The developers of the new suburb of Crace - CIC - have ditched the ACTPLA Concept Plan for Crace in favour of adopting a 'new urbanism' approach. Their revised design features a grid layout modelled on Reid and with considerable attention to street layout to provide blocks that allow passive solar design.

Big difference isn't it? The ACTPLA concept plan bears more than a passing resemblence to neighbouring Giralang and Kaleen - long, long crescents, poor connectivity, counter-intuitive navigation and very poor passive solar block orientation. It's outdated planning, and ACTPLA should be embarrassed to be touting it.

Of course the devil is in the detail and we'll only know about the quality of the actual development itself once it is under way. So GCC's Alan Kerlin and Jonathon Reynolds met recently with the designers of Crace. We were reassured that they are paying a lot of attention to the sorts of design criteria that we've been trying to get the ACT Government and the LDA to work on.

There will still be quite a dense core of town houses. But they are using a panel of architects and builders to control this part of the development closely. Articulation and design variation should avoid the 'cookie cutter' effect that typifies townhouses in other areas of Gungahlin.

We have talked numerous times with ACTPLA head Neil Savery and with Planning Minister Andrew Barr about the need to overhaul all of the existing but not-yet-built suburb concept plans. But to date our message just hasn't seemed to be yielding on-ground results. And yet more concept plans based on old ideas are being dished up by ACTPLA for areas like Molonglo. (Although to be fair, Andrew Barr has been supportive of our ideas.)

So we hope that when Crace starts delivering on the ground, people will see that there is a better way.

We've invited CIC to present their plans and progress at an upcoming meeting.