Canberra's Centenary

Abstract

Looking at Canberra from an internationally comparative perspective, this viewpoint claims that the city is exceptional in a number of significant ways. Canberra is not only ‘one of the last Cities Beautiful’. This paper makes the surprising observation that among the many famous city-wide boulevard schemes conceived around the turn of the century from Chicago to Helsinki, only the one designed for Canberra was actually implemented to a significant extent. The fact that the skeleton of the wide City Beautiful was then largely fleshed out with bungalows is a different matter. Moreover, Canberra is not only ‘the world's biggest Garden City’. In no other city have Howard's Garden City principles been implemented in a similarly complete manner - ranging from a revenue-producing leasehold system to a network of large ‘self-contained satellites’ connected to a ‘central city’ with green core. The paper examines the visions and plans developed for Canberra from the versions of early modernism 1.0/1.1 via the vers...