Brazil's Curitiba was once a model of sustainable planning. Now, it struggles with a slew of urban problems. The same might be said of Brasilia or many city plans around the globe. Such examples were widely touted as the brave new world of the city. And yet somehow they are failing. One has to wonder if the same panacea is being hatched for Canberra.Take the broadest of views. It has been claimed hominids have survived in Australia for up to 7 million years, the Aboriginals just another mob of Johnny-come-latelies about 68,000 years ago. As extreme as this time line is, it raises the question of how to maintain planning options for future development of Canberra. For example, what city is best going to represent the Australia we hope for, dream of, and would like to live in, in 50, 100, 500, or 1,000 years time? Let alone 10,000 or 100,000 years. What aspects of Sydney or Melbourne, or for that matter Brasilia, Mexico City, Singapore, London, Dubai, LA, or Paris, Rome, or Beijing do we want to import, knowingly or otherwise? Would we even want the alternative once we are forced to live it?It is not convincing that the convenience of current solutions is necessarily more sustainable than those currently claimed for the non-sustainability of the past. A situation which is apparently the engine for the latest round of urban development fashions and trends. The Griffins gave us an unique vision and template, intimately matched to the landscape. At the time people recognised its merit and it succeeded. Is now the time to destroy it? Why?When traveling through the District of Gungahlin it is horrifying to see what is being established. Why are we importing the very worst of Sydney's more western suburbs and cities, such as Penrith's Jordan Springs, to create our very own future ghettos. Think the Molonglo Valley. These suburban regions will undoubtedly nurture the maladaptive neurosis of unfathomable individual and social disfunction. As they have elsewhere. Think Molenbeek, San Bernardino . . . Think the Tuggeranong Town Center. That vision has not worked there, why reimport it to Belconnon, Gungahlin, or Civic?Against the wishes of residents and others, it seems the parkland spaces beside and within Northbourne Avenue cannot be quickly enough resumed, the blight of the Allawah, Bega, and Currong flats deconstructed, even Ainslie Avenue terminally emasculated. To be replaced by what? Oh! An ever greater density of the same . . .How is it that public land can be fenced and topped with barbed wire to enforce restricted access? Think Northbourne Oval. Is this the kind of future we must inevitably resign ourselves to? Perhaps I am just fruitlessly nostalgic, remembering a long lost and free ranging Canberra of my adolescence, wishing that in its return I might regain that youth and innocence? Maybe it is all actually just a dream . . .What precisely are the questions we want answered? Which questions can we answer? Which can only imaginatively be "built" towards?