Jose, who is from Adelaide, mentions the period she served on the city council, prompted by rage at ‘the steady removal of historical buildings from Adelaide’s inner-city streets’. Her formula is simple: ‘The process of development is fraught with so many competing possibilities that the best places will only be made by listening to the community voice.’ Ironically, she claims that it was ‘preserving Adelaide’s heritage’ and championing a design for North Terrace which involved replacing existing trees that caused her to lose the 1995 mayoral election – apparently the ‘community’ was wrong in that case. She accuses developers of seeing things in ‘black and white’.

Places Women Make is superficial and incoherently organised. The chapters – ‘Knitting the City’ and ‘Heroines for Heritage’, etc. – have little structural function. It reads like political spin, relying on sentimentalism, flattery, and exhortation, devoid of evidence or argument, and I found the constant emphasis on female stereotypes galling.