Commentary: The Gold Coast Health and Knowledge Precinct

A key concern for all cities and governments hosting major, facility-intensive sporting events is, ‘What happens after the party?’ This question has both a practical and a societal context, and it spawns the inevitable additional inquiries: Will we get a return on our investment? Will the infrastructure have ongoing use?Will the changes that the investment brings to the city be the ones we intended? Will people thank us for committing the city and the state to the adventure after the exhilaration of contest has subsided and the metaphorical dust has settled? Some of the answers are easy to determine: ongoing use of sporting facilities is a clearly dened metric, as are visitor intensity and revenue generation associated with those events. Similarly, transport infrastructure use and value can be readily assessed in terms of revenues, passenger movements and levels of public participation, and such judgements of success based on hard numbers can readily be drawn. Longer-term effects, such as perceptions of improvements in liveability and urban utility, social wellbeing and cohesion, are softer edged and take longer to emerge, but seem to fold themselves into city narratives in the wake of well-run and successful events, in a largely positive way. But what would happen if one of the planned legacy outcomes was to attempt to fundamentally change the face of the business and industry prole of the city? This is exactly the grand thinking behind the legacy opportunity of the Gold Coast Health and Knowledge Precinct (GCHKP).