The Australian CBD

Abstract

INCE the close of World War II, the central business districts of Australia's leading cities, in common with most other Western metropolitan centers, have suffered increasingly from traffic congestion and suburban competition in retail trade. In Australia, as in America, this has followed upon the rapid growth of urban population, the leveling of incomes, the greater proportion of incomes spent on retail purchases, and the ever growing use of private automobiles. As a result, many Australian business houses in the larger cities have preferred to establish branches in the rapidly developing suburbs, or in the centers of smaller cities, rather than extend their downtown premises. More recently, small regional shopping centers on the American pattern have made their appearance: the first was opened at Chermside, Brisbane, and the second at Ryde, Sydney, in 1957; a third is being built on the outskirts of Melbourne. Meanwhile, municipal authorities are taking a variety of remedial measures to try and stem the flow of trade to the suburbs. Yet for all the importance of these city centers in Australian life and for all the complexity of their present problems, the Australian CBD has so far been the subject of but scanty geographical investigation. The writer has therefore undertaken a detailed field survey of the central areas of fourteen Australian cities, including the six state capitals which together house well over half the Australian population, in order to study the evolution and internal structure of the Australian CBD. But since the scope of the surveys has been too broad to permit an adequate treatment of the findings within the compass of a single article, the present study will be largely confined to an analysis of the internal groundfloor structure of the Australian CBD as exemplified by the capital cities. A comparative analysis of these cities, which range in population from one hundred thousand to nearly two million, sheds some light on the process of segregation and dispersal, as well as on the changing character and associations, of land-use elements with increasing city size. Accordingly, the fascinating individuality of each CBD will be drawn upon only in so far as it is necessary to account for apparent anomalies in the evolutionary process. The paper concludes with a brief discussion on the possible significance of the findings for the geographical examination and description of smaller centers.