At last Canberra's politicians have discovered what many newcomers to the city ruefully learn within days of arrival this peaceful public service town, with its network of nature parks and national institutions, has an ugly underbelly of street violence, crime and easy access to hard drugs.

ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope is out of touch in his threats to slug pubs with fines to curb street violence. The problem isn't alcohol, it's a cocktail of club drugs amphetamines, ecstasy, ketamine, GHB and LSD (yes, it's back) and anybody who gets out after dark knows Manuka and Civic are club drug-dealing hot spots.

So can the ACT Government stop pretending Canberra doesn't have a drug problem?

When I moved from Sydney to work in Canberra four years ago, most friends sent emails joking about the national capital as a sleepy suburban town ("Bought your cocoa mug yet?") or good sheep country ruined. But not my cousin in the drugs squad. "Watch out, there are dodgy dudes in Canberra, and I don't mean the pollies," she scrawled across a card, also lecturing me on the merits of installing a car alarm.

During my first weekend here, I had lunch with an old university friend. A street-wise political activist, he was a mine of information on Canberra's cultural events, book shops, bushwalking spots and Indian spice stores, but warned me about car theft and drug-related street crime. In the past four years, I've encountered more drug-addled violence on Canberra's streets than in Melbourne, Sydney, or across the border in Queanbeyan.

One afternoon in a Civic car park, I talked my way out of being mugged by a drug user who aggressively demanded money, while trying to grab my shopping bag. On another occasion at a Civic restaurant, a drug-pumped bloke stormed past, angrily sending plates and glasses crashing from our outdoor table.

There are more examples I could give of being aggressively jostled, abused, spat at and threatened by drug-pumped clubbers in Manuka and Civic while trying to enjoy a late-night meal with friends.

Some may say I've just been unlucky in these encounters. But after years of living in bigger cities where I'm used to hopping on a tram, train or bus and safely (if, at times, with a sensible degree of caution) wandering the streets at any hour, Canberra is a city that's forced me to modify a lifetime's free-wheeling habits to avoid the risk of street crime. According to urban planners, that's the definition of an unsafe city.

An Australian Institute of Criminology conference recently examined links between urban design and crime. Professor Kim Dovey, from the University of Melbourne, argued neighbourhoods, like ecosystems, had a limited capacity for certain activities and functions, and reached a tipping point when capacity was overstretched.

Civic and Manuka are small urban precincts, too small to absorb an aggressive influx of nightclub patrons without driving down neighbourhood diversity.

But how does Canberra's urban ecosystem fight back? Many planners argue there's a relationship between the design of urban space and public behaviour, including crime and violence. They also argue reacting to a perceived threat of urban edginess by constructing predictable, safely enclosed environments or precincts is a grave error.

The question is, Dovey says, how do you make a city safe "without the kind of totalising control that also kills off the diversity, vitality and creativity of urban life".

Despite civic pride in its Griffin legacy, Canberra is a poorly planned modern city, and successive governments have exacerbated its faults by allowing its urban life to be dominated by multi-level shopping malls, car park towers and a tidy precinct mentality. But real responsibility for the city has been abandoned. The various schemes routinely advanced to "revitalise" Canberra are based on political monumentalism and the fantasy that people will flock to "cafe precincts".

Haven't Canberra's politicians noticed home espresso machines are one of the hottest selling appliances in discount warehouses? No, Canberra cannot count on a caffeine-led urban revitalisation.

But people will flock to urban places where they can explore, experiment, wander into unfamiliar territory, feel a thrilling pulse of vitality and temporarily lose themselves in the bustle of street life.

Recreational drug use is big in Canberra because its one of few outlets many people, young and middle-aged, have for expressing the urban urge to live on the edge of danger.

Cities are about taking risks. We want to walk the streets safely but feel the thrill of sizing up risks and living on our wits. We can usually do that in cities that encourage people out on to the streets to engage with diversity and danger in (to quote Professor Dovey) "a creative and civilised manner". You can't do that in the sanitised world of shopping malls. In Canberra, capacity for urban risk has been boxed into tight enclaves, where it inevitably intensifies and explosively spills over into areas supposedly designated as "safe".

As with any drug rehab program, Canberra needs to admit it has a problem and is struggling to control it. Then it should look honestly at causes. These may include urban design emphasising social divides between rich and poor, an enclosed retail environment that excludes eccentricity and youthful experimentation and the pitiless drabness of public urban spaces like Garema Place.

Rosslyn Beeby is science and environment reporter.