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

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.