming connected to her community. As a result, she thought that, while the Canterbury earthquake sequence was “a terrible thing to happen, … great things come out of disaster”.17

Everything Is Not OK---Impacts Over Time of Hazardous Times Some residents in the most damaged parts of the city were not just critical of expectations that people would be “resilient”, but also the rhetoric of those in leadership positions who said “things are back to usual” or “everything is OK” (see Uekusa & Cretney in this volume). Wendy Hawke, a Women’s Voices project participant, who lived close to houses that were red-zoned, said that: “Things were not OK here. Houses were on an angle; people I knew were moving out. It was not fine…”18 While she did not have to leave her home, she spoke about the emotional impact of watching her neighbourhood being dismantled. Recognition of the emotional toll on people in Christchurch following the Canterbury earthquake sequence informed the All Right? mental health promotion campaign, initiated in December 2012 using a variety of communication strategies. A key feature of the campaign was the question mark following “All Right” which legitimated the possibility that things were not “all right” (Calder et al., 2016). Some of those who told their earthquake stories reflected on the range of emotional states they had experienced during the quakes. Rosie Laing, a health professional living in Lyttelton thought that “we are just much closer to the edge of emotion than other people; more fragile; more tired. We are more inclined to think that what can go wrong will”. But her view was also that Christchurch people “are much closer to other people; we value other people; the community; and the casual support of strangers”.19 Rosie’s words, while acknowledging the emotional vulnerability generated by the quakes, echo Marnie’s positivity about disaster induced connectedness, pro-social behaviour or communitas —a common

17 See Matthewman and Uekusa (2021) for a discussion of positive and even euphoric responses to disasters. 18 https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/object/32495. 19 https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/object/26143.

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experience among people who have lived through quakes, floods, fires, tsunami or volcanic eruptions (Matthewman & Uekusa, 2021). Parents and grandparents who told their earthquake stories for both Women’s Voices project and QuakeBox2 often spoke about the impacts of the quakes on their children and grandchildren, especially their increased levels of anxiety and disrupted sleep. Parents spoke about one or more of their children being “classic quake kids”, jumpy in response to sudden noise, needing extra reassurance, and with persistent anxiety issues. Teacher assessed rates of behaviour problems and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms among children starting school before the Canterbury earthquake sequence were compared with rates for children beginning school in similar parts of the city between February 2013 and June 2014. There were significantly higher levels of PTSD and behaviour problems among children starting school following the quakes. These differences were most acute for children who were under 24 months in September 2010 (Liberty et al., 2016). Exposure to trauma early in life appears to have the most negative effects on children. However, impacts on children’s mental health were not confined to those who were babies and toddlers at the time of the quakes. In 2015, the Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB) reported a 69% increase in all child and youth mental health presentations following the Canterbury earthquake sequence (Humphrey & Renison, 2015). Like other earthquake narrators, QuakeBox2 participant Kimberley Coleman thought that Christchurch could show people elsewhere: “how you can survive or come up through the ashes of something so traumatising”. Adversity created the opportunity to demonstrate your capacity to survive and thrive. Kimberley thought that the responses in Christchurch to the mosque killings “were a lot like we were during the earthquakes … our city really did rally around people after that event”.

Living with Risk, Uncertainty and “Getting on with Things” This chapter has provided vignettes of how some people in Christchurch spoke about their quake experiences, ongoing risk intensified by repeated aftershocks, and the necessity that they “get on with things”. Their earthquake stories illustrate their awareness of the varied impacts of the Canterbury earthquake sequence. Narrators often wanted to distinguish their experiences from those who were “worse off”. While most residents

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at least sometimes just “slogged through the day”, they also reflected on what they learned as they lived through hazardous times, including how to manage anxiety and face up to unanticipated challenges. People in other cities have had to confront the harsh reality of terrorist attacks and the uncertainty it produces. Across the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to over two million deaths, overburdened medical facilities and ravaged economies. Earthquakes, tsunami, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, slips, floods and other natural hazards occur frequently, destroying homes and disrupting the lives of thousands of people. Relative to these disasters, Christchurch has been a safe place to live, despite earthquakes, flooding in parts of the city, the 2017 Port Hills fires, the 2019 mosque shootings and the impacts of lockdowns and other restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the earthquake stories of Christchurch residents provide some insights into how people in a small city in a country of just five million at the end of the world responded individually and collectively to a decade of disasters. While social analysts offer insights into the social, political and economic dimensions of disasters, the narrators who recorded their stories for these different research projects often articulated how organisational processes, national and local policy decisions, the interests of commercial businesses, and inequalities in income and housing status had disastrous consequences following the Canterbury earthquake sequence. CDS researchers critically analyse the social factors that produce disastrous outcomes for people, but so do those who have experienced these disasters. These narrators were very aware of unequal outcomes for people in different circumstances after the Canterbury earthquake sequence and often active in responding to these differences and crafting their responses to hazardous times. They might resist decisions imposed by government, like those who stayed in their red-zoned homes, or they might choose to live close to friends in a damaged suburb rather than a safer, less affected part of town. They often become more involved with others in their community or generated new organisations and ways of connecting. When face-to-face support from others was difficult, they put their energies into digital connections with family and friends. Many of them spoke about “hitting the wall”, while others became elated at what they could accomplish. Residents of other cities will encounter different issues as they experience other hazardous times, but these fragments of stories provide some insight into how these narrators negotiated a range of difficulties, risks and uncertainties and connected to others in their city between September 2010 and December 2020.

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References Aldrich, D. P. (2012). Building resilience: Social capital in post-disaster recovery. University of Chicago Press. Calder, K., D’Aeth, L. D., Turner, S., Fox, C., & Begg, A. (2016). Evaluation of a well-being campaign following a natural disaster in Christchurch, New Zealand. International Journal of Mental Health Promotion, 18(4), 222–233. CERA. (2016). Walking the recovery tightrope: Learning and insights from the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority. EQ Recovery Learning. https://www.eqrecoverylearning.org/assets/downloads/Res0071Walking-the-Recovery-Tightrope2.pdf Cretney, R. (2014). Resilience for whom? Emerging critical geographies of socioecological resilience. Geography Compass, 8, 627–640. Du Plessis, R., Sutherland, J., Gordon, L., & Gibson, H. (2015). The confidence to know I can survive’: resilience and recovery in post-quake Christchurch. K¯ otuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Science Online, 10(2), 153–165. Enarson, E. (1998). Through women’s eyes: A gendered research agenda for disaster social science. Disasters, 22(2), 157–173. Enarson, E. (2012). Women confronting natural disaster: From vulnerability to resilience. Lynne Rienner Publishers. Gordon, L. (2013). Preserving family and community: Women’s voices from the Christchurch earthquakes. Disaster Prevention and Management, 22(5), 415–424. Gordon, L., Sutherland, J., Du Plessis, R., & Gibson, H. (2014). Movers and shakers: Women’s stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes. Women’s Voices Project/Ng¯ a Reo O Ng¯ a Wahine, NCWNZ Christchurch Branch. Report for Lotteries Community Sector Grants Board. http://www.communityresearch. org.nz/research/movers-and-shakers-womens-stories-from-the-christchurchearthquakes-final-version/ Hayward, B. M. (2013). Rethinking resilience: Reflections on the earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, 2010–2011. Ecology and Society, 18(4), 37. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol18/iss4/art37/ Humphrey, A., & Renison, P. (2015, May 22). Earthquake stress triggers mental health issues. The Christchurch Press. On behalf of the Christchurch Hospital Medical Staff Association (CHMSA). https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opi nion/68769392/earthquake-stress-triggers-mental-health-issues Johnston, D., Standring, S., Ronan, K., Lindell, M., Wilson, T., Cousins, J., Aldridge, E., Ardagh, M., Deely, J. M., Jensen, S., Kirsch, T., & Bissel, R. (2014). The 2010/2011 Canterbury eathquakes: Context and cause of injury. Natural Hazards, 73, 627–637. Kenney, C., & Phibbs, S. (2015). A Maori love story: Community-led disaster management in response to the Otautahi (Christchurch) earthquakes as a

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framework for action. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 14(1), 46–55. Liberty, K., Tarren-Sweeney, M., Macfarlane, S., Basu, A., & Reid, J. (2016). Behavior problems and post-traumatic stress symptoms in children beginning school: A comparison of pre- and post-earthquake groups. PLOS Currents Disasters, 8. https://doi.org/10.1371/currents.dis.2821c82fbc27d0c2aa9e0 0cff532b402 Marlowe, J. (2013). Resettled refugee community perspectives to the Canterbury earthquakes. Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal, 22(5), 434–444. Marlowe, J., & Bogen, R. (2015). Young people from refugee backgrounds as a resource for disaster risk reduction. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 14, 125–131. Marlowe, J., & Lou, L. (2013). The Canterbury earthquakes and refugee communities. Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work, 25(2), 58–68. Matthewman, S. (2015). Disasters, risks and revelation: Making sense of our times. Palgrave Macmillan. Matthewman, S., & Uekusa, S. (2021). Theorizing disaster communitas. Theory & Society, 50(6), 965–984. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-02109442-4 Millar, P., Thompson, C., Smithies, J., & Middendorf, J. (2018). The challenge, the project and the politics: Lessons from six years of the UC CEISMIC Canterbury earthquakes digital archive. In S. Bouterey & L. E. Marceau (Eds.), Crisis and disaster in Japan and New Zealand: Actors, victims and ramifications (pp. 159–179). Palgrave Macmillan. Mills, C. W. (1970). The sociological imagination. Penguin Books. First published 1959. Ministry of Women’s Affairs. (2013). Building back better: Using women’s labour in the Canterbury Recovery. A research report by Research First for the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. https://women.govt.nz/sites/public_files/ MWA_Canterbury%20research%20report-online2.pdf Neumayer, E., & Plümper, T. (2007). The gendered natue of natural disasters: The impact of catastophic events on the gender gap in life expectancy. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97 (3), 551–566. Parkinson, D. (2019). Investigating the increase in domestic violence post disaster: An Australian case study. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 32(11), 2333–2362. Potter, S. H., Becker, J. S., Johnston, D., & Rossiter, K. P. (2015). An overview of the impacts of the 2010–2011 Canterbury earthquakes. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 14(1), 6–14. Quake Outcasts v Minister of Canterbury Earthquake Recovery and The Chief Executive, Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority [2017] NZCA 332.

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Reid, M. (2013). Disasters and social inequalities. Sociology Compass, 7 (11), 984– 997. Rivera, J. D., & Nickels, A. E. (2014). Social capital, community resilience, and faith-based organisations in disaster recovery: A case study of Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church. Risk, Hazards and Crises in Public Policy, 5(2), 178–211. Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks on Christchurch Mosques 15 March 2019. (2020). The Report. https://christchurchattack. royalcommission.nz/the-report/ Selwyn District Council. (2017). Port Hills Fire Recovery Plan. Selwyn District Council. https://www.selwyn.govt.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/238191 /SDC-Port-Hills-Fire-Recovery-Plan.pdf Thornley, L., Ball, J., Signal, L., Lawson-Te Aho, K., & Rawson, E. (2014). Building community resilience: Learning from the Canterbury earthquakes. K¯ otuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, 10(1), 23–35. True, J. (2013). Gendered violence in natural disasters: Learning from New Orleans, Haiti and Christchurch. Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work, 25(2), 78–89. Uekusa, S., & Matthewman, S. (2017). Vulnerable and resilient? Immigrants and refugees in the 2010–2011 Canterbury and Tohoku disasters. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 22, 355–361.

CHAPTER 9

M¯aori Community Response and Recovery Following the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence Suzanne Phibbs, Christine Kenney, and T¯ a Mark Solomon

Introduction So when the first three seconds started we all went “here we go again” and started laughing, and then by the fifth second you knew it was different,

S. Phibbs (B) School of Health Sciences, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] C. Kenney School of Psychology, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] M. Solomon Waitaha, Ng¯ati Mamoe, Ng¯ai Tahu, Ng¯a Rauru, Ng¯ati Pa Hau Wera and Ng¯ati Kahungunu, Kaik¯ oura, New Zealand

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_9

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and you knew that it was scary, and you knew that things were about to change… (Rowi, Wahine, Central City, 2012)

In the aftermath of 22 February 2011 Christchurch Earthquake, M¯aori organised rapidly to address the urgent needs and longer-term recovery concerns of the wider community. This chapter summarises the M¯aori community response to the Canterbury earthquake sequence, documents how M¯aori have leveraged on the recovery in order to implement programmes that address vulnerabilities in the areas of housing, income and employment within the M¯aori community (and see Lambert in this ¯ volume). It tracks how research conducted in Otautahi Christchurch ¯ (Otautahi hereafter) following the Canterbury earthquake sequence has informed local recovery initiatives as well as the national disaster resilience strategy. Consideration is also given to how M¯aori cultural values have underpinned Ng¯ai Tahu responses to the Kaik¯oura Earthquake in 2016 and the terrorist attack in 2019. The focus on M¯aori cultural strengths in this chapter is a corrective to dominant deficit-focused and decontextualised framings of M¯aori in relation to social disadvantage as well as socio-economic, health and educational disparities (Bishop, 2005; Walter & Carrol, 2021). Information provided in this chapter is based upon qualitative interviews1 conducted throughout 2012 with 70 M¯aori who experienced the Canterbury earthquake sequence and were involved in the M¯aori Recovery Network (MRN).

¯ Maori Responses to 22 February 2011 Christchurch Earthquake The Canterbury earthquake sequence had a catastrophic impact on the wider environment and people of Canterbury with the Eastern regions of the city being severely affected (Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission, 2011). M¯aori reside in all suburbs but, in 2011, the majority ¯ lived in the low socio-economic Eastern sectors of Otautahi including Aranui, Bexley, Wainoni, Dallington and New Brighton (Stats NZ, 2012). Although these suburbs were severely impacted (Carlton & MacDonald, 2016), resulting in reduced material and financial resources, members of

1 Human ethics approval to conduct the research was obtained from Massey University and Te R¯unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu (TRoNT).

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¯ the M¯aori community in Otautahi stepped up to provide support to those affected by the earthquakes. The day after the earthquake the Kaiwhakahaere (Chairman) of Te R¯unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu (TRoNT),2 T¯a (Sir) Mark Solomon, called a disaster response strategy development meeting at Rehua Marae in ¯ central Otautahi. The meeting was attended by representatives from over 60 organisations, including Ng¯ai Tahu leaders, representatives from Te R¯unanga o Ng¯a Maata Waka3 (urban M¯aori authority for Te ¯ M¯aori Waipounamu), Te Puni K¯okiri,4 the New Zealand Police, Otautahi Warden’s Association, the Te Tai Tonga electorate and several other tribes including Te Arawa and Tainui (Marae, TVNZ, 2011). Norm Dewes, the head of Te R¯unanga o Ng¯a Maata Waka, set the tone of the hui by stating, “there is no you there is no me there is only us!” Within 15 minutes, there was unanimous agreement that all of the M¯aori groupings would work together. The immediate response was shaped by the cultural value “aroha nui ki te tangata”—extend love to all people. A community responder who was at the inaugural meeting described the creation of the mission statement: “On the first day the leaders adopted a theme – ‘aroha nui ki te tangata’ love to all people – so it didn’t matter who we come up against, we helped them” (K¯ okako, Wahine, 2012). The mission statement conveyed the message that Ng¯ai Tahu and Te R¯unanga o Ng¯a Maata Waka resources, including marae, were available to all members of the public. The MRN was established within 24 hours to ensure that the mainstream response to the earthquakes was inclusive of, and accessible to, ¯ the diverse communities in Otautahi. Hui attendees agreed that TRoNT would undertake the leadership role and provide governance for the coordination of community support. Tribal leader T¯a Mark Solomon was delegated the role of media spokesperson. National, inter-tribal and M¯aori organisational networks were operationalised to access social and material resources for wh¯anau (family) in need. Rehua and Ng¯a Hau e Wh¯a Marae acted as Recovery Assistance Centres. The MRN organised people 2 Te R¯ unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu (TRoNT) is the corporate arm of Ng¯ai Tahu, the principal Southern Tribe of New Zealand who hold mana whenua rights over the region. 3 Te R¯ unanga o Ng¯a Maata Waka (urban M¯aori authority for Te Waipounamu) represents people from the Northern tribes who live in Christchurch. 4 Te R¯ unanga o Ng¯a Maata Waka (urban M¯aori authority for Te Waipounamu) represents people from the Northern tribes who live in Christchurch.

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to staff information centres which passed on details about unmet needs to the network distribution centres and referred people to Government, Christchurch City Council (CCC) and the Red Cross. They encouraged wh¯anau to apply for financial relief and in some cases supported people to fill out forms. Te Puni K¯okiri connected wh¯anau identified by the network as having unmet needs to relevant government agencies. Ng¯ai Tahu was able to offer targeted assistance as a result of information received from a random telephone survey of 150 households in the Eastern Suburbs that was carried out immediately following the earthquake. Survey results gave an indication of the percentage of people impacted by the earthquakes, as well as informed an estimation of damages and unmet needs in the community. The old Wigram Air Force Base was set up as a base of operation to administer Iwi affairs, receive, redistribute and allocate human and material resources, as well as co-ordinate Government and inter-tribal liaison. Emergency support services were operationalised from Rehua Marae and Ng¯a Hau e Wh¯a Marae including financial support, aid packages and practical help. An earthquake information and advice service were established by TRoNT which relisted the tribal organisation’s telephone number as an emergency contact centre for accessing assistance within 24 hours of the earthquake (Sharples, 2011). Te R¯unanga o Ng¯a Maata Waka established a contact centre at Ng¯a Hau e Wh¯a Marae, staffed welfare centres, assisted wh¯anau to access support, organised door knocking in the Eastern Suburbs, as well as delivery of essential supplies such as water. The team was managed under the central government’s Ministry of Social Development (MSD) 0800 framework which was repurposed as a disaster help-line. Following an engineering assessment of the facility which found no structural damage Ng¯a Hau e Wh¯a marae became an outreach hub for displaced government agencies, the banking sector as well as various community organisations (Te Puni K¯okiri, 2011). Approximately, 100 Watene M¯aori (warranted M¯aori Wardens), 30 from the South Island and 70 from the North Island were mobilised and ¯ door knocked on houses in Eastern Otautahi in order to ascertain and address unmet needs (TRoNT, 2011). As well as providing comfort to people impacted by the earthquakes, the M¯aori Wardens delivered food, water, chemical toilets, blankets and clothing to people in the Eastern Suburbs. In the following extract from one of the interviews, a TRoNT

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employee, who volunteered to work at the emergency centre at Wigram, describes how the M¯aori Wardens coordinated their response: …the M¯aori wardens did an awesome job… They…went through door knocking at every house… on the east side, every house, and they sent in their lists to us, food, clothing, bedding whatever it was they needed and we got those [requests] onto the trucks from here [Wigram]. They were all delivered… (K¯otare, Male, 2012)

M¯aori Wardens enacted the kaupapa of man¯akitanga extending respectful support to address households’ immediate needs and continued to work in the Eastern Suburbs until the middle of April, 2011. Referring ¯ to the 30 Otautahi M¯aori Wardens who operated out of Rehua Marae one of the TRoNT managers commented that: Our [Ng¯ai Tahu] wardens they got out into the community - they door knocked on close to 10,000 homes, they delivered around 1600 food packages, they delivered water, anything that people asked for, we delivered. (Tui, Male, 2012)

¯ M¯aori health professionals from outside Otautahi volunteered their services and provided primary health care to the community. Thirteen doctors, eighteen nurses and 10 counsellors operated out of Rehua Marae as “barefoot” medical teams providing health services to areas in ¯ the Eastern Suburbs of Otautahi that were inaccessible by car due to liquefaction and fractured roading (Batt et al., 2011). Te Arawa sent down a group of nurses, Tainui sent down doctors and nurses, and Raukawa sent down doctors and nurses… when the Te Arawa nurses came down here, they had a fully enclosed trailer full of medical supplies. They used them all on the first day… (Tui, Male, 2012)

The mobile medical teams provided healthcare services to residents in ¯ Eastern Otautahi who lacked the necessary resources (money, transport) to commute to medical centres. People in the Eastern suburbs were also unwilling to leave home in case of another earthquake, were reluctant to leave damaged, unsecured homes for fear of looting or were unable to access health care as a result of disability or illness. Resources donated by North Island iwi, as well as community groups and wh¯anau, started arriving at Ng¯ai Tahu’s base of operations in Wigram

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within 48 hours of the earthquake. The necessities of life as well as donated goods including food, water, clothing, blankets and toys, were ¯ distributed throughout Otautahi by teams operating from the old Wigram Airport hangars, as well as Rehua and Ng¯a Hau e Wh¯a Marae. Regular communication between key stakeholders in the MRN ensured that logistical arrangements, involving the receipt and distribution of goods and services, were both practical and efficient. Daily debriefing meetings held at Rehua Marae guaranteed that community needs and issues as well as alterations to logistical arrangements were appropriately communicated to distribution teams, responders and/or relevant agencies. Young Ng¯ai Tahu males organised to dig the products of liquefaction from around wh¯anau houses. Identifying that neighbours of wh¯anau were also in difficulty, led to the teams clearing whole streets of liquefaction. The following interview extract describes how one of the teams spontaneously got together to perform this task in the Eastern suburbs: …a mate’s boss gave him [my brother] the use of two diggers, a 1.5 tonne and 3-tonner. …And first we were going to go around and do our families, brothers, sisters, aunties and that, we had eight houses we were going to clear with silt. But the first house we did, we looked at the elderly couple next door and they were up in silt, and I looked at [my brother] and says, “can’t go home” and he says “yep.” So, all of those eight houses we were going to do, we did both neighbours at the same time. You just couldn’t walk away you know? So we ended up taking five days instead of three, we did something like 54 houses with the excavators… (Kea – Male, Liquefaction Team 2, 2012)

Appreciation for the young men who dug liquefaction from their properties was also expressed by kaum¯atua (M¯aori elders) that we interviewed for example: …they all worked extremely hard around my property, they arrived on the 23rd [of February] and we started shovelling… Those kids didn’t need direction from TRoNT and they cared for us, they went straight to [another Kaumatua’s] house after they finished mine and done the rest of the street … The Student Army arrived a week later. They sort of wandered down the street and we’d [already] cleaned up! (Hoiho, 2012)

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Following initial action by the young (Ng¯ai) Tahu’s, people started ringing up TRoNT for help to clear their driveways, and arrangements were made for the young Tahu’s to be deployed to dig liquefaction. The MRN’s collective leadership manifested in a comprehensive response to the February earthquake. In total, the MRN contacted and/or provided shelter, food, water clothing, toys, finance, health care and other non-perishable goods to over 20,000 households following the February earthquake. The contributions of Ng¯ai Tahu, Te R¯unanga o Ng¯a Maata Waka and the wider M¯aori community to the Christchurch earthquake response have never been formally acknowledged by the Government. In addition, few mainstream media outlets reported on the wide-ranging MRN responses to the 2010–2011Canterbury earthquake sequence (Carter & Kenney, 2018). The MRN was effective in providing support to the diverse commu¯ nities within Otautahi. However, challenges did emerge between the MRN and agencies with whom previous relationships had not been established and/or around roles assigned to M¯aori involved in the disaster response. The MRN experienced belated linkages to the formal emergency management infrastructure including delayed communication with Civil Defence, while M¯aori Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) personnel experienced personal difficulties due to a perceived lack of organisational support for tikanga M¯aori when dealing with the deceased (Phibbs et al., 2015). M¯aori volunteers also experienced problems linking into the mainstream response. Volunteer Watene M¯aori were initially deployed by police to provide security services in the Eastern suburbs. Upon ¯ seeing the devastation and need in Eastern Otautahi, the Wardens immediately changed their role to one of outreach and support delivering basic necessities to an average of 4,800 households per week. Volunteer M¯aori medical teams sent by North Island iwi to provide support to impacted communities encountered initial difficulties with local healthcare providers suggesting that their services were not needed (Phibbs et al., 2015). Nissen et al. (2021) contrast the formal assistance given to the Student Volunteer Army (SVA), who also provided human resources to support the M¯aori response, with the challenges experienced by the MRN suggesting that “wider structural factors helped facilitate SVA support including the students’ ethnicity, education and wealth” (p. 6) (for an extended discussion of the SVA, see Hayward & Johnson in this collection).

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Cultural Factors That Underpinned the Response and Enhanced Resilience The drivers for Ng¯ai Tahu actions following the earthquakes were Ng¯ai Tahu cultural values which are embedded in sets of understandings about cultural identity and operationalised as values that shape behaviours and practices. M¯aori cultural strengths that underpinned responses following the Canterbury earthquake sequence included mahi aroha (work done out of love for the people) (Cram, 2021), kotahitanga (unity), manaakitanga (respect, hospitality), whanaungatanga (relationships), wh¯anau (family), whakapapa (genealogy), marae (a complex of land, buildings and facilities that usually belong to a specific hap¯u or kinship group), whakaruruhau (safety), kaum¯atua (elders), ng¯a manukura (leadership), turangawaewae (home ground), kaitiakitanga (guardianship) and ng¯a taonga tuku iho (knowledge that is handed down) (Kenney & Phibbs, 2015). In disaster contexts, M¯aori kaupapa (values), which are embedded in sets of understandings about cultural identity, were instrumental in enabling and shaping actions to address the needs of their communities. Mahi aroha is the practice of enhancing the mana of self and others through the capacity to give and to maintain positive relationships (Cram, 2021). Mahi aroha was a key component of the MRN. This kaupapa (set of principles) was expressed in the MRN mission statement “aroha nui ki te tangata” and actioned through “leveraging pre-existing community linkages, internal infrastructure, relationships with a tribal network that spanned the country, and established engagement channels with government agencies” (Cram, 2021, p. 4). Kotahitanga means unity or solidarity (Keane, 2012). The principle of kotahitanga reinforced collective approaches to decision-making and collaborative response actions that, in turn, ensured a unity of purpose and social cohesion amongst responders. Kotahitanga embeds high levels of social trust within M¯aori communities. These collectivised forms of social capital are associated with enhanced levels of resilience as well as shorter post-disaster recovery (Uekusa, 2020; Uekusa & Cretney in this collection). Manaakitanga refers to “nurturing relationships, looking after people and being very careful about how others are treated” (Mead, 2016. p. 29). Local Ng¯ai Tahu enacted manaakitanga through extending hospitality and support to the wider earthquake ravaged community. In the aftermath of the earthquake,

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manaakitanga involved providing accommodation, food, access to utilities, clothing, health care and shelter. Whanaungatanga embraces whakapapa and focuses upon relationships with kin and non-kin individuals. Whanaungatanga includes an expectation that individuals provide support and help to wh¯anau and the wider collective (Mead, 2016). This was illustrated through pre-existing positive relationships between TRoNT, government departments, Northern iwi and local service providers which were able to be drawn upon in order to ensure that M¯aori communities ¯ in Otautahi received appropriate forms of support. Resilience was facilitated through whanaungatanga relationships between extended wh¯anau who came together following the earthquakes to provide support to the community as well as family members in need. Wh¯anau serves as the foundation of M¯aori health and wellbeing and the source of social capital within M¯aori communities. Pre-existing forms of family connectedness are an advantage in a disaster ensuring wh¯anau resilience. Extended wh¯anau are able to be drawn upon in times of need, while wh¯anau who have resources will offer them willingly. Wh¯anau roles within a natural hazard event include ensuring the safety of family members, sharing resources such as food or clothing as well as providing emergency accommodation and transport (Kenney & Phibbs, 2014). Wh¯anau also staffed marae, assisted in securing damaged property and helped affected wh¯anau members negotiate the bureaucratic requirements of responding agencies such as Work and Income or ¯ the Earthquake Commission (EQC). Extended wh¯anau living in Otautahi helped to ensure that local marae were resourced, so they could provide support to the wider community. Connectedness to extended wh¯anau is ensured through cultural obligations that are associated with whakapapa (genealogy). Whakapapa, wh¯anau and marae provide a stable emergency management infrastructure for Ng¯ai Tahu wh¯anui. Whakapapa embodies the ties that bind the iwi together through identity, relationality as well as acts of reciprocity. Genealogies also shape infrastructure on the marae, as specific families are tasked with managerial responsibilities as well as day to day duties involved in running the marae. Marae provide a sense of place that is central to M¯aori identity and wellbeing (Mead, 2016). For centuries, marae have been rapidly mobilised centres of support for M¯aori communities when adversity strikes. Prior to the earthquakes, Rehua and Tuahiwi Marae, along with Ng¯a Hau E Wh¯a Marae, had been registered as Civil Defence welfare ¯ centres. In the Otautahi context, Ng¯ai Tahu used their marae to extend

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support to the entire community on an informal basis. Marae are regarded as culturally, spiritually and physically safe spaces for M¯aori. Whakarurutanga refers to safety. Aspects of whakarurutanga include the provision of physical and spiritual safety and protection. M¯aori USAR staff drew upon tikanga (M¯aori cultural protocols) in order to keep themselves safe while working in the red zone. Having access to water for cleansing after leaving the temporary mortuary and saying karakia (prayers) over deceased members of the public were identified by M¯aori rescue workers as necessary forms of protection. M¯aori USAR workers performed these rituals in secret as they did not feel that, due to the nature and scale of the emergency, time taken out to observe these rituals would be supported by management (Phibbs et al., 2015). One place that M¯aori rescue workers were able to ensure that M¯aori spiritual traditions were observed was at Ng¯ai Tahu marae. M¯aori rescue workers accessed Ng¯ai Tahu kaum¯atua in order to be comforted and to have tapu associated with dealing with the deceased removed. Ng¯ai Tahu marae were also used to host, and share the grief with, relatives of foreign nationals that had died in the CTV building. Kaum¯atua refers to a M¯aori elder or elders. Kaum¯atua were the key actors around which Ng¯ai Tahu responses to the earthquakes were organised. Elders modelled aroha (love), organised marae, ensured that tikanga (cultural protocols) was upheld, searched for missing family members, leveraged networks to provide material and human resources, performed whakanoa and whakamoemiti (prayers and cleansing rituals) for USAR workers and provided reassurance within families. Nga manukura refers to leadership (Durie, 1999). Ng¯ai Tahu’s involvement in the emergency response enabled the iwi to showcase the quality of their leadership and to be seen as leaders in the wider community. Effective formal leadership, strategic thinking as well as the emergence of natural leaders following the earthquake were identified as key factors in ensuring the coordination of emergency management and disaster risk mitigation initiatives. Within te ao M¯aori (the M¯aori world), effective leadership is recognised when people successfully work together as a team, highlighting the collective nature of accountability for the response and recovery effort. Turangawaewae translates as “a place to stand”, it refers to places that enable M¯aori to feel empowered or connected (Royal, 2007) such as their home marae or the takiw¯a (region) of an iwi or hap¯u. Turangawaewae provides the context for action in relation to the earthquakes. As the ¯ hereditary kaitiaki (guardians) of Otautahi and Canterbury, Ng¯ai Tahu

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led the M¯aori response, while providing access to the iwi’s networks and resources enabled the MRN to lessen the impact of the earthquakes upon the community. M¯aori leadership in response to the disaster was characterised by tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty) over the form and content of that response. Kaitiakitanga refers to stewardship and protection and is often used in relation to the natural environment (Joseph et al., 2018). The Wait¯ angi Tribunal ruling on kaitiakitanga was endorsed by Otautahi papatipu r¯unanga (Ng¯ai Tahu sub-tribes that have mana whenua status over the ¯ Otautahi region) in their Mahaanui Iwi Management Plan (2013) as follows: Iwi and hap¯ u are obliged to act as kaitaiki towards taonga in the environment such as land, natural features, waterways, w¯ahi tapu, p¯a sites and flora and fauna within their tribal areas. (Waitangi Tribunal cited in Ng¯ai T¯ u¯ahuriri R¯ unanga, Te Hap¯ u o Ng¯ati Wheke, Te R¯ unanga o Koukour¯arata, ¯ Onuku R¯ unanga, Wairewa R¯unanga and Te Taumutu R¯ unanga, 2013)

The Canterbury earthquake sequence highlighted Ng¯ai Tahu responsibilities as guardians and protectors of the whenua (land). Relational connection to the land is underpinned by a responsibility to protect both the physical and social elements of the Canterbury environment through enacting kaitiakitanga (guardianship). Following the earthquakes, Ng¯ai Tahu operationalised this value by engaging as partners with Environment Canterbury (ECan) in developing new environmental initiatives (ECan, 2013). Ng¯a taonga tuku iho refers to treasures, such as cultural knowledge, heritage and heirlooms that are handed down through the generations. M¯aori cultural values and practices that underpinned the response to the Canterbury earthquake sequence are based in M¯aori traditions which are transmitted from one generation to another through practices, waiata (songs) and p¯ ur¯akau (stories). Reflecting on how the M¯aori response to the earthquakes reflected traditional M¯aori values and practices one participant comment: …I was really proud of Ng¯ai Tahu … to be honest… And that’s right across the board…for me when I look from Ng¯ai Tahu’s perspective was our ability to do it (respond). And I know that those who were here before us would have been really proud of what we did… (Kakaruwai. Wahine, 2012)

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Cultural values and practices enacted during the Canterbury earthquake sequence response were also evident in Ng¯ai Tahu responses to the 2016 Kaik¯oura earthquake, the 2019 terrorist attacks (Kenney & Phibbs, 2019) and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic (Cram, 2021). The following sections briefly outline Ng¯ai Tahu responses to the Kaik¯oura earthquake ¯ and the 2019 terrorist attacks in Otautahi.

A Decade of Mahi Aroha In the ten years since the Canterbury earthquake sequence, Ng¯ai Tahu have provided support to those impacted by the 2016 Kaik¯oura earthquake and the 2019 terrorist attacks. Once again M¯aori cultural values underpinned Ng¯ai Tahu responses to these events. On 14 November 2016, a Magnitude 7.8 earthquake occurred 15 kilometres north of Culverden in North Canterbury. Originating in Waiau, the earthquake was one of the most complex seismic events ever recorded, lasting two minutes and rupturing 21 faults. The earthquake caused both horizontal and vertical displacement of up to 12 metres as well as a localised seven metre tsunami (Geonet, 2016; Woods et al., 2017). The earthquake triggered thousands of landslips, isolating communities and causing significant damage to buildings, transportation networks, lifeline utilities as well as disruption to the agriculture and tourism industries (Woods et al., 2017). The earthquake resulted in two fatalities and 580 injury claims to the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) (Stevenson et al., 2017). The Kaik¯oura district in North Canterbury has a total population of 4,000 people with the region hosting approximately 137,000 tourists per year. Within an hour of the M7.8 Kaik¯oura earthquake, the local M¯aori tribe (Ng¯ati Kuri) opened their marae as a shelter and welfare hub for the community. In contrast to 2011, partnerships were established within 24 hours with the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management (MCDEM), the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and Non-Government Organisations. With support from TRoNT and local Kaik¯oura residents, the marae provided shelter, meals, clothing, hot showers and evacuation transport (TRoNT, 2016a) to tourists as well as local residents. Within the first week, the marae provided 10,000 meals and 1,700 care packages (Towle, 2016), sheltered 500 people and registered 1,000 individuals who were in need of assistance. Approximately 50 helicopter trips, provisioned by TRoNT

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¯ in Otautahi, flew in food and supplies to the marae and evacuated vulnerable tourists and displaced residents. Once a temporary road between ¯ Kaik¯oura and Otautahi opened, the tribe helped with providing emergency supplies as well as the evacuation of tourists who were then hosted ¯ by tribal members in Otautahi (Carter & Kenney, 2018; Kenney, 2019). On 15 March 2019 at 1.40 p.m., a lone gunman initiated consecu¯ tive terrorist attacks on the Al Noor and Linwood Mosques in Otautahi. 51 Muslims died, 49 were injured and many others traumatised by the events. Ng¯ai Tahu had pre-existing linkages with the Muslim Commu¯ nity in Otautahi through Ng¯ai Tahu representation on the Refugee and Migrant Centre Board. Ng¯ai Tahu kaum¯atua also worked with Red Cross providing support to the refugee community. Following the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, Ng¯ai Tahu provided assistance to the refugee and migrant community who lost their premises in the earthquake. The Canterbury Migrants Centre (CMC) and the Refugee Centre were invited to relocate their base of operations to Rehua Marae so that they could continue to provide support to their respective communities. Immigrants and refugees were offered respite from the earthquakes at Ng¯ai Tahu marae based in Moeraki and Invercargill. In a television interview conducted in 2011, T¯a Mark Solomon explained the kaupapa underpinning the MRN support to culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) ¯ communities in Otautahi: … I asked the M¯aori community if we could include the Asian, Muslim and migrant communities, to which I got immediate agreement… Look! Everything we do is based on the community it is all of us. We are part of this community and have responsibilities. This disaster has hit everyone and our response is for the people of Christchurch. You ride it out, you survive, and the way to do it is together as a community. (T¯a Mark Solomon, Marae Investigates, 27 February 2011)

The M¯aori value of “aroha nui ki te tangata” was once again actioned following the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attacks. Within 48 hours, Ng¯ai Tahu was working with the M¯aori, Pacific and Ethnic Services police unit and the Muslim community. Traditional M¯aori and Muslim prayers were ¯ used to bless the mortuary and the Otautahi funeral home that received all of the deceased (Parahi, 2019). Ng¯ai Tahu kaum¯atua also supported members of the Muslim community who were charged with preparing the bodies of the deceased for burial. In an interview with journalist

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Carmen Parahi (2019), the Deputy Police Commissioner Wally Haumaha expressed his appreciation of the support provided by Ng¯ai Tahu: This atrocity, this massacre happened on their whenua (land)… Ng¯ai Tahu provided direction, tikanga (customary practice) and they were important to the Muslim leaders. In the end, they wouldn’t move without Ng¯ai Tahu beside them. (Wally Haumaha, Police Deputy Police Commissioner, in Parahi, 2019)

Appreciation for Ng¯ai Tahu support was also expressed by a representative of the Muslim community: We found working with Ng¯ai Tahu we were able to achieve cultural sensitivity, where the requirements of the tangata whenua and our needs were accommodated. Everything worked without any question…That was fantastic. (Dr Mustafa Farouk, Federation of Islamic Associations of NZ, in Parahi, 2019)

Three days after the terrorist attack, members of the M¯aori, Pacific and Ethnic Services police unit, the Muslim community and M¯aori conducted a cleansing process to lift the tapu (spiritual restrictions) from the mosques. Wally Haumaha, the Deputy Police Commissioner commented at the time: The whole process was carried out by Ng¯ai Tahu with absolute dignity. Three of their leaders performed karakia (prayer) all the way down Deans Ave. (Wally Haumaha, Police Deputy Police Commissioner, in Parahi, 2019)

Cultural values and practices enacted in response to adversity were also ¯ embedded Ng¯ai Tahu values and actions associated with the Otautahi rebuild and recovery.

Whakaoranga---Repair, Rebuild, Restore, Reclaim ¯ The redevelopment of Otautahi featured increased collaboration between local M¯aori, regional authorities and central government (Kenney, 2019). Opportunities afforded through the inclusion of Ng¯ai Tahu in legisla¯ tion governing the Otautahi rebuild have enabled Ng¯ai Tahu to use cultural values and knowledge to support the environmental, social and urban recovery within the city and surrounding areas (and see Pickles in

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this collection). At the national level, the M¯aori response to the Canterbury earthquake sequence has informed the National Disaster Resilience Strategy (2019) with the government signalling a desire to “establish a clearer framework for the role of M¯aori in the emergency management system” (National Emergency Management Agency [NEMA], 2020, p. 15). Environmental Recovery The Canterbury earthquake sequence highlighted Ng¯ai Tahu responsibilities as guardians of the whenua. The whenua is understood to be the original progenitor of human life and recognised as Papat¯ u¯aanuku, the earth mother (Marsden, 1992). Prior to the earthquakes, Ng¯ai Tahu had struggled to develop and maintain relationships with statutory authorities within the region. The earthquakes were seen as an opportunity for Ng¯ai Tahu to participate in the rebuild and have an enhanced cultural presence within the city. The Canterbury Earthquakes Recovery Authority (CERA) ¯ was established in 2011 to coordinate the redevelopment of Otautahi. Ng¯ai Tahu was accorded the same status as the city and regional councils in the CERA legislation governing the rebuild (CERA, 2012; CERA, CCC & TRoNT, 2012). In 2012, interview participants anticipated that Ng¯ai Tahu’s role as an equal statutory partner would enable the Iwi to contribute to the redevelopment of the city: …we would be able to work… in equal partnership… with the decisionmakers, with the power brokers, and the entrepreneurs of our whenua, that live within our takiw¯a (region) and we would have equal rights and equal say over how our environment is looked after, and how people behave, in emergencies such as r¯ u whenua (earthquakes), yeah, and… it’s huge! (Whio, Male, 2012)

At the time, the inclusion of Ng¯ai Tahu as an equal statutory partner was unique and set a precedent for relationships between iwi and statutory authorities, such as regional and city councils, throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. Another way that Ng¯ai Tahu could participate in urban rebuild planning was through sharing cultural knowledge about the Iwi’s history within the region. As one community responder stated:

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We have a responsibility as kaitiaki of our land to work with CERA and the others to plan for the future. One of the ways we can help is by using our cultural knowledge to inform the redesigning and rebuilding of Christchurch. (Kea, Male, 2012)

TRoNT, with the assistance of additional information supplied by papatipu r¯unanga, was successful in getting key Ng¯ai Tahu sites included in the CERA blueprint for the city. if you look at the blueprint, you know, Ng¯ai Tahu took the opportunity to do something, like [achieving recognition of] Market Square… a culturally important site, which … is fantastic… (Kea, Male, 2012)

CERA and the CCC visited Ng¯ai Tahu headquarters, consulted with the community and communicated effectively. For Ng¯ai Tahu, this was a sign of a positive relationship: Not only have CERA and the [Christchurch City] Council come here, to the Iwi headquarters, but they’ve also gone into the communities. They’ve been incredibly open in their dialogue… Ng¯ai Tahu can’t fault the inclusion that we’ve had from both those organisations… (Tui, Male, 2012)

Tribal relationships with central government and local authorities ensured that the M¯aori community was engaged in decision-making processes related to urban renewal. Key concerns such as the establishment of housing developments on Ng¯ai Tahu lands, restoration of local rivers as well as the preservation of culturally significant sites were addressed within the urban recovery programme (CERA, CCC & TRoNT, 2012). CERA was disestablished in 2016 with a range of local and central government agencies taking over its roles and functions. Ng¯ai Tahu continued to be involved in many of the devolved agencies such ¯ akaro Avon River as Regenerate Christchurch which developed the Ot¯ Corridor (OARC) plan. In 2020, Regenerate Christchurch’s leadership role was transferred to the CCC. Local authorities have statutory obligations under the Local Government Act (LGA) (2002) and the Resource Management Act (RMA) (1991) to take into account Iwi Management Plans when drafting or altering regional policy statements and district plans. In 2013, the six ¯ Ng¯ai Tahu (r¯unanga) (sub-tribes) residing in Otautahi developed the

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Mahaanui Iwi Management Plan (Ng¯ai T¯u¯ahuriri R¯unanga, Te Hap¯u o ¯ Ng¯ati Wheke, Te R¯unanga o Koukour¯arata, Onuku R¯unanga, Wairewa R¯unanga & Te Taumutu R¯unanga, 2013) which outlined their 10-year vision for Ng¯ai Tahu involvement in resource management within the region. Funding support for the local Iwi management plan was provided by the CCC and ECan. Covering the timeframe for the Canterbury rebuild, aspirations within the plan encompassed co-governance, decisionmaking and planning procedures that included Ng¯ai Tahu perspectives, extension of marae-based assets and a greater role for marae in resource management. The plan has constituted a tool for Ng¯ai Tahu to express their tribal identity, authority, relationships and guardianship responsibilities in regards to the indigenous flora, fauna, water and other natural ¯ resources in Otautahi and the surrounding area. Ng¯ai Tahu partnered with ECan Regional Council in developing new environmental initiatives. The Mahaanui Iwi Management Plan addressed ¯ iwi resources protection in the Otautahi region while Te R¯ op¯u Tuia, a broader partnership between Ng¯ai Tahu and ECan, brought together cultural conservation practices and statutory responsibilities to facilitate the maintenance of sustainable natural resources (ECan, 2013). The public/private partnership includes the geophysical profiling of Ng¯ai Tahu lands and earthquake changes, documentation of sites of tribal significance, protection of cultural heritage sites and restoration of traditional food gathering sites (Kenney, 2019). Social Recovery ¯ The redevelopment of Otautahi has continued to generate employment opportunities for M¯aori, fuelling a 24% increase in the urban M¯aori population (Stats NZ, 2018) and a 20% increase in the number of M¯aori employed within the region (Stats NZ, 2014). The number of Ng¯ai Tahu ¯ residing in Otautahi has also increased 11.7% (Stats NZ, 2014). Some of this increase in the M¯aori population can be attributed to M¯aori initiatives aimed at addressing vulnerabilities identified following the earthquake such as financial hardship and substandard housing as well as persistently high youth unemployment. Social housing ventures were developed in partnership with the Canterbury Community Trust and Ng¯a Maata Waaka, the urban M¯aori authority (Watson, 2013). Urban land owned by Ng¯ai Tahu was also set aside for the rebuild and the creation of new housing developments in the north and west of the city (Solomon, 2012).

