Why it looks like this

Canberra exists because Sydney and Melbourne both wanted to be the capital — so Australia built a new one between them. The plan came from a 1912 international competition, won by Chicago architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. Their design is geometry placed in a landscape: circular avenues and straight axes aimed exactly at the hills around the valley, with an artificial lake at the centre.

The result is one of the most recognisable street patterns on Earth: a capital drawn as circles in open country.