Earthquake Reflections, Part II

On the Garden City

Four days after the earthquake I picked 4 kg of tomatoes,and preserved seven half litre jars of tomato and herb puree.  So we are all set for pasta sauce, come the next emergency!

Last year's 7.1 earthquake in Canterbury was a big, frightening nuisance, but only buildings and roads got hurt. Last week's 6.3 earthquake, occurring after six months of aftershocks (over 4,000 of them, and some as high as 5.1) was a tragedy, with significant loss of life, and huge social, psychological and economic trauma and disruption. I heard a seismologist say on the radio that human beings are perfectly designed and built to withstand the 20,000 km per hour acceleration forces of an earthquake – but the buildings they are in or near may not be. This was surely the case for many of Canterbury's heritage buildings of brick and stone, which were designed for English, not New Zealand, conditions. But it has also turned out to be the case for some much more recently designed and built concrete buildings in Christchurch's CBD, which should have been more resilient.

It will take a while before we find out why they failed, with such horrific consequences, and perhaps the reasons will be unique to each one. However such failures, and what we now know about the vulnerability of the ground that Christchurch stands on, certainly suggest that any rebuilding of the central city would be wise to avoid high-rise concrete buildings for safety reasons. As I have loathed these buildings since they first started going up in my home town, both for their ugliness whether viewed from near or afar, and for their shadow and wind tunnel effects at street level, I am personally looking forward to the rebuild of the CBD using renewable, flexible materials (wood!) and a return to the open, spacious feel that central Christchurch and Colombo St used to have, with wide skies over low buildings – so different from the 'tunnels' of Queen St, Lambton Quay and Willis St, and George and Princes streets.

Commercial buildings in the CBD are only the most visible part of the infrastructure of a modern city, and not even the most important part. Reticulated services - fresh water, sewage/drainage, electric power, telecommunications – are much more important for the well-being of the whole population. Other essentials are reliable food supplies, sanitary solid waste disposal, medical and veterinary services and supplies, and sturdy roads and bridges. 

I have been thinking for some time that for purely ecological reasons we need to completely re-think urban design and service provisions. We can not and should not keep operating on a nineteenth century model of reticulated services which was always ecologically and socially suspect for a number of reasons. These have become even more salient over one hundred years later.

One of the main reasons we can't keep on the way we are now is the huge amount of energy required to keep these services operating, pumping in water and pumping (or trucking) away waste. The earthquake has created a 'short emergency' in Christchurch, where tens of thousands of homes have been cut off from reticulated water and sewage systems, with all the inconvenience and potential hazards that poses. We can cope in the short term because there are large trucks available to move around fresh water and portable toilets – but this is not the solution for the 'long emergency' (in the words of American writer James Howard Kunstler) which New Zealand and other countries are facing as global oil reserves dwindle, coal-burning is (hopefully) cut back to save the climate from further over-heating, and renewable energy sources are insufficient to power expanding reticulated services – including power itself.

Christchurch is lucky in that its electrical energy comes from hydro power – renewable and climate neutral – but it can't afford to waste it. It is also lucky in that it has good artesian water sources throughout the city, and there is still a reasonable amount of good quality land within and beside the city which is suitable for food production. But in the past twenty years the city has encouraged urban sprawl over good quality land (and on places which we now know are vulnerable), and it has privileged the private motor vehicle as the primary mode of access to non-reticulated essential services and goods, such as food (in supermarkets) and medical services. It has effectively discouraged food production within the city limits by allowing in-fill housing without providing public garden and park offsets, by banning the planting of fruit trees on street verges and in public parks, and by making it so difficult to use public land for food gardening. Sports clubs have been allowed to effectively privatise public land with their courts, pitches and club houses, but would-be gardeners are not allowed to fence off their crops.

These policies and practices turn out to be foolish when it comes to coping easily with a short emergency, and they are even more foolish and out-dated when it comes to being resilient in the face of a long emergency. So I have come up with a set of proposals for (re)building a resilient garden city, which would have the effect of increasing acute emergency capacity and resilience in the short term and  provide for stronger ecological and social effects for resilience in the longer term. They are based on the research I have done for my forthcoming book Food@Home, and on research I have been doing (with Shiv Ganesh of Waikato University) on the Transition Towns movement and related initiatives which are trying to build more ecologically and socially resilient communities in the face of peak oil, climate change, financial meltdown and the other big challenges of the twenty-first century. Readers of this blog will not be surprised that many of my solutions start with a garden.

I will be putting a new page on my blog - (Re) Building a Resilient Garden City – to set out these proposals. Please check back next week if you are interested.