2023: The year Christchurch's red zone will finally get moving

Saturday, 13 May 2023

Christchurch’s red zone is finally on the verge of something. After years of promises, processes and a false start or two, the future is here. MICHAEL WRIGHT reports.

The words were stark. A little ambiguous, phrased as a question like they were, but enough to capture the excitement, hope and above all expectation of the moment: What is about to happen to Christchurch’s red zone?

That headline ran in The Press just over six years ago. The accompanying story giddily expanded on the opportunity presenting itself in the city’s east. Regenerate Christchurch – a new body formed out of the ashes of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (Cera) – was to devise a plan for what to do with more than 600 hectares of the residential red zone. Land deemed damaged beyond repair by the 2010-11 earthquakes and subsequently cleared of most of its buildings and people. There would be public meetings and consultations. Grand ideas followed: a native forest, a whitewater sports park, a New Zealand version of the UK Eden Project, even a 2km-long artificial lake for sports like rowing and kayaking. Everything sounded plausible.

“After the central city, this is without a doubt the next biggest, some will say bigger, opportunity for something quite remarkable to happen,” then residential red zone general manager for Regenerate Christchurch Rob Kerr told The Press. “It has the potential to be transformational for the future of Christchurch.”

Today, that vast expanse of land sits emphatically untransformed. Regenerate Christchurch is long disestablished and Kerr is on the outside looking in. He helps run a trust that fosters sustainable research in the red zone.

“Look,” Kerr says, “I think there are many people, and I'd agree with them, who say that we have lost some momentum. The regeneration plan was [completed in] 2019. It is a long time between drinks.

“There's various community groups. Many of them doing great work. But there are many others that have sort of just frittered away because the opportunities were difficult to grasp… people just go on with their lives and start doing other things.”

On the face of it, this assessment is accurate. If you acquired a drone and directed it to the sky above the red zone to take aerial photographs, those photographs would look more or less the same as ones taken last year, the year before that, and the year before that. A catalogue of inertia.

But Kerr also knows things are happening in the background. “There are things going on,” he says, “And the city council is doing things and they are devoting some real money into capital works.”

And here lies the rub. After years in actual limbo, Christchurch and its red zone now find themselves in a kind of phoney version where, finally, an awful lot is happening, even though it might not look like it.

‘The year of activity’

Regenerate Christchurch was established in April 2016. Cera had a five-year lifespan under the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act and in its place, under new legislation, came Regenerate – to develop regeneration plans – and Ōtākaro Ltd, responsible for delivering the anchor projects the Government had committed to and managing Crown-owned land.

The residential red zone was by far Regenerate Christchurch’s biggest project. In September 2016 it released a draft outline for a regeneration plan for the red-zoned Avon River corridor between Oxford Tce and Stanmore Rd. If the outline was approved by Greater Christchurch Regeneration Minister Gerry Brownlee, then a draft plan would be developed.

Observers were lukewarm. This was essentially a plan to make a plan to make a plan for a tiny pocket of the red zone with no timeframe or funding attached. Labour's then Canterbury spokesperson Megan Woods mustered “it's good to see something finally happening”, while a local business leader said he expected “significant movement to be made in the next two years”.

By December that idea had been ditched in favour of another draft outline – this time for the redevelopment of the entire red zone. Regenerate Christchurch chief executive Ivan Iafeta stressed the scale and complexity of the process and the importance of not steamrolling through public consultation, as was the perception with other post-quake authorities. A few weeks later, in an interview with The Press, he proclaimed 2017 “the year of activity”.

The year of [in]activity

This was what prompted The Press to wonder hopefully in a headline in February 2017. Regenerate was then at the start of a six-month process to deliver a regeneration plan that would lay out the future of the red zone - what it would include, how it would be managed, when it would be done and at what cost.

But the emphasis on process and meaningful consultation quickly came to be viewed as an excuse for inaction. For the rest of its existence, Regenerate was dogged by criticisms that it was doing too little, too slowly. In March 2017, Brownlee said he was “cognisant of the concern that some have expressed that Regenerate have not achieved a great deal in their first 12 months of existence”. A public exhibition of development ideas planned for the 2017-18 summer was months late.

