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The urban riverfront of Melbourne, Australia, has been transformed over the past 20 years into a popular leisure precinct known as Southbank. This is a postmodern landscape of contrived spectacle, where playful urban life is simulated, choreographed and consumed. Yet it is also the site of many forms of unplanned and unstructured activity. This paper explores the complex uses and meanings which can develop around such a waterfront, and outlines three dialectics which reveal how many new kinds of public life emerge within it. New tensions between global and local, politics and play, representation and embodied action lead to a rethinking of both formularized waterfronts and urban design theories.
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Stevens et al. (2004) studied this question.
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