Page 4142 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 21 September 2011
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their shopping needs and the emergence of larger supermarkets, discount department stores, regional shopping malls, bulky goods outlets, factory outlets and homemaker centres. All of these have driven a change in the way people shop and where they shop, and this has also increased concentration of retail ownership.
Canberra’s retail hierarchy needs to accommodate these economic changes and, indeed, social changes in our community. The commercial centres structure of city, town, group and local centres, supplemented by the speciality retailing found at places like Fyshwick, Hume and Mitchell, mean that we can consider where retail facilities and services are best located to serve the Canberra community. The challenge we must confront is how to best respond to the needs of an increasingly affluent and mobile population while considering the social and environmental consequences of development.
The centre’s hierarchy policy has been and remains an important tool, but it cannot remain static in the context of this variety of social and economic changes which I have just outlined. It must continue to ensure that retailing is available at convenient locations and is located in diverse mixed-use centres, but it must accommodate changing retail formats—for example, larger supermarkets and “big box” retailing.
The intention of the retail hierarchy is not about protecting individual businesses from competition, but it is about providing certainty to commercial investors about where to invest. It is also intended to ensure the community has good accessibility to retail facilities and that residential areas are not compromised by retail or commercial developments that have unacceptable noise or traffic impacts.
The retail hierarchy does not remain static. It must be modified and be flexible enough to respond to social and economic changes. The policy itself is well set out in the territory plan’s commercial policies. These policies set out the city’s role as Canberra’s central business district and premier location for high-end retailing, entertainment and community and business facilities. But it also serves the function as a district town centre for Canberra central—that is, north and south Canberra.
The retail function of the town centres is to provide comparison goods shopping and personal services to their surrounding district populations. Consistent with this role, they are the locations of department and discount department stores. Like the city, they benefit from the trade generated by the workforce at these centres. Over the last 20 years we have seen our town centres grow to provide an increasing expansion of additional services and facilities, such as cinema complexes, restaurant strips, coffee shops, as well as an expansion of large supermarket retailing. The location of the major town centres in each of Canberra’s towns supports the balanced delivery of retail services across the city. These centres can be easily accessed by car, bus or bicycle, and assist us in providing for a decentralised pattern of development and greater flexibility in choices of journeys.
The function of group centres is to provide weekly grocery shopping opportunities and business and community services to a neighbourhood group of suburbs with a catchment of around 15,000 to 20,000 people. These were introduced in the early 1960s in response to the emergence of supermarket retailing. The group centres are
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