Significant trees and green spaces planned around the Northbourne Avenue public housing precinct are critical to Canberra's heritage as a garden city and should be protected, a 2011 heritage review was told.
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Cultural landscapes and heritage expert Ken Taylor told a government conservation study that landscaping and trees around the 1960s housing designed by Sydney Ancher represented "an exemplar of medium density" on a par with leading European housing precincts.
Emeritus professor at the Australian National University, he warned the areas were directly linked to Walter Burley Griffin's vision for Canberra and the legacy of the National Capital Development Commission, including the creation of Northbourne Avenue as a grand boulevard and suitable entrance to the capital.
The precinct looks set to be bulldozed as the Barr government pushes ahead with plans to redevelop Northbourne Avenue to reap money for the Gungahlin to the city tram line.
Heritage experts have found the postwar international modernist-style housing has significant historic value, and complete demolition is opposed by both the ACT Heritage Council and the National Trust.
Professor Taylor said the concept of trees and landscape articulating city form were imprinted in the idea of the capital city, linked to the work of foundation horticulturalist Charles Weston and praised by a 1955 Senate report which came before then prime minister Robert Menzies championed further development of Canberra.
Spaces between the towers, pair houses, three-storey flats, maisonettes and garden flats provide a distinct setting and spatial pattern providing a human scale. The area benefits from unity, harmony and a sense of variety.
"The question is do these historical layers translate to heritage values?" Professor Taylor wrote.
"I suggest they do and that the spaces are worth protecting for the future. They are part of what, for the time, was a new page in the city's history and development with cogent links to international planning ideas."
The submission notes Griffin's concern with the integration of architecture and landscape, and argues the dignity of the now rundown architecture is "found not so much in its scale or magnificence as in its setting".
Well-planned green space and tree plantings were an art aiming to create a beautiful environment and "not a kind of urban plastic surgery that patches what has been marred".
The submission helped guide the full conservation management plan, ignored by the Barr government as it pursued demolition plans for all but two buildings.
A small museum will be created on a floor of one of the Dixon Towers.
In April, it was reported a previously unreleased ACT government report provided a blueprint for effective redevelopment of the area without compromising its "very high level of heritage significance".
The report called for conservation, reuse and revitalisation, including through unused space which could mean new housing towers were built to raise funds for public housing elsewhere in Canberra.
Experts said the plan would protect the area's role as a "gateway" to Canberra and allow for privately owned restored dwellings as well as new medium-rise buildings.
A challenge to the procedures leading to heritage protection for about 40 per cent of the precinct is expected in the ACT Supreme Court.
The government's Capital Metro Agency regularly cites the Griffin legacy as justification for the introduction of trams, including special corridors the American landscape architect created around the city for rail.
