Walter Burley Griffin is Dead

Walter Burley Griffin & Marion Mahoney had a vision for creating for Australia a capital city like no other. WBG was a landscape architect who thought flora was important in designing a city. Thus we have the bush capital, a legacy that is now threatened.
The current temporary planning elite have no time for landscaping only seeing it as a maintenance expense that minimizes dwelling yields on a block. Arborists have been redeployed from suburbia to the arboretum. Residents are losing their streets & community by the imposition of in-appropriate multi-unit developments that are not sympathetic or compatible. Open space & community facilities are forever lost to the goal of providing battery hen low quality flats that have a very limited lifespan.
There is no definition in the Territory Plan or the Planning & Development Act of density!
The sad fact is the ACT budget is dependent on land sales & revenue from development. Builders are a sizeable component of the workforce and are aware of the inevitable downturn in the industry.

I’ve got the whole NIMBY thing happening in my head – Curtin is bordered to the north by pretty pretty green wedge that I’d like to see still there in 40 years. It’s in Barr’s circle, so I have to wonder if he has eyes on that.

The thing is that many of the new developments in the inner areas are not being bought by owner-occupiers, who have a stake in the long term future of the area they are buying into, but being snapped up by investors. Hence the popularity of one bedroom apartments, as they are marketed primarily to investors looking for rental returns. The one bedders are terrific because the marginal value of the rental return decreases as the size of the property increases. And great for developers because they can make more money cramming in lots more one bedroom apartments which sell at around 2/3 of the price of a 2 bedroom apartment.

From the 2006 census, 77% of dwellings in Australia were freestanding houses, yet in the inner north suburb of Turner, for instance, where there was a 200% increase in residents living in apartments between 2001-06, only 53% of dwellings are now freestanding houses. In Turner in 2006 , around 60% of residents were renting, compared to around 30% in Australia as a whole (2007-08 Survey of Income and Housing). Added to that, around 40% of residents had changed address in the previous year. Now, having a transient population can make an area more dynamic – but when they make up the majority of an area’s inhabitants, who is going to care about the future of the school and the parks?

Bill Randolph from UNSW noted back in 2005:
“Two key characteristics underpin my view of the higher density housing market and its likely future. The first is the high proportion of this form of housing that has been sold into the investment market. This in itself marks the higher density market as being qualitatively different from the mainstream housing market. The outcome of this form of investment-led housing is that it has very different outcomes for those who live in it. If this characteristic continues, then there are substantial implications for the future of the sector as well as for the roll out of planning strategies in our cities. The implication is that the proportion of renters will rise as higher density housing becomes a mainstream housing form in our cities. Renters have very different attitudes and expectations of their housing than owners. Moreover, the demand for such housing will primarily come from investors, reflecting their needs and perceptions, not those of the households who end up in it. What are the implication of this? This is an issue that planners have yet to fully comprehend in their desperation to find sustainable alternatives to urban sprawl” (Paper presented at the Strata and Community Title in Australia for the 21st Century Conference)

And while the median price of apartments across all of Canberra may be less than of free standing houses ($400,000 vs $510,000, according to Allhomes data), it isn’t in the inner areas, where most of the development is happening. The median unit prices in the inner south and inner north are consistently above the median unit price elsewhere in the territory. So much for affordability. The only affordable housing is in areas where Andrew Barr doesn’t think housing is sustainable. Quite a quandry.

And why is it that that Andrew Barr wants to tear down perfectly good houses in the inner areas to increase density, when we have many, many acres of paddocks, of little agricultural or environmental value, less than 5 kms from Civic? And even less for the other town centres. We are not like Sydney, where you have to drive 30 or 40km from the centre to hit a rural area. If Andrew Barr wants to bury WBG, he would be better off making better use of the abundant vacant land close to the centre rather than destroying still serviceable housing infrastructure.

Hopefully someone at the forum will ask Mr Barr about the ACT Government’s take on heritage values. Hey! Whoever did that rock art at Yankee’s Hat – OLD! DEAD! Mr Barr can’t object now if I go and paint over it. Unless he’s happy to be called a hypocrite.

So now our esteemed minister for planning is taking inspiration for the development of Canberra from the Simpsons. I almost stopped reading there. How can anyone take that guy seriously?

But what a choice – ditch all respect for an eminent planner and any legacy he might have (even if you don’t like all of it), and accept Barr’s corrupt vision for Canberra as the new sacred legacy. Sounds to me more like he’s pandering to developers and trying to justify a childless, inner-city liefstyle.

gospeedygo said :

A time will come when

..when WBG will say no more and rise again a terrorise the city! Also he will be 10ft tall for some reason and really angry.

Hmmm. I’ve got mixed views on this. It’s clear that there’s a developers’ hand up his ass moving his mouth, especially when he promotes apartment/townhouse living so strongly. He says “but apartments and townhouses in established areas are becoming much more popular.”. Mr Barr, please define ‘popular’. With the way the ACT government releases land, we’re forced to live where they decide to release land, so we have SFA choice in the matter. Just because you allow places like Crace to be built does not make it popular.

However, I strongly agree with him when he says he embraces spontaneous growth, and that’s something WBG could not have anticipated. There’s no sense in maintaining 1890’s planning when it’s simply not relevant. Personally I think Canberra needs to lighten up and stop planning so hard.

+1 for both Skid and I-filed.

Andy Pandy’s really going out on a limb here, and although I agree with the underlying sentiment of his statement, both the Jebediah Springfield reference and the heavy-handed dismissal of Griffin are in poor taste.

I would be far more amenable to Barr’s verbosity if I thought there was actually a possibility that they could implement something simple like light rail or a system utilising small buses. In the absence of any evidence of this kind of competence, this is nothing more than patronising bombast with no purpose other than to make the government look busy for the last two years before the election.

Well a poorly educated minister with his hand in the back pocket of bad developers, happy to see bad building design wreck the Bush Capital, would say all that, wouldn’t he! I think dignifying his “op ed” with a forum is a mistake.

Does the Heart Foundation rep bring knowledge to the conversation, or just enthusiasm?

Barr’s Jebediah Springfield analogy is pretty much in the vein of the old Kate Carnell “emotional baggage” insult to Canberrans before the death of Katie Bender in the Canberra Hospital explosion. High-handed, rude, patronising and unpleasant.

Barr’s colleagues should not be thanking him for this: it is further signifying that the ACT Government is arrogant and out of touch.

A justification for constructing monstrosities everywhere. A time will come when