Off the Plan: The Urbanisation of the Gold Coast

Off the Plan

THE URBANISATION OF THE GOLD COAST

Editors: Caryl Bosman, Ayşın Dedekorkut-Howes and Andrew Leach

© Caryl Bosman, Ayşin Dedekorkut-Howes and Andrew Leach 2016

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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Off the plan : the urbanisation of the Gold Coast/Caryl

Bosman, Ayşin Dedekorkut-Howes and Andrew Leach.

9781486301836 (paperback)

9781486301843 (ePDF)

9781486301850 (epub)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

City planning – Queensland – Gold Coast.

Urban policy – Queensland – Gold Coast.

Gold Coast (Qld.) – History.

Gold Coast (Qld.) – Planning.

Bosman, Caryl, editor.

Dedekorkut-Howes, Ayşin, editor.

Leach, Andrew, 1976–editor.

307.7609943

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Front cover: (background) GCRT 2031 Corridor Study (Gold Coast City Council and HASSELL; imagery by Doug and Wolf); (foreground) Modified from Mantra Circle on Cavill, Surfers Paradise, Gold Coast, Australia, by Phalinn Ooi. Available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) at https://www.flickr.com/photos/phalinn/6874989458.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

List of contributors

Chapter 1 Considering the Gold Coast

Ayşin Dedekorkut-Howes, Caryl Bosman and Andrew Leach

Chapter 2 All that glitters: an environmental history ‘sketch’ of Gold Coast City

Jason Byrne and Donna Houston

Chapter 3 Holidaying on the Gold Coast

Noel Scott, Sarah Gardiner and Ayşin Dedekorkut-Howes

Chapter 4 Transport: from cream cans and campers to city centres and commuters

Daniel O’Hare and Matthew Burke

Chapter 5 The Gold Coast: innovation incubator for the real estate development industry?

Eddo Coiacetto, Sacha Reid and Andrew Leach

Chapter 6 Changing landscapes: Gold Coast residents and the impacts of rapid urban development

Caryl Bosman

Chapter 7 Thirty years of Gold Coast architecture

Andrew Leach

Chapter 8 The politics of paradise: intergovernmental relations and the Gold Coast

Michael Howes

Chapter 9 The changing face of local government on the Gold Coast

Paul Burton

Chapter 10 Selling the city

Ruth Potts, Sarah Gardiner and Noel Scott

Chapter 11 City with/out a plan

Ayşin Dedekorkut-Howes and Severine Mayere

Chapter 12 Looking beyond the horizon

Ayşin Dedekorkut-Howes and Caryl Bosman

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This book has been an idea some years in the making. Initially a project of GoCART, the Gold Coast Area Research Team of Griffith University’s Urban Research Program, its remit has expanded to capture several strands of the research around the Gold Coast’s formation and operation as a city. This research is anchored to Griffith University, especially the activities on its burgeoning Gold Coast campus, near Southport. It describes, too, a research community that extends to several neighbouring universities. The editors wish to acknowledge the ongoing support of colleagues in the Urban Research Program and, in particular, Brendan Gleeson, Jago Dodson and Paul Burton, who have each served as directors of the centre while this book has been under development. Aspects of this book document research funded by the Australian Research Council as Future Fellowship project FT120100883. We are grateful for the support and encouragement of Lauren Webb at CSIRO Publishing, who has shown remarkable tolerance as well as expertise in guiding us towards publication.

List of contributors

Caryl Bosman is a senior lecturer and Head of Discipline Urban and Environmental Planning at Griffith University and a member of the Urban Research Program. She has a PhD in urban planning and a Bachelor of Architecture. Her research interests focus on the planning and development of past and present suburban landscapes. Caryl’s current research centres on the residential landscapes of the Gold Coast and planning and provision of housing for an ageing population, particularly in relation to ideals of community, ‘the good life’ and placemaking.

Matthew Burke is Deputy Director (Nathan campus) and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the Urban Research Program at Griffith University. His research explores transport and land-use planning and transport policy, with particular focus on how the built environment and transport systems influence travel behaviour. Matthew worked in transport and land-use planning at all three tiers of government in Australia, before joining Griffith. He is presently exploring the impacts of the Gold Coast’s new light rail system.

Paul Burton is Professor of Urban Planning and Management at Griffith University and Acting Director of its Urban Research Program. He directs the City of Gold Coast/Griffith University Growth Management Partnership and is a founding member of Regional Development Australia, Gold Coast. Before moving to Australia in 2007, Paul was Head of the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol, a director of the charity, Support Against Racist Incidents (SARI) and served as the chair of the Bristol Democracy Commission, which recommended the adoption of a directly elected mayor for the city.

