First, a playground: Fifteen Years On

22/02/2026

Today marks fifteen years since the earthquake that killed 185 people and unmade a city. I want to tell a story I am not sure has been told quite this way before.

I live opposite the Margaret Mahy playground.

I say that not as a point of geography but as a point of orientation because for me, as for many who have watched this city rebuild itself from the ground up, that playground is not simply a playground. It is a theorem. A proof of concept. An act of faith rendered in steel and timber and the laughter of children who were not yet born when the ground moved. But to understand what it proved, you first need to understand the scale of what it was built against.

On 22 February 2011, at 12.51 in the afternoon, Christchurch stopped. The central city, that intricate, layered, Victorian and Gothic fabric of a place, was effectively erased. One hundred and eighty-five people died. Tens of thousands were displaced. The insurance system, which was supposed to provide the floor beneath the recovery, revealed itself to be a labyrinth. And into that void stepped the state, with a recovery plan of some ambition and considerable controversy, built around a series of anchor projects that would, in theory, signal to everyone else that the city centre would rise again.

The anchor projects were late. Some were very late. This is on the record, and there is no need to relitigate it here. But the lateness matters to the story I want to tell because it creates the question at the heart of it the tale. If the timeline kept shifting, if the state’s commitment was perpetually visible on the horizon but slow to arrive in practice, then what was it that gave the private sector the confidence to move at all? What was the first credible signal that trusting the state was a reasonable thing to do?

The answer, I would argue, is a playground.

The Margaret Mahy Family Playground opened in 2015, before most of the anchor projects had found their feet, let alone got their first business case done. It sits at the edge of what would become the Arts precinct between the Ōtākaro Avon River Corridor, the East Frame and the city grid: a precinct that needed to breathe again before anything else could grow around it. And what the playground did, in its quiet and joyful way, was demonstrate that the state understood something that spreadsheets could not easily capture: that a city is not made of commercial floor space. It is made of families. Of places where children run until they are breathless and parents sit in the late afternoon sun and feel, for a moment, that the place they had known was not entirely gone. That it was worth staying for.

That feeling, modest, domestic, irreplaceable, was what the private sector had been waiting for. Because across the rubble and the heritage demolition debates and the insurance disputes still grinding through the courts, there were developers and entrepreneurs and hospitality operators who were watching very carefully indeed. Asking themselves whether it was safe. Not structurally safe, but economically, emotionally, wairua safe to put their money and their reputations on the line in a city that was still, in so many respects, an open question.

The playground said: Yes. Nau mai, haere mai. Come back to the city. We can do this.

And they came. Richard Peebles, Kris Inglis, and Mike Percasky, the trio already responsible for Little High Eatery, committed eighty million dollars to Riverside Market on Oxford Terrace before the anchor projects had anywhere near delivered on their promise.

Antony Gough staked somewhere in the order of a hundred and fifty million dollars on The Terrace, the start of the hospitality and office precinct that would help return life and laughter to Ōtākaro at a time when the awa itself was still a building site.

Philip Carter and the Carter Group assembled and developed The Crossing: that magnificent precinct of laneways and heritage facades at the corner of Cashel and Colombo, betting on a retail heart that had yet to fully materialise.

Hotels went up against the odds and the prevailing wisdom and the not inconsiderable weight of actuarial caution.

And then there is The Tannery: Alasdair Cassels and his family looking at a heritage industrial site on the banks of the Heathcote in Woolston, in the middle of the city’s darkest chapter, and deciding that preservation and reinvention were not opposites. That the rubble did not have to have the last word.

These were not small decisions. They were big bets. Significant, consequential, deeply personal big bets. Bets placed on the proposition that the state and its officials would hold their nerve and help make the city centre viable again.

To understand the full weight of those bets, you need to sit with what the private sector was working without: certainty, precedent, a functioning insurance environment, and for many of them, a career built in commercial property development. These were people whose expertise lay elsewhere: in brewing, in hospitality, in retail, in the quiet business of knowing a city and loving it. They did not arrive with vast development portfolios under one arm and a risk model under the other. They arrived with conviction. They put their own money into a broken city because they believed, before the evidence was conclusive, that it was worth believing in. That is a different kind of qualification entirely, and in the circumstances, it may well have been the more important one.

That quality, call it courage, call it conviction, call it a particular kind of love for a place is not spoken about nearly enough. We are comfortable celebrating the finished buildings. We are far less comfortable acknowledging what it cost, personally and financially, to begin those buildings and precincts when the outcome was genuinely uncertain. It was local people who moved first in Christchurch and carried a risk that no business case could fully quantify, and they carried it anyway. We don’t talk about this enough.

Nor is the role that Ngāi Tahu played sufficiently acknowledged. Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu occupied a position that was neither simply public nor simply private: which is exactly as one would expect of an Iwi navigating post-settlement governance in a city that sits within its rohe. Ngāi Tahu’s investment, under Ngai Tūāhuriri’s leadership, insisted that a rebuilt Ōtautahi reflect something of its deeper history. Iwi and hapū presence throughout the recovery shaped what the rebuild became in ways that a simpler account tends to miss. The story of Ōtautahi and Christchurch is not a two-party story. It never was. And, no longer is.

Which brings me to something I suspect will be unfashionable in certain corners of the internet, but which I think the evidence of this rebuilt city plainly supports.

There is a particular kind of cynicism that has made itself very comfortable in Aotearoa’s public discourse: a reflexive assumption that when the state, the private sector and te ao work together, someone is being captured and someone is being naive. It circulates endlessly on social media. It is treated, in some quarters, as sophistication. It is not. It is a failure of imagination dressed up as scepticism, and it has a real cost: because it makes it nearly impossible to recognise, let alone celebrate, the moments when institutions from the public, private and te ao sectors actually show up for each other and for the people who need them most.

Ōtautahi is one of those moments, and it deserves better than that particular habit. The anchor project timeline tested the patience of everyone who had committed capital on the basis of it. And the courage the private and te ao sectors showed in moving ahead regardless: trusting the state to follow through, to be its word, deserves to be understood for what it was. Not a commercial calculation. Not a risk-adjusted portfolio decision. A bet on this country’s capacity to do what it said it would do, made by people who had every reason to wait and chose not to.

I am not naïve about what remains unfinished. There are families in this city still working through EQC claims that have dragged on for a decade and a half. The cathedral stands as it has stood for fifteen years: beautiful, frustrating, irreplaceable, and still an argument about what we owe the past and who gets to decide. The recovery is not over. For some people, it may never feel entirely over.

And yet. Ōtautahi, even in its incompleteness, represents something we do not talk about enough as a country: which is what we look like at our best. What we are capable of when people with capital and people with mandate decide, together, that a place and its community are worth the risk.

The city that stands here now was built by people who trusted each other before they had reason to. Who moved when the ground was still uncertain. Who believed, in the middle of the worst of it, that Ōtautahi was worth the effort.

I think about that every time I look out my window. The playground is there this morning, as it is every morning: the same steel and timber that the state’s builder’s put into the ground as its first act of faith, its first promise kept.

There are children on it already, doing what children do, entirely unbothered by the history beneath their feet. They do not know that they are playing on the site of an argument about what this country owes its people. They do not know that the laughter carrying across the road is, in a very real sense, the sound of big bets that paid off. But I know. And on this Sunday of all Sundays, that playground says something about who we can be, and I wish we shared that story with one another more often.

Ngā mihi maioha.