Transforming the Tourist City into a Knowledge and Healthy City: Reinventing Australia’s Gold Coast

The Gold Coast has rapidly evolved into a major tourist consumption city, prompting the Gold Coast City Council to pursue economic and cultural diversification through knowledge‑based urban development and healthy‑city initiatives. This paper reviews the policies, projects and programs underpinning this transformation, drawing on documentary analysis and spatial assessment of major and emerging knowledge and health nodes. It highlights the opportunities and challenges of applying knowledge‑city principles in a smaller, non‑metropolitan context and emphasises the value of integrating active‑transport networks and smaller distributed nodes to support long‑term urban sustainability. The findings offer practical insights for the Gold Coast and other tourism‑dependent cities seeking to transition toward more resilient, knowledge‑driven and health‑supportive urban futures.