Page 199 - Week 01 - Thursday, 16 February 2006
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great deal of public parkland near the town centre and it is already losing much of what it has. I recently visited the area where Guardian House, an arguably valuable building, was removed along with many valued trees and is being replaced by a building that is arguably too big for the space. Residents and workers in the area have complained bitterly about this loss of amenity.
In addition, Sky Plaza, which has 165 apartments, provides no open space apart from a concrete courtyard, with little seating, alleviated to some extent by a beautiful mosaic fountain by artist Bev Hogg, and the parkland across the road, which residents might have enjoyed, will be swallowed up in the Woden East development, a place which is advertised as a location to have a lifestyle rather than a life. I have learnt to read that word “lifestyle” as meaning luxury and out of the range of many Canberra people. I would like to see our planners consider, every time they look at a development application, the access that its residents will have to open space so necessary to our wellbeing.
Similarly, the redevelopment of Civic may reduce amenity if it does not include open space in the form of pocket parks throughout the city. A park at City Hill is fine but not easily accessible to many who work in the city. For example, see how the area adjacent to Hobart Place is enjoyed on a weekday, providing breathing space, literally, and a place for small markets and casual meetings.
A point that I have made before is that our open space network must include adequate lifestyle corridors and contiguous areas, including broad corridors to enable wildlife to move freely, especially as climate change destroys their habitats. This is crucially important as we cannot know what the impact of climate change will be and definitely we should take a precautionary approach. This, therefore, requires forward planning.
I have not had time to scrutinise the plans in detail but I note that the area at the base of Red Hill off Kent Street, between Hughes and Deakin, is not zoned as open land, although it performs an important link between grasslands in Curtin and Red Hill. We pride ourselves on our nature parks and the fact that we have the largest area of endangered yellow box and red gum grassy woodlands in Australia, but we are eating away at them. The loss of East O’Malley was a planning disaster; there we have another “lifestyle” development of luxury homes that can never be as ecologically valuable as the wooded area, a haven for our disappearing birds, that it replaces.
I am told that there is likely to be another lifestyle medium residential development of four storeys or so behind the Telstra exchange in Kent Street, and this is an incursion on the grasslands of Red Hill. Residents in Hughes and other nearby regions make good use of this area and the loss of it as open space will no doubt be fought hard by them. We know that when residents move into a wooded, grassy area they often start worrying about wildfire, although their activities can be a possible cause of it, and demand buffer strips and tree felling. This is understandable. I do not blame the residents, but I think that they can often be misinformed, and politicians can politically use this and governments can respond, often with an overkill approach since the resources and knowledge for sensitive management of areas contiguous with nature reserves are not usually available.
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