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Canberra was built in harmony with its landscape setting, creating a legacy of urban form well-connected to the natural environment. Its urban design and planning not only amplified the surrounding natural landscape such as forested hills and mountains but also created a human-made green urban character. However, plans for future development as a compact city pose a challenge to conserving the city's green spaces. A green infrastructure plan is necessary to consider the city's green space design heritage and the linked socio-ecological values while minimising the urban footprint. The paper employs a historical literature review to understand the factors and characteristics that shaped Canberra's green character and the socio-ecological values of its green spaces. The research found the influence of historical and modern design and planning concepts in consolidating green infrastructure and creating ecological corridors and social infrastructure. One of the essential conditions for maintaining the unique character of Canberra is the preservation of the socio-ecological values of its existing green spaces. A trade-off study must be conducted to balance green infrastructure planning while considering these values, in light of development changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the implementation of sustainability into urban communities that includes the use of sustainability assessment tools such as Green Star Communities (Green-Star). The literature is reviewed regarding the role that these types of tools play, including their challenges, implementation issues and suitability that may support the need for possible alternative processes. An analysis of the Green-Star rating tool was undertaken on the master-planned $8 billion City to the Lake (C2L) urban infill project in Canberra, Australia. Data was collected through a semi-structured interview process to gain an 'insiders' view of Green-Star. The analysis helped shed light on the performance of Green-Star on the C2L project and suggested that there is a need for an alternative process. The C2L analysis showed that whilst Green-Star had benefits, there were some perceived weaknesses that included a scoring system that may not reflect real project outcomes, point chasing mentality of designing to a list, implementation issues due to complexity and size of the project, localisation issues, difficulty in innovating and cost implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking at Canberra from an internationally comparative perspective, this viewpoint claims that the city is exceptional in a number of significant ways. Canberra is not only 'one of the last Cities Beautiful'. This paper makes the surprising observation that among the many famous city-wide boulevard schemes conceived around the turn of the century from Chicago to Helsinki, only the one designed for Canberra was actually implemented to a significant extent. The fact that the skeleton of the wide City Beautiful was then largely fleshed out with bungalows is a different matter. Moreover, Canberra is not only 'the world's biggest Garden City'. In no other city have Howard's Garden City principles been implemented in a similarly complete manner - ranging from a revenue-producing leasehold system to a network of large 'self-contained satellites' connected to a 'central city' with green core. The paper examines the visions and plans developed for Canberra from the versions of early modernism 1.0/1.1 via the versions of post-war modernism 2.1/2.2 and the neo-liberal 2.3 to the brief life of the 3.0 version of urban renaissance and 'modernism reloaded'. It concludes with comments on the realities of 4.0 and 5.0 as new hybrid products of more and also less coordinated urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies vulnerable, transport-poor populations in the Canberra Metropolitan Region, and in doing so, makes two significant contributions to the literature. The first contribution is methodological, advancing accessibility indicators compared with previous attempts in the literature. The second contribution is policy-relevant, identifying significant spatial gap of service in Queanbeyan, east of Canberra. This gap appears to be associated with the ACT–NSW state border. The findings are consistent with similar research projects in Australia; however, this particular research presents an example of transport disadvantage arising from governance, rather than from any particular social-spatial relationship to the configuration of the city. The findings suggest that public policy and public transport planning does not yet effectively reach across the state border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around two‐thirds of the global population will live in cities by 2050 requiring large urban infrastructure development. Decision‐makers and planners usually rely on standard economic accounting methods for urban planning and investments on infrastructure assets. However, standard methods fail to account for the ecosystem services benefits that living infrastructure (e.g. urban forests, open spaces) provides to city dwellers. This could generate socially inefficient configurations of urban spaces and compromise the achievement of long‐term urban sustainability targets. In this analysis, we applied a stochastic whole‐of‐life benefit–cost analysis following the System of Environmental‐Economic Accounting (SEEA) framework to compare alternative long‐term management strategies for living infrastructure in Canberra, Australia. Spatially explicit data, i‐Tree Eco and benefit transfer methods were used to estimate the stocks and flows ecosystem services benefits of urban forests and irrigated open spaces from 2018 to 2070. Our analysis suggests that a '30 per cent canopy cover expansion' scenario has the highest benefit–cost ratio, while the business as usual scenario, where a net loss of 400 trees is expected per year, offers the lowest benefit–cost ratio. Scenarios of expanding versus not expanding irrigated open spaces in the future both result in a benefit–cost ratio of approximately two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canberra, Australia's national capital city, was transformed through the 1960s from a straggling city beautiful on garden city lines, to a modern new city of international standing by the powerful National Capital Development Commission (NCDC), established in 1957. Gordon Stephenson first visited the city in 1954, became a consultant to the NCDC in 1960 and was appointed to the National Capital Planning Committee in 1967. His activities ranged across all scales - residential communities, town centres and the development of a long-term metropolitan planning strategy. Stephenson appears to be an underrated figure in the urban metamorphosis of Canberra through the 1960s. Drawing on a mix of extant primary and secondary sources, this paper sketches the extent of Stephenson's role and influence in Canberra. