- Cities are about people. That should be our first and foremost consideration.

- Community participation and engagement are key. Listen to the people and you will find out what they want.

- Sustainability. We need a city that is built to last. That means thinking ahead to what the future will bring.

- Innovation. This is a time to embed innovation into the new city. With so much creation ahead, it’s time to really bring this to the fore.

- Branding. It’s time to look beyond the Garden City. Let’s be known for something different, something new. Anything.

I’m going to start with Christchurch: the City of Innovation. That’s what we do. We are a city of ideas, inspiration and invention. We attract the best and smartest to live in our amazing city. We are a talent utopia.

What’s your branding for the new Christchurch?

As Yogi Berra said, “if you don’t know where you are going, any road will lead you there”.

It’s one thing to have fantastic futuristic designs but are they practicable? maybe, maybe not. They are certainly buildable. We should not forget that we are moving into a resource challenged time. By 2050 we could have 9 billion people living on this planet. So we do need to build smart, we do need to think about the nature of the built environment as well as the type of city people want Christchurch to be. We have a wonderful brand being well known as the Garden City, as well as being a city with a strong record in technology, manufacturing and the arts. It has a strong farming hinterland and wonderful natural assets reaching from the sea to the snow.

It can easily build on all of those strengths. Here’s a recent example of a city flattened by an earthquake.

On January 17th 1995, Kobe, a city slightly larger in population to Auckland, was hit by a massive 6.8 earthquake, which shattered the city and killed nearly 6,500 people. The total cost was $102 billion. The rebuild process was difficult but according to this 2005 report, the economy eventually recovered to about 75-90% but with the loss of much of its port business. The government was the major funder of the rebuild and tried to focus on specific industries such as biotechnology. Whilst it’s not particularly known as an eco-city or rebuilt along sustainable principles, Kobe was ranked no 9 in the list of world eco cities in a 2010 Mercer report (Wellington was no 5). The lesson Kobe offers are that rebuilding takes time, the economic impact is major and recovery is a long term process.

But Christchurch is very different to Kobe. It is really a very low rise city and should no doubt remain that way. We don’t need some gargantuan high rise marquee building though there is certainly room for some interesting design structures. The human-building interface is very important to the people of Christchurch and that is probably were the focus should be. I agree to some extent with Gerry Brownlee, the Earthquake Minister, that we should only keep the very best of our heritage buildings (The Cathedral, the Arts Centre, the Provincial Buildings and other key sites) and build around them. How we define the best of them and which ones to invest in will no doubt be a heated topic. It’s important to keep the fabric of the city in place whilst recognising that a new layer will emerge.

How we execute this is the tricky bit. There needs to be representation and there needs to be leadership. We will need input from outside especially from people with expertise in sustainable design, both buildings and urban planning. The demolition bit is easy. As Gerry says

“As I’ve said repeatedly, heritage is both forward and back and from this point on, we decide what the heritage of this city will be“.

That’s a good start as long as we know who the “we” will be. Perhaps a good place to start is to set out a wish list and work from that. So here’s some of my wishes for how we approach this:

- People first: This must be a people centered process both in design, form and function. We want a living, breathing, vibrant and safe place to live and work with buildings and green spaces that sing to us.

- The Garden City: This is a wonderful brand but needs updating. We can incorporate ideas related to the Garden: permaculture, hydroponics, leisure, tranquility, beauty, shelter.

- Zero waste: We can make Christchurch the greenest city in the world. Recycling is great but true efficiency is in designing wasteless products and systems.

- Ecological clustering: We can create business clusters where organisations can leverage off each other. We can focus on our core strengths and build around that expertise as well as minimising waste streams

- Hagley Park: This could become our Central Park. Surrounded East, North, West and South by business and residential areas. This could help the CBD spread but keep itself anchored at the same time.

