4. The Ruptured City Ten Years On

In Christchurch Ruptures (2016), I identified five major ruptures that guided my arguments on how the city might regroup and move on: (1) I warned of being too ideologically trapped in the past; (2) I advocated respect for all peoples, regardless or race or ethnicity and regardless of length of residency in the city; (3) I suggested that alternative ways of living in the past have much to offer the present and that a moderate political streak should be fostered; (4) I argued that it is time for a new postcolonial reality and that imagined Englishness should not be restored; and (5) I called the ‘city centre’ as over, and argued that it is time to think smaller in scale and not to restore that was there before, as well as signalling new suburbs and exurbs as worrying. In this chapter I reconsider these five themes. To what extent have my predictions come to pass? Are they still relevant on the 10th anniversary of the earthquakes and what other themes have emerged in the meantime?