Spaces of post-disaster experimentation: Agile entrepreneurship and geological agency in emerging disaster countercartographies

Introduction

Much has already been written about the 2010–2011 Canterbury earthquakes, and the ways that the disaster generated both sociocultural and material fissures in the city of Christchurch. Emergent accounts of responses to the two most significant quakes – a magnitude 7.1 on 4 September 2010 and a, more deadly and destructive, magnitude 6.3 on 22 February 2011 – have largely focused on narratives of response, recovery and resilience (Cretney and Bond, 2014; Wilson, 2013; Winstanley et al., 2015). However, more recent accounts, emerging as the more formal architectures of the city are negotiated and reconstructed, have begun to explore and critically examine the longer term processes of seeking out and inhabiting a ‘new normal’ for local citizens – paying attention to the ways the earthquakes have ruptured the imaginaries that had previously informed many individual and collective narratives of, and for, the city (Dickinson, forthcoming; Wesener, 2015). Some of these have begun to question – without answer – the extent to which alternative, emergent imaginaries of the city might have prevailed in the face of conservative top-down, state-led approaches to post-disaster redevelopment (Cloke and Conradson, 2018).

For Christchurch, the rupture of the earthquakes has exposed and enlivened the notion that alternative performances and inhabitations might contribute more centrally to the recovered and reassembled city. This enlivening can be witnessed most obviously in two ways. Firstly, the earthquakes appear to have given rise to alternative projects that reflect the multidimensional nature of cultural life and Christchurch's more varied history (Cloke and Dickinson, forthcoming). The cultural and urban imaginations of Christchurch as a conservative city were reflected, pre-quake, by the idea that the city reproduced a ‘…quaint and tranquil version of Englishness’ (Cupples and Glynn, 2009: 1) – a characteristic formed through an ignorance of pre-colonial histories, and celebrations of dominant Anglophilia (Low, 2012). The recovery landscape, meanwhile, has generated the opportunity for Māori cultural principles and claims to the city to be built into its re-design (Bennett et al., 2012). Local tribal groups, such as Ngāi Tahu, have a formal place in the city's recovery plan, and it has been argued that the exclusion of indigenous involvement can be somewhat rectified because the earthquakes represent a fresh beginning of sorts (see Ballard et al., 2015).

Second, and linked to shifting representations of a colonial Christchurch, has been the emergence of different threads of activity that represent different democratic and material claims to the city. In addition to the ways in which the diversity of Christchurch's narration has been challenged, a part of the post-quake landscape consisted of the emergence of experimental and transitional creativity that seeks to re-appropriate discourses and practices of inhabiting the city (Cloke and Conradson, 2018). This can be observed through the demonstrations of dissent in the city centre that gave rise to the impression that the city is now open to alternative performances, practices and claims to the city (Bennett, 2014b). Specifically, challenges to the conservative status quo can be seen through the emergence of new third-sector organisations (TSOs) that are catering for a formalised emergence of something other than a dreary top-down, state-driven recovery. Most visibly, organisations such as Gap Filler and Greening the Rubble have received global attention (Atkinson, 2012). In some instances, these organisations emerged in response to the material spaces generated by the earthquakes. In others, the earthquakes appear to have given previously docile or peripheral community projects some kind of social and political traction (see Reynolds, 2014). Activities have included keying into international creative-city political movements that seek to attract investment and attention to ‘bottom-up’ grassroots urban projects, largely focusing around the cultural use of temporary spaces in the city (see Cloke and Dickinson, 2018).

Against this backdrop, this article is situated around a broader question of how emergent projects encountered and negotiated the possibilities of the disaster as they sought to contribute to an emerging radical, critical counter-politics in the city. Focusing particularly on an emergent TSO, the Canterbury Communities’ Earthquake Recovery Network (CanCERN), I draw attention to the kinds of experimentation that played out during the recovery process in the city – arguing that attempts to embed more hopeful, progressive inhabitations of the city were marked by various kinds of agile entrepreneurship that remained open to the ways the earthquake had ruptured the city. CanCERN occupied a complex and contentious space in the Christchurch recovery scene, seemingly emerging out of a lack of community involvement in the ‘new’ and recovering city (see McCrone, 2015). The organisation represented a space of political engagement and care, combining individual casework and practical support to connect disenfranchised and vulnerable members of the public with state, private-market and other TSO services. This included representing community concerns to state recovery bodies, connecting members of the public to appropriate legal and welfare support post-quake and facilitating communication between citizens and insurance companies.¹ CanCERN's occupation of a blurry terrain between the ‘public’ and the ‘state’ saw them both vilified and eulogised by both state officials and earthquake-affected citizens at different times (Law, 2016). Despite vocally working against the state rhetoric that recovery was about restoring the pre-quake status quo, at first glance, the organisation fulfils many of the characteristics that represented the gradual return to a top-down, neoliberal recovery strategy (see Cloke and Conradson, 2018; Cupples, 2012).

