Hard News: What Now?
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Nah, the focus has to be on putting things in place in Christchurch. That's where the people are now, and that's where they'll stay. It doesn't matter hugely how things are done right now, as long as they are done. Cheap and quick is better than nothing. I mean, Riccarton Mall is almost entirely open, and Riccarton's been pretty untouched. There has to an opportunity to chuck up some quick prefab structures there and get something going in the way of office space and of expanded retail on Riccarton Road. The industrial areas out south of Blenheim Road are relatively unscathed as well, I think. These structures won't go down as the greatest things ever built in NZ, but on the other hand, they don't have to. There's got to be similar chances on the eastern side of the city. Even if we end up with glorified tents sitting on parks, that's got to be better than nothing.
Sure, we need to get power and water and essential services back to the east of Christchurch, but if there aren't jobs to get back to afterwards, then it's going to be really painful.
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Sacha, in reply to
There has to an opportunity to chuck up some quick prefab structures there and get something going in the way of office space and of expanded retail
Agree - but that's different from rebuilding the current cbd.
Moving residents away from Christchurch also shifts their economic contributions elsewhere, so rebuilding enough work, transport and retail/service capacity is important. Making clear that temporary means just that should prevent bad future outcomes from getting things moving fast now in the right places.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Fair call Andre, you need places to work. But that said putting up grey concrete boxes in the CBD to fill with workers is not going to create a city people want to live in long term.
I realise there is no perfect option (absent of lots of money). But I also know kiwis have a strong tendency to build plain boring functional things because making it look good would be somehow elitist/wrong/fancypants. And then they go overseas and admire the beautiful cities.
Yes we must get christchurch functioning quickly, but there is an opportunity here to actually make Christchurch beautiful. It can't be the city it was but it can be something as good or better with some care and most importantly some desire to make something special.
And I'm not a planning expert and I'm not an architect but given time to work those professionals can do some very cool things with cities.
None of which is more important than getting the basic infrastructure to people now of course. And all of which will cost money - so please can you raise my taxes now (yes I'm serious I want a tax rise).
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Moving residents away from Christchurch also shifts their economic contributions elsewhere, so rebuilding enough work, transport and retail/service capacity is important. Making clear that temporary means just that should prevent bad future outcomes from getting things moving fast now in the right places.
Remember, there's a fucking wicked social discount rate on getting things going now. Future residents of Christchurch won't be living in a disaster area; it makes sense to make decisions for people here and now, and let the future sort itself out to a large extent.
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Sacha, in reply to
Agree about the urgency to put temporary capacity in place.
However, future and current needs are best kept separate - there's plenty of history of hasty short-term solutions becoming the long-term shape of a place by default. As Bart says, the right answer now is probably not going to make an attractive and successful place later. That won't happen by iteslf or because of the decisions of individual property or business owners without coordinated long-term planning
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Kate Hannah, in reply to
The University VCs have all "met" by phone conference and there are agreements in place with Auckland, Massey, Otago and Victoria for semester-long "exchanges" in which the courses completed will count towards Canterbury degrees. However, this is only in courses at those helping universities that have room - so if engineering, say, here at AK, is full, then the engineering students will not be able to come. Canterbury will be reopening from the 14th, and is largely undamaged out at the Ilam campus.
Other universities (who shall not be named) are apparently enrolling Canterbury students - thus moving the economic base from Christchurch. The whole Adelaide thing is a bit weird - but looking at my copy of the ERA report 2010, I see they have a relatively good engineering school - so for students unable to attend AK due to full classes, that might be an option? James McWha, the VC of Adelaide, while a Scots-Canadian, spent many years at Massey (and may have been VC there for a while?) I went to school with his daughter. So he is probably making the offer as a Nzer.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
People can’t afford to be out of jobs for six months. That has to be the realistic goal: to restore some kind of a functioning economy to Christchurch within the next three-six months.
From what I've seen of business responses to things like fires which affect only a single building, it's usually possible to relocate any business to a basic warehouse. I don't know if such warehousing exists in any less affected areas but my expectation is that many businesses will be running in such temporary buildings in Christchurch fairly quickly ... maybe a month or so (assuming such undamaged buildings exist).
