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CERA community workshop report
Jul. 17th, 2011 07:35 pmThis afternoon I attended a CERA community workshop on the Greater Christchurch Recovery Strategy. This was along the same lines as the CCC's Share an Idea workshops but looking at the "Greater" Christchurch area.
At least that was the theory. From what we heard from a couple of other tables as the facilitator asked around for a sampling of the topics that had come up some people missed the "Greater" bit and focused on the "CBD".
The Recovery Plan is divided into 5 areas<
- Community wellbeing
- Culture and heritage
- Built environment
- Economy (I sat with this group, which seemed to have attracted less interest that the others)
- Natural environment
The workshop suffered for the process not being clearly explained - so we were asked to do stuff with no clear context, no understanding that there was a next step, an the commiserate confusion of some of the participants, time wastage on the first pass and lack of time on the later. (For the record the workshop was facilitated by staff from ESR.)
First we were asked to individually write on sticky notes what signs would tell us in 5 years time that the Recovery Plan was working. The next step was grouping these notes into themes or clusters. The answers focused on economic indicators and clear reporting from CERA. We picked the top 3 to continue with - Unemployment at or better than pre-September levels, the number of tourist beds back up to pre-quake levels and the tourists coming back, and reporting from CERA showing how the region's Economic recovery was matching or exceeding the targets in the Recovery Plan.
For each of these we then looked at
- what needs to be done to achieve this (me for unemployment was about identifying opportunities and needed skills ASAP, -publicising them- and getting training organised)
- what challenges and hurdles stand in the way (politics was a common theme here)
Unfortunately as mentioned above the time we had available was not made clear which meant spending far to much time on the first and then rushing through the last two as we discovered actually we only had 15 minutes left to do -all the rest- not 15 minutes left to finish the first one.
We then went through this process again for the question "What can we use this opportunity to do much better than before". This time we only had to pick one of our clusters, explain what it was about, and why it was so important. Unfortunately by this time people were becoming unfocused and kept making suggestions for specific outcomes, which wasn't what either of the questions was asking for.
We picked Transport as being important for getting resources (including labour) to and from new business locations in a timely fashion and supporting a decentralised industry (future disasterproofing).
(My initial ideas were around getting a range of industry/residential distributed around the hinterland settlements connected to Chch as a central hub by light rail. This would let people live further out of the city but commute easily, or live/play in the city but commute out to work. Or a bit more out there - "Make Christchurch the Silicon Valley of the South Pacific")
Finally we each got to write down one piece of advice we'd like to give CERA. Mine was "Be completely transparent and listen to / act on the feedback this garners you". There was also a feedback form on which I left the same criticisms I mentioned above.
~~~
There was one woman at the table who couldn't stop talking, didn't quite seem to get the point of the exercise and generally rubbed me up the wrong way. Most of the others I was on the same wavelength with to some degree. I take that as an indication that there was a good range of viewpoints and personalities present :-/
Although looking around the room I did feel that my age group and younger were ... under-represented. Still there are a number of workshops being held across the city, hopefully the average will work out.
At least that was the theory. From what we heard from a couple of other tables as the facilitator asked around for a sampling of the topics that had come up some people missed the "Greater" bit and focused on the "CBD".
The Recovery Plan is divided into 5 areas<
- Community wellbeing
- Culture and heritage
- Built environment
- Economy (I sat with this group, which seemed to have attracted less interest that the others)
- Natural environment
The workshop suffered for the process not being clearly explained - so we were asked to do stuff with no clear context, no understanding that there was a next step, an the commiserate confusion of some of the participants, time wastage on the first pass and lack of time on the later. (For the record the workshop was facilitated by staff from ESR.)
First we were asked to individually write on sticky notes what signs would tell us in 5 years time that the Recovery Plan was working. The next step was grouping these notes into themes or clusters. The answers focused on economic indicators and clear reporting from CERA. We picked the top 3 to continue with - Unemployment at or better than pre-September levels, the number of tourist beds back up to pre-quake levels and the tourists coming back, and reporting from CERA showing how the region's Economic recovery was matching or exceeding the targets in the Recovery Plan.
For each of these we then looked at
- what needs to be done to achieve this (me for unemployment was about identifying opportunities and needed skills ASAP, -publicising them- and getting training organised)
- what challenges and hurdles stand in the way (politics was a common theme here)
Unfortunately as mentioned above the time we had available was not made clear which meant spending far to much time on the first and then rushing through the last two as we discovered actually we only had 15 minutes left to do -all the rest- not 15 minutes left to finish the first one.
We then went through this process again for the question "What can we use this opportunity to do much better than before". This time we only had to pick one of our clusters, explain what it was about, and why it was so important. Unfortunately by this time people were becoming unfocused and kept making suggestions for specific outcomes, which wasn't what either of the questions was asking for.
We picked Transport as being important for getting resources (including labour) to and from new business locations in a timely fashion and supporting a decentralised industry (future disasterproofing).
(My initial ideas were around getting a range of industry/residential distributed around the hinterland settlements connected to Chch as a central hub by light rail. This would let people live further out of the city but commute easily, or live/play in the city but commute out to work. Or a bit more out there - "Make Christchurch the Silicon Valley of the South Pacific")
Finally we each got to write down one piece of advice we'd like to give CERA. Mine was "Be completely transparent and listen to / act on the feedback this garners you". There was also a feedback form on which I left the same criticisms I mentioned above.
~~~
There was one woman at the table who couldn't stop talking, didn't quite seem to get the point of the exercise and generally rubbed me up the wrong way. Most of the others I was on the same wavelength with to some degree. I take that as an indication that there was a good range of viewpoints and personalities present :-/
Although looking around the room I did feel that my age group and younger were ... under-represented. Still there are a number of workshops being held across the city, hopefully the average will work out.