I argue, however, that this organisation were engaged in a far more tentative process of probing the nature and potential of the earthquakes than critical discourses might suggest. Acknowledging contemporary research that frame post-disaster arenas as landscapes of experimentation (Chamlee-Wright, 2010; Tironi, 2015) – where more progressive horizons of being are imagined and contested – I argue that the earthquakes did not deliver a ‘clean slate’ for radical political imaginaries or prompt an automatic return to a hegemonic status quo, rather emergent subjects were entwined within an unravelling sense of how the earthquakes had ruptured the city. In this instance, such experimentation was marked not just by attempts to conjure up new senses of place, imagination and politics that challenged top-down recovery strategies, but this tentative probing was characterised by a belief that the disaster only enabled certain kinds of futures. By drawing attention to the ways in which the organisation probed the fissures generated by the quakes, I suggest that the kinds of agility demonstrated by CanCERN and others in Christchurch (i) complicates narratives of linear temporalities of recovery, instead drawing attention to the discursive opening and closing of spaces of progressive possibility post-disaster, (ii) demonstrates an example of the ways in which experimental political projects post-disaster are shaped by tentacular entwinements of the human and non-human (iii) and whose activity contributed to a more collective awareness of the ways the disaster had ruptured the social and political architectures of the city. What follows, then, is an exploration of not only radical critical counter-politics, but an account of how an organisation encountered, negotiated and contributed to an unfolding ‘event-politics’.

The material for this study was gathered during eight months volunteering for CanCERN in a range of capacities, but largely as an organisational representative at the In the Know (ItK) Hub (later described). The rationale for this participant observation methodology was to foster prolonged engagements with people that would see me encounter informal conversations and shed light on the conscious and unconscious practices of organising, but also in response to emerging disquiets that Christchurch had become ‘research laboratory’ (with critiques of researchers ‘breezing in and out’ of the city). Given that CanCERN were made up of staff embedded in various community networks (and with associated earthquake knowledges), I was expected to contribute my experiences and knowledge of the state residential zoning scheme (which I had previously researched) in order to develop a more formalised knowledge exchange.² I was often introduced as a ‘university academic doing research about, and voluntary work for, CanCERN’. Over 350 hours were spent within the organisation and, alongside ethnographic diary entries, multiple interviews were conducted with all staff. This volunteering was a part of a broader project exploring the geographies of the post-disaster city of Christchurch (see Cloke and Dickinson, forthcoming). As a part of that project, interviews were conducted with over one hundred key informants in the city – including representatives of local TSOs, academic researchers and affected citizens. Specific focus in the project was given to emergent TSOs in an attempt to understand the ways they were contributing to the re-emerging material and social fabrics of the city.

Disasters as ruptures to the status quo

It should be noted that the emergence of alternative, and arguably more hopeful, claims to urban space in Christchurch after the earthquakes is not in itself a unique event. Significant geographical attention, in particular, has been given to the ways in which disasters make visible and rupture the material, institutional and political structures that configure reality and normality (Cupples, 2012; Ozerdem and Jacoby, 2006; Pelling and Dill, 2006; Tironi, 2014). Within these accounts, disasters have been framed not simply as traumatic and extreme events, but as situations that render stabilised elements of our social, cultural and political lives as problematic, incomplete or insufficient (Oliver-Smith, 1999). They ‘unmask the nature of society's social structure’ (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, 2002: 9). As the building blocks of everyday life collapse and the world is rendered uncertain, social life expands and multiplies, subsequently overflowing pre-existent parameters (Clark, 2011). As a result, disaster events are framed as moments when linear temporalities are blurred, new (or transformed) actors are brought to the fore of social and political life and the contours of community life are rearranged (Tironi, 2015).

Such ruptures to the status quo are rarely theorised to contribute to a more hopeful re-coding of the city, however. Despite coverage of the emergence of ‘small, temporary utopias’ (Solnit, 2009), emergent disaster subjects are normally juxtaposed against the operations of neoliberally conservative powers of government- and big-business-led recovery strategies. Even when disasters ‘lay bare’ political and social structures, the normative argument is that the political management of the disaster aftermath results in a ‘forceful display of orchestrated ideological cohesion’ (Peck, 2006: 122). Here, the laying bare of the limitations of power is argued not to represent an ideological fracture, but rather serves to feed and empower the problematically hybrid character of the ‘market revolution’ (Graetz and Shapiro, 2005). The dominant argument is that employment of a prefabricated crisis narrative which, in conjunction with a hybrid of a range of conservative, libertarian, pro-business and neoliberal ‘second-hand’ ideas, presents the opportunity to craft a constructed neoliberal unity (Kotkin, 2006). In some instances, this is reflected in a neoliberal inclusion of community voice and responsibility amid rhetorics of the limitations of formal political power (Miller and Douglass, 2016). In others, it sees the assertion of national command over local processes, often in the name of safety, cohesion or conflict management (Kapucu, 2012). This hybridity seemingly makes it clear that the longer run outcomes of disasters tend not to be a reversal, or even a midcourse adjustment, of the tenets of ideological governance but rather an acceleration of extant rule. Disasters, then, not only render visible the structures that organise life, but in some way also work to reveal, create and provoke (Shaw, 2012).

