Canberra: What might have been?
I’ve started on my summer reading list and the first title to be knocked over is Designing Australian Cities by Robert Freestone. A broad sweeping title for a book which is narrowly focused on one topic – the City Beautiful movement of the first couple of decades of the C20th.
As we enter the second decade of the C21th we are now 100 years from the flowering of this movement in Australia and its finest moment – the competition for the design of a federal capital. As history records, the capital, eventually named Canberra, was designed by Walter Burley Griffin though the Canberra we see today is a significant departure from that design.
Given the book is devoted to an architecture topic outside the scope of this forum, I’ll confine my notes to the ramifications of the original and subsequent design work on the federal capital to the transport/urban planning interface – which Freestone hardly mentions but will be of interest to readers of this forum.
I’ll start by mentioning that Griffin’s design was 1 of over 100 submitted to the competition; that the original design was only expected to cover a township of 25000 (though clearly a stencil for future growth); that bureaucrats in the Department of Public Works already had their own bottom draw designs and were working on these even during the period Griffin was appointed to oversea development of his design.
Much of the criticism of Griffin, as pointed out by Freestone, related to his personal management style and was also in large part self-serving, rather than directed at fundamental weaknesses in the design. It was said to ‘lack detail’ – I’m not sure how realistic it was in 1912 for an architect entering a competition at his own expense (only compensated if he won) to provide much more than inspiration and some lovely artwork.
I’ll also jump in at this point to state my respect for his original design – I’ll come back to some of the specific transport issues shortly. And my respect is not to denigrate some of the alternatives. which Freestone comments on. The year 1912 happened to be right on the cusp of the outbreak of modernism, the penumbra of the classical and it is no surprise that the competition entries straddled the divide. To paraphrase Frank Lloyd Wright, the “Roman”[classical] period was complete and did not need to be added to.
Alternative plans mimicked Washington DC closely; the same park setting but classically dressed public monuments and free standing government buildings rather than the modernism which defines Canberra today.
Griffin’s Canberra was not really built, except for a limited precinct around the Civic/Capitol/War Memorial axis. The Canberra we see today is a the 1950s vision, and quite a different rendering of the bush capital. In some ways, more Australian though I don’t mean to flatter by that remark.
Urban Planning
It is clear from the early drawings that Griffin’s federal capital, though considerably smaller at approximately 75,000 people (3 times the design requirement) was also a denser city. It would be polynuclear in the sense of separate land uses (administration, retail, housing, municipal and so on) but mononuclear in the sense that each of these land uses need only be provided once within the stencil.
It was certainly a city you could walk around. You would be able to walk around the precincts that involved your daily business (eg if you were a public servant, the government district was compact enough to walk, if you were a shopper, the retail district would be similarly walkable)
As stated above, Griffin was not providing the detail – but I would imagine that his assumption of housing density would be as prevailed in the early C20th – and he would not have been averse to walk-up multistorey developments if this suited the economics of the city.
Transport
In addition to the motor car, which at this point was still a luxury to most, Griffin assumed a tramway would be built, and an underground railway easement is marked. The mainline railway is shown as having a terminal and yard in North Canberra – which is no doubt consistent with a line from Yass (or a diversion of the Sydney-Melbourne railway). It has been my understanding that the Queanbeyan-Canberra railway was touted as a ‘construction railway only’ and temporary, as with much of Canberra.
While one is tempted to be cynical about the claim of ‘temporary’ – I suspect it is true in so many ways. And that transport and urban planning was sabotaged in Canberra as much as was every other aspect of Griffin’s plan by the usual suspects. The Parliament building was not completed until 1927 (temporary) and much of the federal bureaucracy was yet to move to Canberra even in the 1960s.
And what are the usual suspects?
The Department of Public Works and the parsimonious bureaucrats could be the symptom, the tip of the iceberg, but then what is the iceberg?
I put it down to the fundamental factors that really delayed and marred the development of a national capital.
First, the lack of real support for a federal capital in the first place. Freestone mentions this as a recurring theme, particularly in the context of the lack of support for public monument building. In one sense, Canberra was one big public monument, and therefore suffered in toto.
