City Structure 15 10 Years of Metropolitan Strategic Planning City Structure 15 – 1 Ten Years of Metropolitan Strategic Planning

The South Australian Planning Review’s ‘2020 Vision – Planning Strategy for Metropolitan Adelaide ’ (1992) provided the prototype for the current generation of planning strategies for metropolitan Adelaide. The first adopted version appeared in 1994, with revisions in 1998 and 2003. In April 2005 a further draft strategy was published. This departs in style somewhat from its predecessors, but its principal distinguishing feature is an explicit commitment to a set of guiding principles of ecologically sustainable development which are intended to underpin the future planned development of the Adelaide metropolitan area. This paper provides the background to a recently commenced research project at the University of South Australia which aims to critically review the aims and achievements of metropolitan strategic plans for Adelaide since 1990. One strand of this project is exploring the difficulty of pursuing integrated ‘whole of government ’ planning strategies under prevailing urban governance arrangements. The paper notes within these strategic plans a number of different conceptions of ‘planning ’ which sit uneasily alongside each other – for example, planning as a facilitator of markets, planning as a forum for dialogue and planning as an institution for promoting particula