- Trains: This is a bit of a long shot. But we have train tracks going through key areas in the city and a train station in a potentially key area. With the current rebuilding we could look at a city loop to connect into the north south line from the central station. If there was ever a time to look at light passenger rail then this is it. We could also fit cycling into this work as well.

- Energy: All new buildings to be fully fitted for solar and small scale wind and then be connected to an integrated grid for feed in tariffs.

As people start to put their wish list together, we will start to see common themes appearing. That may be the best way to get a bottom up blueprint for rebuilding and redevelopment. So I invite readers to list their 5 top wishes below.

Then we can bring in the experts to make it all happen

“the London-based Canterbury Association envisioned Christchurch as an English utopia in the South Pacific. They planned an orderly, tiered society (the first settlers had to brandish a reference from an English vicar attesting to their ‘sobriety and respectability’), with an aristocracy and the Church of England as its head and an underclass of artisans and minions to serve them. They named their fledgling city after an Oxford college (Christ Church) and laid it out like an English city, complete with a Cathedral, University and a boy’s school, Christ’s College, modelled on Eton”.

170 years later it’s been challenged by natural forces and has come off second best: down but not quite out. The CBD has seen between 25-30% of building completely destroyed and another 25-30% seriously damaged. The Eastern districts, long known to be built on land of dubious quality, are in serious distress. How does a city recover from this type of disaster?

Well the first thing to remember is that cities have been completely leveled before and have been rebuilt. Lisbon is a fine example of this. On November 1st  1755 an earthquake and tsunami pretty much flattened the city killing tens of thousands and causing damage that reverberated Europe wide. The people of Lisbon responded in an incredible fashion. Wasting no time

“On December 4, 1755, little more than a month after the earthquake, Manuel da Maia, chief engineer to the realm, presented his plans for the re-building of Lisbon. Maia presented five options from abandoning Lisbon to building a completely new city. The first plan was to rebuild the old city using re-cycled materials; this was the cheapest option. The second and third plans proposed widening certain streets. The fourth option boldly proposed razing the entire Baixa quarter and “laying out new streets without restraint”. This last option was chosen by the king and his minister.^[13]“

I would like to consider option 4: razing the entire city and starting again.

Why don’t we demolish the whole CBD and start again, create another utopian vision, this time for a sustainable city: a living breathing system with an integrated energy grid, hi technology buildings in an urban landscape designed for people, creativity and innovation. Of course we could repair and keep our finest historical buildings: the Arts Centre, the Cathedral, the Museum, Christ’s College and any others of a similar standing. There may be some key sites we will have to rebuild but let’s get real: many buildings in Christchurch are/were a complete eyesore; many streets are not that exciting to walk down (for example Colombo Street); many tired shops with very average retail offerings. Many will not be missed and as the most over shopped city in the universe, we can surely survive the loss of many of these. The key challenge will be in how we managed our old heritage with our future one.

So let’s dream a little, not so much as think big but dream big. This is a chance for a new beginning just as it was 170 years ago. We have the opportunity to shape a new future, to create a world leading city and environment, to lead the way and to create new jobs in a hi technology based ecosystem. Our CBD could be smaller and nestled into and around Hagley Park. We simply need better, smarter and healthier buildings, not bigger ones.

I’m going to share some design thoughts just to give people a taste of what dreams can generate, what imagination can create. We want to create something amazing out of this…to somehow make those we have lost proud of what we chose to attempt, to make good out of bad.

Start dreaming now. Lisbon managed it in 1755. I’m sure we can.

So it’s refreshing to see a piece in The Press  on the need for a water market to be constructed to provide an efficient allocation of this precious resource. As I’ve discussed many times, a resource with no price will be treated as if it is free. For many people water is free and always has been but now there are competing claims on water. In New Zealand this is primarily from agriculture with huge demands for irrigation from the dairy industry, which converts water into milk on an enormous scale.