This lack of support ranged from Western Australian secessionism through to Melbourne and Sydney supremacy in the economic and political spheres. All the money to pay from Canberra came from taxes, there was no incidental development of a commercial and public city from the outcome of market interactions.
It wasn’t so much that transport modal choices were being deliberately biased; but that Canberra simply lacked the population or development to make much beyond private motoring worthwhile until well after WWII, at which point it was bound to be caught up in the pro-road policies of post war governments.
If Canberra had thrived in the immediate aftermath of the federal capital competition and Griffin’s plan, I expect we would have seen both a tramway network, and a more compact city to support it. It would remain to be seen whether such a tramway would have survived the tram-removal fetish of the 1950s – with wide streets, newish rolling stock and fewer economic booms and busts (such as characterised the lot of the state capitals) it is possible it might have been retained.
Wide streets, no, boulevards may not be unambiguously good for PT. The Griffin template had a network of “St Kilda Roads” with four carriageways, the centre occupied by trams. As Freestone points out, Boulevard in the French mind is many things, an evening stroll, a frontage for cafes and markets, and a grand street for processions and parades. The strolling and cafes probably wouldn’t have flown, Freestone suggests. And while St Kilda Rd does permit continuous tramway traffic to permeate it even today, it is not the quickest way of delivering people to the city – numerous traffic signals slow progress. Those signals reflect the importance of private road transport – which was facilitated by Griffin’s plan.
Cities of boulevards are quite difficult for pedestrians to go about their daily affairs. Buenos Aires has one of the world’s widest, and it makes it quite unpleasant to go from one side to the other. Even in Paris, some boulevards become a matter, for the tourist, of which metro station to alight at, depending on which side of some roundabout or park you want to get to.
Those European cities in the mediaeval mould, on the other hand, can be difficult to get around by car, but wonderful for pedestrians (depending on their approach to managing traffic, and the availability of PT). Freestone also makes the side note that it isn’t just scale, but building frontage that makes the city ped-friendly. The grand monumental public buildings proposed (and delivered) sitting on their own sites tend to frustrate and block the pedestrians. Such buildings are rarely permeable, the parkland looks nice but serves no other purpose, and the result is distances that are difficult to walk.
Would the underground rail network have worked?
Not for 25,000 people I dare say or even 75,000 – the sorts of ridership you would be looking for, say 8000 pax per hour, would be hard pressed to find enough people to actually ride such a system (assuming, for example, 10% of the city’s population are riding the trains at any one time, who’s running the place?) And that is on top of the population otherwise riding the tram, driving, walking, cycling and however other methods might have been found.
If Griffin’s template could have produced a city of millions – Washington style, then of course it is a different matter. Each of his separate precincts, retail, government, municipal and so on, would have almost required an underground railway. So the clerk in the Prime Minister’s Department could have his beer in the retail district pub after work, but then ride to his home in the residential suburb, and maybe take his kids to the public monument district or park districts on weekends.
But Canberra could never be a city of millions while Australia barely had that to its name as a whole. Which comes back to the failure of the Australian promise – the failure to be able to attract settlement (of the desirable kind: white, English-speaking and loyal to the Crown) in sufficient numbers.
Of course you don’t attract millions so that you can build an underground in the nation’s capital (at a time when the state capitals were underserved by underground railways and had many more people).
And the mainline railway?
This comes back to the general gripes with the NSWGR. Though the Commonwealth Railways owned the short Canberra branchline, they were in effect dependent for the whole period on the service of the NSWGR, who operated it as a slightly more prominent branch service off their vast but poorly built statewide network.
It had a through sleeping car – but so did Coonabarabran if my memory serves me. No real attempt was made by the NSW authorities to accord the service the dignity that even Newcastle received with its Flyer, and as if to spite the national capital, places like Goulburn were made the local hubs of activity and terminus for major passenger trains.
The NSWGR was built as an agricultural development railway, but kept as a pork barrel for Country Party voters – with funds for marginal services ensuring those lines of business that might have been worth pursuing – high density urban passenger rail, premium intercity passenger rail and heavy freight (either forwarded general freight, or bulk) were kept undercapitalised enough to give the road competition the head start.