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In order to address youth unemployment, build M¯aori workforce capacity and increase M¯aori participation in the rebuild, TRoNT partnered with Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (CPIT, now Ara Institute of Canterbury) and construction company Hawkins Group to establish He Toki ki te Rika (a M¯aori Pre-Trades Training Scheme). This innovative collaborative model, set up in 2011, leveraged the existing knowledge, experience and expertise of partner organisations to up-skill M¯aori for the recovery of Canterbury (TRoNT, 2012). He Toki follows a M¯aori approach to learning and also provides professional guidance and support to students through to employment. In 2016, He Toki had 500 graduates, of whom 40% had transitioned into employment and 30 per cent had continued their studies in tertiary education (TRoNT, 2016b). In a climate where 21% of M¯aori youth aged 15–24 were not in training, education or employment, compared to 9.2% of Europeans (MSD, 2016), graduating from class and securing a job created a collective culture of success among rangatahi M¯aori involved in the scheme. At the time of writing, Te Toki has expanded to include Otago Polytechnic and supported over 1,100 M¯aori into trades training (He Toki, 2020). Urban Recovery Incorporating resilience into recovery requires “building back better (BBB)” (Matthewman & Byrd in this collection; UNISDR, 2015). TRoNT incorporated energy-efficient technologies into its new office development on the old Police and King Edward Barracks site opposite the Bridge of Remembrance. The site is culturally significant to Ng¯ai Tu¯ahuriri as mana whenua of the area, and Ng¯ai Tahu, as it is close to the ancient Puari P¯a of Canterbury and Ng¯ati M¯amoe (Ng¯ai Tahu Property, 2020). Officially opened in 2017, the office complex is equipped with an energy-efficient heat exchange system that controls the building temperature using aquifer water. The building’s roof is also clad with photovoltaic panels that produce electricity (McDonald & Harvie, 2017). A range of sustainable technologies improve air quality, reduce energy consumption as well as water use within the complex. The Ng¯ai Tahu building was among a select few that used new green technology in the rebuild (McDonald & Harvie, 2017). In 2020, Te Urit¯ı, one of the two fivestory buildings within the Pita Te Hori Centre, received a New Zealand Green Building Council Award, achieving a 5.5 star energy efficiency rating. The ranking places Te Uriti among Aotearoa New Zealand’s most

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energy-efficient buildings providing a practical example of sustainability as a key feature of the Ng¯ai Tahu value of kaitiakitanga (Ng¯ai Tahu Property, 2020). In the ten years since the earthquakes, Ng¯ai Tahu has engaged in a range of public/private partnerships that have made important contribu¯ tions to the longer-term resilience of Otautahi and the wider Canterbury ¯ region. As restoration of urban Otautahi has progressed, the M¯aori community’s focus has shifted from providing opportunities for M¯aori to participate in the rebuild to identifying innovative mechanisms for promoting community resilience and environmental sustainability in the longer term. Policy Responses Research documenting M¯aori responses to the Canterbury earthquake sequence has been published in academic journals (Kenney & Phibbs, 2015; Phibbs et al., 2015) and as an example of best practice on the United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) website (Kenney & Solomon, 2014). High-quality research has informed evidence-based changes to emergency management policies and practices. The role of M¯aori in facilitating community resilience to disasters has been acknowledged by central government (Ministry of Civil Defence & Emergency Management [MCDEM], 2019) and related amendments to disaster management legislation signalled (NEMA, 2020). M¯aori have been included in the 2019 National Disaster Resilience Strategy (MCDEM, 2019), for example, with a key objective being “building the relationship between emergency management organisations and iwi/groups representing M¯aori, to ensure greater recognition, understanding, and integration of iwi/M¯aori perspectives and tikanga in emergency management” (p. 3). Closer working relationships between iwi, civil defence sector groups and local authorities have also been observed following the 2016 Kaik¯ oura earthquake, the 2019 Nelson wildfires and the 2019 Whakaari eruption in the Bay of Plenty. However, as indicated in the National Strategy, further work is needed to integrate M¯aori approaches to addressing hazards, risks and resilience into central and local government policies, strategies and practices. The Civil Defence sector’s planned engagement with M¯aori constitutes a significant step towards addressing priorities outlined in the Sendai Framework for DRR (2015) that advocate the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge and perspectives in national strategic planning for risk reduction and resilience.

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Conclusion The MRN responses to the earthquakes were effective and efficient, providing an example of how M¯aori cultural values augment disaster response and recovery. Wh¯anau, whakapapa and marae provide a stable emergency management infrastructure within M¯aori communities and, as illustrated in this chapter, are key cultural assets that are associated with M¯aori resilience. Ng¯ai Tahu and Ng¯a Maata Waka worked together leveraging existing tribal, government, business and community relationships in order to provide a wide-ranging response to communities impacted by the disaster. In the initial aftermath of the earthquakes, M¯aori recovery focused on addressing vulnerabilities within M¯aori communities, such as unemployment and inadequate housing, as well as providing opportunities for M¯aori to participate in the rebuild. As the restoration ¯ of Otautahi progressed, the focus shifted to partnering with local and regional government to ensure environmental and community sustainability in the longer term. The Canterbury earthquake sequence provided an opportunity for Ng¯ai Tahu to have culturally significant sites included ¯ in the CERA blueprint for the rebuild of Otautahi, which was seen by the iwi as an important step towards recognising cultural diversity within the ¯ city. Lessons learned from the M¯aori response in Otautahi have informed the New Zealand National Resilience Strategy with the NEMA signalling a desire for a great role for M¯aori in disaster preparedness, response and recovery. In the ten years since the initial Canterbury earthquake sequence, Ng¯ai Tahu has been called upon to provide cultural support and assistance to communities impacted by the 2016 Kaik¯oura earthquake and the 2019 terrorist attacks. The focus on M¯aori cultural strengths during times of adversity highlights Indigenous resilience providing a necessary corrective to both public and academic narratives that marginalise and reinforce negative M¯aori stereotypes (Mitchell, 2020; Walter & Carrol 2021).

References Batt, J., Atherfold, C., & Grant, N. (2011). Te Arawa responds. Kai Tiaki Nursing New Zealand, 17 (9), 38. Bishop, R. (2005). Pathologizing the lived experiences of the indigenous M¯aori people of Aotearoa/New Zealand. In C. Shields, R. Bishop, & A. Mazawi

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Kenney, C., & Phibbs, S. (2014). Shakes rattles and roll outs: The untold story of M¯aori engagement with community recovery, social reliance and urban sustainability in Christchurch, New Zealand. Procedia Economics and Finance, 18, 754–762. Kenney, C., & Phibbs, S. (2015). A M¯aori love story: Community-led disaster ¯ management in response to the Otautahi (Christchurch) earthquakes as a framework for action. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 14, 46–55. Kenney, C., & Phibbs, S. (2019, July 16–19). Love in a time of terror: Revisiting an indigenous love story in Christchurch, New Zealand. Dealing with Disasters Conference. United Kingdom Alliance for Disaster Research- Disaster Research Group – United Kingdom Collaborative for Developing Disaster Research (DwD-UKADR-DRG-UKCDR 2019). University of Northumbria, Newcastle. Kenney, C., & Solomon, M., Sir. (2014). M¯aori Community-led Disaster Risk Management: An effective response to the 2010–2011 Christchurch earthquakes. UNISDR Scientific and Technical Advisory Group Case Studies — 2014. Available at: http://www.preventionweb.net/files/workspace/7935_k enneyandsolomon.pdf Marae Investigates TVNZ. (2011). Interview with Mark Solomon the Kaiwhakahaere of Te R¯ unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu. TVNZ. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=4vVmM99VUqg Marsden, M. (1992). God, man and universe: A Maori view. In M. King (Ed.), Te Ao Hurihuri: Aspects of Maoritanga (pp. 130–137). Reed Books. Mead, H. M. (2016). Tikanga living by M¯ aori values. Huia Publishers. McDonald, L., & Harvie, W. (2017, August 10). Ngai Tahu’s new $85m Christchurch office complex will strengthen city’s mana. Stuff . https:// www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/95641375/new-85m-office-complex-str engthens-ngai-tahu-mana-in-city–iwi Ministry of Civil Defence & Emergency Management. (2019). National disaster resilience strategy. Author. Ministry of Social Development. (2016). The social report. Author. Mitchell, C. (2020, November 30). Our Truth, T¯a M¯atou Pono: Over three centuries we’ve failed to represent M¯aori fairly. Stuff. https://www.stuff.co. nz/pou-tiaki/our-truth/300162006/our-truth-t-mtou-pono-over-three-cen turies-weve-failed-to-represent-mori-fairly NEMA. (2020). Briefing to the incoming minster for emergency management. NEMA. Ng¯ai Tahu Property. (2020). Ngai Tahu property celebrates green star, NABERSNZ ratings for Pita Te Hori centre building. https://ngaita huproperty.co.nz/news/ngai-tahu-property-celebrates-green-star-nabersnzratings-for-pita-te-hori-centre-building-2/

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Towle, M. (2016, November 21). We’re here to help, we’ll help anybody. RNZ . Available at https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/318520/%27we% 27re-here-to-help,-we%27ll-help-anybody%27 TRoNT. (2011). Maori Wardens recognized for quake effort. TRoNT . Christchurch, New Zealand. https://ngaitahu.iwi.nz/maori-wardens-recogn ised-for-quake-effort TRoNT. (2012). Aoraki Matat¯u Annual Report. TRoNT . Christchurch, New Zealand. TRoNT. (2016a). News Bulletin. 14 November 2016. TRoNT . Christchurch, New Zealand. http://ngaitahu.iwi.nz/our_stories/earthquake-message-tamark-solomon/ TRoNT. (2016b). Annual General Report. TRoNT . Christchurch, New Zealand. http://ngaitahu.iwi.nz/investment/ngai-tahu-annual-reports/2016-annualreport/ Uekusa, S. (2020). The paradox of social capital. A case of immigrants, refugees and linguistic minorities in the Canterbury and Tohoku disasters. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 48, 10625. United Nations. (2015). Sendai framework for disaster risk reduction 2015–2030. United Nations. Walters, M., & Carrol S. R. (2021). Indigenous data sovereignty, governance and the link to indigenous policy. In M. Walter, T. Kukutai, S. R. Carroll, & D. Rodriguez-Lonebear (Eds.), Indigenous data sovereignty and policy. Routledge. Watson, L. (2013, February 22). $10m fund for affordable houses. The Press. Available at http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/8340038/10mfund-for-affordable-homes. Accessed 3 October 2014. Woods, R., McBride, S., Wotherspoon, L., Beavan, S., Potter, S., Johnston, D., Wilson, T., Brundson, D., Grace, E., Brackley, H., & Becker, J. (2017). Science to emergency management response: Kaikoura earthquakes 2016. Bulletin of the New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering, 50(2), 329–337.

CHAPTER 10

Asian Migrant Worker Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch Arlene Garces-Ozanne, Maria Makabenta-Ikeda, and Shinya Uekusa

Introduction Individuals worldwide face increasing exposure to disasters (see Chapter 1 and 2 for a brief definitional discussion of disasters). The vulnerability of people to these disasters is highly contextual and largely dependent on

A. Garces-Ozanne Department of Economics, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] M. Makabenta-Ikeda Kyoto Sangyo University, Kyoto, Japan e-mail: [email protected] S. Uekusa (B) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_10

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social arrangements and human–environment interactions (Matthewman, 2015; Tierney, 2014; Wisner et al., 2004). Disaster researchers have theorised and indeed provided empirical evidence that, due to the complex intersection of social forces such as race, ethnicity, gender, sex and class, plus the impacts of neoliberalism, colonialism, populism, anti-immigration discourse, public policy and so on, (im)migrants,1 refugees and other transients are believed to be a highly vulnerable group in any given society in the wake of disasters (Sanfelici, 2021; UNDRR Asia-Pacific, 2020). Increased understanding of vulnerability in disaster research also provides significant insight into individuals’ and communities’ capacity to anticipate, manage and recover from extreme events. Research shows that, as with other marginalised groups, migrants have withstood and coped with disasters and demonstrated their remarkable resilience and adaptation to the subsequent—and compounding—cultural, environmental, political and social changes and challenges. We have focused on the role of social capital and mutual assistance initiatives vis-à-vis migrant resilience in our previous studies (Makabenta-Ikeda & Garces-Ozanne, 2016, 2019; Uekusa & Matthewman, 2017). However, (Asian) migrant experiences following the 2010–2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence suggest the complexity of disaster vulnerabilities and resilience (Uekusa & Matthewman, 2017). Our understanding of vulnerability still seems limited. In this chapter, drawing upon current literature, media reports and our empirical research2 conducted over the last seven years, we explore the last 10 years of disaster experiences and the perspectives of ¯ ¯ Asian migrant workers in Otautahi Christchurch (Otautahi hereafter), many of whom are essential workers in the health care, aged care, agriculture, hospitality and (re)construction sectors but are treated as invisible

1 There are key differences between migrants and immigrants (i.e. immigrants typically

move to a destination country as permanent or long-term residents). However, while we do not intend to use the terms interchangeably, migrants on temporary visas may change their status over time and sometimes become immigrants. 2 Our inquiries were conducted in 2015–2021: (1) as a part of his doctoral research, one of the authors conducted 28 in-depth qualitative interviews with migrants, refugees and linguistic minorities on their experience of the 2011 Christchurch Earthquake and the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, and (2) the other authors conducted field work, face-to-face interviews and an online survey of Filipino migrants (n = 68) in ¯ Otautahi between January 2016 and March 2017 (a few follow-ups in 2021). The purpose of these studies was to elicit specific and personal responses about their experience prior, during and after the Canterbury earthquake sequence.

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second-class citizens. Their voices remain relatively unheard. Therefore, taking a bottom-up approach, it is critical to explore their experiences and understand (the root causes of) their vulnerabilities and resilience to various everyday challenges.

Contextualising Asian ¯ Migrant Workers in Otautahi ¯ Over the last couple of decades, Otautahi has become the second-largest destination of migrants to Aotearoa New Zealand after T¯amaki Makaurau Auckland. The 2018 Census estimated that 27.1% of the city’s population was born overseas, representing between 5–7 percentage points increase on the two previous censuses, with 22.2% in 2013 and 20.1% in ¯ 2006 (Stats NZ, 2006, 2013, 2018). Migrants coming into Otautahi and the Canterbury region, especially those on temporary work visas, have been steadily increasing since the 2010–2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence (Fig. 10.1). Although the flow of migrant workers to assist with ¯ the rebuild started decreasing in 2016, the fact remains that Otautahi is becoming a more diverse city as its overseas-born population continues to grow with about 170 different ethnic groups from 55 different countries, speaking 140 different languages (Christchurch City Council [CCC], 2014). Such an increase, in combination with internal migration, continues to contribute to the city’s population growth, reaching 400,000 in 2018 and growing significantly from 365,000 in 2012. This chapter focuses on Asian migrant workers, Filipinos in particular, because they make up the largest and fastest growing overseas-born ¯ groups in Otautahi but, as compared to Indigenous, refugee and other marginalised groups, these migrant workers are relatively under-studied. Between 2006 and 2018, the Filipino population in the city increased spectacularly. It grew by approximately 11,000% from 858 in 2006 to 10,338 in 2018. This is largely attributed to the significant increase in Filipino construction workers in response to the rebuild efforts after the Canterbury earthquake sequence. In the last decade, the Philippines, India and the UK have been the top three source countries for migrants under the Skilled Migrant Category (SMC) and Essential Skills Work Visa category in Canterbury (Figs. 10.2 and 10.3) (MBIE, 2016). Migrant (re)construction workers were in high demand. Up to 40,000 construction workers were required during the reconstruction peaks (Liu, 2014). But, as the city redevelopment progressed, there was also a shortage in different segments of the labour market. Table 10.1 shows that the Philippines and India have been the main source countries of

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¯ Fig. 10.1 Otautahi reconstruction workers taking a lunch break and listening to a jazz band by the Riverside Market (Photo taken by Shinya Uekusa in 2017)

labour for certain occupations under the SMC and Essential Skills Work Visa category (MBIE, 2017). The majority of migrants work in health care (as registered nurses and aged care), (re)construction (as construction trade workers, carpenters and joiners), IT and tech, education, and agricultural (as livestock farmers and farm workers) industries. The immediate skill shortage list of 2019 indicates that the Canterbury region needed more skilled labour in the following six sectors: agriculture and forestry; education; engineering; health and social services; recreation, hospitality and tourism; and trades (from bakers to electronics, plastic, metal fabrication, vehicle and machinists and motor technicians) (Immigration New Zealand [INZ], 2019a; also McDonald, 2018). All of these occupations are critical to the city’s recovery and redevelopment; indeed, without migrant workers who have supplied skilled labour in these sectors, the city would have only been rebuilt physically but not socially.

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2000 1800 1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 2009/2010 Philippines

2010/11 India

2011/12 UK

2012/13

2013/14

China

South Africa

2014/15

2015/16

Canterbury Total

Fig. 10.2 The top five source countries of SMC applicants in Canterbury, 2009/10 to 2015/16 (Source MBIE [2016])

¯ The Otautahi rebuild and subsequent economic boost demanded more workers than the local labour force could provide, and migration has been a major structural solution to the segmented gaps in the labour market as discussed above. Disasters cause significant economic, physical and social disruptions to societies, yet they also provide some industries with opportunities in the recovery and redevelopment process. Following disasters, there is increased structural demand for construction workers (Belasen & Polachek, 2008), and post-disaster redevelopment requires, and attracts, migrant workers who can provide cheaper and often more skilled labour than locals. For example, after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans attracted a large number of Latino migrant workers for the rebuild (Sisk & Bankston, 2014). From a migrant perspective, this is a “gold rush” (Searle et al., 2015), and it is an economic opportunity for those who experience economic and other forms of hardships in their home countries, in which there are strong “push” factors for emigration such as poverty, various forms of oppression and sometimes disasters (e.g.

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8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0 2009/2010

Philippines

2010/11

UK

2011/12

Ireland

2012/13

India

2013/14

Fiji

2014/15

2015/16

Canterbury Total

Fig. 10.3 The top five source countries of Essential Skills workers in Canterbury, 2009/10 to 2015/16 (Source MBIE [2016])

¯ 70,000 residents emigrated from Otautahi to other parts of the country or overseas due to the Canterbury earthquake sequence). ¯ The Otautahi disaster recovery and rebuild provided many Asian, European and other migrant workers with “promised” employment and economic opportunity (Montgomerie, 2013) even prior to moving to ¯ Otautahi. It is deemed to be a “low risk” form of migration for those who plan to remit their earnings back home to support their families— so-called contracted migration instead of speculative migration which would require a job search after moving to a new country (Silvers, 1977). Indeed, over 10,000 migrant workers arrived in the city on special rebuild visas; they paid fees of up to NZ$20,000 to recruitment ¯ agents to secure visas and job offers prior to their arrival in Otautahi. As the labour demand was temporary, some of these construction workers left the city, yet many also settled down, bringing their families from home and inspiring friends, acquaintances and others to join (McDonald, 2018). National and local governments have supported their settlement: migrant workers who hold a South Island Contribution (SIC) visa and

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Table 10.1 Occupation of Essential Skills workers in Canterbury 2014/2015 and 2015/2016 Top 10 occupations (4-digit level ANZSCO)

Number of applicants

Change over the past year

Top 2 source countries for each occupation

2014/2015

2015/2016

Livestock farmers Carpenters and joiners Aged and disabled carers Livestock farm workers Chefs Retail supervisors Structural steel construction workers Meat, poultry and seafood process workers Nursing support and personal care workers Structural steel and welding trades workers

627

654

Increase

Philippines, India

764

631

Decrease

Philippines, UK

422

475

Increase

Philippines, Fiji

427

347

Decrease

Philippines, India

284 157

259 216

Decrease Increase

China, India India, UK

176

205

Increase

Philippines, UK

136

153

Increase

Fiji, Philippines

81

142

Increase

Philippines, Fiji

164

142

Decrease

Philippines, India

Source Regional Migration Trends, Canterbury Overview 2015/2016 (MBIE, 2017)

live in the South Island for more than two years are currently eligible for residence under certain conditions (INZ, 2019b). The large group of construction workers had developed their ethnic networks and general “social infrastructure” over the last 10 years, thereby facilitating newcom¯ ers’ settlement and migration experiences in Otautahi (i.e. as a couple of respondents in our study explained, there are now more ethnic businesses and community groups available to meet the specific and diverse consumption and service needs among culturally and linguistically diverse [CALD] communities) (see Klinenberg, 2018 for social infrastructure).

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As the city was growing and becoming vibrant, there had been a further ¯ increase in migrant populations in Otautahi as international students, skilled professionals and general workers continued to arrive in the city and wider Canterbury region, especially from India, the Philippines and Iran, until the borders were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.

Addressing Migrant Worker Exploitation and Understanding the Root Causes of Their Social Vulnerability Despite the essential nature of their work, there have been a number of reports in the media and academic publications of worker exploitation (see e.g. Corlett, 2018; McClure, 2014; McClure & Meier, 2015; McLennan, 2018; Mercer, 2015; Searle et al., 2015; Stringer, 2016). It is highly problematic to generalise migrant worker experiences since the group is very diverse. However, it is crucial to explore and address the various issues that migrant worker groups have faced over the last ¯ ¯ decade in Otautahi. In particular, Filipinos in the Otautahi rebuild and agriculture were most likely to be exploited, yet many cases remain underreported. There is power involved: these migrant workers were reluctant to speak out as they were afraid of losing their jobs and visa (Searle et al., 2015). Migrant workers from other countries have faced similar hardships due to the political disenfranchisement, patriarchy, social isolation, racial stigma, language barriers and general social oppression in both home countries and Aotearoa New Zealand. McClure and Meier (2015) explain that ‘those [migrant workers] who did not speak English well, came from countries with low employment standards, and were tied into debt were most vulnerable’ (para. 2). Pre-Arrival Marginalisation in the Aotearoa New Zealand labour market persists, but it is important to understand that the exploitation and discrimination of ¯ migrant workers started prior to their arrival in Otautahi. Typically, they were not from affluent backgrounds and could not easily afford to migrate to a new country. Migrants need to go through complex and costly migration application processes. During the process, language competency

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(English in the case of migrants to Aotearoa New Zealand) can be a significant obstacle for intending migrant workers. However, the contracted migration may still be a lifetime opportunity for many to achieve upward social mobility and cope with structural disadvantages in their home countries (Stringer, 2016). There are often strong push factors in countries such as India and the Philippines which have supplied cheaper and more ¯ skilled labour to redevelop Otautahi and to support its economic growth. Unlike educated/skilled migrants, migrant workers who fill the labour ¯ shortages in Otautahi are charged, for example, NZ$20,000 by recruitment agents in the Philippines where average annual household income is about NZ$8,000.3 These migrant workers often need to sell their assets and/or take high interest loans to cover these fees. Consequently, many Asian migrant workers became bonded labour, as McClure (2014) notes, by taking on big loans. They are bonded because they are not able to pay off, no matter how hard they work (para.6). The reasons for taking high interest loans, selling their assets and becoming bonded labour may vary, yet many are attributable to “structural violence”—a subtle form of violence often embedded in social structure, which “refers to the avoidable limitations that society places on groups of people that constrain them from meeting their basic needs and achieving the quality of life that would otherwise be possible” (Lee, 2019, p. 123; see also Gultang, 1969 for structural violence) such as poverty, the lack of opportunity at home, conflict/war and so no. Exploitation of Essential Workers and Institutionalised Racism In a report funded by the New Zealand Industrial Relations Foundation (Inc.), McLennan (2018) interviewed Filipino construction workers in ¯ Otautahi (and other regions) and explored problem areas such as low pay rates and pay deductions, high debt levels upon arrival to Aotearoa New Zealand, the expense and complexity of immigration matters, uncertain work hours, and housing and inclusion issues among others. Many found a significant gap between the contracts that they signed in the Philippines and the terms provided by New Zealand employers (Liu, 2014). For instance, some Filipino carpenters, who were promised full-time jobs 3 See Philippines Statistics Authority’s 2018 family income and expenditure survey (available at https://psa.gov.ph/sites/default/files/FIES%202018%20Final%20R eport.pdf).

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by recruitment agencies, had no work and income when they arrived and needed to rely on the church to get by (Meier, 2014a). McLennan (2018) was also interested in the other side of the story and explored employer experiences and perspectives on migrant worker-related issues: employers addressed issues around safety rules, different eating habits, immigration and visa matters, the climate and work-life balance (as many migrant workers wanted to work longer hours to earn money to support their families back home). McLennan’s study (2018) then concluded with recommendations for employers and the government to make strategic efforts to improve the experiences of migrant workers by assisting with visa applications, providing fair rates of pay and by promoting practices of inclusion. Collins and Stringer (2019) cite information asymmetry and agency problems at key stakeholder levels in the community, labour unions and legal sectors. According to these studies, the key factors that aggravate migrant workers’ vulnerabilities and exposure to exploitation are key stakeholders’ lack of knowledge of employment law, employment rights and immigration processes. However, as we will further discuss, these policy efforts and interventions are limited to only providing superficial-level solutions. Theoretically, these workers could report to the unions, yet, from migrant worker standpoint, this is simply an unrealistic solution to worker exploitation as it ignores micro-level power dynamics and larger social forces. There are structural reasons why these migrant workers are reluctant to fight for better work conditions and their human rights in general. Journalists such as Cecile Meier have revealed ongoing cases of migrant worker mistreatments. When employers faced cashflow issues, submissive Asian migrant workers with limited English competency seemed to be the first ones denied pay since many migrant workers were tied to certain companies and could not easily change their jobs (Meier, 2014a). Migrant ¯ workers were sometimes not paid the promised wage, yet Otautahi’s Labour Inspectorate could not do anything about such breaches as long as employees were still paid above the minimum wage. Furthermore, McLennan (2018) found that most Filipino migrant workers in her interviews were employed at considerably lower hourly rates than their New Zealand-born and European counterparts. Although, to our knowledge, there is no empirical evidence, it is highly doubtful that Europeans such ¯ as the British and Irish migrant workers in the Otautahi reconstruction have experienced the same level of exploitation and marginalisation. This secondary labour market appears to be predicated on race.

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Safety and work conditions are also areas of concern because, while work-related injuries among migrant workers were spiking, once again they did not report the cases, which they thought could result in losing jobs and visas (Meier, 2014b). Even when they sought medical treatment, there is evidence of further institutionalised exclusion of migrant workers from access to vital social welfare services. Many migrants who work on temporary visas have no access to many of the publicly funded medical treatment and health services (Ministry of Health, 2021). Further, in connection to the post-quake experience, only citizens or permanent residents are eligible for the Canterbury Earthquake Temporary Accommodation Service (CETAS). This means that housing can also be another serious issue for migrant workers. Meier (2015) reported that, while landlords claimed that they offered reasonable rent (e.g. $150 per week including utilities), many did not want to rent to migrant workers. Consequently, migrant workers had no choice but to stay in substandard overcrowded accommodation because it was difficult for them to ¯ find accommodation in Otautahi (McLennan, 2018). Aside from being ¯ essential to the rebuild and redevelopment in Otautahi, migrant workers contribute to society as tax paying residents but, due to their migration status, they are denied access to tax-funded services that other people take for granted, which are crucial to their well-being and are indeed basic human rights. More empirical examples are available in McLennan’s report (2018) and Stringer’s report (2016). MBIE, a government agency, has intervened to a certain extent to solve migrant worker exploitation as a key government priority. However, the situation has not improved. Mercer (2015) presents migrant worker’s voices. One Filipino migrant explained that, as some migrant workers are the sole breadwinners for their family (often back in their home countries) who rely on their remittances, they cannot lose their job or visa. It is important to remember that they invested a considerable amount on their visa and job, so there is no real option to give up. Instead of speaking out and fighting for their rights, “passing” (Goffman, 1963) or “invisibilizing” themselves (Uekusa & Lee, 2019; Villegas, 2010) are, just like many migrants in other countries, their preferred options for better future prospects to avoid racial profiling, various backlashes, deportation risk, stigmatisation and other forms of oppression. It is also a cultural practice of many Asians not to complain or be confrontational to their superiors.

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Many exploited migrant workers are reluctant to speak out about their struggles for these reasons even if, as we observed, resources and support for the legal process are available. Noticeably, interviewees in our studies tended to focus on positive experiences and were either reluctant to talk about exploitation and negative experiences or simply did not perceive their experiences negatively. While we, as critical disaster studies (CDS) scholars, should consider giving voices to the otherwise unheard, we need to be even more critical here. Researchers do not want to put them in spotlights or speak for them, which might unintentionally stigmatise and disempower them. Giving voices may not always be helpful and can be counterproductive. As Oliver-Smith in Chapter 2 proposes, we need to question the Western epistemological orientation of (disaster) research. Rather than focusing on their empowerment, we need to address the root causes of their vulnerabilities and to work towards structural transformation without disempowering the already marginalised. As Uekusa and Lee (2020) argue, empowerment of marginalised groups needs to be carefully planned and managed, taking into consideration the contexts, power and larger social forces because, if they become hypervisible, it can easily draw negative public attention, which the powerless, who have less control over their visibility and social image, want to avoid at all costs (see Brighenti, 2007 for theory and detailed discussion about visibility and power). ¯ “Everyday Disasters” in Otautahi As discussed above, migrant worker exploitation in their pre-/postmigration can be understood as manifestations of institutionalised racism and structural violence in general. However, more critical research work is needed to properly understand Asian migrant worker experience in ¯ Otautahi as they most likely encounter difficulties and oppression outside their workplaces on a daily basis as well. Although many of the Asian ¯ migrant workers in Otautahi did not experience the Canterbury earthquake sequence because they arrived after the main shocks in 2010 and 2011, many are experiencing and coping with the long-term disaster recovery, which is still a part of the Canterbury earthquake sequence, and most importantly leads to “everyday disasters”. Let us revisit a definition of disaster here. Disasters are fundamentally anthropogenic, the result of the (global) distribution of power and human–environment interactions (Enarson et al., 2007). Taking a critical sociological approach and extending the idea of disasters created

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and compounded by power, Steve Matthewman (2015) conceptualised “everyday disasters”, which speak to disastrous social conditions, resulting from poverty, (institutionalised) racism, sexism, economic inequalities, conflict/wars, neoliberalism and other forms of structural marginalisation and oppression (pp. 94–148; see also Chapter 1 in this volume). This form of disaster may not appear as “typical” disasters like the earthquakes. However, as CDS scholars take a critical approach, we need to acknowledge that disasters take many different forms. The marginalised groups in any societies may face cultural, economic, environmental, political and social challenges on a daily basis induced by multi-hazards and human activities, while their affluent counterparts may face similar challenges only when “typical” disasters disrupt their life. This suggests that we use a more critical sociological lens to look at these Asian migrant workers’ everyday experiences. Racial discrimination in both overt and institutionalised forms is a part of everyday life for some ¯ non-white/European migrant workers in Otautahi (see, e.g. Salmond, 2019). Further contextualising Asian migrant workers in the South Island, Taonui (2019) notes that “Cantabrians have shown great compassion and generosity to Muslim and migrant communities following the terrorist attacks” (para. 1) but continues to discuss, with reference to humanitarian refugee and immigrant law specialist Darius Shahtahmasebi, that today “racism is ‘normalised’ for Muslims and Asians living in Christchurch, including skinhead harassment and regular swastika and ‘Asian go home’ graffiti in high school toilets” (para. 35). Allott (2021) wrote a media ¯ report in Stuff , drawing a picture of what it is like to live in Otautahi as (Kiwi-) Asians: “[a] grandfather afraid to leave home after being assaulted. Parents at a Christchurch school receiving hateful emails, telling them to keep their ‘disgusting virus spreaders’ home. A woman whose family has been in New Zealand for five generations, but who’s [sic] children still are not considered Kiwis” (para. 1). Respondents in our studies did not share any experiences of overt racism like these, yet one Filipino respondent shared his feeling of generally being included while he “get[s] the occasional odd awkward feeling of being discriminated [against]”. Language barriers or linguicism—language-based discrimination—is also a common ¯ experience among linguistic minority migrant workers in Otautahi (see Christchurch Migrant Inter-Agency Group, 2011; Uekusa, 2019; Wylie, 2012). As compared to the demography of T¯amaki Makaurau Auckland which ¯ is 59% European/White, Otautahi is 87% European/White and is a city

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that has always celebrated its Englishness. In relation to this, Liu (2014) shares her critical observation: “[w]hereas the civil society of [superdiverse city] Auckland is ‘purpose-built’ to evolve into New Zealand’s multicultural ‘diverse engine’, Christchurch and the deep South are not well-equipped. Labour shortages are forcing the region’s hand” (para. 7; see also Pickles in this volume). Although we do not intend to simplify issues to the point that it is Cantabrians’ “naivete” and unfamiliarity with diversity alone that accounts for matters, the relative homogeneity in Canterbury has caused various race/ethnicity-related discrimination issues, Asian migrant worker exploitation included. Although the impacts are yet to be known, the recent surge of Asian hate due to the pandemic ¯ has likely worsened Asian migrant experience in Otautahi (see e.g. Peters, 2020). Thus, further investigation is much needed around migrant worker experience of compounding disasters and everyday disasters in ¯ Otautahi, particularly in the face of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Social Capital, Resilience and Adaptation In this chapter, we do not intend to overemphasise migrant workers’ vulnerability since they are not necessarily powerless help-seekers. They have shown remarkable resilience and adaptation to a series of adversities ¯ over the last 10 years in Otautahi (and also prior to migrating). Even if people face vulnerability on a daily basis, they do not simply give up. They deal with it and get by. In some specific cases, people can earn strength by going through adversity; hence, the coping and adaptation capacity of socially disadvantaged individuals and communities can be attributable to the condition of vulnerability itself (Uekusa & Matthewman, 2017). Thus, it is slightly misleading to call, or even problematic to mystify, resilience as a set of “special” human and community qualities because, to a certain extent, most people adapt to cultural, economic, environmental, political and social changes and challenges. Nonetheless, how well they adapt to such changes and challenges depends on the resources and/or the access to such resources they possess (Uekusa, 2018; Ungar, 2011). Social capital is one of these essential resources, particularly for those who have limited resources and access to them. As with many other disaster studies focusing on resilience among marginalised groups, we opted for social capital theory to critically analyse ¯ Asian migrant worker adaptation to Otautahi’s compounding disasters and long-term recovery. Putnam (2000) notes that “social capital refers to

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connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them” (pp. 19–22). Aldrich (2017) highlights three different forms of social capital to give a clearer picture: (1) bonding social capital (within networks or homogeneous community), (2) bridging social capital (between networks or communities) and (3) linking social capital (across vertical gradients with external organisations, government services, etc.) (pp. 358–359). For this school of thought, social capital is a collective-level resource. It is logical that, during disasters and the long-term recovery, people tend to rely on their social networks for critical information and emotional, financial and material support (see e.g. Aldrich, 2012; Christchurch Migrant Inter-Agency Group, 2011). Migration scholars typically emphasise how social capital is a critical resource for less wealthy migrants to depend on to get by, and sometimes get ahead, in a new country where they might lack the key resources for success in competitive education and labour markets such as cultural competency, language skills, education, etc. (Uekusa, 2020). For Asian migrant workers, local community help that gave individuals a sense of belonging was a key source of social support. The constant inflow of Asian migrant workers from the same countries or same ethnic groups over time has helped grow ethnic communities physically and ¯ virtually in Otautahi, which became an important support system for the ¯ existing and new migrants. For example, a Filipino resident in Otautahi explained: I believe I have sufficient support from friends here in Christchurch. For the wider community, there is a lot of Filipino Community sharing on Faceboook. Ten years ago, there was nothing on the social media to connect Filipinos living in Christchurch, now there are heaps to choose from such as Pinoy Christchurch, Christchurch NZ, ProudPinoy, etc.

Physical and virtual interactions with others in the local neighbourhoods or online communities can help maintain their bonding social capital and trust among individuals and foster a sense of community, which becomes a crucial resource in case of extreme events or, as discussed earlier, for the everyday realities marginalised groups face. ¯ Another Filipino respondent, who was a long-term Otautahi resident, also ¯ shared his observation of the growth of Filipino community in Otautahi over the last 10 years:

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The quake changed the Filipino Community in Christchurch. There are a lot of migrant workers that arrived to help in the rebuild. Probably around 30,000 Filipino workers mostly carpenters, electricians, tradesmen. So, the community has become vibrant with celebrations like Peñafrancia festival, Sinulog, fiestas and sporting events too. Also many Pinoy sari-sari stores were opened around the city and bakeries and restaurants.

With growing Filipino ethnic businesses (e.g. grocery stores and restaurants) and community groups who provide goods and services including cultural events to meet the specific and immediate needs, the local Filipino migrant community has institutionalised their bonding social capital and developed their social infrastructure for them to rely on to get by and get ahead. As other respondents emphasised, this is also the case for other Asian migrant communities such as Chinese, Indian, ¯ Japanese and Korean communities in Otautahi. Such a community support system in both informal and institutionalised forms became even more important during the COVID-19 pandemic when the best strategy to stop the spread of the virus was to stay home and isolate ourselves from others. While it doubtlessly helped stop the spread, such a strategy has caused feelings of isolation and loneliness. When we recently had a chance to follow up with study participants, a Filipino resident made a comment which summarises our discussion here: “I’ve learned the importance of checking in – even if it’s just an invitation to coffee or a video call. It helps to strengthen those ties that get you through stressful situations, especially considering the COVID-19 situation”. However, the complexity and paradox of social capital needs to be discussed here. Some respondents to our online survey (see MakabentaIkeda & Garces-Ozanne, 2016 for details) also show reluctance to engage in pan-ethnic or inter-community activities, signalling that bridging and linking social capital is weak or even avoided. This somewhat contradictory behaviour could stem from their relative uneasiness dealing with other members of society outside their immediate circle of family and friends—a behaviour that is not uncommon among migrant Filipinos or ¯ other tight-knit migrant groups in Otautahi who typically have strong bonding social capital. For example, a respondent said: I’m an introvert and prefer having a small circle of friends rather than joining community groups. I have a good support group of Filipino and

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Kiwi family and friends that I know I can rely on. These ties have become stronger since the earthquakes.

Indeed, research shows that many social networks (in bonding social capital), through which resources are collectively generated and shared, are usually member exclusive. Although disasters usually increase community altruism and thus people’s social connectedness beyond their usual bonding social capital (Uekusa et al., 2022), social capital is fundamentally for its members to protect their resources but not to share with outsiders. Furthermore, trust-based relationships and social capital have long been discussed in the literature as a vital resource for resilience and adaptation (Aldrich, 2012; Paton & Johnston, 2001). Nonetheless, studies by Uekusa (2020), Uekusa and Lee (2020) and Uekusa and Matthewman (2017) point out that, although there are migrants who find refuge in being nested in community networks, there are numerous migrants who are “invisible” to, or isolated from, these communities either by choice or circumstance. Thus, while we did not find such cases in our studies ¯ with Asian migrant workers in Otautahi (as the invisible may be difficult to reach out to in the first place), we cannot ignore these “dark sides” of and the paradox of social capital in disaster resilience and social capital research (Uekusa, 2020). In this study, we recognise that vulnerability and resilience are two sides of a complex phenomenon with layers of issues that cannot be properly addressed by merely connecting people, nor can we expect social networks to work as a panacea for all socially vulnerable people to get themselves out of difficulties.

Towards More Inclusive Governance and Society: Self-Help, Policy Solutions or Structural Transformation? As discussed above, the resilience literature usually demonstrates the critical role that migrant communities’ strong social capital has played in coping with disasters and subsequent adversities (Aldrich, 2012; Tierney, 2014). This generally aligns with Asian migrant worker experience on ¯ Otautahi. However, the valorisation of individuals and self-reliance has been heavily criticised (Joseph, 2013; O’Malley, 2010). Critical scholars note that resilience is an inadequate concept, which simply mystifies people’s power (MacKinnon & Derickson, 2012; see also Oliver-Smith;

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Uekusa & Cretney in this volume), and social capital is a convenient concept for policymakers to seek less costly, non-economic (and often individualising) solutions to social problems (Portes, 1998, p. 3). In fact, enhancing Asian migrant workers’ self-help/-organising capacities to foster and increase their resilience and adaptation abilities is not sufficient, as it does not address the key issues of worker exploitation and structural violence that they have faced, and continue to face, in ¯ their home countries and in Otautahi. They are most likely to already possess their strong bonding social capital (which is deemed to be a simple result of the social process of racial segregation), whereas many migrant workers lack other forms of resource or, as Bourdieu (1986) terms, capital in other forms, such as labour skills, knowledge, education, disposable income, cultural competency, language skills, political access and positive racial identity, to name a few. Needless to say, some forms of capital are not accessible to everyone as they are unevenly distributed. As critics of resilience (and social capital) warn, instead of neoliberalising and individualising resilience and responsibilising individuals and communities, structural transformation is required, by, for example, overcoming racism, achieving the redistribution of resources, deconstructing the system of gender oppression, and improving resourcing for all residents and communities (Chandler & Reid, 2016; MacKinnon & Derickson, 2012; Tierney, 2014; Uekusa, 2018). We cannot ignore the fact that policy-/government-level efforts are in fact underway. Protecting migrant workers’ human rights and stopping worker exploitation have been a priority agenda. The New Zealand and Philippine Governments agreed to work on the issues and signed a document called the “Arrangement on the Principles and Controls on the Recruitment and Protection of Filipino Workers in New Zealand” in 2015. The Workplace Relations and Safety and Immigration Minister at that time, Hon. Michael Woodhouse, stated that “New Zealand greatly values the contribution Filipino workers make to New Zealand’s labour force – particularly in areas such as the Canterbury rebuild” (para. 2). “With such a significant number of Filipino workers coming to New Zealand to help with the Canterbury rebuild, we want to ensure these workers are treated fairly and not exploited” (New Zealand Government, 2015, para. 4). Christchurch Mayor, Lianne Dalziel, even warned of “zero tolerance” towards worker exploitation and discrimination in workplace practices. As an update to the 2008 Memorandum of Agreement between the two countries, the 2015 bilateral Arrangement addresses

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labour and welfare issues by specifying cooperation priorities to reduce the vulnerability and potential for exploitation of workers by promoting transparent, ethical, and equitable recruitment and employment practices and by ensuring compliance with both countries’ employment and immigration requirements (Searle et al., 2015). MBIE has deployed the Labour Inspectorate to enforce employment standards and detected possible migrant worker exploitation cases. However, without addressing and tackling the structural violence both in their home countries and in Aotearoa New Zealand, these interventions to protect their human rights and promote their well-being remain superficial. Again, focusing on disadvantaged groups’ resilience without understanding, addressing and solving structural problems will simply result in the individualisation of vulnerability and resilience, the responsibilisation of individuals and communities, and the reproduction of social inequality. Simply to put, making the marginalised groups resilient in a true sense would require larger societal efforts to achieve structural transformation by redistributing wealth, overcoming racism, removing patriarchy, promoting diversity and deconstructing the system of oppres¯ sion. Thus, as we explored Asian migrant worker experiences in Otautahi, we need to understand the underlying issues of vulnerability and, most importantly, the social processes of marginalisation and oppression. As with other social science research which intends to promote social justice, our main recommendation is to once again work towards the development of a more inclusive and just society, which requires considerable efforts at all cultural, policy and society levels. ¯ Along with many residents in Otautahi, these Asian migrant workers ¯ indeed have built and contributed to the redevelopment of Otautahi; while many did not directly contribute to the physical reconstruction, migrant workers have been the crucial part of such a redevelopment. It is understandable that many feel like “we built Christchurch, and this is our home” (Mercer, 2015). Even CCC and community groups encourage ¯ them to settle down in the new Otautahi. If we wish to ensure and cele¯ brate Otautahi’s multiculturalism, diversity and inclusiveness in the true sense, there should not be any groups whose well-being is compromised and whose voices are unheard.

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Conclusion ¯ We recognise the growing presence of Asian migrants in Otautahi. They are active in the productive sectors of society as well as in occupations that are widely considered as essential to the recovery, redevelopment and ¯ further growth of Otautahi. Aside from being essential to the rebuild, they actively contribute as taxpayers and yet they have very limited access to social services which are crucial to human security and well-being. Recovery and sustainable redevelopment of the city require a restoration to “normal” functioning society with economic activities and public utilities such as electricity, gas, water supply, rebuilding of housing, buildings, roads and highways, strengthened agricultural and food security, resumption of public transport services, economic activities, etc. In the case of Asian temporary workers who are currently (in)directly working on the ¯ Otautahi rebuild, the apparent contradictions between the essential nature ¯ of their jobs to restore a functioning and vibrant Otautahi and the experiences and treatment that they get deserve continuing attention. We have tried to understand this tension in this chapter. ¯ Many Asian migrant workers in Otautahi have already developed strong bonding social capital, yet their bridging and linking social capital still depends on cooperation and collaboration with those outside their immediate ethnic communities, which may be beyond migrant workers’ control (Uekusa, 2018, 2020). In order to foster and enhance their bridging and linking social capital (if helpful at all), we think that community groups, authorities and all residents can find ways to customise and encourage community engagement that can contribute to further development of pan-Asian/-ethnic networks and inclusive governance (Christchurch Migrant Inter-Agency Group, 2011; Hutton et al., 2015). Going forward, the local city council should strengthen its function as a medium through which the voice of overseas-born residents can be recognised and as a channel to send feedback to the government and wider public. A setup such as this may lead to closer collaboration between the city council, central government, pan-ethnic community networks, community and grassroots organisations, and residents. Such collaboration helps with the eventual customisation of national and local policies to respond to the immediate and diverse needs of individuals and organisations both within and outside CALD communities. There is also a need to explore more ethnic representation in the council to provide avenues for information exchange among the authorities, locals

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and overseas-born residents. We also think that public authorities need to do research on provision of social safety nets and support from local council/government to overseas-born residents who are essential workers ¯ particularly related to the Otautahi rebuild and to subsequently establish publicly funded programmes to provide practical information and assistance to migrants and their families. These are smaller steps towards the structural transformation. However, as discussed throughout the chapter, these policy and community-level efforts still need to be accompanied by larger and deeper societal changes.

