THERE has been a whole lot of thinking going on. More than a decade of dedicated navel gazing as Adelaide, or parts of it, tries to work out what it is, where it’s going and how to get there. And the last bit is the difficult part. Adelaide has been wonderful, in some areas a world leader, at developing the theory – but, by common perception at least, a dunce at actually doing something.

“The irony about Adelaide,” says the Property Council’s SA executive director Bryan Moulds, is that “we lead Australia in the thinking, we just don’t get around to doing.”

This is not news to most people who care about the future of Adelaide and South Australia which, for the purpose of this story, we’ll consider to be as one. It has, however, been highlighted as a major issue by the most recent Thinker in Residence, Charles Landry, and is causing increasing impatience in many sectors in Adelaide.

After a long string of visiting urban planners, social planners, environmentalists, scientists and other eminent experts thinking hard about Adelaide on our behalf, Landry has taken a broader view that attempts to pull it all together.

“Taking a big picture view of Adelaide’s future is not a mere option for the city, but a necessity,” Landry says.

There have been many attempts, some skewed towards planning issues, others addressing economic issues, but rarely taking a holistic view of the city-state. To recap some highlights of our deep-think era, it seems we’ve had more visions than several centuries of travellers on the road to Damascus.

One of the first was urban planner Michael Lennon’s 2020 Vision plan for metropolitan Adelaide – the first plan of its type in Australia, that attempted to create strategies as much about economic development as planning.

In its way, it was a much more formidable document than the Economic Development Framework recently produced by the Economic Development Board.

Timing was a problem for 2020 Vision. Soon after its release a State election saw Lyn Arnold’s Labour Government consigned to history; a new Planning Minister, John Oswald, did introduce a planning strategy, though the vision element had been lost.

So we continued to think. Lennon tried again in the mid-1990s with Adelaide 21, which sparked a great deal of thinking about the role of the city centre. Some people were critical of Adelaide 21, saying it didn’t deliver results – though it did bring many people together and caused a major conversation.

Bryan Moulds says one of the crucial challenges for Adelaide 21 was to deal with the notion that “we were stuffed because of the State Bank collapse.”

Somewhere in there, too, was the A.D.Little report on the SA economy – another well-regarded document that only ended up gathering dust.

It was a precedent that Robert de Crespigny had no intention of following: “Every other report, such as the A.D.Little report or even the brilliant 2020 Vision report, were simply thrown over the counter for someone else to pick up. This (the Economic Development Framework) is the first plan of its kind that had been born from a South Australian government, and … already we’ve had more implemented than from any plan we’ve had before.”

Adelaide 21 was and continues to be an influential strategy. It led directly to the formation of Education Adelaide to sell SA’s education possibilities abroad; it started the North Terrace redevelopment process; and, probably most significantly, it led to the creation in 1999 of the Capital City Committee – a grouping unique in Australia that linked Adelaide City Council, the State Government, business and other stakeholders in the city.

For a time Diana Laidlaw, then Minister for the Arts, Planning and Transport, was at the heart of all this and had a big impact on what eventuated. Laidlaw, with support from Adelaide City Council, found the money to put on the City as a Stage event, which focused on architecture, sustainability, design and cities in general.

It brought to Adelaide people such as Danish town planner Jan Gehl, cultural ecologist Herbert Girardet (later to return as a Thinker in Residence), cultural planner John Montgomery (who has since made his home in Adelaide), Charles Landry (who also returned as a Thinker) and several others.

A two-day event held in March 2001 and modelled on the Festival of Ideas that had begun two years earlier, City as a Stage asked what are the compelling challenges facing cities around the world – and how did these issues relate to Adelaide?

As such events go, this had an extraordinary influence in subsequent events. It led in to the 2002 Festival of Arts, under Peter Sellers, reflecting a strong architectural and urban planning theme. Professor Gehl was invited back later that year to scope out a proposed City Spaces Study. A Green Building Group was established by the Capital City Project Team to promote opportunities for green commercial development – something that has been firmly (and to many, surprisingly) embraced by the Property Council.

Adelaide City Councillor Richard Hayward, pumped up by the free city bike scheme in Copenhagen, announced plans for something similar here – only to see it flattened by a “can’t be done” attitude just as it was set to roll.

Somewhere in there was the new City of Adelaide Development Plan, which sought to reflect the directions proposed by Adelaide 21 and the Capital City Development program – whose most visible impact has been the arts and education-led revival of Adelaide’s West End.

The Property Council was in there, too, with “Adelaide – The Way Forward”, released in August 2000, which outlined more than 80 projects, initiatives and actions designed to boost the city across a wide range of sectors.

At about the same time Business SA, the State’s leading business and employer group, renamed and relaunched itself, quickly followed by a “manifesto for SA’s growth and development”.

SA was busting to reinvent itself. We’ve had the Constitutional Convention, reports on Sustainability and on Social Inclusion. Through the persistence of the Capital City Committee and agencies such as the Office of Sustainability, we’ve seen events that have included a Collaboration, Creativity and Leadership forum; a Green City workshop; input from extraordinary people such as Alfonso Martinez Cearra, who played a major role in the transformation of Bilbao; the renowned Amory Lovins, who argues that capitalism must start evolving in new and different ways; ecological footprinter Mathis Wackernagel and Jaime Lerner, the inspirational former mayor of Curitiba which, like Bilbao, is a case study in city transformation. And finally Landry who, as neither planner nor environmentalist nor economist, has tried to make sense of it all and find a way out of the maze of indecision.
Impatient though many are, there’s no need to mock this extended period of thinking. Landry is the first to say that changing cities, even by the most skilled hands, is a long-term process. Jan Gehl said it could take 40 years.

It can go on too long and not get very far – as it did with the MFP, which finally exhausted the patience of populace and politicians – though a period of careful thinking is necessary if you’re setting out to radically change a city.

