Dearth of gold in quiet conurbation (7)
I believe the answer is:
paucity
'dearth' is the definition.
(I know that dearth can be written as paucity)
'gold in quiet conurbation' is the wordplay.
'gold' becomes 'Au' (Au is the chemical symbol for gold).
'in' means one lot of letters goes inside another.
'quiet' becomes 'p' (music symbol for 'piano', ie soft or quiet).
'conurbation' becomes 'city' (I've seen this before).
'p'+'city'='pcity'
'au' placed within 'pcity' is 'PAUCITY'.
'of' is the link.
(Other definitions for paucity that I've seen before include "Insufficiency, dearth" , "deficiency" , "Shortage" , "Poverty" , "Dearth, scarcity" .)