Short-sightedness again pervades Canberra’s development.
It is only because Burley Griffin’s design was so excellent that the city still feels good, despite the utter ignorance and small-mindedness of the people in charge of building things in it.
This week’s decision by Brendan Smyth to “”call-in” the development application for the Canberra Centre is just the latest in sorry 80 year history of bureaucrats and entrepreneurs trampling on the Burley Griffin legacy.
The “”call-in” means that the development will go ahead irrespective of public consultation. Many people are up set about that. They feel why have public consultation if the Minister will go ahead anyway. I am not so concerned about the truncation of the public consultation process. Rather I am concerned that the people who should be the public guardians of the Canberra vision just do not see they have a roll. They look at each individual development application in isolation. They don’t seem to relate developments to the overall plan of the city. Doing that is important.
Most people cannot articulate what it is about Canberra that makes it so pleasing and restful to the eye. People from elsewhere say it is an easy city. It is like a well-designed house. People cannot say what that something is that makes it so delightful. But there is something there.
The case of Burley Griffin’s plan there are two related elements: the use of the road axis and the limiting of the building line so the tops of the hills are not built on. Thus when you drive, cycle, walk or take the bus down Majura Avenue you see the top of Black Mountain. This concept of looking up an axis to see hills and trees is critical to Canberra’s success at being not only different, but better than many other cities. In Sydney and many other cities you get an unrelenting carpet of built form. Sure, you get the odd concession to parkland, but it is usually in the form: “”This park was put here.”
Let’s go back to Smyth’s call-in. A lot of the public consultation has been whinges from other businesses concerned about their competitive position being eroded if the Canberra Centre expands. That is of small moment. The market will ultimately sort that out. Having more and better shops may or may not be wise. The thing that concerns me is where they might go. The guardians of Griffin’s legacy failed a decade ago when they allowed the Canberra Centre to be built in the first place. They simply should not have been allowed to straddle Ainslie Avenue with a closed in roof. The Canberra Centre blocks the vista to Mount Ainslie from the major civic precinct which houses the Legislative Assembly and Museum (and which housed other civic functions before that, including, ironically the building approvals section). Talk about short-sightedness and lack of vision. They could not see the Burley Griffin vision from their own precinct.
But having made the mistake, why compound it and extend it? We know why. It is because of short-term, narrow thinking by politicians who cannot see past the next election or the next party fund-raiser. They are incapable of looking at the broad sweep. Canberra was not made in a day. Mistakes, too, can be unmade in time. Smyth could have said, “”Ultimately, we will restore the vision.” A building’s life (particularly a shopping mall put up in the 1990s) is probably not much more than 40 years. Then it gets knocked over and the view restored. There are plenty of places to build shopping malls which do not interfere with views.
The map shows the importance of the axis. It shows also the importance of other axes and vistas and how they have been eroded through poor planning and lack of vision.
The XX axis on the map. For now, the Majura Avenue-to-Black Mountain vista is intact. But Majura Avenue curves eastwards and is not continuous. Where it does so, there are single storey houses at present, but the area is zoned B11 to allow for three storeys. They could block the view.
The dreaded car has interposed Parkes Way between the city and the lake. The dreaded car has resulted in Vernon Circle not being a real circle. Why not build Constitution Avenue and Edinburgh Avenue right up to Vernon Circle. Make the traffic stop. Put buildings around Vernon Circle with radiating avenues and vistas up to the hills. This idea was knocked on the head by the Joint Parliamentary Committee in the mid 1990s.
One of the reasons people say Canberra has no soul is because you can zoom right through it or across it in a car without seeing the places where people are. Since the late 1950s the planners allowed too many curved roads and spaghetti freeways. And they have not stopped. They now threaten O’Connor Ridge with a freeway.
The Tax Office was allowed to build an office block with a frontage too close to Constitution Avenue, preventing for now the fulfilment of Burley Griffin’s splendid idea of making Constitution Avenue a major commercial address.
The military were allowed in the 1960s to enclose themselves at Russell denying the completion of the parliamentary triangle. Only the bribe in the mid-1990s of some splendid new buildings got them to abandon the fortress mentality.
And now the Hospice is to go at Grevilla Park, eroding axis marked DC on the map.
Sydney Avenue was at last completed in the mid-1990s, but pressure from Telopea Park School prevented it being connected to NSW Crescent so it is useless. Telopea Park has a feeder to allow students to be set down and picked up out of the traffic, so it would have been safe to open the road through.
The closure of Ainslie Avenue has blocked a traffic exit from the city.
Planners seem to have gone to the extremes: expelled cars or allowed them to zoom at 80km/h through the city.
All these decisions have a pattern. Each development is approved in isolation. Someone wants something in a particular place and the building and planning authorities allow it. There is no excuse, though, there is plenty of space in Canberra to deliver all these functions. If you want shopping or a tax office in Civic or blocks of three-storey flats near the city you can do it without eroding the fundamentals to Burley Griffin’s plan. Griffin himself wanted and planned for such things.
Each individual transgression might not amount to much, but as more erosion of the big picture, the axes and the vistas take place, the more Canberra will lose its special character and world pre-eminence as a planned city. We will drop to the long-term mediocrity that our politicians by default aspire for us in their pursuit of short-term satisfaction.