Some accounts, however, are beginning to question whether narratives of a monolithic neoliberal conservatism give credence to the ways subjects probe the sociocultural fissures generated by disaster events. Given that disasters can be examined as multidimensional sites of physical destruction and social disequilibrium (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, 2002), it can be suggested that the cracks and fissures of the physical landscape are replicated in the political and sociocultural orders of the landscape, resulting in unexpected spaces of suspended and/or disputed signification. For example, Cupples (2007) draws attention to the ways that Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua gave rise to different kinds of social and ethical ‘reorganisation’ that opened out possibilities that women ‘…might be able to exploit within a process of identity renegotiation’ (170). Alternatively, Dimmer (2016) describes transitional arts scenes after the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami, arguing that artistic interventions enabled citizens to question and challenge existing political paradigms of governance. These instances, although varied, highlight emergent activities that question and challenge formulations of recovery as a return to the pre-event norm – suggesting that disasters can give rise to more hopeful, alternative senses of place across different registers.

Emanating from these accounts are questions about how we might better conceptualise how spaces of action and experimentation open and close through different phases in the disaster recovery process. A common response here is exploring the more hopeful and progressive possibilities of the disaster landscape, in particular, might mean abandoning the notion of an individual destructive event, followed by a protracted, linear recovery process. As Cloke and Conradson (2018) point out, disaster events often continue – fuelled by emergent subjectivities that reflect an ongoing openness to the possibilities afforded by the disaster. Similarly, drawing on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Chamlee-Wright (2010) argues that recovery periods are marked by different kinds of social learning whereby opportunities for ethical and political citizenship discursively open and close. Here there is no linear timeline recovery, but rather the disaster prompts discordant ‘search and discovery’ processes that reveal the possibilities and limitations of that event. For Clark (2011), ‘recovery’ is more of a matter of re-thinking and acknowledging the geological. He suggests that the uncertainty of the disaster sees tentacular relationships between the human and non-human woven into emerging forms of knowledge and subjectivity post-disaster – with an acknowledgement that the disaster in some way ‘limits what is open to being re-enacted or done differently’ (p. 57).

These questions about how subjects probe the ways in which the disaster ruptures urban landscapes reflect a wider sea-change in how the post-disaster recovery of communities and associated political landscapes is being conceptualised (Chamlee-Wright, 2010; Lindell, 2013). Increasing attention is being given to the ways in which possibilities for new political and ethical sensibilities of being together are imagined and contested during recovery, yet accounts of disasters are still commonly framed by political meta-narratives of neoliberalism that struggle to give credence to the various lines of flight that irrupt from it (Cupples, 2012). As I have argued elsewhere (Dickinson, forthcoming), a significant challenge in conceptualising these discordant opportunities of the disaster is to find ways of examining how subjects realise and acknowledge how disaster events rupture the established order of things. This article subsequently aims to examine how subjects in Christchurch realised and negotiated the possibilities engendered by the disaster event.

Emergent spaces of community experimentation

In order to demonstrate the ways in which CanCERN encountered (and contributed to) a kind of event-politics, it is first inductive to examine the broader landscape of community organisations operating in the post-quake city. Amongst the spaces of demolition and destruction within Christchurch, there has been evidence of new projects of participatory activism and political engagement that are focused on alternative performances of place. Many of these have become focused on enlivening the notion that the earthquakes – previously typified by a kind of conservative politicism (Parker, 2014) – might serve as a catalyst for an alternative form of participatory politics. In particular, emergent TSOs have been broadly viewed as being involved in stimulating new sets of practices and performances that made possible imaginations of a different kind of city. Of the 450 community-led groups and initiatives operating in the post-quake recovery landscape, almost half of them (230) were established in response to the earthquakes (Carlton and Vallance, 2013).

At first glance, the emergent third sector appeared to be working to reshape political and ethical engagements with the post-quake city – prompting and mediating people's social and institutional encounters. In the initial stages of recovery, these emergent organisations appeared to be playing a significant role in contributing to the makeup of the ‘new’ Christchurch – receiving significant national and global media attention and garnering considerable support from local citizens (Atkinson, 2012). Pertinently, these organisations have been working to build a ‘countercartography’ (Cupples and Glynn, 2009) that holds a mirror to imaginations of a ‘normal’ recovery for the city. The most well-publicised and prolific of these have been engaged in, loosely, three strands of practices that sought to provoke new imaginations and understandings of what the city could become.

Firstly, there has been the emergence of organisations prompting new and alternative aesthetic engagements with the city. Organisations, such as Gap Filler, A Brave New City, Greening the Rubble and Life in Vacant Spaces, enabled by copious availability of vacant land following the destruction and demolition of much of the CBD, have gone about curating the potential for cultural, artistic and performative uses of temporary spaces in the city (Cloke and Dickinson, forthcoming). These uses of space have taken multiple forms including: temporary art, large-scale murals, sport and entertainment installations, novel attractions (such as a cycle-powered cinema) and ever-changing participatory activities (such as book exchanges, public poetry and community gatherings). All are designed to work as a counter to the emptiness and desolation within the city centre during recovery efforts and, in doing so, have drawn people into spaces recognised as the political and economic strongholds of the city. These projects have served to enable forms of representation and imagination that aim to construct an innovative sense of urban life in Christchurch. Importantly, some of the figures behind these organisations were involved in artistic endeavours prior to the earthquakes, but argued that their activities remained a docile presence – and were only accepted as ‘political’ once situated in the post-disaster landscape (Cloke and Conradson, 2018; Newman-Storen and Reynolds, 2013).

