Melbourne's Hoddle Grid best captures the ACT City-to-the-Lake strategy to replace cars with people and cyclists in Canberra's central business district says David Dawes.
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The Land Development Agency chief says after overlaying the City-to-the-Lake plan with numerous other Australian and overseas cities, from Adelaide to Zurich, planners found it was remarkably similar in scale to Melbourne's Hoddle Grid.
"Everyone relates to Melbourne and the Hoddle Grid, the walking capacity from Docklands Stadium to Federation Square. If you look at West Basin and the Canberra Centre, that is about the same distance," Mr Dawes said.
"You think, walking from the Canberra Centre [shopping mall] to West Basin, you take you life into your own hands several times, as you cross a lot of streets," he said. "Part and parcel of what we are wanting to do with the City-to-the-Lake project is make sure we join the city and the lake in parts."
In the City-to-the-Lake plan, the Griffin Grid retains its hexagonal structure with avenues radiating out of City Hill. The barriers to walking and cycling, such as Parkes Way, clover leaf intersections and large car parks will eventually be overcome by lowering and bridging Parkes Way to allow the grid of city streets to connect West Basin and Commonwealth Park.
The Hoddle Grid has similar City-to-the Lake principles, with an inter-connected street grid, a walkable city, mixed-use buildings, entertainment and tourism.
Mr Dawes, who has renewed his contract with the ACT government for the next five years, says the Canberra CBD is unsustainable and must change to attract more people.
On one part of the grid expansion down to the lake, the existing Sydney and Melbourne building blocks are replicated on the other side of City Hill. The proposed development was foreshadowed in the National Capital Authority's Griffin Legacy, a blueprint released in late 2004.
The legacy notes that in the early Griffin Plan, City Hill was a central park enclosed by fine-grain architecture, probably five to six-storey buildings similar to the "brownstones" found in New York and Chicago. The radiating Commonwealth, Northbourne, Constitution and Edinburgh avenues became narrower local city streets on the inside of London Circuit, creating a gateway into the central space.
Over 25 years, Melbourne has overcome high unemployment and transformed into what planners regard as one of the great cities of the world, through investment in tourism and event infrastructure such as a new stadium, a new public waterfront, entertainment and leisure precincts, and public domain enhancements. Victorian Planning Minister Richard Wynne recently described the Hoddle Grid as the grid that laid the golden egg for Melbourne.
Mr Dawes said, "We have to ensure we look at how people are going to live tomorrow. I think we live too much in the past. We need to respect and maintain a lot of the spaces, but the demographics are changing. I look at my own family, what they are wanting is different to what we wanted, or I wanted back in my generation."
Mr Dawes said Canberra must allow innovation that had transformed other cities around the world with buildings of different shapes and heights. "I remember a couple of years ago we looked at Portland, where you had tall buildings, when you walked along beside them they didn't go straight up, you had a two-storey component, front doors to the pavement, and the towers coming out the middle of those buildings.
"The whole objective of the city to the lake is to inject 20,000 people living in the city. You start seeing people walking around and enjoying themselves."
