My first thought when I think of Canberra is that I have no desire to revisit it. I have been there once for a few days and I felt that it had a heavy and slow energy.
What is it about Canberra that lacks life and energy?
For all of its careful design and organised planning, it feels disjointed from the people and the activity of a city life.
One thing that can seen clearly on the plan of Canberra is the formality of the design and the dominance of the the capitol as the central element in the design. The city center itself is located in a separate part of the plan, connected by an axis but otherwise disconnected. Residential suburbs are again planned as separate entities in their own zones. There is very little potential for interaction between the zones within Canberra and very little access without the use of a car. This means that it is very unlikely that people will spontaneously interact with and enjoy the design and architectural elements of the Government zone.
It seems to me that the planners and decision makers of Canberra have attempted to simplify the city for a Government but missed the life and energy found in naturally evolving cities such as Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane etc. As designers and humans sometimes I think it is natural to get frustrated or overwhelmed by complexity and try to reorganize things to simplify and categorise, but in doing so we disregard the chaotic nature of human beings, and decredit the merit of the complexity and subtlety of the chaos we spontaneously create. I feel like increasingly today we are running around feeling like we have to find a way to transform ourselves into efficient robots to live effectively. It seems that perhaps 100 years ago, people were also feeling this way and trying to over-plan, over-categorise, and over-organise things.
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