Jason Byrne is an Associate Professor in Urban and Environmental Planning with Griffith University’s School of Environment, Gold Coast campus, where he has taught since 2006. A geographer and planner, Jason’s research interests include urban nature, parks, green-space, environmental justice and political ecologies of climate change adaptation. He is a member of Griffith’s Urban Research Program and Environmental Futures Research Institute. Jason previously worked as a planning officer, environmental officer and policy writer with the Western Australian Government. He has over 70 scholarly publications, including an edited book Australian Environmental Planning: Challenges and Future Prospects.

Eddo Coiacetto is an Associate Professor in Urban Planning at Griffith University. His research and teaching are motivated by an interest in improving the effectiveness of planning practice, especially by focusing on the challenges of implementing planning in market-based economies and by basing it on a more sound understanding of the realities of urban development. Eddo is particularly interested in the nature of real estate development, the strategies of developers and their implications for urban development, urban planning and sustainability. His research also focuses on planning education and the preparation of students for the challenges and realities of planning practice.

Ayşın Dedekorkut-Howes is a Senior Lecturer in the Urban and Environmental Planning Program at Griffith University’s Gold Coast campus, a researcher with the Urban Research Program and the co-convenor of Gold Coast Area Research Team (GoCART). Her current research focuses on urbanisation and growth management in subtropical areas. She conducts historical research on the development and urbanisation of the Gold Coast as well as current issues and problems the city is facing such as climate change. Ayşın has a background in city planning and has previously worked in Turkey and the United States.

Sarah Gardiner is a Lecturer in tourism and hotel management at Griffith University. She has a PhD in Marketing from Griffith University and has published in several high-ranking tourism journals. Prior to that, Sarah worked for more than 15 years in the private and government sectors of the Gold Coast tourism industry, managing several marketing and product development strategies. She has provided consultancy services to industry in the areas of tourism, events, marketing and community engagement. Sarah’s current research interests are consumer behaviour and tourism destination marketing and development.

Donna Houston is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University. Her scholarly interests are concerned with environmental and social justice in a time of global environmental change. She has recently published research on storytelling in environmental justice activism, urban political ecology in Australian cities and planning for climate-just, more-than-human cities.

Michael Howes is an Associate Professor at Griffith University’s School of Environment and Urban Research Program. Michael’s research explores how governments try to make society more sustainable and resilient with specific projects on climate change, sustainable development, environment protection institutions, public environmental reporting, eco-efficiency programs and environmental policy. Before becoming an academic Michael worked for several years as an industrial chemist and technical manager in the manufacturing sector. He has also been a member of the Queensland Conservation Council board and chaired the Technical Advisory Panel for the Australian Government’s National Pollutant Inventory.

Daniel O’Hare is Associate Professor of Urban Planning in the Faculty of Society and Design at Bond University on the Gold Coast. He holds a PhD and MA (Urban Design) from Oxford Brookes University, UK, and a town planning degree from the University of New South Wales. Danny’s research interests include urban cultural landscapes, urban walkability, knowledge-based urban development and the transformation of coastal tourism areas into sustainable urban regions. His publications on these topics have appeared in journals including Urban Design International, in book chapters, and conference proceedings published by Australian, UK, Chinese and US universities, government departments and professional organisations.

Andrew Leach is Professor of Architectural History at Griffith University, where he holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship and is Deputy Director (Gold Coast campus) of the Urban Research Program. Andrew’s work concerns the intellectual history of twentieth-century architectural culture. He has published widely on this theme, including the books Manfredo Tafuri (2007), Architecture, Disciplinarity, and the Arts (2009), What is Architectural History? (2010) and The Baroque in Architectural Culture 1880–1980 (2015). His inaugural lecture was published as The Gold Coast Moment, and his survey of the Gold Coast Architecture Awards as GC30+.

Ruth Potts completed her PhD at the Queensland University of Technology in early 2015. Her PhD research focused on evaluation of decision-making for natural resource management planning in Far North Queensland. Her PhD was nominated for an outstanding PhD award by both thesis examiners. Ruth’s research interests include governance, natural resource management, planning theory and city identity.

Sacha Reid is a Senior Lecturer in the Griffith Business School, specialising in the areas of real estate, property development and event management. Prior to this role she was the Foundation Research Director for DTZ (Queensland), a global property consultancy full service agency. Her research interests focus around vertical communities, multi-owned properties and high-rise living.

