Adelaide: solvable problems, but are our leaders up for it?  

OPINION: “I’ll have your staple ‘Urban Sprawl’ with a side of ‘Cringing Mediocrity’,” the diner ordered. “Adelaide it is, then,” came the waiter’s reply.

At first glance, South Australia’s pre-eminent city is just another case study in suburban straggle. Adelaide’s north-south footprint from Gawler to Noarlunga rivals that of Perth, the “world’s longest city,” and is aggravated by the usual suspects: myopic politicians, greedy developers and that seemingly universal tension between traditional or single house and land homes (often expressed locally as a “devotion to heritage”) and the bane of urban sprawl.

The last decade saw SA’s government introducing a laudable, 30-year strategy to transform Adelaide into a tree covered city where most of the population lives in a medium-density walkable neighbourhood close to quality public transport. 

It was “a sensible approach that avoids the low-density car-dependent sprawl that has plagued the outer suburbs of (other Australian cities, and) encourages more medium density (infill) development within the existing urban boundary,” Andrew Sadauskas wrote in The Fifth Estate.

However, when combined with former Premier Steven Marshall’s replacing SA’s 72 development plans with a single statewide Planning and Design Code, the changes were lambasted for allowing “high rise by stealth,” and opposed by a 14,000 signature-strong petition.

Yet again, we saw the crying need to combat urban sprawl in a scrap with the popular longing for what’s familiar, traditional and (usually) spacious

Protect Our Heritage Alliance, which organised this entreaty, bemoaned “the prioritising of inappropriate development over heritage, history and community amenity” and called for an “integrated heritage listing process, with strong local government and community participation”.

Yet again, we saw the crying need to combat urban sprawl in a scrap with the popular longing for what’s familiar, traditional and (usually) spacious. Does anyone want to hazard a guess as to which of these requirements came out on top?

Therefore, after pledging to review the planning regime before his 2022 election, Premier Peter Malinauskas and minister Nick Champion effectively dust-binned Adelaide’s 30-Year Plan for sustainable, liveable growth, announcing instead almost 24,000 new homes on re-zoned land in Hackham (in the city’s far south) and Concordia (in the north) without supporting transport infrastructure.

Heritage seems not to have been the priority here, but outer-fringe development certainly was. “Urban sprawl is not a dirty word,” the Premier insisted.

While the above is largely boiler plate among sprawling Australian cities, Adelaide’s issues also have a local flavour.

From rebuilt Victoria Square, which planning expert Mike Brown compares to a glorified roundabout for cars, to Rundle Mall, which is “largely abandoned (at night) and becomes as scary as a clown,” Adelaide has a set of localised problems to go with its generic ones. (In fairness, Brown also a regular contributor to The Fifth Estate, also points out Adelaide’s many redeeming features –its suburbs being “the equal of all other capital cities,”–  but the inner city is a “dead centre,” he says).

All too often, Adelaide mimics its larger brethren, usually with outcomes which are pale imitations of overseas attractions or “peer” cities on the eastern seaboard.

Take Melbourne’s spruced up and lively laneways that Adelaide tried so hard to emulate. I’ve frequented both The Organic Food and Wine Deli (on Degraves Street, Melbourne) and The Laneway on Ebenezer Place (Adelaide); sad to say, the former wins hands down.

Developers preserved [the building’s] front façade and cocooned it behind the glass of a car park lift-lobby, not unlike a lifeless butterfly

Then there’s the signage of Dotonbori (in Osaka, Japan – see photo above) which really makes the place. There’s no comparison between that and Adelaide’s Hindley Street (also pictured) which is basically a cobbled-together collection of property, advertising and business signs – too many of them named after the late property investor Con Polites who stuck his name on buildings like an antipodean Donald Trump.