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Stats NZ. (2018). 2018 census. Statistics New Zealand. http://nzdotstat.stats. govt.nz/wbos/Index.aspx?_ga=2.241804482.172527944.1618962105-651 934673.1591581586&_gac=1.41149334.1618962216.EAIaIQobChMI_ 5HG5f-N8AIVDX8rCh1oUgKqEAAYASAAEgJ2X_D_BwE Stringer, C. (2016). Worker exploitation in New Zealand: A troubling landscape. The Human Trafficking Research Coalition. https://83147a49-ab19-42ca860e-efe5596ad387.filesusr.com/ugd/2ffdf5_28e9975b6be2454f8f823c60 d1bfdba0.pdf Silvers, A. (1977). Probabilistic income-maximising behaviour in regional migration. International Regional Science Review, 2, 29–40. Sisk, B., & Bankston, C. L. (2014). Hurricane Katrina, a construction boom, and a new labor force: Latino immigrants and the New Orleans construction industry, 2000 and 2006–2010. Population Research and Policy Review, 33(3), 309–334. Taonui, R. (2019, June 18). It is time to talk about Christchurch’s racist past, and present. The Spinoff. https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/18-06-2019/ it-is-time-to-talk-about-christchurchs-racist-past-and-present/ Tierney, K. (2014). The social roots of risk: Producing disasters, promoting resilience. Stanford University Press. Uekusa, S. (2018). Rethinking resilience: Bourdieu’s contribution to disaster research. Resilience, 6(3), 181–195. Uekusa, S. (2019). Disaster linguicism: Linguistic minorities in disasters. Language and Society, 48(3), 353–375. Uekusa, S. (2020). The paradox of social capital: A case of immigrants, refugees and linguistic minorities in the Canterbury and Tohoku disasters. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 48, 101625. Uekusa, S., & Lee, S. (2020). Strategic invisibilization, hypervisibility and empowerment among marriage-migrant women in rural Japan. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46(13), 2782–2799. Uekusa, S., & Matthewman, S. (2017). Vulnerable and resilient? Immigrants and refugees in the 2010–2011 Canterbury and Tohoku disasters. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 22, 355–361. Uekusa, S., Matthewman, S., & Lorenz, D. F. (2022). Conceptualizing disaster social capital: What it is, why it matters and how it can be enhanced. Disasters, 46(1), 56–79. https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12470 UNDRR Asia-Pacific. (2020). Reducing vulnerability of migrants and displaced populations. UNDRR Asia Pacific COVID-19 Brief. https://www.undrr. org/publication/undrr-asia-pacific-covid-19-brief-reducing-vulnerability-mig rants-and-displaced Ungar, M. (2011). Community resilience for youth and families: Facilitative physical and social capital in contexts of adversity. Children and Youth Services Review, 33(9), 1742–1748.

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Villegas, F. J. (2010). Strategic in/visibility and undocumented migrants. In G. J. Sefa Dei & M. Simmons (Eds.), Fanon & education: Thinking through pedagogical possibilities (pp. 147–170). Peter Lang Publishing. Wisner, B., Blaikie, P., Cannon, T., & Davis, I. (2004). At risk: Natural hazards, people’s vulnerability and disasters. Routledge. Wylie, S. (2012). Best practice guidelines: Engaging with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities in times of disasters. Christchurch City Council. https://ccc.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Services/Civil-Defence/ BestPracticeGuidelinesofDiverseCommunitiesDisasterMarch2012.pdf

CHAPTER 11

Minutes of Shaking: Years of Litigation Jeremy Finn

and Elizabeth Toomey

Introduction This chapter discusses the major long-term legal issues arising from the Canterbury earthquake sequence and the frequently unsatisfactory procedures that were supposed to resolve them (Fig. 11.1). The overwhelming effect of the earthquakes’ aftermath led to complexity, failure and unacceptable delays. The poorly prepared Earthquake Commission (EQC) was engulfed quickly with numerous complaints. This led to litigation through the courts and the extraordinary delay it took to clear court rulings on a number of key issues. Eventually, both central and local government stepped in to provide dispute resolution services, but these were much too late. These cumulative errors cost Canterbury residents far more than they should have in terms of health and money. The recent introduction, more

J. Finn · E. Toomey (B) University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] J. Finn e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_11

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Fig. 11.1 Property owners protesting insurance settlement delay (photo by Steve Matthewman, 2018)

than ten years after the first earthquake, of the Insurance (Prompt Settlement of Claims for Uninhabitable Residential Property) Bill speaks for itself. This chapter concludes on a positive note, describing the efficient and collaborative relationship between Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) and the Christchurch City Council (CCC) in dealing with the configuration of the vast tracts of red-zoned land which, in years to come, should bring smiles to the faces of weary Cantabrians.

The Earthquake Commission (EQC) Prior to 2010, EQC was a trusted Crown entity and was seen as the face of government that had always been helpful and supportive. This perception changed dramatically following the Canterbury earthquake sequence. An extensive Public Inquiry explored why EQC suffered such serious damage to its reputation—it was targeted as being “uncaring, miserly

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and inefficient” (Public Inquiry into the Earthquake Commission, 2020, p. 9). To EQC’s credit, in 2009, it commissioned an independent expert review of its Catastrophe Response Programme, and work had begun on most recommendations before the earthquakes hit. While these reforms might have eased the personal, financial and administrative costs of recovery, the multiple earthquakes raised challenges over and above those that had been identified. Before 2010, EQC’s experienced staff of 22 managed around 4,000 to 5,000 claims per year. The earthquakes resulted in approximately 460,000 claims, and each could comprise a number of sub-claims (close to 760,000) for different types of damage. After the 2010 Darfield Earthquake, EQC quickly increased its staff and numbers peaked in October at around 1,600. Training was intense and poorly managed, and this led to a breakdown of trust and communication between EQC and claimants. Estimators and assessors were trained in two (subsequently increased to six) days. The inadequacy of this minimal training for skilled work attracted widespread criticism. A significant number of retired police officers, many from Australia, were engaged to assess damaged homes. EQC’s belief that these recruits had the skills to deal with traumatised people was misguided. The macho attitude of the “Queensland police officer” added to claimant distress. EQC’s culture and tone was problematic. The organisation was seen as being led by managers, some of whom “were either incompetent, or bullies and who condoned, if not encouraged an adversarial approach toward claimants” (Public Inquiry into the Earthquake Commission, 2020, p.86). EQC staff felt that they were undermined and pragmatic solutions suggested by skilled staff members were dismissed, met with indifference and, at times, subjected to scathing critique by managers (Public Inquiry into the Earthquake Commission, 2020, p. 87). The constant restructuring of staffing at EQC went well beyond the usual in a normal working environment. Some employees were given no notice of termination, others were re-hired almost immediately, and skilled staff who were not part of the “in group” were dismissed. As public criticism of EQC mounted, numerous reviews were commissioned. One comprised the combined Chief Ombudsman and Privacy Commissioner’s Information fault lines review in 2013 which responded to EQC’s failure to fulfil its official information obligations. As home assessments and repairs got underway, so too did claimants’ requests for the information held by EQC about their claims. Many claimants

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recall the impossibility of getting through to the Brisbane call centre and, as frustration mounted, claimants requested this information through the Official Information Act 1982 (OIA). By early 2013, EQC was routinely breaching its OIA obligations to supply information within the legislative timeframes; within months, delays in responding reached six or seven months. Over a period of approximately ten years, ending in May 2019, EQC received more than 51,000 complaints, relating to 34,000 unique properties (Public Inquiry into the Earthquake Commission, 2020, p. 109). Many disputes resulted from claimants’ difficulties obtaining information and documents. This contributed to further delays for settlement of claims and progress with home repairs. EQC’s outdated or incompatible technology and poor data handling was inadequate. It tried to supplement paper-based recording with assessors using iPads for on-site home inspections. Unfortunately, their introduction required additional software to achieve compatibility with its ClaimCenter technology. This was exacerbated following a High Court declaratory judgement in September 2011, ruling that EQC’s insurance cover (originally $100,000 but now amended to $150,000) reinstated after each natural disaster event. EQC’s software was modified again so that assessors could apportion damage to each earthquake event. This new data could not be integrated with earlier data, thus requiring painstaking manual inputting into the ClaimCenter technology. Eventually, EQC reverted to paper-based recording. Poorly undertaken assessments of damage harmed the integrity and outcome of EQC’s efforts. After the February 2010 earthquake, EQC developed a rapid assessment process in order to triage properties depending on severity of damage. These were quick and superficial and sometimes carried out without the homeowner present or simply assessed by a “drive-by”. Poor communication about EQC’s processes led to heightened public anxiety. The enormous pressure put on assessors to speed up the process (i.e. assessments per day were raised from two to six or seven) together with EQC’s policy of non-invasive assessment resulted in many homes not being professionally assessed for earthquake damage. Many claimants spoke of deprecation or dismissal of their concerns, minimisation of scope of damage and disregard for expert reports obtained by them at great expense. Cash settlement of claims was, and remains, EQC’s preferred practice. A managed repair on a mass scale was not part of EQC’s planning.

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Nonetheless, it appears that the Government directed EQC to undertake a managed repair programme and, to its credit, EQC, essentially a Crown financial institution, accepted this responsibility, fully aware of its inexperience in the field of repairing homes. The repair programme was one of the biggest construction projects Aotearoa New Zealand had ever undertaken, but lacked the years of planning and execution needed for comparable projects like the Waterview Tunnel in Auckland. EQC lacked the necessary design, planning and supervision capacity. This led to many mistakes, inadequate quality control, poor staffing decisions, uncoordinated planning and poor claimant relations. “Botched repairs” were variously described as “shoddy, substandard, rushed, incompetent, sloppy or dangerous” (Public Inquiry into the Earthquake Commission, 2020, p.144). A very controversial repair strategy was the “jacking and packing” method for floor releveling. The impact of these poor practices was to exacerbate the power imbalance between EQC and the claimants. Following extreme homeowner dissatisfaction, a review was undertaken and of the 2,325 properties surveyed, 1005 had compliance issues of varying degrees. The Review recognised positive aspects of EQC’s preparedness and commitment. Its research and collaboration with GNS Science and an engineering and environmental consultant, and its prior arrangements with various professionals, paid dividends. The committed efforts that EQC staff made to engage with the public were commended, especially given that this was often conducted in an atmosphere of anger, resentment and distress. The Review makes substantial recommendations, directed at both EQC and the Government, to improve EQC’s operational practices and claimant outcomes. It also records EQC’s unreserved apology for its shortcomings and the negative impacts these had on claimants, families and communities.

Settling the Law A major feature of post-earthquake litigation is the extraordinarily long time it has taken to get clear court rulings on a number of key issues which collectively affect a very high number of people impacted by the earthquakes and their aftermath. EQC sought a number of declaratory judgements, which give legal rulings on particular legal issues on assumed facts, to clarify key issues as to its liabilities very soon after

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the February 2011 Christchurch Earthquake, and the Royal Commission has recommended use of this option in future (Public Inquiry into the Earthquake Commission, 2020, p. 189). Unfortunately, there was only a single application for a declaratory judgement, discussing the maximum liability of the insurer where the homeowner exercised a policy option to purchase a replacement property, instead of reinstatement (Southern Response Earthquake Services Ltd v Shirley Investments Ltd [2017] NZHC 3190). Governmental agencies or industry bodies should urgently seek declarations on major issues as soon as possible after any future large-scale event. Key legal issues were only settled haphazardly as cases came before the courts. Sometimes, the courts could not give bright-line guidance. Thus, “[t]he question whether the insured property has been destroyed is one of fact, to be answered in all the circumstances” with the physical feasibility of repairs being relevant, but not determinative (Wild South Holdings Ltd v QBE Insurance Limited [2015] 2 NZLR 24 at [108]). Other issues took many years to clarify. The effect of a standard form aggregation clause (which limits the liability of the insurance company to pay for related losses occurring at different times) in a leading insurer’s policy was not settled until late 2020 when the Court of Appeal allowed an appeal from the High Court decision which had been thought to represent the law (Moore v IAG NZ Ltd [2020] NZCA 319) and the Supreme Court refused leave to appeal. The IAG clause capped liability for any loss or any series of losses caused by “one event”, a term defined in the policy as “a single event or a series of events which have the same cause”. Moore’s house had suffered very significant, but unrelated, damage in both the February and June 2011 earthquakes. The Court of Appeal held that these two earthquakes were not a series of events which had the same cause. Moore could therefore recover up to $2.5 million for each event rather than a total of $2.5 million. It would be interesting to know how many other policyholders had settled claims based on a belief that their entitlement was capped by the aggregation clause. For some years after the earthquakes, a leading insurer had dealt with claimants exercising an option in their insurance policy to purchase a different house rather than repair the earthquake damage on the basis that the insurer was liable for a “notional rebuild”—the costs that would have been incurred had a rebuild gone ahead. The insurer did not include a number of items, particularly design fees and contingencies, in those

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notional costs, in reliance on a High Court decision which was overturned by the Court of Appeal, whose judgement was confirmed by the Supreme Court (Southern Response Earthquake Services Ltd v Avonside Holdings Ltd [2017] 1 NZLR 141). The insurer revised its processes for claims being negotiated after the appellate decisions but did not reopen earlier settlements on the basis it had entered them in good faith and believing it had complied with its legal obligations. Publicity about the Avonside decision led a couple who had settled their insurance claim to procure further documentation. They found the insurer had provided them with only one of two reports by a consultancy firm engaged to cost the notional rebuild. The second report estimated the notional rebuild at $1.1 million, $200,000 more than the first. The homeowners successfully sued for damages on the basis the non-disclosure was a misrepresentation inducing settlement at the lower figure (Dodds v Southern Response Earthquake Services Ltd [2020] NZCA 395). Up to 3,000 other homeowners will be able to revisit their settlements as a class action on the issue is under way (Southern Response Earthquake Services Ltd v Ross [2020] NZSC 122). Another important issue was not finally determined until 2019. A significant but unknown number of earthquake damaged houses had been sold without repair, on the basis that the owners would assign to the purchasers their rights under the contract of insurance. The insurance companies generally—and eventually successfully—contended that homeowners with a replacement policy could only assign a right to receive indemnity costs—the diminution in value of the property—not the much larger amount which would be needed to repair or rebuild the damaged premises (Xu v IAG NZ Ltd [2019] 1 NZLR 600). A very recent decision (Sleight v Beckia Holdings Ltd [2020] NZHC 2851) will lead to many homeowners re-opening settlements made with their insurer. The plaintiffs had agreed with the insurer that their house would be repaired under a scheme operated by the insurer. Much later, they found that the repair work was seriously substandard (as was all too common). Eventually, they sued and recovered in the High Court damages representing the costs of repairing the defective work to bring the house up to standard as well as the costs of alternative accommodation while repair work was undertaken. The Government has had to intervene to assist purchasers who unknowingly bought poorly repaired houses.

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Litigation---File Claim and Discontinue To focus on decided cases is to bypass the vast majority of post-earthquake litigation where claims were filed but later discontinued either because the matter was settled or because the plaintiffs—almost invariably homeowners—simply gave up after running out of resources or energy to continue or both. The High Court established an Earthquake List in 2011 to assist in managing earthquake-related litigation and ensuring cases could come to court as quickly as possible. The most recently published version of the List (October 2020) contains 1,301 insurance/EQC related cases. Of these, 148 remain to be resolved in the High Court, and 37 have been transferred to the Canterbury Earthquakes Insurance Tribunal (CEIT). Judgement has been entered in only 63 cases; nine cases were struck out by the Court and five otherwise disposed of. The balance—1,059 cases—have been discontinued. Two firms—neither ¯ of which had a pre-quake presence in Otautahi Christchurch—dominate the filings and discontinuances. Of the 1,319 cases listed in the High Court List, 422 were filed by Grant Shand and 197 by Shine Lawyers, a specialist insurance advocacy firm set up in 2015. Of Shand’s 422 cases, 405 were discontinued, three are unresolved, four more were struck out and 10 proceeded through to a completed trial. Forty-two of Shine’s filings await resolution, 144 have been discontinued, while six were transferred to the CEIT and one to the District Court, one was struck out and three determined by a judge. There is no way to determine how many of those discontinuations were because a satisfactory settlement had been achieved. Anecdotal evidence suggests many were not. Inequality of resources was the major barrier to property owners receiving fair compensation. A striking, and clearly related, feature of the post-earthquake period was the emergence of advocacy services and litigation funders which assisted with claims and/or funded litigation in return for a share of the proceeds. The most prominent of these, Claims Resolutions Services Ltd., had a close working relationship with Grant Shand. The Royal Commission on EQC commented that this new “claimant industry” had a noticeable and detrimental impact on private insurance providers, EQC and claimants (Stevenson, 2018). While there were undoubtedly an unknown number of homeowners who were enabled by litigation funders to achieve a satisfactory outcome where legal fees and the fear of costs orders would otherwise have led to abandonment of the insurance claim

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or accepting an unduly low settlement offer, anecdotal evidence largely supports the Commission’s criticism. There were concerning cases where it seems likely that homeowners were supported in making very sizable claims which had little, if any, chance of success. In one case, the plaintiffs failed to establish the basis for a claim of substantial earthquake damage, having been on notice that the briefs of evidence of its witnesses could not prove key facts (Jarden v Lumley General Insurance (NZ) Ltd [2018] NZCA 6). The plaintiffs were later required to pay the insurer’s costs with an uplift for persevering with the unprovable claim. Lawyers and claimants alike often commented on a perception that claims advisers and insurance companies each developed such close relations with particular experts who were repeatedly briefed to give opinions on damage assessment, repair methodologies and reinstatement or repair costs that these experts ceased to maintain the objectivity required of expert witnesses. The law allows parties to call suitably qualified persons to give expert opinion evidence, even though the person is an employee or otherwise financially compensated by the party calling the expert, provided the expert remains impartial. Finding fully independent experts has for years been almost impossible. The degree of connection may, however, go to the weight to be accorded to that expert’s opinion (see Evidence Act, 2006, s 26; C & S Kelly Properties Ltd v Earthquake Commission [2015] NZHC 1690 at [144]–[148] and [160]). Those principles are, and were, hard to apply where a relatively small number of experts were very regularly called on by parties with the same general interest in the proceedings on a very large number of occasions over a period of nearly a decade. The perception of expert bias could, if such a large-scale issue arises again, be avoided by the creation of a panel of experts who could be randomly assigned by the court to advise parties as necessary. The model in s 25 of the Canterbury Earthquake Insurance Tribunal Act, 2019 (CEITA) (see below) for appointment of facilitators to assist in resolving disputes between experts could be adapted for this purpose. It is too early to tell if, and how far, the levelling of the playing field which the Tribunal is meant to bring about will be achieved, but it is a welcome step away from adversarial litigation which has so disadvantaged claimants in other forums.

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Dispute Resolution EQC’s in-house model for dispute resolution was inappropriate and unprofessional. It resulted in greater stress for claimants and its own staff (Public Inquiry into the Earthquake Commission, 2020, p. 15). Its practices led to formal court-based dispute resolution models. Eventually, central and local government stepped in to provide other external dispute resolution services. Residential Advisory Service The Residential Advisory Service (RAS) was established in 2015 by the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) and was subsequently joined by EQC. It is now a fully funded service operated by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). This free independent service focuses on progressing issues between homeowners, insurance companies and EQC. It is considered a successful model for a variety of reasons: It offers vital technical advice and focuses on claimants and their needs, including psychological issues…its main value has been in helping people understand all the factors that might be puzzling them or impeding their repairs and rebuilds. It offers a practical, people-centred solution. (Public Inquiry into the Earthquake Commission, 2020, p.15)

Its usefulness is best illustrated by the saga of a homeowner whose house was damaged because its foundations had sunk and required underpinning. After unsuccessful discussions with EQC and then, once over cap, five insurance company case managers, he turned to RAS for help. The exhausted homeowner said that connecting with RAS was a turning point: “My life was in limbo. I don’t think I would have been able to get resolution without RAS. The service brought closure and now I am able to get on with my life” (RAS, 2018, para.43). As at June 2018, RAS had helped resolve 4,000 claims. Since the advent of the Greater Christchurch Claims Resolution Service (GCCRS), it is now limited to resolving natural disaster claims outside Christchurch. Nonetheless, as with its successor, doubts as to its impartiality were raised by critics.

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Greater Christchurch Claims Resolution Service The GCCRS is a belated but welcome Crown initiative that provides homeowners with free, independent support to resolve outstanding residential insurance claims stemming from the Canterbury earthquakes. It was part of a package of initiatives developed in response to the Independent Ministerial Advisor’s Report released in April 2018. As the courts were being overwhelmed, the Report identified the need for a simpler, dedicated service that would resolve disputes more efficiently and, in particular, remove the “double-handling” by EQC and private insurers. The GCCRS sits between the advisory service offered by RAS and the formality of tribunal or court proceedings. It is hosted and operated by MBIE with support from Treasury, EQC and Southern Response as well as organisations such as Engineering New Zealand (ENZ), Community Law and private insurers. The collaboration with ENZ is significant. ENZ can deliver to GCCRS professional advice and provide facilitation to reconcile differing engineering views of the homeowner and the other party—EQC or the private insurer. In its first year of service, GCCRS resolved 608 claims. As of March 2020, it had assisted 1,893 homeowners and resolved 1,007 insurance and EQC claims. Its service includes mediation and binding determination by arbitration where mediation has failed to resolve a dispute. In terms of public opinion, the GCCRS has been criticised for lacking its claimed impartiality and independence. Those concerns centred on the funding sources: it has recruited from staff who had worked at EQC and private insurance companies and was serviced and based within the oft-criticised MBIE (Public Inquiry into the Earthquake Commission, 2020, p. 191). However, this criticism is diminishing, probably due to the assistance given to it by its advisory committee which brings together the views, advice and experience of a range of participants including homeowners and legal, engineering and well-being advisors (through four separate advisory groups). The advice from each of its advisory groups has been heralded as “one of GCCRS’ greatest strengths ….an initiative that should be replicated in any services similar to the [GCCRS] that are established in the future” (Public Inquiry into the Earthquake Commission, 2020, p. 191). Statistics contained in various GCCRS Advisory Committee minutes support this accolade. The following successes deserve mention. In June

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2020, 91 new cases were opened; it was established that 80 per cent of facilitations through GCCRS were settling; ENZ had completed involvement with 200 cases, had 20 in progress and seven waiting to be assigned; and six ENZ cases had been completed with the CEIT, 20 were in progress and two were waiting for assignment. In July 2020, there were 122 new cases, and in August, 115. Since August/September 2019, only one case using the GCCRS remained in litigation. It was reported in September 2020 that the GCCRS exit survey remained positive with an overall satisfaction rate of 87 per cent. Canterbury Earthquake Insurance Tribunal The CEIT was established by CEITA to provide fair, speedy, flexible and cost-effective services for resolving disputes about insurance claims for physical loss or damage to residential buildings, property and land arising from the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010–2011. The proceedings of the Tribunal are judicial proceedings subject to appeal to the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court but are inquisitorial, rather than adversarial in nature (CEITA, s 56). The Act requires the Tribunal to have regard to the statutory purpose of providing a fair, speedy, flexible and cost-effective service, but must also observe the principles of natural justice. The Tribunal may appoint its own independent expert advisers where desirable (CEITA, ss 25 & 39) and may make its own enquiries, provided the results of such enquiries are disclosed to the parties. Applicants must own a residential property which was damaged by the 2010–2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence, have held the insurance policy at the time the damage occurred and have an unresolved insurance claim relating to that damage with a private insurer, Southern Response, or the EQC. CEIT does not have jurisdiction to hear claims relating to on-sold properties nor those where the dispute between the parties has been decided by a court or is currently being arbitrated. The District and High Court may also refer cases to the Tribunal where the parties agree. As at 5 October 2020, 37 cases had been so referred by the High Court, with two cases referred by the District Court. Importantly, CEIT can hear claims about defective repairs to the residential property. The Tribunal may refer a question of law to the High Court (CEITA, s 53; Evans v IAG NZ Ltd [2020] NZHC 1326). Importantly, parties must meet their own costs and expenses unless the Tribunal decides that a party (whether successful or not) caused costs and expenses to be incurred unnecessarily

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by acting in bad faith or making allegations or objections that are without substantial merit or the party caused unreasonable delay in resolving the matter. Where possible the Tribunal will seek to have disputes resolved on the papers rather than at a hearing. Mediation of disputes is strongly encouraged, and can be provided free of charge by other agencies. However, 19 of the first 28 cases resolved by the Tribunal were settled during the case management phase, while only three cases were settled later by mediation (CEIT, 2020, Graph 2). Where mediation is not attempted or fails, the Tribunal will hold a settlement conference which may end with a direction to the parties to exchange written offers to settle. If the dispute remains unresolved, the Tribunal will direct parties to file submissions and witness statements. The Chair of the Tribunal will then give a confidential, non-binding indicative ruling as to a possible outcome. If that does not produce a resolution, the matter will be decided by a different member of the Tribunal. CEITA gives the Tribunal power to hear evidence from the parties or from other witnesses. Under s 39, it may also, subject to advising the parties, consider evidence from other claims that it thinks relevant and applicable to the current claim. The Act does not specifically provide whether or not the Evidence Act, 2006 applies to tribunal hearings, a matter which has given some insurance companies a basis to try to impose more rigid rules on witness statements than may have been intended by Parliament (see, e.g., D Trust v IAG NZ Ltd [2019] CEIT0037). Other matters suggest insurers are taking a very legalistic approach to the Tribunal process, for instance in contesting the jurisdiction of the Tribunal to include third parties in the process (Dewes v IAG NZ Ltd [2019] NZHC 2899). That attitude is, of course, antithetical to the objects of CEITA and will undermine its utility.

The Residential Red Zone In the Canterbury earthquake sequence, land damage manifested itself in two particular ways: liquefaction and lateral spreading and significant rockfall and cliff collapse. This led to a comprehensive zoning map for residential Christchurch. Large tracts of land in eastern Christchurch (approximately 490,000 hectares) and across the Port Hills were “red zoned” as unsuitable for permanent residential occupation. Property owners received Crown offers to purchase their land and almost all

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accepted. Until 2019, the Crown managed approximately 6,700 residential red zone (RRZ) properties and, as part of a wider Regeneration Plan ¯ akaro Avon River Corridor (OARC), a public walkway in 2019, the Ot¯ from the coast to the city, was established. In September 2019, following extensive negotiations, the Crown and CCC signed the Global Settlement Agreement (GSA)—a contract that enabled the transition of leadership of Christchurch’s regeneration to the CCC. Schedule 3 of the GSA sets out the terms for the transfer of almost all of the RRZ properties to the CCC. Before that land is transferred, the Crown has agreed to undertake significant title reconfiguration work in the OARC. The deadlines are tight as they are associated with the expiry of special regeneration land powers under the Greater Christchurch Regeneration Act 2016 (GCRA) on 30 June 2021 (with some limited powers extended to 2023 by the Greater Christchurch Regeneration Amendment Bill). The responsibility for implementing the OARC reconfiguration and other RRZ transfers lies with Land Information New Zealand (LINZ). The OARC project has four key stages: (1) Investigation This requires a land tenure review which involves the review of 5,500 Crown-owned OARC titles and approximately 16,000 interests which need to be retained. LINZ has contracted external resources for this work. (2) Developing scheme plans The 5,500 titles will be amalgamated into fewer, larger super lots (approximately 130 super lots, shown in 29 scheme plans). The scheme plans will set out the new super lots. Individual Torrens titles will be absorbed into a much larger Torrens title to enable the development of projects such as an open space community park zone and a trial housing area. This will involve LINZ stopping redundant roads, confirming easements that need to be created (e.g. for infrastructure beneath the redundant roads), revoking reserves, dealing with land subject to offer-back rights under the Public Works Act 1981 or rights of first refusal under the Ng¯ai Tahu Claims Settlement Act 1998 and the amalgamation of Council-owned land. Draft scheme plans will be forwarded to the CCC in tranches for review and approval. (3) Survey work/preparing survey plans

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Survey work, due to start in early 2021 by a panel of six surveyors, will be based on the detail set out in the scheme plans. (4) Statutory actions and transfer of the new super lots to the CCC This will involve formally stopping roads and amalgamating titles in the New Zealand Gazette and will occur progressively in tranches. As LINZ has noted, an interesting part of this project has been how they have worked with Council officials, particularly with regard to the shift from negotiating the terms of the GSA with CCC officials at the negotiating table to working in genuine partnership to implement the GSA efficiently and effectively. A key focus for the parties is the development of the 29 scheme plans. To support this, an Implementation Governance Group was set up, comprising senior representatives from the CCC, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Treasury, ¯ akaro and LINZ. LINZ and the CCC hold fortnightly working group Ot¯ meetings. This is a structured approach that has been effective. It ensures that the implementation programme progresses well and resolves issues as they arise.

Conclusion The litigation process into which many claimants were forced because of the approach taken to justified claims by the EQC and the insurers proved most unsatisfactory. Almost invariably, EQC and insurers had greater access to legal services and to technical and legal information and above all greater financial resources, than did claimants. Such a power imbalance between individuals and large commercial firms and government departments is not new. However, the extent to which post-earthquake government policy allowed the stronger parties to exploit their advantages is a clear signal that rapid and effective government action to support those who have suffered loss from disaster is essential if such exploitation is to be curbed. The efficient partnership between the central and local government authorities, each well resourced, over the red zone land provides a remarkable contrast, and indicates better ways than litigation that can be found for resolving post-disaster legal issues.

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References C & S Kelly Properties Ltd v Earthquake Commission. (2015). NZHC 1690. CEIT. (2020). “CEIT annual report 2019–20”. Canterbury earthquakes insurance tribunal. https://www.justice.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Public ations/CEIT-2020-Annual-Report.pdf. Last accessed 21 November 2020. Canterbury Earthquake Insurance Tribunal Act. (2019). D Trust v IAG NZ Ltd. (2019). CEIT0037. Dewes v IAG NZ Ltd. (2019). NZHC 2899. Dodds v Southern Response Earthquake Services Ltd. (2020). NZCA 395, 3 NZLR 383. Evans v IAG NZ Ltd. (2020). NZHC 1326. Evidence Act. (2006). Jarden v Lumley General Insurance (NZ) Ltd. (2018). NZCA 6. Moore v IAG NZ Ltd. (2020). NZCA 319. Public Inquiry into the Earthquake Commission. (2020). “Report of the public inquiry into the earthquake commission, March 2020”. Public inquiry into the earthquake commission. https://eqcinquiry.govt.nz/inquiry-reports/. Last accessed 20 November 2020. RSA. (2018). “Report of the independent ministerial advisor to the minister responsible for the earthquake commission”. Residential advisory service for property owners. https://advisory.org.nz/case-studies. Last accessed 25 November 2020. Sleight v Beckia Holdings Ltd. (2020). NZHC 2851. Southern Response Earthquake Services Ltd v Avonside Holdings Ltd. (2017). 1 NZLR 141. Southern Response Earthquake Services Ltd v Ross. (2020). NZSC 122. Southern Response Earthquake Services Ltd v Shirley Investments Ltd. (2017). NZHC 3190. Stevenson, C. (2018). “Report of the independent ministerial advisor to the minister responsible for the earthquake commission”. The minister responsible for the earthquake commission. https://www.beehive.govt.nz/sites/default/ files/2018-06/Report%20of%20the%20Independent%20Ministerial%20Advi sor%20to%20the%20Minister.pdf Wild South Holdings Ltd v QBE Insurance Limited. (2015). 2 NZLR 24. Xu v IAG NZ Ltd. (2019). 1 NZLR 600.

CHAPTER 12

Sustainability Through Adversity? The Impact of the Earthquake on the Greening of Death Ruth McManus

Introduction Death is a capstone. It is through death that the multiple ecologies of living, liminal rites of farewell and the practicalities of body disposal and collective memory-work intertwine, grow into and influence each other. Death therefore helps us to conceptualise and engage with disasters in revealing ways. Disaster studies tend to funnel discussions about death along two narrow yet disconnected veins. The first, mostly considered in the planning for and immediate aftermath of disasters, is the problem of retrieval, identification, storage and eventual interment of large numbers of the dead. Alongside all the complex logistics of recovering and evacuating

R. McManus (B) Department of Sociology, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_12

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the living, what to do with the dead is always an aspect of disaster planning and response. By late afternoon on 22 February 2011, Aotearoa New Zealand’s disaster plan had been activated and alongside a field morgue in Latimer Square, the process to organise for mass graves was underway so that the city could cope with the projected yet unknown death toll (NZ Herald, 2011). The second thread for the dead is disaster memorialisation. While still incorporated into disaster planning scenarios, memorialisation of disasters takes place in what is termed the rehabilitation phase (Nichols, 2006). While these two veins of caring for the dead (dealing with the bodies and remembering the disaster) are catered for in disaster studies, they tend to be approached as special circumstances that get considered separately from ordinary, everyday death practices. Rarely do scholars consider the long-term alterations to ordinary and widespread death practices that include the logistics and imperatives of disposing and memorialising the dead that are triggered by the potential for change that arises from disasters. Given that we live in a time of climate emergency when narratives of sustainability (or greening) are gaining traction across political and economic spectrums, it is no surprise to note a “greening response” in disaster recovery. In terms of disaster studies, critiques of the hegemony and inherent vulnerability of coupling centralised efficiencies with neoliberal economies make themselves felt through themes of urban ecological security (Hodson & Marvin, 2009) and post-traumatic urbanism (Lahoud, 2010). This greening can present in many ways, but at base it is the notion that narratives and practices of sustainability have an important place in disaster preparedness (through climate change awareness that supports planning), right through to recovery where greening practices that emerge post-disaster (such as dune planting after sea surges or floods) simultaneously address sustainable land use practices and community engagement that foster socio-ecological well-being which is seen as therapeutic and recuperative (Tidball et al., 2010). However, these greening issues tend to be present in either the practical recovery or the memorialisation spaces and seldom directly connect recovery and recuperation to pre-existing death practices. In terms of the greening of death practices, an approach to both understanding and implementing sustainability that drives a lot of initiatives and practices is based on the idea of institutional adaptive management. When disasters strike, there are broader opportunities to shift practices in new directions, as captured, for example, in routine aspirations to “build back

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better” (see Matthewman & Byrd in this collection). The directions can be varied, multiple and subject to sharp contestation, and as such can simultaneously capture diverse political and economic approaches such as disaster capitalism to global cosmopolitanism. The connection between disaster response strategies and the broader social practices and relationships is often linked to institutional and policy drivers as one if not the key mechanisms through which social change beyond piecemeal, localised efforts can be fostered and implemented. While these policy application mechanisms can be incredibly detailed and have genuine intentions, they often presume that much change is policy driven and should be delivered through a “teach and they will change” presumption. Such an approach has significant conceptual and practical limitations. When education orientated initiatives are developed, most often they fail in the long term because it is not a lack of knowledge that is at the heart of staying with familiar practices, but the effect of path dependencies embedded in existing infrastructures and practices that stymie the ability to implement long-term change (McManus & Gallagher, 2015). Through exploring the consequences of the Canterbury earthquake sequence on body disposal practice in the Canterbury regions and Aotearoa New Zealand more generally, it is clear that overall, understandings and perspectives are shifting—there is a “background greening” of our lives and deaths through a rise in sustainability literacy and death literacy (Hendery, 2014; Johnson, 2018). Its form is more of a groundswell rather than an institutionally led shift towards the conscious greening of death practices. I argue that the institutional context is one that has become risk averse because of the way central government took over the recovery through a command-and-control approach that has undermined regional drives and initiatives including the risk taking that change relies on (see Montgomery in this collection). Consequently, it has had the opposite of the desired effect: it has promoted an innovation averse atmosphere in an already energy depleted population (see Cameron in this collection). ¯ This claim is made based on my understanding of why Otautahi Christchurch has undertaken only partial and uncoordinated opportunities to move towards more sustainable death practices even though the city authorities were as primed as they could ever be to instigate a different mode of body disposal in what was a textbook opportunity to do things differently because of the earthquake disruptions. This hesitancy towards change is rooted in the unintended (?) consequences of multiple social

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forces coming together that include a specific national “command-andcontrol” response to disaster management coupled with antiquated death legislation that has scuppered an already existing momentum towards sustainable death innovation at local government level. To make this claim, it is helpful to first consider the broader sociopolitical context of the dead within which the Canterbury earthquake sequence and compounding disasters unfolded. The discussion first considers the socio-political positioning of the dead broadly speaking and then explores the pre, immediate impact, and post or recovery phases of the earthquakes and subsequent disasters on Canterbury’s greening of death.

The Socio-Political Positioning of the Dead The socio-political positioning of the dead relates to a combination of social and political factors as they pertain to the management of the dead. This means organising for people’s dying. It also means the management of their remains in terms of funerals. Further, it includes the disposal of mortal remains (burial or cremation), and the long-term organisation, management and maintenance of the facilities, equipment and spaces used to store and memorialise the departed such as cemeteries, gardens of remembrance and crematoria. The positioning of the dead means the way that we engage our death practices simultaneously frames or constitutes “the dead” in some particular way. The way we organise and achieve these aspects gives the dead particular shape or presence that articulates the expectations and perspectives of living society. For instance, we can see the religious divides writ large through the separatists’ sentiments of colonial burial grounds of the late nineteenth century (Fig. 12.1) to the concrete1 runs of cremation berms of a successfully utilitarian “state welfare” era post-World War II (Fig. 12.2). These are two examples of the socio-political positioning of the dead: along sectarian (distinct burial sections within a “Christian” enclosure) or utilitarian principles (everybody gets one and one size fits all). Taking the idea of socio-political positioning of the dead, we can say that the living manages the dead according to the prevailing values of the

1 As an expensive commodity, concrete berms indicate economic and social success and their uniformity denotes utilitarianism.

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Fig. 12.1 Akaroa Cemetery (Author’s own image)

time. Therefore, examining the management of the dead is a way to identify and understand the last 10 years of Canterbury disasters’ impact on the greening of death.

Sustainability, Interment and Memorialisation Pre-Earthquakes Sustainability and Interment We know that approximately 33,000 people die every year in Aotearoa New Zealand, and, over the last 10 years, on average, nearly 3,000 people died in the Christchurch area each year (Stats NZ, 2021). In Aotearoa New Zealand, the vast majority of people are buried or cremated. Only a very small handful are buried at sea. These disposal methods are named in the Burial and Cremation Act (1964). Urup¯a, M¯aori burial grounds, do not fall under the auspices of this Act. Although under review since

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Fig. 12.2 Waimari Cemetery (Author’s own image)

2010, it is currently illegal to use any other forms of body disposal under this legislation. Most deceased are managed through a mixed model of cemetery and crematoria providers. Cemeteries can be municipal, church or privately owned, and crematoria are provided by both municipal authorities and private businesses. In Christchurch, all crematoria are private businesses, some of which are global companies that own funeral homes, crematoria and cemeteries. Preparatory research for the Cemeteries Master Plan revealed that: of all the Christchurch residents who die in one year, on average, 30% have their remains interred in a cemetery [Of these interred in a cemetery, 7% are interred as ashes]. The other 70 % are either buried elsewhere or cremated and the ashes scattered or interred elsewhere. (Searle, 2007, p. 10)

This base-line of the scale and type of provision underpinned initial discussion on the Cemeteries Master Plan and informed projected need.

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On 19 February 2007, Christchurch City Council (CCC) Parks and Waterways planner Christine Heremaia headed up the first consultation meeting that marked the beginning of the CCC Cemetery Master Plan. A landscape architect with a strong vision of a sustainable future and a successful record of implementing a sustainability approach, Heremaia brought a Sustainable Development Framework to the Cemeteries Master Plan table. This involved a new cemetery design strategy that aimed “to provide a strategic vision for the development and management of the Council owned or administered cemeteries across the Christchurch District” (CCC, 2013, p. 1). Up to this point, there was no overall plan for the district’s multiple cemeteries, and bylaws were piecemeal. The only cemetery plans had been plot allocation maps for each cemetery, and all cemeteries were organised through outdated 1980, 1983 and 1996 bylaws. Following amalgamation of the Banks Peninsula District with the CCC in March 2006, there was a greater need for consistency between the management of Christchurch and Banks Peninsula cemeteries. New issues had arisen in recent times including the needs of users and greater recognition of the value of cemeteries as open space. During 2009, the council team set up to update the cemeteries’ bylaws joined forces with Heremaia’s Parks and Waterways team so as to integrate the Master Plan consultation outcomes (undertaken late 2007) with bylaw updates. Background work began to figure out what the key needs and trends in cemeteries were. Information was gathered from over at least a generation. “Starting in 1926 and going to 2006, with the figures for each year providing a good long-term picture that also captured the 10 years prior to a crematorium opening in Christchurch to get some idea of the impact a new mode of disposal could have” (Heremaia, 2007, p1, emphasis in original). Alternative modes of disposal were under investigation including the possibility of using “brown” sites (decommissioned industrial areas such as quarries) for interments or columbaria (structures to store funerary urns) so addressing the issue of reusing land that would be difficult to bring back into residential land use. Also, the exploration of emerging new technologies including promession (a freezing process that purportedly reduces bodies to a dry powder that can be placed in a biodegradable casket and interred in the top layers of soil to decompose) and biocremation which uses a three-hour process of alkaline hydrolysis to reduce the body to a genetic-marker free, non-toxic liquid and bone residue, that

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can also be interred in the top layer of soil to decompose. While promession has not advanced beyond the concept stage, alkaline hydrolysis has been taken up in various countries and especially by medical facilities that require non-emitting disposal processes. Such advanced technologies aim to address the sheer numbers of bodies that need attending to in any size of population and to address their management in ways that do not lock up or contaminate land for future generations. The influence of sustainability principles over the preliminary planning and development phases of the Cemeteries Master Plan is readily discernible and written into the vision: To provide direction for the development and management of the cemeteries owned, managed or maintained by the Council for the next 50 years, and the natural, cultural, heritage, landscape and spiritual values are protected and enhanced by the integrated management of these areas as reserves and open spaces, while M¯aori values and traditions to their ancestral land, water, sites, w¯ahi tapu, fauna and flora, and other taonga are protected and culture are enhanced. (CCC, 2013, p. 24)

However, it can be argued that the Master Plan which eventuated was not the one envisioned, especially in terms of an intimated shift in modes of body disposal. It is this gap between raised sustainability expectations and what eventuated that can be taken to indicate the impact of the Canterbury earthquakes on the management of the dead in Christchurch. Before explaining this further, it is important to note that Christchurch’s move towards organising for a new sustainably orientated mode of body disposal that could effectively manage upwards of 3,000 deaths per year in culturally appropriate and more environmentally sustainable ways was just one (albeit with institutional heft) of a rising tide of sustainably orientated initiatives pertaining to the dead. Sustainability and Memorialisation The literature on sustainability and memorialisation indicates that, in the early 1990s, green burial grounds began to emerge where the principles of sustainability were front and centre to the management and organisation of remains and committal within the grounds (Hockey et al., 2012). And CCC’s commitment to sustainability, seen in the work undertaken for the Cemeteries Master Plan, demonstrates the local presence of this

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trend in the management of the dead. The separate but parallel practice of memorialising the dead, where emblems are erected for the dead in meaningfully organised landscapes, emerged in line with green burial ¯ grounds (Madrell & Sidaway, 2010). With the setup of the Otukaikino Reserve in 1992, Greater Christchurch was in an early wave of new patterns of mourning and memorialisation that were in step with the greening of other aspects of our lives. Pre-colonial settlement, the area was a wetland fed by natural springs and used for burial preparation by Ng¯ai Tahu. Bought in 1854 by the Wilson family, it was subject to a compulsory purchase order in 1961 to build the northern motorway. All original vegetation had disappeared until a unique partnership between the Department of Conservation (DoC) and Lamb and Hayward Ltd. (funeral directors), supported by Te Ng¯ai T¯u¯ahuriri R¯unanga, began to manage the reserve as a sustainable wetland—replanting natives to encourage the restoration of original flora and fauna and manage the area as a Living Memorial. The concept is to plant a New Zealand native tree to commemorate the passing of a loved one. It is summed up in its M¯aori title – Mau Mahara – remembering you. For each funeral they conduct, Lamb and Hayward donates funds to the Department of Conservation for trees to be planted and cared for. There are no burials within this reserve, and specific trees are not dedicated to any one person. (DoC Te Papa Atawhai, 2010, p. 2)

Combining the work done on the Cemeteries Master Plan with the ¯ prescient Otukaikino Reserve, there is a clear sense of not only local institutional recognition of the desire for greening of cemeteries and burial provision, but also a momentum towards environmental engagement at an institutional register in the form of the development of the relatively expensive and, it could be argued, conceptually risky Cemeteries Master Plan and the development of memorialisation initiatives such as ¯ the Otukaikino Reserve Living Memorial. In brief, it is possible to say that a greening initiative was building and momentum was reaching a critical tipping point towards a sustainable orientation in the management of the dead in the greater Christchurch area.

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The Impact of the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence and Compounding Disasters on Interment and Memorialisation People still died of ordinary causes during the initial stages of the Canterbury earthquake sequence, so people still had to be buried or cremated. Funeral homes, crematoria and cemeteries continued to offer their services as best they could which depended on the level of damage they had sustained. Given the CCC’s central role in providing and managing cemeteries, a set of criteria and protocols were quickly put in place so dealing with the dead could continue as safely as possible (Fig. 12.3). According to a later report on these initial disaster times, “where a pre-purchased plot is no longer usable due to earthquake damage an alternative plot will be made available, however this may be in another cemetery. All cemeteries with damaged headstones are Operational”

Fig. 12.3 Akaroa Anglican Cemetary (Author’s own image)

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(CCC, 2013, p. 8). Though operational, the CCC’s advice at the time was that burials would be considered on a case-by-case basis. The Sextons would have to consider the state of surrounding graves and access routes to the burial plot and “each interment needed to have a safety plan drawn up which could include limits on the number of mourners able to enter the cemetery” (Davies, 2011, p. 1). Managing safe farewells for the newly dead sat alongside the need to manage the memory markers of the longer dead. Memorial walls full of ashes at a Christchurch crematorium crumbled during the February Christchurch earthquake. The Linwood Crematorium escaped the February 2011 magnitude-6.3 earthquake seemingly unscathed, except for the two memorial walls that dated to the late-1960s and housed nearly 300 peoples’ ashes. Crematorium staff had chiselled the ashes out of the hollow bricks and rubble and found every plastic urn was intact. Cremation Society of Canterbury general manager Barbara Terry said “every individual’s ashes are safe”. Terry had received emails from as far away as the United States and the Netherlands, asking if the memorial gardens had been destroyed. She said the ashes would be held in storage until the memorial walls were rebuilt (Fig. 12.4) (Carville, 2011).

Memorialising the Disaster As the long-standing remembrances to the dead were recuperated and repaired, various forms of disaster memorialisation took shape that range across formal and informal spaces, objects and practices. The landmark memorials are those that either stand the test of time or are officially sanctioned, and these include the Earthquake Victims interment site in Avonhead Cemetery and the Oi Manawa Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial, which was opened to the public on 22 February ¯ akaro Avon River in central Christchurch 2017 on the banks of the Ot¯ (Fig. 12.5). The February 2011 Christchurch earthquake interment site, municipally owned Avonhead Cemetery, was unveiled on 21 February 2012 and opened to the public on 22 February 2012. The inner circle is reserved for the burial of unidentified remains and to commemorate the four unfound victims, the outer circle has the individual gravestones for each interred there (Fig. 12.6). Not all of those killed by the earthquake are interred within this site. Some have been laid to rest closer to their families instead.

