The proposed Christchurch Convention Centre Precinct is one of the central features of the Government’s plans for the central city, it will occupy two of the most important blocks of the city between Cathedral Square and the Avon River. It is being built with a public contribution of $284 million, a figure that the PM has indicated is likely to increase. The total cost for the project is over $500 million. Yet, despite its crucial position in the city and the enormous amount of money being put into this project almost nothing is known about critical things like: what is actually going to be in the precinct, if it is going to make money, and even who will own it. The project has required the purchase and demolition of dozens of buildings, it will require the closure and removal of a major road through the city. There has been no public consulation at all, and little communication even with the local council. The project is being run by a group within the Christchurch Central Development Unit (CCDU), within the Christchurch Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA), under the leadership of Minister Brownlee. Construction starts this year, and bookings are already being taken for events in 2017.

The CCDU Blueprint for Central Christchurch

I’ve talked to former Mayors, people inside CERA, inside Council, community leaders, local business owners, inner city residents, and many more and almost no one supports either the location or scale of this project. Associate Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Minister Nicky Wagner has at least been willing to make a stern defense of the project, but the only other supporters are groups like Christchurch Tourism and the Christchurch Chamber of Commerce whose members stand to gain from the significant government support. As George Bernard Shaw once said “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

I’m going to introduce this article with my main criticism, then highlight my concerns over its scale and location, the lack of business case, the lack of public support, and the problems with what it communicates about the priorities of Christchurch as a city. Lastly, I will propose a sensible way forward.

The most important comment I have about this project is on the placement of the project in the city, and what this says about Christchurch to the world. The sorts of thing that a city puts on its most important sites — and and the amount of money that is spent on these things — says a lot about a place; about the experience of a place, and its identity, about the imagination of the people there, what is deemed possible in a place, and its highest aspirations. It affects the people that are attracted, and the types of investment that go on to build the fabric of a city.

In Auckland it is commerce and universities, Wellington has Parliament and large public institutions. By putting a giant Convention Centre in the middle of the city Christchurch is essentially saying to the world ‘the best of what we offer is a nice place for business people to meet and talk about other places’. That’s our grand vision, that’s our message to the world. Even more critically the vision is one that not only physically excludes the public from the core function of the building, but is the result of a large and bureaucratic exercise in keeping the public out of the design and conception of it. Our most important asset is a place that is empty for most of the time until people use it and grace us with their money. Because in a world of Convention Centres that is the main thing we value in people. It is a strange and highly unimaginative extension of neo-liberalism; this isn’t the value of art-for-business, or sports-for-business, but the realization of the world with the empty logic of business-for-business at its centre.

The vision is a huge building designed by professionals from overseas, constructed with money from people that don’t live here, for rich people visiting from overseas, the profits going back to overseas companies running it, that has been approved without the knowledge or consent of the people that live here. Whatever you think of the need for a convention centre I don’t think this was ever the vision that the people of Christchurch asked for.

A photo of the repairable library that was demolished to make way for the Convention Centre.

Urban issues

Building a convention centre right in the middle of a city flies in the face of urban planning wisdom. Convention Centres are very large buildings that are only fully activated and busy during booked events, at which time the public is by nature excluded. The spaces are either too big to have the intimacy and scale that city centres need or there is an event on and the public isn’t supposed to be there. So in most cities (Auckland, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney) these facilities are placed on the outskirts of the central areas where people can walk into the cities restaurants and hotels, but do not dominate central city life.

Another problem with convention centres is that they require the delivery of large amounts of food, beverages, tables, chairs, installations and so require entrances for big trucks. This isn’t a good match for a pedestrian and cycle-friendly city. This is the opposite of what we want to see in the centre, and the entrances inevitably kill one side of the projects. Which is it going to be? The Avon? Colombo? Gloucester? All of the streets in this crucial part of town are too important to damage like this.

Why is the building being put there? and are the original reasons still valid?

We have to return to the uncertainty of 2012, when the 100-day blueprint was being created. There were very real concerns about capital flight, loss of investor confidence, and too much downtown land leading to property collapse. In this context it was felt that something bold and big was needed and needed quickly. This bold move was the 100-day plan, with its centrepiece being the enormous Convention Centre.

