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October 27, 2009
Adelaide has had a long string of visiting urban planners, social planners, environmentalists, scientists and other eminent experts thinking hard about Adelaide on our behalf. There has been a history of good urban thinking, but no actual doing in to ensure city living and active use of the city in a people friendly city.
There has been a pessimism and anxiety about the future, a lack of clarity about where the state is going, that has lead to a retreat from constructive thinking about the future in order to dig oneself into the trenches of the past/present. The dead hand of Treasury weighs heavily on the Adelaide, and this has resulted in a state of paralysis about the city reinventing itself for the 21st century.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, mural, Adelaide City Council, 2009
There is no sense of Adelaide becoming a design friendly city; a city based on good urban design and innovative buildings; a city that is people friendly.
So the Property Council of Australia (South Australian Division) call for a revitalised and rejuvenated central business district in Adelaide in its report, Adelaide 2036: Building on Light's Vision, is to be welcomed. This builds on the earlier Adelaide: The Way Forward (2000) which outlined more than 80 projects, initiatives and actions designed to boost the city across a wide range of sectors. The response has been favourable.
The Report rightfully returns to Colonel Light's urban design and Jan Gehl's Public Spaces and Public Life: City of Adelaide (2002) Consequently, many of its proposals to make Adelaide more liveable and people-friendly are sensible. These include:
upgrading laneways across the central city, modelled on the Melbourne City initiative; improving public spaces including reducing the heat island effect through more trees, creating a linked, people-friendly city; an incentives scheme to increase investment in public art and the public realm; the central city should be easy to move around in, with frequent and free trams and buses, safe pedestrian and cycle networks and good visual connections; extended tram routes( to the airport)
They are designed to make changes from a car dominated city to a people-friendly city; one in which walking is the key to liveable city.
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What the Property Council says about Adelaide is so true:
It adds that Light would be stunned to find it as it is today given over to motor vehicles, poorly landscaped, inactive for most hours of most days, difficult to access and virtually unusable.It adds:
Victoria Square is a disgrace. It signifies the failure to reinvigorate our public spaces in the central city.