Boomtown

Sitting next to the Great Barrier Reef, marinated in coal and gas, the industrial boomtown of Gladstone, Australia embodies many of the contradictions of the ''overheated'' world: prosperous yet polluted; growing and developing yet always on the precipice of uncertainty.

Capturing Gladstone at the peak of its accelerated growth in 2013-14, Thomas Hylland Eriksen dissects the boomtown phenomenon in ...