University of New South Wales School of Built Environment emeritus professor James Weirick says Bradfield’s green network is analogous to the extensive central parklands of Adelaide and greenbelts of its second planned city, Canberra.

Grids locked into city designs

Weirick says another theme that Australia’s latest planned city shares with its predecessors is grids.

“For a long time in the mid-20th century, under the car-based idea, grid planning was out and four-way intersections were considered to be dangerous by traffic engineers,” he says.

“But the grids came back.

“Of course, there’s the grid in [Colonel William] Light’s 1837 plan for Adelaide and there are grids in Griffin’s plan, although when you look at it you see the polygonal aspects of them, but within those polygons there’s a predominance of grids.”

Weirick says that Bradfield has “a whole series of grids” offset from a spine road that follows a ridgeline between the city’s two main creeks.

“So, it’s not a US city where the grid is laid out everywhere; it is inflected within the undulations of the shale landscape,” he says.

“Nevertheless, the everyday experience of the city will be a series of predominantly square grids.”

▲ Weirwick says the everyday experience of Bradfield will be a series of predominantly square grids.

Weirwick says a third thing the three planned cities have in common is government-owned land.

“Now, of course, Adelaide became government owned by stealing it from the original owners,” he says.

“And Canberra was, in quite spectacular fashion, purchased at rural land prices.

“In the very beginnings of the Commonwealth parliament, there was an amazingly far-sighted decision, and various sides of politics in that era supported that idea; the public ownership of land makes it very much easier to plan, design, and release land and so forth.”

In 2021, the NSW Government bought the 114ha Bradfield site from the Commonwealth for $322 million. 

Weirwick says the decision to progress the city’s first 1400 homes, a hotel, shops and a university campus as a joint venture between the BDA and multinational developer Plenary (which was contacted for comment for this story) minimises economic risk and the flow-on risk of compromising the city’s planning.

“If the risk is spread between the BDA and Plenary as a joint public private partnership, that means, presumably, the development scale will be consistent with the masterplan and not be changing all the time in return for paying for the costs of development,” he says of the billion-dollar project for Bradfield’s first superlot.

Aerotropolis on another plane

An area the BDA is focusing on that was not a priority of government agencies in the days of Colonel Light and the Griffins is designing with and for the area’s traditional custodians.

“The Griffins were highly critical of the treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia and Griffin did work with Aboriginal people on his scheme for Port Stevens [New South Wales, which was never built],” Weirwick says.

“But, this idea of Country has been promoted, certainly in New South Wales, by the government architect and it came out of the emergence of First Nations professionals, the architects, building careers, which is a recent phenomenon.

“And a few, really effective, First Nations architects began to really influence the whole thinking.”

Camilleri says the Bradfield masterplan was built around designing with country, and evidence of that is Bradfield’s first building, which is yet to be named. Now complete, the building was designed by Hassell, which was contacted for comment for this story.

“Also, a lot of choices that we’re making in the delivery of the landscape and the built form and features; there’s an incredible focus on the way that is done with First Nations people,” she says.