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1912, Walter Burley Griffin famously won the international design competition for Australia's national capital, later named Canberra. In 1914, Walter – along with his wife and professional partner Marion Mahony Griffin – moved from their native Chicago to Australia to orchestrate Canberra's realization. On a return visit to the USA in 1925, Walter was commissioned to lay out an extension to the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. Until now, this project was only known from a singular, passing mention of it in a period newspaper article. This report reconstructs the writer's convoluted effort – spanning more than a decade – to confirm Walter Burley Griffin's authorship of this enigmatic project and to locate the plan itself. In parallel, it recovers, partly based upon evidence-derived suppositions, the circumstances surrounding what proved to be Griffin's final American commission. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Both Canberra and Bangkok have in recent times invoked design competitions to initiate new Parliament buildings. The Canberra case was in a tradition of open international competition, that of Bangkok limited to Thai architects, with both bringing 'the nation' into deliberation. In each, the design needed to negotiate an established urban landscape: in Canberra an urban design of axial set-pieces, formal and geometric, of largely US derivation; in Bangkok, a less ordered urban landscape, organically evolved over centuries. The resulting urban design complexes raise questions of how the idea of the nation is to be represented in urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1960–70s, there was a proposal to expand the administrative border of Canberra into the neighbouring state New South Wales to accommodate long-term population growth and urban development. However, this attempt failed ultimately. This study investigates this 'remaking' of the border, and revisits the same issue in the planning and development context of the twenty-first century. It employs three conceptual constructs – 'bordering', 'debording', and 'rebordering' – to draw insights into the nexus between the border's (re)making, dominant planning thinking, and emerging development process. It uses a mix of primary and secondary sources of data and information collected from the National Archives of Australia, newspaper clippings of The Canberra Times, interviews with planners involved, Australian Census data, and planning literature. It finds that the border expansion proposal was driven by a political advocacy out of a modernist technocratic planning vision for a linear city, and was based on an over-optimistic and mechanical population projection. However, as a highly political initiative, its failure was doomed by political strains and changes, and local community's concerns. Knowing this history contributes to tackling a similar issue in today's paradox of a planning paradigm for compactness and sustainability and an emerging development expansion onto the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The centennial city of Canberra, the Australian capital, has been developed following stringent planning concepts to deliver liveable neighbourhoods. The built environment of Canberra was strongly influenced by the Garden City concept in the early days and the New Town Development model in the 1960s and 1970s. While enhancing quality of life (QoL) is increasingly emphasised in urban planning, little empirical research has been done to assess how urban planning underpins this better QoL. This research examines the relationship between urban policy and QoL in Canberra by applying an integrated policy evaluation tool. The neighbourhoods of Canberra have been divided into seven districts for spatial analysis. The QoL level in each district was compared and the Belconnen and Tuggeranong districts were identified as achieving a lower QoL than other districts. Key indicators that were closely linked with the QoL level in these districts were identified. Using scenario analysis, the article identifies the changes to QoL in the two districts which could result from improving these key factors. The article proposes a method of mapping the interdisciplinary issues with the related urban policy and concludes with the implications for urban planning and further analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the story of Canberra Airport's transformation from a dilapidated aviation facility to a world-class small ‘airport city’ juxtaposing aeronautical and non-aeronautical land uses with a critical focus on the tensions with established planning and corporate institutions. The analysis is framed within five main discourses: the global entrepreneurial turn in airport development towards mixed use precincts; neoliberal government policies welcoming private investment and management within the public sphere and notably airport privatisation from the mid-1990s; the rise of airport real estate markets and the singular role of a local development company in the case of Canberra; a new governance regime privileging the commonality of federal privatised airports, but excluding