ancient cities

extensive tree planting and suburban style planning
into a “garden town” while some departures from
Griffin’s recommendations for the allocation of land
uses and placement of buildings were set in motion.
With less than 100 houses by 1924, the pace of
development had to quicken if the federal parliament
was to meet in the national capital within the three
years stipulated by the government. The gazettal of
Griffin’s scheme as a road plan in 1925 paid lip service
to the richness of his planning vision but nonetheless
established the geometric framework for later
planning—notably the central “parliamentary triangle.”
The same year a new Federal Capital
Commission was appointed. This was a powerful
body with ample financing, a large number of staff,
and full corporate control over planning, construction,
maintenance, and general administration. It
achieved the goal of opening the first (albeit temporary)
parliament house in 1927. The wider nation
was still skeptical about the concept of a remote but
indulged “bush capital” for privileged politicians
and elite public servants, an antagonism that
remains.
After the job was done, the commission was
disbanded and Canberra’s population declined
with the onset of the Great Depression. From 1930
until the late 1950s the planning and administration
of Canberra was divided among several federal
ministries including Home Affairs and Works.
A city administrator provided a semblance of coordination
alongside the National Capital Planning
and Development Committee. Critics still complained
about “a good sheep station spoiled.”
There were few new major public buildings, the
Australian War Memorial (1941) being a notable
exception; it is now one of Australia’s major
domestic tourist attractions. The city had a diffuse
garden suburb character, but even this was threatened
by severe housing shortages as it became
established as a national center for military operations
during World War II.
The National Capital
Development Commission
Political embarrassment at the state of the city led
to a crucial 1955 inquiry by a Senate committee.
The major recommendation was to create a single
central authority with sufficient finance and power
to carry out a balanced, long-term program of
Canberra, Australia
103
urban development. The resultant National Capital
Development Commission (NCDC), guided initially
by advice from British planning authority
William Holford, transformed Canberra from a
small garden town into Australia’s largest noncoastal
city and a planned metropolis of international
significance. Population growth was fueled
by a major relocation program of public servants
from Melbourne in the 1960s, Canberra’s socalled
golden era.
The NCDC was effectively a new town corporation
with extraordinary powers buttressed by
public land ownership. For the first time since the
early Griffin period, Canberra again became a
national center for planning innovation. By the
1970s the city was also the exemplar of a national
policy of planned urban decentralization. Planning
was dominated by a technocratic physical approach
that worked efficiently while the NCDC’s major
brief was the production of a standardized urban
environment. The key strategic document was
Tomorrow’s Canberra (1970), whose analytical
rationale came from a major land use and transportation
study undertaken by American consultants
Alan Vorhees and Associates. The desired
urban structure of metropolitan Canberra was a
Y-plan articulated as a series of discrete communities
of 50,000 to 100,000 residents with nodal
town centers and linked by an internal public
transportation spine and peripheral freeways. This
schema laid the blueprint for the new suburban
towns of Woden, Belconnen, Tuggeranong, and
Gungahlin and remains evident today.
Since the 1960s, landmark elements in the
planned landscape came to fruition, from major
national buildings such as the National Library,
the High Court, and the National (Art) Gallery, to
a metropolitan hierarchy of commercial retail
nodes to the damming of the Molonglo River to
create the centerpiece, Lake Burley Griffin. The
high point was the new Parliament House designed
by Mitchell, Giurgola, and Thorp and opened to
celebrate the Australian bicentennial of European
settlement in 1988.
By then winds of change were evident. The
NCDC’s corporate planning approach was seen at
odds with moves toward greater community participation,
with a Legislative Assembly already having
been established in 1974. Pursuing an economically
rationalist ideology, the federal government was