Canberra’s National Planning Heritage and Belconnen Town Centre’s new look

This week’s class included a guest lecture from Mr Ed Wensing and a quick explore of the Belconnen Town Centre.

Mr Wensing explained the history of planning for Australia’s capital city including the many planning layers that helped to shape Canberra into the city it is today.


The first major points Mr Wensing made was about Canberra being the result of federation (1901) and because neither Sydney nor Melbourne could decide which would be the capital city (plus other states were concerned about either city having too much power). So, Australians decided to put the capital half way between the two.


The next major point was that Walter Burley Griffin had designed the initial plan for Canberra and that there had been six subsequent plans that reshaped the original but 
still kept it's core principals (eg. open space, 
sustainability of built environment and 
movement of people).

Refurbished Benjamin Way

After the presentation, the class walked down to the Belconnen Town centre to see some of its new additions and discuss how they came about. I was taken back a bit at its transformation as I had worked in the area up until a year and a half ago and had always seen it as being neglected and unappealing.

Margaret Thompson Park

The area has been transformed in line with the Belconnen Master Plan and in the photo above you can see a small part (the exterior revamp) of the 100 million dollar upgrade that the Westfield Shopping Group have done to their Belconnen Mall.


Additionally, the ACT Government has set aside 24.4 million for roadwork improvements. 

Lake Ginninderra waterfront

In these photos that I took on the day, you can see a cleaned up Westfield Shopping Centre, a nice park for local workers and families to use and a waterfront being prepared for public utilisation (such as sitting and eating lunch next to the water).