The draft plan for Gungahlin Town Centre, radically different from Canberra’s four other town centres, was made public yesterday.
The centre will serve a population approaching 100,000 in the next 30 years _ the largest of Canberra’s townships.
Minister for Environment, Land and Planning, Bill Wood, presented the draft variation to the Territory Plan at a public meeting in the Assembly building. There will be six weeks of public consultation and an Assembly committee hearing before it becomes officially part of the plan.
The 140-hectare centre is between the suburbs of Ngunnawal, Harrison, Palmerston and Franklin bounded by Gundaroo, Mirrabei and Nudurr Drives.
The main difference between it an Belconnen, Woden, Tuggeranong and Civic is mixed use. Residences, shops, offices, social and recreational uses can be housed in the same block or even the same building. The built core of centre is to be on a human scale _ 900 metres across. The aim is to have people walk through the streets (rather than park and enter an enclosed shopping mall). Car use will not be excluded, but not allowed to dominate. Public transport will be encouraged.
Mr Wood said the draft variation was done with nine months of consultation with community groups, starting with a blank sheet.
The community had expressed disappointment with past centres. It did not want acres of car-parks, nor a huge enclosed shopping mall. It wanted a continuation of the Bush Capital, streetscapes and a centre on a human scale. There would be a maximum of four storeys (contrast the Woden Tower and Civic’s office blocks) and a minimum of two.
The detailed physical form and the method of release of land and the extent of government involvement had yet to be worked out.
“”The Government is keen to see some measure of government ownership,” he said.
Development would be staged, avoiding the mistakes of the past when the massive town centres were built either too early or too late. Gungahlin has 6000 people now and will have 30,000 by 2000 and 100,000 by 2023. So its growth will be much slower than the other centres, requiring more careful staging. The town centre will have a resident and working population of up to 5000 people (the other centres have virtually no residents, but some are planned for Civic).
The draft plan shows that once a modified grid pattern had been settled on, the planners looked at a dozen aspects of the site and then laid the streets and nominated land uses to get the best of solar orientation, the topography and drainage, and to avoid the worst of the wind flows.
The plan shows other major differences with the other centres. It has a main street going through the centre that incorporates the Inter-Town Public Transport system (contrast Melrose Drive and Northbourne Avenue which by-pass the commercial hub).
The new land use category “”residential (mixed use)” will allow, for example, residences above shops and offices and mixtures of uses in the one block or building (contrast Belconnen’s large enclosed shopping mall, surrounded by car parks and beyond that slabs of offices and acres of residences or Woden’s medium-density residences on the other side of Melrose drive).
The open space is different. Rather than large contiguous areas of open space, the plan provides for more numerous but smaller parks within the mixed residential-commercial 55-hectare core area. On the north-western edge of the site are two 60-metre wide watercourse parks. There are sports parks on the north-east and south-west corners.
Mr Wood said that action would be postponed pending further study on areas that might contain the endangered legless lizard and (italic with cap S and lower case p) Synemon plana (end italic) moth.
Because of the proximity of Mitchell, there will be no service trades area.
Copies of the draft plan can be inspected at the six ACT government libraries or at the John Overall Offices Shopfront, 220 Northbourne Avenue.