If the focus had been kept on reducing journey times, upping axle loads, payload lengths, loco sizes and operating efficiencies, it would not be difficult to imagine a straight and fast line from Sydney to Goulburn and Canberra, such that an off-the-shelf tilting train today might be doing the run in say 2.5 hours, and competing centre to centre with aviation.
And a sensible heavy railway on the direct route might have a freight yard for local produce, containerised general freight into the city from Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane or beyond.
Such a railway might have also supported a modest interurban rail service out of the area – with settlements such as Yass being confirmed suburbs of the city. Certainly the desirable Southern Highlands towns of Bowral, Mittagong and so on would be as much Canberra’s playground as Sydney’s.
Again, the NSWGR would have been within their rights to say they staged development of a Canberra railway around the Fed’s progress with actually building the city.
By the 1950s when a real prospect of a federal capital was in reach, the feast had moved on, with road and air links being more important. Canberra has certainly never suffered a lack of domestic aviation into its airfield, definitely ahead of cities that were already larger such as Newcastle or Townsville.
[As an aside, I never thought a bog-standard NSWGR trestle across the Molonglo, or potentially across the ornamental lake, did justice to Griffin’s plan. .They might as well put the whole thing out of its misery and sell the Kingston site if they need the money. Any future fixed rail in the ACT depends on urban passenger traffic, including potentially to Queanbeyan, and a high speed train would be better coming from the north.]
It is also not just the failing of the original Australian promise of settlement and growth, but also the lack of economic growth and economic development. Add in that the Great Depression probably on the ground hit Australia harder than most developed economies, that WWII, while not physically disruptive, was not the economic enhancement to Australia that it was to much of the developed world.
Just to diverge: The UK Treasury estimated in 1952 that the entire cost of WWII to the UK had been regained in improved productivity from wartime capitalisation, and stopped just short of thanking the Germans for their aerial demolition of London’s redundant port facilities, which were superceded in more productive ports elsewhere in the UK!
But that was not really the case in Australia. So much lost time between 1912 and 1950. Not just within Canberra, but also in the states, whose economies did not really develop much during that time.
Economic development also drives sophistication in political policy and regulation.
Washington was already, in 1912, a significant place for businesses to lobby, for economic policies to be made, for the indulgences of the rich and powerful to be played out in the political sphere. This didn’t matter whether you were cattle baron, speculator, property developer, industrialist or whatever. DC was the place to be.
Australia remained a state-focused place for many years. The levers of political influence remained in the state capitals for decades (as did many of the federal bureaucracies in the event). Basics such as company regulation, infrastructure and industrial standards were state issues. Our cockies and squattocrats looked to their state representatives to protect them, even as Section 92 marched on.
And Australia never had the military procurement culture of the US. Even if Defence had been in Russell in the early years, I suspect we wouldn’t have seen the revolving door of influence in Russell that exists in Washington.
The Constitution was a shopping list of minutiae – with the Feds getting the post office, the lighthouses, meteorology and other trivia.
Even where constitutional law was screaming out the possibility of centralisation, such as through the corporations power, the Interstate Commission (that never was) or centralised wage fixing – it was a long time coming. One can imagine the Engineers Case of 1920 as a bridge across the Rubicon of States’ rights that was never crossed – well not until the recent Workchoices case. We did not, in that sense, use the scope that the US Congress was afforded under their constitution to expand the power of Washington over the economy.
So one wonders, even if the population had been there – what would there have been there to do in Canberra, such as would merit a large capital.
Maybe Griffin was right – and a constitutionally modest Canberra, administering a limited range of national functions (and the lighthouses), would have been best kept within say a 5km radius of Capitol Hill, with a small tramway network and a nice big railway station in its northern quarter.
I have argued before the whole ACT was a mistake – the Federal territory should only ever have been excised from NSW around the actual institutions of the Federal Government – to encompass the Parliament, the Executive, the GG, the foreign embassies, the High Court, and perhaps the Defence/Security establishment. Such a territory could have easily been a mere 10sqkm or so. Any extra land required for public servants’ housing, retail and so on, could have been within NSW, within an extended Queanbeyan.