state, territory and local determinations; and the specificity of the setting of Canberra as a national capital and city having to adapt to the dynamic impacts of a new development typology. The comprehensive redevelopment of Canberra Airport since the late 1990s highlights both strengths and shortcomings in public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Celebrated architect and city planner Daniel Hudson Burnham enjoyed a rise to fame in the aftermath of his widely acclaimed achievement as Director of Works for the World's Columbian Exposition, held in his adopted Chicago in 1893. Roughly in parallel with Burnham's rise, town planning movements were coalescing in Australia, and it would not be long until the Chicagoan's name was circulating in Australian professional circles. This is a pilot study broadly aimed at chronicling and interpreting Australian awareness of Daniel Burnham at the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, it is concerned with the reception of Burnham's civic design ideals and why some believed them to be of antipodean relevance. Their Australian impact, however, is beyond the present study's scope. Reciprocally, this essay also surveys Burnham's knowledge of Australia. Special emphasis is given to Burnham within the context of the Australia's Federal Capital competition (1912), arguing that although the Chicagoan did not compete, he profoundly, albeit vicariously, impacted the capital's design. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A number of important city-building projects across the early 20th century drew on the utopian ideas of the City Beautiful movement, an architectural response to the poverty and social dysfunctions generated by urban industrialism. This was also a moment in which the imperial connections and imperial ambitions of settler capitalist societies coincided with national projects. The curious co-existence of these ambitions was embodied in the capital city projects of the time – simultaneously imperial and national, and developed through an exchange of utopian ideas about architecture, planning, nature and modernity. Of these, Canberra is exemplary; the most fully realized. A hundred years later, its story is still largely told in narrow terms, as a parochial tale of incomplete nationalism. Shifting focus to explore Canberra in relation to other capital city building projects during the period offers a better understanding of the complex overlays of imperialism, nationalism and regionalism at play in new world settler societies, and the cultural traffic across the Anglophone world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The National Capital Canberra as a planned city has a unique system in Australia with direct federal planning controls combined with Australian Capital Territory (ACT) government administration integrating state and local functions. The immediate surrounding border of NSW is also a significant consideration in planning and land management. In its Centenary year, Canberra is reflecting on its planning heritage and in doing so exploring the planning challenges for the next 100 years. Key issues being discussed include climate change, renewable energy, public transport, regional development and demographic change. Recent initiatives include the introduction of light rail, green precincts and strengthening Canberra as a knowledge economy capitalising on the universities and national research institutions. The voices of the community are developing strongly and the planning system is being challenged to accommodate this change. This article will outline the major reforms in the planning system in the ACT in recent years and discuss whether these have provided a platform for a more sustainable future for Canberra as a national capital, a regional capital for the south-east NSW and as a local community expected to grow to half a million population by 2030. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious communities have historically posed distinct challenges for urban governance in their accommodation within the built environments and social landscapes of cities. Looking to the future, this article examines two broad religious trends: increased pluralisation driven by the processes of secularisation and transnational migration; along with the emergence of the 'mega-church' as an organisational and built phenomenon, and their expected impacts on planning practice. This article particularly considers the impacts of these changes within Canberra, however, it is anticipated that the issues identified will resonate elsewhere in urban Australasia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until the launch of Federation Square in Melbourne, in 1997, Australia's contribution to the history of international architectural competitions consisted essentially of two buildings: the Sydney Opera House, won by Jørn Utzon in 1957, and the Federal Parliament House in Canberra, won by Mitchell/Giurgola and Thorp (MGT) in 1980. While Utzon's building is widely acknowledged as a daring piece of innovative design and one of the architectural icons of this century, MGT's winning scheme for Parliament House drew heavy criticism from the moment the proposal was unveiled: neo-Classicist lines, a Beaux-Arts parti, and the building's occupation of Capital Hill – at the top of the Griffins' 1912 scheme for Canberra – were seen by many as displaying a lack of sensibility towards Australian landscape, culture, and ingenuity, and as the result of a conservative approach to contemporary urban design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Canberra is the only really modern city in the world. Not that that has been made obvious to the casual glance, but a structure can only be truly modern when the foundations are properly laid for that particular thing. . . . For this science . . . had died out and was no longer practiced." (Marion Mahony Griffin, 'Canberra, its Designer and its Plan', The Centennial Anniversary of the Founding of Australia, Magic of America, Federal Battle, p. 380.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]