The concept of geoparks was first introduced in the first international conference on geoparks held in China in 2004. Here in New Zealand, Kiwis are accustomed to national parks, land reserves, marine reserves, and urban cities and regional parks. The concept of these protected areas has been long-standing in the country, whereas the UNESCO concept of geoparks is still novel and yet to be established in New Zealand.
In this dissertation, I explored the geopark concept for better understanding of its merits and examined the benefits of geotourism attractions as a sustainable economic development strategy to retrieve a declining rural economy. This research is focused on Kaikoura as a case study with geological significance, and emphasizes pre-earthquake existing geological heritages and new existing geological heritages post-earthquake to determine whether the geopark concept is appropriate and what planning framework is available to process this concept proposal should Kaikoura be interested in future.
The Kaikoura earthquake in November 2016 highlighted the vulnerability of New Zealand’s rural communities to locally-specific hazard events, which generate regional and national scale impacts. Kaikoura was isolated with significant damage to both the east coast road (SH1) and rail corridor, and the Inland Road (Route 70). Sea bed uplift along the coast was significant – affecting marine resources and ocean access for marine operators engaged in tourism and harvesting, and recreational users. While communities closest to the earthquake epicentre (e.g., Kaikoura, Waiau, Rotherham and Cheviot) suffered the most immediate earthquake damage, the damage to the transport network, and the establishment of an alternative transport route between Christchurch and Picton, has significantly impacted on more distant communities (e.g., Murchison, St Arnaud and Blenheim). There was also considerable damage to vineyard infrastructure across the Marlborough region and damage to buildings and infrastructure in rural settlements in Southern Marlborough (e.g., Ward and Seddon).
Queenstown and Christchurch are twin poles of New Zealand's landscape of risk. As the country's 'adventure capital', Queenstown is a spectacular landscape in which risk is a commodity. Christchurch's landscape is also risky, ruptured by earthquakes, tentatively rebuilding. As a far-flung group of tiny islands in a vast ocean, New Zealand is the poster-child of the sublime.
Queenstown and Christchurch tell two different, yet complementary, stories about the sublime.
Christchurch and Queenstown are vehicles for exploring the 21st-century sublime, for reflecting on its expansive influence on shaping cultural landscapes. Christchurch and Queenstown stretch and challenge the sublime's influence on the designed landscape. Circling the paradoxes of risk and safety, suffering and pleasure, the sublime feeds an infinite appetite for fear as entertainment, and at the same time calls for an empathetic caring for a broken landscape and its residents.
Initial recovery focus is on road access (especially the inland SH70) although attention also needs to be focussed on the timelines for reopening SH1 to the south. Information on progress and projected timelines is updated daily via NZTA (www.nzta.govt.nz/eq-travel ). Network analyses indicate potential day trip access and re-establishment of the Alpine Pacific triangle route. When verified against ‘capacity to host’ (Part 2 (15th December) there appears to potential for the reestablishment of overnight visits. Establishing secure road access is the key constraint to recovery.
In terms of the economic recovery the Kaikoura District has traditionallyattracted a large number of visitors which can be grouped as: second home (and caravan) owners, domestic New Zealand and international travellers. These have been seen through a behaviour lens as “short stop”, ‘day” (where Kaikoura is the specific focal destination) and overnight visitors. At the present restricted access appears to make the latter group less amenable to visiting Kaikoura, not the least because the two large marine mammal operators have a strong focus on international visitors. For the present the domestic market provides a greater initial pathway to recovery.
Our experiences in and reflections on Christchurch suggest Kaikoura will not go back to what it once was. A unique opportunity exists to reframe the Kaikoura experience around earthquake geology and its effects on human and natural elements. To capitalise on this opportunity there appears to be a need to move quickly on programming and presenting such experiences as part of a pathway to re-enabling domestic tourists while international visitor bookings and flows can be re-established. The framework developed for this study appears to be robust for rapid post disaster assessment. It needs to be regularly updated and linked with emerging governance and recovery processes.
Liquefaction affects late Holocene, loose packed and water saturated sediment subjected to cyclical shear stress. Liquefaction features in the geological record are important off-fault markers that inform about the occurrence of moderate to large earthquakes (> 5 Mw). The study of contemporary liquefaction features provides a better understanding of where to find past (paleo) liquefaction features, which, if identified and dated, can provide information on the occurrence, magnitude and timing of past earthquakes. This is particularly important in areas with blind active faults.