Author Rebecca Solnit has written an excellent book called Paradise Built in Hell that is about the communities that form after disaster, and how contrary to the popular media and political narratives of dysfunction and looting, communities respond with much grace, innovation and integrity when placed in difficult positions. The people of Christchurch illustrated this. She suggests that it is not communities but elites that often panic after disaster and in the quest to appear to be in control they often make foolish large decisions. This theory of elite panic is the only way I can explain the placement of the project.

There is a video here in which one of the designers from the 100-day blueprint, Kirsty White — Senior Urban Designer at Sydney firm Woods Bagot — talks about how the Christchurch Convention Centre is needed because it will catalyse that part of the city by building and entire block. “The idea is that typical convention centre functions; the exhibition space and the plenary space are wrapped with local uses and local amenity. The idea is that we are going to catalyse urban development and complete urban blocks.”

Three years after this statement was made there is little evidence of any meaningful local amenity or local use. The centre is likely to be wrapped by high-end shops that can afford what will be expensive rental spaces. As someone with their ear close to the ground I haven’t heard of any approaches to cultural, community, or arts groups about how it might work with their needs.

Other nice ideas mentioned by the designers when first proposed are: “Roof top gardens overlooking cathedral square for public uses, views of the Southern Alps, a public winter garden”. From the images I’ve seen there is no presence of these parts of the design now.

Most tellingly White says: “It’s really about getting an early win in place.”

They have missed the opportunity to get an early win, and if this was one of the main reasons for the project then I think it’s fair to call into question the way it is still being forced through planning and consultation processes.

In some aspects the rest of the 100-day plan has been a success. It’s taken a while, but we are now seeing a lot of construction activity in the city and while land prices are too high for many projects they also didn’t collapse. The irony of the convention centre is that the plan it is part of has worked so well that the project isn’t needed there anymore. It’d be better to chop the land up and make some money selling it back to developers. Or create something unique and meaningful to Christchurch that makes this city different to other cities, not the same. Perhaps a large research facility, a centre to support the burgeoning technology scene here, or a large covered space for markets and events. Or all of those.

The next urban problem is the continual secrecy around the project - and its contents - continues to affect other projects in the city. Christchurch is a small city that wants to punch above its weight in terms of good quality concert and performance venues. But to do this it needs to be really careful about not duplicating or missing out on any particular facilities. Apart from one room that can fit up to 2000 people no one knows what is going in the centre, so the council and other arts groups can’t plan their facilities. The organization that was created to facilitate a speedy recovery is actually hindering because of its bizarre obsession with secrecy.

My understanding is that the design teams in CERA who are designing the project have met with Council planners only once to explain their ideas or get feedback. This is outrageous. Half a billion dollars being spent on a project in the two most important blocks of a city, and the design team doesn’t think the local knowledge or the city’s rules and regulations are important.

The really crazy thing is that the CERA legislation is so powerful that they aren’t obliged to. Groundwork starts on this project later this year and there is no mechanism to ensure that the design team has considered the extensive urban implications of this large building, or met with the council to get feedback. Also there is no resource management process needed, and no public consultation on the precinct.

Even busy with people the space looks too empty and too large. (image from CCDU website)

Economics

Have a look yourself at the 80 pages of business case prepared for the CCDU. (The heavy redaction had removed all financial and economic information.) The case is a pretty simple idea based on the following points:

1. Attract large groups of high-spending visitors.

Cities have been building Convention Centres around the world for decades and there are hundreds of examples demonstrating that the model never works well enough for it to pay its own way. It is a problem that is amplified by the fact that so many other cities are building similar subsided facilities that compete with each other and drive prices down. In this view Convention Centres are a kind of arms race with tax payer dollars, cheered on by what one commentor called the ‘Industrial Convention Centre Complex’. In one example in article by Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post the author calculates that the public is subsidising each visitor (businessperson) over $300 per night. We need to know the numbers in Christchurch. Do we want to be a city that gives money to rich visitors whilst in the middle of a post-quake housing crisis with hundreds homeless?

Geographer David Harvey writes about the focus on these kinds of large public investment projects saying: “Much of the corruption that attaches to urban politics relates to how public investments are allocated to produce something that looks like a common but which promotes gains in private asset values for privileged property owners.”

