ABSTRACT
Authorities often articulate the desire to ‘build back better’ (BBB) after disaster. Yet, despite widespread desires to do so, the scholarly consensus is that it is all but impossible to do so. This general failure to BBB is explored through a specific case study: Ōtautahi Christchurch following the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence (2010–2011), which is frequently taken to be the paradigmatic case in how not to BBB. This chapter draws on STS literature to examine why we have never built back better. It argues that recovery blueprints belie a false politics of mastery, the erroneous belief that only humans count (and usually only those in official positions), and that all other things can be controlled or ignored. They therefore fail to consider the full range of agents (including non-human others) that constitute the scene, nor do they accommodate temporal emergence (including groups opposed to said plans). What STS teaches those making plans to BBB, then, is that they require more openness (to the range of actors involved), more time (to consider the dances of agencies between actors, and to understand both the temporalities of failure and success) and more humility (for you are less powerful than you think).
