The city that people once moved to for "a house with a garden" could be forced to rethink its identity to house the hundreds of thousands moving to the capital over the next decades.
Canberra's planners have long been unrestrained in developing a city surrounded by ample green space and empty paddocks, but as the suburbs approach the borders of the ACT, government and communities will have to make hard decisions about where the next generation of Canberrans will live.
Originally planned for 25,000 people, Canberra's population has grown to roughly 460,000 and is expected to reach 780,000 by 2060, according to a 2025 RSM report.
Chief Minister Andrew Barr noted Canberra's population growth was increasingly based on immigration, requiring forward-thinking housing policies, in a speech to the ACT Legislative Assembly in May 2026.
"Growth on the urban fringe, such as in the Molonglo Valley, West Belconnen, and future areas under planning, has an important role to play. These areas provide diversity of supply and support long-term growth," he said.
"But they also require extensive new infrastructure: arterial roads, bridges, new schools, health facilities, active travel networks, stormwater management, and utilities."
The capital city's unique Y-shaped axis and spread-out town centres have long made it the envy of traffic-plagued Sydney and Melbourne. But as Canberra's population grows, so too do the traffic jams on arterial roads and suburban connectors. Distances that make public transport slow and cumbersome have left Canberrans reliant on what used to be a symbol of freedom, now turned into a deadweight: cars.
University of Canberra urban architecture professor Milica Muminovic said Canberra needed to improve public transport and decrease residents' reliance on cars if the capital wanted to become a more sustainable city.
Canberra had to move on from the city advertised by the federal government in the 1960s, encouraging people to move to the ACT for "a house with a garden", and focus on densification, she said.
"Of course opening new suburbs with greenfield doesn't help ... we're promoting unsustainable transport, but also we are reducing available green land," Ms Muminovic said.
"I think there's a lot of space for Canberra to develop better outcomes in terms of high residential apartment buildings ... if we offer a certain quality and a lifestyle living in these areas that you can just walk to your light rail stop and be in a city in minutes."
Cars had allowed the capital to sprawl far further than the original Griffin's design, creating challenges of distance and energy that even electric vehicles would not solve, Ms Muminovic said.
"People think that having an electric car, you're a lot more sustainable, but that's not completely the case because you still use energy and you're still not efficient in usage of that energy," she said.
Out in the northern suburbs of Canberra, Gungahlin Community Council president Henley Samuel suggested the territory government could look to countries with large populations and small land footprints like Singapore, to plan for the ACT's future.
"If you look into the infrastructure, that's kind of a nightmare, currently we can see the roads are not duplicated, the infrastructure is not going to be capable of handling more people and the transport, again, that's going to fail," he said of Canberra's fast-growing northern suburbs.
"Most of our office space has been taken already and converted into the residential apartments, so we need to retain the core office and commercial space."
The ACT government committed to a hard limit for urban sprawl in April 2025, but has still not set a boundary despite conservation groups calling for the territory's undeveloped western and eastern edges to be protected.
Discussions about expanding the borders of the ACT into parts of NSW north-west of the territory are ongoing. Suburbs on the ACT side of the cross-border Ginninderry development are under construction, with some already complete, while land on the NSW side, only accessible by driving through the capital territory, is still caught up in government negotiations. The Yass Valley Council, which governs the land in question, announced it was against moving the border in December 2025.
ACT Property Council executive director Ashlee Berry said the declining amount of land for new suburbs meant homes would either need to be built in NSW regions surrounding the ACT, or Canberra would have to densify.
"The fact that we are a small landlocked territory means that we need to start looking at other alternatives rather than greenfield or new suburbs, because we've got nowhere to go really to the north," she said.
"If we don't change and we don't adapt, it will really hold Canberra's growth and economic prosperity back."
The ACT government's solution has been the "missing middle" legislation amendments, planning changes designed to allow more homes on inner-city suburban blocks. Formally unveiling the changes in June, Planning Minister Chris Steel said the changes would allow the construction of sustainable and well-designed homes that "fit gently" into existing suburbs.
"The Missing Middle Housing Reforms are about providing more homes for Canberrans where they want to live," he said.
"And makes sure we can keep what we love about our suburbs, while providing more housing for current and future generations."
The Territory Planning Authority had received 10 development applications under the missing middle legislation in the six weeks to August 12, as well as 20 missing middle proposals submitted for pre-application discussions or initial lodgement checks.
However, some have raised concerns about the feasibility of construction in inner-city suburbs, namely the high cost of building and the expensive lease variation charges (LVC), which are paid by the builder to change the official use of land.
A Legislative Assembly committee assessing the legislation changes heard from University of Canberra data expert Vincent Learnihan that suburbs with the highest LVC, up to $343,750 in the inner south, were also the best suited for densification, and suburbs with the lowest LVC were the worst suited.
"Without additional safeguards, [the amendment] risks increasing the number of people living in neighbourhoods that do not support walking, active travel, social interaction or healthy ageing," he said.
This is despite Ms Muminovic arguing that development along the light rail corridor and around local shops in the inner north and inner south would have the best outcomes for Canberra.
Giving up a house with a yard in favour of a public transport commute and public green spaces could become a more appealing option, she said.
"What we're seeing also in last decade is that there is a proliferation of this idea of living in a house, and the houses became so big that there is almost no private garden ... maybe living in an apartment building would be a much better option because that will offer walkability options and a different lifestyle," Ms Muminovic said.
Ms Berry acknowledged there had been some significant community backlash against a denser Canberra, including against the government's missing middle amendments, but argued the capital was far from losing its "bush heritage".
Residents in Canberra's inner south and inner north have notably become notorious for blocking developments in their established suburbs.
"I know some of the comments in the missing middle consultation were around the need to have a backyard and that every family needs to have a backyard, but we're running out of land," Ms Berry said.
"The research shows that if we have really good public open spaces ... then living in smaller dwellings is not a bad outcome at all.
"We will always have people who don't like development, don't like density, and will find a reason to oppose things because they just don't like change ... but we can't sit around and not do things just because a minority in the community don't want it."
