This chapter concentrates on recent planning initiatives in South Australia. It goes beyond official publications to review, comment on and provide a critique on those developments. In doing so it seeks to place them within a wider, if more superficial, appreciation of current trends in State urban planning operations generally. A major linkage is made between these two dimensions by analysing the concept of strategic planning which is a common ambition of all State operations, and a prominent and distinctive feature of the South Australian current experiments.

Setting the Scene

There are some background assumptions and interpretations that should be outlined. While government policies and actions of all kinds and all levels impact on urban conditions, the States build and operate the cities. Commonwealth policies and actions, whether targeted on urban issues or unintended in their urban impacts, have great influence. They tend to be more abstract in their character and effect. State policies involve constructing the built environment of the cities, operating it and servicing its people, so that they are a mixture of the abstract and the physical. Local policies are mainly physical in their orientation and impact and considerably influence the character of the street and the suburb.