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Fig. 12.4 Walls tumbled but family ashes intact (Photo credit: Stuff Limited)

The Crown’s national memorial to the disaster, Oi Manawa, is a long concrete pavement and marble wall with inscriptions of the names of those killed that runs along the Avon in central Christchurch, and a contemplative space on the opposite bank that looks onto the wall (Fig. 12.7). Slovenian architect Grega Vezjak won the commission and undertook the design from overseas. Their design was selected by a panel of experts and approved by the then Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee. It met with a mixed response. While some approved, questions were asked about both the design that was chosen and the means by which it was chosen, thus highlighting the issues of aesthetics and public consultation and the decision-making process (Meier, 2015). This having been said, the Wall is one of only two national disaster memorials in Aotearoa New Zealand and, alongside the Tangiwai National Memorial, it stands as a focal point for formal annual remembrance. Formal memorials take many years to come to fruition. This is not the case for informal modes of remembrance. What started with people leaving flowers on chain-link fences that closed off Christchurch city

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Fig. 12.5 Avonhead Canterbury Earthquake Memorial (Image Author’s own June 2016)

centre immediately after the earthquake metamorphosed into a striking mode of annual remembrance. Flowers are habitually placed in road cones on 22 February all around the city (see Fig. 12.8). This informal memorialisation practice was also used as a marker for the Christchurch massacre, 15 March 2019, indicating its uptake as a directly recognisable way to memorialise other disasters in the Christchurch area. Temporary memorials also transformed into permanent ones, the most well-known being “185 empty chairs” (Fig. 12.9). “The chairs appeared on the quiet morning of February 22, 2012, the first anniversary … (artist Peter) Majendie’s installation of 185 white chairs on site of the demolished Oxford Terrace Baptist Church would be there for just one week” (Matthews, 2017). Since then, the white chairs have become a fixture and TripAdvisor’s top landmark attraction. Made up of a collection of domestic chairs, each different and painted white, the memorial

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Fig. 12.6 Avonhead Canterbury Earthquake Memorial (Image Author’s own June 2016)

has become an unofficial sacred space and an internationally recognised symbol of the disaster. When we look across this brief range of examples, most focus is on the disaster itself and remembering the event and individuals as such. So what is there to say about the impact of the earthquakes on the remembrance of the dead in terms of helping us see the current socio-political positioning of the dead in relation to sustainability? What is striking to me is that the conceptual space for seeing sustainability practices as memorialisation practices does not seem to be present in local authority or national body memorialisation approaches, so there seems to be a green void in the post-earthquake institutional remembrance of the dead. This green void is also discernible in the earthquake’s long-term impact on the Cemeteries Master Plan. The consultation and subsequent plan development were put on hold for two years, and, during these intervening years, the

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Fig. 12.7 Oi Manawa Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial (Photo by Kenjiro Fujita, 2018)

intellectual driver for the Plan, Christine Heremaia, was diagnosed with a terminal illness to which she succumbed in March 2014. Although the Plan made the light of day in 2013, principles of sustainability in the development of a new mode of disposal that could manage the depleted cemetery space and the projected numbers of the dead were underdeveloped. Despite the knowledge that all local cemeteries would be pretty much full within 10 years, and notwithstanding the acknowledgement that consultation had highlighted a strong community desire for among other things a green cemetery, the outcomes were underwhelming. Section 9.2 of the 2013 Cemeteries Master Plan is worth quoting in full because it simultaneously acknowledges the desire for, and the eventual provision of, an eco-burial cemetery: There has been an increasing demand from residents to have an Ecoburial cemetery within the Christchurch District. Eco-burials (also referred to as natural burials) are a form of burial where no chemicals or toxic substances are used to preserve or embalm the body or in the burial

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Fig. 12.8 Flowers in cones, University of Canterbury Campus (Image Author’s own, February 2016)

process. Decomposition is encouraged. … A suitable site has not been selected … as the selection and establishment of an Eco-burial cemetery within the Christchurch District may take a few years, Green Burials are also being offered as an option. Green burials are possible at any cemetery where suitable conditions exist. Draft handbook proposes minimum

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Fig. 12.9 White chairs memorial, facing the cardboard transitional cathedral on corner of Hereford and Madras (Photo by Peter Simpson, 2019)

depth change from 1.4 to 1.0 metres which will render a greater number of cemeteries suitable for Green burials. (CCC, 2013, p. 29)

The years since the Canterbury earthquake sequence have seen the development of a new eco-burial site within the Diamond Harbour Memorial Gardens, which opened in November 2017 with a total of 12 plots that were quickly filled, and a green burial site in Yaldhurst Cemetery which opened in December 2019 (Watson, 2020). A draft development plan is currently (2021) underway for a new cemetery come sports park in Templeton. The land at Templeton is suited to both cemetery and sports use and the location is ideal as there has been a population shift westward since the earthquakes, said council head of parks Andrew Rutledge. The council is

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legally required to provide for community burial needs and we have been looking at possible cemetery sites across the city. A new cemetery on the land at Templeton could potentially provide for the city’s burial needs for at least 60 years (Otago Daily Times, 2019).

Overall, the council’s consultation processes indicated a significant interest in and groundswell towards greening of body disposal—but only in terms of burials, e.g. depth of plot, no embalming, etc., not alternative body disposal processes. Furthermore, more recent public submissions on the proposed Templeton Cemetery and Sports Park indicate that local communities continue to feel marginalised and their concerns ignored— consultation processes remain ambiguous sites of social engagement for locals —and a sense of not being heeded still prevails. The planning for, and lead up to, the development of the new Templeton cemetery shows a lack of appetite by the council to be innovative. New cemetery provision follows existing protocols and land use—so cemeteries remain the same as they ever were. Quarry rehabilitation was last formally reviewed in 2014 and reveals the impact of earthquakes on local ones: a steady stream of trucks bringing in rubble from demolitions and taking out aggregate for the rebuild has seen the working lives of some quarries shortened and applications for new quarries increase. While rebuild rubble can be used to raise the ground levels of some quarries, since the demolition phase is through, overall, the council notes that quarried land cannot usually and feasibly be returned to pre-quarry ground levels, and because of this, there is a heightened risk of run-off or seepage into Canterbury’s aquifers which are its source of potable water (for more on regional water politics, see Wynyard in this collection). While quarries may seem an interesting and innovative “brown space” where quarry rehabilitation could pair up with innovative new body treatment practices, only certain forms of body treatment that did not generate run-off could be practically taken forward. The CCC is not in a position to take the lead until (or if and when) the 1964 Burials and Cremation Laws review is completed. There is a lost opportunity to be vanguards in the support of the uptake of new technologies such as bio-cremation. If made available, this technology would address the run-off from natural burials and emissions from firecremation and so provide more sustainable body management services for the thousands that require body disposal every year.

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So, with all this movement and development of a Master Plan, the upshot is that there is a very small eco-burial site at Diamond Harbour (full before it was completed) and the (in principle) position that it is possible to have a green burial in any council cemetery depending on local conditions (e.g. water table). From these lacklustre developments, it is legitimate to argue that there has been a lack of social connection and initiative of ways for new practices, sites and technologies (such as the use of brown sites for columbarium or the support of new technologies available for body dissolution such as water cremation) to integrate into and move beyond the existing death management infrastructure. This reticence is understandable if the argument is posed of the impact of Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) on council initiatives and innovation. When council implemented its processes of community consultation post-earthquake, national government came in and usurped these strategies. Why would a council and communities with this most recent experience expose themselves to such a process again? This risk averseness could be argued to be a long-term impact of national response to disasters on innovative opportunities (for further meditations on disasters and innovation, see Cameron in this collection). The risks of reaching into new territory in the sustainable management of death are perceived as greater than its potential benefits. I make this argument based on the seeming reticence of Christchurch local authorities to take up the opportunity to green the management of death.

Conclusion Pre-disaster, the management of the dead was being rethought and a move towards the sustainable development of the organisation of Christchurch’s expanded cemeteries portfolio was both observable and building momentum. Some institutional incentives and initiatives were underway. During the disaster, institutional initiatives were restricted. The subsequent impact of the Canterbury earthquake sequence on the management of body disposal and memorialisation clearly indicates a key issue in how sustainability is understood in terms of body disposal provision. The scale, practicality and costs of a green death render it cosmetically and individually attainable. However, it is not supported in a broad socially and ecologically sustainable initiative. The current model of death management just does not engage sustainably with the bigger

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picture of a population with 3,000 deaths a year, with multiple expectations, needs and technologies, or with land use limits and a growing population. While headstones had toppled and some columbaria had shaken out their contents, the direct damage to the city’s cemeteries was relatively minor compared to the damage done to the city of the living. Official interment sites, memorials and less formal remembrance practices have all been made to mark the damage to people and property. And their range and variety give a sense of the scale and depth of the losses endured. The official memorials themselves do not incorporate any greening aspects or practices. You could argue that a focus on the individual rather than on sustainability practices may be taken as a clear marker of the formal socio-political positioning of the dead post-earthquake in Christchurch (in death, as in life, we are all neoliberal subjects). We can see a hesitancy to explore and develop green approaches beyond a very basic provision. Partly, it is the loss of a main personality, Christine Heremaia, the driving force of the sustainability or greening of CCC’s landscaping practices. But also more significant and perhaps more insidious, we can point to the take-over of the rebuild by central government, and the ongoing trumping of local initiatives by national government bodies which has depleted the initiative and necessary risktaking drive to institute the broad-based greening of death by local authorities. Therefore, it has become sufficient to say that there is enough provision to give people green burials in conventional cemeteries. The CCC does not have the legislative mandate to get cremation providers to transform their plant to new technologies (such as bio-cremation units instead of burners) because cremation facilities are privately provided in Christchurch and so cannot develop brown sites into resting places given the lack of support for new run-off and emissions-reduced technologies. So the Christchurch situation seems to have stalled at the macro-development level even when it had the opportunity to change through disaster response times. While a sea-change in how we are thinking about and engaging with death is underway, the earthquake did not act as an accelerant for social change in the management of the dead. It seems instead as if the earthquake, or rather the ways in which local and national authorities have responded to the earthquakes, hollowed out the Cemeteries Master Plan’s original aim of reorganising the management of the dead through a sustainability approach.

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My chapter explored ways in which new meanings and practices of sustainability through adversity are considered in and through the ongoing shifts in the socio-political positioning of the dead. It charts and interrogates the constitution and management of the dead pre-, during and post- “disaster” as a vein through which broader themes of socioecological sustainability and the effects of disaster on these trends can be more deeply re-understood. Given that we now live in post-disaster ecological emergency times, I argue that Christchurch’s death management manifests the effects of outdated legislation linked to a specific political approach to disaster management and their joint impact upon Christchurch’s death practices. And I extrapolate to say that it is not so much disasters but broader political responses to disaster that have limited our abilities to embrace the greening of death beyond sporadic, individual-driven and short-lived initiatives.

References Carville, O. (2011, March 3). “Walls tumbled, but family ashes intact”. The Press. http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/4725919/Walls-tumbledbut-family-ashes-intact CCC. (2013). “Cemeteries master plan”. Christchurch City Council. https:// ccc.govt.nz/the-council/plans-strategies-policies-and-bylaws/plans/cemete ries-master-plan. Last accessed 4 January 2021. Davies, M. (2011). “Digital photograph: Earthquake damage to Lyttleton Roman Catholic and Dissenters Cemeteries, Reserve Terrace, Lyttleton”. Canterbury Museum. https://collection.canterburymuseum.com/objects/ 660630/digital-photograph-earthquake-damage-to-lyttelton-roman-catholicand-dissenters-cemeteries-reserve-terrace-lyttelton DoC Te Papa Atawhai. (2010). Ötukaikino. In DoC (Ed.). New Zealand Government. Hendery, A. G. (2014). Earthed in hope: Dying, death and funerals a pakeha agglican perspective. Philip Garside Publishing Ltd. Heremaia, C. (2007). “Body disposal trends”. Personal communication with Ruth McManus. Hockey, J., Green, T., Clayden, A., & Powell, M. (2012). Landscapes of the dead? Natural burial and the materialization of absence. Journal of Material Culture, 17 , 115–132. Hodson, M., & Marvin, S. (2009). “Urban ecological security’: A new paradigm? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33(1), 193–215. Johnson, E. (Ed.). (2018). Death and dying in New Zealand. Freerange Press.

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Lahoud, A., Rice, C., & Burke, A. (2010). Post-traumatic urbanism: Wiley. Madrell, A., & Sidaway, J. (Eds.). (2010). Deathscapes: Spaces for death, dying, mourning and remembrance. Ashgate. Matthews, P. (2017, July 1). “Christchurch’s 185 chairs: Remembering loss and thinking ahead”. The Press. https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/christchurchlife/art-and-stage/94189382/christchurchs-185-white-chairs-rememberingloss-and-thinking-ahead McManus, R., & Gallagher, J. M. (2015). ‘It really was a shock to the system’ - a socio-technical study of the effects of the Christchurch earthquakes on water conservation habits. New Zealand Sociology, 30(1), 63–87. Meier, C. (2015, May 14). “Marble earthquake memorial an ironic choice, says survivor”. The Press. https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/business/the-reb uild/68507149/marble-earthquake-memorial-an-ironic-choice-says-surivor Nichols, S. (2006). Disaster memorials as government communication. The Australian Journal of Emergency Management, 21(4), 36–43. NZ Herald. (2011, February 24). “Christchurch earthquake: 76 in temporary morgue – Collins”. New Zealand Herald. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/ christchurch-earthquake-76-in-temporary-morgue-collins/S4PN3HMI6G73 KBLJ3AZ6ZYYJLE/ Otago Daily Times. (2019, September 13). “New Cemetery, sports park planned for council land”. Otago Daily Times. https://www.odt.co.nz/star-news/starchristchurch/new-cemetery-sports-park-planned-council-land Searle, C. (2007). Interment Trends 1926–2006, prepared for Christchurch Cemeteries Plan Workshop 2007. Unpublished excel spreadsheet. Christchurch City Council: Christchurch. Stats NZ. (2021). “Deaths by area, city/district councils (Maori and total population (Annual-Dec) Christchurch City 2009- 2019 Stats NZ INFOSHARE”. Statistics New Zealand. Last accessed 7 January 2021. Tidball, K., Krasny, M. E., Svendsen, E., Campbell, L., & Helphand, K. (2010). Stewardship, learning, and memory in disaster resilience. Environmental Education Research, 16(5/6), 591–609. Watson, M. (2020). “Eco Burials”. Diamond Harbour Community. https://dia mondharbour.info/eco-burials. Last accessed 5 January 2021.

PART IV

¯ Otautahi as a Laboratory for the World: A Prelude to the Future

CHAPTER 13

Why Don’t We “Build Back Better”? The Complexities of Re-constituting Urban Form Steve Matthewman

and Hugh Byrd

Introduction Work by disaster scholars reveals remarkably consistent patterns in which the isolated, weak, ethnic minorities and the less wealthy consistently fare worse when catastrophe strikes (Matthewman, 2015, p. 20). This has led researchers to conclude that recovery should not simply return affected communities to the status quo ante. Instead, it should seek to reduce the structural disadvantages that produce and exacerbate vulnerability and work to make places safer than they were prior to disaster (Clinton, 2006, p. 6). This is crystallised in the phrase “build back better” (BBB), which was first articulated by the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special

S. Matthewman (B) School of Social Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] H. Byrd School of Architecture, Unitec, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_13

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Envoy for Tsunami Recovery, former US President Bill Clinton, in 2006. Since then, the idea of BBB has assumed the status of orthodoxy within post-disaster reconstruction. Yet despite widespread desires to do so, cities routinely fall short of this aim. One expert at the Canterbury Earthquakes Symposium said that failure is the norm. In his bald assessment, “no one builds back better” (Hopkins, 2018). Glenn Fernandez and Iftekhar Ahmed’s (2019, p. 3) literature review reaches a similar conclusion: “The promise to not re-create or exacerbate pre-disaster vulnerabilities has generally been unfulfilled. Although the BBB narrative talks about the improvement of communities, translating this narrative into practice is rarely observed”. This chapter asks the all-important question, “why not?” It explores this general failure through a specific case study, the city of ¯ Otautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, following the 2010–2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence.1

Christchurch Ruptures: Hopes for a Better City The earthquakes were primarily a tragedy: 185 people died and 7,000 were injured. Lives were altered irrevocably. Much trauma remains. Over 8,000 households were displaced due to land damage. The majority of the Central Business District (CBD), some 80%, was destroyed or was subsequently demolished. Horizontal infrastructure was also hugely impacted. Over 1,628,429sqm of roading required repair or replacement, while 659 km of sewer pipes and 69 km of water mains were also affected (Greater Christchurch Partnership, 2015, pp. 10–11). This also provided an opportunity for wholesale urban renewal, providing the prospect to BBB. As Anake Goodall (2018), a member of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Review Panel, told us:

1 This chapter draws on research conducted by Steve Matthewman, Hugh Byrd and Christine Kenney as part of a three-year Marsden project funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand. The broad focus of the research is on how to build sustainability into the city following the earthquakes. The narrow focus is on the place of renewable energy in this process. The research consists of key-informant interviews with Government Ministers, local council officials, iwi (M¯aori tribal) groups, heads of rebuild and regeneration agencies, academics, community activists, journalists, and members of the public (n = 60, ongoing). This is supplemented with document analysis, informal meetings, off the record interviews, participant observation and Official Information Act (1982) requests. Institutional ethics approval for the work was granted by the University of Auckland.

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Christchurch … got all its old infrastructure removed. So, everything that Paris, London and New York and the great cities that have got centuriesold infrastructure, for them to move ahead they’ve got to dismantle yesterday’s infrastructure, or the bits of it that are now redundant and build the future’s infrastructure, whether that’s solar panels, insulation in New York buildings or whatever. Christchurch got the first bit of that equation for nothing; they’ve taken all the old infrastructure away.

The city became “the theatre of the greatest single urban design project in our nation’s history” (Falconer, 2015). “It’s like someone picked the central city out of Christchurch”, said Roger Dennis, the proponent of the Sensing City project that promised to turn Christchurch into the planet’s first genuinely smart city (Anderson, 2014). “No one in the world is rebuilding the heart of a living city from scratch”. Initial signs were promising. Arguably, no city of comparable size has had such high levels of investment. Peter Townsend, CEO of the Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce, said: “I don’t know of anywhere in the world where $40 to $45 billion is being tipped into a population of 360,000 people to rebuild a city” (RNZ, 2016). Foreign Policy touted Christchurch as a global city to watch, noting that the “massive rebuilding effort … is a unique opportunity to rethink urban form” (Glaeser & Sassen, 2011, p. 72). The city council was also celebrated for its Share an Idea process of public “conversations” which anticipated the central city’s future. This solicited 106,000 ideas from 60,000 citizens. International accolades were also garnered for the new temporary urbanism programmes that commenced (Wesener, 2015). Multiple visions for the city were articulated. Amongst other things, it was hoped that the new Christchurch might be: • A magnet city: KPMG saw the rebuild as offering the potential to reinvigorate the city by creating a new centre to attract people and capital, thus providing the synergies for exciting, creative and lucrative projects. Christchurch, it predicted, could attract wealth creators and disruptors, and become a haven for the young, entrepreneurial and energetic (Haynes, 2015). • A sporting city: The region’s success in provincial rugby was undisputed, and Canterbury excelled in other sporting domains besides. Earthquake Recovery Minister Brownlee had a vision to transform Christchurch’s vacated residential red zone land into the “sporting

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capital of New Zealand”. An international standard open water course providing for rowing, swimming and triathlon would create an unparalleled venue in the Southern Hemisphere (Dally, 2013). • A future-proof city: In 2011, the then Mayor, Bob Parker, said that “[t]his is fundamentally a nineteenth century city. We have a unique historical opportunity to embrace the paradigm of the twenty-first century. Environmental understanding and sustainable living are light years away from the experiences of the founders” (Quoted in Yarwood, 2011). Under Parker’s leadership, the CCC’s Share an Idea programme resulted in the “People’s Plan”. It delivered a clear mandate for a compact, liveable and sustainable city. • A smart city: As noted, Roger Dennis, leader of the Sensing City project, sought to turn Christchurch into the world’s first smart city. Sensors would be embedding into built infrastructure to give realtime information on such things as air quality, noise levels and energy consumption. He said that the project would “pave the way for Christchurch to become a laboratory to better understand how technology can create more sustainable urban environments. In doing so the city is expected to become a melting pot of emerging technology such as big data, the internet of everything, cheap sensors and pervasive connectivity” (Dennis, 2013). • A post-colonial city: Christchurch was one of the most quintessentially English settlements in the colonial project (Pickles, 2016, p. 9). The principal M¯aori iwi (tribe) of the South Island, Ng¯ai Tahu, made history after the earthquakes, finding themselves in the “globally unique” position of being the first Indigenous group to be an official partner to recovery following major disaster (Keene, 2013; Phibbs et al. and Pickles in this volume). The Indigenous urbanism podcast noted that the earthquakes provided “a chance to build, more or less from scratch, a post-colonial city, inclusive of everyone; and with a strong recognition of the mana whenua [people with customary authority] of local hap¯u [subtribe], Ng¯ai T¯ua¯huriri” (Kake, 2018).

The Future Collapses: Failure to BBB Alas, the first city of the twenty-first century was not to be. Central government usurped local government. The people’s plan (Share an Idea) was replaced by the government’s own blueprint (Christchurch Central Recovery Plan). The smart city died a swift death. KPMG quickly

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curbed its enthusiasm, lamenting an opportunity lost (Haynes, 2015). Regenerate Christchurch’s CEO Ivan Iafeta (2019) noted that “the perception that others have of Canterbury, and that a lot of Cantabrians have of Canterbury itself, is that historically it’s a fairly white conservative community”. University of Canterbury sociologist Mike Grimshaw (2018) called it “the Uncle Barry problem”. When he asks his students to personify the city, they say “older”, “white”, “only high school education”, “conservative”, “a bit racist”, “all of that sort of thing”. In addition to losing its magnetism, the city is yet to win the title of sporting capital. While Christchurch now has a world class cricket facility in Hagley Park, the residential red zone does not have a sporting water feature, the Metro Sports facility will not be completed until 2022, and work on a replacement rugby stadium for Lancaster Park has not even commenced. Cynics suggest that despite the initial burst of optimism the city centre has moved from red zone to dead zone. It is all too easy to find media headlines like “Can Christchurch be Saved?” (Stylianou, 2014) and “The Future isn’t Going Anywhere, so Why Did Christchurch Rebuild the City of Yesterday?” (McCrone, 2017). As Anake Goodall (2018) put it: What we’ve done, very perversely, is we’ve gone and built a brand-new last century city; that’s what we’ve done. I don’t know if this is true, but I don’t think there’s one green roof in the city, with vegetation on top to regulate the cooling, regulate the heating and reduce the power bill, and collect water and recycle that.

The desired compact city continues to sprawl and the “CBD now has twice as much space in buildings given to car parking as to residential living space. What kind of twenty-first century city is that?” James Dann (2021) recently asked. The smart city’s progenitor was even more damning: “I’m going to give you an unfiltered view of the rebuild”, he told us at interview. “I would say it’s been a cluster fuck” (Dennis, 2018). For many commentators, the Christchurch rebuild is the paradigmatic case of failure to BBB. Doug Ahlers, an international recovery expert based at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, castigated the government-led, top-down, command-and-control recovery model overseen by a specialist agency as “global worst practice” (Quoted in Macfie, 2016). Local urban sociologist, Mike Grimshaw (2018), also sees Christchurch as a textbook case of how not to BBB. This proposition “resonates because it is the truth… I mean, I’ve always said why are we

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trying to rebuild a nineteenth, twentieth century model of a city in the twenty-first century?” Similarly, urban designer James Lunday has said that the government’s recovery plan “is generally held up as an example of what not to do now, not as a best case” (Quoted in Harris, 2020). The “magnet”, “sporting”, “future-proof” and “smart” cities all serve as examples of what Morten Nielsen (2014) calls “collapsed futures”. (We shall return to the post-colonial city in the conclusion). This notion is akin to William Gibson’s (1981, p. 29) idea of “semiotic ghosts”. Both are products of the collective public imagination and desire; both signal a “tomorrow that never was ” (Gibson, 1981, p.24, emphasis in original). They are fragmentary reminders from a past that never came to pass. Foreclosed as full possibility, these phantasms of unfulfilled futures nonetheless linger “within the present as traces of that which will no longer be” (Nielsen, 2014, p. 213).

BBB: Exploring the Tensions How are we to explain these collapsed futures, these failures to BBB? Disasters are complex events within rapidly changing environments. Actors have to work with imperfect knowledge, governance structures can be compromised, and authorities are assailed by multiple, and competing, resource claims. Efforts to BBB therefore take place in super politically charged domains. Moreover, authorities are inevitably dealing with a fractured public. There is no such thing as Christchurch society, rather, there is a range of different actors: individuals, groups, communities, iwi, commercial organisations, aid agencies, local and national authorities. They have crosscutting memberships, contesting notions of how the city should be recomposed and of how life should be lived. Christ Church Cathedral serves as a good example here. Formerly a place of worship, city symbol and tourist attraction. Its future form and function have generated heated debates. Should it remain a ruin, a monument to the earthquakes, or should it be rebuilt? If rebuilt, should it be restored to its original state, replaced by a replica, or be replaced by something else entirely? And what purpose should it serve? Should it be an Anglican establishment, or, following the mosque shootings, would it be more appropriate to designate it a multi-faith establishment? Historian Reinhart Koselleck (2018) provides us with a useful framework for thinking through these antagonisms. He argues that any major

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event will unfold, and should be examined through, three key oppositions. Koselleck calls them before and after, inside and outside, and above and below. Before and after refers to generational differences. Inside and outside refers to the politics of difference, of in-group and out-group, friend and foe. It also speaks to notions of public and private, of what is secret and what is known, of how decisions are made and, crucially, by whom. For Koselleck, these differences are mediated rather than resolved. Finally, above and below refers to the social hierarchies that define human existence. For, just as there is no coherent society, there is no truly equal one. Let us apply his framework to the Christchurch case. Before and After The simultaneously saddest and most optimistic statement ever made to us about the city came from a nurse. She was overwhelmed by pity for the city’s elderly who would never get to see their 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. Prominent Christchurch architect Peter Beaven probably summed it up best for the older generation, saying: I feel shattered really... I have moved to Blenheim. We couldn’t cope with Christchurch. I just feel profoundly sad at what has happened. We lost the inner city, which was our life, and we lost my office in the Provincial Chambers. A great number of the buildings of that period of modernism are in trouble and being pulled down. The whole of Christchurch has been lost anyway. You can’t isolate any particular work. It is not just my buildings, it is the whole Christchurch city character. All those Victorian streets and buildings. It has been torn away from us. (quoted in Gates, 2012, emphasis added)

Yet a decade on, the youth await their place. For many, their memories do not extend beyond a city that has always been broken. Compounding matters, Christchurch has an older demographic profile when compared to other Aotearoa New Zealand cities. The head of one of the rebuild agencies observed that senior citizens also tend to have a disproportionate sense of stewardship over the central city. This cohort came of age prior to mass private vehicle ownership, suburbanisation and the subsequent “mallification” of Christchurch, when the urban centre also acted as the centre of social gravity. It was the hub for transport, retail and recreation.

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They have the longest association with the city, and they feel the loss of heritage buildings most keenly. They frequently expect the new builds to replace what was lost. Their mandate is therefore to build back the same. While there have been some concessions to younger children in terms of city design—the Margaret Mahy Park sought their serious input (Miller, 2015), and the central library incorporated wishes for a Harry Potter-style staircase—youth may have hoped for a little more excitement. Aside from a skate park and a couple of Instagrammable swings (see Fig. 13.1), there is still precious little to entice them back into the city or to tell them that it is their place too. As fifteen-year-old youth leader Dom Wilson said to local journalists: “Young people … don’t feel Christchurch is a place where it is actually truly their home” (Quoted in Harris & Law, 2019).

Fig. 13.1 Instagrammable #chchswing (Photo by Shinya Uekusa, 2020)

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Inside and Outside For veteran activist John Minto, the Share an Idea consultation process was “the most important and biggest and most effective exercise in democracy that has ever happened in New Zealand” (Quoted in Matthews, 2016). At interview, he described it as “an outpouring of what is at the heart and soul of Christchurch”, whereas the Government’s Recovery Plan is simply “a corporate plan” based on “private sector led redevelopment, and it’s been an absolute disaster”. Others were inclined to agree (see Montgomery, Pawson, Pickles in this collection). James Dann (2021) saw the benefits of the Recovery Plan largely accruing to property developers and businesses from out of town. The resulting feeling, as Christchurch journalist Philip Matthews (2020) put it in episode three of his series Munted, was that the rebuild was done to, not by, Christchurch. In episode seven he added: There was a sense that the city was a laboratory for political ideas. And as was said about the mass closure of schools and the operation of rebuild agencies, things were done to an already struggling population, too quickly, too dramatically, and often without consultation or consent.

The Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act 2010 (CERR Act 2010) and the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act 2011 (CER Act 2011) were enacted to expedite the rebuild. The legislation was also expedited, bypassing consultative processes. There was no meaningful public participation and the ultimate legislation delegated virtually unchecked law-making power to the executive. One legal expert said that it swept aside three centuries of constitutional convention (Vance, 2010). Decision-making was subsequently impacted in three key ways: (1) rebuild planning was removed from locally elected councillors and placed in the hands of appointed officials within a new agency (CERA) who were accountable to a single Minister with extraordinary powers, (2) suspension of regional elections was prolonged, meaning that commissioners managed water resources rather than elected representatives (see Wynyard in this volume), and (3) locally elected school boards of trustees were cut out of future decision-making by the Ministry of Education on issues such as school closures and mergers (Hayward, 2016).

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Interviewees have been quick to point out that in Christchurch, “[i]t truly was the worst of both worlds. I mean, they got this quite big promise of a bottom-up approach… Christchurch’s quite a communitarian town from my perspective” (Curtis, 2019). “People got really engaged”, Bruce Curtis (2019) said to us, but then. nothing happened. You know? Just nothing happened. If there was a ploy to disenfranchise people; you couldn’t come up with a better one. It makes me wonder? Actually, I don’t think there was a plan. I think the earthquake in Christchurch has been an unfolding disaster. It wasn’t just the two quakes; it was then two years of aftershocks; then Kaik¯oura five years after that.

Above and Below Clearly some count more than others. This brute fact carries over into built form. What gets to be constructed, where and for whom are often functions of connections and resources. They are the network effects of accrued cultural, social and economic capital. A key figure in the rebuild said to us, on condition of anonymity: I’d cynically say that consultation can also mean that the rich will organise, just get what they want. So, for example, one of the biggest Christchurch City Council projects that has been done so far, was starting the Art Gallery, because the Art Gallery had this incredibly well organised group, the stakeholders, who said: “Unless we have the Art Gallery really super strong, base-isolated, the Rembrandts and Picasso’s will never come back”. [P]eople who have got their shit together, they’ll get what they want. While all that was happening; well, there wasn’t anywhere for the poor people of the Eastern suburbs to go and play rugby league, they didn’t have a field operating for a long time in those Eastern suburbs, while all those sorts of discussions were going on. So, that’s the thing about these environments, the leaders get busy, but the well-resourced leaders can continue to operate and lobby, and kind of get what they want. (Anonymous A, 2018)

This point was also made by the former Chief Executive Officer of Te R¯unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu (TRoNT), Anake Goodall, who said:

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one has the capital, the other, the information. Those with all the resources up the big end of town are the least responsive because they’ve got the least need to change. Those that are really sensitive to the change are right on the edge. And guess what, they’ve got no resources. They don’t have the money, or the human resources either (Quoted in McCrone, 2017).

Elite interests were catered for in other ways too. For example, city councillors modified land intensification policies “to protect mainly upper-income suburbs such as Fendalton, Merivale and St Martins from further residential intensification under the Comprehensive Development Mechanism” (Salmon, 2015, p. 164). Such actions worked against the development of a compact city. We were told that local government is particularly poorly placed to build back better as they dare not risk offending the local power elite with whom they share social connections. They live in the same neighbourhoods, and they operate in the same milieu: So, if you’ve got a major natural disaster, and you want to make significant change, local government I don’t think is going to get you there, because they won’t have courage at key times. Local government won’t take on well-organised local interest groups. They find that really hard. I love the idea of strong local government, but because they’re so connected to their communities, they can’t stand fighting well organised local minorities…. they go to the same restaurants, they go to the same supermarkets, their children are in the same sports teams. So, you see, disaster environments, while they sound like great environments to make these step changes, they’re hard, because you also get these people just driven by these… there’s so much complexity; there’s so much mayhem. (Anonymous B, 2018)

Resources for Hope Yet it would be wrong to conclude that Christchurch has singly failed to build back better. Meaningful change may take time. Experts suggest that it takes decades, or longer, to truly recover and regenerate after disaster (Brundiers, 2018). Most of our assessments regarding BBB simply come far too soon. Indeed, reasons to be hopeful abound. Evan Smith (2018), ¯ akaro Network, who worked tirelessly to maintain Chair of the Avon-Ot¯ a sense of community ownership over the rebuild, and was dubbed Mr.

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Red Zone by the local press, said that there were “heaps” of positives to emerge from the earthquakes: Part of it is to do with, for me, the red zoning experience. It’s the first time in their lives many people realized that land wasn’t just real estate, that there were emotional bonds to the land, and if you’re forced off it, it’s that sense of what t¯urangawaewae [a place where one has the right to stand] means. So, it’s that place to stand, how important the land and the river were to people’s lives. So, there’s that sense, but also the sense that it’s not just real estate, that land ownership is just a fiction, and that kaitiakitanga [guardianship] is what’s important - you’re looking after the land for future generations. So, a lot of those concepts which were core to tangata whenua kaupapa [M¯aori principles] are becoming more evident in the community, and more of a sense of how important the river is to spiritual life as well, I think. All those kinds of concepts are beginning to take effect.

At interview, even the most cynical respondents could think of positives to have emerged from the quakes: housing stock is better; commercial buildings are safer; many of the new builds are aesthetic as well as structural improvements, with a number winning architectural awards; mental health issues no longer have the stigma that they once did (on this see Turner, 2017). The temporary and transitional urbanism projects have built community and demonstrated new possibilities (Carlton & Vallance, 2017). Interviewees also reported that people have become more community minded. University of Canterbury sociologist Rosemary Du Plessis commented (2018): “I do think there are more people who know their neighbours, and think they should … Things like that. There’s more sharing of things. There’s people who didn’t know their neighbours, who now know them” (and see her contribution in this collection).

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While the damning headlines continue—“The Last City of the 20th Century” (Dann, 2021), “Why is the City STILL Broken?” (Bayer, 2021)—so does the rebuild and recovery. At interview, Ivan Iafeta (2019) notes, “eighty percent of building stock within the CBD was demolished. As we sit and talk at the moment, over 90 percent has either been rebuilt, or is in construction, or is in the consenting and planning phases”. And some aspects of the rebuild, particularly those with no cost barriers that are open to all, like T¯ uranga, the central city library, and the Margaret Mahy Playground, are broadly celebrated as successes.2 While the city might not be entirely rangatahi-friendly this has not stopped youth from exerting their own agency (see Hayward & Johnson in this collection). The Student Volunteer Army (SVA) successfully mobilised to help fellow Cantabrians clean-up in the aftermath of the quakes. Unusually for a voluntary group they have become a “repeat emergent” emergency response organisation (Carlton & Mills, 2017), also aiding after the Kaik¯oura earthquake (2016), with the current COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 Canterbury flood. They also now offer programmes for primary, secondary and tertiary level students across the country, and thus offer an inspirational model for young leadership nationally. As noted, the disasters also made for a world first. Ng¯ai Tahu were ready to act in this post-colonial, post-settlement and post-quake environment. Having formally settled their grievances with the Crown over two decades prior, established their corporate governance structures, invested heavily in their rangatahi (youth), and been on track to become a billiondollar entity, Ng¯ai Tahu were well placed to indigenise the Garden City. They are making their presence felt in the very fabric of the city: ng¯a wh¯ariki manaaki (welcome mats) around the central city, a waka (carved canoe) climbing frame at a New Brighton playground, leaf and seed designs sandblasted onto the walls in Victoria Square, native planting

2 We might say the same of the new focus on the Avon-Otakaro ¯ River, the additional green spaces and pedestrian zones, and the new bus station. Even so, we can still demonstrate the impossibility of pleasing all of the people all of the time. For example, the Margaret Mahy Playground has been criticised for its cost (“the world’s most expensive playground”), for its location (in the central city where few children live, thus reinforcing the city’s car dependency and putting it out of reach of poorer children from distant suburbs), for having dangerous play elements, for being less accessible to children with additional needs and for downgrading Ng¯ai Tahu narratives.

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along the South Frame, inscriptions carved into the Terraces by the Avon¯ akaro River (“NOKU ¯ Ot¯ TE AWA”—the river is mine), a mahinga kai framework for the red zone (holistic and sustainable ecological management of the river and its natural resources). Debbie Tikao, the head of Matapopore Trust, the group charged with making Ng¯ai T¯ua¯huriri and Ng¯ai Tahu values, beliefs and stories more visible in the new city, said the following: “Embedding Indigenous values into a contemporary urban environment at this scale is a global first” (Quoted in Harvie, 2016). This most English of settlements is certainly indigenising. As McCrone ¯ ¯ akaro. (2019) writes: “The city has now become Otautahi, the river Ot¯ The central library is T¯uranga, the convention centre will be Te Pae. The Justice Precinct is still mostly just the Justice Precinct—Te Omeka is yet to catch on—but it is draped in an aluminium k¯ak¯apo feather cloak”. Elite capture of the recovery has also encountered limits. Significantly, the Chief Ombudsman has ruled that Regenerate Christchurch did not ¯ akaro/Avon act unlawfully in declining to include a rowing lake in the Ot¯ River Regeneration Area Plan (Office of the Ombudsman, 2019). The majority of the city’s residents support ecological restoration of the residential red zone and the Ombudsman’s decision provides the prospect of its development becoming the counterpoint to the government’s blueprint: a “greenprint” that will be the people’s anchor project. Finally, when the quakes struck there was something of an Old Boy Network running the city that birthed our suffragette movement. The majority of the national and local authority figures were male. Now the Prime Minister, the Minister for Regeneration, the Mayor, the Editor of The Press , and the CEOs of the Christchurch Foundation, Christchurch NZ and the Christchurch Chamber of Commerce are all female. As Amy Carter (2019) said to us: “This city is definitely run by women now”.

Conclusion BBB is difficult because, while you can design buildings and precincts, you cannot engineer urban life. “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” (Dann, 2021). Besides, effectively rebuilding a city involves more than physical reconstruction. Regeneration entails rebuilding lives, neighbourhoods, affective communities, social relations, occupations and aspirations. Despite the myth that

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disasters provide a blank template on which to build, earthquakes do not eradicate vested interests and institutions. Actors find themselves inhibited in all sorts of ways. Disaster situations are highly complex, and powerbrokers find themselves faced with competing interests, imperfect knowledge and well-organised elites. David Caygill (2018) has held a range of public offices, including past roles as a Christchurch City Councillor, Member of Parliament and Minister of Finance. When we interviewed him, he was serving as deputy chair for Environment Canterbury (ECan). We asked what constrained him. He answered: It’s a great question. I’d make the same comment I think about “the rebuild”, the constraints that applied to the sets of decisions that people have made and needed to make in response to the earthquakes. I’d make the same comment I think about that set of subjects as I might make more generally, certainly about the kinds of environmental challenges that Environment Canterbury is part of. And that is, I think the biggest constraint is simply the lack of agreement, or to put it another way, what I think of as the clash of values that occurs when big decisions need to be made. (Caygill, 2018, emphasis added)

Yet all too often in disaster situations, elite values and interests prevail. Authorities frequently align in the service of the powerful at the expense of public and environmental well-being. This has led some commentators to argue that they are seized upon by corporations and politicians to advance their own economic and political agendas (Klein, 2007). In the case at hand, central government actions clearly alienated locals from their own recovery. Bonnie Honig (2009) provides one of the more sophisticated accounts of such emergency politics. She observes the tendency to both centralise and consolidate top-down forms of sovereignty during emergencies. In such situations, we see inevitable tensions between executive overreach (force) and those who put their faith in the rule of law, between securement of necessities (“mere life”) and the aspirations of the people (“more life”), between the emergency (the decisions made) and emergence (the consequence of those decisions). Must it be this way? Honig believes not. Unity is illusory. Tensions are always present in political life. The rule of law is always subject to contestation, interpretation, exceptions and novel human actions. The emergency merely brings these antagonisms into sharp relief. She argues

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that we should not reduce democracy to the rule of law and the extension of rights alone. Instead, we must create a space for human agency, for the potential for new constituencies to emerge, even if they unsettle existing practices and systems. In practice, this may mean that we accept the suspension of certain norms and laws. Emergency politics therefore hold both promises and risks. We must be attuned to the new connections and realities that are brought into being, and the fairness of them, paying attention to who legislates, who speaks and who counts. Honig insists that politics is viewed through the optic of the needs of democracy rather than the needs of the emergency. How do you please all of the people all of the time? You do not. It is not possible because “the people” is not a stable, coherent identity. It is fractured by generations, genders, ethnicities, classes, immigration patterns and so on (as we noted in our discussion framed by the work of Reinhart Koselleck). While politics operates with a notion of “the people”, there always remains the multitude, “their unruly ungovernable double” (Honig, 2009, p. 3). In this sense, democratic politics is always in a state of emergence. It is essentially agonistic. Honig’s (2009, p. xvi) vision of sovereignty is distributed and multi-vocal: “power must rest with the people but the people are never fully who they need to be (unified, democratic)”. While it might not be possible or desirable to try to solve the problems that derive from this, we can at least look to negotiate the issues. In the absence of total control of situations, accommodation and mediation are the best strategies. For Honig, solutions for the wronged include restitution, compensation, formal apologies, support and empowerment. Through such actions we help fulfil the driving impulse behind BBB: to let people define the limits of their own existence (Fig. 13.2).

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Fig. 13.2 Artist S¯emisi Fetokai Potauaine’s sculpture, Vaka ‘A Hina, denoting unity and moving forwards together (Photo by Peter Simpson, 2019)

References Anderson, C. (2014, September 8). “A Plan To Rebuild Downtown Christchurch, this time with sensors”. Next City. https://nextcity.org/daily/ entry/a-plan-to-rebuild-downtown-christchurch-this-time-with-sensors Anonymous A. (2018). Interview: Rebuild agency worker. Christchurch, 23 April. Anonymous B. (2019). Interview: Rebuild agency worker. Wellington, 29 September.

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Bayer, K. (2021). “Why is the City STILL Broken?” New Zealand Herald, 22 February, A. 12. Brundiers, K. (2018). Disasters as opportunities for sustainability: The case of Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. Sustainability Science, 13(4), 1075– 1091. Carlton, S., & Mills, C. E. (2017). The student volunteer army: A ‘repeat emergent’ emergency response organisation. Disasters, 41(4), 764–787. Carlton, S., & Vallance, S. (2017). The commons of the tragedy: Temporary use and social capital in Christchurch’s earthquake-damaged central city. Social Forces, 96(2), 831–850. Carter, A. (2019). Interview: Chief Executive, Christchurch Foundation, Christchurch, 5 November. Caygill, D. (2018). Interview: Commissioner, Environment Canterbury, Christchurch, 21 May. Clinton, W. J. (2006). Lessons learned from tsunami recovery: Key propositions for building back better. UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery. https://www.preventionweb.net/files/2054_VL108301.pdf Curtis, B. (2019). Interview: Sociologist. Hamilton, 27 June. Dally, J. (2013, December 2). “MP Gerry Brownlee Makes Sporting Declaration”. Stuff . https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/business/the-rebuild/946 3960/MP-Gerry-Brownlee-makes-sporting-declaration Dann, J. (2021, February 21). “The Last City of the 20th Century”. Slate. https://slate.com/business/2021/02/christchurch-earthquake-annive rsary-how-the-rebuild-failed.html Dennis, R. (2018). Interview: Sensing City Project Leader. Christchurch, 7 March. Dennis, R. (2013, July 16). “Sensing cities, smart citizens?” Scientific American. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/sensing-cit ies-smart-citizens/ Du Plessis, R. (2018). Interview: Sociologist/CERA Employee, Christchurch, 23 April. Falconer, G. (2015, June 27). “Let’s Talk About the Christchurch Rebuild”. Stuff . https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/business/the-rebuild/69664217/ lets-talk-about-the-christchurch-rebuild Fernandez, G., & Ahmed, I. (2019). ‘Build back better’ approach to disaster recovery: Research trends since 2006. Progress in Disaster Science, 1, 100003. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pdisas.2019.100003 Gates, C. (2012, March 5). “Architect ‘Shattered’ by Christchurch’s Loss”. Stuff . https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/6521812/Architects-shatte red-by-Christchurchs-loss Gibson, W. (1981). The Gernsback continuum. In T. Carr (Ed.), Universe 11 (pp. 81–90). Doubleday.