The question then becomes how do you get those businesses back into permanent buildings in the CBD. What those new buildings in the CBD look like how they interact with the infrastructure etc etc ... those are complex questions. But you can solve it very quickly by building generic concrete and steel blocks quickly or you can try and do something different and better.
You can rebuild infrastructure by simply making new roads where the old ones were or you can ask questions about whether that is the best way to move people and goods in and out of the CBD in 2011.
It's not my choice but if it were I would take the time to let the real experts in those fields to come up with options rather than simply pressuring everyone to build as fast as possible.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Sprawl requires more infrastructure to support, and the more infrastructure you have the more infrastructure there is to damage.
Yes, and the more infrastructure in one place, the more there is to be damaged by one particular rupture. The higher you stack it, the further it has to fall, as well.
Look at many of the suburbs of Christchurch - itself a fairly sprawled city relative to population - that are still without any reticulated services, or even any temporary ones, and tell me you still believe that sprawl is good.
Christchurch is exactly where I'm looking at. Despite the destruction in the suburbs, that's actually where I'd have rather been when the quake struck, and where I'd want to have been living too. Even one without power or water or sewerage is still a permanent shelter with all my things, which is more than can be said for the piles of rubble in the city.
Comparative disaster responses across suburbs are heavily affected by their existing resources including social capital - and in this case things as basic as the absence of local supermarkets and transport.
Yes, that is true. Suburbs without local shopping are very isolated. But that's part of urban sprawl, the development of more suburban centers. The absence of such things, and the absence of transport, are closely tied to expecting to use centralized services that have suddenly become unavailable.
NOTE: I'm not saying urban sprawl is better, period. I'm just noting that it seems to have survived better. A much higher percentage of the suburbs are in a livable situation than is the case in the CBD.
Also, I accept that it could be possible to build disaster-proof high density urban centers, in theory. But it's not even a theory for the suburbs, that's exactly what's happened. Right here, in Christchurch.
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Paul Williams, in reply to
What has impressed me? Metiria Turei. Drove up from Dunedin with piles of lunches, and she and about twenty Greens went straight to work with the volunteer army digging silt out of retirement flats in Woolston. TV cameras nil, shovels lots.
Good that you've at least mentioned this - I saw the twitter exchange but wondered what had happened? Turei continues to impress me as a person of words and deeds.
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As Bart suggests, it seems possible to me that a great deal of the central city workplaces could be temporarily relocated. Get people an office with working power, phones and internet and you get a huge percentage of office based businesses going again. I don't see huge urgency in erecting concrete honeycombs.
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Sacha, in reply to
I'm not saying urban sprawl is better, period. I'm just noting that it seems to have survived better. A much higher percentage of the suburbs are in a livable situation than is the case in the CBD.
Check again in another month or three..
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The Herald's online editor Troy Rawhiti-Forbes is reporting from the eastern suburbs (Storify plugin).
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Sofie Bribiesca, in reply to
Does anyone have any ideas as to who the most useful targets for any sort of correspondence would be?
I'd check your paper and target journos who you like reading. Claire Trevett, Derek Cheung? Matt McCarten,John Armstrong would be on my list.Then seeing as I don't get responses from National (I have tried, still waiting) I'd push Labour and Greens and Maori.
I always have luck with Labour and Greens.
Best of luck to you. -
But you can solve it very quickly by building generic concrete and steel blocks quickly or you can try and do something different and better.
Personally I like steel and concrete blocks and would quite like Christchurch to have a lot more of them. Many of the ones we already have are really rather nice.
The main thing the CBD needs is people and activity. That's paramount. Everything after that is a nice to have.
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FWIW - I don't think Brown-kingcoal-lee deliberately meant to overlook the Eastern suburbs. I think that the Eastern suburbs were never on his radar at all, at least not in the same way other parts of the city and other suburbs are. I think it's a 'blind' spot he has, in much the same way as some have blind spots about the needs of differently abled people for example.
