A history of vision and plans for the transformation of a coastal tourism city into a knowledge city: Australia's Gold Coast

Many coastal mass tourism centres have attempted to reinvent themselves as they have grown from informal coastal towns into large cities. Lifestyle migration boosts urban growth as these cities become home to ‘permanent tourists’ attracted by the characteristics that attract tourism. Australia’s best known resort, the Queensland Gold Coast, provides a case study of a resort region experiencing similar transformations to those noted in Honolulu, Miami and Sitges, Spain. These cities have pursued broader socioeconomic resilience rather than the common strategy of simply expanding or improving their tourism appeal. Using literature review and documentary research, this paper traces how ideas of a ‘knowledge city’ have featured in Gold Coast planning history since the 1980s, through proposals including an ‘innovation corridor’, ‘research triangle’, a designated knowledge precinct and the development of universities and hospitals under plans and strategies for economic development. Although implementation has been sporadic, the case study demonstrates a continuity in narrative that has shaped outcomes towards the desired ‘knowledge city’, thereby creating a more cohesive urban structure integrating knowledge nodes, town centres and urban transport infrastructure investments. This case study will add knowledge to inform planners grappling with the transformation of similar coastal tourism areas into significant cities

The Changing Child Population of the United States: Analysis of Data From the 2010 Census

Provides an overview of 2000-10 trends in the U.S. child population, including rate of growth compared with previous decades, changes in the share of Latino and racial minority populations, and changes at the state level and in large cities

Stories matter

Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS), http://storytelling.concordia.ca, is currently developing new oral history database software, entitled Stories Matter. As Michael Frisch notes, “[the] Deep Dark Secret of oral history is that nobody spends much time listening to or watching recorded and collected interview documents.”Instead, oral historians tend to privilege transcripts over voices, losing the meanings inherent in their interviews. By returning the orality to oral history, Stories Matter will make it possible for oral historians to engage with their interviews and their collections in a more holistic way

Mobile Agents for Mobile Tourists: A User Evaluation of Gulliver's Genie

How mobile computing applications and services may be best designed, implemented and deployed remains the subject of much research. One alternative approach to developing software for mobile users that is receiving increasing attention from the research community is that of one based on intelligent agents. Recent advances in mobile computing technology have made such an approach feasible. We present an overview of the design and implementation of an archetypical mobile computing application, namely that of an electronic tourist guide. This guide is unique in that it comprises a suite of intelligent agents that conform to the strong intentional stance. However, the focus of this paper is primarily concerned with the results of detailed user evaluations conducted on this system. Within the literature, comprehensive evaluations of mobile context-sensitive systems are sparse and therefore, this paper seeks, in part, to address this deficiency