ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the planning of Adelaide, a state capital city and its metropolitan region, in the context of urban Australia, diminished regional growth and the global economy. From the broadest perspective, the experience of Adelaide over the past 30 or so years has been the experience of many cities in the developed world as they have sought to adapt to the changing international division of labour and new spatial patterns of consumption. Australian cities went through a dramatic period of population growth, economic development and outward expansion between the end of World War Two and the early 1970s. It had taken over a century for the population of Australia's five major cities to reach their 1947 total of four million. Since its establishment in 1836 as 'a community systematically settled by balancing land, capital and labour' following the ideals of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, South Australia has had a distinctive history.