Noel Scott is a Professor in the Griffith Institute for Tourism at Griffith University. His research interests include the study of tourism experiences, destination management and stakeholder organisation. He is a frequent speaker at international academic and industry conferences. He has over 200 academic publications, including 13 books. He has supervised 18 doctoral students to successful completion of their theses. Prior to his academic career, Noel worked as a senior manager at Tourism Queensland and Research and Planning Manager at Suncorp Building Society.

Severine Mayere is a Senior Lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning in the School of Civil Engineering and Built Environment at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Her research interests include comparative urbanisation, land-use planning, and regional planning and governance. Severine holds degrees from the University of Paris-Sorbonne and Florida State University. Prior to joining QUT she held research positions in the United States (Florida State University) and Germany (Technical University Dresden).

Chapter 1

Considering the Gold Coast

Ayşın Dedekorkut-Howes, Caryl Bosman and Andrew Leach

The subtropical, Pacific-edge Gold Coast city-region, abutting the New South Wales border in the Australian state of Queensland, is famous for its sun and surf. Although the country’s sixth most populous city, it is popularly viewed as an overgrown resort town. Its glittering image as a vacation destination – with long stretches of white sandy beaches, a skyline of resort skyscrapers, an enduring legacy of such gimmicks as the gold lamé bikini-clad Meter Maids, and the now century-old figure of the tanned and carefree surfer – dominates representation of the city in policy and publicity alike. Cultural analyst Patricia Wise (2006, p. 185) sums up the general perception of the Gold Coast accurately when she observes:

The city continues to be characterized in the national media as a ‘cultural desert’. Its neighbour, the state capital Brisbane, is represented as having ‘matured’ into a ‘metropolitan centre’ with a ‘vital arts life’ and definable ‘cultural precincts’, like Sydney and Melbourne. But in the Australian cultural imaginary the Gold Coast’s total identification with leisure, popular cultural excess and dispersion is taken to signify a sort of perpetual adolescence. There is no expectation that it will ‘grow up’ into ‘a real city’ where ‘culture’ occurs.

As Grahame Griffin (1998, p. 286) noted nearly two decades ago, ‘the Gold Coast isn’t an easily definable place with a singular identity’. A survey of its caricatures bears this out: Michael Jones borrowed from Noël Coward’s snipe at the French Riviera to describe it as ‘a sunny place for shady people’ (Jones 1986, p. 1); the pages of the Brisbane Sunday Mail cast it as ‘sin city’ (Griffin 1998, p. 285); urban sociologist Patrick Mullins held it as an example of ‘tourism urbanization’ that is physically, demographically, socially, economically and politically distinct from other Australian cities (Mullins 1991); local historian Alexander McRobbie has called it ‘the most heterogeneous region in Australia’ (McRobbie 1991, p. vi); the city’s own Gold Coast Heritage and Character Study has it as ‘the most postmodern of all Australian cities’ (Allom Lovell Marquis-Kyle et al. 1997, p. 4); for sociologist David Holmes the Gold Coast is ‘an urban setting that has already achieved many of the conditions towards which post-industrial urban centres are moving’ (Holmes 2001, p. 179); while for Paul Burton it is a city still in the throes of an urban ‘adolescence’ (Burton 2009, p. 1).

At the same time, with a population of more than half a million people, the Gold Coast is one of the fastest growing cities in Australia, already far larger than some of the state and territory capitals. It is the country’s most populous non-metro city, occupying one of the largest urban areas outside the major state capital conurbations. Thanks to the peculiar history of local government amalgamations in Queensland, it is home to the second most populous local government area (LGA) in Australia. After Sydney, Melbourne and Tropical North Queensland, the Gold Coast is the nation’s fourth most popular destination for international leisure visitors (Tourism Research Australia 2008). It is a substantial and complex city. Economically and socially it is no longer limited to the characteristics of a resort town. A real city has for some time been emerging from behind the glittering façade. More than a mere tourism destination, it is a city with two universities (three, if you extend the Gold Coast across the state border to include Tweed Heads; and more if you include the ‘branch’ campuses of other institutions), an international airport, national sports teams, two major regional hospitals and many other amenities. It is a city that is preparing to host the XXI Commonwealth Games in 2018. Indeed, as sociologist David Holmes (2006) has suggested, the Gold Coast is now looking for the balance within the dual identity of a city and a destination. Robert Stimson and John Minnery have gone further to suggest that the Gold Coast presents at least four different images to the world: ‘a city of leisure; a city of enterprise; a city of tourism; and a city in its own right within the South East Queensland ‘sun-belt’ growth metropolis’ (Stimson and Minnery 1998, p. 196).

