A Message To Christchurch City Councillors
As you digest the submissions to the Draft City Plan, please keep one thing in mind:
It’s OK to not compromise.
One of the traps of soliciting widespread feedback from different groups, with different motives, different levels of understanding, is that you try and appease them all, often by compromising others values. It’s the design by committee trap. Try to please everyone, and you’ll end up pleasing no one.
The most important thing you need to make sure is that all aspects of the plan are coherent. I’d much rather a plan which is not to my taste, but coherent, than a plan which is incoherent in attempting to appease polar opposite interests. The coherent plan will have a demographic who will absolutely love it. The incoherent plan will only have critics. Your role is to try and see the forest for the trees, and to make sure that every piece of the plan works as a whole. Make sure that restrictions aren’t arbitrary, but have good LONG TERM rationals, not temporary band-aids.
I’ve been following the submissions and can see there are polar opposite views expressed. The ones which annoyed me most were those who had failed to see how the rules proposed in the draft fit into the bigger picture of the plan, the ones who seamed miffed that the pre-earthquake status quo wouldn’t resume. I’ll single out Hamish Doig’s submission as being firmly in this category.
It’s OK to not compromise the plan for the sake of these people.
Ultimately your job is to set the fundamental framework to make sure Downtown Christchurch is not rebuilt as an uninspiring tilt-slab dump, but a city where interesting people want to come live.
Layton Duncan