In mid-2018, the agency’s board was given an official ‘hurry-up’ by the city council and the new Labour-led government. And when a draft regeneration plan was released, somewhat hastily, that November it was light on detail. Proposed developments like the Eden Project or a whitewater sports park were not named.

The regeneration plan was finally delivered to the new minister in charge, Megan Woods, in March 2019. By this point Regenerate was in something of an existential crisis. It had axed many of its planning staff and pivoted to commercial development, focusing on the central city. This brought it uncomfortably close to the work of other Crown and council-owned entities and prompted claims the city was ‘over-agencied’. The council threatened to slash Regenerate’s funding.

Woods finally signed off on the plan in August 2019. The 80-page document divided the area into four zones, including the “green spine” following the Avon River from central Christchurch to New Brighton, and others covering environmental restoration, recreation and visitor attractions. But it was, again, light on details. This wasn’t necessarily a failure of planning, more an inability to manage expectations.

“Regenerate Christchurch was co-owned by the Crown and the council,” Kerr says. “[It was] asked to do a plan on land that it didn't have, which would be implemented through budget that it didn’t have.

“[Different groups hoped] it would be like an expressions-of-interest process where leases would be awarded or something like that. But that wasn't the way that Regen was set up.”

This very point – the limitations of Regenerate’s mandate – had been indirectly highlighted a few weeks before the plan sign-off. In late July 2019, the Crown and the city council reached a global settlement - essentially agreeing the terms on which the government would exit Christchurch’s earthquake recovery and finalising who would own, pay for and manage what was left to do.

The red zone was a major part of this. The settlement stipulated that ownership of the entire area, more than 600 hectares, would pass from the Crown to the council – an unprecedented transfer of land. So it was hardly surprising that a regeneration plan released weeks later didn’t include confirmed projects for what to do with that land. “[The transfer process is] going to tie up all the surveyors and conveyancing lawyers in this city for years to come,” council strategy manager Brendan Anstiss said at the time.

No-one knew quite how prescient those words were. Nearly four years later, it still isn’t finished. Land Information New Zealand (Linz), which managed the red zone for the government, bundled the land – 5500 sections in all – into 29 superlots. Each one needed to have land surveyed, titles consolidated and legal road statuses removed. Linz initially told the council the job would be done by July 2020, then May 2021, then the end of 2021. The current deadline is next month. Twenty-four lots have been passed to the council so far. “It’s not as easy as you might think,” council red zone manager Dave Little says. “Where there’s things like waterways, particularly, that surveying process takes quite a lot of time.”

For now, the council parks department is leading the red zone development while the long-term management is worked out. As part of the global settlement, the council agreed to a co-governance model with community groups and local iwi. An establishment committee, co-chaired by former Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel and Ngāi Tūāhuriri Runanga Upoko Te Maire Tau, is working on the details for that, and managing transitional uses of the land in the meantime. This has been a challenge as well, for the same reason Regenerate struggled to put meaningful detail into its plan: when the ownership and management of the land is still in flux, no-one can really greenlight anything.

“The level of paperwork just to test ideas [for transitional uses] is infuriating,” Avon-Ōtākaro Network manager Hayley Guglietta says. “For the planting groups it’s frustrating because we can’t plant. Last year was really the first year. We had a massive season, 60,000 trees. First time in 10 years we could say we’ve done a massive number of trees. [Before that] it was simply because the land didn’t belong to the city. We couldn’t do it.”

Guglietta is also on the establishment committee. She is focused on the community side, but says the long-term legal structure, whatever form it takes, should be decided “fairly quickly”.

“The governance group should really be working on the long-term plan and managing the project and ensuring that the mana whenua voice is in there. And that we’re looking at it from an intergenerational point of view.”

Like everyone, when you talk to Guglietta about the red zone the frustration is measured but palpable. It has taken a long time to get here. Developing such a vast and unique space was never going to happen quickly, but no-one really expected it to take this long.

“Back in 2016 we were frustrated because we were fighting hard for this plan,” Guglietta says, “And we saw two years of Regenerate Christchurch spending millions of dollars on something that everyone had kind of agreed to in the first place. The global settlement hadn’t happened. We were still up in the air about all of it.”

“The frustrations of the past were… nothing was happening. But the frustration we have now is actually stuff is starting to happen. It’s just frustrating that it’s taken so long.

“I think once we get on a roll we’ll see big changes this year.”

