Chapter 9: Places: Shops, Marketplaces, and Local Development¶

On February 22, 2011, an earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand. The city center was cordoned off; it soon became known as the red zone. The shops still standing were behind the barriers.

Very quickly, a committee of downtown retailers and property owners got together. Their assessment was simple: many small businesses were looking for a solution, none could afford to move into a mall, and many were dying. The committee also rejected an idea gaining ground in the city, that Christchurch could do without a center.

In March, they had an idea. They presented it to the minister responsible for the Canterbury recovery, who announced it publicly with them the following month: a temporary shopping center built from shipping containers. Containers keep goods secure, go up fast, and hold up in earthquakes. The committee set itself a deadline, the last week of October, before the big annual show and the Christmas shopping.

The construction company found 64 containers in China. The committee, which had meanwhile become a trust, Re:START the Heart Trust, had to sign the purchase before the money was raised. "We signed it before we had a dollar in the bank," its chair would later say. The money came afterward: an interest-free loan of 3.36 million New Zealand dollars from the earthquake appeal trust, a grant from a bank, and later government funds. The construction company and the architect at first worked for free. The containers arrived at the port of Lyttelton in August, sixty-one days before opening.

On Saturday, October 29, 2011, eight months after the earthquake, the Re:START mall opened in Cashel Mall, its containers painted in bright colors. The local magazine that covered the day speaks of tears of joy among residents who had thought they would never be able to come back downtown. The department store next door reopened the same day.

Re:START was supposed to be temporary. It would last more than six years, and its closing would be part of its success: Chapter 14 tells that story.

What the scene teaches¶

A local economy shows in its streets. As long as downtown Christchurch was closed, the city had retailers, customers, and money, but nowhere to bring them together. Re:START did not create businesses: it gave a place back to businesses that existed.

Retailers did it. Not an agency, not an international program: a committee of retailers and property owners who knew their street, their customers, and the retail calendar. Your club looks much more like that committee than like a humanitarian organization.

The date came from retail, not from the project. The committee aimed for the week before the show and the Christmas shopping, because that is when a share of the year's sales is made. A place that opens after the season has lost its reason for being.

Temporary was the plan. Containers, not walls. A project that did not claim to rebuild the city, only to hold on until the city was rebuilt.

We do not know everything. No independent evaluation of Re:START was found: no sales figures, no business survival rate, not even their exact number. According to an official 2014 press release, most of the retailers there had been there since opening day. That is all we can say.

Why a street reopens, or does not¶

Chapter 1 showed that a business reopens if its neighbors reopen, and that power, water, access, and customers matter more than damage to the premises. This chapter draws the practical consequence: the right level of action for restarting retail is the street or the market, not the isolated business.

A chapter on Kobe in a study by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) puts it in one sentence, though about a different disaster, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in eastern Japan, and its shopping streets: "There is no point in opening a store that is isolated from other stores."

The 2021 guide on employment after a disaster from the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) lists what the restart of business activity depends on: how fast debris is cleared and roads are repaired; the return of electricity, water, gas, and telecommunications, even through temporary networks; and the rebuilding of market selling areas, warehouses, and the physical assets of businesses. Only the last point falls under business support. The first two belong to the authorities, and your club can flag them, track them, and sometimes help fill the gaps.

In Beirut, after the port explosion of August 4, 2020, a Near East Foundation team toured four neighborhoods near the port from August 11 to 14. A butcher in Quarantina showed what he had lost: his security cameras, a meat refrigerator that cost about $5,000, two cars, cracked walls. The grocery next door had lost its refrigerator. But the assessment noted something else: jobs in the neighborhood depended on the port, the warehouses, and the factories, almost everything had stopped, and there were fewer people to keep the shops going. Asked about tradespeople who could repair their homes, residents answered unanimously that there were none in the neighborhood.

The shopkeeper lost a refrigerator; the street lost its customers, and the neighborhood its repairers. Aid can buy back the refrigerator. The customers depend on jobs at the port and the warehouses.

