The star of the Gungahlin East vision is the living amenity. Let it breathe. Image: SLA.
You have to hand it to the consultants and their graphic artists who come up with beautiful renders for property developments.
Who wouldn’t want to live in these imagined places?
The recently published Gungahlin Town Centre East Design and Place Framework, the product of two years of community consultation, is a case in point.
If you believe the document and the renders, the undeveloped east side will be an urban paradise that has something for everyone.
Offices, apartments, “vibrant” cafes and restaurants, public facilities and sporting courts all set in a woodland garden with a community green.
It is the nature of these consultations, of course, that the “Framework” will attempt to reflect all the views and suggestions fed into the feedback funnel.
I’ve seen these before, whether it’s private projects or the Wright-Coombs village proposed in Molonglo, or its new town centre or the Belconnen Town Centre Place Design Brief or the Woden CIT plaza plans.
These are still in play, but generally, others like them all seem too good to be true, and inevitably, the bar is set too high for the seeming realities of property development, and when it is finished, there is usually disappointment.
There is a hint of this in the usual single-word adjectival disclaimer in the captions accompanying the marvellous illustrations – ‘indicative’.
A beautiful scene worthy of a development in the national capital. Will it come off?
It doesn’t happen all the time, and some projects do manage to come close to the depictions, but often, the vision narrows as the costs of delivering it increase.
This is a pity because good urban development puts the people who will live there first and provides an environment that is not only pleasant but functional, particularly from a climate perspective, is rare.
It comes down to space and providing sufficient servings of it to allow a development to breathe and provide the public and living infrastructure to make it a great place to be.
But space in any development is at a premium.
At first glance, the vision for Gungahlin Town Centre East is a dynamic one. There are high rises for housing, but not too many, although hopefully, they won’t all look the same.
There are offices for employment, although the experience in Gungahlin is that these are a hard sell, leading to the dormitory suburb complaints that have dogged Town Centre development there.
On the ground, there are retail and hospitality spaces, recreation and public facilities like a library, and even an indoor multi-sports hall.
But the star is the natural space – the linear park, the trees (yes, 30 per cent canopy), the community green, the nature play and the pond.
I hope it comes off, that an extra high-rise is not squeezed in at something else’s expense, or that the government would love to provide all the amenity, but really it’s up to the private sector and its legitimate need to make a buck.
If all the artist’s impressions that I’ve seen had come to pass, Canberra would not have the concrete jungles it has and density would not have such a bad name.
The community knows what it wants, and while not all is possible, it deserves developers and town planners who can live up to people’s aspirations and not just consider them indicative.
Loading ...
