Abstract: Licensed clubs (or registered clubs as they are formally known in some states) are a poorly understood organisational phenomenon within the leisure, community, and economic geographies of Australia’s cities. This paper accordingly seeks to better conceptualise these clubs as a diverse category of organisation, emerging and changing with the unfolding of Australian urban life. Following some preliminary description, licensed clubs are generally theorised as hybrids, located between the spheres of ‘the economy’ and ‘community’. The paper then specifically observes public attitudes towards clubs, and develops a typology of the organisational behaviours of local clubs in the context of a particular Australian city – Canberra. In analysing this material, it is noted that the sometimes ambiguous organisational behaviours of clubs, given competing commercial and community demands, can pose challenges for urban governance practice. However, in doing so it is emphasised that this very ambiguity may imply that clubs deserve to be seen within contemporary public debates neither simplistically as ‘mini-casinos’, nor as bastions of ‘a community way of life’, as their detractors and defenders respectively suggest, but in their own distinct terms.