Page 1746 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 4 May 2005
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We have Mr Corbell’s concept and if you would believe the Corbell rhetoric you would think this was the first time in Christendom that anyone had ever thought about how we deal with the alienation of City Hill caused by Vernon Circle. I would like to quote some of the very fine words that come in the foreword of this document:
Only rarely do opportunities arise to consolidate a capital city’s central area and to address elements that remain unfinished 100 years after they were first conceived. The combination of the release of the ACT Government’s Canberra Plan, with the subsequent establishment of the Canberra Central Program, and the Australian Government’s Griffin Legacy has created this unique opportunity.
But that is not all. And this is the important part. Mr Corbell used some of these words himself:
Griffin’s vision for Canberra was that it would be an ideal city—
I think he used the term “a city like no other”—
a city that expressed in its form and in the vigour of its community, the values of a strong, democratic nation.
It goes on:
The National Triangle symbolises the links the city has to its landscape and gives spatial definition—
I love that term—
to the values underpinning Griffin’s Plan. Griffin conceived City Hill as the apex of the Triangle that would represent the territorial, or municipal, functions of the national capital.
And he goes on to talk about the symbolic importance of City Hill. This is really about City Hill.
But what do we have in this concept plan? What we have in this concept plan and what we have all thought about in relation to City Hill, over the nine or 10 years that I have been involved in various ways in this Assembly, is: how do you ameliorate the impact of Vernon Circle? How do you actually make it less awful than it is?
What we saw with the living city project was a group of people who dared to think outside the square and to say, “Let’s pretend that Vernon Circle isn’t there and if it weren’t there how would we design our city?” You come up with a very different image. It has been a signal failing of a whole range of planning organisations and governments of both persuasions that no-one had the vision to say, “Just for a moment let us pretend that Vernon Circle is not there; let us look at what would happen to this city if Vernon Circle were not there. And is it possible to execute this?”
What you actually see from the living city proposal we saw launched last week—and if we all care about the city we would have been to a briefing or an exposition at the
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