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Glaeser, E., & Sassen, S. (2011). “16 global cities to watch.” Foreign Policy, 1 December (190), 72 & 85. Goodall, A. (2018). Interview: Member of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Review Panel, Christchurch, 11 April. Greater Christchurch Partnership. (2015). Resilient Greater Christchurch. https://wellington.govt.nz/~/media/about-wellington/resilient-wellin gton/files/resilient-greater-christchurch-plan-web.pdf Grimshaw, M. (2018). Interview: Sociologist. University of Canterbury, Christchurch, 23 April. Harris, D. (2020, July 10).” Critics Scoff at Todd Muller’s ‘Gerry Rebuilt this City’ Call in Christchurch”. Stuff . https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/pol itics/122103558/critics-scoff-at-todd-mullers-gerry-rebuilt-this-city-call-inchristchurch?cid=app-iPhone Harris, D. & Law, T. (2019, September 7). “Christchurch – A City at a Crossroads. What do Residents Want for its Future?” Stuff . https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/115555538/christchurch-a-city-at-a-crossroads-what-do-residents-want-for-its-future?cid=app-iPhone Harvie, W. (2016, September 23). “How M¯aori will Rebuilt Christchurch Look?” Stuff . https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/business/the-rebuild/841 95996/how-maori-will-rebuilt-christchurch-look Haynes, C. (2015, October 16). “Christchurch losing its magnetism”. KPMG. https://home.kpmg.com/nz/en/home/insights/2016/08/christchurch-los ing-its-magnetism.html Hayward, B. (2016, April 22). “Sustaining democracy in disaster: The seeds of recovery”. Making Christchurch. https://makingchristchurch.com/sustai ning-democracy-in-disaster-the-seeds-of-recovery-390675eb26a9 Honig, B. (2009). Emergency politics: Paradox, law, democracy. Princeton. Hopkins, J. (2018). “Recovery governance arrangements”. Canterbury Earthquakes Symposium. University of Canterbury, Christchurch, 29–30 November. Iafeta, I. (2019). Interview: Regenerate Christchurch. Christchurch, 6 November. ¯ Kake, J. (Host). (2018). “Otautahi revealed [Audio podcast transcript].” Indigenous Urbanism. https://player.fm/series/indigenous-urbanism/otautahi-rev ealed Keene, H. (2013, July 30). Future vision. Te Karaka. https://ngaitahu.iwi.nz/ our_stories/future-vision/ Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Allen Lane. Koselleck, R. (2018). Historik and hermeneutics. In S. Franzel & S. L. Hoffmann (Eds.), Sediments of time: On possible histories (pp. 41–59). Stanford University Press. Khouri, C. (2019, January 17). “The third place: T¯ uranga”. Architecture Now. https://architecturenow.co.nz/articles/the-third-place-turanga/

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McCrone, J. (2019, October 26). “Christchurch and its search for a postrecovery sense of purpose.” Stuff . https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/bus iness/the-rebuild/116782765/christchurch-and-its-search-for-a-postrecov ery-sense-of-purpose McCrone, J. (2017, August 26). “The future isn’t going anywhere, so why did Christchurch Rebuild The City Of Yesterday?” Stuff . https://www.stuff.co. nz/the-press/news/95661149/the-future-isnt-going-anywhere-so-why-didchristchurch-rebuild-the-city-of-yesterday Macfie, R. (2016, March 15). “Shakedown of a shakeup.” New Zealand Listener. http://www.noted.co.nz/currently/social-issues/shakedown-of-a-shakeup/ Matthewman, S. (2015). Disasters, risks and revelation: Making sense of our times. Palgrave Macmillan. Matthews, P. (2020) “Episode 3 ‘Do not pass go’” and “Episode 7 ‘The new normal’”. Munted [documentary], Stuff Interactives. https://interacti ves.stuff.co.nz/2020/08/munted/ Matthews, P. (2016, September 10). “John Minto: The Underdog’s Tale.” Stuff . https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/84039267/john-minto-theunderdogs-tale Miller, A. (2015, September 4). “In New Zealand, a playground designed for and by kids.” Bloomberg CityLab. Minto, J. (2019). Interview: Activist, Mayoral Candidate, Christchurch, 4 November. Nielsen, M. (2014). The negativity of times. Collapsed futures in Maputo, Mozambique. Social Anthropology/anthropologie Sociale, 22(2), 213–226. Pickles, K. (2016). Christchurch Ruptures. Bridget Williams Books. RNZ (2016, January 29). “Rebuild Half-way there but Five Years on, There’s Still Pain.” RNZ . http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/mornin greport/audio/201787302/rebuildhalfway-there-but-5-years-on,-there%27sstill-pain Salmon, G. (2015). Christchurch. In L. Early, P. Howden-Chapman, & M. Russell (Eds.), Drivers of urban change (pp. 135–171). Steele Roberts Aotearoa. ¯ akaro Network. Christchurch, 27 Smith, E. (2018). Interview: Chair, Avon-Ot¯ February. Stylianou, G. (2014, May 4). “Can Christchurch be Saved?” Stuff . http://www. stuff.co.nz/national/10002634/Can-Christchurch-be-saved Turner, S. (2017). Interview: All right? Mental Health Campaign Manager, Christchurch, 15 December. Vance, A. (2010, December 29). “Quake law dangerous, lawyers say.” Stuff . https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/canterbury-earthquake/4176800/ Quake-law-dangerous-lawyers-say

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Wenzel, J. (2009). Bulletproof: Afterlives of anticolonial prophecy in South Africa and beyond. Chicago University Press. Wesener, A. (2015). Temporary urbanism and urban sustainability after a natural disaster: Transitional community-initiated open spaces in Christchurch, New Zealand. Journal of Urbanism, 8(4), 406–422. Yarwood, V. (2011). “Resurrection: Christchurch moving on.” New Zealand Geographic, May-June (109). Available: https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/res urrection-christchurch-moving-on/

CHAPTER 14

Turn and Face the Strange: Reflections on Creativity Following the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence Trudi Cameron

What occurs after disaster can be viewed as reverse creative destruction (Monllor & Altay, 2016). Schumpeter’s (1934) theory of creative destruction proposed that market-based activity grows when conventional frameworks are disestablished, allowing innovation and change. Milton Friedman famously concurred in Capitalism and Freedom (1982) but with more sinister intent: Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around... to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. (p. xiv)

T. Cameron (B) Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_14

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During and after the Canterbury earthquake sequence, the creative ideas “lying around” were not likely those Friedman had in mind. Support was available, but the survival of ideas not pointedly underpinned by dominant neoliberal ‘wisdom’ were far from inevitable. Most of those who chose to act on creative ideas were motivated by a prosocial drive and enabled by a comfort with discomfort, honed while immersed in a society whose prevailing sociopolitical values they did not share (Cameron et al., 2018a, b). Much of what occurred “challenged and questioned neoliberalised formulations of a resilient person or city” (Cloke & Conradson, 2018, p. 362). After a disaster, ‘Nature’ is the destroyer. The need for innovation is therefore great. The ‘standard definition’ of creativity is something that is both novel and useful (Runco & Jaegar, 2012). Innovation is applied creativity. The availability of more traditional or expected options is reduced after a disaster, so creative—novel, unique, strange, quirky—alternatives become acceptable substitutes and allow a new sense of ‘normality’ to ensue. Based on research that explored how individuals creatively responded to the social processes triggered by the Canterbury earthquake sequence, the findings of this exploratory study open the discussion about who creates after a disaster, and about what enables or hinders them. The information presented owes much to interviews with 45 of those who had primary roles in implementing and attempting to sustain creative ideas for social or commercial benefit following the earthquakes. In addition to completing a Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI),1 participants generously shared their memories, reflections, insights and predictions in semi-structured interviews that shone light on their courage and willingness to face and embrace novelty or “the strange” (Bowie, 1971), which are typically feared in times of less need (Sternberg & Lubart, 1996). Many of the most memorable early responders to the 2011 Christchurch earthquake were those who applied creativity to fix what was bent or broken, be it physically, socially or commercially. Bennett (2019) states that “over 80 essays and texts” have been written about the ¯ temporary transitional projects that appeared in Otautahi Christchurch ¯ (Otautahi hereafter) after the disaster, many of which presented as highly 1 For full information about the methods and methodology see Chapter 3 in Between the Cracks: the intersection between individuals, social processes and creativity after the Canterbury Earthquakes 2010–2012 (https://researcharchive.lincoln.ac.nz/handle/ 10182/13328).

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Fig. 14.1 Gap Filler’s Dance-O-Mat (Photo by Peter Simpson, 2019)

creative (p. 1). Creative people filled many vacant social and physical gaps. The exploits of some, particularly groups like Gap Filler and Greening the Rubble, became well-known both locally and internationally (Fig. 14.1) (Bergman, 2014; Cloke & Conradson, 2018; Wesener, 2015). Arguably, most commonly associated with art or craft, creativity after the Christchurch earthquake was seen widely in the unique and useful productions and processes of social and commercial entrepreneurs. It became commonplace to shop, see a show, view art, eat, drink coffee, play games or partake in social or commercial business in unexpected, unconventional, often repurposed or shared places and spaces (Cloke & Conradson, 2018). Original artworks could be seen throughout the city. The availability of blank walls to brighten and building owners who were full of post-disaster goodwill provided the conditions for street art to ¯ flourish (Macfie, 2014). Otautahi post-disaster creativity also inspired a feature length film, The Art of Recovery, which premiered at the 2015 Christchurch Film Festival. Creativity provided amusement and distraction. Not only for those in need of alternatives, but also for those in

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authority, unprepared and without time, skills or, perhaps, inclination to distract and amuse the disaffected.

Prosocial Motivation Most of those involved in implementing creative responses were motivated by humanitarian values. After the ‘false dawn’ of the first major earthquake on 4 September 2010, while shocked, people were still able to find amusement in what felt like ‘dodging a bullet’. A 7.1 earthquake had struck their city, buildings had fallen down, but no one had died as a direct result of the event (Earthquake Commission [EQC], 2013). Books were created about the happy return of animals and the like, and earthquake-related humour could be observed, as in the “You know you’re from CHCH when …” website and books. After the tragedy of the most devastating event, a violent 6.3 magnitude aftershock, centred in Lyttelton on 22 February 2011, such frivolousness and self-congratulation would have been inappropriate. The appropriate way to ‘deal with’ the situation seems to have been to produce and support creativity that enhanced the well-being of those in the postdisaster setting. Those with the ideas, skills, means and opportunity could do something to help, be it accommodate, distract or entertain. The enthusiasm and courage of those prepared to adapt creatively, in work or social settings, engaged and encouraged others to become involved and express themselves. This relieved tension for all. Perhaps as a member of the Student Volunteer Army (SVA), or painting a chair white to commemorate the life of one of the 185 tragically lost in the earthquakes. Just two of the many post-disaster ventures that incorporated novelty in both their framework and ideas.

Pre-Adapted Creators ‘Free Thinkers’ and ‘Opportunists’ are names given to the two groups found likely to create after a disaster. ‘Free Thinkers’ have a general dissatisfaction with aspects of the pre-disaster society and a desire to improve on it, to better align it with their values. Experience with ‘otherness’ may be an advantage for ‘Free Thinkers’. Adept at living at odds with ¯ aspects of ‘normal’ society they are pre-adapted to adversity. In Otautahi, as in wider Aotearoa New Zealand particularly since the early 1990s, and, indeed much of the increasingly globalised world during the previous

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three decades, ‘normal’ society was considered one that operated in accordance with neoliberal principles. ‘Normal’ was when relatively unfettered market forces were free to pursue maximum efficiency and growth, often at the expense of social cohesion and public well-being (Johnston et al., 2012). It appears that the invulnerability developed by ‘Free Thinkers’ living in a neoliberal society can allow them to act more swiftly and effectively in an unstable post-disaster context (Cameron et al., 2018a, b). The newly configured setting was interesting and appeared full of possibilities for ‘Free Thinkers’; it then became the turn of those who fully embrace traditional and conventional life to feel at odds with their environment. This may have given ‘Free Thinkers’ a sense of power. They were ready to act, while others mourned the disappearance of their comfortable existence, and waited for others to ‘do something’ to encourage its return (Cameron et al., 2018b). After disaster, some negative or exploitative opportunistic creativity can be expected from those less scrupulous (Cropley et al., 2010). However, the ‘Opportunists’ discussed here are those who creatively adapt or establish commercial operations after a disaster for beneficial ends. While it is possible for an individual to be both a ‘Free Thinker’ and an “Opportunist”, this latter group includes a higher proportion of those less overtly creative, or who feel ‘forced’ into implementing creative ideas by the social and economic processes that evolve after a disaster event leaves fewer alternatives. They are less at odds, even embracing, of entrenched sociopolitical and economic norms. ‘Opportunists’ are inclined to be more experienced at implementing creative ideas, more considered in their actions, tend to have at least some drive for financial success (which ‘Free Thinkers’ often have little of, beyond sustainability). They are more adaptable and confident. They are also more assertive leaders and more willing to work alone than the ‘Free Thinkers’ who prefer to work with others. Like the ‘Free Thinkers’, ‘Opportunists’ seem pre-adapted to operate effectively in an unstable setting, but for different reasons. They, too, are comfortable with uncertainty, and relish risk. Seeking and exploiting market opportunities is a ‘way of life’ for ‘Opportunists’. A disaster merely makes more opportunities available (Cameron, 2020). While the phenomenon has been less researched at community level, at a national level, Naomi Klein (2007), in particular, has laid bare the benefits available to “disaster capitalists” who identify—or exacerbate—gaps in the market of a newly-vulnerable state.

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Extraversion Not Required Analysis of data from the aforementioned TIPI revealed an important finding that deviates from what researchers have previously found regarding the importance of extraversion in creative venture implementation. Past research views extraversion as valuable, even essential, particularly during the early phases of a creative venture (Leutner et al., 2014; Shane, 2003). Extraversion is seen as necessary because “entrepreneurs frequently must vie against established organizations that have more resources” and “must capture trade from rivals” (Miller, 2015, p. 1). However, the TIPI data suggest that those who implement creative ideas in a post-disaster setting need not possess extraversion. This is likely because the disaster events result in other factors that encourage enthusiasm and acceptance of creative options. The need to act and adapt quickly, or a shared, perhaps nervous, energy brought about by the uniqueness of the situation, may lead to an enthusiastic embracing of any option that allows adjustment or distracts (Cameron et al., 2018b). It seems extraversion is not essential because those implementing ideas in a post-disaster setting have less need for the trait as there is already high demand for creative products. Although a reasonable proportion of the sample identified as either moderately or strongly extroverted, almost half agreed to only being “a little” extraverted, or less. Therefore, although extraversion is a personality component present in some, the data reveal it is not essential for creative idea implementation after a disaster. The physical and social environment—full of need created by the earthquakes—does this work for the more introverted. Ideas are accepted quickly as time is ‘of the essence’ (Cameron et al., 2018b).

Enablers Local government that included members who had been elected with the knowledge of the challenges faced, and appreciation of the need to think differently, were widely considered supportive of novel idea implementation after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. Some elected representatives were recognised as having been personally involved in transitional projects and thus knowing the value of creative substitutions for goods, services, entertainment and liveliness in an initially bereft city. In addition to providing direct funding, study participants reported that some of those charged with regulating authority—the Christchurch City

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Council (CCC)—could be known to ‘turn a blind eye’, or fail to regulate or interfere with the implementation of unconventional activity if no immediate harm was apparent. Harm is a relative term after a disaster, and the focus during this period was on ensuring the provision of bare necessities and physical safety. Despite not all associated officials clinging to the hope of a return of the pre-quakes status quo, it appeared important that life was seen to go on, particularly in the central city. The availability of local government funding and personal encouragement was appreciated and allowed those ends to be met. A general uprising of community spirit, or ‘spirit of recovery’ also resulted in a relaxation of political and cultural partisanship. This allowed an attitudinal shift to enable the implementation of creative ideas. More alternative approaches and creations were accepted. Some interview participants attributed this to an ‘old boys’ network’, ‘old school’ or ‘old guard’ losing some of their power to maintain conservative traditions in the city. Prior to the Christchurch earthquake, the political-economic environment was one “in which landowners and business communities tended to powerfully and influentially endorse neoliberal policies, while also clearly benefiting from them” (Cloke & Conradson, 2018, p. 364). This shift—and opportunity—was long awaited and one that could not ¯ be squandered. Otautahi finally felt like it was more ‘their’ place or at least had a place for creative people and other alternative thinkers. In her book Christchurch Ruptures , Katie Pickles comprehensively analysed the impetus, and need, for the change from a historian’s perspective: The earthquakes have exposed major components in the history of Christchurch, such as the dominant Anglican tradition and Englishness, the denial of a M¯aori past and the environmental pitfalls of building a city on a swamp…it is unhelpful and inaccurate to cling to an imagined city. (Pickles, 2016, p. iv; see also Pickles in this collection)

Those who wanted to implement creative ideas that might not normally be considered acceptable capitalised on the situation. The ‘old guard’ and largely conservative populace held views that—like the city— were not necessarily built on solid or valid foundations and, therefore, were not unshakeable. The Post-Disaster Creative Opportunity Power Shift Model (Fig. 14.2) illustrates how creative idea implementers are able to occupy a power vacuum that becomes available when those in authority are ‘caught

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Fig. 14.2 Post-Disaster Creative Opportunity Power Shift Model

off-guard’ and systems are destabilised by disaster. This provides an opportunity for those prepared to act creatively to take advantage of a situation that features a relaxation of official and social rules that lead to greater tolerance for creativity. When disaster occurs, there are opportunities for power and transformation. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein (2007) focuses on the actions of disaster capitalists with well-prepared disaster ‘relief’ plans ready to be enacted. Post-disaster power vacuums in countries such as Chile, Iraq, Sri Lanka and others affected by the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004, as well as hurricane-affected cities like New Orleans in the USA, have been commandeered by those seeing an opportunity to advance neoliberal agendas such as the privatisation of public schools and housing (Klein, 2007). The Canterbury earthquake sequence, particularly its prolonged nature, was a complete surprise. The Canterbury plains had been an area of low seismicity throughout recorded history of such information. There were no active fault lines known within 25 km of the city (Kaiser et al., 2012). It is unlikely that agendas were packed, nor plans fully outlined for activating them. Therefore, gaps existed to be filled by those with imagination and comfort with adversity.

Hindrances However, the disaster context itself was dynamic and featured evolving social processes, specifically away from a ‘spirit of recovery’ towards a form of ‘elite panic’. While widespread actual panic after disaster has long been

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shown to be a myth, ‘elite panic’ has not (Fritz, 1996; Quarantelli & Dynes, 1972; Tierney, 2003). It seems the ‘elites’ (elite being a relational concept referring to one’s authority over another individual or group) who are used to holding power before a disaster are uncomfortable in a disaster-affected setting where the previous status quo no longer exists. Past researchers have found that ‘bottom-up’ or ‘grassroots’ strategies can triumph while established institutions fail due to being unable to improvise quickly or effectively (Clarke & Chess, 2008; Solnit, 2010). ‘Elites’ find the situation challenging (see Montgomery in this volume). It is a threat to their dominance, while others more used to life on the margins can fare better. “Innovation often feeds off more subversive cultures, and grassroots innovations contribute spaces for being subversive”, they “challenge dominant visions and values” (Smith & Stirling, 2018, p. 91). As depicted in Fig. 14.2, eventually, political and other organisations stabilise. In the initial post-disaster period, before stability returns, creative approaches are permitted—or at least tolerated. It follows that the political and social environments begin to become less accommodating of creative and unsanctioned approaches. With reference to the creativity of the most prominent transitional organisations, Cloke and Conradson (2018) noted the energy and joy they brought to the city could be “viewed as a staged atmosphere, a temporary and limited adornment of the built environment en route to an already defined ‘new normal’, rather than a hopeful experience that might be sustained” (p. 364). As the CCC was known to have been supportive of transitional ¯ projects, it would be incorrect to assert that Otautahi experienced an overt ‘elite panic’. However, central government was perceived to have contributed to a moderated version. It is significant that the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA), with its ability to wield “extraordinary decisional powers” (Amore et al., 2017, p. 621), was not praised by a single participant. The blueprint for the city’s rebuild showed disregard for the in excess of 100,000 creative, and other, ideas collected from the public during the “Share an Idea” campaign (Swaffield, 2013). The plans to rebuild the city into large precincts was experienced as demoralising and demotivating (see also Matthewman & Byrd in this volume). Figure 14.2 shows that those with pre-earthquake authority eventually restabilise and regain their power. The power vacuum closes along with openness and support for creative approaches.

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Regeneration and Creativity Fatigue CCC funding and support was reduced during the regeneration phase that followed recovery. In addition, the wider populace became less tolerant of what had been created in the transitional period as it began to seem more ‘other’, juxtaposed against a city of cranes helping to construct the future. These scenes appeared emblematic of the power of private investment, underscoring the legitimacy of neoliberalism’s ‘rule’. The novelty component of creativity was now only acceptable, provided it was outweighed by the other—usefulness. Novelty as a distraction becomes less necessary, less useful and consequently less valued. Once familiar goods are more available, unusual alternatives can be seen as having ‘exhausted their welcome’. They can also begin to be seen as reminders of a more miserable time. There was creativity fatigue and a creative backlash as seen by some of the negative media comments discussed. A community member was quoted in The Press referring to a range of once revered creative ideas as “messy” and “backward” (Harvie, 2014). The previously celebrated 185 chairs memorial also received criticism, with some family members of victims considering it “self-indulgent, inappropriate and strange” (Lee, 2017). Fritz (1996) observed this as an expected occurrence as people “return to normal pursuits” (p. 29). A disaster is new, interesting and brings purpose and meaning. However, as time passes, the thrill dies with the post-disaster energy and the stresses of a routine life re-emerge, making usefulness once again more important than just getting by.

Post-Disaster Creativity Although difficult to define or quantify, there is a near consensus amongst creativity researchers that a ‘standard definition’ of creativity exists. As mentioned, to be considered creative, output must contain two components: novelty and usefulness (Runco & Jaeger, 2012, p. 2). To determine the requisite creative value of the ideas implemented by participants of the study, the creative output of each, within the setting, was categorised by Kaufmann’s (2003) taxonomy. The assessed creative output ranged from novel adaptations to a familiar solution to highly novel tasks used to address highly unique problems. Therefore, ideas contained both novelty and utility, at least to a degree, so each could be considered creative.

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¯ The novelty in Otautahi was primarily implemented by those who were predominantly prosocially motivated (Cameron et al., 2018b). The dominance of a prosocial drive indicates that a distinctive form of creativity can emerge after disaster. Post-disaster creativity tends to be highly novel. In more routine settings, novelty is not as highly valued as usefulness. Novelty alone is not enough. However, after a disaster, the novelty component of creativity itself becomes useful particularly in meeting social needs (e.g. for hope, a sense of possibility, to build social capital, etc.). Novel responses to the social processes following the earthquakes resulted in values-inspired ideas and skills being channelled through a ‘prosocial filter’, to achieve a type of creativity that differs to that in non-disaster settings. In non-disaster settings, context merely serves as another factor—or input—in the process. Although the context may have an impact, models indicate that creators do not seem to act in direct response to their environment, at least, not in an overt way (Amabile, 1983, 1996, 2012; Csikszentmihalyi, 2014). In a non-disaster context, those who choose to create feel freer to create as they will. After disaster, those with a prosocial motivation create appropriately and in response to the socially dominant immediate needs—almost as if it would be rude, even immoral, not to. However, during the later recovery period, creativity becomes, once again, judged by its ability to serve a commonly accepted purpose with novelty as merely a point of difference. Therefore, as the community and organisations stabilise, and more commonly expected or familiar goods and services become available, the need to accept something ‘strange’ abates. The Creative Novelty Value Shift Model (Fig. 14.3) illustrates how the value of creativity can shift after a disaster: twice. The model symbolises that before a disaster, in a routine setting, the value of creativity is predominantly judged by the usefulness of its output. To be widely accepted, creativity should serve a clear purpose or solve a problem (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Usefulness is considered paramount, while novelty contributes an aspect of interest. The Creativity Novelty Value Shift Model proposes that the novelty component of creativity can increase in value, equalling usefulness, after a disaster. This occurs because the perceived social value (usefulness) of novelty itself can increase, prior to waning as recovery progresses. The creative ideas that were more adaptive than novel—i.e. they were higher in utility—were able to be sustained. Some examples include furniture manufacturers and agencies involved in enabling creators or recyclers.

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Fig. 14.3 Creative Novelty Value Shift Model

Adaptive ideas are likely to retain their appeal as familiar or recognisable aspects are involved. A café in a shipping container is still a café. Adaptive creativity is not completely ‘strange’, and likely has neoliberal subjectivities. The characteristics of those who act on unique ideas after a disaster may contribute to their activation but may also lead to their demise. The TIPI data indicates the opportunities to create to meet prosocial needs appeared to attract those who were more agreeable—or “tenderminded”—due to social processes that revealed social need to be alleviated (Mooradian et al., 2011, p. 101). The post-disaster social environment is likely to stabilise, but the creators may not. The situation may become less comfortable as they, once again, feel at odds with a more conservative or regimented social environment, and the resharpened focus of the more intensely market-driven aspects of their society. A systematic account of what occurs is illustrated by the Non vs. Post-Disaster Creativity Model (Fig. 14.4). It is necessary for both parts to be viewed together for comparison. The dynamics of the model are as follows, beginning with what has been discussed as known to occur during the creative idea implementation process in a routine— or ‘normal’—context. In a non-disaster, market-based setting, an idea is sparked in an individual who assesses it. An idea that offers high utility is likely considered more promising. If the idea is to be implemented, past research suggests that the characteristic of extraversion would be employed to persuade supporters before the idea is established. After

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Fig. 14.4 Non vs. Post-Disaster Creative Idea Implementation Model

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which, assuming other relevant, necessary skills are effectively activated, the creative idea will either survive and develop, or fail to be sustained, based on whether or not it is popularly supported both initially and subsequently. Following disaster, there appears to be a significant difference at the ideation stage, specifically with regard to the speed of implementation. When a disaster strikes, aided by immense need, a lack of alternatives and a socially-driven ‘spirit of recovery’, creative ideas become immediately popular and highly valued. There is increased willingness to support unique ideas. There is a reciprocal relationship between a ‘spirit of recovery’ and the valuing of creative ideas. It appears that each fuels the other, resulting in popular engagement that permits successful implementation of the idea. Public engagement also continues to fuel the ‘spirit of recovery’ and extends the valuing of novelty. Greater acceptance of novelty may also result from a fear that if novel ideas are abandoned the community may be the poorer for it, due to the lack of options. Creativity begins the process of restabilisation. However, as the initial recovery period ends, another process begins. The social, commercial, organisational and physical environments stabilise. In addition, a degree of ‘elite panic’ can accompany restabilisation (all facets of this restabilisation are incorporated in Fig. 14.4 in the label ‘Restabilisation’). Creative ideas are perceived as being less needed, or even a threat, or a negative reminder of instability. Those in authority are likely to reduce or withdraw support for creative ideas, which have become less popular. They come to represent an extreme shift from the comfort of the previous status quo. Their distraction is no longer required because more conventional options are again available. Simultaneously, those whose goals were primarily prosocial—the more “agreeable”—become demotivated once initial goals are met. There is little desire to evolve to a more stable environment, particularly if extraversion is required. It must also be noted that no disaster is the same as another, and earthquakes are different to other types of disaster. After the mosque attacks ¯ on 15 March 2019, Otautahi again showed the depth of its community spirit as the city mourned together, aghast that they must do so again, so soon, and in response to such an unfathomably abhorrent act. At the time of writing, the disaster that is the COVID-19 pandemic continues. By global standards, while Aotearoa New Zealand appears relatively unscathed, there was a sense of looming disaster during the first

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forced national “lockdown”. The uncertainty and suddenly quiet neighbourhoods could feel surreal. A large-scale ‘spirit of recovery’ was unlikely when getting together to provide or receive prosocial support could only occur online, or in socially distanced fashion. In fact, such a disaster can lead to the opposite of support. “Contagious diseases not only create out-group antagonism, they also weaken the bonds of social integration within a group or community” (Rao & Greve, 2018). Furthermore, the health emergency nature of the disaster has resulted in a seemingly widely shared belief that the government ‘elites’ should be trusted. Although this may have much to do with the specific New Zealand government officials involved, trusting them has resulted in relatively good outcomes to date (Flahive & Anderson, 2020). It may be asked why is it important to be creative, or to include the accommodation of creativity, in urban planning? The answer is not creativity for creativity’s sake, but rather, for the sake of the spirit, enthusiasm and momentum, it produced after the Canterbury earthquake sequence. Could this be replicated in a non-disaster setting for more enduring beneficial effects? Although the problems in more routine settings can be less urgent, the post-earthquakes experience demonstrated that unusual approaches with unpredictable outcomes may indeed produce effective—and more interesting—solutions. In addition, creative ventures can operate at a ‘grassroots’ level that allows for increased diversity, and the inclusion of a wider range of tastes and perspectives. Gaining greater understanding of how people may be encouraged to accept novel alternatives, climate friendlier options, for instance, or non-growth-related measures of national prosperity, would not be wasted in an uncertain future when ‘normal’ options are likely to be increasingly less available or useful. It must be acknowledged that some creators have persevered and managed to stay true to their prosocial values. Gap Filler, for example, ¯ in 2020 celebrated 10 years of continuous creative service in Otautahi where they have creatively reworked spaces in the city and red zone and continue to bring their brand of joy to residents and visitors. XCHC (Exchange Christchurch), a creative community, established in response to the post-quake creativity to foster its growth, continues to do so in 2021. The creative ideas “lying around” after the first disaster of a disastrous ¯ decade for Otautahi brought relief. Relief from a necessary, almost automated compliance with a neoliberal world view—usually invisible because

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of its ubiquity. Perhaps understanding why motivation is lost by some creators (What’s wrong with making money?) and why creativity is viewed as a threat by those who enjoy the sociopolitical status quo (What is there to fear?) is key. The answers may lead to greater support, establishment and sustenance of novel ideas that have intrinsic and social value, regardless their contribution to the reinforcement of what ideologically underpins society.

References Amabile, T. M. (1983). The social psychology of creativity: A componential conceptualization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(2), 357–376. Amabile, T.M. (1996, January). “Creativity and innovation in organizations”. Harvard business school background note, 396–239. Amabile, T. M. (2012). “Componential theory of creativity”. Working Paper 12 – 096. Encyclopaedia of management theory. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pub lication%20Files/12-096.pdf Amore, A., Michael Hall, C., & Jenkins, J. (2017). They never said ‘Come here and let’s talk about it’: Exclusion and non-decision-making in the rebuild of Christchurch New Zealand. Local Economy, 32(7), 617–639. Bennett, B. W. (2019). The political lives of temporary projects: Infrastructure and participatory urbanism in post-earthquake Christchurch. Doctoral Thesis, University of Technology. Bergman, J. (2014, April 4). “After earthquakes, a creative rebirth in Christchurch”. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/ 06/travel/after-earthquakes-a-creative-rebirth-in-christchurch.html Bowie, D. (1971). Changes. Hunky Dory, RCA. Cameron, T., Montgomery, R., Moore, K., & Stewart, E. (2018a). Swimming with ideas: What happens to creativity in the wake of a disaster and the waves of pro-social recovery behaviour that follow? Creativity Studies, 11(1), 10–23. Cameron, T., Moore, K., Montgomery, R., & Stewart, E. J. (2018b). Creative ventures and the personalities that activate them in a post-disaster setting. Creativity and Innovation Management, 27 (3), 335–347. Cameron, T. (2020). Between the cracks: The intersection between individuals, social processes, creativity after the Canterbury earthquakes 2010 – 2012. Doctoral Thesis, Lincoln University. Clarke, L., & Chess, C. (2008). Elites and panic: More to fear than fear itself. Social Forces, 87 (2), 993–1014. Cloke, P., & Conradson, D. (2018). Transitional organisations, affective atmospheres and new forms of being-in-common: Post-disaster recovery in

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Christchurch, New Zealand. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 43(3), 360–376. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. HarperCollins. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014). “The systems model of creativity and its applications”. In D. K. Simonton (Ed.), The Wiley Handbook of Genius (pp. 533– 545). First Edition. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Cropley, D. H., Cropley, A. J., Kaufman, J. C., & Runco, M. A. (Eds.). (2010). The dark side of creativity. Cambridge university press. EQC. (2013, September 4). 7.1 Earthquake - Christchurch 4th Sept 2010. https://www.eqc.govt.nz/news/7-1-earthquake-christchurch-4th-sept-2010 Flahive, B., & Anderson, R. (2020, April 1). Coronavirus: Why the PM’s repeated ‘stay at home’ message appears to be working. Stuff . https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/120696983/coronaviruswhy-the-pms-repeated-stay-athome-message-appears-to-be-working Friedman, M. (1982). Capitalism and freedom (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. Fritz, C. (1996). Disasters and mental health: Therapeutic principles drawn from disaster studies. Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware. Harvie, W. (2014, June 19). “‘Messy’ Gap Filler site should go”. The Press. http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/christchurch-life/art-and-stage/101 76887/Messy-Gap-Fillersite-should-go Johnston, J., Sears, C., & Wilcox, L (2012). “Neoliberalism unshaken: A report from the disaster zone”. Excursions, 3, 1. http://www.excursions-journal.org. uk/index.php/excursions/article/view/6 Kaiser, A., Holden, C., Beavan, J., Beetham, D., Benites, R., Celentano, A., Collett, D., Cousins, J., Cubrinovski, M., Dellow, G., & Denys, P. (2012). The Mw 6.2 Christchurch earthquake of February 2011: Preliminary report. New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics, 55(1), 67–90. Kaufmann, G. (2003). What to measure? A new look at the concept of creativity. Scandinavian. Journal of Educational Research, 47 (3), 235–251. Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Random House. Lee, J. (2017, Jan 31). “Some Christchurch quake victims’ families say chair memorial should be scrapped”. The Press. http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/ news/christchurchearthquake-2011/88887868/some-christchurch-quake-vic tims-families-say-chair-memorialshould-be-scrapped Leutner, F., Ahmetoglu, G., Akhtar, R., & Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2014). The relationship between the entrepreneurial personality and the Big Five personality traits. Personality and Individual Differences, 63, 58–63.

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Macfie, R., et al. (2014). Shock of the view. In B. Bennett (Ed.), Once in a lifetime: City-building after disaster in Christchurch (pp. 371–377). Free Range Press. Miller, D. (2015). A downside to the entrepreneurial personality? Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 39, 1–8. Monllor, J., & Altay, N. (2016). Discovering opportunities in necessity: The inverse creative destruction effect. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, 23, 274–291. Mooradian, T. A., Davis, M., & Matzler, K. (2011). Dispositional empathy and the hierarchical structure of personality. American Journal of Psychology, 124, 99–109. Pickles, K. (2016). Christchurch ruptures (Vol. 38). Bridget Williams Books. Quarantelli, E. L., & Dynes, R. R. (1972). Images of disaster behavior: Myths and consequences. Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware. Rao, H., & Greve, H. R. (2018). Disasters and community resilience: Spanish flu and the formation of retail cooperatives in Norway. Academy of Management Journal, 61(1), 5–25. Runco, M. A., & Jaeger, G. J. (2012). The standard definition of creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 24(1), 92–96. Schumpeter, J. A. (1934). Theory of economic development. Harvard University Press. Shane, S. (2003). A general theory of entrepreneurship: The individual-opportunity nexus. Edward Elgar Publishing. Smith, A., & Stirling, A. (2018). Innovation, sustainability and democracy: An analysis of grassroots contributions. Journal of Self-Governance and Management Economics, 6(1), 64–97. Solnit, R. (2010). A Paradise Built in Hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in disaster. Penguin Books. Sternberg, R. J., & Lubart, T. I. (1996). Investing in creativity. American Psychologist, 51(7), 677–688. Swaffield, S. (2013). “Place, culture and landscape after the Christchurch earthquake”. Space Place and Culture, 1–26. Tierney, K. J. (2003). Disaster beliefs and institutional interests: Recycling disaster myths in the aftermath of 9–11. In L. Clarke (Ed.), Research in social problems and public policy, terrorism and disaster: New threats, new ideas (Vol. 11, pp. 33–51). Elsevier. Wesener, A. (2015). Temporary urbanism and urban sustainability after a natural disaster: Transitional community-initiated open spaces in Christchurch, New Zealand. Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 8(4), 406–422.

CHAPTER 15

Planning, Governance and a City for the Future? Eric Pawson

Introduction A decade on from the start of the Canterbury earthquake sequence, a longer-term perspective can be taken on what the disaster means for future planning of the city and its region. At the outset, the focus was on practical problems of survival and adaptation, whilst initial academic effort construed the earthquakes as a geological phenomenon. Within a year or two, interest had shifted to debate between transitional and more permanent means of social and economic reconstruction (Bennett et al., 2014). With increasing distance however, it becomes clearer that many of the issues that have been challenging or persistent stem from problems of governance. Not all of these are earthquake related, but they do reflect the struggles that emerge within urban and regional systems when

E. Pawson (B) School of Earth and Environment, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_15

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existing governance arrangements are disturbed by relentless challenges or external shocks (see also Montgomery in this collection). The scale of damage from the earthquakes was such that structures of local governance either could not or were deemed unable to cope. This was evidenced most clearly by the Crown assuming emergency planning powers in place of, and then subsequently alongside, the Christchurch City Council (CCC). In fact, this had a recent precedent. In 2010 the National-led government replaced Canterbury’s elected regional councillors with centrally appointed commissioners, when the former were deemed unable to respond effectively to escalating demands for irrigation water for dairy conversions (see Wynyard in this collection). A decade later, a long running central-local contest over regional health resourcing also came to a head, with the resignation of senior Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB) managers who considered that the Wellington-based health bureaucracy was consistently unwilling to recognise post-earthquake needs. These examples imply that existing governance structures—in a number of different contexts in Canterbury—have been insufficiently anticipatory (Boston, 2017) in the face of change. This chapter explores governance and planning in the context of post-earthquake urban recovery. It traces links between new governance entities created for the rebuild and antecedent planning processes, and discusses the extent to which these new entities, in focusing on specific outcomes, have delivered a coherent or a fragmentary post-earthquake vision. Three aspects of post-earthquake urban governance are examined: (1) the genesis of the Crown’s blueprint for the CBD, (2) the enabling of rapid expansion of subdivisions in greenfield districts in and around the urban area and (3) the debate over the future of the city’s red zone, those eastern suburbs abandoned in the face of damage from liquefaction. The use of these simple colour-coded metaphors suggests a clarity that is at odds with the complexity of the context, as well as the contingent and fragmentary nature of post-earthquake governance when considered as a whole. Greenfields growth, for example, reflects an anticipatory framework drawn up before the earthquakes, but seems at odds with the conditions needed for the central city blueprint to succeed. It is also debatable whether the Crown’s actions in resourcing a “blank slate” approach to this blueprint have produced something that has legitimacy from a local perspective. Alongside this, long-standing community struggles for involvement in determining the future of the red zone have generated debates about new, non-traditional forms of anticipatory governance.

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Issues of Governance The term “governance” is not synonymous with “government”, but rather refers to “the development of governing styles in which boundaries between and within public and private sectors become blurred” (Stoker, 1998, p. 17). There are scales of governing within the public sector in Aotearoa New Zealand, at central, regional and local levels. Reference to the private sector recognises that “the real power to reorganise urban life … often lies with … a broader coalition of forces within which urban government and administration have only a facilitative and coordinating role to play” (Harvey, 1989, p. 6). Governance as a term emerged in the neoliberal 1990s to signal the engagement of a wider range of players in the sphere of public action. This was due to a growing belief in the failure of the state in the pursuit of prosperity, as a result of perceived inefficiency and lack of flexibility (see also Oliver-Smith in this collection). In consequence, governing organisations are now linked across different spatial scales and drawn from the public, private and community/voluntary sectors. This in turn has transformed processes of government (Goodwin, 2009) towards assisting, collaborating with or functioning like the corporate community (Hackworth, 2007). David Harvey’s (1989) essay on the transformation of urban governance in late capitalism therefore argued that the capacity to get things done no longer rests with government alone, but draws on broader interests that can be more responsive to the prospects and costs of competition between cities—and countries—for production facilities, consumption flows and control functions. More recently, such forms of governance have been critiqued from an intergenerational perspective as prioritising private short-term interests, “front-loading” the benefits and “backloading” the social and environmental costs, shifting them (as in the case of climate change) well into the future (Boston, 2017). A clear example of such front-loading in Canterbury was central government’s pre-earthquake decision to impose its own regional commissioners to facilitate the needs of an expanding dairy industry. This conflicted with the responsibilities of the elected representatives which, shaped by the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA), were more broadly based and longer term (Mueller, 2017). This example reveals two things: first, the power of economically motivated interests to override those defined in terms of wider values, but

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second—and in contrast—that the capacity to plan and value on a longterm basis had long been sanctioned in legislation, notably the RMA for environmental resources, but also the Local Government Act 2002 (LGA). It was the LGA that enabled the development in 2007 of the Greater Christchurch Urban Development Strategy (UDS) between the regional council (Environment Canterbury [ECan]), the local authorities (CCC, Selwyn District Council and Waimakariri District Council), and Transit New Zealand (TNZ) as the basis “for all organisations and the community to cooperatively manage growth” (UDS, 2007, p. 8). Provision for community participation was also written into the purpose of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act 2011 (CER) but in the context of prioritising “a focused, timely, and expedited recovery”. It required the development of a recovery strategy in consultation with the UDS parties (except TNZ), but with the addition of Te R¯unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu (TRoNT) as the Treaty partner. The forms of governance that have emerged since the 1990s are therefore complex and elusive, reflecting the constant renegotiation of national and local state relations within both the market and society (Arnouts et al., 2012). Terms such as “network governance”, “collaborative governance” and “deliberation” have been adopted to describe processes that encourage development of interdependencies amongst a range of actors (Ansell & Torfing, 2016). Increasingly such processes seek to establish greater legitimacy for public actions in the face of the intractable problems that have emerged as a result of the growth of social inequalities as well as environmental crises that have accompanied neoliberalism. Whereas networks are vulnerable to co-option by the most powerful parties, they also allow for representation of a larger range of interests (Ansell & Gash, 2008). In Aotearoa New Zealand, the inclusion of the Treaty partner is now an essential part of this, consistent with both the restoration of property rights, as well as recognition of marginalised Indigenous voices. It reflects the fact that actually existing forms of neoliberalism are contingent on context. The rest of this chapter explores how such governance issues have ¯ ¯ shaped an emergent Otautahi Christchurch (Otautahi hereafter) through consideration of the three colour-coded districts identified above. These do not account for the whole urban or metropolitan area, nor are they official planning terms, although the downtown “blueprint” and city’s “red zone” were in popular use for some years after the quakes. The text reflects the experiences of living through the devastation and rebuild,

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research on the colonially framed vulnerability of the city to environmental disasters (Pawson, 2011), as well as a pedagogical interest in contributing to recovery through the development of community-based research courses for university students (Pawson, 2016). In turn, these have led to various regeneration roles beyond the academy with both public agencies and community groups (e.g. Pawson, 2017; Pawson et al., 2019). The analysis also draws on official documents and press articles as well as engagement with figures in local politics, council, the community and business.

The Central City Blueprints Buildings, streets and underground services in the central city were badly affected by the earthquakes due to liquefaction associated with ground conditions and a hidden network of buried streams. This vulnerability was rooted in years of colonial urban development that had attempted environmental domination (Pawson, 2011). Victorian unreinforced masonry structures were weakened in the first 2010 quake, and many destroyed on 22 February 2011, when a lot of newer buildings were also compromised, in two cases with considerable loss of life. Yet the risk of such outcomes was not unknown. In the 1990s, both the Earthquake Commission (EQC) and Civil Defence (now the National Emergency Management Agency) had produced reports on liquefaction, work summarised in a 1996 television documentary in which the city council’s Manager Building Control stated on camera that “your heritage list … defines most of your earthquake-prone buildings” (Dixon Productions, 2011). Nonetheless, legislation requiring earthquake strengthening was not enforced in a coordinated manner around the country, nor were building code standards as specified sufficient. That said, it has always been the purpose of the code to protect life rather than structures. The pre-earthquake central city was suboptimal in other ways, which were the subject of a report from Jan Gehl’s international urban design consultancy (Gehl Architects, 2010). Looking back, this was the genesis of themes that subsequently emerged in the blueprint. Its significance ¯ from a governance perspective is that Gehl brought to Otautahi his reputation for retrieving traffic-dominated cities for pedestrians and street life, based on a research method of close observations of how people use public space, working in participatory ways with local citizens. His report reflected earlier Gehl projects in places such as Copenhagen, Barcelona

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and Melbourne, with its recommendations for a more pedestrian and cycle friendly city, with a “traffic calmed” centre, inviting and accessible public spaces, and “green–blue” connections, emphasising amenity ¯ akaro Avon River. features such as parkland and the Ot¯ The city council, which had engaged Gehl, was therefore well-placed when given the responsibility under the CER Act of drawing up a plan for downtown renewal. Gehl Architects returned to assist in the public consultation and planning process that took place in mid-2011. This included open lectures from invited international practitioners and a wellreceived “Share an Idea” campaign, including a workshop weekend when 10,000 people contributed 106,000 ideas on post-it notes (Gehl Architects, 2020). Many of the themes that emerged from this exercise echoed those in the 2010 report, and provided the opportunity to act on its central theme of “a change of mindset … where traffic planning and public space planning are thought of as one” (Gehl Architects, 2010, p. 117). The resulting council blueprint was described in the Mayor’s foreword as “the People’s Plan for their city” (CCC, 2011, p. iii), reflecting a strong sense of local engagement and legitimacy. The Press portrayed it as “winning widespread praise from residents” (Sachdeva, 2012). Share an Idea also won an international award from the Netherlandsbased Co-Creation Association, with the chair of the jury remarking that “Next to developing the new city centre, the result of this co-creation is also a stronger community” (Scoop, 2011). Nonetheless, “co-creation” was overturned within a few months in favour of heavily centralised governance mechanisms, when the Minister for Earthquake Recovery directed the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA, established under the CER Act) to set up a new business unit. This unit was to oversee preparation of a detailed blueprint for the central city in one hundred days. The reasons for the shift to a more authoritarian modus operandi lay in government’s belief that the council’s plan, self-costed at $2 billion, did not sufficiently allow for the “focused, timely, and expedited recovery” specified in the Act. A new Crown blueprint team was selected very quickly. It was a consortium of six firms, and included a planning consultancy and two ¯ architectural practices from Otautahi, alongside an Auckland project manager and two Australian urban planning companies. The team was divided into two groups. One refined a broad vision, building on and incorporating many of the elements of the council’s plan. The other

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identified and located a series of “anchor projects”, to be funded by negotiation between central and local government (McCrone, 2012). These were intended to retain business confidence, and provide a framework of “precincts” on the ground within which private investment would flourish, and the state’s investment be protected. There was to be no more public engagement, but there was a shared Crown-council investment commitment of many more billions. If the city council plan was illustrated with imaginative ground level views of varied new streetscapes, the Crown blueprint that emerged emphasised panoptical perspectives, thereby betraying the differences between engagement and imposition (or “bottom-up” and “top-down”). The new blueprint—the Christchurch Central Recovery Plan—was a sweeping vision, dependent on amalgamating land titles to form large development plots within an artificially confined central area. And it literally swept much before it, with the almost complete demolition of buildings in the old central business district. In their place, anchor projects and themed precincts (for “innovation”, health, cultural, retail, etc.) have been planted across whole city blocks. Many of the bigger anchor projects, however, were soon years behind the original schedules, and ironically have followed rather than led private development. Inevitably the switch to a more directive governance style roused strong public reactions, often over the fate of heritage sites. This was hardly surprising as Gehl identified heritage as an essential element of place, yet, by 2014, 235 listed or registered heritage buildings had been demolished without public recourse, using section 38 powers in the CER Act (Halliday, 2014). An exception was the Christchurch Town Hall, a fine example of post-war modernist architecture. In mid-2015, the city council voted to repair this venue at significant expense rather than support construction of a replacement facility in the Crown blueprint’s “cultural precinct”. This, “the victory of local democracy over central government preference”, has preserved “one of the best rooms in New Zealand”, the central auditorium (Walsh, 2020, p. 133). Citizen ire had also been raised over proposals in late 2014 to reconstruct Victoria ¯ akaro Avon River from the Town Square, the public space across the Ot¯ Hall, to fit with the blueprint’s vision of a consistently treated river corridor through the central city. The square had been re-designed with public input in the 1980s, prioritising positioning of colonial-era statues. In this instance, compromise was reached with some updating of hard

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landscaping and the incorporation of mana whenua elements in a space that had once been the market for M¯aori and colonial exchange. Local and social media often represented these instances as the resistance of a community rendered invisible beneath the broad brush strokes of a conventionally zoned master plan. In reality, the situation was not so simple. The Victoria Square outcome reveals some of the opportunities that the blueprint, in building on earlier planning work, has provided for re-imagining the downtown. The public desire for more green space and an enhanced river corridor has been delivered, enabling the self-proclaimed Garden City’s story to be told in new ways. There is more emphasis on Indigenous plantings, and greater visibility of the Ng¯ai T¯u¯ahuriri story of the land the city occupies (Ng¯ai T¯ua¯huriri being ¯ the Ng¯ai Tahu hapu, or sub-tribe, whose territory includes Otautahi). An example is the series of thirteen weaving patterns, Ng¯a Wh¯ariki Manaaki, that has been incorporated along the river corridor’s new pedestrian greenway. The wh¯ariki (welcome mats) reference the whakamanuhiri or process of welcome for visitors to the city. It is the role of Matapopore, Ng¯ai T¯ua¯huriri’s urban design agency, to engage with developers to ensure that Indigenous values and narratives are recognised in the rebuild. As part of this, it has gifted names to many of the new public buildings in the city, such as T¯uranga (speaking of whakapapa, lines of descent, across generations), the central library. These opportunities are a product of the cultural as well as environmental ruptures exposed by the earthquakes, opening up imaginative space for more nuanced forms of placemaking (Pickles, 2016; Pickles in this volume). Nonetheless, nearly 70 hectares of physical space remained vacant in the inner city by 2020, much of it occupied for car parking (CCC, 2020). This is now far more conspicuous than the transitional activities facilitated by council-supported social enterprises such as Gap Filler and Life in Vacant Spaces (LiVS), for which the early post-earthquake years became well-known (Lesniak, 2016). The blueprint has captured some of the outcomes envisaged in Share an Idea, although that event sits wistfully in the public mind due to the manner in which the blueprint itself was subsequently executed. But, in late 2014, it too won an international award (the World Architecture Urban Design Award for Future Projects). There is now a more pedestrian friendly, nature-oriented urban fabric, with some striking street art, and popular public spaces, including laneways and sheltered plazas imitating the Melbourne model.

