Council’s popularity-contest approach to heritage consultation is a mistake
Wednesday, 18 March 2026
Derek Wallace is a retired academic whose doctoral research focused on public policy development and he has written a history of public planning in New Zealand entitled Governing the Future. He is chair of Icon - Inner City West Neighbourhood Association where three of the four buildings are located.
OPINION: The city council has asked Christchurch citizens to provide feedback on how each person would prioritise the spending of rates income on the four big heritage projects confronting the city: in alphabetical order, the Arts Centre, the cathedral, the museum and the provincial chambers.
I believe this is a misplaced initiative, and indeed an abnegation of leadership on the part of the council. Immediately, bodies of support for the first three projects have sprung into action, each appealing separately, in the absence of a broader context, to become the public’s favourite.
This kind of competitiveness – although inevitable in the circumstances – is most unfortunate. There is a real danger that the council will use the responses to its light-fingered consultation process to chop one or more of the projects in order to make a meaningful contribution to the others.
Read more:
If the people want to mothball Christ Church Cathedral, let’s spend up instead on the Square
Former Christchurch mayor throws support behind public money for Christ Church Cathedral restoration
The provincial buildings, with no body of vocal support, might well be sacrificed under this approach. Or else, the projects will be unevenly funded in a way that will be detrimental to the overall outcome.
To be sure, the projects are not equal in terms of their current progress towards completion, their importance to the city both economically and culturally, or in terms of their historical and national significance, so uneven funding is unavoidable. But finding the best basis for selective allocation is the important task.
So what could that basis be? Planners and managers often talk about “critical path analysis” – a methodological process that involves working out and following the optimal sequence of development steps to allow the most efficient and timely completion of a project.
Typically, this approach is applied in relation to a single project. It is not often employed as a way of analysing the order of action among several projects at once.
My suggestion is that we take up the challenge of using the approach to establish how all the big four projects could be retained, but their restoration organised (prioritised) using the logic of a critical path analysis, rather than by public appeal alone.
When we start to think this way, a clear way forward emerges, in my view.
Under any measure, the timely completion of the museum is of fundamental importance. Huge amounts of public funding have already been dedicated to the project, but it is useless in its current state of restoration. It needs to be fast tracked to the point where it can start making the significant contribution to tourism revenue that we know it is capable of. This might not mean it has to be completely finished. Perhaps it is still possible to sequence the rebuild so that parts can be left until after other parts are in use.
The cathedral also has had a substantial sum of money spent on restoration. Much of it has been private rather than public money, and arguably it should stay that way. But the city has a stake in its historic, symbolic, and touristic drawing power. Dismantling the whole thing at this stage is surely unsupportable. It needs to have enough done to it so that the fences surrounding it and blocking access to the square can be entirely taken down, and so that it no longer interferes with the ongoing development of the central city.
As Joe Bennett pointed out in a recent Press column, the building can be an object of appreciation and even one that is revenue-generating in an uncompleted and yet stable state, which it is close to being right now. Rates funding could be used to guarantee at least this outcome.
The Arts Centre also has unrestored sections which have been stabilised for now. The management is taking a responsible position in identifying the former Canterbury University student union building, latterly the Dux de Lux, as its immediate focus for council funding, and this, relative to the other projects, represents a small amount. Further it is an amount that would soon begin to generate revenue for business and the city generally, as well as contribute to funding the remaining expensive work to be done at the centre.
That leaves the Canterbury Provincial Buildings, the site that set the architectural example for all the other buildings in the big four list, and possessing surviving elements of extraordinary interior design.
A responsible approach to the big four projects, as outlined above, should be able to release funds to finally kick-start the restoration of this iconic structure. If not – and as long as it can be maintained in its stabilised state – it could wait. But clear arguments would need to be made for waiting – not just its position in a list of uninformed prioritising.
I would argue, in closing, that this sort of analysis could and should have been done by the professional planners at the council, and a fully developed proposal put out to citizens for information and comment, rather than exposing the whole endeavour to the risks of over-hasty opinion polling.
Ideally, an oversight committee of all the main stakeholders should be established to mutually inform and help steer the progressive completion of the whole set.