Living it up in the ‘new world city’: high-rise development and the promise of liveability

The growth of high-rise developments raises questions about how the emotional and social leisurescape of the city is evoked, produced and represented. In this article, we examine how advertising images and texts promoting new high-rise developments produce notions of ‘liveability’ through the depiction of idealized spatial experiences that typify urban leisure lifestyles. The focus of our analysis is three high-rise developments in Brisbane, a self-proclaimed ‘New World City’, and the capital of Queensland in Australia's northeast. We identify how marketing images evoke particular emotions to construct desirable relationships between consumers, domestic space and urban leisurescapes. Our analysis revealed social tensions between different constructions of the liveable city and the implications for leisure planning. While Brisbane City Council sought to be inclusive in its planning for urban liveability, developers imagined urban renewal projects through exclusive lifestyle practices and normalized consumer identities (white, middle class, heterosexual, without children).