The actual ‘year of activity’

In an airless meeting room at the Christchurch City Council offices, the two men who right now probably know more about and have more to do with the red zone than anyone else give a briefing on these big changes.

Like Guglietta, they are at pains to acknowledge that while the people of Christchurch may have heard all this before, this time it really is different. Even if it still doesn’t look like it.

“We’re very aware that to people from the outside looking in it looks like nothing’s happening,” says council head of parks Andrew Rutledge. “There is a lot happening.”

Scrolls of maps, charts and diagrams on the table underscore this theoretical flurry of activity. Rutledge traverses the basics: $800m over 30 years to develop the red zone, $340m over the next decade. Nearly half of that - $164m - will go to community recreation and ecological restoration and the rest on stormwater detention and other water quality work.

Dave Little, the council red zone manager, explains how this is already happening. “We’re at quite an exciting time. Notwithstanding consenting challenges, the next two to three years you’re going to see quite a lot of physical construction going on. Primarily you’ll see Waitaki St, Bexley, hopefully Wainoni Landing. And the [city to sea] pathway will be the primary focus.”

Some of those projects will sound familiar. Waitaki St, in Bexley, is the first stage of the massive ecological restoration project to broaden the floodplain of the Avon River. Stopbanks will be built back from the waterway, and in many cases lowered; new stormwater infrastructure will be installed; and the city to sea pathway – an 11km shared-use trail and the crown jewel of the river corridor – will be built in tandem. The pathway would be designed and constructed in three sections. Work is expected to start next summer.

Rutledge calls Waitaki St the canary down the coalmine, for a few reasons. The biggest is an unexpected consenting hurdle from Environment Canterbury (ECan). A Court of Appeal decision last year quashed an ECan decision allowing Cloud Ocean Water and Rapaki Natural Resourses to extract 8.8 billion litres of water a year using a decades-old consent. As a result ECan is no longer granting consents for activities that intercept groundwater.

This includes the stormwater work going on at Waitaki St and, theoretically, the entire river corridor. “[It’s] quite a dramatic shift from how they’ve been interpreting consenting in the past,” Rutledge says. “What it effectively means is it’s going to be very difficult for us to implement anything if they stick to that interpretation. If we want to plant a tree and we hit a little bit of groundwater we’re not allowed to plant the tree. Because groundwater is considered water take and water take is not permitted.”

As it stands, the only workaround would be spectacularly inefficient above-ground infrastructure to treat stormwater. “You have to basically build it up, put its own little stopbank around it,” Little says. “It sits way up high in the air, and you have to pump the water to get into it and then to get back out of it. So more power, more [running costs], crazy-looking landscape, just totally counterintuitive to what we normally do.”

The Cloud Ocean case is now before the Supreme Court and in the meantime ECan is refusing to budge. A recent city council report said efforts to “work collegially at multiple levels to resolve the issue” had been “unsuccessful”. The council has obtained a legal opinion on the matter and is exploring other regulatory options. About $100m worth of projects around Christchurch are thought to be affected. Mayor Phil Mauger this week called the impasse “crazy”.

Waitaki St is also the test case for pretty much every other challenge in redeveloping an entire river corridor. For example, electricity infrastructure. When Orion looked at the Waitaki St plans and saw they called for the relocation of an 11kV cable, it baulked. The lines company, understandably, didn’t want any of its assets in the floodplain, but it also didn't know what power requirements the council would need for new infrastructure, like pump stations to get stormwater through the new stopbanks. “We’d be saying…you’ve got to put [the cable] somewhere else,” Little says, “And they were saying we don’t know where to put it because we don’t know what your demand is going to be elsewhere.”

So the council had to expedite the electricity plans for the entire corridor. Essentially planning for work that wouldn’t get done for 10 or 20 years. Waitaki St went on hold in the meantime, but the delay will pay off later.

“If you try and deal with all the complexities at project by project level it becomes really long-winded and really expensive and you do it again and again,” Little says. “So we… deal with [big picture issues] across the entire corridor which takes quite a long time but hopefully will streamline delivery down the track.”

The council struck a similar problem with contaminated land. Little goes as far as calling this the biggest unforeseen challenge of the project. “It was all ex-residential [land] and is more contaminated than we probably thought it would be,” he says. “You’ve got everyone’s old asbestos piles that they dumped in their backyard, you’ve got the lead paint that they scraped off the house when they repainted, they did some oil changes. There’s all sorts of stuff and it’s almost impossible to predict exactly where it is.”