Initial objections are alway around the issue that water is a necessity for life and should therefore be free.  Well so is food and shelter and they aren’t. We have lived with the false notion that water will always be plentiful and is a constant renewable resource. Tell that to Australian farmers who have suffered a 5 year drought in many areas. Water availability is subject to climatic variation and to overuse. Just look at the state of NZ rivers and lakes which are well known to have experienced a serious decline in quality over the last 20 years of intensive farming.

It’s fairly simple to make sure people are allocated a fair supply of free water to assuage those who believe they shouldn’t pay for it but anything above a basic amount should be paid for just like our energy.

It’s only through the pain of payment that we really focus our efforts on conservation, efficiency and alternatives.

It’s time we got on with this whilst we still have water to charge for.

The Greens have come out with a story about a buried chapter in this report. They claim that Chapter 13 was pulled due to a very negative slant on the dairy industry. It pointed to dairy as the “largest cause of environmental decline” in New Zealand. Anyone who likes to swim in their local stream, river or lake could attest to that.

The dairy industry is also one of the biggest earners for the country. There you have it. New Zealand is no more immune to political lobbying than any other country except its pretty transparent. It’s hard to keep anything a secret here.

The Greens propose that this report come under the auspices of the Parliamentary Commissioner of the Environment rather than the government.

Yes to that!  The government simply cannot be trusted to be objective. Yes it’s a sad statement to make but that’s the way it is until we get a more distributed form of democracy and power.

If you can’t sleep then here is the link to the various reports.

This is just the beginning of a more serious debate on the issue of environmental costs otherwise known as externalities. Food miles is just a simple way of engaging the public and media just as the phrase “think global, buy local” has always done.

We all like to support our local farmers whether in NZ, UK, France, Japan or the US. However we all like to sell as much as our produce into markets where we can achieve a better price (even after taking account of transport costs). NZ is heavily geared towards exporting and with a large productive base and small local market it is more exposed than many other larger countries.

Stepping away from the hype and hysteria we can see that the Food Miles debate is both important and necessary. Consumers should be paying the full price for the goods they buy and that includes the basic inputs of energy and matter as well as ecosystem goods and services.

Whilst food miles comes across as a marketing ploy and is somewhat simplistic in its formulation, it can be seen as the start of a serious attempt to bring Trucost pricing into the mainstream economic system. Of course it makes sense to buy your veggies from the farmer down the road but the supermarket system is all pervasive and has driven costs down so far that they have been able to get away with an international supply chain as well as shipping domestic produce many miles further than necessary.

Pricing ecosystem services in at the primary level would see a vastly different pricing mechanism: one which included the price of nutrient and effluent run off, mining run off, soil depletion, air quality processing, clean water provision and the numerous other services which have enormous economic value.

If this happens then maybe we can relax a bit as the produce in our supermarkets and farmers markets will be priced on the same basis.

Only then will we really know which is really cheaper.

We know in our hearts that we need to consume less and make better. We don’t do it because we are time constrained as we slave away in our jobs to pay off huge mortgages, large rents and all the bills we have incurred in our consumption binge. If we really knew the true cost of our goods and services we may change our behaviour with increased speed.

And yet see the seething anger when petrol prices go up……we may be in position to control and destroy the planet but it may well do that to us first. Anyway this may or may not resonate. See what you think:

March 2004.

