Blocklines: 1. The residential freeway through inner Canberra that later NCDC designers would have avoided. 2. Kaleen . . . residents blessed with no direct traffic thoroughfare.
Subsequent bureaucrats have been damned for messing up the Burley Griffin plan. But Saint Walter was not infallible. He did not have the planning solution for everything in Canberra. Indeed his design has created some problems.
The subsequent bureaucrats did mess up the Triangle and cut the city from the lake with the ghastly Parkes Way, but they also created two special features of Canberra … the town centres and the clustered suburb. Both have reduced the blight of the car that has wrecked other cities.
But these two good works of the National Capital Development Commission are under threat with the push to upgrade Civic. This is not just last week’s announcement, but earlier concentration on development at the centre, too.
Scrubbing off graffiti, more grass and less concrete and getting rid of crime are fine aims for Civic. They are also fine aims for Tuggeranong, Belconnen and Woden. When presented as an attack against graffiti and crime last week’s ACT Government plan for Civic’s rebirth will get immediate support, but plan appears to have other elements.
The Government appears to have gone off for a weekend retreat listened to one or two people and announced a plan that has the potential to shift the whole direction of Canberra development in a way that might create more problems than its solves.
One of the best features of Canberra has been the concept of town centres. Those planners who took up the task of making Canberra’s Australia’s capital in practice and well as name after World War II rightly wanted to avoid the manic peak hours that dogged other cities with thousands of people going into the centre in the morning and out in the evening. The planners created the decentralised townships. Not everyone could live in the township where they worked, but at least there has been some traffic flow in the reverse directions in peak times.
Major government departments have been located at Belconnen, Woden and Tuggeranong, dispersing employment across Canberra. They were not unqualified successes, but lessons were learnt on the way, and some of the plans for the Gungahlin town centre looked very good. But now Gungahlin appears to be put on the backburner. One ACT department that was to go there is now going to Dickson instead.
It is fine to give priority to Civic for upgrading open space and cleaning graffiti, but not for employment creation. There is some value in having more residential use in Civic and more mixed residential, retail and office buildings. But that does not appear to be the aim of the renewed concentration on Civic. Rather the aim appears to be increasing property values of existing buildings.
The head of Urban Service, John Turner, bemoans that Civic as the central business district has been diluted since the old National Capital Development Commission adopted the Y plan. Well, good. There is no need for a central business district with its associated congestion. The creation of one may help a few owners of existing office buildings make a financial killing, but it will not make life any better for the people of Canberra, especially the people of Gungahlin, whose town centre seems ever more distant. It seems that the property owners in Civic, and to some extent Dickson, want to capture the people of Gungahlin, using their demand for retail, office, parking and other services to drive up their property values and too bad for their personal cost and community cost associated with the travelling too and fro.
The best of the Gungahlin plans were to have more mixed uses of buildings (office, retail and residential) and more variegated land use, so that residences could be next to offices and retail buildings. This would reduce crime and improve amenity, but developers have run shy of mixed uses in the past.
It should have been done more in the earlier town centres, particularly Belconnen which is perhaps the worst town centre because it is not mixed. It has land-use apartheid, with the shopping mall, offices and residences utterly separated with the consequence that the offices are dead at weekends; the residences dead during weekday daytimes and the mall dead at night. It is ripe for crime.
But most developers find mixed-use buildings and mixed-use sites too difficult. They say they do not yield enough profit. Shopping mall developers particularly disfavour mixed use. Heavens, shop-keepers may get to own their shops instead of being indentured for life to paying a large portion of their turnover to the landlord.
The only way developers could be encouraged to mix residential and offices in one building was when planners gave them extra floors to do so. Encouraging mixed uses, however, should not mean just a plan to concentrate development in Civic.
All town centres deserve attention and changes to lift amenity and reduce crime. Maintaining the town centres and pushing ahead with Gungahlin will reduce traffic congestion in and out of the centre at peak hours.
The way things are going, however, there is virtually no major public or private employment planned for Gungahlin. Meanwhile, employment continues to grow in Civic and at Russell. The result has been that some suburbs, particularly Reid, O’Connor, Turner and Lyneham are being used as thoroughfares to jobs in Civic and Russell. (I have to declare here that I live in Lyneham.)
Part of the problem is that these suburbs were based on designs by Griffin, before the motor car became so ubiquitous. They are not like NCDC-designed suburbs. The older suburbs have direct roads through them. Thus Campbell residents and Russell workers pour through Currong Street, Reid, and residents from Gungahlin and North Lyneham pour along the Archibald-MacKennal-Miller-Street dragway. But these streets are supposed to be residential. And the traffic is made worse by dual occupancy and medium density.
To make O’Connor, Lyneham, Turner and Reid comparable to later NCDC-designed suburbs and give the residents similar traffic-design conditions to people living in Kaleen, Evatt or most of Tuggeranong, for example, you would have to block off the thoroughfares at the suburb’s border: Currong Street at Anzac Parade; Archibald and Brigalow Streets at Mouat Street; Miller Street at MacArthur Avenue and McCaughey Street at Barry Drive. But it won’t happen.
The new ACT planners, though, appear to be Civic-minded in their own way; not civic-minded in the way the NCDC was. The NCDC put residential amenity before commercial-property values. But there is no reason why the people in these suburbs should not claim the same amenity as NCDC-designed suburbs, requiring traffic to be dispersed to feeder roads designed to take them.
(Incidentally, note how post-NCDC street lay-outs in Gungahlin have put profit before amenity with tiny roads, reserves and blocks.)
At least John Langmore is decent enough to admit error with respect to traffic through North Canberra. He said this week that the decision of a parliamentary committee he was on not to extend Ginninderra Drive to Northbourne Avenue should be revisited. That extension would have taken the bulk of traffic down six-lane roads with no houses on them.
I bet the ACT traffic bureaucrats (who have pre-determined the issue despite residents’ overwhelming objection) do not follow suit.
In all, Civic is being pushed and Canberra is going the way of other unplanned cities to the gain of few and to the detriment of the many.