Programme Outline
Behavioural Response & Social Recovery Indicators
Dynamics of Urban & Regional Economic Recovery

Programme Outline
This research asks how we can enhance the resilience of urban communities in New Zealand. Resilience promotes a more rapid social and economic recovery following a devastating natural disaster. Resilience accelerates social recovery, and social recovery concerns economic recovery. We need to understand this inter-relationship in a New Zealand context so as to speed the economic recovery of the wider community following disaster.

Mobility, communication and information bind our communities and underpin their resilience to disasters. We examine these factors in order to understand their roles in shaping our responses, as well as their contribution to social and economic recovery. A significant part of the programme will examine these factors in the context of the earthquakes that affected Christchurch, New Zealand, in September 2010 and February 2011. The generic findings will also be applicable to other natural disasters with the potential to destroy or seriously disrupt the normal function of urban infrastructure.

This research is centred around two research strands:

1. The behavioural response and social recovery indicators
2. The dynamics of urban and regional economic recovery

Behavioural Response & Social Recovery Indicators
This strand of research will address the social response to a hazard event, examining the transition from immediate behaviour (e.g. evacuation), through to recovery back to normal functioning (return to work, normal home-life and leisure). We will identify characteristics and processes that enhance and facilitate a faster recovery back to the level of day-to-day household and community stability required before economic recovery can fully proceed. The Christchurch earthquakes of 2010-2011 have provided the opportunity to shift from simulation-based methodology to examine some of these issues in a real event context.

The key projects arising from this research strand will address:

• Population displacement and short, medium and long-term mass temporary accommodation
• Billeting uptake: facilitating our natural accommodation resilience
• Temporary and transitional accommodation needs assessment
• Household migration analysis
• Perceptions of building safety
• Prioritising symbolic infrastructure to increase confidence in community recovery
• An evidence-based tsunami evacuation plan
• Natural leadership performance indicators

For further information about this research strand, contact Dr Jared Thomas.

Dynamics of Urban & Regional Economic Recovery
The effects of the 2010 and 2011 Canterbury earthquakes on the greater Christchurch area and the Canterbury region provide an excellent and unique opportunity to understand the impact of disasters on the urban dynamics of our larger centres and the region in which they are located. This includes understanding how business agglomerations and their associated workforces and population markets are at first disrupted and displaced, then re-form temporarily, and then as the rebuild progresses either entrench in their new locations or return.

The key projects arising from this research strand will address:

• Recovery of urban centres and the interplay between Christchurch's central business district and suburban centres
• Long-term recovery of Gisborne after the 2007 earthquake
• Business agglomerations and networking behaviour
• Regional resilience via the dynamics between main centres and satellite towns
• Indicators of economic and urban recovery

For further information about this research strand, contact Dr Felicity Powell.