Secondly, a form of creative social and economic entrepreneurism could be seen through emergent organisations such as the Ministry of Awesome. Here, the cultivation of a ‘can do’ attitude – generated both through discourses of earthquake resilience and the push for a ‘21st century city’ – sought to shape the rebuilding urban and economic environments (see Cloke and Dickinson, forthcoming). Ministry of Awesome, in particular, encourage the emergence of new projects, businesses and visions for the city – and in turn stimulate a process where potential creative urban innovation becomes recognised (Ballard et al., 2015). Active bottom-up solutions to perceived urban deficiencies are encouraged to be enacted in small, low-cost projects that carry low levels of risk and encourage local participation. Organisations in these strands have loosely become known as the ‘transitional organisations’ (Cloke and Dickinson, forthcoming) given the ways their innovations have made us of, and become recognisable in, the temporary activity-spaces of demolished and damaged areas of the city.

Third, a range of organisations (such as the CanCERN and the Wider Earthquake Communities’ Action Network [WeCAN!]) have been prompting different forms of political engagement for disenfranchised and disillusioned local citizens pushing for a more participatory rebuild and recovery. These organisations have played an active role in disrupting the conservative imaginaries which had previously informed individual, corporate and state narratives of the city, albeit in ways different to the aforementioned, perhaps more recognisable, organisations. CanCERN and WeCAN! appeared to be tapping into the idea of transition in some senses – acknowledging that the recovery period offered an opportunity through which the urban landscape could be re-imagined in more inclusive and hopeful ways – but whose existence emerged instead from a sense that existing political architectures and strategies did not ‘map onto’ the re-emerging city. Specifically, Hayman et al. (2012) point towards these kinds of organisations reflecting collective and recognised responses to top-down state initiatives that, prior to the earthquakes, generally dissipated with little impact. Therefore, the emergence of these TSOs, and their subsequent relationships with the state, reflected for many the notion that the earthquakes had not only materially ruptured the city, but that these ruptures extended into the political architectures too.

CanCERN, in particular, had been involved in simultaneously offering a form of experimental political advocacy and engagement whilst pushing for some degree of institutional change. Their stance was articulated by a staff member as not being about ‘representing or standing for the community’ but instead ‘…representing the perspective that things can't carry on in the same way. The earthquakes have changed us and forced us to change how we do things’. As such, CanCERN did not occupy an austerely autonomous space of ‘anti-political’ organising, but rather sought to create working relationships with state and private-market organisations to expose and work through the limitations of a state- and market-led recovery. The organisation was founded in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquakes by a network of local community groups concerned at the lack of transparency through which Earthquake Commission (EQC; the state insurance body), the National-led government and local council were implementing recovery plans. It consisted of a network of 14 separate community groups and neighbourhood associations and was publically supported by 12 others. In an attempt to bring together concerns with the insurance industry post-quake and the methods through which local and central government were instilling recovery, CanCERN initially marketed itself as a community organisation advocating for the prioritisation of homeowners in residential recovery decision-making.

The shifting nature of the recovery landscape saw the organisation foster a range of specific initiatives that sought to open out different forms of political potential. Breakthrough, for example, sought to reshape relationships between the private market and citizens. Emerging as a collaborative project with Southern Response, the state-headed insurance company that replaced AMI, the initiative offered assistance to any individual/household displeased with how their claims were being handled or who were concerned with the lack of progress being made with their insurance claim. CanCERN staff acted as brokers who could access legal and technical advice, facilitate meetings with insurers, bring managers and technical staff to the table and ensure there were agreed actions for progress. The success of the initiative meant the project expanded to include almost all insurance companies involved in the rebuild – all costs of which are borne by the insurance company. Alternatively, the ItK Hub sought to engrain new forms of political encounter into the re-emerging city. The initiative involved the creation of a singular, shared space where representatives of various welfare, community, private market and state organisations were situated. In total, representatives from a range of 18 organisations could be present at any one time – fronted by CanCERN staff. The Hub space marked a radical departure from status quo political engagement in Christchurch, where state agencies had previously been critiqued for their inaccessibility both pre- and post-quake (Carlton, 2013). The initiative was visited informally by thousands of citizens in the five months it was open. This included approximately 500 direct sit-down engagements with CanCERN members of staff.

