In 2011 a flood disaster in Lockyer Valley in the Australian state of Queensland led to loss of life and catastrophic damage. The rural town of Grantham was hit particularly hard. The state government initiated an unprecedented recovery and resettlement plan for the development of new homes for impacted residents. Planners successfully reduced flood risk in the “new” Grantham, located in the vicinity of the existing town. How did the resettlement plan change the lives of residents? Complementing the article on Grantham in issue 108 of Topos, we spoke in further detail with Kate Isles, a planner who was involved in the planning process and implementation for the recovery of Grantham with the Queensland Reconstruction Authority from its very beginning after the 2011 floods.
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Topos: What is the current status of the “new” Grantham, how many houses have been built, how many people live there?
Kate Isles: “New” Grantham or upper Grantham is now well established following the now historic land ballot of Saturday, 6th August 2011. Around 70 homes have now been built or relocated there.
Topos: Is Grantham considered a successful case of resettlement planning?
KI: I suspect the responses to this will differ when you ask different people. In my view yes. Resettlement in its simplest terms is the process of moving people to a different place to live, because they are no longer able to stay in the area where they use to live. So in this regard the answer should be yes. It was a unprecedented event and therefore no manual existed for a process to follow. There will be many sides to the Grantham story. In a circumstance like this you couldn’t possibly expect complete success. The best you can hope for is that the vast majority saw the engagement, efforts and delivery as one that was progressed with the best of intentions.
Topos: Can New Grantham, and particularly the planning process, serve as a guiding image or model for other communities that need to adapt to (flood) risk/disaster?
KI: Again, my view is yes. The underlying principles are universal. Set a vision and work back from this vision. For Grantham this was about setting the vision to have some affected residents in their homes by Christmas of the same year. From there we had to step back through all the events that needed to occur from house connections (plumbing), civil engineering and surveying to road closures, and importantly, a regulatory environment that would enable this to occur. Ordinarily this whole process would have taken 2 years. We reduced this down to 10 months which included 3 months of community consultation. The key to the success was the collaboration across all levels of government and the private sector to believe in and commit to the vision. The land use planning process for declaring Reconstruction Areas is similar to the process identified for declaring Priority Development Areas under the Economic Development Act.
Topos: How did the “growth option” (i.e. offering properties to prospective buyers who weren’t residents before the flood) influence the development of Grantham? It seems this was key.
KI: I agree with you regarding the growth option and that opening the development up to others is an important factor both going forward and continuing to strengthen the existing and future community. It is not a dissimilar principle to the need for “salt and peppering” in housing developments, i.e. don’t only have one building of social housing – salt and pepper, mix where you can. It builds better communities.
Topos: Did the planning for “new” Grantham also benefit those who remained in the “old” Grantham?
KI: Reflecting on this, within the Grantham community you had two groups of directly affected residents. 22 people lost their lives in the most horrific of circumstances. There are those from “lower” Grantham and those who established upper Grantham. The latter very much had survivor’s guilt. Therefore, in my view, it was important that the two benefitted from the process. That lessons are learned, new processes embedded, to ensure that the events are never repeated. I genuinely believe this occurred and that Queensland and Queenslanders are far better prepared, are better aware and have a greater understanding of the natural hazards that we may face.
Topos: Looking back, how do you view your contribution to the Grantham resettlement planning?
KI: I reflect very fondly on my time and involvement in this process. It was exhausting, yet rewarding. The least I could do as a professional was play my role in making the survivors’ lives the best they can be and to honour those that lost theirs.
Kate Isles, MPIA, is Director of INFINITUM PARTNERS, a planning firm in Albion, Queensland, Australia. She was Director Land Use Planning at the Queensland Reconstruction Authority (QRA, 2011-2013) and also a Board Member of the QRA (2015-2018).
The detailed description of the “new” Grantham can be found in topos 108.
How would landscapes change if cities would migrate? It’s not that irrational if you consider global warming and a possible shift of climate zones. Annalisa Metta turned this thought experiment into the art project “Southward. When Rome will have gone to Tunis”. Together with composer Jonathan Berger she created an imaginary travelogue of Rome’s displacement to Africa. It’s a narrative of a dislocation, an atlas of pictures and sounds.
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I write these words as Europe suffers through the hottest week on record. Extreme temperatures are sweeping across the continent from Poland to Spain, including a historic peak of 45.9 C in France. The heatwave continues 2018 summer’s trend of hot weather and recordbreaking temperatures in Northern Europe – spurring fires that scorched thousands of hectares in Sweden, drought causing cattle to perish in Switzerland, halting Hanover’s airport operations due to cracks in the tarmac, and more. But now last year’s headlines are fading memories and seem a mere prelude for today.
Climate change is a hot topic. People – mostly the young people – are mobilizing throughout the world, stoked by fierce debates between apocalypticists and denialists. While focus is placed on the disastrous environmental effects of global warming on economics and politics, scant, if any, attention is paid to its consequences on the meaning of place. Beyond its impact on ecology, economy, and planetary survival, climate change affects perception, habit, identity and memory. It questions our notions of eternity and our ideas of stillness. It is a cultural agent and calls for a paradigm shift from “climate and environment” to “climate and landscape”, involving the complex and entangled topics connected with longing and belonging, finally with the sense of place.
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Referring to geography, the notion of displacement typically evokes the forcible movement of populations, due to ethnic, religious, political, or economic reasons, including poverty and famine. Throughout the world the climate crisis is forcing a painful exodus on many. Concurrently, we are facing a very different sort of climate-caused displacement – that of the virtual migration of place. The latter does not happen because we are migrating, but because our place is changing. It is displacement without moving, it is being displaced while keeping our place. The Italian term spaesamento precisely expresses this particular type of displacement. It is a mixture of uprooting and disorientation. While the latter evokes the idea of feeling uncomfortable because of loosing reference points, spaesamento means literally to be senza paese, “without country”, to find oneself outside the usual setting and to misplace identity.
When looking at climate change through the lens of the “sense of place”, we readily realize that we are all involved in this global dislocation. In Europe, for example, climate change is forcing producers to relocate their farming. The French Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique found that an average increase of 1° C in temperature results in a 100-km migration of crops. French signature grapes – Pinot Noir in Burgundy, Merlot in Bordeaux – could no longer be there. Conversely, southern England could become the new Champagne, with better climate conditions for Chardonnay. Eventually, Bordeaux wine will be made in Brittany or Cornwall, and Sidi Brahim wines, today produced in Algeria, will come from Corsica. This displacement means changing the identity of wines, so rooted in the local terroir.
This is a radical shift in our history. In Western culture, farming and urbanism are the starting points of any stationary arrangement of the world, opposed to and overtaking a nomadic lifestyle. Cities celebrate steadiness and persistence, permanence and rooting: they are not used to moving, as people are. (…)
The whole article about the art project “Southward. When Rome will have gone to Tunis” can be found in topos 108.