A real Washington DC, with a Maryland and Virginia to house its people.
Federal capitals are always fraught, and as Freestone points out, for grandiose schemes to succeed they need authoritarians behind them. Just as Haussman needed Louis Napoleon, and Speer needed Hitler, so to did Putrajaya need Mahathir in our time. There is no shame in wanting a city to be a national monument. We should never pretend there is an economic payback – but realise that having a capital is the curse of being a nation state.
And having a federal capital is the curse of being a federation.
It is interesting to see how Europe is dealing with this. Brussels was only ever an obscure political compromise of the 1960s and now seems irrelevant and redundant coming into 2010. If anything, the only payoff seems to be to hold the centrifugal forces of Belgian bi-communalism together a few more decades. Brussels is of course “Francophone but not in France” just as Canberra is “in NSW but not of it”.
A real European capital would probably be closer to the geographical centre, more steeped in the angst of pan-European conflicts and culture (perhaps on the Germano-Slavic divide) and potentially a new city, or a “Bonn” built up. I’d wager somewhere near Trieste, Ljubliana and Klagenfurt – the interaction of the Germanic, the Slavic and the Romance.
At least Brussels has a good modern transport system, to bring this post back to the topic.
A modern enclosed shopping centre is arguably the new walkable retail district, in the original mould. Having an enclosed shopping centre in each of the towns means that the original retail commercial centre at Civic can never be much more than the walk-about centre of its mmediate environs.
While you are free to live in which ever suburb you wish (or across the border), in practice the homogenous nature of Canberra housing means there is no particular reason not to live in a suburb of the town you work in. And much of this type of commuting is of course done by car.
And judging by the ABC News Radio traffic broadcasts in the morning, it is rare indeed for Canberra to suffer the all encompassing congestion and slow journey times that keep rail transport in business in the five mainland state capitals.
If Griffin’s electric tramways had been “US Interurban” in flavour, with long sections of rail-style cross-country running on separate corridors, they could have been a template for a modern inter-town electric rail system.
Of course, this idea has also considerable weaknesses. The town centres are not compact in themselves either – so unless multiple stations/stops were provided, it might be hard to use them to get around locally. And by definition the town centres are supposed to be very similar – providing very little reason to leave them. There is no sense leaving Woden Plaza and journey for 30 minutes to …visit another shopping mall in Belconnen?
I would be interested in a US perspective on Canberra’s prospects for fixed-rail transport. The low density, car friendly characteristics have been overcome in several US light rail schemes – but the city is very small.
And ‘commuter rail’ in the smaller cities that have benefited from it have often used it to overcome freeway congestion (more cost-effective than extra lanes) which is absent in Canberra, and the freight rail infrastructure they are using is in better condition than the former NSWGR.
The public debate has moved away from privatisation of government functions, but has not swung back in any big way to a larger state sector.
Canberra may yet grow from accretion, but I doubt it will grow in the Whitlamesque way, with active consideration of new state functions and the staff to support them. Which means no grand plans for transport which can’t be justified by extra population.
Now the ACT is self-governing and has dreams of its own light rail network, I’m not sure there is any constituency for this thinking though. The Federal Government is still the largest employer in town – and they conspicuously recruit Australia wide, permanently turning Canberra into a city of migrants, never quite interested in its fate.
Too many Commonwealth public servants I have met still cast one eye towards the house they hope to buy in Sydney or Melbourne or Noosa, when they have had enough or saved enough. You still experience the mad rush on a Friday night at the airport and the expression “Last one out please turn off the lights” is still widely used. {I suspect the MPs and their vast legions of staff are also largely responsible for this effect, as they conspicuously crowd the airport}. I even recall when the hospital implosion tragedy happened, they said they staged the event to stop people leaving on weekends!
I therefore suspect there are too few people in Canberra with enough roots there to make it want to prosper, even before you have to deal with the other 21 million Australians and their views of the place.
