Glebe Park is priceless. Photo: James Coleman.
One of the great joys of spring in the national capital is watching the streetscapes tinge with green as their deciduous guardians come into leaf.
As the sun becomes fiercer and the days grow warmer, they shelter us and insulate neighbourhoods from the heat.
But these are green fringes, not so much open space. With so many new buildings reaching skywards in the great densification and space at a premium, the notion of the public park as a means to provide not just green space — a term that seems to cover a multitude of things — but genuine natural buffers between the built environment is being overlooked.
Sure, the new developments rightly have their landscaping, central plazas and deep soil for large trees, but these are embedded in the design and often compete with the usual ground-floor shops.
When was the last time that land in the city or a town centre was given over to a new city park for its own sake, to break up the concrete and steel and provide a haven from the towers?
Ngamawari by Lake Burley Griffin and Haig Park, which has been reclaimed somewhat, could qualify, but I’m talking about in the thick of the manmade forest.
The City Renewal Authority has been releasing city blocks for sale, the surface carparks that so marked Civic when we first arrived in Canberra 30 years ago this month.
That has been a good thing, but every time I drive by or visit Glebe Park, the closest thing to a Central Park in Canberra, I realise how valuable it has become.
It is now a priceless patch of earth and an asset to the adjacent apartment dwellers and the Crowne Plaza Hotel, and its successors.
Glebe Park exists on its own natural terms. There are no shops, coffee carts or hawkers. But there are play areas, picnic areas, tall shady trees and grass to gambol on. It presents a perfect platform for events and outdoor theatre.
Imagine Canberra without it and you can understand what a loss it would be.
The public hostility shown to potential creep from the hotel some years ago means it is secure, but could there be more Glebe Parks, if smaller, in the city and town centres?
The problem, of course, is that any blocks that could fit the bill are probably too valuable to the government coffers.
But the office workers and residents in these vertical workplaces and villages deserve and need more than plazas to find peace, play and exercise.
The government should look to the 19th-century and early 20th-century garden designers for inspiration, even if these dedicated spaces are only pocket parks.
That far-thinking legacy is enjoyed across the country, and is worthy of being taken up again.
Yes, we need vibrant CBDs and town centres, and some developers should be commended for their landscape designs, but surely there is room for traditional, self-contained city parks that have their own intrinsic value.
