Adelaide's Park Lands have long been home to large events, as well as numberless small, private encounters. Until now, no book has been published to document this wealth of social activity. In The Adelaide Park Lands, Sumerling recounts tales both enchanting and bizarre from the time of earliest European settlement until present days.

Planners internationally have employed green belts to contain the explosive sprawl of cities as varied as Tokyo, Vienna and Melbourne during the twentieth century. As yet, no collection has gathered these experiences together to consider their contribution to planning. Juxtaposing examples of green belt implementation worldwide, this book adds to understanding of how green belts can be effected in theory and how practitioners have adapted them in practice. The book provides a typology of green belt implementation and reform, enabling planners to grasp why these policies are employed and whether they are relevant to twenty-first century planning.

Adelaide is well known for its encircling park lands and beautiful gardens. They have been the site of many prestigious events and at times the source of much contention. In Anticipating Municipal Parks, Don Johnson contests the accepted understanding that Colonel William Light was the sole architect of the city of Adelaide, revealing the often-ignored role of Light's Deputy Surveyor, George Strickland Kingston. Johnson also investigates the role and influence of John Arthur Roebuck and John Claudius Loudon on the course of town-planning theory, and the political and theoretical influences leading to the economic and social ideas of Ebenezer Howard and his Garden City. This is a fascinating look at how Adelaide helped define city planning ideas in the nineteenth century.

In the 1970s the Australian Commonwealth Government and three States, Victoria (1974), New South Wales (1977) and South Australia (1978), passed legislation to protect the built heritage within their jurisdictions. The legislation was primarily a response to two factors: a large number of public protests against the demolition of historic buildings in all Australian states by the 1970s and the influence of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, which the Whitlam Government (1972-75) embraced enthusiastically. The other states, with governments that were more influenced by development interests, were slow to follow the federal lead. In this study, Sharon Mosler examines heritage issues and conflicts in Adelaide from enactment of the first South Australian Heritage Act in 1978 to its successor in 1993, and also analyses issues leading from that period into the twenty-first century. State legislation introduced by the Labor government of Premier Mike Rann (2002 - present) has affected the built environment significantly since this book began. The Rann government has given the built heritage a low priority in its strategic plan compared to population growth, while the Adelaide City Council has become more balanced in the past decade, although the council too has focussed on increasing Adelaides population. The result has been more high-rise buildings at the expense of heritage conservation and historic precincts.

The entire Australian continent was once covered with networks of Indigenous placenames. These names often evoke important information about features of the environment and their place in Indigenous systems of knowledge. On the other hand, placenames assigned by European settlers and officials are largely arbitrary, except for occasional descriptive labels such as 'river, lake, mountain'. They typically commemorate people, or unrelated places in the Northern hemisphere. In areas where Indigenous societies remain relatively intact, thousands of Indigenous placenames are used, but have no official recognition. Little is known about principles of forming and bestowing Indigenous placenames. Still less is known about any variation in principles of placename bestowal found in different Indigenous groups. While many Indigenous placenames have been taken into the official placename system, they are often given to different features from those to which they originally applied. In the process, they have been cut off from any understanding of their original meanings. Attempts are now being made to ensure that additions of Indigenous placenames to the system of official placenames more accurately reflect the traditions they come from. The eighteen chapters in this book range across all of these issues. The contributors (linguistics, historians and anthropologists) bring a wide range of different experiences, both academic and practical, to their contributions. The book promises to be a standard reference work on Indigenous placenames in Australia for many years to come.