Comfort or boredom? What ‘Davos man’ gets wrong about Canberra

Canberra, according to a new study, is one of the greatest places on earth to live

I know nothing about urban development, and even less about the mechanics of town planning. I prefer to see cities on foot, partly because I envy the life of the flâneur and partly because a city’s personality tends to reveal its best elements to the leisurely walker, rather than the hasty traveller.

There’s a lot to be said for getting lost in a foreign city, especially one that follows no internal logic or uniformity. Of London and Paris, G.K. Chesterton observed that the former was a riddle, and the latter an explanation. I’ve always taken this to mean you’ll find more of life’s intrigues and mysteries along crooked backstreets than you will prancing along Haussmann’s grand boulevards. I still think Chesterton is right.

But today’s urbanists would see little value in a riddle city. They would decry its lack of functionality and shake their heads disapprovingly at the poor air quality, the loud noises, the traffic congestion and, God forbid, the preponderance of smokers. An explanation city, on the other hand, offers no explanations at all – it merely sets you along a one way road to sterility and boredom. There’s no appetite for contradiction in these places, no time for eccentricity; symmetry and straightness are what counts most.

Urbanist Georges-Eugène Haussmann

G.K. Chesterton on holiday in Brighton, England.

I remembered the Chesterton quote a couple of weeks ago, when a new report from the advisory firm Oxford Economics named Canberra as having the second highest quality of life in the world. Our nation’s capital was indexed as the only non-European town in the top 10, among a roll call of other boring cleanscapes such as Bern, Basel and Zurich.

The report shares similarities with The Economist’s better known liveability index, a popular fixture among the Davos “global citizen” types, who also enjoy ranking healthy spaces. (The Economist ranks the least liveable cities, too: last year’s wooden spoon went to the Syrian capital Damascus for the fourth year running, which is no mean feat considering the competition).

The Oxford research was led by a bearded man called Mark from London, who considered all the usual things these reports do, including life expectancy, income, healthcare, cultural sites and so on. He commended Canberra for its “low degree of income inequality”.

That’s fair enough, but it’s difficult to believe Mark from London has visited Canberra, and if he hasn’t we should invite him down to Questacon or, better still, get him a ticket along the light rail before he starts his next liveability project.

Everyone knows Canberra is a slow motion catastrophe. Plonked in the middle of a bushy, bureaucratic somnambulism, some say living there is like committing suicide by walking into a door over and over again, though I’ve always found that view a little extreme. Besides, the Lancaster bomber at the War Memorial is pretty cool and Blue Poles is always worth a visit. Its low density sprawl also makes it fantastic for drink drivers.

A jogger run past Questacon, Canberra’s National Science and Technology Centre.

My beef with Canberra is that it’s a humourless place; poking fun at it just doesn’t make sense anymore. It now occupies that rarefied zone, beyond satire, where parody and reality are scarcely discernible, like an old joke that cuts too close to the bone. Footage of our former deputy prime minister rolling on the ground, utterly banjaxed, illustrates this predicament exactly. We have to ask, is it even worth laughing anymore?

None of this is to say Canberrans should decamp to Gomorrah for a livelier existence. Nor is it to suggest boring cities are necessarily bad places, or that exciting cities can only be fraught with danger and unpredictability.

But why do the liveability gods seem to get it so wrong, why do they so often confuse comfort with boredom? Presented with the option, would you really want to live in the world’s cleanest and most accessible, 15-minute city, or the world’s most vibrant and interesting? Perhaps it’s time they find a better model or we do what should’ve been done long ago and, finally, give the liveability listers the flick.