|
December 2, 2006
I'm in Canberra this weekend. It's been very hot all this week. It is unusual for this time of the year the locals say. Maybe the weather is changing? Canberra is usually seen as a cold place.
My understanding from working in Canberra is that the capital city sees itself as the garden city. The city is actually a planned parkland. The national institutions are surrounded by vast lawns and landscaped gardens, roads are divided by nature strips, the suburbs have lots of lawns and the satellite cities are linked via forest and bushland. It is an attractive city.
Canberra was designed as a garden city. Walter Burley Griffin was influenced by the City Beautiful and Garden City movements, which influenced town planning during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Canberra has evolved from formal English-styled gardens and landscapes to the bushland settings for the new suburbs.
Andrew Baumann, Panorama of the lake and surrounds, 2005
So what happens to the garden city on indefinite water restrictions requiring a 35% reduction in water consumption? Will Canberra become a dry inland place?
What suprises me is that there is still little water reuse in the suburbs, no subsidies for homeowners to install rainwater or gray watertanks, or no incentivess to convert gardens to become more water efficient. Canberra is only just beginning to come to grips with the realities of gliobal warming.
|
A weekend in Canberra!!! Yikes, It makes me Shudder just thinking about it.