The Ottawa model might be better for Canberra (better for Canberra than Ottawa I suspect). Buses along busways with a bit of fixed infrastructure in the town centres, and dedicated lanes on the intertown highways.
If the towns were able to build up density in their centres, that might at least provide a constituency of people who don’t use private motor transport for their every move—that might be users of PT in a future life.
And we should not forget the enthusiasm for cycling. You can get them out of their cars in the right circumstances.
But Canberra is definitely ‘pro-road’ in extremis, its town planning, modal investment, its size, and operational policies like parking completely unfriendly to PT.
I don’t know if Griffin’s Canberra could ever have lived down the ‘bush capital’ label; but it could conceivably have been a very diffferent place to live. A mini-Washington and a small European new town at the same time. A pleasant university campus of a place, with a little tramway and compact walkable centre. Dreams are free!
I always agreed with Yass as the best place for the National Capital – at least it was on the main line between Sydney and Melbourne – it was one of the last places along with Cooma to loose to the site of Canberra.
If Melbourne had of given up the bureaucracy sooner than the 60’s, maybe Canberra would have had a chance at being a more compact city, but as it developed during the ‘progressive/car’ era, it really didnt stand a chance. The tramway network would have worked if the city had been developed earlier – as the infrastructure would have been new enough to not be ripped out in the purges of the 60’s.
Public Tranport, even with teh current review by Jarret, is seen as the absolute last reasort in Canberra, hence its shit frequencies. Though what has been proposed is a quantum leap forward (with the 15min min frequencies) with the frequent bus services etc.
The Only place where Griffith’s vision for Canberra has been realised is the Sydney suburb of Castlecrag, where the curvlinear form has been kept, even if there are only two of the houses left.
Thanks James. Didn’t know about Castlecrag- is that all those streets “The Rampart” “The Portcullis” and so on?
Certainly agree it was too late for trams when Canberra was being really built into the 60s and 70s – but if they had already been there they probably would have been left.
A Canberra of 75000, compact and walkable would have been a wonderful thing! Especially if it hadn’t sprawled beyond the flat North Canberra area across the river/lake and with a limited reach in South Canberra.
If the peak oil monster really is as nasty as some claim, Canberra’s screwed. No sea transport, neglible rail transport, no centralisation, no walkable high density. And its a hilly city so forget fantasies of Amsterdam on the Molonglo wrt to cycling.
Riccardo, interesting post. The thing that strikes me from reading Freestone now is the extent to which aesthetic considerations dominated. Perhaps that is Freestone’s influence, but I get the feeling that there were two main agendas: an aesthetically pleasing city worthy of being a “capital”; and state parochialism that wanted a capital that wouldn’t compete.
Personally, the best site for a large city is probably Wagga, which would command the inland river system, and be viable as a central economic hub for a very large part of the agricultural heartland of Australia. Aesthetically however, Wagga is no Canberra, so the convergence between the interests of economic uncompetitiveness and aesthetics wins out.
Similarly with regard to the layout of the city. It isn’t designed for practical economic vitality, it is all about vistas, tree lined boulevards and “symmetry of plan” which at the scale being considered was a sure-fire way to make Canberra un-walkable. Despite that, Canberra’s main destinations remain on the spine through Civic and the government areas. If there was a light rail line, and driving was made more difficult – removing staff car privileges from public servants and introducing a parking levy would probably be sufficient – then I think you’d find public transport would be viable. It is the obnoxiousness of small scale urban design (the modernist ethos, essentially) that makes Canberra difficult to traverse.
Incidentally, Brussels is only partly Francophone, it’s origins are more Germanic, but in reality, like the other European capitals Luxembourg and Strasbourg it lies on the border of the Germanic-Francophone divide that was (and to an extent still is) the central divide in European relations. Ignoring Russia, which by dint of population and area has always been separate from Europe, Strasbourg is pretty close to the geographic centre. Nice city it is too, much better more so than Brussels.
Thanks Russ.
Agree Canberra’s design it would be hard to make a city more hostile to PT than it is. Hadn’t thought of CBR being a city that ‘couldn’t compete’ economically – I thought the main issue was it was a drain on taxpayer funds – and we are talking about a time when the states really had most of the power, and any monument building they wanted would have been done in their own capitals. They were only 10 years out from having been quasi-independent nation states, and the habit of wanting to develop their own prestige would not have been lost.
