Entrepreneurial Approaches to Urban Decline: The Honeysuckle Redevelopment in Inner Newcastle, New South Wales

Abstract

Global changes in production and consumption, and the resulting competition between places for investment flows, have encouraged the emergence of the 'entrepreneurial state'. This paper focuses on the Honeysuckle redevelopment in Newcastle, New South Wales. This case study of active entrepreneurialism, aimed at promoting Newcastle's interurban competitiveness through material and symbolic reconstructions, reveals the changes wrought by an entrepreneurial approach to the style and content of city government and politics. The Honeysuckle Development Corporation operates at the juncture between federal, state, and local government engagement with capital in the attempt to address the local impacts of economic restructuring. It provides an important case study of the shifting parameters of the relationship between various tiers of the state, and between these tiers and the interests of capital in contemporary urban redevelopment. It also addresses the problematic questions of sustainability, accountability, and equity in urban entrepreneurialism, while providing a long-overdue empirical study of Newcastle.

Shedding New Light on Adelaide? Intersections between Urban Design Projects and City Marketing

“…Dunn et al, 1995;McGuirk et al, 1996;Winchester et al, 1996;Rofe, 2004). Research into Newcastle's revitalization reveals the complex and contested nature of landscape.…”

The Virtuous Discourses of Private Communities

“…However, it is likely that local authority support for private communities is also influenced by dominant perceptions on the state of public order, stability and perceived advantages of market driven service provision (neo‐liberalism). Neo‐liberalism, in the guise of ‘entrepreneurial urban governance’ has been identified throughout municipal operations (Hubbard and Hall 1998; McGuirk et al 1996). Of course, democratic, inclusionary, and even socialist, principles are similarly endemic in local government (McGuirk 2005; Owen 2002).…”

Constructing the Port: External Perceptions and Interventions in the Making of Place in Port Adelaide, South Australia

“…Similarly, the Port came to be characterised by rising unemployment as industry closures and relocations rendered the Port increasingly derelict. However, while local and state governments rapidly established entrepreneurial partnerships with private industry in order to transform Newcastle from ‘problem’ to ‘promise city’ (McGuirk et al , 1996; Rofe, 2004), the political will to re‐invigorate Port Adelaide through encouraging new economic activity was, until recently, lacking.…”

“…Allied to this theoretical context are a number of important papers that critically analyse the complexity of landscapes in transition and the economic and social narratives they both embody and communicate. Here the works of Dunn et al (1995) on the changing identity of Newcastle are most instructive (see also McGuirk et al , 1996; Winchester et al , 1996a; 1996b; Rofe, 2004). Tracing the changing nature and fortunes of Newcastle longitudinally, Winchester et al , (1996b, 75) reveal Newcastle to be a city ‘... redolent with images’.…”