Making Canberra a Mobile Place

Greetings from the Canberra Wine House, where I am taking part in the "Ideas and Actions for Dickson: Community Workshop". This is hosted by a team of planners contracted to the ACT Government. I booked for this event, thinking it was about master-planning for the Dickson shopping center and surround, as it is developed in conjunction with the new light rail and bus hub. However,  it was instead about how to get more sense  of community in the area.

In the late 1990s I chaired the Dickson Precinct Community Group, to provide advice to the ACT Government on planning the area. The Draft Master Plan, and Community Consultation and Cultural Profile Report from 1998, may be of interest.I was a little disappointed that the 2018 activity did not seem as organized as that twenty years ago.

We were asked to come up with ideas which could be implemented relatively quickly. My serious one was to issue planter boxes to the local primary schools and kindergartens and then place these around the library. A less serious one was an "uber-park": build a shallow planter box on Eclipse Engineering's Container Roll-Out Warehousing System (CROWS™), and stack these in a shipping container to create a relocatable pocket park.

The container would be transported by truck to a location, the pallets slid out and arranged to form a grassed area. The empty container would then be used as a kiosk. I was surprised when one of the other participants also suggested a relocatable "pop-up" park, so perhaps it is not such a silly idea.

Canberra Dickson Centre Master Plan

Last week I found a post card in my letterbox asking for my input on the "Dickson Centre Master Plan". The is for the shopping center near where I live in Canberra. I chaired the community group which the government consulted on the previous "Dickson Group Centre Redevelopment". Now as an ordinary citizen I was deligited to be invited to comment on the new plan.

It was refreshing to receive a small simple card, rather than a large complicated brochure. The postmasters has a map of the proposed location of new supermarkets, on existing car-parks on either side of the Dickson Library. The other side had a description of the proposal and two tick box options. The text was too small to read comfortably in a light gray font. It would have been better to have less text in a bigger font, as the information is also available online.

Also it was odd that the card was from the ACT Government "Economic Development Unit", not the land planning department. While it was claimed the survey could be completed at the unit's web site, I could not fiond the survey on-line. The words "survey" and "Dickson" do not occour on the web page the residents are referred to.

Unfortunately the master plan is a 6Mbyte PDF file, making it difficult to download and read. The document says "The ACT Government is committed to making its information,
services, events and venues accessible to as many people as
possible. If you have difficulty reading a standard printed document and would like to receive this publication in an alternative format — such as large print or audio please telephone (02) 6207 7307." Unfortunately this statement is in white text on a pattered red and white background, making it very difficult to read.

The web page for the Master plan failed an automated accessibility test, with 19 Problems. The ACT Government clearly has not met its commitment to making information accessible.