THE CITY BEAUTIFUL - TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE AUSTRALIAN EXPERIENCE

The emergence of modernist urban planning in Australia in the early tw entieth century was infused with a city beautiful ethos. Partly indige nous, partly imported, the nature and significance of Australian city beautiful ideas are best appreciated in an international context. Ther e are instructive comparisons with the American experience. City beaut iful ideology was modulated more through bureaucratic and individual d iscourse than institutionalized commercial-civic elites, as well as be ing more absorbed into an architecturally-inspired picturesque plannin g owing as much to British precedent as to the Beaux-Arts tradition. T he theoretical and practical manifestations of the the Australia city beautiful went well beyond the best known project: Waiter Burley Griff in's Chicago-connected 1911 plan for Canberra. However although proto- modernist in inspiration, the early aesthetic-based planning paradigm generally failed to address more pressing practical planning problems of the day The scale of public interventionism implied in its agenda o f urban reconstruction was also at odds with the market-led logic of A ustralian urban development. Suppressed in planning thought for many d ecades, the aesthetic turn has nevertheless re-emerged with the reviva l of interest in urban design.