The Detailed Business Case states some interesting things:

First is that the number of conventions held in Christchurch fell considerably after the quakes, but that most of the conventions shifted to other NZ cities. This suggests the $284 million isn’t going to increase the size of the pie in NZ, but instead assure that Christchurch gets its share of it. This seems like a strange and expensive way to spend $300 million dollars of public money.

Even if the business case does stack up the other significant issue is the placement of the centre in the middle of the city; the mitigation around this (ie the public space design and the amenity it offers people here) is really undercooked in the documentation provided so far.

This is another telling sentence: “Typically, alternatives to the proposed use analysis and progressed to the Detailed Business Case are developed in an Indicative Business Case. However, in this case the Christchurch City Recovery Plan had identified a Preferred Option for the scale and design of the Proposed Convention Centre.” What this means in English is ‘we don’t know if this proposal is better or worse than other options because the government told us this is going to happen anyway. ‘

Amazing one of the main goals of the convention centre is to lend ‘credibility to the rebuild of the CBD’ and foster confidence and certainty. This for a project that is running over a year late, and how can it build confidence when they won’t release any information about it?

The business case also states that much of the conference activity will return to the city eventually, but without the convention centre would not happen in the central city and be spread out at the university and other locations. So $286 million to largely focus activity in a centre that probably doesn’t even need it now?

It says the convention centre will demonstrate excellence in design and environmental sustainability. Not much sign of that yet.

The detailed business case illustrates a concerning misunderstanding about the function of cities. It expects the placement of this building in the centre of the city and associated functions to stimulate development and add to investor confidence, as if these are the defining things that characterize a city. It doesn’t mention the massive risk a building of this scale introduces to a central city location, which needs to be thriving and busy to give Christchurch cultural, social, and economic stimulation it deserves. The case mistakes investment for urban success and this is an incredibly short-sighted view.

The other clanger in here is that much of the logic of the centre is based on introducing it as an early project into the city. They’ve taken too long for this to have real impact in terms of building confidence and as each month and year passes this logic becomes weaker and weaker.

A large part of the business case is that it is coherent with other government strategies such as the Christchurch Central Recovery Plan and the National Convention Centre Strategy. This is all very nice, but says nothing about the efficacy of the spending or the impact on the city.

In the 90 pages of the Business Plan there is only one paragraph which discusses the risks associated with putting an oversized space that needs surplus empty capacity into the city, and states simply that ‘active edges’ and access to bars and restaurants should mitigate that. Professionally, I disagree with this entirely and think the urban risk is much more serious.

A recent study on the effect of Walmarts in America illustrates how this sort of analysis should be done. The author compares two buildings, a renovated six story steel framed building converted into shops, offices and condos with a Walmart. The old building sits on less than a quarter of an acre while the Walmart and its parking lots occupy 34 acres. The author added up the property and sales tax paid on the land and the Walmart paid $50,800 per acre and the other smaller over $330,000. In other words the city was getting up to seven time return on its for the smaller more intense mixed use building.

While the Convention Centre might be prettier than a Walmart it follows the same logic. Large building, single use, requires a lot of transport. Similarly when the author looked at job creation the smaller development produced 74 jobs per acre and the Walmart less than six.

I’m not for a second saying that these numbers would be matched, but this is the sort of analysis we need to be seeing for this building. There is no trace of it in the business plan.

Convention Centres don’t make enough money to pay for their construction. If they did they wouldn’t need government investment to make them work. So the game then becomes about how much value the investment adds to the rest of the city, to restaurants, cafes, catering companies, hotels, brothels, and other service industries. Again, the Government has released no forecasts or estimates for this in the case of Christchurch. Presumably the government is caught in a negotiation in which they try to get the running costs as close to zero as possible, and the parties running it try to get the capital investment as high as possible to compensate. So a range of extra building such as restaurants and hotels are subsidized to compensate for the loss of the Centre itself.

The strange, and really quite outrageous thing, about the Christchurch Convention Centre is the governments refusal to make its case to the public. We are coughing up $284 million of public money with no evidence that the rationale behind it is solid. If the numbers were looking good, and provided a strong and compelling case, wouldn’t you think they would proudly reveal them? The absence of a public detailed economic argument suggests that case is questionable. The worry is that we are getting a Centre that is really about fulfilling political goals, rather than economic or social ones. The problem is that the Convention Centre, like the other anchor projects, is tied into a powerful political narrative that sees any change to the plans as a failure. This puts the Government in an incredibly poor negotiating position.