“The traditional way is you have to literally dig holes and send the soil off for sampling. We’ve done that at Waitaki St and it’s every 10m. We’re still finding that it’s missing spots.”

For now, the workaround is to identify high-risk areas and focus soil testing there. Some new technologies may help but traditional testing will still be required. That may be labour-intensive but it’s better than the alternative of carting all contaminated soil to the Kate Valley landfill and blowing out the clean-up budget in the process.

The upshot of all of these things is that planning the city to sea pathway, the river corridor and the entire red zone redevelopment has taken even more time. It’s almost four years since the regeneration plan - not swiftly conceived itself - was approved. And this has led, understandably, to yet more exasperation from the other people who want to get to work too.

‘All we could do was keep making submissions’

Of all the lofty projects envisioned for the red zone, none soared higher than the Eden Project. First mooted in 2014, the plan was to create a Kiwi version of the rockstar British eco-tourism attraction best known for its series of biodomes housing a “captive” rainforest and drawing a million visitors a year. Back in 2017, a concept drawing for the New Zealand iteration included an underground forest and a lava room. The price tag was about $100m.

Things quickly ground to a halt. When the regeneration plan finally emerged it didn’t endorse specific projects. It focused on themes and types of land use. “That was the frustration about the whole thing,” says Martin Hadlee, chairman of the Eden Project New Zealand trust. “I think everyone understood that that land was reserved for an Eden Project until such time as it evaporated… We had to take it that it was an Eden without a name.”

Covid gummed things up further. The 2017 report is now six years out of date. Costs would likely have gone up “a lot” since then, Hadlee says. In the meantime, other Eden expansions in the UK and China have progressed further and are now higher priority. Reflecting on the stasis, Hadlee reaches for the same adjective almost everyone spoken to for this story used at some point - frustrating.

“[The bureaucracy was] extremely frustrating… in the early days the trust spent the majority of its time trying to convince Cera, Regenerate Christchurch, the tourism bodies and the council that this project was a brilliant idea. But it’s been hard work because all of those organisations had a multitude of things to deal with and we were just seen as something novel and there wasn’t the capital to invest in it. So we just had to keep on presenting.

“We never knew whose job it was to actually get the project across the line. All we could do was keep making submissions.”

Eden International hasn’t given any indication on whether it still wants to proceed, he says. “There’s not a lot we can do at our end until they’re satisfied that they can manage the project and complete this design and ensure that the funds have been raised to do it. There’s quite a long way to go.”

The future

Frustration about the red zone is broadly down to two things: an enthusiastic public putting the cart before the horse, and a protracted planning process that did little to temper that enthusiasm. If, back in 2017, the abiding message had been we know this is exciting but none of it can happen until we work out who will own and manage the land and how they will do that which is super-complicated and is going to take years, then expectations since then might have been different.

“I don't think that question [who will own and manage the red zone] was truly ever asked before the idea of Regenerate Christchurch was established and given the job of developing the plan,” says Rob Kerr, the former Regenerate general manager.

“Nobody knew what the right implementation would look like… This is certainly something that Regenerate Christchurch engaged the minister and city council in, in their discussions and our discussions, when I was there.

“Perhaps why the momentum has been lost a little bit is because of that delay between [saying], OK do the plan then think about what the next step is, as opposed to doing it in parallel.”

It doesn’t really matter whose fault any of this is. Or if it is even anyone’s fault at all. The red zone was never meant to be an adventure playground. It’s an environmental legacy project that can redefine Christchurch and provide a unique chance to restore the city’s ecological health and resilience. The sort of thing that is supposed to take generations. Pining for an Eden Project, or a whitewater sports park or a rowing lake in the meantime and being annoyed that it isn’t happening yet misses the point.

“[For] the people who aren’t as entrenched in it as what I am,” Hayley Guglietta says, “‘Happening’ for them is a built structure or a [Project] Eden or something. For most of us who are working in this space, all we want to see is the restoration project. I’d be quite happy with that. With really good community-led stuff dotted in between. Good city to sea pathway, the restoration of the river. For a lot of the people who are in this, that’s a satisfactory outcome.”