As such, the organisation were simultaneously engaged in contributing to different sorts of formal political process and also opening out political encounters that contain a kind of rousing potential for transformation. These emergent spaces and initiatives deployed both political strategies and pedagogic practices of engaging with institutional bodies, not only enlivening an experimental spirit but also mobilising an imagination of transformative cultural and political process. For example, according to a manager of CanCERN, the initiatives put forward by the organisation should, among other qualities: exist for the greater community good; work for individual citizens struggling with welfare or recovery needs; challenge existing social and political norms; drive some form of social change; create space for new state-society engagements and open out space to give credence to the ‘things made possible by the earthquakes’. This ethical mix represents a set of evolving aspirations for the deliberate incubation of alternative futures both through a recognition of the limitations of existing political processes and architectures and an earthquake event that demanded some sort of line of flight from the status quo. The emergence of this strand of TSO activity, then, was at least in part a response to this sense of disempowering inability on the part of most people to make any meaningful contribution to the rebuild process. But it was also a recognition of the opportunity to combat neoliberal elitism by experimenting with creative community projects that enabled a more common involvement in the recovery of the city – emerging from the acknowledgement that ‘old’ political processes did not map onto the re-emerging city.

An agile social entreprenuership

Key to the transition from a discursive post-quake community network to an organisation reshaping state and private market recovery strategies was a tentative probing of both the opening and closing spaces of the post-quake landscape. Broadly, the ideologies of the state response to the earthquakes can be observed through the emergence of a formalised top-down (and widely regarded as undemocratic) blueprint for the city – formed around neoliberal market and investment-driven rhetorics and resulting in contentious plans for a large-scale convention centre and sports stadium, for example. Critical accounts of this blueprint planning have labelled it as a kind of pre-quake neoliberalism and conservatism in action (Bennett, 2014b; Cloke and Conradson, 2018). In response, core to CanCERN's activity was a form of agile social entrepreneurship that was able to remain alert to the possibilities of the rupture in a way that more formal blueprint planning of state recovery strategies were not. The underlying value here is one of opening out ephemeral and temporary experiments of social and political entrepreneurship in the city in a way that might leave room for hope in alternative futures/possibilities, even within seemingly more permanent, conservative, neoliberal plans. Yet, this openness to adaptability and reflexivity resulted in an organisation characterised by indeterminacy, chaos, internal disorder and an often shifting/developing mandate. As such, I argue that this kind of agile entrepreneurship might best be explored through two sets of discussions, firstly addressing the ways CanCERN encountered and negotiated repressed and emergent claims to the city and secondly examining how experimental initiatives were shaped by unravelling sense of fragility and geological indeterminacy.

An unravelling geological indeterminacy

Guggenheim (2014) contends that disasters enable us to understand a world in which the material and the natural are not only objects of concern and control, but are the very foundation for radical change. Similarly, according to Delueze and Guattari, the earth is a metastratum of ‘inherently excessive forces and energies, in which even the most apparently stable or stratified [social] formations will sooner or later unsettle themselves’ (1987, in Clark, 2011: 20). As such, the foregrounding of geological agency requires us to acknowledge how the human and the non-human are inextricably linked in tentacular processes (Haraway, 2016). As already evidenced, the material ruptures generated by the quakes were also accompanied by the emergence of different kinds of radical critical counter-politics cultivated in fissures in the social and political architectures of the city. Pertinently for organisations involved in the tentative probing of the possible post-quake, experimentation was paired with an acknowledgement that the quakes saw the undoing of a belief in the earth to provide a supportive, gathering ground. This can be observed in two ways.

Firstly, organisational strategies and processes were shaped by an ongoing reflexivity prompted by a recognition of geo-physical fragility. On one occasion, I turned up to the ItK Hub and was told that we needed to have a staff meeting because, ‘We're now dealing with council planning issues too. We need to figure out how we're going to document and manage these interactions’. This chaotic and on-the-spot response was symbolic of much of the running of this initiative – particularly given the strong aftershocks that continued to strike the city years after the initial quakes. In another instance, I turned up two days after a significant aftershock and was told to, ‘…forget what we told you in the meeting last week. We’ve changed the process and put that idea on the scrapheap’. On another occasion, staff considered shutting the ItK Hub for a period of time after another aftershock: ‘What's the point in being open…for all we know the work we’ve done so far is redundant. We could be back at square one. We can't tell people that’. In response, although the underlying propositional process of the initiative was designed to endure, the day-to-day experimental procedures were subsequently required to be adaptable and reflexive. This ranged from the mundane (often changing promotional material and record-keeping to reflect the dynamic landscape) to the strategic (including been told to ‘focus on individuals on a case-by-case basis…that's all we can do, especially if we don't know if we [referring to the initative] will be here next week’). Undertaking these experimental projects, then, required the organisation to ensure that not just the initiatives, but their rationale for existence was flexible, adaptable and sensitive to the mood, need and uncertainty of the times.