This book draws these characterisations of the Gold Coast into conversation with one another, subjecting this city-region to a sustained regard under the multiform lens of urban history. It sets about to unsettle the assumptions with which the Coast is treated out of habit, asking how – from starting points as varied as environmental history, the history of housing and the histories of media and tourism – various factors conspired to make the city of Gold Coast. There is, of course, some basis to the assumptions that commentators bring to any fresh reading of that city, and this book sets about to demonstrate the origins of those assumptions as well as those moments in which they depart from the reality of the situation the Gold Coast describes. To recall the title of an earlier attempt by two of the present authors (Dedekorkut-Howes and Bosman 2011), this book addresses through history ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being Gold Coast’. Through a series of iterations this book examines the historical evolution of the Gold Coast, its urban development, its environment, the structure of its development, urban form and urban systems (including transport), its population and history of population change, its demographic composition and housing, its economy and significant industries, its governance, its image and its opportunities. In these many respects the city can sustain comparison with state and national trends, with the Australian state capital cities and with the nearby city of the Sunshine Coast, which – being the second major tourist settlement in the state of Queensland – shares some of its preconditions while presenting us with a decidedly different urban history.

Historical evolution

A few key observations serve to orientate the reader among the individual contributions that follow. As Jason Byrne and Donna Houston observe in the following chapter, the area now called the Gold Coast has been continuously occupied by members of the Yugambeh peoples, and especially the Kombumerri saltwater people, along with the Wangerriburra, Minjunbal, Gugingin and Numinbah peoples, since around 23 000 BC. Following the British occupation of Sydney in 1788, the southern coast of what became Queensland in 1859 was sighted and surveyed from 1823, the time of John Oxley’s landing at Mermaid Beach, and charted in 1840 by the New South Wales Government. The area of Moreton Bay was drawn by Robert Dixon in 1842. The Gold Coast region witnessed the difficult progression of British settlement from the middle decades of the nineteenth century onwards, with the earliest British settlement, Nerang, surveyed in 1865. While the city would be orientated towards the Pacific by the turn of the twentieth century, the area’s first settlements supported agriculture across the region defined in its westward extension by what Michael Jones (1988) called the Country of Five Rivers. Coolangatta and Tweed Heads (straddling the colonial and then state border) and Southport (to the north of the Nerang River) emerged as the major service towns in the late nineteenth century, supporting inland sugar plantations, logging activity and dairy production (Mullins 1984; Jones 1988).

The first railway line from the colonial capital of Brisbane to Southport (a distance of less than 80 km) was completed in 1889 to support the farming industry. The line also allowed for more democratic access to the beach, thereby encouraging the development of a holiday centre. With the extension of the railway to West Burleigh in 1901 and to Coolangatta–Tweed Heads in 1903, what was then called the ‘South Coast’ in relation to Brisbane began to sustain development as a regional leisure destination (Longhurst 1995). The area was connected to New South Wales and Victoria by rail in 1930. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s most of its visitors were from its immediate neighbours in the south-east corner of Queensland (Prideaux 2004). Increased private motor vehicle ownership complemented rail mobility, and from the mid-1930s onwards automobiles became a popular way to travel to the region from Brisbane or northern New South Wales. The sale of land parcels at Southport, Surfers Paradise and Coolangatta offered many from Brisbane the opportunity to establish second homes on the ‘South Coast’ – an opportunity famously taken up by Queensland’s Governor Sir Anthony Musgrave in 1884, who set an example that was widely followed.

The introduction of passenger air services in 1947 and direct flights from Sydney to Coolangatta in 1956 made the city easily accessible to the national tourism market (Prideaux 2004). Following these developments, and the lifting of the post-war construction restrictions, the large-scale sale of coastal building plots began in earnest from 1952 onwards (Hofmeister 1988). Improvements to the interstate motorways, responding to rising car ownership, described a major change to the way in which visitors were getting to the Gold Coast, and heralded the closure of the Brisbane to Gold Coast rail line in 1964 (Longhurst 1995). In the following decades the attractions and services offered on the Gold Coast developed and diversified to respond to the changing profile of its tourist markets. These markets underwent a major shift from being primarily domestic to primarily international during the 1980s, with direct airline connections from Brisbane to Europe and Asia enabling the city and its beach to become an international tourism destination. The rail link to Brisbane was restored in 1997 (Nightingale 2006), but rather than following the coast as its predecessor once did, the new link followed an inland line parallel to the Pacific Motorway – reflecting as it did the Gold Coast’s emergence as a commuter satellite to the capital.

