City of Adelaide
Local government strategic planning innovation in a changing climate
The City of Adelaide is leading the way local governments undertake strategic spatial planning and urban design with an innovative digital approach through the City Plan – Adelaide 2036 (City Plan) project.
The City Plan is an engagement, data and design-led strategic urban design framework. It has been designed to support the doubling of our target residential population from 26,000 to 50,000 by 2036, while becoming more accessible, cooler and greener and driving investment in infrastructure and housing.
Adelaide’s CBD is evolving as a place where people choose to live. Growth comes at a critical time in history when our climate is warming and walkable access to amenities is at a tipping point. There is a need to disrupt policy design, test different growth scenarios and choose urban design solutions that give people the choice to walk, live well and participate in community life. The City Plan uses a sophisticated set of isochrones and indices that enable policy makers to experiment with future city designs and optimise decisions about policy intervention and investment through a digital framework.
The City Plan responds to the planning and design challenge through a multipronged approach:
Originality
The City Plan is prefaced on climate change scenarios and planning for climate resilience in the face of rising temperatures. It takes a people first and place-based approach to neighbourhoods through co-design of strong local urban identities with the people that live, invest and enjoy the city.
The origins of the City Plan are its spatial data, evidence base and visualisations through the City of Adelaide Digital Explorer (CoADE). The CoADE is the dynamic digital framework hosting the City Plan, which enables people to interact with future possible outcomes for the city and make conscious decisions about the future in which they wish to live, across 400 layers of data.
Innovation
The City of Adelaide set out to create something unique for local government in Australia. The City Plan is not a static report. Instead, through CoADE, it is a dynamic framework combined with a digital analytical tool to allow us to adapt our approach to changing priorities beyond a four-year political cycle.
The purpose of developing CoADE is to ensure that the City Plan’s urban design strategies can be designed and tested based on the city’s current state and be adapted to how and where the city is changing over time and emerging global factors.
Urban design outcome
The City Plan includes a ‘kit of parts’ of urban design elements that prioritise the human experience and promote a vibrant, liveable and functional city, helping balance future development, heritage and density against liveability.
Urban design elements range from civic plazas to create communal spaces that foster social interaction, cultural exchange, and civic engagement within the city; to new housing models and built form principles that balance density and housing diversity with preserving the city’s unique features and heritage character.
Evidence based outcomes
Time has been taken through an 18-month process to understand government, non-government, private sector and community priorities, and build these into the final plan. The process of good design provides an enabler for people to participate in a productive and constructive conversation about the future of our city.
Please note that the information provided has been submitted by the organisation and has not been independently verified.