What is missing	Who is responsible	What the club can do
Access, debris clearing, roads	authorities, public works firms	flag, relay retailers' needs
Electricity, water, telecoms	utilities, authorities	flag; shared generator if the rules allow
Premises, stock, equipment	the retailer, its insurers, its lenders	connect to a lender or funder (Chapter 6)
Customers	local jobs, residents coming back	reopen together, bring customers back
Repair tradespeople	labor market	training, matchmaking (Chapter 7)

The principle: restart a place, not scattered businesses¶

The ILO formalized this approach under the name local economic recovery. Its 2010 guidelines, written for post-conflict situations and extended to disasters in 2016, define it as an area-based approach that stimulates both supply and demand in the affected markets: in the short term, it gradually reduces dependence on aid through temporary jobs and income; in the long term, it recreates the conditions for the local economy to restart on its own. It is time-bound, results-oriented, and favors local purchasing of goods and services.

Among the principles specific to this approach, two concern your club directly.

"Minimize Market Distortions." The ILO observes that food distributions and other donations can prevent surpluses produced in unaffected regions from being sold, with effects on prices and on farmers' incomes, and that grants and free loans, if not limited in scope and time, distort the perceived cost of capital.

"Maximize the Use of Local Resources." The ILO says it bluntly: "In certain cases, local procurement might be less cost-efficient than importing goods and services. However, it creates opportunities for local businesses and stimulates the local economy."

The same guidelines call for involving at least one representative of local government in decisions from the start. And they set the horizon: in the long run, local economic recovery should evolve into ordinary local economic development. Here is the boundary between this book and the CED guide.

Temporary places to keep retailers¶

Re:START is not an isolated case. Wherever premises are destroyed, temporary places have served to keep retailers in the area while waiting for permanent walls.

Sanriku: thirty shops and bracelets¶

After the 2011 tsunami, the town of Minamisanriku, in Miyagi Prefecture, opened a temporary shopping village of thirty shops, with support from the small and medium-sized enterprise program of Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Some shops sold souvenirs made by residents, mostly women. In the same Sanriku region, another project, run by a nonprofit alliance of media companies, had women make a braided bracelet from fishing net materials.

That bracelet points to a blind spot. Fishers hit by the disaster had found work in an emergency employment program of the Fisheries Agency, clearing the ports. Their wives, who had worked in seafood processing before, were left without jobs. The project paid them about half of sales; as of February 29, 2012, according to the project's website as cited by the World Bank, 298 women producers had received up to 83 million yen. These are figures reported by the project. The lesson holds without them: a sales outlet can put to work the people other programs forget.

Hassa: a business park with four actors¶

After the earthquakes of February 6, 2023, in Turkey, the municipality of Hassa, in Hatay province, set up prefabricated shops in a business park so that retailers who had lost their premises could start again and the local supply chain could get moving. With few resources, it looked for a partner to help these retailers rebuild their stock and equipment.

The program that followed, run from May to September 2023, rested on four actors who split the work.

Actor	Role
Municipality	provides the site, then training
Chamber of craftsmen and tradesmen	certifies pre-earthquake business registration
Turkish NGO YSYD	contacts retailers, follows up, monitors
International NGO CORE	pays the grants, staffs the registration desks

Retailers whose shops had been destroyed were notified by text message using the chamber's register. Three registration desks received them in the park. Only businesses that existed before the earthquake, were registered with the chamber, and were damaged were eligible. Each submitted a business plan. The grant was paid in two equal installments, the second after a monitoring visit and presentation of invoices for stock and equipment purchases. Fifty-eight businesses in the park received support.

One figure shows the limit: retailers asked for 159,236 Turkish lira on average; they received 35,000 lira on average, about 22% of the average request (the program's brief says 35%, a figure inconsistent with its own averages). The grant helps reopen; it does not replace what was lost. And secondhand purchases, being cheaper, often came without an invoice, which delayed the second installment. What the program achieved, and what its evaluation does or does not prove, is the subject of the scene in Chapter 13.

This four-actor model can be transferred: a public site, a business register, a local monitoring organization, a funder. A club can play the funder, or the organization that knows the retailers, provided it accepts the kinds of proof the local market can provide.

Reopening a market¶

The Iron Market of Port-au-Prince, two red and green halls opened in 1891, had been a hub of the city's trade for more than a century. A fire gutted the north hall in May 2008. The earthquake of January 12, 2010, did the rest: a concrete slab added decades earlier collapsed onto the south hall.

