Refurb for West Row Park

“The package of works includes new seats, footpaths, bike racks, street lights and drought-tolerant shrubs. There’s also a special planting of Canberra’s Centenary Correa, Canberra Bells.

One would hope the Guvt has learnt to invest in “Bogan tolerant” materials. We will wait to see how long it takes for the bike racks to be bent into skate ramps, the plants to be ripped up and used as missiles, and seats either burnt or covered in muck and graviti, if one can see all the vandalism through the lack of lighting due to VB bottles on a Saturday night being hurled at the new fancy lights.

It is a barren park now, it needed something done to clean it up and put a proper path across it. Whether it needed to be turned into a mostly concrete jungle for $700k is debatable.

Why’s this story written in the future tense? (“is shelling out 6/7ths of the $700,000 needed to refurb”) The press release says that the park is now open, and it sure looked complete when I walked through it this morning. It’s not very attractive, but it replaces an under-used dustbowl, so it’s probably not worse.

Before work commenced I saw a report on ABC News and the $700K figure was bandied about. IIRC the report also mentioned other small parks would also be refreshed. It did sound like the budget for the West Row work was $700K but I thought, nah, can’t be, that must be for all the other projects too.

$700K that’d have to be pushing a couple of grand per sq metre for that dinky park.

Didnt they re-do this park about 6 months before this re-do? (which seemed to take forever, no doubt why it cost so much). And its not a park, its a concrete area with some metal chairs and a couple of native grasses.

Although given that every other car park in Civic is being sold, presumably it only has to last for about 12 months before it gets dug up and turned into a building

(and, no, there is still no way to ride through this area without hitting a pedestrian or two, or slinking between the tables at the Wig n Pen)

Good, I hope they widen the footpath so I can ride to Uni from the interchange without pedestrians tripping over me.

Looks shit. They took away all the grass and replaced it with concrete, pavers and woodchips.

I’m surprised they still call it a park instead of something like a ‘modern alfresco eating zone’

High usage city parks need careful design so they don’t end up ongoing maintenance burdens for the Gov’t. And a higher standard (read: expensive) of equipment and engineering.

I’m keen to see how it looks when done. It was designed by Jennie Curtis, who also did the landscape design for my place. (Best money we spent on the whole house project BTW.)

What the hell? It costs 700k to put some plants, paths and seats in a tiny little “park” (more like a slightly enlarged nature strip)? Hell i’ll do it for them for 350k, sign me up.