Discourses of Risk: buying into 'the good life'

Abstract

Histories of the Gold Coast depict rapidly changing landscapes, partly because it is a neoliberal city and partly because land, and in particular residential land, is limited. The Gold Coast population continues to grow with the majority of people continuing to migrate from within the eastern states of Australia. The difference between the migration cohorts of the 50s through to the 80s and the current cohorts is significant. The early years saw entrepreneurial, professional and business cohorts swell; currently it is Baby Boomers moving to the Gold Coast to retire and the 20-25 cohorts seeking part-time work, mainly in the tourist and hospitality industries. A land shortage coupled with high population growth and climate change factors has significant impacts for individuals, communities, populations, the local, state and federal economies and the Government. I am particularly interested in the physical and social transformations evidenced in the residential landscapes of the Gold Coast City in the first decade of the 2000s, specifically in relation to the production of the ‘good life’ in Active Adult Lifestyle Communities (AALC). AALC are planned, designed, developed and marketed to a targeted and limited cohort and these estates embody very particular and specific ideas of ‘the good life’ and in particular concepts of place. The development of AALC are premised on risk minimisation. Yet, they produce other risks. These other risks produce landscapes that are vulnerable to economic, social, cultural, temporal, political and environmental change. Discourses of risk are concerned with producing normality and order (dichotomised by abnormality and chaos) to establish a holistic (dichotomised by fragmented) sense of self. The obsession with normality and order (and therefore certainty) and wholeness, in opposition to abnormality and chaos (and therefore uncertainty) and fragmentation, has been with us for many years, and is particularly prominent in times of rapid and macro scale change. Perhaps Ferdinand Tonnies concepts of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft marks one of the significant points in discourses of change and the risks attached to the processes of change.