The extensive liquefaction caused by the 2010-2011 Canterbury Earthquake Sequence (CES) gave the geoscience community the opportunity to study the liquefaction process in different settings (alluvial, coastal and estuarine), investigating different aspects (e.g. geospatial correlation with landforms, thresholds for peak ground acceleration, resilience of infrastructures), and to collect a wealth geospatial dataset in the broad region of the Canterbury Plains.
The research presented in this dissertation examines the sedimentary architecture of two environments, the alluvial and coastal settings, affected by liquefaction during the CES. The novel aim of this study is to investigate how landform and subsurface sedimentary architecture influence liquefaction and its surface manifestation, to provide knowledge for locating studies of paleoliquefaction in future.
Two study cases documented in the alluvial setting showed that liquefaction features affected a crevasse splay and point bar ridges. However, the liquefaction source layer was linked to paleochannel floor deposits below the crevasse splay in the first case, and to the point bar deposits themselves in the second case.
This research documents liquefaction features in the coastal dune system of the Canterbury Plains in detail for the first time. In the coastal dune setting the liquefiable layer is near the surface. The pore water pressure is vented easily because the coastal dune soil profile is entirely composed of non-cohesive, very well sorted sandy sediment that weakly resists disturbance from fluidised sediment under pressure. As a consequence, the liquefied flow does not need to find a specific crack through which the sediment is vented at the surface; instead, the liquefied sand finds many closely spaced conduits to vent its excess of pore water pressure. Therefore, in the coastal dune setting it is rare to observe discrete dikes (as they are defined in the alluvial setting), instead A horizon delamination (splitting) and blistering (near surface sills) are more common. The differences in styles of surface venting lead to contrasts in patterns of ejecta in the two environments. Whereas the alluvial environment is characterised by coalesced sand blows forming lineations, the coastal dune environment hosts apparently randomly distributed isolated sand blows often associated with collapse features.
Amongst the techniques tested for the first time to investigate liquefaction features are: 3D GPR, which improved the accuracy of the trenching even six years after the liquefaction events; thin section analysis to investigate sediment fabric, which helped to discriminate liquefied sediment from its host sediment, and modern from paleoliquefaction features; a Random Forest classification based on the CES liquefaction map, which was used to test relationships between surface manifestation of liquefaction and topographic parameters. The results from this research will be used to target new study sites for future paleoliquefaction research and thus will improve the earthquake hazard assessment across New Zealand.
The major earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 brought to an abrupt end a process of adaptive reuse, revitalisation and gentrification that was underway in the early 20th century laneways and buildings located in the south eastern corner of the Christchurch Central Business District. Up until then, this location was seen as an exemplar of how mixed use could contribute to making the central city an attractive and viable alternative to the suburban living experience predominant in New Zealand.
This thesis is the result of a comprehensive case study of this “Lichfield Lanes” area, which involved in depth interviews with business owners, observation of public meetings and examination of documents and the revitalisation research literature. Findings were that many of the factors seen to make this location successful pre-earthquakes mirror the results of similar research in other cities. These factors include: the importance of building upon historic architecture and the eclectic spaces this creates; a wide variety of uses generating street life; affordable rental levels; plus the dangers of uniformity of use brought about by focussing on business types that pay the most rent. Also critical is co-operation between businesses to create and effectively market and manage an identifiable precinct that has a coherent style and ambience that differentiates the location from competing suburban malls. In relation to the latter, a significant finding of this project was that the hospitality and retail businesses key to the success of Lichfield Lanes were not typical and could be described as quirky, bohemian, chaotic, relatively low rent, owner operated and appealing to the economically important “Creative Class” identified by Richard Florida (2002) and others. In turn, success for many of these businesses can be characterised as including psychological and social returns rather than simply conventional economic benefits. This has important implications for inner city revitalisation, as it contrasts with the traditional focus of local authorities and property developers on physical aspects and tenant profitability as measures of success. This leads on to an important conclusion from this research, which is that an almost completely inverted strategy from that applied to suburban mall development, may be most appropriate for successful inner city revitalisation. It also highlights a disconnection between the focus and processes of regulatory authorities and the outcomes and processes most acceptable to the people likely to frequent the central city. Developers are often caught in the middle of this conflicted situation. Another finding was early commitment by businesses to rebuild the case study area in the same style, but over time this waned as delay, demolition, insurance problems, political and planning uncertainty plus other issues made participation by the original owners and tenants impossible or uneconomic. In conclusion, the focus of inner city revitalisation is too often on buildings rather than the people that use them and what they now desire from the central city.
