Before the Canterbury earthquakes, he did not appreciate that people "would die for their business".
A lot of people took "huge risks" and made stupid decisions after the February 22 earthquake last year, sneaking into the central city and crawling across broken glass to obtain records or other items.
He would never again underestimate the resilience of the business community, he told about 600 people attending The New Zealand Merino Company's conference in Christchurch yesterday.
Of the Chamber of Commerce's 3000 members, 360 were inside the four avenues in the devastated central city.
While they had to "get up and go" from their premises, 90% were still in business which was an "incredible statistic", he said.
Very few businesses had been lost in the city, unemployment was lower than the rest of New Zealand, and trading was 95%-97% normal based on eftpos transactions, which was "not bad" when put in the context of New Zealand's worst natural disaster.
One of the reasons the $30 billion insurance bill was so high was that New Zealand was "extraordinarily well insured".
In the Haiti earthquake, there was 1% insurance cover, the Turkish earthquake 7%-9%, the Japanese earthquake 17%, Chilean earthquake 23% and Christchurch 80%.
"We've had an awful lot of destruction in our city. Our balance sheets have been really severely compromised, whether it's your house or your business or your community or your infrastructure.
"But we're going to be the recipients of $30,000 million worth of insurance money that is locked in to the future of this city if we can encourage the capital to land here," he said.
"That is a unique position for any city in the world to be in. This is the fourth most expensive natural disaster from insurance purposes in the world since 1971," he said.
Some of the critical issues now included trying to create an environment in the city to encourage capital "to land".
"At the moment we do not have a city that is conducive to landing capital. We need to get there as fast as we can.
"There was also a perception that 'we're going back to where we came from'.
"We're not going to rebuild Christchurch as it was.
"Christchurch is going to a new place and the sooner we get our heads around the fact we're going to a new place, the better," Mr Townsend said.
A city was needed that was facing forward for the next 150 years, that was iconic, and had an economy designed "to ride the great tail winds of our time".
People needed get their heads around the long timeframes involved but that did not mean that they "sit to one side and weep" while the city was rebuilt.
"It means that we lock growth into Christchurch and we lock in the development of this whole region as we go forward for the next 20 years.
"There is no other city in the world that effectively has locked its future in with economic growth with insurance money that is generally very much tied in to the city," he said.