In that sense, I don't think he actually registered that there would be areas that have food deserts, poor transport links, and poor social infrastructure needing help, so I can't really blame him for 'overlooking'. But it's nice that he has swung into action so quickly.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Personally I like steel and concrete blocks
Now you're being perverse :P
Yes steel and concrete can be beautiful.
The Auckland Uni Chem building is not beautiful. IMO of course, noted art and architecture critic that I am.
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The main thing the CBD needs is people and activity. That’s paramount. Everything after that is a nice to have.
And that's where I start to get the shits. Typically, men, and it is usually straight white men, paint a glowing picture of a rebuilt city - nice shining pictures of buildings, and shiny automobiles, and shiny streets but typically, they ignore people totally, as in, they don't exist. They are stage props, scenery, bits of fluff to fill the gaps in the shiny buildings and shiny streets.
They would have better luck asking mall designers to design the city, for these kind of straight white men see people as walking wallets, pedestrians with money in their pockets, so they build for pedestrians, and never for cars because you can't easily get money out of a car. Not surprisingly, people love malls. Botany Town Centre, a mall, would be a good example of how to build for people.
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Brian Fallow argues for spreading the load of quake recovery to future generations.
We do not normally take a strict pay-as-you-go approach to infrastructure spending. It is orthodox and logical to spread the cost of long-lived assets over future as well as current taxpayers, by borrowing to pay for them.
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New Zealand Government debt is low by international standards and so therefore is the share of the taxpayer's dollar pre-empted by servicing that debt. As Standard & Poor's noted late last week, before the quake the forward track for Government debt would have seen it peak at just half the median level for AA-rated sovereigns.
The peak will now be later and higher, but there ought to be significant headroom there.
There is a world of difference between an increase in debt which is structural and reflects a lack of political will for a government to live within its means, and one which arises from a one-off shock.
However he also lends credence to repeat bollocks from the top:
Finance Minister Bill English nonetheless had a point when he said on Tuesday that New Zealand's external debt was too high. "We want to get government debt under control because it is [now] what is driving that external debt," he said.
I've asked before but someone please explain to me how public debt can be "driving" the private sector debt that makes up the vast majority of our nation's total exposure and is mainly residential property gambling fostered by our big Australian banks.
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Sacha, in reply to
Botany Town Centre, a mall, would be a good example of how to build for people.
Ironically, Botany is a classic car-centred mall - try getting around it on foot.
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Sacha, in reply to
I don't think Brown-kingcoal-lee deliberately meant to overlook the Eastern suburbs.
Perhaps, but the net effect is the same for those on the street. We can still do so much better than well-meaning incompetence - and the same goes for your apposite comparison, disability policy.
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Sacha, in reply to
Does anyone have any ideas as to who the most useful targets for any sort of correspondence would be?
The media seem to be getting the message. I'd go for the main national and local politicians, who are all resourced to and obliged to answer your correspondence.
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NBH, in reply to
Following on from Kate's response to Giovanni, the Education Directions blog (http://www.ed.co.nz/) has been keeping up an excellent daily summary of the tertiary education sector's experiences and responses.
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I do struggle to keep up with where the moral high ground is at any given moment.
It's usually to be found under the moral high horse.
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
I don’t think Brown-kingcoal-lee deliberately meant to overlook the Eastern suburbs. I think that the Eastern suburbs were never on his radar at all
But he apparently has visited the Eastern suburbs many times over the last few days. And he's an MP from Christchurch! I wouldn't expect Rodders, or Nikki Kaye, or even Murray McCully to know intimately the concerns of the residents of deepest, darkest South Auckland's electorates, but I would expect them to recognise, if visiting immediately following a major earthquake and vested with near-absolute power to facilitate rebuilding, that the people in those electorates are more vulnerable than the people in their own electorates. Brownlee is the walking exemplification of the saying "there are none so blind, as those who cannot see."
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And he’s an MP from Christchurch!
From Fendalton. You know all that guff about social stratification in Christchurch? Well...
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