Adelaide’s planning history is replete with examples of the adoption and adaptation of iconic urban open space ideas. The making of urban open spaces, beginning with the Adelaide parklands, is a direct result of the diverse roles attributed to those spaces and the values placed on them by the public and by design professionals responsible for their provision. The emergence of the garden city idea and the concepts of the neighbourhood unit, pedestrian oriented design, the British New Towns and social and environmental planning in the twentieth century contributed to the reconceptualization of open space as a system that underpinned the structure of the urban environment. Contrary to nineteenth century practice, increasingly through the second half of the twentieth century, the social, environmental, aesthetic, health and marketing benefits of open spaces, combined with detailed site analysis, determined the development of local open space systems at the beginning of the planning process. Using an interpretive-historical methodology and combined methods that draw on interpretivehistorical, qualitative and case study techniques the paper examines how the benefits attributed to open spaces resulted in the evolution of local open space systems in Adelaide in the second half of the twentieth century. The discussion focuses on three sites: Elizabeth (1954-1966), Noarlunga (1960-1985) and Golden Grove (1974-2003).