The development of the Breakthrough initiative also provides an example of an experimental initiative that carried a kind of inherent unknowingness, and subsequent fragility. Initially, a staff member rationalised Breakthrough as the outcome of, ‘a year of trying to figure out which buttons can be pushed to try and change things. It was a shot in the dark that we thought would miss the mark’. Two weeks later, the same person commented that the initiative was taking a ‘…back-seat and it might be on its last legs’, telling me not to ‘sell it to the public anymore…run it past [the Manager] first’ – the rationale here being that a recent aftershock had shifted the ways insurance companies were processing claims. Finally, in a meeting almost two years after the beginning of the initiative and after an expansion of the programme, another staff member stated, ‘little did we know that this would become the rock, the centre of our efforts. Insurance experts are travelling from around the country, even overseas, to see how this works’. Even this last comment was attached with a proviso: ‘I don't think Breakthrough will exist by next month though…we're certainly not planning for it’. Catering for this emergent indeterminacy demonstrates, as Clark (2011) puts it, a kind of investment in a geo-physical materiality with an autonomy and integrity all of its own. Indeed, contrary to other emergent organisations and community groups fostering experimental encounters with the city post-quake, CanCERN were unique in their lack of a long-term plan for a presence in the city. Some of these other emergent TSOs have leveraged the earthquakes to instil a set of evolving aspirations for the deliberate incubation of creative place-making across broader scales – framing the earthquakes as rupturing a form of global conservative politicism and subsequently using Christchurch as a springboard for a kind of networked activism (see Cloke and Dickinson, forthcoming). Conversely (and despite quite persistent questioning), organisational staff felt unable, or unequipped, to articulate how they might exist in the more permanent material and social fabrics of the city.

Secondly, staff at CanCERN articulated a sense of geological force in the failed experiments also – acknowledging an unravelling sense of geological agency through the idea that the earthquakes ruptured the landscape in specific, and unknown, ways. In this instance, organisational experimentation was as much about unravelling and discovering the nature and potential of these ruptures as it was pushing for forms of progressive change. Most visibly, the negotiations, the ‘gives’ and ‘takes’ and the openness to forms of organisational redirection reveal processes of realising the nature of the disaster in Christchurch. Activity, in these instances, appeared to be less about faithfulness to radical change and rather more about engaging the rubric of the earthquakes to probe the possible presents and futures that might be actualised through their various initiatives. One staff member told me she joined the organisation because she thought CanCERN would be at the forefront of a kind of ‘revolution’ in the city, but quickly realised ‘we're like any other political organisation…trying to pick which shitfights are worth the time and effort and which ones are just distractions’.

Subsequently, faithfulness to the interruption of the status quo was still observable in the failures, the ‘push-backs’ and the ‘stop signs’ (as one staff member, below, put it) because staff were entwined within a complex and messy process of discovering the possibilities engendered by the earthquake event. Staff generally considered that the earthquakes ruptured the possibility for some things to occur and, whilst ‘…the government recovery has made it clear we need to get them to right some wrongs’ organisational endeavour was largely about probing ‘…what all this rumbling underneath us has actually shaken’. Subsequently, significant organisational endeavour focused on figuring out, as one staff member told me, whether ‘…something not working is actually a stop sign or a sign that we just need to push it further, from a different angle’. For example, I documented the following in my diary during the planning phases of the ItK Hub:

John [Manager] walked into the training session and sat down with a sigh. Rubbing his hands over his eyes, he tells the room (5 of us) that EQC [the state insurance scheme] only want to have staff there at certain times. ‘But that goes against this whole project…the whole reason for doing this!’ someone exclaimed angrily.

Discussion goes on for a few minutes. John ends the conversation by saying that we should get back to the task at hand, and the admission that ‘our hands might be tied with this one. I’m going to push as much as I can, but if that doesn't work then we'll make the ground up somewhere else…there'll be an alternative somewhere there’. He later commented that they needed to show ‘faith’ in the idea because even EQC recognised the need for the initiative. (March, 2015)

As such, in a climate of uncertainty and unknowable outcomes, experimentation became a discovery of the nature and potential of the earthquakes through trial and error; and Christchurch at least to a small extent became a place where people looked to try things out, to look for opportunities to create social and creative value, albeit through a recognition that the capacity to construct, assemble and perform were shaped by a sense of inhuman agency and indeterminacy. The range of activities that the organisation were involved in indicates that these kind of participatory experiments were not just about empowering or including some sense of community but of formatting what an post-quake actor was, how that actor is required to participate and how this participation is shaped by a sense of what now is/is not possible. There is a kind of social learning playing out here, albeit within the parameters of a newly disturbed and fragile world (Chamlee-Wright, 2010; Clark, 2011). The section that follows explores the idea of fidelity to a sense of the perceived nature of the event in further detail, through an examination of the decision to close the organisation in 2015.

Narratives of closure: Performing fidelity to the event

The closure of CanCERN in late 2015 followed the closure of the ItK Hub and the de-establishment of the main state recovery agency (which, in early 2016, handed over recovery responsibilities to a range of existing state departments). The decision to cease existence, however, was not one that had been determined in advance but had been guided by a sense that CanCERN's role in the recovery had, as a manager told me, ‘…been questioned by everyone to a point where we can no longer clearly answer what we're doing, or how to go about it, or even that the situation demands us being here’. Contrary to literatures that point towards efforts by emergent disaster networks/organisations to endure (Drabek and McEntire, 2003; Stallings and Quarantelli, 1985), CanCERN's existence appeared to be shaped by an unravelling perception of what the earthquakes enabled them to do. The following interview excerpt is worth quoting given the way it provides a sense of a developing awareness of how the earthquakes invoked possibilities for alternative futures and shaped the decision to cease activity:

We’ve always had a sense that CanCERN has a role to play in influencing what Christchurch looks like, but we know at the core we're a residential recovery organisation. It's the way the situation has presented itself…it's the opportunity to say that there needs to be change, but also recognising that the time and place influences how we push that. There's no point banging a drum after the crowds have left, and we're really sticking to the idea that we were called to do a job…though it's a job that is impossible to say when it might be finished…I guess it's about being able to collectively step back and realise ‘that drum can't be beaten anymore’.

