Canberra's central national area has similarities to Griffin's design when viewed from the air. But residents and visitors have difficulty identifying the major elements of the plan when they are actually in the city. The monumentality of Griffin's City Beautiful plan has been replaced by extensive landscaping. Canberra has been called, with some justice, a city in a park.
The central area of Canberra - the original focus of the Griffin plan - displays versions of his land and water axes, some trace of the original street patterns and Holford's version of the lake. Very little of Griffin's complex symbolism has survived. The strong geometry of his plan has also been lost over the intervening 80 years. Successive waves of planners and politicians have shaped the city according to the latest dictates of town planning fashion, personal taste and political reality.
The fate that befell Griffin's design would probably have awaited any of the designs by his fellow competitors in the 1912 competition. The ideas inspiring those early-twentieth century designers have been superseded by other theories of urban design over the intervening years.
That part of Canberra bearing the Griffin stamp, modest in size and altered in many respects from his vision, remains an extraordinary achievement deserving recognition and protection as one of the treasures not only of Australia but the entire urban world.
Griffin's plan was not perfect; but it had a considerable breadth of functions and meaning, and in spite of its City Beautiful background it was centred upon human beings and their daily lives, - not upon the motor car, or an abstract system, or a ceremonial area.
For Australians the most familiar and acceptable symbol of environmental beauty is the natural landscape. A national capital centered on a park is perhaps what we deserve. Some feel that since Griffin called himself a landscape architect he would have been pleased with this city made of trees but it is not what he proposed.
The planning of Canberra is a continuous process. Where the competition entrants of 1912 had an empty site for which to plan a city, today's planners must contend with what now exists. The directions taken in the past have meant that some options can never be exercised. But fresh eyes can look at the city as it is and devise new ways to reinforce the characteristics of a capital city. Future planners may try to restate some of Griffin's ideas. Others may develop other ways of expressing national significance in Australia's capital.
In 1988, with self-government for the Australian Capital Territory, the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC) was abolished. A new agency, the National Capital Planning Authority (NCPA), was created in January 1989. Its brief is to ensure that the national capital is planned and developed in accordance with its national significance.
The NCPA's Central National Area Design study aims to reinforce Griffin's vision, and to expand it to meet the situations of the present and the future. By publicising its design proposals and through public consultation, it invites Australians to 'consider the place of our national capital in modern Australia'.
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