Adelaide talks but doesn’t act. It talks about becoming people friendly a European-style but it does little to ensure that it’s urban form starts evolving from a car-based suburban city with no inner city life to a compact city in which everyone lives and works within walking or cycling distance of everywhere else.
It is struggling to devise a network of compact urban districts connected by rapid public transport that would minimise the need for cars, and the impacts they cause. Instead it is continuing to develop as a city that sprawls into its rural hinterland, whose urban centres are mostly large shopping malls girded by massive carparks, which are connected up by more and more freeways.
The car rules.It cannot shape its 5 squares into piazzas because it remains at heart a garden city in which the city spreads out across the countryside and provides each household with a decent house on its own plot.