Abstract

A number of important city-building projects across the early 20th century drew on the utopian ideas of the City Beautiful movement, an architectural response to the poverty and social dysfunctions generated by urban industrialism. This was also a moment in which the imperial connections and imperial ambitions of settler capitalist societies coincided with national projects. The curious co-existence of these ambitions was embodied in the capital city projects of the time – simultaneously imperial and national, and developed through an exchange of utopian ideas about architecture, planning, nature and modernity. Of these, Canberra is exemplary; the most fully realized. A hundred years later, its story is still largely told in narrow terms, as a parochial tale of incomplete nationalism. Shifting focus to explore Canberra in relation to other capital city building projects during the period offers a better understanding of the complex overlays of imperialism, nationalism and regionalism at play in new world settler societies, and the cultural traffic across the Anglophone world.