ABSTRACT
The range of projects outlined in earlier chapters is linked by the kilometre-long stretch of Southbank promenade extending from the Arts Centre to the Exhibition Centre. This promenade has been designed as a postmodern riverscape of urban spectacle, where a spontaneous and playful urban life is simulated, choreographed and passively consumed. The transformation has succeeded in attracting high densities of people. Both the SouthGate and Crown Casino projects were launched with a spirit of festivity and carnival. They each created a waterfront lined with scheduled entertainment venues and saturated with choreographed street theatre, public artworks and illusory soundscapes, intended to attract a well-heeled clientele and to frame leisure within a context of consumption. The riverscape has been designed as a contrived form of permanent carnival, filled with representations of excess and release. Yet the practice of liberation is largely reduced to a spectacle that stimulates the senses of a passive body. The urban design serves an instrumental function: feeding the Dionysian desires that the city awakens, and channelling them into consumption and carefully managed forms of play. Yet this riverscape is in reality much more complex and interesting than such a view would suggest. These commodifications of place experience also have their paradoxes: they create conditions for spontaneous, unexpected and resistant activities. This chapter will explore this landscape of desire through a series of dialectic tensions and movements, where new forms of genuine urban life emerge in the form of play and politics. The new spectacle of global waterfront projects is at once superficial and ersatz, yet also becomes the site of authentic local practices. Southbank's success in stimulating desires also gives rise to the genuine abandon of the carnival. And, to the extent that the riverscape is a rule-bound interdictory landscape, it also produces a dialectic tension between authority and resistance. The urban riverscape is rendered more authentic by the ways in which the spontaneity of play and politics cuts through the pre-packaged spectacle.