Urban Designer James Lundy has worked on similar projects in other countries and the normal desired return of private investment to public input is 1:10 or 1:5 at its worst. Even at this rate we shouldn’t be paying more than $100 million to attract the rest of the investment. Something in the Christchurch project is quite wrong.

The basic argument being put forward by supporters of the project is that this money will provide significant economic benefits for the city. I have two problems with this.

The economic benefits have never been presented to the public, and this National government doesn’t have a good record of being rational with this argument (see their roading programme), so with no public business case it’s impossible to evaluate. There is no attempt to compare this spending with alternatives. The beauty of money is that it can be spent in different ways and those ways compared. To throw almost $300 million at a project for economic reasons without making comparison defies economic logic. It turns something like this into a self-defining prophecy, and while that might end up getting the thing built, it makes for poor economic choices and poor urban planning. This is where the ‘just get on with it’ logic is at its most destructive.

Let’s put this project budget into perspective. $284 million is not a small amount of money. It is more than twice as much as Ngai Tahu was paid for centuries of historical grievances.

This $284 million is being spent on a dubious project while at the same time:

· Christchurch City Council is being forced to sell off money-making assets in order to stay afloat,

· Damaged playgrounds won’t be repaired,

· The city’s roads will take 30 years to fix,

· Sewerage will leak into the city’s rivers for another 20 years,

· The $10 million Arts Trail project was pulled,

· $10 million from the Margaret Mahy Playground was cut,

· The Metro Sports Facility is stalled,

· The Residential Demonstration project won’t go ahead,

· The new Library has been scaled back to save money,

· The Arts Precinct is stalled,

· The City Gallery has had its purchasing budget slashed.

The government could build a smaller convention centre for $100 milllion, fix all the problems listed above, and put $80 million to mitigating the terrible housing crisis here. I’d much rather have a number of smaller projects, supported by the people of Christchurch, raising the bar for the city than give over such significant local and national resources to these over-sized Government-led ones.

The peculiar logic driving CCDU’s interventions in the city can be illustrated with another current project. The government now owns the large IRD office building, and are unsure of whether to demolish or keep it. The building is worth $50 million and will cost $20 million to fix up. But for that they get 14,000 square metres of office space. Seems like a good deal to me. But they don’t want to create that much office space in the city as it might scare away developers and investors and flood the market. It feels like the state is working to protect developers and investors here, instead of working for the common good.

There is however an obvious solution, the government should fix the building and lease it out as a low cost to arts and community NGOs for ten years. These agencies don’t have a space in the new city and can’t afford new expensive rents and so won’t compete. Then in ten years the government can sell the building for a profit. The idea of demolishing it says a lot about how they see the world. “The 14,000-square-metre structure cost $50 million to build and was completed in 2007.”

Former Mayor Garry Moore , who knows Convention Centres well because he built the last one, suggests a convention centre of this size in Christchurch will probably lose between $20 to $40 million a year. Add that up as a cost over 20 years and we are talking serious money. Who is going to be expected to pay? The ratepayers of Christchurch?

The suggested down-sizing of the project was reported about a year ago, but doesn’t seem to have come to anything.

In that article the Minister says the business case could not be released during the tendering process because of commercial sensitivity. The tendering process is now long finished and while the business document has been released all the important financial information was blanked out.

Politics and city-making

It’s pretty clear that Christchurch needs some sort of Convention Centre. As far back as 2002, the New Zealand Herald reported that the previous convention centre built in 1995 for around $15 Million dollars, was bringing an estimated $70 million a year in direct benefits to the city. Part of its success was the way it worked with the adjacent Christchurch Town Hall. The new Convention Centre precinct, by contrast, is a monster that is forecast to cost half a billion dollars (33 times as much) and entirely occupy two entire city blocks between Cathedral Square and the Avon River. Two blocks that I would argue are the two most important blocks in the city.

This massive expansion has happened without any public discussion. Yes, the Christchurch City Council included the need for a convention centre in its 2011 plans for the city (informed by the ‘Share an Idea Campaign’ and largely rejected by the government) but to have it turn into such a huge project without any public oversight or conversation defies not just common sense but the spirit of how cities develop their public infrastructure.

