Urban waterfronts are liminal zones of heightened sensory experience, particularly haptic experiences: the immediate bodily experiences of touch, proprioception and kinaesthesia (body position and movement). Such experiences are generated through direct contact with natural and built environments, strongly mediated by cultural and historical meanings, and they are crucial to forming physical and emotional understandings of...

It is the purpose of this paper to engage with the challenge of interpreting situations and events in history so that they can be realized as forms of ‘mediated products’. The process and action of mediation has more to do with the ‘domestication’ of ‘the spoils of history’ (Lowenthal, 1996), and the transformation of those...

Development conflicts can emerge as a result of different meanings, values and attachments to places. This paper will review the on–going (2005–2013) development conflict on the Southport Spit, one of the last significant undeveloped public green spaces on the Gold Coast. Our aim is to examine how competing place values have been constructed over time...

The nature of what constitutes a ‘good life’, or at least a better life than that on offer, is varied and contentious. This paper focuses on two historical examples of the search for a good life in Queensland in which the mechanisms involved were the creation of locally innovative forms of settlement.

Around the world coastal areas are witnessing dramatic changes due to the consequences of the growth of human settlements. Rapid urban expansion in coastal settlements due to ‘life style migration’ impacts negatively on environmental coastal amenities that are the driving factor behind the attraction of these areas. The Victorian Coast in Australia is under stress...