More money would come if we want it. It's more a sense of, does the situation warrant us being here? We felt strongly that the opportunity existed for us to achieve something, even if we weren't quite able to put our fingers on how to do it. We’ve always said that we would stay around as long as CERA [the state recovery agency] were, trying to implement those things. But in terms of saying ‘that's it’, we're done’…well, you have to be able to read the situation to answer that. After a while you realise, the time for us has gone.

Pertinently, the sense that the earthquake enabled different forms of social, political and cultural improvisation indicates a kind of experimentation and organisational presence that reflect an ongoing fidelity to the possibilities afforded by the rupture. Fidelity, meaning the act of being faithful, is a term that is conceptually attributed to Alan Badiou's (2005) work on the philosophies of the event. A philosophy of an ‘event’ (including geo-events such as earthquakes – see Shaw, 2012) theorises the opening up of spaces that enable the possibility of new forms of knowledge and subjectivity to emerge through the practicing of faithfulness (or fidelity) to the nature and potential of that event. Notably, Mould (2009) exploration of urban parkour uses fidelity as a lens through which participant relationships with the city is given meaning – where the performance of parkour represents the emergence of an ontological fissure that shifts the architecture of the city, and the cityscape is embraced and reimagined in ways not previously possible (p. 747). Additionally, McCormack (2003) uses the context of Dance Movement Therapy to explore how fidelity is wrapped up within how new spaces of thinking and moving come into being. In relation to the Christchurch context, Cloke and Conradson (2018) explore a range of other emergent TSOs, arguing that previously dominant interests and representations of Christchurch are ‘…being challenged by the emergence of previously undervalued aesthetics and ethics of transitional imaginaries, the being and becoming of which are energised by a continuing fidelity to the event’. These accounts demonstrate some of the ways that participants show faithfulness to the shattering of the status quo – exploring how the event is retrospectively perpetuated by a fidelity that shifts it to something more than a mundane moment.

Tironi (2014) argues that post-disaster landscapes are marked by affective and material atmospheres of indagation through which participatory political experiments are openly composed, negotiated and subsequently recomposed as the landscape is ‘reassembled’. In this instance, demonstrating fidelity in these times was about more than probing the landscape to bring about some idealised or abstract idea of institutional and societal change. Rather, remaining faithful to the earthquake event denoted recognising that the rupture manifested in different ways for various actors, in turn generating multiple event spaces through which claims to the earthquakes could be made. The social, ethical and political forms of experimentation that took place during CanCERN's existence, then, served more than to probe what forms of change were possible. They also worked to prompt ongoing practices, performances and activity in the name of the event itself, with a recognition that the agencies that the organisation acted upon were borne out of some sort of tentacular entwinement of the human and non-human. In these kinds of ways, performatively (and sometimes anarchically) contesting the neoliberally conservative power of government and big business to impose a new normal on Christchurch occurred not from a ‘clean slate’ position, but in credence to a perception of what the event represented within ongoing narratives of the city. Relevantly, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) use the concept of assemblage to argue that creative lines of flight come into existence not by way of linear development, but through the coming together of previously unrelated objects, processes and forces. In this instance, the emergent countercartographies stimulated by CanCERN – in that their initiatives have seen the co-production of different kinds of radical counter-politics – might be read in a manner that is sensitive to the fidelity of the earthquakes. This sensitivity opens up questions about what the representations and recognitions of the event that shape how the realities of the post-quake landscape are assembled and negotiated.

Consequently, the closure of CanCERN, and the difficulties they faced in their day-to-day activities, might be better understood by putting aside the assumption that experiences of ‘falling short’ were in themselves necessarily failures. A cursory glance at organisational activity could focus on a number of projects that did not ‘take-off-the-ground’ (glimpses of which are only provided given the constraints of this study), the chaos that marked my narrations of activity, or the shifting focus of their initiatives, and dismiss the organisation as an unstructured, temporary initiative. Instead, the testing and probing that CanCERN undertook in their ‘unknowingness’ revealed a simultaneous susceptibility and receptivity which were not attributes reflective of organisational resilience, for example, but rather might be considered as attributes that defined them in its fidelity-induced natality (also see Harrison, 2008; Lewis, 2003). Recognising when to shut down, in this instance, harked to the idea that the broader recovery landscape consisted of complex temporalities and agencies that imposed themselves on organisational projects and trajectories.

