The Concrete Corridor: Strategising Impermanence in a Frontier City

Abstract

The Gold Coast can be understood as a ‘new frontier city’, a site which does not meet usual expectations of urban formations and cultural practices. This article explores novel potentials for creative industries and cultural development in the city by focusing on emergent intersections between large-scale real estate development and the creative sector. Drawing on ways of thinking developed by Deleuze and Guattari, we utilise notions of rhizomes and assemblages as a methodological strategy. The article aims to demonstrate that, for the Gold Coast's urban and cultural trajectories, which are marked more by impermanence than continuities, such thinking is likely to prove very useful alongside, supplementary to, or instead of a range of established approaches to urban analysis and policy development.

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