21st Century (2000–present)

Canberra City to the Lake Plan

2013 · Australia · Oceania · National modernization and capital-city building · Planned by ACT Government
Griffin's competition-winning plan for Canberra defining the land axis and lake corridor that the City to the Lake plan develops.
Griffin's competition-winning plan for Canberra defining the land axis and lake corridor that the City to the Lake plan develops. · Public domain · Walter Burley Griffin (PD-Australia)

Core idea

Civic center to lakefront urban extension

Why it matters

Realigns capital’s core to waterfront

Description

City to the Lake was a 2013 urban design framework by the ACT Government to extend Canberra's civic centre southwards to the shore of Lake Burley Griffin. Its key moves included lowering or bridging the Parkes Way arterial that severed the city from the water, developing the West Basin waterfront with a new boardwalk and mixed-use precinct, and proposing sites for major facilities such as a stadium and convention centre. The plan addressed a district-scale gap at the heart of the national capital.

Significance

The framework engages directly with the unfinished legacy of the Griffins' 1912 plan, in which the lake was to be the city's ceremonial centrepiece rather than its edge. It exemplifies the wider late-twentieth and twenty-first-century effort to urbanise modernist capital cities designed around the motor car, and has framed ongoing Canberra debates about waterfront development, public land and infill.

What shaped it

Sources

Open it on the interactive timeline →
hub.toekom.st — History of Urbanism · an interactive timeline of 850 planned cities across 6,000 years.