Woolworths Concept Plan lodged with its Direct Sale application, March 2024. It ignores and destroys the original design from 1973 in that Hawker Place contained loops at each end, the eastern one of which will be devoured by the supermarket building. Open seating and playing areas are on the eastern side of the supermarket building near Springvale Drive. Further plans can be viewed at https://woolworthshawker.com.au/ or download Review the Masterplan [PDF 49MB]
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Friends of Hawker Village now has a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/284374974261053
Check there for more information and posts.
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Tonight is the BCC meeting with a presentation on Woolworths plan to expand in the Hawker shopping centre. The meeting starts at 7pm and the Zoom link is https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82827220149
The attached article lists various concerns.
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Woolworths are looking at options to revitalise a section of the Hawker shopping precinct and to increase their offering in Hawker – with possible complementary shops and facilities, where family and friends can meet and the community can thrive. There are several ways to provide your thoughts as they look to revitalising Hawker shops: Provide a submission after attending a workshop; and/or talking to them at Woolworths, Hawker between 1pm-4pm om Wednesday 19 July and/or Saturday 22 July.
More details are available at https://woolworthshawker.com.au/
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The Combined Community Councils of the ACT, in a media release on 30 May, expressed disappointment in the Planning Reform, where outcomes were always predetermined and the opportunity for meaningful reform has been missed. The CCCACT’s specific concerns regarding the Planning Reform and the Government’s response to the Planning Bill Inquiry include:
This statement is discussed in the City News of 15 June 2023 where Michael Moore declares that “it is not too late for the development of Canberra to proceed in a manner that retains the character and best elements of the world’s best planned city.“
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The Hawker Football Centre’s website states that “it was converted from grass fields to synthetic fields thanks to help from the ACT Government in 2009. Nine years later, Hawker was refurbished with nearly five tons of new rubber to provide a more stable and even surface for users. The refurbishment also involved cleaning the turf and ‘standing-up’ of the turf fibres.”
According to Dr Sebastian Pfautsch, urban heat expert at Western Sydney University, “artificial turf is made of microplastics thought to break down and end up in waterways. It smothers and probably destroys the composition of the soil it is laid on, it conducts heat which is thought to change the microclimate of suburbs and, ultimately, it ends up in landfill.
“Of course, artificial turf itself is made from crude oil, so you need to extract fossil fuels to then produce the plastic that you need for making artificial turf.” “Where natural lawn would transpire when wet and have a cooling effect, artificial turf was usually lined with black webbing, meaning it can reach a surface temperature of up to 100 degrees in summer.”
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The completion of a public housing complex of 14 dwellings on two large, original single-housing blocks on a bend in Smith Street, Weetangera is disappointing because it fails the climate change test. The image shows how most of the land area is covered by the buildings and driveways, leaving little room for greenery, especially trees. Another eight public housing dwellings are planned on the adjoining three blocks on Belconnen Way, shown here as cleared but now under construction.
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City News, 20 April 2023
POPULATION projections have been indispensable in informing the planning and provision of social infrastructure (schools, shops, aged care, public transport etcetera) and physical infrastructure (roads, water, sewer, stormwater, power) and services. The 2022 Projections, without analysis, assume the higher projected population can simply be accommodated by increasing densities in inner areas and higher densities in the major centres (eg, the population of Molonglo is said to increase to 86,000 in 2060 – is it desirable, feasible, at what cost?).
All the district and suburb estimates of population suffer from the inadequacies of the 2018 Planning Strategy which assumed 70 per cent infill best achieved compact city objectives. The strategy did not evaluate the merits of higher greenfield share scenarios where such areas are well connected and have substantial employment, services and facilities.
Clearly there is a need to review the strategy to comprehensively consider housing preferences, infrastructure requirements, transport, environmental impacts and housing affordability. Such a review will need an increase in the strategic planning capability within the bureaucracy including the appointment of a demographer.
There has not been an in-house demographer since 2015. Such capacity may increase the community’s confidence in the competency of the government in exploring alternative urban futures and avoid the muddle of the 2018 Planning Strategy, District Plans and 2022 Projections.
Mike Quirk is a retired NCDC and ACT government planner.
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The study warned there was a practical limit to increasing density, with extra costs if too many dwellings require more infrastructure or reduce how attractive the location is to live. In the latter respect, the ACT Government has refused to consider the drop in house value or the distress caused to local residents in Weetangera, associated with the redevelopment of 7-9 Smith Street for fourteen townhouses and another eight on three adjoining blocks at 67-71 Belconnen Way, creating a large united village for Housing ACT, in contradiction of their supposed “salt and pepper” approach.
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Our governments seem, on the one hand, to behave like control freaks when it comes to excluding the populace from decision-making but, on the other, when it comes to controlling developers, they lapse into near-total permissiveness.
What can planning rules actually achieve? If they can’t mandate beauty and should avoid flexibility, if they should eschew government self-interest and strive for broad-scale long-term impartiality, how should they be made? What principles should they enshrine? We know from experience that it’s easy to make rules that foster the exploitative, profiteering CBD-view of the city centre; city as cash machine. That’s simple but can we also make rules that encourage the softer, more empathetic and life-enhancing kind of city for which we yearn? How can we use democracy to create the city as habitat?
Really, there’s only one question that the designers of city-shaping rules should ask themselves. It’s this: where does the public interest lie? Money-making washes its own face. It needs no government protection. The public interest, by contrast, is weak and amorphous and needs all the definition and protection it can get. Indeed, this is what we have government for.
The first step in determining the public interest is genuinely to seek it. Again, this is obvious. Yet few politicians seem to give a damn, despite a surprising degree of consensus.
Most rules work by exclusion. They constrain freedom by setting boundaries but, within those bounds, facilitate it. A height limit, density limit or floor-plate limit (establishing a maximum area for each floor) says, ‘Within these constraints, do whatever you like.’ In fact, rules are only necessary to protect the weak. If people were reliably good, we wouldn’t need codes, rules, disciplines, religions or laws. Rules exist to protect the weak and vulnerable against depredation by the strong and powerful.
From Killing Sydney, The Fight for a City’s Soul by Elizabeth Farrelly (2021)
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friends of hawker village 