by Shane Sody

The City of Adelaide has unveiled a five-year Strategic Plan that contains a startling new direction for your Park Lands.

In recent years many sporting clubs, schools, and elite sports have been given approval for large new private facilities on Park Lands sites, that are leased (effectively privatised) for decades.

There are dozens of sports buildings already dotted around your Park Lands, and there is an increased demand from women and girls to play sport in your Park Lands.

However, some of the old buildings are not equipped with suitable modern facilities or even female change rooms or toilets. There’s no doubt that some of these decades-old buildings are in need of refurbishment, repair, or replacement.

The City of Adelaide has been trying to come up with a policy that will encourage different groups to share any new buildings, so there can be fewer buildings overall, but with each new one equipped with better facilities.

However, that initiative is now in doubt. A higher-level overarching “Strategic Plan” adopted by the City Council on 12 December 2023 appears to have put a stop to this process. (PDF, 18 pp, 2.0 Mb)

Like all local governments, the City Council is required to have a "Strategic Plan" covering a period of at least four years.

The City's new Strategic Plan 2024-28 states unequivocally (on page 15) that over the next five years, the Council will

"Advocate for no new development in the Park Lands and returning Park Lands that have been alienated." [emphasis added]

This is a surprising twist. Such a radical change had not been anticipated when the Draft version of Council's Strategic Plan was released in November 2023.

The earlier, draft version of the Plan suggested that the Council would, in future, "advocate for Park Lands development to be low impact".

In our submission, the Adelaide Park Lands Association did not suggest that there should be "no new development" because that would appear to be an unrealistic goal, and might actually thwart efforts to consolidate some of the many existing buildings.

There is potential for carefully-planned new development to deliver a return to the public of more open, green, public space. It would be possible to design and deliver facilities such as sports changing rooms that are publicly owned and operated, and made available to a wide range of users rather than reserved for just the wealthiest schools and sports organisations.

It remains to be seen whether the radical new direction endorsed in the Council's new Strategic Plan will be carried through and endorsed within other Council plans that are still in development, such as:

• Park Lands Community Buildings (Sport and Recreation) Policy; and

• the long-delayed revision of the Park Lands Management Strategy

Re-greening in the Strategic Plan

When reviewing an earlier, draft version of the City Strategic Plan, on 5 November, we urged the Council to be "more ambitious" with proposals to restore lost areas of your Park Lands.

At the time, APA urged the Council to revise its draft plan to:

• include a commitment to work with or empower community groups to restore hard-surface areas of the Park Lands to Open, Green, Public;

• step up advocacy for State Heritage listing of your Park Lands; and

• clarify the ambiguity inherent in suggesting that the "productivity" of your Park Lands should be "enhanced".

The final version of the Strategic Plan, adopted by Council on 12 December 2023 now includes a commitment to “pursue State Heritage listing”. However it still contains an ambiguous reference that the Council will "advocate for ..... productivity of the Park Lands".

In relation to proposed restoration, the Strategic Plan falls short of any commitment to work with or empower community groups to undertake re-greening.

Rather, it retains as a vague “key action” merely to “work with partners to create innovative ways to create or convert underutilised areas to green space.”

There has been a lack of Council commitment over the past three years to any re-greening initiatives from the Adelaide Park Lands Association.

Nevertheless new wording in the 2024-28 Strategic Plan does commit the Council to, in future: "seek to reclaim Park Lands green space in line with the Kadaltilla Strategic Plan."