Professor Dick Blandy, of Flinders University, explained why in an address to SA Business Vision 2010 in November, 2000. He said problems facing SA (as many other places) derive in part from the absence of a powerful utopian vision, such as the vision on which the state was founded. The result is pessimism and anxiety about the future. People can’t see where the state is going, or even where it is trying to go, and become discouraged by this “defuturising”.

This, according to Dutch sociologist Fred Polak, leads to a retreat from constructive thinking about the future “in order to dig oneself into the trenches of the present. It is a ruthless elimination of future-centred idealism by today-centred realism. We have lost the ability to see any further than the end of our collective nose … the task before us is to reawaken the almost dormant social awareness of the future and to find the best nourishment for a starving social imagination.”

To counter a starving social imagination, Landry says the issue of leadership is central to everything, which implies leadership at all levels. “To make a city work, it is not enough to demand leadership only from government,” he says. “Leaders come in many forms and often in unusual places: from communities, business, the cultural arena, from those concerned with environment or from activists of many types. However, given Adelaide’s history, government does play a special role in giving permission and providing opportunities for many to lead.

“In Adelaide’s case, as this is a moment of dramatic change, transformational leadership is required rather than the skills of the co-ordinator or manager.”

Laidlaw also says it’s about leadership, but does it have to come from the Premier or his ministers? The best they can do is to give permission for people in their charge to be creative, use their initiative, take more risks and see themselves as facilitators rather than regulators. Instead of declaring “you can’t”, instead say “you can – but these are the things you’ll have to do to succeed, and we’ll help you”.

This is not, she says, an attitude that typifies the modus operandi of State Treasury. “What I thought was killing – both in the Liberal government as in the Labor government – was the dead hand of Treasury,” she says scathingly. “Their sole purpose seems to be avoiding risk, and Adelaide just won’t prosper in this way. They just don’t get it. As long as they keep out of trouble they think they’re doing their job and it’s killing the spirit of the public sector. It doesn’t enable creative thinking and development. Treasury is an enormous part of the problem – they sap your strength and your enthusiasm.”

Not everything will be resolved by looking towards North Tce and the government of the day for answers. “We’ve been in a state of paralysis for a decade,” says Festival of Ideas founder, former ACC councillor and now the new CEO of Arts SA, Greg Mackie. “Risk management has become a code for risk avoidance. Now the risk pendulum must swing back and we must get on with it.

“Risk avoidance at a political level, combined with the starving of resources for R&D, has caused a serious loss of momentum and the loss of many creative people to other states.”

Mackie adds that our yearning for another great leader like Don Dunstan has contributed to our paralysis. This yearning for another iconic, charismatic leader is no better than a cargo cult mentality, ducking the difficulty the rest of community has in taking responsibility for leadership.

“What defines a leader is a person willing to make a decision, and there’s a lack of that in SA,” Laidlaw adds. “We go round and round in circles … there’s so much wasted energy.”

Landry suggests the need for an “urban animateur” – a person whose role is to add value to existing initiatives by identifying opportunities to connect people, organizations, events, conferences and build Adelaide’s potential as a connected and strategic city. This would be in contrast to the many roles recently established which control, regulate or adjudicate activities.

He stresses the need for a new style of leadership: “Most importantly, it requires the courage to act decisively in the knowledge that some, if not many, will disagree. Secondly, to acknowledge that what is required goes well beyond one political cycle. Thirdly, to dare to be creative and inspirational.”

This requires urban revolutionaries rather than animateurs. So who are these potential revolutionaries and where will they come from? Some already exist – and they don’t work from North Tce.

Mackie, although now part of the government administration, may well be one. Some point to people like the Property Council’s Bryan Moulds, who looks to combine spatial planning with economic and environmental sustainability in a holistic manner, and rejects the tag “industrial land” in favour of “employment land”.

Others point to people like economist Rodin Genoff, industry strategist with Playford Council, who, with the council, is playing an important role in the devolution of power to the northern region.

“Devolution of power is about building broad-based leadership,” Genoff says, “and it is about changing the system in the way we do things. But we also need vigorous leadership from the top level of government that encourages this broader-based leadership.”

This implies a need for generosity of power, in which central government works closely in harness with the northern, central and southern metropolitan regions. Landry has urged that the ACC start thinking about itself not in isolation but as a key part of the city as a whole.

Already attempts are being made to reconfigure this relationship with an historic meeting late last year between the CEO’s of Adelaide, Onkaparinga, Marion, Playford and Salisbury councils. It was the first time such a meeting had been held. “Landry was responsible for bringing together organisations that had never come together, and might otherwise never have met,” says Rodin Genoff.

None of this is to imply that nothing has changed. An audit of changes just in the Adelaide CBD is impressive. Legislative changes such as the urban growth boundary are both challenging and necessary. The failures largely have been failures of imagination.

“Colonel Light was a good urban planner,” says Bryan Moulds, “but if he were here today he’d do it differently. The straight streets have influenced our thinking – we’re gridded like our city’s layout.”

Landry says that local leaders will need to move from being merely strategists to being visionaries. “Whilst strategists command and demand, visionaries excite and entice,” he says. “They will need to move from being commanders of their governments, businesses, institution or cultural body to being able to tell a story about the bigger picture, and where their entity fits in, so moving from being institutional engineers to change agents.

“There are ordinary, innovative and visionary leaders. The first simply reflect the desires or needs of the group they lead. An innovative leader questions circumstances to draw out the latent needs, bringing fresh insight to new areas.

“Visionary leaders, by contrast, harness the power of completely new ideas and get beyond the ding-dong of day-to-day debate. The task is simply to retell a compelling story of Adelaide so that everyone feels they have a role to play, however small or large.”