‘Greens take us back to the Dark Ages’ screams the Business Round Table. ‘Business doesn’t care about anything apart from money’ whines the Green Party. Sound familiar? This is generally what passes for debate between the official representatives of the economy and the environment. It is reminiscent of a long running stand off between a teenager and parent. Will the environment and business ever resolve their disagreements live together in sustainable harmony?
To answer this question we need to explore how the economy and the environment interact. The word economics is derived from the Greek ‘Oikonomos’ meaning household steward or home economist in modern diction. In ancient times, the household was the central functioning unit of any economy and most economic activity took place within that framework. Now the household is a place where we live and sleep but rarely do we produce anything that is identified as part of the economy, reflected by GDP. Business is now the place where most economic activity takes place and it is now the steward of the environment.
Our technological capabilities have also moved on giving us DVD recorders, microwaves, mobile phones and other similar gadgets but they are still all built from materials taken from the same source as thousands of years ago. As, John Muir, the founder of the modern ecology movement, said “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything in the universe”. In simple terms, the economy is simply a subset of the environment, and economics a framework for understanding our transactions with the environment. They are one and the same, not distinct and separate entities as often portrayed in the media.
We have become expert in transforming natures’ goods into new products to satisfy our ever increasing desire for material consumption. At the same time, the waste products from manufacturing, some 90% of actual inputs, are becoming harder to absorb and process. Whilst nature provides obvious goods in the form of wood, minerals and fossil fuels, little attention is paid to the crucial services it provides in acting as a both a source and a sink for economic activity. These services include waste processing, climate regulation, water supply and regulation, soil formation, nutrient cycling, food production, erosion control, pollination and even recreation and cultural values.
The value of these services has been largely ignored by the mainstream economics profession rather like the value of unpaid labour in the economy. A mother who goes out to work and hires a nanny to look after her children suddenly finds out the monetary value of her work in the household. Previously no value was attributed to looking after children but as soon as someone is employed formally then the value is recognized. Of course anyone who has children knows too well the value of unpaid labour in the home.

Whist ecosystem services have always had value they have never been recognized in monetary terms and therefore incorporated into the economic framework. In 1997, a study, led by Robert Costanza at the University of Maryland, attempted to value global ecosystem services. The findings estimated very conservatively the value of ecosystem services to be in the region of 2-3 times global GNP. In 2000, a study into the external costs of UK agriculture by Jules Pretty at the University of Essex, showed a value of ₤2.3bln, based on actual financial costs incurred. This equated to ₤208 per hectare of arable and permanent pasture. Again this was a conservative estimate of all agriculture related externalities.
What these and other studies have shown is that there is a real and attributable value to these services previously taken for granted. If any business has any doubt about the relevance of these costs, they should have another look at their insurance bill. Munich Re, one of the world’s largest re-insurance companies, puts the annual global costs of climate change at US$300bln by 2050. Even the Pentagon, a normally conservative institution, is recognizing the potential security issues of serious environmental changes. One thing Greens need to recognize from their side is that without security, law and order, the issue of environmental damage is likely to be an irrelevance.
Actually incorporating external costs at the company level has proved difficult. However Trucost Plc, a London based but Christchurch born company has designed an external cost calculator and an environmental rating system, which incorporates the externalized costs of any organization into their actual accounts. Initially there was strong resistance from some in the environmental movement, concerned about placing a value on nature. However, now there is an understanding that if you don’t value something then it will be treated as if it has no value. It is an unashamedly anthropocentric view to place a monetary value on nature but one which in the long run will lead to a more sustainable economy. Mainstream economics needs to acknowledge the importance of externalities and not spend so much time pouring over inflation statistics. Economics is fundamental to how society organizes itself and surprisingly can be fun and understood by anyone, as demonstrated by Diane Coyle in her recent book, “Sex, Drugs and Economics”, which succinctly analyses everyday activities in simple language.

Whilst the economics profession needs to wake up, the environmentalists must also acknowledge that expecting society to make a wholesale change of consumption habits without strong financial incentives is naïve. The only way to make them change their current ‘unsustainable’ consumption patterns is for goods and services to properly reflect the externalized costs that make them unsustainable in the first place. The true sustainable business is one which internalizes all its costs, instead of passing them to the taxpayer to pick up at some future date. Therefore, in order to create a sustainable economy, we must recognize the value of the environment in real terms. Then maybe business and the greens can redirect their energies to work out smarter and cheaper ways of living well and enjoying life.

But how does money actually grow? There always seems to be more of it around. Who creates it?