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Business activation and the emerging framework of anchor projects has enabled retention and return (from post-earthquake suburban locations) of many of the consumption, public service and command functions that Harvey (1989) identified as important for a central city. Other small-scale governance experiments have worked alongside this. A politically backed initiative by the Central City Business Association to establish a wellutilised container mall held some retailing in the inner city during the immediate post-earthquake years. The success of the businesses involved encouraged local developers to rehouse them in two of the most popular new downtown attractions, Little High Eatery (2017) and the Riverside Market (2019). Such examples aside, however, many might still agree with the assessment that “the procrustean planning regime – Modernism redux – imposed by the recovery authority foreclosed the possibilities of new paradigms of urban development” (Walsh, 2020, p. 159).

The Suburban Greenfields New paradigms of urban development are also not to be found in the suburban greenfields where expansive auto-dependent subdivisions built on farmland have proliferated in the last decade. Much of this growth has been within Christchurch City boundaries, especially in the south west (Halswell, and the Ng¯ai Tahu Property developments in Wigram). But a lot has been around existing rural towns to the north and south, in Waimakariri and Selwyn districts, respectively. Selwyn, after Queenstown Lakes, was the second most rapidly growing territorial local authority in the country in the 2011–2018 intercensal period, due to new housing developments in Lincoln and further afield at Rolleston. Waimakariri was not far behind, with a lot of new housing being added to Kaiapoi and around Rangiora. That the region has been able to accommodate this extent of post-earthquake urban expansion reflects the anticipatory governance process that produced the 2007 UDS. The UDS had proposed that 45% of growth in the numbers of households between 2006 and 2041 be accommodated by intensification of land use in existing urban areas, and 55% in greenfield areas. The Land Use Recovery Plan 2013 (LURP), prepared under the CER Act, frontloaded this strategy, facilitating rapid rezoning of greenfield sites to accommodate post-earthquake housing. Although there were fears that resident numbers in the city would fall as people traumatised by ongoing quakes departed, population trends have been more subtle. Many of those

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initially displaced subsequently returned, accompanied by an influx of rebuild and other essential workers from around the country and overseas (see Garces-Ozanne et al. in this volume). But there was considerable movement within the metropolitan area after the classification of the city’s earthquake-damaged residential properties into four zones. Three of these were “green”, ranked according to future risks of liquefaction, with the “TC3” zone in the “moderate to significant” risk of future land damage. The fourth category was red zoned, where “land repair would be prolonged and uneconomic” (Johnson & Olshansky, 2017, pp. 84–85). Almost all red-zoned households chose to move following the offer of a government buy-out package. The main area affected encompassed ¯ 5,400 properties in an 11-km strip of land in eastern Otautahi along ¯ the Ot¯akaro Avon River Corridor (OARC). Smaller red zones were notified in parts of the Port Hills, and along the Kaiapoi River, seawards of that town. Along with people in TC3 areas, whose houses were badly damaged, red zoning added considerably to the population churn in and around the city, leading to pressure on greenfield sites. Between the censuses of 2006 and 2018, the population of Rangiora expanded from 12,000 to nearly 18,000, and Rolleston grew from about 5,000 to 17,500. In 2020, developers lodged bids with Selwyn District Council to rezone land for a further 4,500 houses in Rolleston, drawing opposition from CCC. The objection was based on loss of land for productive purposes, as well as fears about congestion from flows of car-based commuters into the city (Law & McDonald, 2020). The city’s concerns mirror those of planners everywhere about the car-dependent paradigm of urban development. In this case, they are the product not only of front-loading the UDS, but also of government national roading policy. Between 2009 and 2017, this focused on “Roads of National Significance” (RONS), routes considered critical to improving economic productivity and growth. Two of the Canterbury RONS are the northern motorway extensions to facilitate traffic flow from Rangiora and nearby towns to Christchurch, and the southern motorway to Rolleston. In governance terms, these strategies drawing population outwards sit awkwardly alongside the state’s investment in its own downtown blueprint, itself predicated on more centripetal metropolitan dynamics and an increase in inner city resident numbers to support the businesses it is designed to attract (see Pickles in this volume). This continues a long-run city council ambition to boost the residential population of the

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downtown, now named Project 8011—after the central city postcode and the estimated number of homes needed for 20,000 people by 2028. Nonetheless, only a third of this number currently live in the inner city (within the Four Avenues), fewer than before the earthquakes (Law, 2020). The appeal of the greenfields is that they support a traditional suburban lifestyle, at a reasonable price, and often in houses more generously proportioned than in previous decades. The land is generally at little risk of liquefaction and development is supported by the Ministry of Education’s enthusiasm for building new schools (whereas school access is a barrier for families considering downtown living). Nor is commuting an issue, with many greenfields dwellers viewing this as valuable family or personal time (Heins, 2015). Ironically, the anticipatory and collaborative governance embedded in the UDS has enabled a post-earthquake housing policy which, when combined with the National-led government’s transport priorities, at best does not support the blueprint, and may actively undermine it.

The Red Zone ¯ Although there are several red zones in metropolitan Otautahi, the phrase is most readily associated with the 602 hectare OARC. If neither the blueprint nor the greenfields represent new paradigms of urban development, can this be facilitated in the OARC, and what sort of governance would it require? Certainly expectations of the red zone have long been high, illustrated by a Press leader in 2017 which proclaimed that “despite all the attention paid to the centre city rebuild, it is the red zone that is Christchurch’s field of dreams” (Fig. 15.1). A key reason is that with limited opportunities for public engagement in that rebuild, it is the red zone that has been the focus of wider citizen participation. It remains “Christchurch’s last and best chance to transform trauma and misery into a legacy that will outlive memories of the quakes” (The Press , 2017). After the first earthquakes in 2010, there was discussion of land remediation in the river corridor. The extent of liquefaction, including lateral spread along stream courses, that occurred during the event on 22 February 2011 put paid to this. Following the government announcement that homes would have to be abandoned, residents in the river ¯ akaro corridor began to self-organise. The establishment of the Avon Ot¯ Network (AvON, a grouping of individuals and organisations concerned with the post-earthquake future of the eastern parts of the city) led to a

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¯ Fig. 15.1 Otautahi residential red zone (Photo by Peter Simpson, 2021)

petition asking that Parliament “work with the people and local authorities of Christchurch to ensure that the Avon River red zone becomes a reserve and river park when the home owners have to leave”. It was signed by more than 18,500 people and delivered to Wellington in May 2012, after a symbolic journey up the river and then to the airport. AvON has since promoted an openly values-based set of governance goals, “to

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establish a community-driven, science-informed living memorial to rejuvenate and nurture the long-term environmental, economic, community and spiritual wellbeing of the eastern suburbs and greater Christchurch” (AvON, 2020). Implementation of these goals was long stymied by government’s presence in the city as an emergency manager and planning agent. Sections purchased by the Crown from homeowners were placed for management purposes in the hands of a government department, Land Information New Zealand (LINZ). LINZ cleared the houses over a period of several years from 2012 (leaving many garden trees and shrubs in response to public pressure). It fenced off whole blocks, hindering regeneration of native vegetation by grassing and mowing the whole river corridor as if it was a playing field. Road access was largely closed off. Apart from informal use of this large area, little happened until the CER Act expired in 2016, and was replaced by the Great Christchurch Regeneration (GCR) Act. This new legislation, like the old, was valid for a five-year period. The GCR Act marked a shift away from the state-centred view of governance emphasis embodied by CERA towards a more collaborative model, with the creation of a joint Crown-council rebuild planning agency, Regenerate Christchurch. Its primary responsibilities were to produce a plan for the OARC by means of community engagement, and, in the same spirit, to consider the future of the coastal suburb of New Brighton in the face of sea level rise, and to stocktake progress with the ¯ akaro Ltd. as a Crown company to expeblueprint. The Act also set up Ot¯ dite work on the central city anchor projects. Regenerate Christchurch was wound up in 2020 after four years, by amendment to the GCR Act, once its plan for the river corridor had received Ministerial approval. Its ¯ akaro continued in other functions were absorbed into the city council. Ot¯ existence as major anchor projects remained to be completed, including Te Pae Christchurch (the convention centre), Parakiore (the metro sports centre) and the multi-use stadium (with opening dates of 2021, 2023 and 2025, respectively). Regenerate marked a departure from previous post-earthquake practices as it prioritised transparent engagement with citizens, youth, schools and residents’ groups, through means such as community needs assessment, public consultation, advisory group review and open exhibitions. Interestingly, this had long been the approach of Waimakariri District Council to post-earthquake engagement (Vallance, 2015), whose Kaiapoi red zone plan had been signed off by the Minister in 2016. The change

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of approach in the city opened up the river corridor to the extent that LINZ (2020) could say that, since 2016, it had “supported almost 150 short-term projects and events in the red zone”. Its claim that it “actively encourages the use of the land” was only true at that point of temporary uses, with the exception of small patches of native planting by the Avon¯ akaro Forest Park group and schools. Longer-term projects, many of Ot¯ which were first proposed nearly a decade ago, have had to await not only the river corridor regeneration plan, but also decisions on its implementation. The plan as approved in 2019 identified about half of the red zone land as a “green spine” of Indigenous forest and wetlands between the city centre to the sea, for purposes of recreation and catchment management for the wider city. The balance is in “reaches” themed for small projects, such as community gardens, sport facilities, tracks and trails, whilst flexible enough to accommodate some more ambitious proposals like a fenced eco-sanctuary and an Eden Project, designed in conjunction with Eden International. A notable absence from the plan is any detail on land ownership, governance and financing, omitted at the insistence of Regenerate’s two controlling partners. The first issue was resolved in the “global settlement” between the city and the Labour-led government in 2019 such that, on 1 July 2020, management of the river corridor passed to the city council with ownership to follow in tranches as LINZ completed transfer of land titles. Local debates about governance focused on the desire for an independent single-purpose entity, enshrining co-governance, although it was for long unclear if that meant a partnership with the public, or with “Te R¯unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu and Ng¯ai T¯u¯ahuriri as manawhenua” (Regenerate Christchurch, 2019, p. 63). In reality, it has to mean both if community expectations for safeguarding public memories of a previously inhabited area are to be met. The University of Canterbury has played a public brokering role to explore what form such an entity might take, and what can be learned from governance experiments elsewhere (Pawson et al., 2019). If progress in red zone transformation has been slow, it has followed a “new paradigm” in terms of process and priorities. The vision of the plan is “to connect us together with each other, with nature and with new possibilities” (Regenerate Christchurch, 2019, p. 23). Amongst the seven plan objectives are the creation of a restored native habitat to provide an abundant source of mahinga kai (food sources), and the establishment of a “world-leading living laboratory” for research and experimental

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purposes, including the challenges of biodiversity and climate change adaptation (Pawson, 2017). The proposal for a fenced eco-sanctuary, ¯ for example, would incorporate the existing council-owned Oruapaeroa Travis Wetland, extending this into higher land in the red zone to act as a refuge for native species in times of flood. Furthermore, it would function as an ecological “anchor project” at the heart of the green ¯ akaro Avon Estuary. In this way, it spine and the blue edges of the Ot¯ could aid generation of connected pathways for native species through the metropolitan area, as eco-sanctuaries elsewhere have done, as part of a long-term post-earthquake legacy.

Conclusion ¯ This discussion of post-earthquake Otautahi’s central city blueprint, greenfields and red zone has revealed various attributes of postearthquake governance. In some respects, it has been more anticipatory than Boston’s (2017) critique that long-term interests are not usually sufficiently prioritised might suggest. The blueprint, for example, incorporates not only Gehl’s proposals based on participatory urban design methods but also much of what emerged from Share an Idea. The expansion of the greenfields has been based on the 2007 UDS. Even if it has front-loaded a policy originally intended to be spread over several decades, it has permitted a rapid expansion of building that has kept house prices and their rate of increase lower in Canterbury than in other parts of the country. On the other hand, the greenfields encourage car dependency and metropolitan fringe expansion seemingly at odds with the conditions that the blueprint requires to succeed. In this sense, governance structures have been as much fragmentary as unitary. One thing that is clear is that authoritarian governance, as embodied in the Crown blueprint, has not been popular with a public searching for place-making roles in the wake of disaster and the loss of heritage markers. It has not even proved particularly efficient, with long delays to many of the anchor projects, some of which are predicated on pre-COVID¯ 19 levels of international travel. But Otautahi has also experimented with messier forms of paradigm-shifting governance, permitted to a limited extent with transitional activities and events in the city centre, but now emerging on a longer-term basis in the red zone. The evidence suggests that these are a more secure—if often frustrating—foundation

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for engaging residents in forward-looking, adaptive and participatory decision-making to cope with accelerating change in the future. Cities internationally increasingly face issues like climate change adaptation and carbon management which, being both complex and dynamic, require new forms of governance (Dryzek & Pickering, 2019). When the politics of neoliberalism has widened inequalities and reduced trust in government internationally, there is growing need for deliberative governance processes that focus as much on process as on outcomes. These are well-suited to intricate situations characterised by value-driven dilemmas and long-term time horizons (OECD, 2020). The types of experiments ¯ in governance used in post-earthquake recovery in Otautahi given their procedural emphasis (Vallance, 2015) could well form the basis of—as well as the public expectation of involvement in—climate change strategies in the city and elsewhere in Aotearoa New Zealand. If such strategies are to succeed in changing public behaviours, then governance processes, which increase knowledge of the issues that tap into collective diversity ¯ and are seen to earn legitimacy, are vital. In this respect, the Otautahi experience of different types of governance may turn out to be one of the lasting legacies of post-earthquake recovery.

References Ansell, C., & Gash, A. (2008). Collaborative governance in theory and practice. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 18(1), 543–571. Ansell, C., & Torfing, J. (Eds.). (2016). Handbook on theories of governance. Edward Elgar. Arnouts, R., van der Zouwen, M., & Arts, B. (2012). Analysing governance mode and shifts—Governance arrangements in Dutch nature policy. Forest Policy and Economics, 16, 43–50. ¯ akaro Network. AvON. (2020). A vision for the Avon River red zone. Avon-Ot¯ www.avonotakaronetwork.co.nz/home/home.html Bennett, B., Dann, J., Johnson, E., & Reynolds, R. (Eds.). (2014). Once in a lifetime. City-building after Disaster in Christchurch. Freerange Press. Boston, J. (2017). Safeguarding the future. Governing in an uncertain world. Bridget Williams Books. CCC. (2011). Central city plan. Draft central city recovery plan for ministerial approval December 2011. Christchurch City Council. CCC. (2020). Vacant sites programme. Urban Transport and Development Committee, Christchurch City Council. https://christchurch.infocouncil.biz/ Open/2020/12/UDATC_20201209_AGN_4100_AT.htm

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Dixon Productions. (2011). Christchurch 1996 quake doco—why buildings collapse. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkTy6ogLDX8&t=318s Dryzek, J., & Pickering, C. (2019). The politics of the Anthropocene. Oxford University Press. Gehl Architects. (2010). Christchurch 2009: Public space, public life. Christchurch City Council. Gehl Architects. (2020). A plan for the recovery of Christchurch. https://gehlpe ople.com/projects/christchurch-new-zealand/ Goodwin, M. (2009). Governance. In R. Kitchin & N. Thrift (Eds.), International encyclopaedia of human geography (pp. 593–599). Elsevier. Hackworth, J. (2007). The Neoliberal city. Governance, ideology, and development in American urbanism. Cornell University Press. Halliday, J. (2014). Losing our collective memory: The importance of preserving heritage architecture. In B. Bennett et al. (Eds.), Once in a lifetime. Citybuilding after disaster in Christchurch (pp. 210–218). Freerange Press. Harvey, D. (1989). From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation of urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler, 71 B(1), 3–17. Heins, A. (2015). Greenfield drivers. Residential choice, transport, and the subjective experience of travel in the Greenfield suburbs: A case study in Christchurch, New Zealand (MSc thesis). University of Canterbury. Johnson, L. A., & Olshansky, R. B. (2017). After great disasters. An in-depth analysis of how six countries managed community recovery. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Law, T. (2020, November 16). Christchurch City Council rules out rates discount for inner-city new home buyers. The Press. https://www.stuff.co. nz/the-press/news/123371552/christchurch-city-council-rules-out-rates-dis count-for-innercity-new-home-buyers Law, T., & McDonald, L. (2020, November 21). Plans for nearly 1000 new Rolleston homes opposed over land use and transport worries. The Press. https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/123429830/plans-for-nea rly-1000-new-rolleston-homes-opposed-over-transport-and-land-use-worries Lesniak, M. (2016). Rebuilding/reimagining post-disaster Christchurch: When complexities between actors have an impact on long-term development (Masters Altervilles dissertation). Universite de Lyon. LINZ. (2020, December/January, 39). Get road-wise in the red zone. Avenues. McCrone, J. (2012, August 4). Grand design: Plan will change the face of Christchurch. The Press. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/7415332/Planwill-change-the-face-of-Christchurch Mueller, S. (2017). Incommensurate values? Environment Canterbury and local democracy. New Zealand Journal of Public and International Law, 15, 293– 312.

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OECD. (2020). Innovative citizen participation and new democratic institutions. Catching the deliberative wave. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Pawson, E. (2011). Environmental hazards and natural disasters. New Zealand Geographer, 67 (3), 143–147. Pawson, E. (2016). Classrooms without borders: New spaces and places of learning. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 40(1), 14–30. ¯ akaro Avon Pawson, E. (2017). Developing the concept for a living laboratory, Ot¯ River Corridor. Report prepared for Regenerate Christchurch. ¯ akaro Avon Pawson, E., Kerr, R., Mein Smith, P., & Williams, C. (2019). Ot¯ River Corridor. Governance case studies. University of Canterbury. The Press. (2017, August 30). Editorial: Unleashing excitement in the red zone will make it Christchurch’s field of dreams. https://www.stuff.co.nz/thepress/business/the-rebuild/96310927/editorial-unleashing-excitement-inthe-red-zone-will-make-it-christchurchs-field-of-dreams Pickles, K. (2016). Christchurch ruptures. Bridget Williams Books. ¯ akaro Avon River regeneration plan. Regenerate Christchurch. (2019). Ot¯ Christchurch. Sachdeva, S. (2012, January 2). City looks ahead to a much brighter future. The Press. https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/christchurch-earthquake2011/6207203/City-looks-ahead-to-a-much-brighter-future Scoop (2011, November 24). Share an idea wins international award. Scoop. www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK1111/S00632/share-an-idea-wins-intern ational-award.htm Stoker, G. (1998). Governance as theory: Five propositions. International Social Science Journal, 155, 17–28. UDS. (2007). Greater Christchurch urban development strategy 2007 . https:// greaterchristchurch.org.nz/assets/Documents/greaterchristchurch/UDSAct ionPlan2007.pdf Vallance, S. (2015). Disaster recovery as participation: Lessons from the Shaky Islands. Natural Hazards, 75, 1287–1301. Walsh, J. (2020). Christchurch architecture. A walking guide. Massey University Press.

CHAPTER 16

Lessons for Democracy from a Decade of Disasters Bronwyn Hayward and Sam Johnson

Introduction ¯ This chapter reflects on the impacts of significant disasters in Otautahi Christchurch between 2010 and 2020, particularly impacts for young citizens’1 sense of “agency” (that is their ability to imagine and create change); and for the practice of democracy in the wider Canterbury region. The discussion also considers the way Christchurch’s experiences 1 For the purpose of this chapter, we deliberately use the term citizen to go beyond the narrow legal definition of an individual who has rights and duties to recognise a broader sense of being, and belonging in communities through participation, and claims making. This broader concept of citizenship recognises the political relationship between people but does not limit the possibility of being a citizen to those who are over 18. It can include all those who participate in their communities, such as children, recent or forced migrants, and refugees, for example (Harðardóttir & Jónsson, 2021; Hayward, 2021).

B. Hayward (B) · S. Johnson Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_16

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shed light on broader challenges facing liberal democracies in disasters. In an increasingly chaotic and uncertain climate future, characterised by more frequent and cascading crises, the question of how we maintain democratic practises during disruption is an urgent one (Felicetti, 2021; Smith, 2021). Given that cities and states will face more frequent disasters, we cannot simply suspend democratic decision-making every time we face a crisis (Hayward & Cretney, 2021; Honig, 2009). In this chapter, the discussion highlights some lessons from the way one city responded to the disruptions associated with the Canterbury earthquake sequence of 2010– 2012, the terror attacks on Christchurch mosques on 15 March 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic. We highlight the importance of the struggle to ensure democratic practices are inclusive, equitable and accountable particularly for children, youth and future generations (Smith, 2019).

Why Does Democracy Matter in Disasters? In a disaster, how we make decisions matters. In the confusion of a traumatic event and its aftermath, we often hear the call for leadership by “strong leaders” and/or “experts” (Hayward & Cretney, 2021). In any crisis, effective leadership and expert advice is crucial, but much research also suggests that inclusive, participatory practices in recovery which are distinguished by transparent accountable decision making and sensitivity to diverse voices, which consider the needs of future generations, is more likely to promote democratic outcomes over the long term (Amore et al., 2017; Chandrasekhar, 2012; Smith, 2019, 2021). However, the pressure to act quickly in response to a disaster, marshalling and allocating resources swiftly to meet complex needs in a context of confused communication, means it is often tempting to set aside the democratic principles of participatory, accountable and transparent decision-making in favour of centrally led or top-down responses (Honig, 2009). Yet failure to use inclusive, transparent and accountable decision-making processes is also more likely to lock-in pathways

S. Johnson e-mail: [email protected] S. Johnson Student Volunteer Army, Christchurch, New Zealand

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of inequity and maladaptation after disaster (O’Brien et al., 2009), exacerbating corruption, inequality, profiteering and poor management (Fenner & Mahlstein, 2009; Klein, 2007; Montgomery in this collection). While many studies highlight the value of participation and community engagement, especially by marginalised communities in disaster recovery, it is disappointing that democratic responses to disaster, particularly responses which prioritise the needs of youth and future generations, are still the exception rather than the rule (Geekiyanage et al., 2020; Vallance, 2015). As we have noted elsewhere, disasters are fundamentally political events (Hayward & Cretney, 2021; and see Matthewman & Byrd in this collection). Political decisions made over decades prior to an event can exacerbate community vulnerability, while decisions made after a disaster can enhance or undermine a community’s ability to respond and recover (Vale & Campanella, 2005). Understanding how city governments in particular respond to disasters is especially important. By 2050, seven out of ten people on the planet will live in urban areas, so improving urban responses to disaster is a pressing concern. As the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic have recently reminded us, for example, overcrowded urban living arrangements can become crucibles that magnify the impacts of a disaster like a pandemic. Similarly, in a changing climate, urban residents are often exposed to increasing and novel risks, including heat stress or flash flooding, yet many city residents may be unable to avoid these risks because they simply cannot move from their homes easily. Decisions about land use after a disaster can also lock-in intergenerational inequity, raising house prices or driving unsustainable urban sprawl (White & Haughton, 2017). In this context, it is crucial to learn from the way local governments as well as nation states react to disasters and to think about how these responses can be democratised to ensure decision-making is more inclusive, transparent and accountable (Andrews et al., 2018).

Getting Heard in a Disaster Whenever disasters occur, they tear at the social fabric of a society, exposing not just physical fault-lines but economic, racial and gendered divisions too (Hayward, 2013). There is also a tendency after any disaster to focus on the urgent short-term issues of recovery at the expense of planning for the needs of future generations, a problem sometimes

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described as the “tyranny of the present” (White & Haughton, 2017). Furthermore, as other chapters in this book have discussed, the Canterbury earthquakes shook the whole city but their full impact was not felt equally (e.g. Du Plessis in this collection). Some groups lacked resources or support to have their voices and priorities heard clearly in the confusion and “noise” of the aftermath of the earthquakes (Hayward, 2013). Poorly designed policies, rushed decision-making, obfuscation by authorities and ineffective communication, exacerbate the impacts of the disaster (Montgomery in this collection). At its very worst, this contributes to a downward social spiral in terms of growing inequality, mental ill health, and greater youth and adult alienation rather than to recovery (Hayward & Cretney, 2021; O’Brien et al., 2009; Thornley et al., 2015). Christchurch’s experiences of disasters in the decade from 2010 to 2020 have many similarities with other, medium-sized cities globally facing complex risks. The earthquake events between 2010 and 2012 were not New Zealand’s deadliest seismic disaster (that was the Hawke’s Bay earthquake of 1931), nor, as the editors of this volume note, were they the only disaster to impact the city over the last ten years. Near the end of the decade on 15 March 2019, a gunman opened fire on two local mosques in Christchurch. The murder of 51 people who were at prayer was the single biggest terrorist attack to occur in the country since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Moreover, in 2020, Christchurch, like the rest of New Zealand, experienced the first far-reaching impacts of the COVID-19 global pandemic as the city was brought to a standstill by an unprecedented nationwide level 4 lockdown on 25 March 2020. Christchurch residents, like other New Zealanders, were instructed to stay at home in their “bubble” and were not to travel other than for essential reasons in order to prevent further community transmission of the virus. In each of these three crises, leadership by citizens, particularly Indigenous leadership, was vital (Kenney & Phibbs, 2015; Tumahai, 2019; see also Phibbs et al. in this collection). In this discussion, however, we focus on the spontaneous leadership of young citizens in particular in contrast to a dominant assumption that disaster responses are most effective when led by top-down command-and-control decision-making (Nissen et al., 2021). We wish to highlight the role of youth-led responses to the earthquakes and other disaster events that followed and to consider how democratic practices could be enhanced to enable more formal opportunities for youth and community leadership.

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Youth Agency in Disasters: Reflections from Christchurch Citizen-led action in times of disaster is not unusual. Spontaneous expressions of solidarity and volunteering or helping have been documented after many disasters (Cretney, 2019; Prince, 1920; Solnit, 2009). What is particularly striking about the experiences of Christchurch, however, is the extent to which youth leadership has developed over time as the result of cohort experiences before the earthquakes (Carlton & Mills, 2017; Nissen et al., 2021), and have continued as young citizens built their skills through collective responses to unfolding crises. The experience of large-scale youth volunteering in Christchurch after the earthquakes helped to develop local and international networks, encouraged new social norms and citizenship capabilities to support youth agency and better coordinated responses to future challenging situations (Pine et al., 2018). Anecdotally, the experience of student volunteering at the time of the earthquakes gave a sense of permission to some youth who felt they could go on to implement change in other ways whether by creating a community garden, a street art work, or a youth climate rally. The experiences of taking part in civic life opens possibilities to challenge existing democratic practices or at least build understanding on how existing processes of democracy operate. One question is whether this positive sense of political agency and the capacity to respond to crisis situations can be experienced equitably amongst all youth, sustained and supported by local and national governments to enable a greater voice for future generations in future decision-making. First, however, as noted elsewhere, it is important to recognise that confusion and exhaustion is common in disasters and that volunteer efforts cannot replace the leadership of governments and the farreaching ability of the state to mobilise and coordinate national resources (Hayward, 2013; Hayward & Cretney, 2021). Perhaps one of the most profound civic lessons of New Zealand’s success in eradicating COVID19 in 2020 is that a generation of young New Zealanders has seen the power of focussed state leadership, informed by expert advice and supported by collective citizen action. While citizen volunteering has a role to play, excellent communication and leadership by government is also essential in a disaster. As Nissen et al. (2021) note, citizens are often thrust into roles of frontline responders at times when they are exhausted and uncertain. In

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the months and years after the 2010 Darfield earthquake, residents experienced an average of one aftershock over magnitude 5 every 10 days. In total, the community experienced 59 earthquakes at magnitude 5 or more in the two years, and each event renewed residents’ collective grief and exhaustion (Hayward, 2013). While citizens may be empowered by leadership experiences, a model of disaster recovery which overly relies on grassroots action cannot be sustained. Similarly, over-dependence on government support is potentially risky (Allen et al., 2017). A lesson learned from crises in New Zealand over the past decade is that government, private sector and community-led responses are each essential to crisis recovery. That said, there is a critical role that citizens can play in supporting and rebuilding the fabric of community after a crisis as Christchurch youth have demonstrated. However, the first global research project into volunteering in 182 countries in 2017, including New Zealand, indicated that the community and voluntary sector is “significantly under resourced” and “lacking sufficient sustained capacity” (Allen et al., 2017). In 2010 and 2021, there was a significant public outpouring of goodwill and community leadership. The organisation of mass youth volunteering in Christchurch after the earthquakes is well-documented— now commonly known as the Student Volunteer Army (SVA) (Carlton & Mills, 2017; Johnson, 2012; Lewis, 2014; Mutch, 2013; Nissen et al., 2021). The SVA was a socially entrepreneurial and practical response started by then University student Sam Johnson, one of the authors of this chapter, via a Facebook page on the evening of the September 2010 Darfield earthquake. The rapid mobilisation by students was also enabled by pre-existing factors. Sam himself had an extensive social network including a rural community background which he could call on in encouraging others to take action. In addition, his peers, students that initially stepped up to help, brought their own social networks, communication and event organisation skills honed through participation in a campus musical theatre group. Moreover, as most students lived and studied in the less impacted west side of the city, many had their own means of transport and access to social media platforms (Nissen et al., 2021). As a result of these conditions and the group’s association with the University and its student club structures (Carlton & Mills, 2017; Nissen et al., 2021), the young volunteers were comparatively well organised and positioned to connect residents in need with students who could help.

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Their efforts expanded over time to involve over 11,000 student volunteers with 32,000 engaged via social media. A core group of students on the ground coordinated the large numbers of these volunteers in neighbourhood working parties that ranged in size from 10 to several hundred students daily. The students were deployed to assist predominantly with cleaning up liquefaction in the suburbs with other students self-organising into teams to coordinate food, welfare and other support (Hayward, 2013). Civic mobilisations after disaster are common after emotionally motivating disaster events (Twigg & Mosel, 2017). However, there were some unique elements of the Canterbury student volunteer experience that have created a new narrative in New Zealand around the role of student engagement in civic life (O’Steen & Johnson, 2016). In the first instance, the success of the SVA has led to analysis of how such spontaneous movements can be made even more inclusive, but what is often forgotten is that large-scale local student volunteering nearly failed at the outset. Threatened by the possibility of large numbers of students self-organising for the city recovery, officials initially rebuffed the students’ offers of help. The initial response by Civil Defence to the turnout of students in the first days, for example, could be characterised as “thanks for the offers of help but go home”. It took significant negotiation by Sam Johnson with help from the local Head of the Chamber of Commerce Peter Townsend and then Mayor of Christchurch Bob Parker, both of whom could see the morale raising value of students being allowed to help. Control of the student volunteers was initially passed to a government agency; however, this arrangement quickly failed due to the inability of the bureaucracy to be sufficiently responsive to rapidly changing situations, at which point the students resumed control and worked in partnership with Civil Defence. Official resistance towards emergent groups in the aftermath of disasters is not uncommon (Twigg & Mosel, 2017). And despite the success of the SVA, there is still limited engagement of volunteer groups into the Civil Defence structure in Aotearoa New Zealand. It is hard to imagine the Canterbury earthquake recovery without the student volunteer story, so it is remarkable that opportunities for youth to volunteer are still largely unsupported. Youth participation still requires strong advocacy. Secondly, prior to the earthquakes, there was a dominant assumption that students were apathetic and disengaged (Nissen et al., 2021). National media coverage of student volunteering however inspired many

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at a time of despair and sparked similar, if smaller, community efforts, using social media to create “baking armies”, “farmy armies” (rural towns and farms providing food and supplies to the city), “time banks” and a range of residents’ support organisations (see, e.g., Piddock, 2011). In the decade that followed, this experience of youth volunteering did not diminish; instead, it has become a social norm of local youth mobilisation. On 15 March 2019, for example, thousands of local high school students were crowded into Christchurch’s Cathedral Square in the largest New Zealand student protest about climate change. The very high proportion of Christchurch’s youth who took part in the local protests about climate change has been linked to the capabilities and norms for youth mobilisation built up through the volunteer army experiences (Hayward, 2021). The “school climate strike” protest was abruptly curtailed however about an hour after it began, amid emerging news reports of the horrific terror attacks on two nearby Christchurch mosques, resulting in the murder of 51 people. Three days later, Okirano Tilaia, a 17-year-old student from a local high school, led thousands of his young peers in a vigil for the victims. The “Students Uniting In Love” vigil, like the SVA and schools strike events, involved large numbers of youth who quickly organised to demonstrate their support for affected families and rejection of racism, through a range of actions including mass haka (cultural dance performance), waiata (song), karakia (prayer) and ceremonies including candle lighting outside the local mosques (Hayward, 2021). Thirdly, a decade after it began, the SVA itself has expanded as an active national youth trust working to extend the values and ethos of the earthquake response to younger age groups. Youth volunteering projects have been replicated by over 140,000 younger students aged from 5 to 12 years in primary schools in New Zealand and a national framework for volunteering now operates in 240 secondary schools that tracks student volunteering in relation to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These young people, through the SVA-in-school initiative, have formal opportunities to increase their capabilities and a sense of agency to tackle projects they care about in the community and understand their impact. Importantly, the projects are all student-led and not just created by adults (Johnson, 2020). The SVA also drove youth volunteering responses to the COVID-19 lockdown. After the announcement of the level 4 lockdown, the SVA mobilised to support efforts to shop for the elderly who were unable to source grocery deliveries online

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and to provide childcare for essential workers. The organisation needed to quickly evolve in a digital environment, and it partnered with tech entrepreneurs via an Instagram group to build an online grocery delivery service that mobilised 3,000 volunteers and delivered nearly as many grocery orders from 50 supermarkets around the country. Operated again largely by students from the University of Canterbury with support from experts and health advisors, the students added significant capacity to the pandemic response and supported a segment of the population who could afford to pay for groceries but not access food online. Most recently, the SVA was active in responding to the 2021 Canterbury floods. The way Canterbury’s youngest citizens have gained skills, norms and capabilities for mass organisation in the aftermath of disaster is remarkable. However, it is also troubling that, despite significant numbers of students turning out to volunteer and support their community over the past decade, a recent pilot survey of the city’s youth revealed that fewer than one-third of the sample of 300 young city residents aged 12–24 years felt that they could make a difference to their city or that people who made decisions in the city listened to them (Prendergast, 2020; and see Matthewman & Byrd in this collection). Similarly, while the student action narrative has continued to have a strong political resonance in the city and nation, with leaders continually referencing the SVA’s example in public forums and encouraging communities to prepare for “emergent leadership” (Dalziel, 2019), the authors of this chapter have observed ongoing resistant attitudes by bureaucracies to engaging youth leadership or voices in major civic events. For example, in both the COVID-19 response and the 2021 Canterbury flood events, we observed confused policy settings which continue to disincentivise youth volunteers from taking the initiative after a crisis or working in partnership with government. Civil Defence does not have any mechanism for supporting organisations with the costs of their response work, and in the observation of the authors, their insistence on leading all emergency responses ignores the psychosocial benefits, and practical value, of meaningful and well-planned community-led mobilisation. Furthermore, after the mosque attacks, only one school-aged student was invited to a counterterrorism hui held in Christchurch in 2021, and no local Muslim community leaders—let alone students—were given opportunities to speak, despite students leading many vigils and local peace building initiatives. Other studies have noted that planning decisions after the

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earthquakes have resulted in a focus on the needs of present generations at the expense of planning for the needs of future generations (White & Haughton, 2017). To understand this tension between the potential for youthful agency and barriers youth face when attempting to participate democratically, it is important to understand the impacts of central government-led responses to disaster.

Disempowerment: The Impact of Top-Down Government Post-Disaster As noted above, while governments are essential for providing large-scale, coordinated responses in disasters, they often struggle to ensure these responses are inclusive, transparent and accountable to the community or consider long-term issues (Hayward & Cretney, 2021; Kavanagh & Singh, 2020; Montgomery in this collection; Smith, 2021). In the case of the Canterbury earthquake sequence, the then national-led government was widely criticised for responding to the September 2010 Darfield earthquake with top-down leadership that persisted for too long in excluding community voices and authorities (Amore et al., 2017). Initially in 2010, just ten weeks after the first earthquakes, local government began a process of widespread consultation for a city “rebuild” with a popular series of consultation events called “Share an Idea”. This creative mass outpouring of community ideas led by the local council was abruptly marginalised in subsequent decision-making when central government rushed through a far-reaching Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act 2010 (CERR) under urgency and a City Blueprint of large “anchor” projects (Matthewman & Byrd in this volume). The purpose of the CERR Act was to respond to the Canterbury earthquake sequence by providing statutory powers to meet wide-ranging recovery needs (Hayward & Cretney, 2021). Concerned by the broad scope and far-reaching impact of the Act, 27 legal scholars wrote an “open letter to New Zealand’s people and their Parliament” arguing that the CERR Act 2010 represented “an extraordinarily broad transfer of lawmaking power away from Parliament and to the executive branch, with minimal constraints on how that power may be used” (Geddis, 2010). In particular, individual government ministers, through “Orders in Council”, were empowered to change “virtually every part of New Zealand’s statute book” if required in order to achieve “very broadly defined ends,

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thereby effectively handing to the executive branch Parliament’s power to make law” (Geddis, 2010). The CERR Act effectively sidelined local communities and the elected city council in the rebuild of the city, replacing it with the creation of a centrally administered government department—the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA)—responsible to a single minister who held far-reaching powers under this new legislation. The CERR Act was initially useful for securing much-needed national resources. But over time, in the authors’ observation, the new powers slowed community recovery, and little official thought was given to alternative community leadership. The Deputy Minister of Earthquake Recovery, Nicky Wagner, advocated for a local citizen advisory group, but this organisation was gradually also set aside as CERA’s consultants and staff compulsorily acquired land and planned and organised major large-scale “anchor” developments including a convention centre and new precincts for justice, art and health. Wellington-based officials and consultants began commuting regularly to work for CERA in the city. Without local insight and networks, these advisors often duplicated or simply discounted local social capital. While the city government was strained under the scale of the disaster, no thought appears to have been given to supporting the existing local council. Instead, the functions of local government were largely replaced by central agencies who lacked skills and models for community consultation. As a result, local residents were left confused about how to approach decision-making agencies or even where these agencies were located and which new organisation was responsible for what task (Fig. 16.1) (Hayward, 2013, 2014). The impact of top-down command-and-control government was also reinforced when the earthquakes were also used to justify continued suspension of regional government elections (Environment Canterbury [ECan]) (Hayward & Cretney, 2015), until 2019. As a result, regional and local councils and voters were excluded from making decisions about use of local resources and rates or over the management decisions for allocation of water rights (Sovacool et al., 2018). In the wake of the terror attacks of March 2019, the government established a Royal Commission of Inquiry into its security agencies and the events leading up to the attacks. This Commission was given the power to investigate wider issues surrounding the attacks, for example, including concerns over whether New Zealand security services had paid too little

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Fig. 16.1 Democracy denied, New Brighton (Photo by Peter Simpson, 2021)

attention to white supremacy groups online. The centrally established commission became a very important focus for local concerns as well as national ones about the conditions and context which had contributed to or enabled such terrorism. However, the tight control of the terms of reference and the exclusion of local Muslim communities from developing the terms of reference or viewing the evidence has disappointed many victims of the terror attack (Stuff, 2020). As previously mentioned, the subsequent first counterterror hui which was encouraged by the Royal Commission reinforced this exclusion, with no local Muslim community leaders included on the programme until public outcry resulted in the grudging creation of a pre-breakfast panel for the Islamic women’s council to discuss “what hate feels like now”. One student was also invited to join an audience of 300. Similarly, while the swift action taken by the New Zealand government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic won global praise and

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proved extremely popular with the public due to effective elimination of local virus transmission, there remains ongoing uncertainty and a lack of information about local community health services over the long term. A remarkable incident during the pandemic saw the resignation of seven of 11 members of the local Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB) including the popular Senior Health Officer and a letter penned by senior doctors described the situation as an “unprecedented leadership crisis” caused by the CDHB’s “lack of transparency and competency with its decision-making” (Broughton, 2020). In this context, there is anxiety about whether health priorities and concerns of Christchurch residents will be heard and responded to.

Conclusion Careful critiques of the way that governmental power is used after a disaster are important because they hold the use of power accountable throughout a crisis. Weighing the need for urgent action alongside inclusive, transparent democratic decision-making is not an easy task but it is a necessary one. All disasters are context specific and involve different sets of actors, however all disasters raise deeper democratic questions about how the powerful can be prevented from simply becoming more powerful in the aftermath of chaos and disruption (Cretney, 2014). In the coming decades, disasters will become more frequent in a changing climate. If we wish to avoid the common problem of democracies becoming less accountable after a disaster (Pelling & Dill, 2010), we need to learn from the remarkable everyday efforts of citizen-leadership, including leadership of youth, and find ways to ensure local communities, especially youth, are heard and have opportunities to take action, and that the needs of future generations are considered in long-term planning (Smith, 2021). Christchurch’s experiences highlight the way that centralisation of power so easily marginalises young citizens, even when many youth have taken leading roles in local disaster recovery. Ensuring democratic practices are inclusive, equitable and accountable after disasters, particularly for children, youth and future generations will require significant, ongoing, community struggle.