The rebuilding was funded by a private donor, about $12 million, and entrusted to architects with a deadline of less than a year. The market reopened on January 11, 2011, the day before the first anniversary of the earthquake. It was designed to hold 800 vendors.

A year later, a reporter from the architecture press found hundreds of vendors and customers from the neighborhood there. But a souvenir seller told him that tourists "don't come that often." Around the market: tents, run-down buildings, crowded streets.

The building was rebuilt. The neighborhood was not, and part of the clientele did not come back. The sources read say nothing about how the market was managed after it reopened, or about vendors' income. For your club, the lesson is twofold: a symbolic place matters, it tells the city it is coming back; but a market lives on its customers, and the customers depend on everything around it.

Rebuilding in a way that puts the local economy to work¶

Rebuilding homes, schools, and public buildings is not the subject of this book. But it is the biggest job after a disaster, and the way it is done decides who benefits.

In Bhachau, in Kutch district, Gujarat, India, the earthquake of January 26, 2001, brought down 93% of the houses in this town of about 35,000 people. The State of Gujarat chose to have owners rebuild themselves, with aid paid in three installments: 40% at the start, a second at completion of the walls, the remaining 20% at the end. Government engineers certified each stage before the next installment. Families hauled the materials themselves and supplied the unskilled labor; masons trained in earthquake-resistant rules built alongside them. The local organization that supported families excluded for lack of land title sums up the value of the method in two phrases: it "Strengthens local economy" and "Promotes local artisanal participation."

An Overseas Development Institute (ODI) survey of 434 households in late 2004 and early 2005 compared the approaches. Satisfaction with housing quality reached 93.3% for owner-driven reconstruction, against 22.8% for houses built by contractors on a new site, which had nonetheless received more: aid of 124,000 rupees per housing unit on average, against 40,000 to 90,000. The same survey notes limits: aid calculated on what had been lost rather than on need, and, according to some, small payments to speed up disbursements.

The World Bank's 2010 handbook on housing reconstruction explains the mechanism. Owner-driven reconstruction "tends to involve local building industry, thereby contributing to restoration of local economy and livelihoods." Local materials, unlike imported ones, "support the local economy and livelihoods."

The 2021 ILO-UNDP guide adds an idea that a club of business owners grasps immediately: in a disaster area, few local businesses are organized enough to bid on public reconstruction tenders; the rules may need adapting so they can compete, alone or in partnership with larger firms.

What your club can take from this when it funds or sponsors a construction project: require in the specifications the use of local tradespeople and suppliers; help small local businesses team up to bid; pay in installments, against a verified stage, as in Gujarat or Hassa.

The empty building trap¶

The costliest risk in this chapter is simple to describe: a new building, inaugurated, photographed, and empty a year later. The research done for this book found no study devoted to rebuilt markets left empty after a disaster, nor on the management of rebuilt markets in low-income countries. But the signs are there: the Iron Market without its tourists, and in Kobe, after 1995, housing built to attract working people that stayed vacant, "a market that failed to materialize," according to a UN-Habitat study. That case is about housing, not a retail market; we cite it because the mechanism is the same, supply built for demand that does not come.

The only case documented with its governance comes from a wealthy country. In Cedar Rapids, in the United States, after the 2008 flood, a public market opened in 2012 in a flooded and rehabilitated industrial building. The idea came from local women. Vendors were selected, 24 out of more than 300 applicants; rents were below market; the market supports its retailers like an incubator. According to the Canadian toolkit that reports the case, a neighboring retailer says the market doubled his weekend business; the same toolkit places the market within a neighborhood revitalization plan carried by several actors. Keep the method, not the scale.

One rule already holds in normal times, and this book adopts it: a facility is a service, not a building. After a disaster, it becomes mandatory. Before any construction, your club requires written answers to five questions:

Who owns the site?
Who runs it day to day?
Who collects the rents or stall fees, and at what level?
Who pays for maintenance, and from what budget?
Which retailers will move in, and will customers come?

No ribbon-cutting without these answers.