I suspect Washington had 2 advantages over CBR – first, with 13 colonies and additional territories added, it was conceded early they needed a distinct capital. Second, from my knowledge of US constitutional history, the feds there had made a much earlier play for additional power, especially in economic policy (which was a very difficult area across most of Australia’s history).
You can tell I am a fan of centralisation of political power and do not understand why the argument was ever mounted that Canberra was ‘distant’ yet places like Perth and Brisbane, at the geographic limits of their respective states, somehow weren’t.
Hadn’t thought of Wagga, and actually my suggestion with my 1910 hat on would have been Albury/Wodonga. Already had the rail (with BG through to Adelaide and SG through to Qld Border and eventually Brisbane). Not quite the amphitheatre that got Canberra the job, but still scenic with a few hills outlining the site (but fundamentally flat) and of course already settled.
Disagree about Germanic/Francophone divide being the central divide today – hence my comment about putting it much closer to Slavic Europe. Of course that wasn’t possible in the 1960s but should be reflected today. That said, Slovenia would be the most stable place to put it, followed by Czecho. Slovenia seems to have benefited from its strong Austrian history, with a Slavic background but not labouring under it (excessive tribal tale-telling). Europe is about people getting over their recent grievances, and if Western Europeans can do it, it is time for the east to do it.
Luxembourg is also a good choice because I feel they would be happy to be someone’s capital at the expense of potentially losing their own identity. A role that would be hard for a traditional European capital like Paris or London to fulfill.
Interesting post as always Riccardo and good comments also from the others. It’s good to see the benefits of a summer reading regime bear fruit on TT.
Some of the worst urban planning damage that locked-in car dependency in Canberra came in the 1960s and 1970s with the advent of the National Capital Development Commission and its ‘Y-Plan’. As a result of the NCDC’s deliberations, Canberra was also seen as a place to try out some ‘new’ local-level urban planning ideas, such the neighbourhood units which, while trying to create self-contained, walkable neighbourhoods (with schools, shops, churches, etc together with housing) meant that to leave the neighbourhood unit involved crossing arterial roads and extensive car travel.
The NCDC also diverged from the Griffins’ plan by creating the dispersed, car-dependent Canberra we know today by promoting development of ‘new towns’ in the British style (and at low, ‘Australian’ densities) at the ends of the ‘Y’ in Gunghalin, Belconnen and Woden-Tuggeranong.
Additionally, the last few decades of self-government has seen even the ‘Y-Plan’ suborned with a fourth development axis toward Queanbeyan from the airport and Fyshwick.
It would also be great to have Damien Haas (from ACT Light Rail) comment on this thread (he’s previously commented on the ATRF thread) as well. I’m sure he has some great local knowledge on the PT problems of Canberra.
LS
Thanks LS
Off-topic, I’ll give you some observations of the rest of the book.
Firstly, I knew little about the era apart from the Canberra issue
It seems the architects/aesthetes were in league with the planners for a while but the planners jumped ship when they same the other group really weren’t interested in whether the plans WORKED, only that they looked good.
I think it was the old form/function dichotomy, the architects having faith that good design must work by definition.
Also interesting to see the ideologies – using the left-right political spectrum, a lot of what we would call ‘right’ were backing heavy city engineering for ‘moral’ or ‘patriotic’ reasons and seemed quite uninterested in a big-business aversion to the government spending large sums of money – somewhat different from today where the ‘right’ seem to pander to small-town feeblemindedness to get votes. Following, not leading.
The book also tends to support my view that Australia really did do it tough, we really didn’t have a roaring twenties to make up for the other four decades of the first fifty years of federation being lean years or worse. The infrastructure deficit was never really made up.
The US, too, tends to experience swings and roundabout but gets more done on the swings.
