Consider this subversive question: will all or any of the journeys of the Thinkers in Residence be seen to be necessary? The Premier’s Department has so far sponsored some five publicity-friendly professional thinkers – neo-Sophists, if you like, to this notional Athens-of-the-South. We are promised many more and a small bureaucracy has been formed to support them.

To date their interests have been broadly urban and focussed on creativity, sustainability and ecology. Their missions see them briefly live here, scan South Australia’s and Adelaide’s problems, and sing for their suppers by way of suggesting inventive solutions.

It’s a well-meaning cultural program. While some say there’s a touch of the cultural cringe about it, its supporters argue on the contrary that it’s the antithesis of parochialism and a lack of creative self-esteem. Rather it’s a splendid demonstration of the self-confidence of a polity willing to listen and learn from highly-regarded creative people who, practically or osmotically, may do the State some service.
Just how much service, of course, depends on how much hard sense the hard men and women of Cabinet and Treasury can make of the thinkers’ words, and that’s where it’s probably going to be a bit tricky.

I have read the papers of the first three Thinkers, and they’re fine, they’re all fine. The sentiments can’t be faulted. The task the bureaucracy now faces is how to turn the variously opaque, nebulous and worthy into something solid that be taken to Cabinet and get a Treasury tick.

These thoughts came rather strongly to me the day I settled down to read Charles Landry’s contributions as Thinker 2, his First Impressions and Rethinking Adelaide papers. The news that morning was not good, though it was extraordinarily apposite. Adelaide, as ABC radio breathlessly announced, was “officially” 90km long. Delinquency and juvenile mayhem was on the rise in the northern suburbs. Mitsubishi’s engine plant in the southern suburbs was to close. In the great urban diagnostics news race, this was a trifecta.

One of the problems Charles Landry has always had about Adelaide is that it’s too long, and when not too long, too flat and wide, and altogether lacking the close knobbly bumps and kinks of Old World cities. Dysfunctional suburban extremities provide no surprises to his consultancies. In this he is very much the European of his immediate post-war generation and class. “Adelaide is more than half the size of London with a seventh of its population,” he complains.

Adelaide as a 90 km city isn’t exactly new news, certainly not to transport and traffic planners, nor housing developers, nor politicians watching the knock and pluck of metropolitan votes.

And here is where there may be a problem about the ultimate relevance of all Thinkers’ words. Will they have time to comprehend the closely thatched context in which their words are formed and fall? For instance, Landry’s reports have to be read in relation to a large, specific South Australian and a much larger general Australian literature on urban planning, development, and urban creativity. Whether they make sense or nonsense will ultimately be determined by that context.

With modern SA, that literature has to begin with the 1962 Report on the Metropolitan Area of Adelaide. Since its publication, schools of geographers have watched its general predictions become specific realities, including the long line of housing unravelling from the pre-war central metropolis up towards Gawler and down towards Sellicks Beach.

The first person to predict that this would be the shape of Adelaide to come was another outsider, the UK-trained town planner Stuart Hart, now a Thinker in Permanent Residence. He arrived in Adelaide in the mid-1950s as the newly appointed head of premier Tom Playford’s Town Planning Committee, and was charged with supervising the writing of the 1962 Report.

At that time a neat metropolitan area stopped south at Flagstaff Hill, north at Gepps Cross, east at the foothills east and west at the coast. Elizabeth was a small “satellite city”. The population was almost 500,000. With post-war car manufacturing cranking up, European migration beginning to boom, and detached housing an entrenched, 60-year-plus, Australia-wide social and political ideology, Hart read the semiotics, did the sums, and predicted the inevitable – the 90km city.

Anyone proposing creative solutions to the problems of Adelaide’s urban form and demography, and its sense of itself, really should start with the 1962 Report, reading it for its deductive prescience as well as for its misses. It had a big miss with south Adelaide, for instance, construing the whole square mile as Central Business District. That happily forced the writing in the 1970s of the highly creative City of Adelaide Plan, currently under threat by some notably uncreative City Council members.

Another miss was its uncritical acceptance of a bulldoze-and-entangle, Los Angeles-like freeway system. That was enthusiastically endorsed by the Hall government in the late-1960s and, without the money to build it, the cars to fill it and a people to endorse it, just as enthusiastically dumped by the Dunstan government in 1970.

These aside, the 1962 Report proposed or deduced the major land trends and forms that make up the 90km city today. All subsequent planning instruments and policy initiatives can be traced back to it and to the idea of a lineal city, which Hart’s generation had been taught was the desirable form for a motorising society.

In this, the Greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis’ concept of “Ekistics” – the “science of human settlement” – was pervasive. Doxiadis argued that transport and communication determined urban form and in modern terms this should allow for a socially efficient lineal string of small cities rather than one agglomeration.

The philosophy found favour around the world and remains current. In Australia it continues powerfully to affect Perth (where Landry has advised), Darwin, Canberra, as well as Adelaide. In Adelaide, the slowly developing hubs and nodes at, for instance, Salisbury, Elizabeth, Golden Grove, Tea Tree Plaza, Seaford Rise and Noarlunga Centre are its progeny. Indeed, the original 1972 designs for the Noarlunga Centre were by architect Newell Platten, who lived in Athens and worked for Doxiadis in the 1950s.
So what does Landry propose can heal the dysfunctional wounds and creative vacancies of this lineal Doxiadis construct?

His brief, he says, was “...to assess the city’s culture and creativity potential” and “talent churn” so that it changes “...from a place to leave to a destination to come to”.

To this end, he believes it needs to “...enhance its sense of self and confidence”, “...capitalise on the potential of its people”, “...project itself better into global consciousness”, “...value creativity as capital”, and “rethink” itself. Many words and many exhortations are then used in his recipe for rethinking, but boiled down they mean essentially that Adelaide should be more culturally entrepreneurial, have a “talent strategy” and be an international centre quickly recognised by Google searches.

Aside from reinstating the interstate rail terminal on North Tce, the only solid, practical recommendation in the Rethinking document is the one the bureaucracy will find hardest to formulate and cabinet the hardest to digest. The 90km city, he says, should properly examine the idea of a tripartite northern, central, and southern form of governance, to make it creatively fit for the 21st century.

As it happens, that’s an old idea. But, of course, some of the best ideas for Australian cities are old ideas, as thinkers in permanent Adelaide residence already know.