LARGELY because the city was founded after the invention of the motor car, Canberra has a road network second to none - or a ''rolled-gold road network'' as The Canberra Times phrased it in August.
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The city's amazing roads put all Australia's state capitals to shame and contribute to the fact that our so-called peak hours are really just peak minutes.
A quick look at the statistics indicates that we have 2869 kilometres of sealed roads to service a population of almost 400,000. This bitumen glut translates into more than 7000 square metres of black top for each and every one of us.
For those of us who suffer from number numbness, that translates into an area of seven large residential blocks or enough space to park 189 Priuses - each.
Adding up the cost of the new Majura and Gungahlin parkways and the proposed light-rail network, we are engaged in a capital investment proposition of more than $1 billion to get people from A to B within the capital a few minutes quicker.
Is there an argument that perhaps some of this money might be better spent on cardiac surgery to improve the faint heartbeat of our city centre?
On Monday documentary film The Human Scale screens at the National Film and Sound Archive's Arc Cinema as part of the Canberra International Film Festival.
Andreas Dalsgaard's film explores the ground-breaking thinking of Danish architect Jan Gehl, who has become a legendary figure in the transformation of public spaces. Gehl shows successful examples of cities that have done away with the car-friendly conventions that have dictated so much of our urban form.
For 40 years Gehl has been systematically observing humans in their urban environs to see how they naturally use them; creating city squares, closing roads off to traffic and opening up disused laneways (as in the case of Melbourne) - all of which have a dramatic effect on the lives of real people.
Some of the notions explored in this polemical and visually stunning film are that we are quintessentially social mammals who are defined by a ''speed scale'' of five kilometres per hour (not 60 km/h) and if we continue our infatuation with the horseless carriage we will continue ''walking towards a chaos created by ourselves''.
From Melbourne to Copenhagen and Dhaka to Chongqing, The Human Scale evocatively explores the notion that ''we shape cities and then they shape us'' and that people do, indeed, want to be part of this story.
The debate is not just about the hardware of the city but the software - we are the software. We often hear the term ''master plan'' and in Canberra we do indeed have some exciting yet embryonic initiatives such as the City to the Lake project, the Capital Metro and the City Plan. The Human Scale suggests, however, that in lieu of a master plan what we need is a framework - a beautiful coat hanger, perhaps.
When the film is released on DVD in December, copies need to be slid under the doors of our key decision-makers, many of whom are very passionate on this topic, to show them how one might expand our current incomplete planning toolbox. With many ingenious examples of how cities can and do change, The Human Scale is fascinating food for thought for urban planners, governments and residents alike.
■ The Human Scale screens on Monday night at 7pm at the National Film and Sound Archive's Arc cinema as part of the Canberra International Film Festival. It will be followed by a panel discussion on urban planning in Canberra featuring University of Canberra chair of urban and regional planning Barbara Norman, ACT Minister for Territory and Municipal Services Shane Rattenbury and Australian Institute of Architects ACT chapter president Tony Trobe.
An architect looks at the anthropological to reduce urban isolation
His documentary may be about urban planning and architecture but Danish director Andreas Dalsgaard prefers to think of The Human Scale as ''more of an anthropological film about our way of life''.
''Architecture films are usually about buildings,'' Dalsgaard told the US website architectsandartisans.com recently.
''This is a film about people, the way we live and how the physical environment impacts our life and wellbeing.''
The Human Scale (screening in Canberra on Monday) focuses on Copenhagen-based architect Jan Gehl's work exploring the transformation of public space in cities in China, Europe, the US and Australia.
Gehl's solution for inner-city areas clogged by traffic is to decrease the space given over to cars and to open that space for pedestrians, thereby encouraging human interaction and reducing the debilitating impact of high-rise and suburban isolation.
''I was inspired by their very fact-based, almost scientific, approach to measuring urban life - where do we choose to walk and linger, and why?'' Dalsgaard said of Gehl and his team at Gehl Architects.
''I am interested in people, culture and ways of life. If any architect on this planet can claim to work with that in mind, it would be Jan Gehl. He might be the only architect who I could make a film about.''
Arc will follow up Monday's showing of The Human Scale with more screenings in its Utopian Cinema series of classic films set in the great cities of the world, including Tokyo-Ga, German director Wim Wenders' 1985 postcard from Japan in its economic prime (November 16), and Roma, Federico Fellini's 1972 love letter to the city where he studied in the 1930s (November 24).