The US might build several of the world’s tallest building, then decide its a bad idea then do 2 decades of campus-style exurbia, then decide that’s a bad idea. In Australia we would take so long, with so much talk and little action, we meet the US back at the original point in the cycle.
sorry they SAW, not they same
Riccardo, the states attitude to Canberra is similar to their attitude to Federal power. They considered it a threat (rightly) and tried to stymie it any way they could. That included extra constitutional provisions to prevent the sort of Federal control that was emanating from Washington. Federal government was supposed to be a figure-head for the “Australian” commonwealth, and Canberra was its glorious capital, empty of any real purpose except as a site for those few things. The states were happy to put up some amount of funds to build it, but they didn’t want a city that would compete for trade and business, and that pertained to forgoing Albury in favour of somewhere more isolated. More Australian states is probably still a good idea, incidentally.
This attitude probably only pertained up to the early 1920s though. The secessionist movement of the 1930s aside, the states have tended to be submissive in their relations with the capital and its politicians. Too late to choose a site for a grand city instead of a pretty back-water though.
On American planning and our tendency to copy. One of the oddities is that Australia has tended to be far enough behind that we will begin down a path after the US has already rejected it – at least in part. So we began freeway programs after they’d already abandoned many of theirs because of local opposition; we started a high-rise slum clearance problem after the US had started dynamiting their worst examples. This tempers some of the worst excesses though, so perhaps it is no bad thing. The design aesthetic is still very strong in the planning profession, as is the willful ignoring of evidence contrary to what is currently popular.
Lastly, without wanting to completely derail the thread by talking about Europe, it is probably more accurate to say there are (and have been) three dividing lines in Europe: the Latin(Roman)-Catholic; the Germanic-Protestant; and the Greek/Slavic-Orthodox. Trieste is a good spot for a capital, because it lies at the intersection of all three – being heavily influenced by Venice, before the Austrian empire. There is (and has been) a fourth split in Europe now too though, which is the Mediterranean-Muslim part of Turkey across North Africa. Trieste still fits that, but I wonder if Venice itself would make a good capital. It would give it the vitality and purpose it currently lacks, and it has always been cosmopolitan and for most of its history, independent of anyone.
Well, I’m the lead planner for the Strategic PT Network Plan for Canberra, so I’m in the thick of most of these issues.
I agree with most of your comments. Canberra has always suffered from being an idea more than a city. But there are good ideas in it, and today there’s some real leadership on PT issues from CM Jon Stanhope as Transport Minister.
I have a couple of pieces on this process at the category ‘Canberra’ at humantransit.org … including dealing with the light rail issue.
Thanks Jarrett
I’m glad to hear. I suppose I worry that the ACT Light Rail is just an ambit claim, in case Rudd has a spare billion lying around. I’m not on the ground in Canberra much these days so don’t know the vibe about whether such a scheme would have popular support.
I remember too many dark winter nights going back to my serviced apartment in Kingston from Woden and the endless highways and the realisation that the NCDC had spent all the money on this and nothing else.
On the subject of the ‘neighbourhood units’ mentioned by Loose Shunter, has it really worked out that way? I know a few places have lost all their shops and often the local school as the population didn’t justify either.
And does anybody actually live that way in Canberra? Apart from a few elderly people, I would doubt it. There’s also cycling paths pretty much everywhere but they aren’t too popular.
Somebody,
I think it started working out that way in the 1960s and 1970s when Canberra was still experiencing population growth from inmigration of government workers with young families. Now population growth has slowed and is skewing toward the elderly, there is a disconnection between the urban form and the people who live in it. Hence the loss of shops, schools, etc with ageing populations.
The Neighbourhood Unit concept was one of those experiments that were readily adopted after WWII by public housing authorities around Australia. Another example was the ‘Radburn’ layout (housing frontages clustered around open space, vehicle traffic limited to garages and back lanes, hierarchical road networks in local areas and lots of cul-de-sacs) which was adopted extensively by the NSW Housing Commission for developments in Western Sydney in the 1960s and 1970s. The estates designed on Radburn layouts have had difficulty coping with demographic change also, this time from the decline of public housing from housing for low- to middle-income working people to housing of last resort.
LS
Hi! Just had to respond. I really was impressed by your opinion