The federal capital of Australia : a virtual planning history
Date
1997
Authors
Freestone, Robert
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Urban Research Program. Research School of Social Science. Australian National University.
Abstract
Canberra is one of the most significant products of twentieth century
planning. The conventional historiography of its origins divides into
three successive phases: a 'battle of ideas' over the very notion of a
federal capital, the 'battle of the sites', and a 'battle of the pkms'
defined by the international design competition of 1911-12 won by
Walter Burley Griffin. A less well chartered strand through the decade
leading up to this competition was popular, professional and
governmental debate and discussion about the desired look and layout of
the new federal city. The aim of this paper is to recover this 'prehistory'
of planning to give some insight into the state of early modern
planning theory in Australia. The paper charts the evolution of the
generalised notion of a federal 'city beautiful', its hardening into
planning concepts for a 'practical twentieth century town', and the
maturation of an integrated set of planning ideas and images that helped
set the scene for the ways in which the competition entries would be
assessed.
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Working/Technical Paper
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Open Access
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Australia (CC BY-NC 3.0 AU)
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