A book entitled Adelaide: Water of a City has been published by the Barbara Hardy Centre for Sustainable Urban Environments at the University of South Australia.

Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia, is an isolated community of about 1.5 million people on the south-central coast of Australia. Water security is a big issue in Adelaide, given its historic reliance for water on the River Murray, which is now dying. Adelaide's warmed up future necessarily depends on it becoming a sustainable city. The history of Adelaide is a story of water and the city must rethink the way it uses water, and move to embrace sustainable water management.

The water book features the photography of John Hodgson who is currently having an exhibition at the Epson Gallery.

None of the images from the exhibition are online. Those produced for the book are here as thumbnails. This online thinness is a pity because we are dealing with a public policy issue.

What is online is the Introduction to the book, which costs $150. How many citizens are going to buy that to inform themselves of water issues in the city of Adelaide? The commitment to open source is close to non-existent.

The Introduction makes a crucial point about the state government's growth plans for the city up to 2036; namely, these do:

not address water sustainability. Water sustainability is over- ridden in this document, which is driven by conventional theories for the planning of growth corridors to accommodate traditional forms of dwelling and their spatial locations. This plan compromises the inherent productive landscape, its natural resource qualities, water catchment and harvesting, and the scenic landscape imperatives of the peri-urban regions surrounding the Adelaide metropolitan area.