What the Rotary Foundation funds, and what it does not¶

The rule has direct consequences for this chapter. The global grant terms and conditions in force in July 2026 exclude "New construction of, or additions to, any structure in which people live, work, or engage in any gainful activity," with examples that include schools, homes, shelters, and hospitals, but also "containers, and mobile homes." They add: "If the project depends on the construction of such a structure, it must be paid for by funds other than global grant funds." They also exclude the purchase of land or buildings.

In other words, neither Re:START, nor the Hassa park, nor a new market hall could be paid for with a global grant. The rules do not, however, prohibit repair or renovation, which the Rotary Foundation Code of Policies mentions; but the line between repair and reconstruction should be confirmed with the regional grants officer before you build a project on it.

The consequence for your club fits in one rule of conduct: separate the walls from the activity. The walls (a market hall, temporary shops, a workshop) are funded elsewhere: local government, the state, donors, foundations, interest-free loans like the one that launched Re:START. The activity (retailers' equipment, training, access to credit through a lender, coaching) can fall under a global grant, subject to its conditions. Chapter 10 details this setup.

What the club does¶

Step	What the club does	With whom
Choose the place	a street, a market, a neighborhood, not scattered businesses	Chapter 3 assessment
Bring retailers together	a committee of retailers, owners, elected officials	retailers' association, chamber
List what is blocking	access, services, premises, customers, tradespeople	authorities, utilities
Decide temporary or permanent	temporary first, with an end date	municipality
Write the operating plan	owner, operator, revenue, maintenance	committee, municipality
Separate walls and activity	look for wall funders elsewhere	local government, donors, foundations
Buy and hire local	construction specifications	local businesses
Pay in installments	against a verified stage	local monitoring organization

Your club can take the initiative to form the committee, or become one member among others. In Christchurch, retailers designed everything; in Hassa, a municipality. In both cases, someone brought the people who held the street around one table. That is often what a club does best.

The pitfalls¶

Pitfall	Why it happens	Remedy
Helping isolated businesses on a dead street	you help those who ask	choose a place, reopen together
Rebuilding a building with no operator	construction is visible	five written questions before any construction
Confusing a reopened building with returning customers	the opening makes the news	track foot traffic and sales
Opening after the retail season	the project follows its own calendar	set the date by the retail calendar
Temporary with no planned end	temporary becomes permanent	set from the start when and how to close
Seeking a global grant for walls	the rule is little known	separate walls and activity
Demanding invoices the market cannot provide	normal-time rules are applied	plan suitable proof, as in Hassa
Forgetting those with no shop	registers do not see them	street vendors, home-based work, as in Sanriku

Ordering the four levers over time¶

This chapter closes Part III. The four levers have been described; what remains is to put them in order, for your area and your disaster. The diagram on the part opening page proposes a sequence; this book restates it here as a calendar for your club to fill in. The windows are orders of magnitude, and the sequence is a proposal, not a standard.

Lever	First months	6 to 24 months	Beyond 2 years
Money (Ch. 6)	lender manages its clients; savings; bridge support	small business grants via partners	new credit through a local lender
Skills (Ch. 7)	paid work with training	reconstruction trades	lasting trades after the building work
Markets (Ch. 8)	plant on time; restore traders	repaired chains; checked cooperatives	consolidated cooperatives
Places (Ch. 9)	reopen the street; temporary places	reopened markets; local buying for building work	permanent places run by local people

Three documented markers support this sequence. An independent ILO evaluation in the Philippines, after Typhoon Haiyan, judged the restart of existing businesses "highly cost effective" and advised against creating new businesses in a twelve-month project. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) places farmer field schools after the first relief, once communities are starting to settle again. In Nepal, recovery credit channeled through cooperatives arrived fifteen to thirty months after the earthquake. The rest is judgment: yours, informed by the Chapter 3 assessment.

What your club now has in hand¶

At the end of this work, your club has the "places" section of its recovery file: the chosen place, what keeps it from coming back to life and who is responsible, the committee that carries it, the operating plan for any building considered, and the separation between what funds the walls and what funds the activity. It also has the four-lever calendar, which brings together the sections from Chapters 6 to 9 and says, for each one, when it starts and when it hands over.

The Christchurch committee signed for its containers before it had a dollar in the bank. It knew what it wanted to reopen, for whom, and by when; the money followed. What remains is to find out where yours will come from, and in what order: that is the question of the next chapter.