Page 2823 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 17 September 2014
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That this Assembly:
(1) notes, regarding Civic:
(a) the need for revitalisation and rejuvenation of many of much of the public realm;
(b) poor access to City Walk and Garema Place;
(c) recent contributions to the debate about the city centre by Mr David Tickle, Associate Professor Richard Hu, Mr Hamish Sinclair and Dr Ed Blakely;
(d) the vast majority of Canberrans access the city centre by car; and
(e) the need for better transport infrastructure; and
(2) calls on the ACT Government to facilitate the publishing of an options paper by March 2015 that would detail the alternatives open to the Government for revitalisation of Garema Place and City Walk.
I am pleased to bring this motion to the Assembly today. Civic is supposed to be the heart of our capital. But if Civic is the heart then Canberra is in a bad way. It is high time that serious attention was paid to the state of the city centre so that Canberrans can have pride in the heart of the city.
Members will be aware that I published an article in the Canberra Times earlier this month calling for a discussion about how to bring life back to the centre of Civic. In my opinion piece I raised the possibility of reopening City Walk to limited traffic. While I believe it is important to bring back life to the city, I am not necessarily tied to the idea of bringing back cars. Instead, I want to start a conversation. For too long we have ignored the problems in the city centre. We have allowed it to become a wasteland while we focus on other areas around the city. I am not discouraging the development of other areas of the city. I believe development is good but we cannot ignore the city centre.
My proposal, which I said I was not wedded to, included a single-lane road, perhaps cobblestone, which would be open to limited traffic during the day and general traffic at night. It would help bring people to the city centre and also make the area far more accessible for people with a disability. It could, perhaps, resemble the shared zone by the lake outside the front of Reconciliation Place. It does not need to be a busy road, just something to bring people to the doorsteps of the businesses and public realm. Given that the width of the pedestrian mall is near 50 metres, there would still be in excess of 40 metres open for people on foot.
I am not the only person to have noticed that the state of the city centre is not what it could be. In fact, a piece from 1976 by a University of New South Wales lecturer E Duek Cohen, published in the Canberra Times, reports the following:
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