The planners issues chocolate freckles to the community groups taking part in the planning of Gungahlin Town centre.
It was not a cynical sweetener along the lines: “”We’ll give you a few lollies and we’ll go away a do precisely what we like.” No; it was an analogy of the planning sought by most of the people involved.
Freckles are those little chocolate bits with hundreds and thousands on them. They are highly clustered with a high density of mixed use (green equals open space, yellow equals community facilities, orange equals residential, blue equals commercial, pink equals retail and white equals parking). The are on a human scale.
The contrast is with the other Town Centres: Belconnen, Woden and Tuggeranong, and to a lesser extent Civic.
Planning in Canberra has come the full circle. No more Stalinist schemes imposed from above. Gungahlin is to be planning from below.
The people have told the planners that Gungahlin is to be everything that Belconnen is not.
No large enclosed shopping mall and no acres of car-parking. Unlike Belconnen and Woden the main inter-city transport link (be it bus, light rail, tram, solar or electric bus) is to go through the heart of the centre. And unlike those two centres the town centre is to have retail, office, residential and entertainment uses mixed in the same block or even in the same building. It is to be on a human scale with streets people will walk down on a modified grid scale.
Belconnen and Woden have 9 to 5 single use centres with residential pushed out.
But hang on a moment, isn’t Gungahlin to be just like any other non-planned town in Australia? Walk through Newcastle and you can see grid-pattern streets with people living on the first floor, or a house next to a shop and public transport going through the guts of the town centre. Why muck about with all these expensive planners? Why not just let the people build the thing in the way any number of 20,000 to 100,000 size towns have grown?
Further, who is to guarantee that these planners will get it right anyway. After all, they made a complete hash of Belconnen. They did a bit better in Tuggeranong, but only when they come back to the rough-and-ready mix-use and grid style of Newcastle, Geelong or even Civic do they seem to be getting it right.
When it is built, who is to say future developments won’t make it wrong or at least reveal some planning errors for people to pounce upon? The people of Canberra are not happy unless they have got something to be miserable about.
In short, why bother planning when people appear to be happier doing it their own way?
The Gungahlin exercise gives an answer to that question. The planners began with a blank sheet and worked with community groups to build a design.
People untrained in architecture, town planning, urban design and so on are fairly good at telling what they do (italic) not (end italic) want. They can tell this from their everyday use of places like Belconnen Town Centre or Woden. They are mediocre at saying what they do want and not very good at all at translating what they want on to a site to get the best from it. They are also not good a recognising conflict between their stated aims: no car parks AND accessibility; lakeshore development AND natural settings.
The Gungahlin exercise highlighted some DON’Ts from the other centres. Belconnen’s single-use planning was rejected. Belconnen has a Mall surrounded by car-parks. Offices are in slab over the road. Medium densities are still further away in a slab. The buses and the main inter-city road do not go through it. Woden is the same.
The result: the shopping mall is 9 to 5 Monday to Saturday. The offices at 8 to 5 Monday to Friday. They are deserted at night. The bus depots become trouble spots. The offices have to be lit up for security at great cost, but the light does not benefit anyone (other than the odd security guard).
When those DON’Ts are translated to DOs, the planners are needed. With Gungahlin they drew up a dozen or so diagrams of the area each isolating one aspect of it: stormwater, windbreaks, cold air escapes, solar orientation, vegetation, topology, geology, walking distance, aspect, views and so on.
They reminded me of Mah-jongg tiles: the four winds, the directions, the bamboos and so on.
The you lay down land-uses and streets in a way that makes the best use of these things, rather than just plonking them down. That way you protect views, use the morning sun on slopes facing east, provide suitable ground for buildings needing foundations, avoid building on the cold-air drainage, design street directions so the promenade with outdoor cafes gets the northern sun and so on. You make balance each out. It may be, as in the case of Gungahlin Town Centre that the views are of less importance than for a purely residential estate, for example.
Some of the economic mistakes of the previous town centres are to be avoided. Because there is not one large shopping mall, Gungahlin can be staged. This means you do not get a huge mall with no people living nearby, or thousands of people waiting the one-off construction of the mall. That way resources are used better. Also, with mixed-use development, you can have a greater variety of land-ownership.
The planners hope to avoid some of the past mistakes with green space.
Canberra must have more unused green space than any city in the world. Part of that has been because of earlier land-use-dominated planning: this area is retail; this area is wholesale; this is residential; this is office; this is park. So you get large tracts of each. The result is that office workers have to walk quite a long way to get to the large parkland, instead of walking a short way to a small park.
That does not mean Gungahlin will be all beer and skittles.
Planning is of its nature difficult because who can predict the future. It may be that the planners will be cursed in 20 years time for not have the foresight to predict some technological change that profoundly changes society.
Further, Gungahlin is unlikely to generate enough employment to avoid a twice daily crush along Northbourne Avenue. The new gateway from the Federal Highway around the back of Mount Majura and Mount Ainslie announced by the National Capital Planning Authority yesterday will relieve some pressure, but it is not a total solution.
As the city grows the evolution to public transport is bound to cause pain without some voter-unfriendly measures against car use.
The me-and-my-car attitude has dominated Canberra thinking for a long time. To date it has been self-fulfilling.
At present Gungahlin Town Centre will allow cars through its grid-pattern streets, and buses and pedestrians.
Maybe if parking is made rare and expensive and if traffic calming is imposed so that cars cannot go faster than 20km/h people will realise that taking a car to town is simply not worth it.
It happens in Europe. And who knows by the time Gungahlin has 100,000 people cars will not be the noisy, smelly, ugly, injurious things as we know them now.
In all, though, Gungahlin on paper looks like a great improvement on Belconnen and Woden.