Build Back Better for Whom? Market-led recovery and residential settlement in Christchurch’s central city, 2011–2025

“Build Back Better” (BBB) has become the guiding principle of disaster recovery, written into the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030. Yet “better” remains unsettled standard: better for whom, and measured against what? This paper examines the long-term trajectory of post-earthquake housing reconstruction in Christchurch’s central city after the 2010–2011 Canterbury Earthquake Sequence, where central government took limited direct responsibility for housing, relying instead on regulatory and financial levers to activate private redevelopment. Read against a wider pattern of crisis-driven urbanisation, it contrasts the policy ideal of a repopulated, liveable centre with what the market produced, using policy and document analysis alongside socio-demographic and housing data. The findings suggest that the centre generated dwelling supply more successfully than residential settlement: compact, low-amenity typologies, an investor-skewed tenure mix and clustered short-term rentals point to a socially selective betterment that may have served developers and investors more than residents. The paper offers a long-term evaluation of BBB under market-led delivery and argues that BBB should prioritise residential settlement over speed or volume of reconstruction.