You probably assume your local central bank does because only they can print notes and coins. That much is true but that’s only a bit of the story. Currently only 2-3% of the total money supply is created in the form of notes and coins that we keep in our wallets and purses.

The rest? Well as JK Galbriath noted the way in which most money is created is “so simple that the mind is repelled”. The private banking system simply create the balance of new money by issuing new loans.

That’s it. For those of you who thought banks lent out money you have deposited with them i’m sorry to inform you that this is not the case.

If you deposit $1000 in the bank, they now have the ability to lend out (and in the process create new money) up to $10000. Of course they charge interest on that loan which is where they make their huge profits from.

I’ll give you an example:

In New Zealand the money supply has increased 101% in the last 8 years. So the total money stock has more than doubled in 8 years!! In that time house prices have risen 143%.

But the official measure of inflation has only risen 20%. Hello…..what is going on here? Yes it is a complete mess.

It is not the central bank or government printing money and causing huge (but unmeasured inflation). It’s the private banks who are doing it! The ones who scream and shout if governments ever think about reclaiming their right to issue money interest free on behalf of their citizens.

It is one of the greatest swindles of in history.

It requires that people sit up, take notice and look hard at what is happening around them. In the US especially the system is starting to creak…..look at the housing market and the lenders that operate in it.

Please see the following sites for more information. Once you learn about this life will never be the same

US: www.monetary.org

UK: www.monetaryreformparty.org.uk

Can: www.comer.org

Aus: www.peoplesbankparty.org

As my old history teacher said read, learn and inwardly digest.

Let’s start with the basic problem. Governments are controlling the issue and yet governments do not create greenhouse gases. Who does? People and organisations do (ok and so do some animals) and they need to deal with it. Then we need to ask who provides the polluting items? Fossil fuel companies in the main (ok farmers and cement manufacturers as well) are the providers of the feedstock.

Added to that we have the other side of the equation which is the sequestration system, our rainforests, soils, other vegetation, oceans and whatever else sucks up greenhouse gases.

So we have a certain volume of fossil fuel feedstock coming into the system to be combusted in various forms to provide energy in the main (as well as a multitude of petrochemical based products) and we know where the major changes in land use occur so we know the net volume of greenhouse gases added in any given period.

What we don’t know is the tolerable limit of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It could be 400ppm, 500 or 600 (using carbon dioxide equivalents). No one knows and quite frankly the models we have are really best guesses. We do know that there is likely to be a tipping point over which we will have some severe and irreversible impacts. Hopefully our science will get better and allow us to forecast accurately but we are still learning about our systems and as yet cannot be certain as to where this level is.

So at some point we have to pick a number. Let’s say 500ppm. We are now at 380ppm so we can plot out a course for getting there. We must have a global cap on emissions or we are wasting our time. Forget about national limits..they are a complete red herring and unworkable unless governments want to control the sale and use of all fossil fuels within their own region. Given global trade that is simply not possible.

Once we have a global cap we can work out an annual quota for fossil fuel production. Then the fossil fuel companies can compete for the right to produce. One suggestion is that rights are grandfathered in but a better one is that the rights are auctioned off annually and the receipts put into a global environmental contingency fund. This has been suggested by Oliver Tickell through his proposal Kyoto2. You can read about that here www.kyoto2.org.

Once annual quotas are put into place the market will adjust prices to meet demand at the appropriate supply level. I have proposed a complete reorganisation of the global energy market to increase efficiencies and therefore lower prices.

Then we can forget about all the attempts to somehow finesse this problem. We just have to work out how much we can use and then carry on as normal. If prices go up then renewable and alternative energy will be sought out. Either way we need to adjust our behaviour.

This is the most likely way of achieving that. Governments can help negotiate the process like they did with Montreal but ultimately this problem can be solved easily by the fossil fuel companies taking charge like the CFC producers did before them.

Give people the freedom and the incentive to change and they will.