This week we learnt that the military bureaucracy wants to put some splendid new buildings at Russell.
Some buildings will be demolished, a couple of 20,000 square metre buildings are to be constructed and some roads are planned.
However, Russell, being in the central national area, should be more than a secure office complex for the military. It is an uncompleted point in Walter Burley Griffin’s Triangle _ the triangle we hear so much about, yet 82 years after it was planned is still not complete.
The apex of the triangle is Capital Hill with the flag pole atop Parliament House. Another point of the triangle is City Hill. The other point is, alas, somewhere in a car park at the back of Russell offices (It is not the Australian-American War Memorial which is south-west of the point.) At present Kings Avenue stops at the roundabout at Parkes Way and Constitution Avenue dribbles out. One turn-off skulks into suburban Campbell and the other twists its way up to Russell.
So what? Who cares? Plonk a few roads down. Assign some land uses. She’ll be right.
Great cities are not made like that. They require vision, geometry, artistic integrity and order. These attributes of the 1912 Burley Griffin plan have been slowly eroded in the past 82 years and unless we are careful there could be a further erosion with the proposal for Russell.
Apparently the National Capital Planning Authority, the national body which is charged with looking after national interests in Canberra, has a plan to complete the Triangle.
However, last week it said it could not comment on the defence project. Well, it may have some short-term sensitivities, but this cannot be a tenable position for very much longer.
While it is laudable there is some long-term plan to reconnect the Triangle the details of it should not be kept under wraps so the Defence Department’s view becomes the paramount. Defence is more interested in security than planning an excellent national capital. And security means secrecy and secrecy means little or no essential public involvement in town planning. The public should see some of the details of the ideas.
The railroading of the Russell part of Griffin’s plan goes back 40 years. Sir Robert Menzies is rightly credited with giving the necessary political drive to drag Canberra from a country town into a capital. However, he was not a town planner, nor an artistically creative man. He made a grave mistake. British to his bootstraps, he brought out the best of British town planners, Sir William Holford, to advise on the planning of Canberra.
In 1958 Holford presented his report to Parliament. Its acceptance, virtually lock stock and barrel, by the National Capital Planning Commission resulted in: the further compromise of the remaining geometry and hierarchy of purpose of the Griffin Plan; the cutting off of the city from the lake by the egregious Parkes Way; the surrendering of the city to car; the handing over of a carte blanche to the NCDC enabling it to build whatever it liked, wherever it wanted, provided there was some nice green space and some pretty trees around it.
The English garden school supplanted Griffin’s more urban focus.
And the defence bureaucracy loved it. The new planning regime enabled it to post what in effect are intangible “Keep Out” signs at the King Avenue-Parkes Way roundabout and at the end of the foreshortened Constitution Avenue. Burley Griffin’s Triangle was buried.
What should be done now? Australia is still suffering from recession. In recessions, Canberra is not affected as badly as the rest of the nation. It causes resentment. Canberra-bashing is rife. It is the wrong time to do anything much at all.
But recessions come and go. Canberra as a symbol of Australian nationhood will stay. With the hoopla of economic boom, the Olympics and the centenary of Federation, some Australians (perhaps even the Prime Minister) will be saying let’s improve Canberra (as happened in the boom-Olympics time of the 1950s).
When that happens, it would be better if the defence bureaucracy had not closed off the best design options in the mid-1990s by the construction of expensive buildings in an enclave with a security imperative.
So the NCPA should start publishing some long-term options for the city. And do so quite fearlessly. Inevitably, NIMBYs (Not In My Bureaucratic Yard) will come out of the woodwork. Good. A contest between the desires of some organisations and the overall vision of the city can only be a healthy thing. If there are yelps about cost, it has to be pointed out these are long-term objectives.
Clearly, not every aspect of the 1912 plan is still appropriate. But its fundamentals have been proven over the years: adherence to it has generally resulted in attractive qualities of the city (the Mount Ainslie axis, the Parliamentary Triangle, the bigger uncompleted triangle, the lake itself and so on); departures have generally resulted in a blight (Parkes Way; Black Mountain Tower; and the failure to build buildings and spoke roads around City Hill and to give Constitution Avenue some commercial soul).
Russell is a critical site in the central national area. The military could build pretty well what it wanted in Belconnen or outer Woden without having a profound affect on the character of the city. Russell is different. The Defence Department should not have an enclave there. If it wants to stay on that critical site it should have to compromise with other developments in the city. That should mean sharing the site to make it more part of the city. As well as the completion of the Triangle and the upgrading and commercialisation of Constitution Avenue, uses of the site will inevitably affect other possibilities such as a gateway to the city from an international airport, a VFT station and linkages between routes from other parts of the city.
Before anyone starts committing short-term (five to 10 years) money to Russell, the Australian public (not just Canberrans) should see where it will fit in the long-term (20 to 70 years). The military should not be allowed to make a pre-emptive strike.