Canberra and the paradox of planning

I made my first trip to Australia’s capital this week. I’d been told on many occasions that Canberra is a bit dull; a description I’ve always thought must be unfair. After all how bad can a nation’s capital really be? It turns out that the description is unfair. Canberra is actually insufferably dull.

The odd thing though is that it’s also quite a pleasant city. It’s got the best museums and galleries in Australia, has plenty of serene public gardens and walkways, and has a great location split either side of the Griffin River and surrounded by lush hills. An archetypal planned city, Canberra was built in the 1910s and 1920s in a spot roughly equidistant between Melbourne and Sydney in an effort to placate the competing power bases.

It’s probably fair to say that most planned towns and cities fail to inspire. It made me wonder though for what type of society do planners actually plan for? My suspicion is that planners probably overly focus on the more private aspects of our wellbeing and happiness, at the expense of more social or community factors. So Canberra residents benefit from having large plots of land with vast bungalows and outside decking, have wide boulevards with limited traffic congestion to get home quickly in the evening, and have quiet parks and gardens to pass their weekends in.

What then are they missing?

• First, the lack of urban density in any part of the city means there are relatively few places for people to naturally interact or come together. So walking at 6 o’clock in the evening only five hundred metres from Capital Hill (or for that matter any other parts of the city centre) you’ll rarely come across a passing pedestrian.


• Second, and perhaps a consequence of the first, is that there are few shared experiences for residents of planned cities. With residents spread so disparately the payoff of public infrastructure – whether public transport, leisure facilities or spaces for community events – is much lower. And hence many of the interactions that define social life are palpably absent.


• Third, there’s no natural centre or gravitational pull. Moving around the city you never get the sense of going from anywhere to anywhere else – instead this empty feeling of just moving about from one anonymous area to another.


• Fourth, and linked to the previous point, there’s no clear sense of where particular functions might agglomerate. Most cities which have evolved rather than having been planned have distinct areas, whether they represent particular types of business, legacies of distinct ethnic groups, or agglomeration of cultural activities like galleries or markets.
  

It all makes for quite an odd experience – it’s an extremely dull, yet perfectly pleasant city. Of course, for people who are intensely private individuals, who want to live a bland and stress free existence, I’m sure planned cities like Canberra are great places to call home. But I’ll not be moving there anytime soon.