page_title: City of Adelaide
section_title: Population
hierarchical_section_title: City of Adelaide / Population
caption_attribution_description: English: Jubilee 150 Walkway - City of Adelaide coat of arms
context_page_description: The City of Adelaide, also known as the Corporation of the City of Adelaide and Adelaide City Council is a local government area in the metropolitan area of greater Adelaide, South Australia and is legally defined as the capital city of South Australia by the City of Adelaide Act 1998. It includes the Adelaide city centre, North Adelaide, and the Adelaide Park Lands, which surround North Adelaide and the city centre.
  Established in 1840, the City of Adelaide Municipal Corporation was the first municipal authority in Australia. At its time of establishment, Adelaide's first mayor, James Hurtle Fisher, was elected. From 1919 onwards, the municipality has had a Lord Mayor, as of 2019 being Sandy Verschoor, who replaced Martin Haese in 2018.
context_section_description: At the end of the 20th century, the city had little more than thirty per cent of the population it had in 1915 (when the population reached more than 43,000), and about 5,000 less than the 1855 population of 18,259. In proposing reforms and his advocacy for town planning legislation, Charles Reade illustrated the Adelaide slums associated with the city's high population levels with lantern-slides accompanying his lecture "Garden cities v. Adelaide slums and suburbs" in the Adelaide Town Hall on 8 Oct 1914. 
  Reade was attacked by the Adelaide City Council who fought against the Town Planning and Housing Bill reforms and the press pointed out the wickedness of families being forced to 'herd together more and more in overcrowded conditions of living' and the 'sheer nonsense on the part of the City Council to pretend' that there were no slums in the city:
  The City Council does not want to learn. It seems to want the slum owners to be left untouched so that the landlords may reap their harvest of gold while the poor of this city reap their harvest of suffering, disease, and other ills associated with bad housing.
  In seeking a return to higher density population levels, Adelaide City Council launched its 'New Directions' with its three themes of Capacity, Vivacity and Audacity on 3 July 2001. The "Capacity" theme proposed doubling the city's population by 2010 and increasing the number of City visitors and workers.
  According to the Annual Reports, the population has increased rapidly, due to the targets stated in the strategic plans developed at about that time.
  Notes
  The population figures have been extracted from Adelaide City Council Annual reports. The data is summarised on pages 149-150 of A Thematic History. Additional data not in that summary can be found in the reports on the council's "Annual Reports" page.
  1840 The initial Annual Report noted a population of 8,480, with 1,615 buildings in the city.
  1844 The second available figure (6,107) is also the minimum recorded in council reports.
  1880s There are no figures available for the period between 1881 and 1912. South Australia suffered a severe depression in the 1880s when the State population, (and probably the city's population too), declined.
  1915 The peak population was 43,133.
  1921 The State population passes 500,000. The city population was 39,458.
  1963 The State population passes 1,000,000. The city population was 23,000.
  1993 There is only one figure available between 1976 and 1999 - 11,405 in 1993. It was in the late 1990s that the council developed and started implementing its plans to increase the city's population, and not until 2004 when it started regularly updating the population estimates based on figures supplied by the Bureau of Census and Statistics.
  2001 In 2001, the council set targets for population numbers for 2006 and 2010. These targets were raised considerably in 2003. In 2009, targets were set for 2012.
  The following table sets out the figures of various types of city population in the 21st century:
   * Visitors to the city from the Adelaide Metropolitan area, for all purposes
  
   ** Square kilometres (millions of square metres) of office space. i.e. 1.503 km² = 1,503,000 sq. metres.
caption: Coat of arms
exif: {}