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CHAPTER 17

Concluding Reflections: Making Social Choices in Turbulent Times Bruce C. Glavovic

This book deepens and extends Critical Disaster Studies (CDS) by shedding light on the drivers and root causes of vulnerability and risk that ¯ have shaped the 2010–2020 decade of disaster experiences in Otautahi ¯ Christchurch (hereafter Otautahi), Aotearoa New Zealand. These experiences are poignant and distinctive given the concentrated and concatenating waves of disaster experienced, from earthquakes to wildfires, a terrorist attack, the global pandemic, and the entangled cataclysm of climate change. The flurry of disaster responses and recovery efforts has informed disaster practice around the country and underpins nationwide efforts to build resilience. Making social choices in the midst of disaster is central to these efforts. Hence the focus of this chapter: What do the social ¯ choices made in Otautahi over the last decade reveal about, first, the root

B. C. Glavovic (B) School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0_17

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causes and drivers of vulnerability; and second, preparing for a turbulent future? Insights are distilled from chapters in the book, CDS scholarship, and the author’s fieldwork over the last decade. “Dark spots” and “bright ¯ spots” in the making of social choices in Otautahi are critically examined. The chapter starts with conceptual clarification about making social choices in turbulent times. It then moves to a synopsis of some of the dark and bright spots during the last decade. The concluding section distils implications for CDS and charting pathways for the future of the city, and possibly elsewhere. The prescient words of Peter Beck, then Anglican Dean of Christchurch, warrant recounting. He suggested a course for recovery founded on human values, reflexivity and local community engagement (Beck, 2010): What will change because of the earthquake? … In the early days after the quake we saw unparalleled community spirit as we reached out to one another … leadership … and emergency services were brilliant … volunteers [were] inspiring. … For now we move into the recovery phase. Inevitably things aren’t going to go as smoothly as some would like. … There is much to be done. … And we have the chance to rebuild the city, and to do it right. We get the chance to review what has worked and what has not in our planning of the past and to renew our heritage for future generations. We get to build liveable spaces, and redesign the city on a human scale, with human values at the centre. … The role of urban planning … is to uphold and strengthen the character of particular places. So it is vital that communities here have a voice in the design, and it is not left to the powers that be in Wellington, who may not balance the vital economic needs with an holistic understanding of the aspirations and well-being of this particular set of communities. … The city council and the central government in Wellington have big decisions to make on our behalf. They need to have big ears to listen and to test out ideas with the citizens. A consultative, inclusive process is the way forward. … In 100 years from now we want people to look back at what we have done to preserve and enhance our unique heritage and say “well done!” (para. 4–17)

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Making Social Choices in Turbulent Times CDS is a powerful lens through which to examine the framing, making and institutionalisation of social choices. Social choices centre on collective or public decisions, involving divergent worldviews, values, interests, and preferences and are distinct from individual or private choices and corporate decisions. Making social choices is the essence of governance ¯ and is key to public decision-making in Otautahi, as contributions to this volume show. Governance is more than government. It encompasses a spectrum of interactions ranging from state-dominated social choicemaking to societal autonomy or self-regulation (Kooiman, 2003; Treib et al., 2007). Governance describes how norms and collective interests are defined, negotiated and advanced to steer the economy and society (Pierre & Peters, 2000). Contestation and conflict are intrinsic to governance interactions and shape the institutions within which these interactions occur. Institutions are the formal and informal structures and processes, rules, norms, and cultural cognitions that shape expectations and actions aimed at enduring improvements to human and social-ecological well-being (Scott, 1995). They structure and produce social choices that enable some actors and constrain the aspirations and actions of others. They can provide stability and meaning to social life. Institutionalised interactions are historically situated, with people’s complex identities and power relationships framing and shaping decision-making structures, processes and outcomes. A key task of CDS is to shed light on how the making of social choices is enabled and constrained by these interactions in the face of disaster. Governance interactions take place in arenas of engagement, i.e. settings, places and spaces in which actors from government, civil society and the private sector interact, influenced by science and media, to shape the nature and course of human development, and vulnerability and risk (Healey, 2006; Jørgensen, 2012). These arenas of engagement can be enduring or ephemeral, and interactions take place in emergent and dynamic ways. Power and politics shape access and influence in these settings. In practice, arenas of engagement may be more akin to “struggle arenas”—in which power and influence are deployed to include/exclude, set agendas, and make and implement decisions—with inevitable winners and losers.

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Mouffe’s (2000) notion of agonistic pluralism—in which adversarial politics are foundational for nurturing freedom and democracy—is instructive; and prompts careful interrogation of claims about deliberative, consensual public decision-making. Agonism recognises the imperative to harness the productive potential of social conflict—which can reveal the limits and injustices of prevailing practices and open up opportunities for vulnerable people to assert their rights, interests and priorities. Predisposition to disaster and recovery pathways post-disaster are shaped by interactions in arenas visible and invisible to public scrutiny. For instance, formal political settings include voting procedures to elect local representatives as well as less formal and transparent political arenas, e.g. “backroom” special interest lobbying. Social choices can be imposed by an authoritarian state. Streets, town squares and “empty spaces” in a post-disaster landscape can become sites of interaction and political struggle as citizens strive to have their voices heard. Arenas exist across scales from the local to national level, and beyond. In sum, social choices are crafted through cumulative interacting private and public decisions and actions (and inactions) that are institutionalised over time through formal and informal structures, provisions and cultures. These institutions are not static; they evolve over time to reconcile the simultaneous need for societal stability and flexibility in the face of an uncertain future. These insights outline the essence of critical disaster governance which is core to social choice-making in turbulent times. They help to address the central question of this chapter. ¯ I now turn to the past decade of disaster experiences in Otautahi and apply the above conceptualisation to reveal some of the contours of CDS through dark spots and bright spots of the city’s 2010–2020 disaster experiences. I start by focusing on social choices made amidst the earthquakes because they are the defining feature of this decade. I then reflect on subsequent waves of adversity and associated social choices.

Reflections on a Decade of Disaster ¯ Experiences in Otautahi: The Earthquakes After the 2010 Darfield Earthquake, and initial relief that “we dodged ¯ a bullet” (Otautahi resident, personal communication), the rupture on 22 February 2011 sheeted home the enormity of the disaster governance challenge. I focus on governance actor interactions and highlight some of the defining social choice dark spots and bright spots.

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First Responders and Emergent Groups On the bright side, in the immediate aftermath of earthquakes, accounts of bravery and mutual help came to the fore in “episodes of communitas”, reflecting deep-rooted human connections, empathy, altruism and aroha (Matthewman & Uekusa, 2021; see also Du Plessis; Montgomery; Phibbs et al.; Uekusa & Cretney in this volume). After the initial triage, authorities, critical infrastructure providers, tangata whenua, business and community groups, variously began securing unsafe buildings, restoring critical infrastructure, and attending to priority community recovery needs. On the dark side, attempts to dovetail volunteer efforts with emergent government processes and practices were often difficult and frustrating (Charity organisation worker, personal communication); but experience varied, with some episodes of collaborative interaction being salutary (Waimakariri District Council [WDC] staff member, social worker, business leader, personal communication). The transition to recovery was chaotic because of limited experience in large-scale recovery, compounded by abandonment of recovery provi¯ sions in place from the early 2000s (Otautahi-based CDEM professional, personal communication; see also Montgomery in this collection). On a positive note, there was a rapid increase in the number of community groups and non-governmental organisations contributing to recovery efforts. To open up future bright spots for post-disaster recovery, more careful consideration needs to be given to leveraging the contributions of emergent groups and more established organisations that are not part of formal recovery institutions (Nissen et al., 2021). Legislative Responses to the Earthquakes The legislative response casts a dark shadow over the government-led recovery. After the 2010 Darfield Earthquake, rushed drafting led to the Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery (CERR) Act. The CERR Act set up the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Commission (CERC) to advise government. The 2011 Christchurch Earthquake sparked another legislative scramble—resulting in the more draconian Canterbury Earthquake Recovery (CER) Act. In essence, power was transferred from the legislature to the executive, via a newly established government agency—Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA)—which had far-reaching powers to override legislation and regulations that might

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otherwise stand in the way of a quick recovery. Eminent legal scholar, Dean Knight (2010, p.24), said it was a “constitutional outrage”. CERA, under the direction of the Minister for CER, the Hon. Gerry Brownlee, had the “final word” on the prioritisation and implementation of overall recovery and consequently regeneration prospects. Then Christchurch East Labour Member of Parliament (MP), Lianne Dalziel, lamented that CERC, an independent body with no power, had been replaced by CERA, a powerful body without independence (Dalziel, personal communication). It seems political leadership was caught offguard and manifested “elite panic” (see Montgomery in this volume for elite panic). Though provisions for community engagement and public participation were institutionalised in the CER Act, they were to prove largely tokenistic. On the bright side, such draconian legislative dictates have not been invoked in subsequent disasters. Robust democracy is the best safeguard against arbitrary decisions by elites. A critical light therefore needs to be shone on legislative processes and practices in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Role of Te R¯ unanga o Ng¯ ai Tahu The earthquakes were a chance to rethink how the bi-cultural partnership embodied in Te Tiriti o Waitangi should frame recovery efforts and restore cultural touchstones embedded in the history and physicality of the city (Pickles, 2016). That the government embedded Te R¯unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu (TRoNT) as a foundational partner in the formal recovery effort is a bright spot that gestures to a progressive and respectful recovery approach (Phibbs et al. in this volume). But, as Simon Lambert in Chapter 5 observes, despite this important and precedent-setting move, real-world experience locally and in other settler colonial countries demonstrates that Indigenous Peoples are often at the centre of state discourses and practices that are discriminatory and oppressive; revealed in social cleavages along racial and ethnic lines (Matthewman, 2015). Against this dismal reality, Phibbs et al. (in this volume) expound on the enlightening success story of response and recovery efforts led by TRoNT. These efforts were founded on long-standing cultural values, exemplified by aroha nui ki te tangata—love to all people—a core theme quickly and consensually adopted by 60 M¯aori organisations and other parties at the outset of their initial response.

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Lambert in Chapter 5 complicates this narrative by pointing to recovery challenges faced by M¯aori without ancestral rights (Ng¯a Maata Waka). The upshot of this account is the imperative for disaster governance to go beyond a “pan-Indigenous” framing for involving Indigenous Peoples. Phibbs et al. Chapter 9 recount how Ng¯ai Tahu and Ng¯a Maata Waka worked together to leverage existing relationships between governance actors to support earthquake-impacted communities and inform formal recovery plans and practices, and reconfigurations of the institutional architecture for disaster governance. These insights underscore the dynamic and complex institutional landscape within which disaster governance episodes, and processes and practices, unfold—with myriad arenas of engagement opening up and/or closing down opportunities for emancipatory engagement of iwi and Indigenous Peoples more generally. Government Every facet of government was involved at some point in the earthquake disaster cycle. The character of government choices and interactions with other governance actors is nuanced and dynamic and defies sweeping generalisations. Nonetheless, there are notable dark spots and bright spots that reveal how vulnerability, risk and resilience were impacted by government choices. Emergent Government Processes and Practices The recovery governance architecture was re-designed and constructed amid the 2010–2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence. Government processes and practices were emergent, as evidenced by unfolding disaster governance episodes and evolving interactions within government at various levels, and with TRoNT and actors in the private sector and civil society (WDC staff member, Christchurch City Council [CCC] staff member, CERA staff member, personal communications; see also Matthewman & Byrd; Montgomery; Pawson in this volume). Adaptive responses to rapidly changing locality- and time-specific circumstances are vital for effective recovery governance. However, their effectiveness is shaped by government leadership and organisational culture. Government Leadership and Organisational Culture A dark tone was set by political leaders with the draconian legislative response. This was reinforced by Hon. Brownlee’s contrarian and

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belligerent approach to Cantabrians and local government. He held an iron-grip on the course charted by CERA. By contrast, CERA’s Chief Executive, Roger Sutton, was popular and held in high regard in the early months of 2011. The Sutton-Brownlee leadership duo was characterised as a “good cop-bad cop routine” (Community organiser, personal communication). The authoritarian style of CERA became the organi¯ sational embodiment of government in Otautahi, entrenched through episodes of government intervention—from the protracted city centre cordon to the red zone decision, and school closures through a Ministry of Education edict that bypassed school boards of trustees. This “dark” institutional culture contrasts with the decision to embed TRoNT in the formal recovery architecture. Notwithstanding the CER Act provisions for public participation, rhetoric about community engagement was a thin veneer that did not conceal CERA’s authoritarian organisational culture (Amore et al., 2017; Simons, 2016). On the bright side, there was laudable commitment, hard work, personal sacrifice and excellent work by staff and senior management in many government agencies. The Office of the Auditor General (OAG, 2017) judged that CERA performed well under challenging circumstances in the early stages of recovery. However, it was unable to sustain this performance. It failed to engage communities well, and it was neither effective nor cost-effective. Local Government Leadership, Organisational Culture and Capabilities A black spot on the recovery was the incumbent government’s jaundiced view of local government capabilities and democracy in Canterbury. These perceptions shaped CERA’s interactions with local government. The relationship between Hon. Brownlee and CERA and CCC leadership was especially fractured. This was not without cause. From early in the recovery, CCC leadership was publicly criticised for being ineffective—prompting a march in February 2012 by over 4,000 protesters to demonstrate against the CCC Chief Executive’s pay increase, and lack of council transparency and accountability. Privately, many local and elected officials and community leaders were critical of the CCC leadership (CCC and WDC staff members, city politician, community organiser, Community Board Chair, and public health professional, personal communications). The mid-2013 withdrawal of CCC’s building consent authority resulted in CCC Chief Executive Tony Marryatt’s resignation and Bob

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Parker’s decision not to run for Mayor in the October 2013 local election. Matters improved under newly elected Mayor Lianne Dalziel, but it was difficult for the new CCC leadership to overcome the legacy of unconstructive CERA-CCC interactions. In sharp contrast, the WDC leadership and organisational culture were a shining light (Vallance, 2015). Decisive but flexible and “joined up” leadership by the WDC Chief Executive and Mayor, ably supported by capable and collaborative staff, contributed to a responsive and reflexive community-centred approach (community organisers, Kaiapoi residents, local business organiser, and WDC Mayor, CE and staff members, personal communications). Post-CERA Government-Driven Regeneration Roy Montgomery in Chapter 3 characterises the post-CERA transition as a shotgun marriage between central and local government—with CERA morphing into Regenerate Christchurch (a joint venture between ¯ the Crown and CCC), the Crown-owned Otakari Ltd., and CCCowned Development Christchurch. These entities were the centre of much wrangling between local politicians and government, with dubious contributions to on-the-ground regeneration (Amore et al., 2017). Much remains to be done. The anchor projects central to the CERAinspired recovery and regeneration have yet to materialise; recovery woes persist and will likely remain for years to come. The promised gold at the end of the recovery rainbow remains out of reach, despite the economic focus of government. In the public’s eye, recovery failure was dressed up by the government as success (Simons, 2016). However, labels of success or failure gloss over the multi-faceted nature of recovery. The government’s authoritarian reach and domineering interaction with local government did not extend across the whole city and all stages of the disaster cycle (Matthewman & Byrd in this volume). Eric Pawson in Chapter 15 observes that “Share an Idea” elements can be found in CERA recovery plans; and foundations were established by CERA that will benefit local communities in future. Private Sector Constructive interactions between organised business and the government in the response and early stages of recovery were a bright spot, with the wage subsidy being especially helpful for businesses to navigate initial

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earthquake impacts (CE, Canterbury Employer’s Chamber of Commerce, personal communication). A seldom recognised bright spot was the catalytic role played by some business leaders in establishing and/or supporting community groups, e.g. Canterbury Communities’ Earthquake Recovery Network (CanCERN), or efforts to hold government to account, e.g. Future Canterbury Network (Community organisers, business leaders, personal communication). Private sector innovation in the face of disaster is noteworthy, and at times occurred in spite of the CERA-led recovery. In practice, government-private sector interactions were highly variable, with constructive relationships between WDC and Enterprise North Canterbury and local businesses (Business leader, WDC staff member, personal communication); and variable interactions between business and CERA and CCC (Business leaders, personal communication). Civil Society Civil society shaped social choices in a variety of ways, revealing dark spots and bright spots core to addressing vulnerability and preparing for the future. Prising Open Opportunities for Community Engagement Engagement in disaster governance is inherently political—centred on contending visions for the future and their implementation (Cretney, 2019; Rivera-Muñoz & Howden-Chapman, 2020). Disaster governance unfolds through episodes of politicisation and de-politicisation (Cretney, 2018, 2019). The former opens up opportunities for collective action and can enable transformative grassroots change; the latter closes down democratic potential in the interests of power elites (Uekusa & Cretney in this volume). There were many bright spots in the manifold ways in which established and emergent groups reconfigured how to organise neighbourhoods and communities, grow local food and transform “transition spaces” in order to re-politicise and re-direct the recovery (Berno, 2017; Cloke & Dickinson, 2019; Wesener, 2015). Many shining examples were undertaken with some governmental support, at the risk of co-optation (Cameron in this volume). The CCC’s “Share an Idea” campaign engaged over 10,000 citizens and generated over 106,000 recovery priorities. However, the Minister for CER’s decision to jettison the plan is a dark spot that closed down

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opportunities for civil society to shape recovery outcomes (see Cameron; Du Plessis; Hayward & Johnson; Matthewman & Byrd; Montgomery; Pawson; Pickles in this volume). Holding Government Accountable Some community groups worked “within the system” to achieve community-relevant outcomes, e.g. CanCERN became embedded in CERA processes and practices, and in so doing was better able to provide up-to-date and accurate information to residents and provide CERA with timely insights into community issues, concerns and dynamics (CanCERN organisers, personal communication). Other groups, like the Wider earthquake Community Action Network (WeCAN)—a human rights watchdog—took a more confrontational approach, including legal action to bring human rights issues to the fore that would likely otherwise have been ignored (WeCAN organiser, personal communication). A significant blight on the recovery was the apparent disregard the Minister for CER and CERA leadership had for the community forum established by the CER Act. Albeit lacking powers, its statutory standing suggested that it had a valuable role to play. Carefully selected and dedicated community representatives ended up as window-dressing (Community representatives, personal communication). Community as an Arena of Engagement, a Symbol of Collective Action and a Locus for Living with Disaster What are the possibilities for communities to build forward-looking, just, equitable and empowered communities? Project Lyttleton and the work of Margaret Jefferies were a shining light amongst a long list of community endeavours (Cretney, 2016, 2018; Cretney & Bond, 2014). Dedicated, well-networked individuals, with the ability to secure enabling resources, shaped the success of many community efforts. Communities became sites of social innovation and creativity (Cameron in this volume) and reframed community resilience. Notwithstanding limits to resilience, and the perverse resilience of ideologies and institutions that entrench vulnerability and risk, determined collective action can build social capital, deepen local democracy and re-direct the trajectory of recovery in ways that foster “good” community resilience (Lambert; Pickles; Uekusa & Cretney in this volume). Invariably, the roots of such efforts are embedded in pre-event social interactions. Socially disadvantaged and marginalised, but self-organised, minority groups and migrants

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often have strong and durable social networks that enabled them to navigate everyday challenges, including racism, and this helped them cope in the aftermath of successive shocks (Uekusa & Matthewman, 2017; also Garces-Ozanne et al.; Uekusa & Cretney in this volume). Science and Media Technical and scientific knowledge was foundational for the government’s recovery effort, with scientists analysing vast amounts of data. Professional bodies, like engineers, architects and planners, were mobilised in support of the recovery effort, placing huge demands on them. New insights about recovery and resilience were revealed through kaupapa (cultural values) (Phibbs et al. in this volume). Initially, there were few CDS voices “speaking truth to power” (Cretney & Bond, 2014; Hayward, 2013) but that has begun to change (Amore et al., 2017; Cretney, 2016, 2018, 2019; Hall & Amore, 2019; Matthewman, 2015; Pickles, 2016). The media plays a pivotal role in shaping understanding about the dynamics of disasters. Journalists flagged issues of social concern and celebrated success. Engaging with the media, especially social media, has become vital in disaster governance—to communicate important information to the public in a timely manner; to take stock of recovery progress; and to inform private, government and community actions. Simons (2016) points out that different media can convey very different views about recovery success and failure. The foregoing synopsis reveals complex interactions between disaster governance actors in a morphing ecosystem of struggle arenas. Interactions unfold in parallel within and between geographic, sectoral and temporal scales. Many interactions are contested. The authoritarian approach of the Minister for CER and CERA contrasts starkly with grassroots efforts to “rebuild communities”. Contrasting dark and bright spots are also revealed in the interactions between the CCC, civil society and CERA and between the WDC and its communities and other governance actors. Alignment between disaster governance episodes, disaster governance processes and practices and the surrounding institutional architecture are central to reducing vulnerability, and preparing for a turbulent future. Highlighted below are some of the most notable dark spots and bright spots indicative of more or less coherence between disaster governance levels.

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The Red Zones: A Precedent-Setting Social Choice The red zone decision was a defining episode in the recovery process— with bright and dark sides. The buy-out package was intended to expedite recovery in the worst-affected areas by removing uncertainty (especially around insurance) and minimising future harm. But the decision devastated those living in these areas. In the fullness of time, this may prove to have been a wise social choice, notwithstanding the authoritarian way the decision was made. In many jurisdictions after a major disaster, e.g. postKatrina New Orleans, rebuilding takes place in areas exposed to future extreme events, and the cycle of disaster, rebuild, disaster, etc. repeats itself over time at massive social cost. Residents in the designated red zones were presented with Hobson’s choice; and opted to relocate or stay for a complex set of reasons (Dickinson, 2021). Once CERA made the red zone decision, the question about the future of these areas loomed large. Tait et al. (2016) found strong public support for red zone land to be reserved for environmental and recreational purposes—in contradistinction to the initial government position that the land should lie fallow until engineering solutions facilitated new residential development. Despite the deep loss and heartache experienced by red zone “leavers”, more recent collaborations between Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) and the CCC signals a bright future for enduring public use of this land. Insurance Woes Insurance was, perhaps, the darkest chapter in the post-earthquakes story. Many faced years of uncertainty and convoluted battles with insurers and/or the Earthquake Commission (EQC) through the courts, Ombudsman, in-person or one of the belatedly established dispute resolution services (see Toomey & Finn in this volume for details). Key precedent-setting issues required legal judgements. Settlements were hampered by recurring events, each of which required re-assessment before resolution. Nonetheless, compared to most overseas jurisdictions, ¯ Otautahi property and business owners were in an enviable position with government-backed EQC coverage, and exceptionally high-private insurance coverage for damages above the EQC base level. Yet, complaints about shoddy and unsafe repairs are legion and were corroborated by the

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Public Inquiry into the EQC released in March 2020. The Inquiry recognised bright spots in the EQC effort, but labelled the EQC: “uncaring, miserly and inefficient” (cited in Toomey & Finn in this volume), prompting the EQC to make an unreserved public apology. Challenging questions remain about the best way to tackle the vexed issue of insurance over disaster impacted land, and, more fundamentally, insurance, property rights and our relationship to place and community in hazard-prone landscapes (Page & Brower, 2014). Plans, More Plans Planning plays a central role in recovery, as Peter Beck observed in 2010. Dark and bright spots are exposed by reflecting on three pivotal planning choices. Why Plan; for and by Whom? From a CDS perspective, a post-disaster recovery plan is a political statement about who shapes the future city—with critical decisions about the distant future made under intense time pressure (Olshansky, 2009). Recovery planning institutionalises dominant ideologies in constructing the post-disaster political economy and its built form. Recovery plans should, however, be the embodiment and enabler of collective needs, hopes and aspirations rooted in people’s connection to place and community. They should harness local capabilities, prepare for a brighter albeit turbulent future and embrace diversity and new possibilities. CERA focused on economic recovery and the physical rebuild instead of prioritising community recovery and preparing for the future (Cretney & Bond, 2014; also Montgomery in this volume). An indelible stain on the recovery process was the Minister for CER’s decision to substitute the CCC draft Central City Plan, based on the “Share an Idea” campaign, with an in-house CERA Central City Recovery Plan, that was then unashamedly branded as a CERA-CCC-TRoNT collaboration. A fundamental shortcoming of CERA plans was their failure to address the drivers and root causes of vulnerability. Stifling public engagement was a further blight on CERA plans. In essence, the portfolio of CERA recovery and regeneration plans was neither truly for nor by the people ¯ of Otautahi.

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Blueprint or Process? A Blueprint rationale framed CERA’s overall recovery planning approach. It was underpinned by a rational comprehensive planning logic founded on neoliberal ideals to promote a market-friendly economic recovery, with aspirations of cost-effectiveness, efficiency and optimality. Anchor projects played a key role in plan delivery. Was this an appropriate approach? In the ¯ post-disaster reality of Otautahi, recovery planning unfolded in the face of complexity, uncertainty, dynamism and contestation over who defines the trajectory of recovery. This recovery problématique cannot be reduced to a Blueprint; and, even if it could, it would be out of date by the time ¯ it was published. Tragically, much post-disaster development in Otautahi has occurred despite CERA’s Blueprint approach rather than because of it (Smyth, 2020). Rebuild or Prepare for a Promising but Turbulent Future? Four key dimensions of the future orientation of formal recovery plans are revealing about social choice-making in the face of disaster. First, there was ongoing tension between retaining the colonial character of the city, especially its heritage buildings, and inculcating the values and culture of ¯ mana whenua. Otautahi is a different city now (see Matthewman & Byrd; Montgomery; Pawson; Pickles in this volume). The presence and history of Ng¯ai Tahu are visible and celebrated. Many of the colonial heritage buildings have been demolished—along with 80% of the buildings in the city. In their place, an eclectic mix of restored and new buildings is taking form; in part reflecting the incoherence of formal recovery plans. Second, the ethnic and demographic profile of the city has shifted, with greater diversity. Formal recovery planning did little on this front. Much remains to be done to embrace and celebrate this diversity and multiculturalism (see Garces-Ozanne et al. in this volume). Third, it is debatable whether or not formal recovery planning has adequately prepared the city and its people for a turbulent future (see Matthewman & Byrd in this volume). The city is certainly now more seismically safe than prior to 2010. However, given its location, some areas are still hazard-prone. With the horizontal and critical infrastructure largely repaired by more modern materials, there has been some improved resilience. But the opportunity to redesign the city for the future was not seized.

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Finally, climate change compels a move to a post-fossil fuel political economy. Agility is also necessary to simultaneously realise the poten¯ tial of rapid socio-technical advances. How ready is Otautahi for this future? There have been some improvements to building sustainability. Many people have shifted to fast-tracked greenfield developments on the city outskirts, with associated socio-environmental impacts. The expanded highway system surrounding the central city reinforces an urban design logic-oriented towards cars and reliance on fossil fuels. In short, formal recovery and regeneration efforts have made many improvements to the built fabric of the pre-2010 city. They failed to build an inclusive and innovative city for the future—as Peter Beck had hoped. By contrast, a host of informal actions and transition activities unfolded that provide grounds for cautious optimism about the future (see Cameron; Du Plessis; Matthewman & Byrd; McManus; Montgomery; Pawson; Pickles; Uekusa & Cretney in this volume). Some people started growing food on vacant lots in the inner city. There is a stronger sense of community, and perhaps more empathy and care. As the ruptures to the built environment were repaired, the ruptures to the social order enabled new imaginations and beginnings (Pickles, 2016). It is the ¯ people of Otautahi who are rebuilding this socio-cultural fabric, with new connections and opportunities, ready for a promising, albeit turbulent future. New constellations of civil society actors, and governance actors more generally, were forged in this transition and the associated spaces and settings for interaction. These interactions in ephemeral transitional places contrast starkly with the top-down plans that drove CERA-centred recovery interventions. Even as the latter closed down spaces for local democracy and social innovation, local resistance and dogged determination against overwhelming odds won small victories and created enclaves of opportunity. Marginalised Voices Notwithstanding the signs of communal interaction that spark hope and unity, many have been and are marginalised from recent episodes of communitas and community building (Matthewman, 2015; Matthewman & Uekusa, 2021; see also Du Plessis; Garces-Ozanne et al.; Hayward & Johnson; Lambert; Uekusa & Cretney in this volume). Many immigrants and migrant workers face adversity everyday through racism and linguistic marginalisation (Uekusa & Matthewman, 2017; also Garces-Ozanne et al. in this volume). Self-help capabilities are not an excuse for the retreat of

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the state. Rather, the challenge is to mobilise enabling support; where necessary confronting and resisting oppressive and marginalising practices; and standing up for systemic change. How might these interactions bridge the gendered impact of disasters and the gendered nature of recovery? That the city is now “run” by women is testament to the leadership role that women have been and are playing (see Du Plessis; Matthewman & Byrd in this volume). The voices of migrant and ethnic minorities also need to be heard—in arenas of engagement that are safe and inclusive. The voices of young people and children need to be heard—in arenas of engagement where they craft social choices for their future. The voices of older adults need to be heard (see, e.g., Tuohy et al., 2015). M¯aori voices are being heard, but vigilance is required to ensure that their values, culture, needs and aspirations are not only heard but shape the trajectory of recovery and regeneration. These earthquake experiences framed social choice-making through the remainder of the decade.

Reflections on Waves of Disaster Across the Decade I begin with a reflection on how water in Canterbury inextricably links the environment, culture, the political-economy, democracy and natural hazard risk, before looking at unfolding disasters through the decade. Water: A Connecting Medium The “water issue” flows through the ups and downs of the decade—but has left a dark stain on local democracy. For Canterbury residents, the 2010–2020 decade began with the replacement of democratically elected regional councillors by government-appointed Commissioners; democracy was only fully restored in 2019. This suspension of local democracy was prompted by government concern about alleged inefficient management of water resources in a rapidly changing agri-commerce setting, driven by dairy intensification (Wynyard in this volume). Water is an integrative medium and symbol that binds together the natural environment and its biodiversity with the people of Canterbury and their cultures, social identity and political-economy. It has shaped and is shaping the course of local democracy and disaster risk in the region in the face of climate and global change.

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The story of water in Canterbury mirrors the ebb and flow of governance interactions in arenas of struggle. In sharp contradistinction to the top-down commodification and capture of Canterbury water, in the Manawat¯u region, as part of a Treaty settlement, a de-colonised sociolegal reframing recognised the river as an ancestor of the M¯aori people of Whanganui—an indivisible and living whole (Winter, 2019). In this legislative bright spot, in March 2017, the Whanganui River became the first river in the world to be granted legal personhood (Collins & Esterling, 2019; Ruru, 2018). Unfortunately, in Canterbury, the government’s Janus-faced approach to the politics and management of water, and disaster governance more generally, was laid bare at many points in the 2010–2020 decade of disasters. Port Hills Wildfire The February 2017 Port Hills wildfire, amongst the most significant wildfires in Aotearoa New Zealand history, caught local residents offguard and added to earthquake recovery woes. Local and national reviews were undertaken to assess the cause(s) of the fire and response adequacy to inform future incident management, coordination and community engagement. On the bright side, the Port Hills experience, and subsequent scrutiny of wildfire risk and incident management, was a catalyst for the first major institutional restructure of the fire service since 2002. The reforms should enable more effective wildfire responses. On the dark side, they do little to address the drivers and root causes of wildfire exposure and vulnerability. Land-use planning plays a pivotal role in this regard and, regrettably, was outside the scope of the reviews. Robust planning provisions are necessary to make social choices that contain the spread and intensification of property development at the wildland-urban interface (Kornakova & Glavovic, 2018). More integrated disaster governance processes and practices are needed to coordinate land-use planning, climate change adaptation and CDEM, together with enhanced community engagement and public awareness and education. Montgomery (2018) questions whether lessons were really learned after the Port Hills wildfires. He posits that the reforms manifested another round of elite panic and symbolic gestures. The political and economic drivers of sprawling property development at the wildland-urban interface need to be addressed to contain climate change compounded wildfire risk (Kornakova & Glavovic, 2018).

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Mosque Terrorist Attack The 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings surfaced the dark side of social life in Aotearoa New Zealand: racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Muslim, anti-M¯aori, anti-Pasifika, anti-Asian and anti-migrant sentiments, and the denigration of “the Other” (Thiruselvam, 2019; see also Graces-Ozanne et al.; Pickles in this volume). It also prompted an outpouring of empathy and support. The swift and caring political response, which led to decisive gun reform, is a bright spot in this dismal story. Building safer and more inclusive, tolerant and equitable communities in Aotearoa New Zealand, however, remains an obdurate challenge. Mirnajafi and Barlow (2019) argue that working in authentic partnership with Muslims, ethnic minorities and marginalised social groups is foundational for more than tokenistic solidarity. Doing so is an act of resistance against the status quo that can be transformative (Thiruselvam, 2019). ¯ This is especially apt in increasingly diverse and multi-cultural Otautahi (Garces-Ozanne et al.; Pickles in this volume). Climate Change The mismatch between the need for rapid transformative change to stem global warming, and adapt to climate change, and equivocation on climate change action casts a dark shadow over the 2010–2020 decade (Archie et al., 2018). However, there are promising signs of change with a palpable shift away from the insipid climate change response by the three-term National-led government (2008–2017) to assertive action by the post-2017 Labour-led government. But is it too little too late; and how does this impinge on local social choices? Far from being a natural hazard of distant future concern, climate change is socially produced and constructed and has immediate implications for social choice-making. Since the mid-1980s, rural Canterbury has faced double-exposure—the hegemony of neoliberalism coupled with escalating climate change impacts (Burton & Peoples, 2014). Disaster ¯ experience in Otautahi over the last decade further complicates this predicament, revealing the multiple exposures faced by people in the city, with waves of disaster compounded by climate change and rising sociotechnical precarity (Hayward & Johnson; Matthewman & Byrd; Pawson in this volume).

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¯ A series of floods and extreme coastal storm/erosion events in Otautahi in the latter half of the decade was a spur for action. Initial technically oriented CCC work to address escalating sea-level rise risk sparked controversy. Matters came to a head towards the end of the decade. In early 2019, school children protested against government inaction on climate change. The CCC declared a climate and ecological emergency on 23 May 2019. Provisions to tackle climate change were being more fully developed by the city and Ng¯ai Tahu with other partners in 2021 even as school children marched again in protest against perceived persistent inadequate government climate action. COVID-19 Decisive government action, largely supported by the private sector and civil society and symbolised by the “team of 5 million” mantra, have in the main managed to contain the virus up to mid-2021. But this required Cabinet to wield extraordinary authority in marshalling the pandemic response (Hayward, 2020). This extraordinary level of authority has been necessary. It has been appropriately applied given the imminent threat to life, social well-being and public health. Unlike the panicked response after the initial earthquakes in 2010–2011, the government did not resort to draconian legislative or constitutional changes (Hayward, 2020). Rather, the evolving pandemic governance response has been crafted through reflexive deliberations between elected officials, public servants and scientists, in consultation with tangata whenua, and leaders of key community groups and business. Notwithstanding room for improvement, a decisive and agile multi-level, all-of-government approach has been developed, including an effective informal alignment of local and central Government that augurs well for the future (Reid, 2020). But it is early days, and there is much to learn. One bright spot has been the M¯aori pandemic response. Better social outcomes appear to have been achieved by many M¯aori, reflected in lower relative infection rates. The nationwide M¯aori strengths-based COVID-19 response looks beyond identifying vulnerabilities to understanding and unlocking the resources, capabilities and potential that might otherwise be latent in communities (McMeeking & Savage, 2020). As experience over the ¯ last decade in Otautahi shows, however, the drivers and root causes of vulnerability need to be addressed even if a strengths-based approach can be marshalled to enhance overall community resilience.

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Closing Reflections: Towards Ethical, Engaged, Deliberative and Reflexive CDS In Chapter 2, Anthony Oliver-Smith outlined foundational elements of CDS, spotlighting vulnerability at its heart. The ideology and institutions of neoliberalism foment symbolic and structural violence that create and compound vulnerability, especially when superimposed on a legacy of colonialism and contemporary prejudice. State authoritarianism compounds vulnerability. These ideological and structural forces are concurrently resisted and reinforced by social choice-making amidst disaster. Social choices are constructed through contested interactions between governance actors in arenas that are simultaneously places of engagement and struggle. Hence the question: What do the social choices ¯ made in Otautahi over the last decade reveal about, first, the root causes and drivers of vulnerability; and second, preparing for a turbulent future? Enabling and empathetic disaster governance responses were shining lights in an otherwise dark sky. A people-centred approach that engages with entangled and escalating contemporary risk is foundational for CDS scholarship and practice. A strong ethical foundation is the basis of a critical praxis of disaster governance to avert dangerous climate change, environmental destruction and inequitable and unjust development in, what is now, a COVID-19 world. The dark stain of disaster governance practices rooted in neoliberalism and authoritarianism, manifest in the leadership style of the Minister for CER and the organisational culture of CERA, was counter-balanced by grassroots resistance and efforts to redefine community recovery and resilience in dire circumstances. Momentary encounters between community groups and other governance actors, temporary installations, symbolic artwork and ephemeral projects might seem trivial in the context of major disasters. But their cumulative impact can be transformative over time. They are a powerful counter-narrative to the privileging of narrow economic and elite interests. They leave an indelible mark on people and their social-ecological landscape. They redefine the ambience and structure of a recovering city, in anticipation of a promising albeit turbulent future. The bridging and enabling roles played by local authority leaders and frontline staff are crucial but contingent on the direction and capability of both central and local government. The contrasting realities faced by the CCC and WDC, and the (in)adequacy of their governance responses,

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were exposed by the earthquakes. Even when local government exemplifies “best practice”, its ability to help address the root causes and drivers of vulnerability is constrained by higher governance levels. The limits of CERA’s top-down, blueprint orientation to recovery planning were laid bare. In essence, CERA plans neither harnessed the productive potential of conflicting values and interests, nor enabled a people-centred vision for the future. Critical disaster governance is a negotiated process involving all governance actors in an historically situated and locality-specific context. It is founded on visionary thinking, inclusivity and robust deliberation, underpinned by hard-won public trust and legitimacy. It fosters reflexivity and adaptative capacity to enable plan formulation and implementation that are responsive to inevitable change. Critical disaster governance is a fit-for-purpose social choicemaking process that is founded on human values and aspirations—defined by those living in disaster. It unlocks agonistic potential to leverage divergent perspectives for the common good and confronts the drivers and root causes of vulnerability. It is human-scaled, embraces diversity and difference and celebrates the human spirit. It is founded on human wisdom and values; perhaps most cogently articulated by TRoNT under the leadership of T¯a Mark Solomon: Aroha nui ki te tangata—love for all people—a fitting foundation stone for CDS in Aotearoa New Zealand, and perhaps elsewhere. In closing, a decade after the first earthquake, Peter Beck observed (2020): I reflect on what a transformation has happened here over the last decade. … what was once a place of trauma is now an oasis of healing. The spirit, the wairua of the people and of this land will not be defeated. … It is a huge collaborative and sometimes fraught effort between grassroots community and voluntary and statutory agencies. There is a long way to go … I can feel this land healing from trauma, embracing creativity, connectedness between us and the environment. This is an analogy for what the world is going through now. How are we going to shape our future beyond this pandemic? … We have a chance to challenge the grotesque inequality, self-interest, poverty and injustice of the old normal. … We need a vision of well-being and equity for all humanity and our fragile planet. … The human spirit of care, compassion and courage will not be denied. This is the spirit that can shape our future. Out of this trauma can come hope and new life. I believe that love is stronger than hate, that life is stronger than death. (para. 2–11)

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¯ Glossary: Te Reo Maori Words and Translations

Aotearoa New Zealand Aroha Kindness, affection, love, compassion Aroha nui ki te tangata Love to all people Aruhe Fern root Awa River Haka Cultural dance performance Hap¯ u Kinship group He toki kit e rika A M¯aori pre-trade training scheme Inaka Whitebait Iwi Tribal kin group K¯ainga Home, village, settlement, habitat, dwelling Kaitiaki Guardians Kaitiakitanga Guardianship Kaiwhakahaere Chairman, manager K¯akahi Freshwater mussels Karakia Prayers Kaum¯atua M¯aori elders Kaupapa Values Kia atawhai ki te iwi Care for the people Kokopu A species of whitebait Kotahitanga Unity, solidarity, collective action K¯ owaro Canterbury mudfish © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0

379

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¯ GLOSSARY: TE REO MAORI WORDS AND TRANSLATIONS

Mahi aroha Work done out of love for the people Mahinga kai Food resources Man¯akitanga Respect, hospitality Mana motuhake Self-determination, independence, sovereignty Mana whenua People with customary authority in a territory M¯aori Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand Marae A complex of land buildings and facilities that usually belong to a specific hap¯u—kinship group Mauri Life force Ng¯a maata waka Visitors from other tribal territories Ng¯a manukura Leadership Ng¯a taonga tuku iho Knowledge that is handed down Ng¯a wh¯ariki manaaki Welcome mats Ng¯ai Tahu The M¯aori people of the southern islands of New Zealand—Te Waipounamu Ng¯ai Tu¯ahuriri The hap¯u (kinship group, subtribe) with mana whenua over Christchurch City P¯a Fortified village, stockade P¯akeh¯a A person of predominantly European descent Papat¯ u¯aanuku The earth mother Paraki Common smelt Pora Turnip P¯ ur¯akau Stories Rangatahi Youth Rangatira Chief Rangatiratanga The right to exercise authority R¯ u whenua Earthquakes R¯ uaumoko Atua (God) of earthquakes R¯ unanga Sub-tribes T¯a Sir Taiwharu Whitebait Takiw¯a Region, territory T¯aniko To finger weave, embroid Tangata whaiora An individual or group seeking health Tangata whenua People of the land, the M¯aori people Taonga Treasures, prized resources Tapu Spiritual restriction Tauiwi Non-M¯aori Taurapa Canoe stern post

¯ GLOSSARY: TE REO MAORI WORDS AND TRANSLATIONS

381

Te Pae The central city convention centre Te R¯ unanga o Ng¯a Maata Waka Urban M¯aori authority for Te Waipounamu Te Tiriti o Waitangi The Treaty of Waitangi Tikanga M¯aori cultural protocols Tino rangatiratanga Sovereignty T¯ıpuna Ancestors Tuna Eel T¯ uranga The central city library Turangawaewae Home ground, place to stand W¯ahi tapu Sacred place Wai Water Waiata Songs W¯aik¯ oura Freshwater crayfish Waka Carved canoe Watene M¯aori Warranted M¯aori Wardens Whaiora Seeking health Whakamanuhiri Process of welcome Whakamoemiti Cleansing rituals Whakanoa The process of removing tapu Whakapapa Genealogy Whakaruruhau Safety Wh¯anau Family, extended family Whanaungatanga Relationships Wh¯ariki Welcome mats, woven mats Whenua Placenta or land

Index

A Abbotsford landslide, 61 access, 96, 115, 117, 119, 132, 169, 178, 189–191, 195–197, 221, 224, 230, 251, 263, 327, 329, 340, 343, 355 political access, 228 accumulation capital accumulation, 113, 146 disastrous accumulation, 33 primitive accumulation, 144, 146, 147, 157 activism, 37, 88, 129, 136 adaptation adaptation ability, 228 adaptive creativity, 310 adaptive response, 359 climate change adaptation, 45, 332, 370 Agamben, Giorgio, 34, 43 aged care, 212, 214 ageing society, 13 agency. See social agency

agility, 368 agonic pluralism, 356 agonism, 356 agri-commerce, 369 agriculture industrial agriculture, 144 intensive agriculture, 147 AIDS epidemic, 46 All Right?, 3, 126, 134, 136, 181 Al Noor Mosque, 156 Alternative future, 43, 133 altruism, 40, 65, 73, 227, 357 Anchorage earthquake, 66 anchor projects, 4, 75, 76, 81, 90, 96, 99, 290, 323, 325, 329, 331, 361, 367 Anglican, 305 Anglican establishment, 282 antagonism, 135, 282, 291, 313 Anthropocene, 11 anthropogenic, 14, 222 anti-Asian sentiment, 13, 371 anti-immigrant sentiment, 13

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 S. Uekusa et al. (eds.), A Decade of Disaster Experiences ¯ in Otautahi Christchurch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6863-0

383

384

INDEX

anti-migration rhetoric, 14 anti-racism rallies, 96 aquifer, 149–151, 154, 157, 204, 270 Ardern, Jacinda, 80 Arrangement on the Principles and Controls on the Recruitment and Protection of Filipino Workers in New Zealand, 228 Asian migrant worker, 13, 19, 212, 213, 219, 220, 222–225, 227–230 authoritarian politics, 14 authoritarianism, 13 ¯ akaro Network (AvON), 287, Avon Ot¯ 327–329 Avon River, 328 ¯ akaro River, 72, 99, 263, Avon Ot¯ 290 awa, 154, 156

B Banks Peninsula, 259 barrier cultural barrier, 130 language barrier, 218 Beaven, Peter, 283 Beck, Peter, 354, 366, 368, 374 Beck, Ulrich, 13, 61 Bennett, Barnaby, 95, 300, 317 Bhopal, 29 biculturalism, 88. See also colonialism; Indigenous; M¯aori; Ng¯ai Tahu biodiversity, 13, 331, 369 Birkland, Thomas, 81 Black Lives Matter (BLM), 37, 88 blank slate approach, 318 Bloomfield, Ashley, 80 blueprint, 15, 75, 81, 202, 206, 280, 290, 307, 318, 320–324, 326, 327, 329, 331, 367, 374 bounce back, 132, 179

bounce back discourse, 132 Boxing Day Tsunami, 306 Brazil, 34, 97 Breathe Housing Community, 99 bright spots, 354, 356–359, 361, 362, 364, 366, 370–372 Brownlee, Gerry, 70, 74, 264, 279, 358 brown space, 270 build back better (BBB), 20, 77, 81, 113, 127, 204, 255, 277, 278, 281, 282, 287, 290 failure to BBB, 281. See also bounce back; bounce back discourse; discourse of resilience burial Burial and Cremation Act, 257 eco-burial, 267, 269, 271 green burial, 260, 261, 268, 269, 271, 272 natural burial, 267, 270 Burnham, 151 burnout, 135 Business-as-usual, 72, 79 bus interchange, 91 Butler, Judith, 44 buy-out package, 326, 365 buzzword, 131

C Canterbury Association, 58, 59 Canterbury Communities’ Earthquake Recovery Network (CanCERN), 74, 174, 175, 362, 363 Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB), 99, 151, 153, 182, 318, 347 Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act 2011 (CER), 74, 76, 115, 285, 320, 322, 323, 325, 329, 357, 358, 360, 362–364, 366, 373

INDEX

Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA), 7, 10, 12, 74–76, 89, 96, 115, 117, 132, 167, 201, 202, 206, 246, 271, 285, 307, 322, 329, 345, 357–368, 373, 374 Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Review Panel, 278 Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act 2010, 71 Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act 2010 (CERR Act), 71, 285, 344, 345, 357 Canterbury earthquake sequence, 5–7, 15, 18–21, 57, 60, 61, 69, 78, 80, 81, 87, 113, 119, 126, 128, 130, 134, 136, 146, 156, 168, 170, 171, 173, 181–183, 188, 193, 194, 197, 198, 201, 205, 206, 212, 213, 216, 222, 237, 238, 248, 249, 255, 256, 262, 269, 271, 278, 300, 306, 313, 317, 336, 344, 359 Canterbury Earthquakes Insurance Tribunal (CEIT), 244, 248, 249 Canterbury Earthquake Temporary Accommodation Service (CETAS), 221 Canterbury economy, 147 Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce, 279 Canterbury floods, 289, 343 Canterbury Television Building (CTV), 7, 64, 196 capacity adaptation capacity, 224 adaptive capacity, 31, 135 coping capacity, 135, 224 self-organizing capacity, 65 capital cultural capital, 286 economic capital, 286

