Adelaide

Adelaide is the only major Australian city that was planned before a single settler arrived—and that planning has shaped everything since. In 1836, Colonel William Light had an impossible task: survey 2,400 kilometers of coastline, find the best location for a capital, and design a town, all before the colonists landed. He chose a site on the River Torrens that the governor and early settlers opposed, but Light prevailed. His grid layout, ringed by parklands that no development could touch, remains the city's defining feature. Adelaide was designed to be orderly, and orderly it has remained.

The Kaurna people had inhabited the Adelaide Plains for millennia before Light arrived. The European settlement that displaced them was unique in Australian history: South Australia never received British convicts. The colony was founded on Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory that land should be sold, not granted, and the proceeds used to transport 'respectable' laborers rather than prisoners. This ideology of planned respectability—free settlers, rational design, religious tolerance—became Adelaide's founding mythology and enduring self-image.

For a century, Adelaide grew as a service center for South Australia's wheat and wool, punctuated by occasional copper mining booms. The city remained smaller and quieter than its eastern rivals, earning a reputation as the 'city of churches' for its religious diversity and as a cultural backwater for its conservative pace. Manufacturing arrived with Federation-era tariff protection—car factories, appliance plants, the industrial base that employed working-class suburbs through the mid-20th century. But when tariffs fell and globalization arrived, Adelaide's manufacturing collapsed faster than Melbourne's.

Today Adelaide is reinventing itself around defence and space. The city hosts seven of the world's top ten defence contractors—BAE Systems, Boeing, Lockheed Martin among them—and the Australian Space Agency has made its headquarters in the Lot Fourteen innovation precinct. Over A$90 billion in defence projects are planned for the next 50 years, primarily naval shipbuilding for the AUKUS submarine program. The first Australian-designed satellite, Kanyini, launched in 2024. The city employs 939,000 people, with 40,000 jobs created since 2022, though productivity still lags the national average by 20%.

By 2026, Adelaide's bet is clear: become Australia's defence capital. The AUKUS nuclear submarine program will transform the Osborne shipyards; the space sector is growing from the same precinct. The city that was planned before anyone arrived is now planning for a future where submarines and satellites matter more than wheat and wine. Whether Colonel Light's orderly grid can accommodate the transformation remains Adelaide's central question.