Between 1934 and 1995, the area administered by what has since 2013 been rebranded as the city of Gold Coast expanded by means of a series of amalgamations, connecting a string of once-independent coastal resort towns, including Labrador, Southport, Surfers Paradise, Burleigh Heads and Coolangatta, and inland settlements, such as Nerang and Mudgeeraba, into a single urban system. In 1958, the South Coast Town Council adopted the informal but more marketable name used widely, if informally, by the local and national media – the Gold Coast. The region was bordered to the north and west by the alluvial plains and hinterland hills of the Albert Shire until March 1995, when the amalgamation of the two LGAs rendered the Gold Coast a ‘super city’ (Stimson and Minnery 1998, p. 199), and the nation’s most populous municipality after Brisbane.

(A technical observation: the contiguous urban area of the Gold Coast region extends beyond the state boundaries to the south and only a street separates the suburb of Coolangatta, which is part of the city of the Gold Coast, from its twin city Tweed Heads in New South Wales. If the Gold Coast is defined as a region rather than an administrative jurisdiction, Tweed Heads is viewed as part of the region. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has recognised the contiguous urban areas of the Gold Coast–Tweed region as a single urban conurbation since 1966.)

Population growth and demographic structure

The trajectory of the Gold Coast’s growth is one of the more astounding episodes in Australia’s demographic history. While the 2011 census confirmed its ranking as Australia’s sixth largest major urban centre (urban area population 557 822, LGA population 494 501: ABS 2013b), it has grown from a few sparsely populated settlements over a large area. In 1933, for instance, the Gold Coast had a population of 6602 (Council of the City of Gold Coast 1969), which had grown more than five-fold in three decades to become 33 716 (including Tweed) in 1961. For more than five decades, the Gold Coast has been one of the fastest growing urban regions in Australia (see Table 1.1), doubling its population between 1954 and 1966, and again between 1966 and 1976, when it passed 100 000 (Mullins 1979). The city registered the largest population growth among all LGAs in Australia with 74 200 additional people reported and an average annual growth rate of 4.8% between 1991 and 1996, during which time Queensland was the country’s fastest growing state or territory (ABS 1997). Since this time, it has consistently registered the second highest growth levels after Brisbane, with an average annual growth rate of 3.6% between 1996 and 2006 (ABS 2007). Despite having a more moderate rate of growth in recent years, in the decade up to 2011 the Gold Coast–Tweed conurbation still topped population growth levels among Australia’s major cities with a 2.8% annual growth rate (see Table 1.2).

While Australian urbanisation tends to differ from that of other Western societies in the concentration of its population in capital cities, Queensland, in turn, tends towards a higher degree of decentralisation (Hofmeister 1988; Mullins 1988). The recent growth of the Gold Coast has been challenging the primacy of the state capital of Brisbane to an extent not experienced by the other Australian capitals, where second cities beyond the immediate conurbation of the capital proper are much smaller and located some distance away. In fact, the Gold Coast is more populous than Canberra, Hobart and Darwin.

From 1991 to 2012 the most prominent population growth in Australia outside the capital cities was along the coastline. Table 1.1 shows that of the 10 largest urban areas in the country, the coastal cities of the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast are the fastest growing. However, this growth might not solely be due to the factors identified by Mullins (1991) as being proper to tourism urbanisation, but rather to a more generalised trend of sunbelt growth, ‘a regional development phenomenon resulting from basic shifts in comparative economic advantage’ (Abbott 1987, p. 8; compare Stimson 1995; Guhathakurta and Stimson 2007). The term ‘sunbelt’ originated in the United States in reference to ‘those South and South-western states that, because of geographic position, enjoy a natural advantage over places in the North’ as opposed to the ‘frostbelt’, and ‘implies that climate is mild, the air clean, and sunshine copious’ (Raitz 1988, p. 14). The concept of sea change (Stimson et al. 1996) reflects the concentration of this migration on coastal communities. Australian sunbelt migration is evident in changes to the rank order of cities and towns in Australia’s national urban hierarchy between 1961 and 2011, and especially from the 1970s onwards (see Fig. 1.1). Within the comparatively faster growth of coastal sunbelt cities – excepting Townsville, which does not have a tourism-based economy – the Gold Coast–Tweed urban area shows the most remarkable rise, from eighteenth place in 1961 to sixth in 2011. With the exception of Darwin, the cities experiencing highest population growth are located in Queensland. The Gold Coast’s growth is consistent with state and nationwide