ABSTRACT
Introduction .................................................................................................... 148 The Christchurch Earthquakes ..................................................................... 149
Response and Rebuilding ........................................................................ 150 Motivation and Opportunities for Civic Engagement in a Postdisaster Context: Key Literature and Concepts ................................. 153
Civic Engagement ..................................................................................... 153 Civic Engagement in a Disaster Context ............................................... 154
In 2011, a yet undiscovered fault line shifted abruptly 7 kilometers below the city of Christchurch, the second largest city in New Zealand, creating an earthquake with a 6.3 magnitude. Due to the shallowness of the earthquake, nearly three-quarters of the city’s housing stock was destroyed. The earthquake is embedded in the collective memory of Christchurch residents, but another story resulting from this disaster remains largely untold. Local and national government responses to the disaster, which shifted throughout the response and rebuilding periods, yielded a significant impact on civil society and civic engagement (Bennett, 2011). While we often understand civic engagement as a function of factors such as citizens’ financial, educational, and time resources (Foster-Bey, 2008), we argue here for more inclusion into this equation of governments’ ability to provide meaningful opportunities for input following a disaster. Studying the disaster context serves a dual purpose: it yields deeper knowledge about resilience, which can be applied by practitioners, but disasters also create a unique political landscape in which rapid changes in governance strategies and citizen resources allow for a close examination of how these factors interplay.