And how is this even being pursued with so little information being made available or public input? It is the result of an extraordinarily powerful Christchurch Earthquake Recovery Act that gives the minister exemptions from any consenting or consultation processes. The land was purchased under the threat of compulsory acquisition. This is a project that is entirely based on use of the full force of the government using using emergency powers.

There is a defense to why this process has been so obscure, to a point. It goes like this. CERA and its development unit CCDU realized quite early on that they didn’t have the skills or expertise to lead a development of this size and complexity. So they couldn’t just work up a brief and employ some designers to get on with responding to the brief as has happened with other projects like the Bus Exchange or Justice Precinct. Instead they put a call out for interested parties who know how to build, and run, convention centres, and asked them what other facilities would also be needed to make it work financially. They then negotiated with a number of these until there was only one viable party left.

I have some sympathy for this process as they have ended up with a team that does know what they are doing. The problem is that that team knows what they are doing so well that they have managed to push it to their advantage and we now have the situation where the companies are getting a greater than 1:1 subsidy for the project from the public purse. John Key implied earlier this year that it is also likely that the New Zealand tax-payer will have to put in more. I don’t like this process because it locks out of the process the people who are paying for it (the broader NZ public) and the people whose city it is being placed in. (Christchurch)

In August 7th last year the government spent around $16,000 on a small launch for around 80 people. At this launch the consortium Plenary Conventions New Zealand was announced as the successful bidder to construct and run the large centre. This group includes significant Christchurch property owners The Carter Group, and Ngāi Tahu Property (responsible for such ‘outstanding’ developments as Wigram Skies and Tower Junction). A large French company Accor will run the hotels and convention centre when built. The design of the centre is being led by Woods Bagot with support of the Christchurch firm Warren Mahoney. (You can see the sparkly images of the centre here: https://ccdu.govt.nz/projects-and-precincts/convention-centre-precinct)

The CCDU is already taking bookings for the centre in 2017, work is set to begin this year. And yet we know almost nothing about it. What is in it? Who will pay for inevitable operating subsidies? How much profit the companies will make?

There is also an element of blackmail in the funding of this project. The people of Christchurch are disempowered because we are being told this $284 million of public funding via central government is a gift and the money may be withdrawn (as if it isn’t also their money) if they complain. The rest of the country is being told is a gift to Christchurch, and don’t be selfish about that because they need support after the earthquake etc. So with a simple piece of political rhetoric it becomes apparent that no one has a voice to question this project.

Artwork by Mike Hewson on what will be part of the northern area of the Convention Centre.

Concluding thoughts

The problems with this project: its location, its scale, the lack of support from the people of Christchurch, the questionable business case, political interference, and its mistaken vision for the city lead me to two calls that are I think pretty reasonable given everything:

1. Before construction starts CCDU needs to present a full business case for the building and the contracts that are being signed on our behalf. How much subsidy will it take, who will pay it, how much profit will the consortium make etc.

2. I strongly believe that this project and the large stadium need full independent public reviews. The size, location, urban logic, and business cases for both the projects need to be reviewed, and a proper discussion needs to be enabled between central government, local government and the people here. Both the stadium and convention centre are important projects for the city, this is all the more reason to make sure they are made in the best possible way, at the right size and in the right place. I’d like to think this second call is something the Christchurch City Council and the interested rest of NZ might want to get behind. It’s all our money and to question the wisdom of its spending, isn’t turning your back on Christchurch, its helping.

When people talk about a lack of democracy and the exclusion of the public in the Christchurch rebuild, it is this sort of project they are referring to. Christchurch has the money, talent, and goodwill to become one of the most amazing cities in the world. The myopic thinking, secretive planning, and economic short sightedness of this project, as it currently stands, is anathema to that vision.

The signs currently placed around the site open with this startling sentence, straight from the North Korean public relations playbook. “Thunderous applause will erupt from the palms of thousands when our world-class Convention Centre Precinct is completed.” I think the government might find that’s a long slow clap, not applause.

Barnaby is a writer and designer. He is co-founder of Freerange Press, and was co-editor on recent Christchurch books: Once in a Lifetime: City-building after Disaster in Christchurch, and Christchurch: The Transitional City. Barnaby can be contacted at barnaby@projectfreerange.com