Better engineering now protects our most precious people in places such as Tūranga central library in Christchurch. OPINION: Christchurch isn’t the city it was a decade ago today, when a 6.3 magnitude earthquake turned a sunny Tuesday afternoon into a nightmare. It’s actually now a safer city. That’s thanks to better design and earthquake engineering built into many of the buildings that replaced the ruins of the city centre. A decade of scientific research, much of it undertaken in the Garden City itself, has informed new methods of making buildings more resilient to earthquakes. We’ve also seen a shift in thinking around earthquake engineering. Before the Christchurch quake, the priority was to design buildings so that they would prevent loss of life and avoid collapsing.