Pragmatically, it was in part this ‘not knowing’ that enabled CanCERN to explore, unfold and penetrate the aporias that the earthquake raised. Thinking about this agency in relation to existing conversations about third sector-state relations, it would be easy to ignore these explorations – and in doing so dismiss their activity as a form of ‘public service on the cheap’ – willing partners who, seemingly guided by an understanding of progressive possibility, became partners in mopping up difficult to access citizens during recovery. However, a more fruitful line of questioning might focus on how ontological fissures bring alternative subjects and subjectivities into being. To attach narratives of resistance or co-option is to deny the complex and unfolding fidelities that are at play in the post-quake landscape. To label its closure as the expiration of a neoliberalised compliance with the state is to ignore the logics and organisational experimentations that probed the opening and closing of spaces of progressive possibility.

Concluding remarks

In this article, I have offered an empirically detailed examination of a TSO that emerged after a series of earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2010–2011. At first glance, this organisation, CanCERN, could easily be theorised as a failed experiment in participatory politics: characterised by a shifting and generally unknown mandate, co-opted by neoliberal interests (subject to the contracting of the state and private insurance companies), and as a temporary prospect whose emergent spaces of engagement were gradually re-occupied by the mainstream, conservative infrastructures of the city. Indeed, for many, the initiatives generated in the cultural and political fissures of the city post-quake were seemingly in themselves viewed as representing the potentiality of those fissures. As such, CanCERN were often critiqued as contributing to a reinforcement of the status quo of politics in the city.

Yet, I have contended that the organisation were involved in different fostering encounters that provoked forms of countercartography that both held up a mirror to the perceived neoliberalised recovery in the city and offered more hopeful senses of place and political life. Importantly, the experimental probing of the post-quake landscape by this organisation is not occurring in isolation in Christchurch. Cloke and Conradson (2018), amongst others, have pointed to the ways other post-quake organisations, such as Gap Filler and A Brave New City, are working to offer ‘both a new imagination of how things can be, and a new set of practices and performances that enact that imagination within a wider environment characterised by both hopefulness and difficulty’ (p. 362). I have also pointed elsewhere (Cloke and Dickinson, forthcoming) towards efforts by other emergent TSOs to weave aspects of the temporary and the transitional into the re-emerging ‘permanent’ physical and social fabric of Christchurch – where small, low-cost temporary projects have reflected an emergent ‘transitional city’ movement (Reynolds, 2014). For Christchurch, it is clear that the kinds of creative experimentation demonstrated by CanCERN have in some way contributed a broader, palpable atmosphere of hopeful possibility in amongst the shifting landscapes of recovery. The organisation's closure then represents something more complex, and hopeful, than a tick-box on the road to ‘recovery’.

I have also argued that the accounts of organisational life in this article speak to different kinds of receptiveness, agility and indeterminacy that complicate mainstream narratives of disasters and recovery. The entrepreneurship evident in CanCERN's operations after the earthquakes reflected an unravelling recognition of the geological forces that ruptured the city in distinct, and unknown, ways. CanCERN were not faced with a clean-slate to enact new grandiose visions of reordered social and political life and, alternatively, organisational initiatives appear to have demonstrated more complex encounters that reflect something other than a simple return to the conservative status quo. Consequently, I have suggested that the political search unleashed by the disaster was not orientated around ‘making the best’ of the situation, but instead the setting up of an agile entrepreneurship that remained open to the nature and potential of the ruptures generated by the earthquakes. This is not to suggest that the organisation placed a kind of spiritual faith in geological forces providing a route for messianic change, but that the experimental search for new ways of inhabiting and organising urban space was (a) in some cases circumscribed by the geological indeterminacy of the landscape and (b) marked by an unravelling sense of how the disaster has ruptured the established order of things. Importantly, giving credence to these material and sociocultural/political ruptures, then, was still observable in the failures, the push-backs and the declared ‘stop signs’ because staff were entwined within complex and messy processes of discovering the possibilities engendered by the earthquake event. Certainly, such accounts challenge narratives of the closure of organisations as representing either a lack of resilience or a restoration of the status quo and suggest that further research is needed to explore how different kinds of subjects encounter and make sense of opportunities within the recovery landscape.

In an initial response to this challenge, I tentatively framed organisational endeavours, and in particular the decision to close in 2015, through a discussion of fidelity – arguing that there may be broader value in asking empirical questions about how more hopeful futures are imagined and grasped in relation to an unravelling perception of the nature and potential of that event. Here I argued that ongoing fidelities to the event can be witnessed through the emergences of these experimentations in Christchurch: drawing on an unthinking of the previous civic subject, new senses of life and place and a new imagination encouraged by sites and practices that enable a temporary (at least) reshaping of the conservative status quo. Consequently, previously dominant interests and representations of the city are being challenged by the emergence of previously undervalued aesthetics and ethics of alternative and more hopeful imaginaries, the being and becoming of which are energised by a continuing fidelity to the event. In this way, the experimentation that emerges from the rupture of the event subsequently enables a fidelity to it – both laying by laying bare the social, cultural and political schisms made evident by the earthquakes and responding to them in a way that reflects the conditions that made this evident. The concept of fidelity, in this instance, offers scope for future research to conceptualise and empirically explore how emergent claims to the city (as well as experimental searches for more hopeful futures) are shaped by the conditions that enabled their irruption.