Tourist utopias: biopolitics and the genealogy of the post-world tourist city

Abstract

This review article locates urban tourism research within contemporary debates of critical urban studies. The review describes and analyses an emergent urban form – the “tourist utopia” – by focusing on the paradigmatic examples of Las Vegas, Dubai, and Macau. Though culturally, historically, and geographically distinct, these tourist cities share a set of characteristics which foreshadow more general global urban transformations. These characteristics include their juridical status as enclave “spaces of exception” within larger states; transnational investment regimes; public–private partnerships; transient multi-national populations; superlative and iconic architecture; and economies devoted to shopping, gambling, sightseeing, spectacle, and amusement. I explore the way each of these tourist cities functions as a metropolitan laboratory of urban futures and analyse them in terms of relationships among post-Fordist regimes of labour and consumption, themed environments and scripted experiences, mobilities of tourists and workers, and novel forms of sovereignty. The review highlights, in the tradition of the world city hypothesis, seven characteristics of these paradigmatic cities that are increasingly common to many global cities today; and speculates about the dialectic of dystopian and utopian valences in their post-world city futures. More generally, it introduces concepts from urban theory which may be relevant to research on tourism.

Keywords:

• enclave
• neoliberal
• world city
• immaterial labour
• sovereignty
• mobility
• utopia

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the University of Macau Research Committee [RG031/08-09S/TS/FSH]. The article was written when the author was a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore, and an earlier version appeared in the ARI Working Paper Series [WPS 177, 2012]. The article benefitted significantly from critical feedback from scholars in and around ARI, including Chua Beng Huat, Tim Bunnell, Michael Feener, Ola Soderstrom, James Sidaway, and Laavanya Kathiravelu. Tony Schirato made helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper. Some of the ideas were presented at a conference organized by Middlesex University Dubai, November 2011, and as a plenary lecture at the Pearl River Delta Graduate Conference, University of Macau, February 2012.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The economies of Las Vegas and Macau are almost completely reliant on tourist dollars, whereas Dubai leverages tourism to diversify its economy and decrease its dependence on transfers of oil rent from Abu Dhabi.

2. Extant literature includes Judd and Fainstein (1999), Li and Bihu (2013), Maitland and Newman (2014), Selby (2004), and Spirou (2011).

3. For a competing view, see Judd (2003).

4. While Dubai and Abu Dhabi share visible similarities, they also have “very distinct development strategies” and “markedly different roles within … the UAE federation and within the international system” (Davidson, 2007, p. 34). However, as with Las Vegas in the USA, or Macau within Southeast Asia, characteristics which initially were indicative of Dubai's exceptional status are increasingly normalized across the UAE and the region.

5. “Ong's focus on production also leaves those enclave spaces oriented towards consumption (such as enclaved tourist resorts) largely outside her vision” (Sidaway, 2007, p. 334).

6. On enclavic tourism, see Edensor (2000, 2001) and Hailey (2009).

7. The characterization “post-world” is similar to what Chaplin and Holding (2002) call the “post-urban”, referring to the examples of Las Vegas, New York's Disneyfied Times Square, and City Walk in Los Angeles. “Post-urban” implies that “the urban has entered into a critical self-aware stage, both historically and conceptually, with regard to the marketable status of the image of the city” (p. 185). This self-consciousness has emerged “largely through the actions of marketing executives, brand managers, political strategists, tourist board directors and financial analysts” who play an increasingly important role in urban development (p. 185).

8. In a quite different, but equally instructive, example of pedagogical tourist enclaves, Graham (2012) describes an archipelago of third-world themed urban sites, mostly located in the USA, a “shadow world urban system” (p. 93) of simulated cities that American soldiers visit as “tourists” to rehearse future foreign military engagements and anti-terrorist operations.

9. Arrighi (2010) contends that financialization is not a new stage of capitalism, but a recurrent phenomenon that has occurred in the “autumn” of each previous “long century” of capitalist accumulation, and indicates the coming displacement of the global economic hegemon by a new regime.

10. I have resided for more than a decade in Macau, and experienced first-hand the city's transformation from economically depressed colonial backwater to global gaming paradise. In addition, I have made numerous trips to Las Vegas, and two week-long research trips to Dubai, to study iconic and themed resort architecture in both locales.

11. “ … Une idée neuve en Europe”, Situationist statement published in Potlatch (1954), quoted in de Cauter (2005) (p. 57).

12. This exercise is also consistent with Lefebvre's method of “transduction” and utopian reflection on “the possible” (Lefebvre, 1996, pp. 147–159; see also Coleman, 2013; Pinder, 2013).

13. Jameson (2009) demonstrates this method via a utopian interpretation of Walmart, “the purest expression of that dynamic of capitalism which devours itself, which abolishes the market by means of the market itself” (p. 421).

14. Abandoned theme parks, shopping malls, and even entire cities in China perhaps provide a glimpse of what that world might look like (Lam, 2014).