Perhaps the cherry on top for this resident of inner-eastern Adelaide was a former architect’s office in the nearby Hutt Street restaurant precinct (below left). Demolished to make way for an open-lot car park, developers preserved its front façade and cocooned it behind the glass of a car park lift-lobby, not unlike a lifeless butterfly pinned to a collector’s display.

Such is Adelaide: desperate to keep up with the big boys (with a veneer of “heritage”) but not quite getting there. In the process, Adelaide often turns itself into a laughing stock.

In case you haven’t guessed, Adelaide’s problems have a psychological component. “In order to stand equal with (Melbourne or Sydney) Adelaide always needed to (try to) be extraordinary,” Brown wrote in The Fifth Estate.

Adelaide’s insecurities are perhaps best symbolised by the damming up of the Torrens Creek (it’s not a river) around the CBD. The Torrens looks like a “proper waterway” to city-area tourists, thanks to an act of fakery which screams: “we’re a capital city; take us seriously!”

Rather than affecting the airs and graces of a bigger town, Adelaide could try for something from the ground up. “Making inner city areas attractive to bright people (who in turn drive business and commerce) is super important,” Brown told The Fifth Estate in a recent conversation.

Adelaide’s CBD, a somewhat uninhabited “dead centre” at night, could learn from the Postcode 3000 planning policy, which resurrected Melbourne in the 1990s. Aimed at increasing residential developments in and around Melbourne city, Postcode 3000 was complemented by the ideas of planner and architect Rob Adams, who wrote Melbourne’s first comprehensive urban design strategy to create a vibrant and well-populated streetscape.

It worked (see “Melbourne’s laneways”, above) filling the CBD with “fun, cool things” that brought the upwardly mobile flocking. In turn, this improved the psychology of Melbourne (which faced a bleak fate in the 1980s, not utterly unlike Adelaide today) and generated the kind of compact, physical togetherness that drives economies, promotes social harmony and generates a unity of purpose more readily associated with Barcelona, whose Cerda grid accommodates one of Europe’s highest population densities.    

Is such a thing possible in Adelaide? Only with the kind of visionary leadership one associates with former Premier, the late Don Dunstan, whose social reforms and innovations pointed the way to an “urban” way of life best suited to central Adelaide, not far flung Aberfoyle Park.

Of course, Dunstan wasn’t an urban designer, and the chances of his (rare) like encountering an equally-improbable intellect like Rob Adams’ is as likely in SA as winning that state’s Cross Lotto game.

Overcoming some of the more generic problems afflicting Adelaide and other cities (see above) faces equally prohibitive odds. Promoting higher-density urban living has another distinct benefit we mustn’t forget – it furthers the fight against urban sprawl – but what did we get from the new Malinauskas government?

That’s right: “urban sprawl is not a dirty word” (see above). Those 24,000-odd far flung new homes were a nod to developers happy to oblige Adelaideans’ desire to buy a single house and land out in the sticks before spending half their days commuting to and from wherever the jobs are.

Right now, there aren’t any Don Dunstans or Rob Adams’ planning our future direction; rather, we’re saddled with folk more interested in the four-year electoral cycle, and keeping those donations rolling in.

To promote better decision-making, some have suggested an inquiry, or even a Schwarzenegger-style “Governator” to upend the system and start again, but inquiries have been known to be nobbled or ignored, and for every benevolent dictator that comes along, there’s often a couple of Caligulas waiting in the wings.

Others have called for more community engagement, which would theoretically take electoral self-interest out of the equation, but how do you remove that “quarter acre block” dream that nowadays seems a part of Australians’ DNA?

Barring something downright revolutionary, we’re saddled with a system of myopic politicians (and the odd Dunstan) risk-averse bureaucrats (and the odd Adams) rapacious developers (and the odd Dan McKenna) and average punters enamoured with net zero at an abstract level but still drawn to the old single house and land imperative.

We’ve seen the data showing we’re on the Titanic, but to quote Hugh Laurie (above) we just “won’t take the hint.” Who knows: maybe we’re the problem.

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