385

social capital, 14, 20, 194, 195, 212, 224–228, 230, 286, 309, 345, 363 capitalism capitalist system, 33, 146, 147 contemporary global capitalism, 36 contemporary neoliberal capitalism, 19, 157 global capitalism, 148 carbon management, 332 car-dependent paradigm, 326 Carrell, Bishop Peter, 98 Carter, Amy, 290 Carter, John, 69 catastrophe, 6, 32, 44, 46, 111, 144, 156, 277 low visibility catastrophe, 144 Catastrophe Response Programme, 239 catchment, 150 catchment management, 330 Cathedral Anglican Cathedral, 97 Cathedral Square, 4, 93, 342 Catholic Cathedral, 98 Christ Church Cathedral, 282 Cave Creek, 68 Caygill, David, 291 cemetery Akaroa Cemetery, 257 Avonhead Cemetery, 263 CCC Cemetery Master Plan, 259 Cemeteries Master Plan, 258–261, 266, 267, 272 eco-burial cemetery, 267, 268 green cemetery, 267 Templeton Cemetery, 270 Waimari Cemetery, 258 Yaldhurst Cemetery, 269 central business district (CBD), 7, 8, 10, 171, 174, 278, 281, 289, 318, 323

386

INDEX

Central City Business Association, 325 Central City Plan, 74, 76, 366 Chernobyl, 29 “Chicago boys”, 60 Chile, 60, 306 Christchurch Art Gallery, 69, 73 Christchurch Branch of the National Council of Women of New Zealand (NCWNZ), 168 Christchurch Central Development Unit (CCDU), 75, 81, 93 Christchurch Central Recovery Plan, 4, 15, 89, 280, 323 Christchurch City Council (CCC), 4, 8, 10, 63, 69, 72–75, 78, 81, 88, 93, 95, 99, 100, 131, 174, 190, 201–203, 213, 229, 238, 250, 251, 259, 260, 262, 263, 269, 270, 272, 280, 286, 305, 307, 308, 318, 320, 322, 324, 326, 359–362, 364–366, 372, 373 Christchurch Earthquake, 7, 64, 72, 87, 110, 112, 114, 129, 169, 193, 199, 242, 263, 300, 301, 304, 305, 357 Christchurch Foundation, 290 Christchurch massacre. See Christchurch Mosque attacks Christchurch Mosque attacks, 58, 64, 80 Christchurch NZ, 225, 290 Christchurch Ruptures , 18, 87, 88, 95–97, 305 Christchurch Town Hall, 323 church, 112, 220, 258 citizen senior citizen, 283 young citizen, 335, 338, 339, 347 city, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 20, 21, 34, 69, 70, 72, 76, 87–93, 95–102, 110, 113–115, 119, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131–134,

167, 169–173, 175, 177–183, 188, 200–203, 206, 213, 214, 216, 218, 223, 226, 230, 250, 254, 255, 264, 270, 272, 278–285, 287, 289, 290, 301, 302, 304–308, 312, 313, 317, 318, 321–327, 329–332, 336–338, 340–345, 354, 356, 358, 367–369, 371 centre, 91–93, 99, 171, 265, 279, 281, 283, 290, 322, 327, 330, 331, 354, 360, 361. See also central business district (CBD); de-centred city; extreme city; Garden City; gateway city; magnet city; post-colonial city; Sensing City; sporting city; urbanism; urban regeneration civic mobilisation, 341 Civil Defence, 60, 61, 64, 65, 69, 73, 78, 193, 195, 205, 321, 341, 343 civil society, 40, 224, 355, 359, 362–364, 368, 372 ClaimCenter technology, 240 Claims Resolutions Services Ltd, 244 Clarke, Lee, 66, 76, 81, 307 climate change, 11, 13, 14, 17, 42–44, 96, 133, 144, 154, 157, 254, 319, 332, 342, 353, 368, 370–373 climate change adaptation, 45, 331, 332, 370 climate emergency, 14, 254 Clinton, Bill, 278 coastal erosion, 372 coastal storm, 372 coliform, 150 collective collective bond, 129 collective citizen action, 339 collective grief, 340

INDEX

collective response, 19, 126, 129–131, 136, 339 collectivity, 131, 173 colonialism, 19, 30, 36, 96, 212, 373 coloniality, 36, 37, 41 colonial policies, 41 colonial urban development, 321 colonisation, 58, 59, 109, 111, 113 colour-coded district, 320 columbaria, 259, 272 command-and-control, 12, 132, 255, 256, 281, 338. See also disaster response, centralised disaster response commodification, 146, 370 commodification of nature, 147, 157 communitas , 171, 173, 176, 368. See also altruism community alternative community, 345 CALD community, 12, 199, 217, 230 Christchurch Afghani community, 179 community action, 129, 364 community capacity, 131, 136 community empowerment, 102, 133 community engagement, 96, 136, 230, 254, 329, 337, 354, 358, 360, 370 community gardens, 128, 133, 330, 339 community-led mobilisation, 343 community-led response, 128–130, 340 community organisation, 190 community-oriented research, 11 community recovery, 6, 345, 357, 366, 373

387

community resilience, 18, 126–128, 130, 131, 136, 137, 205, 363, 372 community spirit, 305, 312, 354 community spiritedness, 129 community vulnerability, 337 creative community, 313 diverse communities, 97, 101, 179, 189, 193 homogeneous community, 225 Indigenous community, 116 inter-community, 226 migrant community, 199, 226 Muslim community, 8, 168, 199, 200, 343 online community, 225 refugee community, 199 sense of community, 97, 172, 225, 287, 368 community resilience, 18, 126–128, 130, 132, 133, 135–137, 205, 363 community resilience building, 14 connectedness. See social connectedness construction, 8, 33, 58, 68, 169, 204, 213–217, 241, 289, 323 colonial construction, 89 contagious disease, 11, 13, 135, 313 convention centre. See Te Pae Cook, James, 88, 93, 176 corporatisation, 60 cosmopolitanism, 255 cost-effectiveness, 367 COVID-19, 8, 11, 18, 21, 44–46, 58, 71, 79–81, 96, 99, 102, 108, 111–113, 135, 136, 173, 178, 183, 198, 218, 224, 226, 289, 312, 331, 336, 337, 339, 342, 343, 346, 372, 373 COVID-19 global pandemic, 4, 8, 126, 134, 338

388

INDEX

Creative Novelty Value Shift Model, 309, 310 creativity adaptive creativity, 310 creative destruction, 299 creative ideas, 15, 21, 300, 303–305, 308, 309, 312, 313 creative substitution, 304 opportunistic creativity, 303 post-disaster creativity, 301, 308, 309 value of creativity, 309 Creech, Wyatt, 152 cremation bio-cremation, 259, 270, 272 Burial and Cremation Act, 257 Cremation Society of Canterbury, 263 water cremation, 271 crematoria, 256, 258, 262 Linwood Crematorium, 263 crisis ecological crisis, 144 human health crisis, 144 critical disaster studies (CDS), 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 21, 28–30, 33–38, 40–45, 87, 109, 119, 120, 136, 137, 173, 183, 222, 223, 353–356, 364, 366, 373, 374 critical Indigenous disaster studies (CIDS), 18, 107, 109, 119 critical perspective, 14, 27, 28 critical theory, 28, 43 critical voices, 19, 20, 137 Crown, 58, 59, 64, 74, 76, 77, 91, 93, 94, 156, 238, 241, 247, 249, 250, 264, 289, 318, 322, 323, 329, 331, 361 cultural competency, 225, 228 cultural critique, 44

culturally and linguistically diverse communities (CALD), 12, 199, 217 Curtis, Bruce, 286 Curtis, Leanne, 174, 180

D dairy dairy boom, 151, 152, 156, 157 dairy cattle, 148, 151, 156 dairy cow, 148, 151 dairy farming, 147, 148, 156, 157 dairy heifer, 151 dairy intensification, 369 intensive dairy farming, 144, 148–151, 153 Dalziel, Lianne, 88, 228, 343, 358, 361 Dance-O-Mat, 95. See also Gap Filler Dann, James, 281, 285, 289, 290 Darfield Earthquake, 7, 67–69, 71, 129, 170, 239, 340, 344, 356, 357 dark spots, 354, 356, 359, 362, 364 death death legislation, 256 death management, 20, 271, 273 death practice, 254–256, 273 sustainable management of death, 271 decade of disaster, 6, 13, 136, 183, 353, 356, 370 de-centred city, 100 decision-making accountable decision-making, 336 democratic decision-making, 336 participatory decision-making, 21, 332 transparent decision-making, 336 decolonisation, 36, 92. See also Indigenous

INDEX

deliberation, 21, 320, 372, 374 democracy democratic decision-making, 347 democratic future, 17 democratic participation, 132 liberal democracy, 336 Department of Conservation (DoC), 68, 261 Department of Health (DoH), 150, 151 depoliticisation, 132 deportation, 221 deregulation, 58, 60. See also neoliberalism Development Christchurch, 76, 361 Dewes, Norm, 189 Diamond Harbour, 271 Diamond Harbour Memorial Gardens, 269 disaster accumulation, 109 agents, 11 altruism, 129 causation, 29, 30, 36, 39 drivers of disaster, 39 environmental disaster, 143, 144, 321 everyday disaster, 11, 130, 222, 224 freshwater disaster, 144, 145 human-made disaster, 156 neoliberal disaster, 33 nuclear disaster, 30 rapid onset disaster, 11 slow-onset disaster, 8, 11, 126, 143 structural aspects of disaster, 28 technological disaster, 29, 135 disaster capitalism, 6, 40, 41, 45, 66, 111, 255 disaster capitalist, 303, 306

389

disaster governance, 137, 356, 359, 362, 364, 370, 373. See also governance disaster impact, 29, 366 disaster insurance event, 15 disaster management, 20, 60, 63, 64, 70, 71, 78, 81, 111, 129, 205, 256, 273 disaster memorialisation, 254, 263 disaster mythology, 129 disaster preparedness, 14, 206, 254 disaster prevention, 43 disaster recovery, 14, 132, 179, 194, 216, 222, 254, 337, 340, 347 Disaster Research Center (DRC), 65, 66 disaster response, 18, 19, 80, 127, 134, 189, 193, 206, 255, 272, 338 centralised disaster response, 132 disaster risk, 11, 35, 39, 41, 196, 369 disaster risk management (DRM), 31, 34, 39, 42, 43 disaster risk reduction (DRR), 11, 14, 31, 34, 43, 110, 112, 113, 118–120, 205 disaster studies, 18, 37, 112, 115, 118–120, 143, 156, 224, 253, 254 disaster tourism, 6 disastrous accumulation, 33, 109 discourse anti-immigration discourse, 212 bounce back discourse, 132 discourse of resilience, 132 discourse of resilience, 132 discrimination, 108, 118, 130, 218, 228 racial discrimination, 223 disempowerment, 344 disempowering, 35, 131, 222 disparities

390

INDEX

economic disparities, 4 wealth disparities, 14 displacement, 36, 38, 42, 198 disposal, 38, 256, 257, 259, 260, 267 body disposal, 253, 255, 258, 260, 270, 271 dispute, 72, 111, 116, 240, 245–249 dispute resolution services, 237, 246, 365 diverse, 20, 35, 95, 97, 126, 168, 217, 218, 230, 255, 371 diverse city, 213 diverse voices, 19, 336 diversity, 18, 28, 97, 99, 117, 120, 128, 206, 224, 229, 313, 332, 366, 367, 374 diversity of perspectives, 37 downward social spiral, 338 Drinking Water Standards, 153 drought, 154 Du Plessis, Rosemary, 19, 131, 168, 288, 338, 357, 363, 368, 369 Durie, Mason, 196 E earned strength, 136 Earthquake Commission (EQC), 10, 70, 72, 77, 79, 178, 195, 237–241, 244, 246–248, 251, 302, 321, 365, 366 Eastern suburbs, 7, 72, 177, 190–193, 286, 318, 329 E. coli, 153, 154 ecology, 31, 127 economic economic boost, 215 economic challenge, 126 economic disparities, 4 economic growth, 13, 41, 45, 109, 126 economic interest, 38, 156 economic opportunity, 215, 216

limited economic growth, 126 ecosystems, 19, 31, 108, 131, 150, 154, 157, 364 Eden Project, 330 Edgecumbe earthquake, 61 elite panic, 18, 64, 76, 80, 306, 307, 312, 358, 370 Ellesmere District, 150 emancipatory engagement, 359 emergency aid, 40 emergent emergent group, 341, 357, 362 emergent leadership, 343 emigration, 215 employment employment law, 220 employment rights, 220 empowerment, 20, 45, 222, 292 community empowerment, 133 endurance. See resilience Engineering New Zealand (ENZ), 247, 248 English competency, limited, 220 Englishness, 97, 224, 305 English settlement, 9. See also colonialism; colonial policies; settlement entrepreneur commercial entrepreneurs, 301 social entrepreneur, 301 environmental commons, 147 environmental degradation, 33 environmental destruction, 38, 43, 45, 373 environmental justice, 14, 38, 44 environmental regulation, 144 environmental security, 42 Environment Canterbury Act, 144 Environment Canterbury (ECan), 67, 73, 81, 144, 145, 149, 151, 152, 154, 197, 203, 291, 320, 345 epistemology, 44

INDEX

epistemological standpoint, 127 equity, 12, 374 Erebus crash, 61 Essential Skills Work visa, 213, 214 ethnic ethnic business, 217, 226 ethnic minority, 97 ethnic network, 217, 230 ethnic representation, 230 pan-ethnic, 226. See also whiteness ethnicity, 13, 97, 193, 212 ethnicity-related discrimination, 224 everyday disasters, 11, 130, 222–224 Exchange Christchurch (XCHC), 313 exclusion, 146, 346 institutionalised exclusion, 221 exploitation exploitation of human labour, 32, 45 exploitation of natural environment, 32, 45 resource exploitation, 39, 41 extraversion, 304, 310, 312 extreme city, 9 extremism, 14. See also hate; terror attacks F farmers, 9, 59, 148, 149, 214 Farmy Army, 129 fatigue, 135, 308 February earthquake. See Christchurch Earthquake feminist research, 44. See also feminist researcher; gender feminist researcher, 169 Fendalton, 287 festival of architecture, design and food (FESTA), 95 Filipino Filipino construction worker, 213, 219

391

Filipino population, 213 Fire and Emergency New Zealand, 73, 79 first responders (FR), 66, 169 flooding, 8, 42, 63, 167, 183, 337 flood, 8, 9, 331 Food Resilience Network (FRN), 99, 133 food resource, 147 Forensic Investigation of Disasters (FORIN), 39 Frankfurt School, 28 Free Thinkers, 302, 303 freshwater, 19, 143, 144, 146, 147, 150, 152, 153, 155–157 Friedman, Milton, 299, 300 Fritz, Charles, 11, 65, 307, 308 Future Canterbury Network, 362 future-proof city, 280 G Gap Filler, 72, 95, 97, 129, 301, 313. See also temporary urbanism Garden City, 89, 93, 99, 289, 324 gateway city, 8 Gehl, Jan, 321–323, 331 gender, 12, 13, 37, 169, 212, 292, 337. See also inequality; intersectionality; Old Boy(s) Network; oppression genealogies, 194, 195 German Committee for Disaster Reduction, 39 globalisation, 14, 40 Global Network for Civil Society Organizations for Disaster Reduction (GNDR), 42 global pandemic, 14. See also COVID-19 global warming, 371 Gluckman, Sir Peter, 57 GNS Science, 10, 63, 241

392

INDEX

Godley, John Robert, 88 gold rush, 215 Goodall, Anake, 278, 281, 286 governance authoritarian governance, 21, 331 collaborative governance, 320, 327 corporate governance, 289 critical disaster governance, 356, 374 global governance, 40 governability, 39 governance structures, 21, 282, 318, 331 inclusive governance, 227, 230 network governance, 320 pandemic governance, 372. See also disaster governance Government entities, 38 Greater Christchurch Claims Resolution Service (GCCRS), 246–248 Greater Christchurch Regeneration (GCR), 329 Greater Christchurch Urban Development Strategy (UDS), 100, 320 greenfield, 318, 325–327, 331, 368 greening, 254–257, 261, 270, 272, 273 Greening the Rubble, 72, 95, 301 green spine, 330, 331 green void, 266 Grimshaw, Mike, 281 groundwater, 4, 126, 149–151, 153, 155 growth economic growth, 13, 41, 45, 109, 219 population growth, 213 H Hagley Park, 281

Haitian earthquake, 27 haka, 342 Hakatere river, 150 Halliday, Jessica, 95, 323 Hamilton, 114, 151 Hamilton, John, 72, 88 hap¯ u, 9, 129, 194, 196, 197, 280 Harvey, David, 31, 33, 34, 147, 319, 325 hate, 13, 14, 224. See also extremism Hawkes Bay gastroenteritis outbreak, 63 hazard anthropogenic hazards, 45 multi-hazard, 223 natural hazard, 11, 29, 30, 33, 41, 46, 61, 119, 156, 174, 183, 195, 369, 371 technological hazard, 29, 30, 42 hazardscape, 120 health care, 191, 193, 195, 212, 214 hegemony, 93, 254, 371 hegemony of Western science, 37 Heremaia, Christine, 259, 267, 272 Hillsborough stadium disaster, 64 historically disenfranchised communities, 45 homogeneity, 224 Honig, Bonnie, 291, 292, 336 Horkheimer, Max, 28 hospitality, 8, 15, 194, 212, 214 human emancipation, 28 human-environment interaction, 212, 222 human-induced hazard, 8, 11, 19 humanism, 40 humanitarian assistance, 40 humanitarian emergency assistance, 42 humanitarianism, 40, 129 human resourcefulness. See resourcefulness

INDEX

Human Rights Commission, 144 human security, 230 Hungary, 34 Hurricane Katrina, 27, 33, 40, 42, 70, 77, 215 Hurricane Sandy, 27 Hurunui river, 150 Hutchinson, Lonnie, 90 hypervisible, 222

I Iafeta, Ivan, 281, 289 ideological conservatism, 28 immigrant. See migrant Immigration New Zealand (INZ), 214, 217 impoverishment, 13 inclusivity, 12, 374 inclusiveness, 134, 229 inclusive practice, 336 India, 34, 213, 218, 219, 226 Indigenous Indigenous communities, 38, 108–111, 113, 114, 117, 119, 120, 130 Indigenous knowledges (IK), 109, 205 Indigenous leadership, 338 Indigenous Peoples, 18, 107–109, 111–113, 119, 120, 358, 359 Indigenous population, 109, 146 Indigenous sovereignty, 111, 114 Indigenous Urbanism, 9, 280 individualisation individualising, 228 individual solutions, 34, 35 individualism, 31, 60 inequality economic inequity, 46, 130, 223 income inequality, 9, 126 inequalities, 11, 19, 183, 320, 332

393

intergenerational inequality, 337 inequity, 11, 13, 14, 337 information, 101, 109, 178, 188, 190, 202, 225, 230, 231, 239, 240, 251, 259, 280, 287, 300, 306, 347, 363, 364 information asymmetry, 220 infrastructure century-old infrastructure, 279 critical infrastructure, 9, 13, 357, 367 horizontal infrastructure, 278 infrastructure decline, 14 physical infrastructure, 131 social infrastructure, 131, 217 innovation grassroot innovation, 307 methodological innovations, 36 inorganic nitrogen, 150 institutional architecture, 359, 364 institutional culture, 360. See also organisational culture institutionalised racism, 11, 219. See also racism insurance insurance battle, 5 insurance claims, 20, 135, 173, 243, 244, 247, 248 insurance payout, 174, 175 private insurance, 60, 70, 72, 244, 247, 365 Insurance Council of New Zealand, 69 Insurance (Prompt Settlement of Claims for Uninhabitable Residential Property) Bill, 238 interdisciplinary, 28 interment, 253, 259, 263, 272 internal migration, 101, 213 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 144

394

INDEX

International Monetary Fund (IMF), 32 International student, 218 intersectionality, 36, 37, 44, 109 invisibilisation invisibilising, 221 irrigation intensive irrigation, 151 irrigation scheme, 67, 147, 152, 154 Islington, 151 isolation, 80, 118, 226 iwi, 12, 114, 129, 156, 190, 191, 193, 195–197, 201–203, 205, 206, 280, 282, 359

J Janus-faced approach, 370 Japan, triple disaster, 30 Jefferies, Margaret, 363 Johnson, Sam, 12, 13, 21, 72, 74, 96, 129, 193, 289, 340–342, 363, 368, 371 Joy, Mike, 144, 148, 149, 156 Justice Precinct. See Te Omeka

K Kahu Matarau, 90 Kaiapoi, 100, 325, 329, 361 Kaik¯ oura earthquakes, 63, 156, 188, 198, 205, 206, 289 k¯ainga, 89 kaitiaki, 155, 156, 196, 202 kaitiakitanga, 194, 197, 205, 288 karakia, 196, 200, 342 kaum¯atua, 192, 194, 196 kaupapa, 91, 129, 191, 194, 199, 288, 364 Kelsey, Jane, 9, 59 Key, John, 70, 152

Klein, Naomi, 40, 41, 45, 66, 76, 111, 117, 291, 303, 306. See also disaster capitalism Kobayashi, Audrey, 96 k¯ orero, 91 Koselleck, Reinhart, 282, 283, 292 kotahitanga, 194 KPMG, 279, 280

L laboratory, 280, 285 Christchurch as living laboratory, 16, 20 labour bonded labour, 219 labour skill, 228 migrant labour, 19 skilled labour, 214, 215, 219 wage labour, 146 Labour government, 59, 60, 147 Labour Inspectorate, 220, 229 Labour market labour market gaps, 19 secondary labour market, 220 labour shortage, 219, 224 shortages of labour, 8 Lancaster Park, 4, 281 land agricultural land, 143, 145, 151 land intensification, 287 land use, 148, 254, 259, 270, 272, 325, 337 privatization of land, 146 Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), 10, 238, 250, 251, 329, 330, 365 Land Use Recovery Plan (LURP), 325 language language barrier, 223 language-based discrimination, 223

INDEX

language competency, 218 language skills, 225, 228 Latimer Square, 254 Latour, Bruno, 111 leadership community leadership, 338, 340 emergent leadership, 343 Indigenous leadership, 338 youth leadership, 339 Le Bon, Gustave, 65 legal procedure, 20 legal support, 7, 20 legislation, 20, 67, 68, 71–74, 78, 80, 107, 132, 200, 201, 205, 258, 273, 285, 320, 321, 329, 345, 357 Level 4 lockdown, 8, 134, 338, 342 lockdown, 5, 8, 79, 80, 135, 183, 313, 342 Life in Vacant Spaces (LiVS), 95. See also temporary urbanism Lincoln, 100, 151, 325 linguicism, 223 linguistic minority, 223 Linwood Islamic Centre, 156 liquefaction, 7, 110, 129, 191–193, 249, 318, 321, 326, 327, 341 litigation, 77, 237, 241, 244, 245, 248, 251 Little High Eatery, 325 Local Government Act (LGA), 202, 320 loneliness, 226 Lunday, James, 282 Luxemburg, Rosa, 146 Lyttelton Timebanks, 128

M Macfie, Rebecca, 12, 175, 178, 281, 301 magnet city, 279

395

Mahaanui Iwi Management Plan, 197, 203 mahi aroha, 194, 198 Mahinga kai. See food resource maladaptation, 337 manaakitanga, 15, 177, 194, 195 managed retreat, 17 Manawat¯ u, 370 mana whenua, 9, 88, 89, 93, 115, 197, 204, 280, 324. See also Matapopore Charitable Trust; Ng¯ai Tahu; Ng¯ai T¯ u¯ahuriri M¯aori M¯aori community, 19, 188, 189, 193, 199, 202, 205 M¯aori cultural value, 19, 188, 197, 198, 206 M¯aori land, 157 M¯aori Recovery Networks (MRN), 114, 129, 188, 189, 192–194, 197, 199, 206 M¯aori Urban Search and Rescue (USAR), 193, 196 marae, 15, 129, 171, 189, 194–196, 198, 199, 203, 206 Margaret Mahy Park, 284 marginalisation, 11, 35, 119, 131, 132, 218, 220, 229, 368 structural marginalisation, 223 marketisation, 146 Marryatt, Tony, 360 Marshall, Denis, 68 Marx, Karl, 146 Marxist, 28 Matapopore, 89–91, 93, 290, 324 Matapopore Charitable Trust, 89 m¯atauranga, 91 Matthewman, Steve, 4–6, 11, 12, 15, 16, 20, 66, 74, 77, 88, 95, 107, 127, 129, 130, 136, 143–145, 156, 157, 171, 172, 174, 179, 182, 204, 212, 223, 224, 227,

396

INDEX

238, 255, 277, 307, 337, 343, 344, 357–359, 361, 363, 364, 367–369, 371 Matthews, Bishop Victoria, 97 memorialisation, 20, 254, 260, 261, 265, 266, 271 mental health mental health issues, 4, 126, 178, 288 mental health service, 118 Merivale, 175, 287 Methaemoglobinaemia, 153 methodology, 43, 74, 118 research methodology, 36 #MeToo, 37 Metro Sports, 4, 75, 281. See also Parakiore migrant Asian migrant, 224, 226, 230 European migrant, 223 migrant worker, 213–216, 218–224, 226, 228–230, 368 migrant worker mistreatment, 220 migration contracted migration, 216, 219 internal migration, 101, 213 speculative migration, 216 Mills, C. Wright, 178 Ministry for Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF), 150, 151 Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), 150 Ministry for the Environment (MfE), 67, 150, 151, 154 Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), 68, 213, 214, 221, 229, 246, 247 Ministry of Education, 285, 327, 360 Ministry of Internal Affairs, 61 minority ethnic minority, 97 minority communities, 38, 42

Minto, John, 15, 285 Mississippi delta, 38 mobile medical teams, 191 Modernism redux, 325 Mooallem, John, 66 moral panics, 65, 66 multiculturalism, 229, 367 multi-disciplinary, 11 Muslim community, 8, 168, 199, 200, 343, 346 mutual mutual assistance, 212 mutual help, 129, 357

N Napier earthquake, 118 National Disaster Resilience Strategy, 79, 188, 201, 205 National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), 60, 63, 201, 205, 206, 321 National government, 34, 60, 152, 271, 272, 339 National Influenza Pandemic Plan, 71 National Party, 67, 71 neighbour, 129, 170, 172, 173, 175, 192, 288 neighbourhood, 13, 20, 108, 114, 118, 169, 171, 173, 175, 176, 181, 225, 287, 290, 313, 341, 362 neoliberalisation(s), 32, 60, 136, 145, 146, 148 neoliberalism neoliberal capitalist penetration, 40 neoliberal country, 9 neoliberal economy, 77, 254 neoliberal governance, 8 neoliberal governmentality, 58 neoliberal ideology, 60, 75 neoliberal logic, 43

INDEX

397

neoliberal models of development, 34 neoliberal policies, 32, 41, 305 neoliberal political economy, 38 neoliberal recovery, 37 neoliberal values, 37. See also disaster capitalism New Brighton, 91, 188, 289, 329, 346 new normal, 13, 136, 307 New Zealand Company, 58, 59 New Zealand Experiment, 59 New Zealand Institute for Language, Brain and Behaviour (NZILBB), 168 New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA), 101 Ng¯a Hau e Wh¯a marae, 189, 190, 192, 195 Ng¯ai Tahu Ng¯ai Tahu Claims Settlement Act 1998, 88, 250 Ng¯ai Tahu Cultural Precinct, 4 Ng¯ai Tahu Rangatira, 149 Ng¯ai T¯ ua¯huriri, 9, 89, 90, 92, 93, 280, 290, 324, 330 Ng¯a Maata Waka, 115, 206, 359 Ng¯a Pae o te M¯aramatanga, 117 Ng¯a Wh¯ariki Manaaki, 91, 92, 289, 324 nitrate nitrate contamination, 152, 153 nitrate fertiliser, 148 Non vs. Post-Disaster Creativity Model, 310 nuclear war, 44

Old Boy(s) Network, 290, 305 old guard, 305 old school, 305 Oliver-Smith, Anthony, 11, 12, 17, 27, 30, 31, 36, 39, 41, 42, 58, 78, 79, 117, 174, 222, 227, 319, 373 once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, 6 Opihi river, 150, 154 Opportunist, 302, 303 oppression, 11, 28, 36, 64, 107, 215, 221–223, 229 gender oppression, 228 O’Regan, T¯a Tipene, 149 organisation community organisation, 190 grassroots organisation, 230 organisational culture, 359–361, 373 ¯ Oruapaeroa Travis Wetlands, 331 ¯ akaro/Avon River Precinct, 91, 99, Ot¯ 100 ¯ akaro/Avon River Regeneration Ot¯ Area Plan, 290 ¯ akaro Avon River Corridor Ot¯ (OARC), 99, 202, 250, 326, 327, 329 ¯ akaro Limited, 76, 89 Ot¯ ¯ akaro Orchard, 99, 133 Ot¯ ¯ Otautahi M¯aori Warden’s Association, 189 otherness, 302 ¯ Otukaikino Reserve, 261 ¯ Otukaikino Reserve Living Memorial, 261 over-population, 13

O Official Information Act 1982 (OIA), 240 Oi Manawa Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial, 263, 267

P Paikea, 91 P¯akeh¯a, 157 pan-Asian network, 230 pan-ethnic network, 226

398

INDEX

pan-Indigenous, 18, 115, 120, 359 paradox, 18, 20, 108, 226, 227 Parakiore, 4. See also Metro Sports Parker, Bob, 70, 72, 280, 341, 361 parochialism, 59 participatory, 115, 321, 331, 336 participatory practice, 336 partisanship cultural partisanship, 305 political partisanship, 305 partnership, 88–90, 93, 95, 101, 198, 201, 203, 205, 251, 261, 330, 341, 343, 358, 371 bicultural partnership, 89, 93 passing, 74, 221, 261 patriarchy, 13, 218, 229 PEARL, 39 Pegasus Town, 100 Performing Arts Precinct, 4, 75 Peruvian earthquake, 117 phosphorous, 150, 154 Picketty, Thomas, 112 Pickles, Katie, 9, 12, 16, 18, 75, 97, 98, 200, 224, 280, 285, 305, 324, 326, 358, 363, 364, 367, 368, 371 Pike River Mine Explosion, 64 Piripi, Haami, 118 placemaking, 324 planning land-use planning, 370 recovery planning, 366, 367, 374 top-down planning, 96 urban planning, 12, 313, 322, 354 police, 64, 117, 193, 200, 204, 239 policy adaptation policies, 44 neoliberal policies, 32, 36, 41, 305 public policy, 17 political disenfranchisement, 218 political economy, 41, 366, 368

post-fossil fuel political economy, 368 politicisation, 128, 362 pollution, 4, 11, 126, 149 water pollution, 8, 150 population ageing. See ageing society populism, 212 populist authoritarianism, 13 portaloos, 180 Port Hills, 4, 7, 8, 63, 126, 134, 156, 167, 178, 183, 249, 326, 370 post-colonial city, 9, 102, 280, 282 Post-Disaster Creative Opportunity Power Shift Model, 305, 306 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 126, 182 P¯ otiki, Tahu, 91 poverty, 11, 13, 35, 41, 117–119, 215, 219, 223, 374 power centralisation of power, 132, 347 political power, 38, 114 power dynamic, 220 power of people, 111 p¯ owhiri, 91 praxis, 373 Prebbleton, 100 preparedness, 14, 241 Pressure and Release model (PAR), 30 private gain, 157 private responsibility, 60 privatisation, 32, 58, 60, 306 Project 8011, 327 Project Lyttleton, 363 promession, 259, 260 promised employment, 216 property development, intensification of, 370 prosocial prosocial drive, 300, 309 prosocial filter, 309 prosocial motivation, 302, 309

INDEX

prosocial need, 310 prosocial support, 313 prosocial value, 313 provincialism, 59 public fractured public, 282 public participation, 285, 358, 360 public policy, 118, 212 public utilities, 230 Public Inquiry into the Earthquake Commission, 239–242, 246, 247 push factors, 215 Q QuakeBox, 19, 168, 169 QuakeBox2, 19, 169, 171–175, 177–180, 182 Quake Outcasts, 77 Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), 116 Quarantelli, Enrico, 65, 66, 307 R racial identity, 228 racial profiling, 221 racial segregation, 228 racial stigma, 218 racism institutionalised racism, 11, 219, 222 overt racism, 223 systemic racism, 133 Radio New Zealand (RNZ), 279 Rae, Hauauru, 115 Rakahuri river, 150, 153, 154 Rakaia river, 150, 155 rangatiratanga, 156 Rangiora, 100, 325, 326 Rangiora Earthquake Express, 171 Rangitata river, 153 rapid onset disaster, 11

399

reciprocity, 195, 225 reconstruction, 4, 20, 39–42, 96, 169, 213, 214, 220, 229, 278, 290, 317 recovery grassroots recovery, 134 spirit of recovery, 305, 306, 312, 313 urban recovery, 21, 200, 202, 204 recruitment recruitment agency, 220 recruitment agent, 216, 219 Red Cross, 190, 199 redevelopment, 6, 13, 19, 93, 200, 201, 203, 213–215, 221, 229, 230, 285 sustainable redevelopment, 230 red zone red zone leavers, 365 red zone plan, 4, 329 residential red zone, 250, 279, 281, 290, 328 refugee, 12, 13, 130, 131, 135, 170, 178, 179, 199, 212, 213, 223 Regenerate Christchurch, 76, 202, 281, 290, 329, 330, 361 Rehua Marae, 171, 189–192, 199 remembrance Bridge of Remembrance, 92, 204 institutional remembrance, 266 remittance, 221 reproduction of social inequality, 229 rescue workers, 196 resettlement, 38, 42, 179 Residential Advisory Service (RAS), 246, 247 residential intensification, 287 resilience community resilience, 18, 126–128, 130–133, 135–137, 205, 363, 372 contested nature of resilience, 127

400

INDEX

limits of resilience, 128, 134, 136 limits to resilience, 135, 136, 363 migrant resilience, 212 resilience research, 35 resilience thinking, 35 resistance to resilience, 133 wh¯anau resilience. See endurance resource collective-level resource, 225 collective ownership of natural resources, 157 food resource, 147 freshwater resource, 143, 144, 146, 147, 155, 156 natural resource, 8, 59, 146, 152, 157, 203, 290 redistribution of resource, 228 Resource Management Act (RMA), 152, 202, 319, 320 resource sharing, 129 unlocking resources, 152 resourcefulness, 136, 169, 179 response community-led response, 128–130, 340 community response, 78, 134, 136 democratic response, 337 greening response, 254 pandemic response, 343, 372 political response, 132, 273, 371 urban response, 337 youth-led response, 338 responsibilization, 136, 229 restabilisation, 312 Reynolds, Ryan, 95 Richardson, Ruth, 60 risk characterisation of risk, 38 construction of risk, 33, 36, 43–45 health risks, 46 human manufacture of risk, 61 M¯aori risk management, 129

risk averseness, 271 risk construction, 41, 45 risk management, 38, 61 risk management systems, 57 risk reduction, 44, 45, 71, 205 risk science, 38 science of risk assessment, 38 social construction of risk, 33, 44 Risk and Root Cause Assessment (RRCA), 39 Risk Society, 13, 61 Riverside Market, 214, 325 Roads of National Significance (RONS), 326 Rolleston, 172, 326 Rolleston Prison, 172 root cause analysis, 38, 41, 44 root causes, 9, 11, 14, 17, 21, 30, 39, 45, 213, 222, 353, 366, 370, 372, 374 Royal Commission of Inquiry, 63, 64, 168, 345 R¯ uaumoko, 110 runoff, 150 rural decline, 14 Ryall, Tony, 74

S Sassen, Saskia, 33, 157, 279 Savage, Michael Joseph, 59 Science and Technology Studies (STS), 29, 30 sea-level rise, 4, 8, 11, 126, 157, 372 second-class citizens, 13, 19, 213 second colonisation, 37 second disasters, 6, 126 sectarian, 256 sediment, 150, 154 segmented gaps, 215 segregation, 228 self-organization, 130, 327

INDEX

self-regulation, 355 self-reliance, 132, 227 Selwyn district, 155, 325 Selwyn River, 8. See also Waikirikiri River semiotic ghost, 282 Sendai Framework, 2015-2030, 112, 113, 205 Sensing City, 279, 280 settlement colonial settlement, 88, 93 European settlement, 89 p¯akeh¯a settlement, 59 post-settlement, 289 pre-colonial settlement, 261 sexism, 11, 29, 130, 223 Share an Idea, 15, 74, 75, 96, 279, 280, 285, 307, 322, 324, 331, 344, 361, 362, 366 shared-identities, 129 Skilled Migrant Category (SMC), 213–215 skill shortage list, 214 slow-moving destruction, 18, 156 slow-onset disaster, 8, 11, 126, 143 smart city, 279–281 Smith, Evan, 287, 307 Smith, Neil, 33 Smith, Nick, 67, 144, 152 social agency, 21 social arrangements, 11, 14, 174, 212 social bond, 129, 130, 172 social capital bonding social capital, 225–228, 230 bridging social capital, 225 linking social capital, 225, 226, 230 social change, 17, 134, 212, 224, 255, 272 social choice, 21, 353–356, 362, 365, 367, 369–371, 373, 374 social cohesion, 194, 303

401

social connectedness, 227 social construction of risk, 33. See also risk social contract, 33, 35 social fabric, 337 social forces, 11, 14, 31, 137, 212, 220, 222, 256 social inequality, 229 social infrastructure, 131, 217, 226 social innovation, 363, 368 social integration, 135, 313 social isolation, 218 social justice, 229 socially constructed process, 11 social construction, 30 socially disadvantaged communities, 11, 130 social media, 175, 225, 324, 340–342, 364 social network, 130, 225, 227, 340, 364 Social Network Analysis (SNA), 117 social oppression, 130, 218 social order, 17, 368 social safety net, 231 social theory, 28 social value, 309, 314 social welfare, 58, 60, 221 societal autonomy, 355 society inclusive society, 14, 229 just society, 14, 229 socio-ecological system, 19, 30 sociological imagination, 178 socio-political socio-political positioning, 20, 256, 266, 272, 273 socio-political values, 300 solidarity emergent solidarity, 128 tokenistic solidarity, 371

402

INDEX

Solnit, Rebecca, 66, 70, 76, 95, 102, 129, 134, 307, 339 Solomon, T¯a Mark, 19, 88, 189, 199, 374 Southern Response, 77, 247, 248 South Island Contribution (SIC) visa, 216 sovereignty, 40, 112, 120, 197, 291, 292 sporting city, 279 Square Cathedral Square, 4, 93, 342 Victoria Square, 92, 93, 289, 323 Statistics New Zealand (Stats NZ), 4, 148, 153, 154, 156, 188, 203, 213, 257 statue James Cook statue, 92, 93 Queen Victoria statue, 88, 93, 94 Robert Falcon Scott statue, 92 status quo, 99, 134, 277, 305, 307, 312, 314, 371 stigmatisation, 221 St. Martins, 174 stress, 5, 9, 65, 102, 117, 136, 173, 179, 226, 246, 308, 337 chronic toxic stress, 126 structural demand, 215 structural solution, 215 structural transformation, 20, 222, 228, 229, 231 structural violence, 29, 219, 222, 228, 229, 373 Student Volunteer Army (SVA), 12, 72, 129, 193, 289, 302, 340–343 suburb, 4, 7, 15, 70, 99, 100, 114, 171, 172, 174–177, 180, 183, 188, 287, 329, 341 suburbanisation, 283 superdiverse city, 224 superdiverse society, 96 support system, 130, 134, 225, 226

sustainability building sustainability, 368 environmental sustainability, 35, 205 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 342 sustainable future, 17, 259 sustainable land use, 254 Sutton, Roger, 74, 360 symbolic violence, 373 syndemic, 46

T Tahu P¯ otiki, 91 takiw¯a, 156, 196, 201 T¯amaki Makaurau, 59, 213, 223 tangata whenua, 59, 200, 288, 357. See also Indigenous; M¯aori Tangiwai National Memorial, 264 taonga, 59, 147, 155, 197, 260 Tau, Te Maire, 88, 89, 110, 156 TC3, 326 Te Awa o te Ora, 117 technological change, 14, 32 tectonic faults, 9 Te Kowhai, 151 Templeton, 269, 270 Templeton Cemetery and Sports Park, 270 temporary transitional project, 300 temporary urbanism, 279 Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI), 300, 304, 310 Te Omeka: Justice and Emergency Services Precinct, 90, 91, 290 Te Pae, 4, 290, 329 Te Papa, 91, 99, 100 ¯ akaro/Avon River Precinct, 91, Ot¯ 99, 100 Te Puni K¯ okiri, 189, 190 terror attacks

INDEX

terrorism, 97, 346 terrorist attacks, 4, 8, 135, 136, 168, 183, 188, 198–200, 206, 223, 338, 371. See also Christchurch Mosque attacks Te R¯ unanga o Ng¯ai Tahu (TRoNT), 75, 88, 89, 114, 115, 155, 156, 189–193, 195, 198, 201, 202, 204, 286, 320, 330, 358–360, 374 Te R¯ unanga o Ng¯a Maata Waka, 189, 190, 193 Te Tiriti o Waitangi: The Treaty of Waitangi, 59, 88, 358 Te Waihora, 154, 155 The Art of Recovery, 301 theory political theory, 128 social theory, 28 The Press , 115, 290, 308, 322, 327 Three Mile Island, 29 Tierney, Kathleen, 11, 15, 35, 38, 66, 76, 127, 128, 212, 227, 228, 307 tikanga, 177, 193, 196, 200, 205 Tikao, Debbie, 89, 290 Tilaia, Okirano, 342 tino rangatiratanga. See sovereignty tipping-point, 135 t¯ıpuna, 155 tokenistic, 358 tokenistic solidarity, 371 tourism, 8, 96, 198, 214 Town Hall, 93, 323 Townsend, Peter, 279, 341 toxic contamination, 36 transdisciplinary, 11, 12, 17 transdisciplinarity, 37, 109 transformation grassroots transformation, 133 structural transformation, 20, 222, 227–229, 231

403

transformative ability, 136 transient, 212 transitional activity, 95, 102, 324, 331 transitional urbanism, 15, 21, 129, 288 Transition Towns, 128 Transit New Zealand (TNZ), 320 transportation corridor, 101 trustworthiness, 225 tsunami, 30, 63, 182, 183, 198 T¯ uranga, 91, 289, 290, 324 T¯ uranga library, 96 Turangawaewae, 194, 196 TVNZ, 155, 189 tyranny of the present, 338 U UC CEISMIC (the Canterbury Earthquake Digital Archive), 168 Uekusa, Shinya, 12, 13, 18, 19, 31, 35, 66, 102, 127–130, 135, 136, 171, 172, 179–182, 194, 212, 214, 221–225, 227, 228, 230, 284, 357, 362–364, 368 uggianaqtuq, 110 “Uncle Barry problem”, 281 unconventional ideas, 21 unemployment, 126, 203, 204, 206 unequal recovery, 13 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 111 United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 144 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, 342 United States (US), 34, 38, 111, 113, 114, 148, 263, 278 unity, 194, 293, 368 University of Canterbury, 73, 168, 169, 281, 288, 330, 343

404

INDEX

unsustainable urban sprawl, 337 upward social mobility, 219 urban demonstration village, 99 urban development, 42, 102, 325–327 Urban Development Strategy (UDS), 100, 320 urbanism Indigenous urbanism, 9, 280 post-traumatic urbanism, 254 temporary urbanism, 279 transitional urbanism, 15, 21, 129, 288 urban regeneration, 99 urup¯a, 257 US Gulf Coast, 36 utilitarian, 256

V vacant sites, 4, 95 valorisation, 132, 227 vertical gradient, 225 Vezjak, Grega, 264 Victoria Square, 92, 93, 98, 289, 323, 324 violence domestic violence, 126, 169 slow violence, 36, 143 structural violence, 29, 219, 222, 229, 373 symbolic violence, 373 visa Essential Skills Work visa, 213, 214 South Island Contribution (SIC) visa, 216 special rebuild visa, 216 temporary visa, 8, 221 temporary work visa, 213 visibility, 222, 324 Vogel, Julius, 59 volunteer

emergency volunteer, 60 student volunteer, 339, 341, 342 unpaid volunteer, 60 volunteerism, 129, 134 vulnerability historical construction of vulnerability, 36 pressure and release model of, 30 vulnerabilities, 9, 11, 19, 35–37, 107, 120, 132, 188, 203, 206, 212, 213, 220, 222, 278, 372 vulnerability paradigm, 29, 37, 38

W Wagner, Nicky, 345 waiata, 197, 342 Waiau Toa river, 150 Waiau Uwha river, 150 Waikirikiri River, 153–155 Waimakariri District, 100 Waimakariri District Council (WDC), 320, 329, 357, 359–362, 364, 373 Waimakariri river, 150 waka, 91, 93, 94, 101, 289 Watene M¯aori, 190, 193 Watt-Cloutier, Sheila, 110 waves of disaster, 6, 13, 17, 126, 353, 371 wealth, 32–34, 45, 108, 111, 119, 175, 193, 229, 277, 279 wealth disparities. See disparities WeCAN, 363 welfare state, 59 wellbeing, 126, 195, 329 public wellbeing, 303 West Coast, 68 Western epistemological orientation, 36, 222 Whakaari White Island Gas Explosion, 63, 80

INDEX

whakapapa, 101, 194, 195, 206, 324 whakarurutanga, 196 wh¯anau, 15, 118, 177, 189, 190, 194 whanaungatanga, 194, 195 Whanganui, 370 wh¯ariki, 90–93, 324 White chairs memorial, 269 whiteness, 96 white supremacist terror attacks. See Christchurch Mosque attacks Wider earthquake Community Action Network, 363. See also WeCAN wildfire, 4, 134, 156, 205, 353, 370 wildland-urban interface, 4, 370 Wilkinson, Kate, 68 Winn, Coralie, 95 Women’s Voices, 19, 168–172, 174–179, 181, 182 Women’s Voices Ng¯a Reo o Nga W¯ahine project, 168 Woodend, 100 Words of Hope, 97

405

Work and Income, 195, 220 working-age population exodus, 126 World Ecology, 33 World Health Organization (WHO), 153 worse off, 174, 176–178, 182 Y years of litigation, 7, 20, 75, 135, 173 youth youth agency, 339 youth climate rally, 339 youth leadership, 343 youth-led response, 338 youth quake, 96 Z zero-order responders (ZOR), 66 Zero tolerance, 228 Žižek, Slavoj, 111, 112 zones of sacrifice, 36