Tourist Utopias: Offshore Islands, Enclave Spaces, and Mobile Imaginaries 9789048527014

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Prolegomenon
1. Mapping Tourist Utopias
2. The Zone Is on Vacation
Enclaves
3. Instant Cities in the Jungle
4 After Utopia
5. Choreographing Singapore’s Utopia by the Bay
6. Cultural Utopia
Imaginaries
7. Disney’s Utopian Techno-Futures
8. Tourism and a Virtual Bulgaria
9. Sublimity, Sovereignty, and Sophistry
10. Macau Utopics
Archipelagoes
11. From Dubai to Mount Athos
About the Authors
Index

Citation preview

Tourist Utopias

New Mobilities in Asia In the 21st century, human mobility will increasingly have an Asian face. Migration from, to, and within Asia is not new, but it is undergoing profound transformations. Unskilled labour migration from the Philippines, China, India, Burma, Indonesia, and Central Asia to the West, the Gulf, Russia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand continues apace. Yet industrialization in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and India, the opening of Burma, and urbanization in China is creating massive new flows of internal migration. China is fast becoming a magnet for international migration from Asia and beyond.  Meanwhile, Asian students top study-abroad charts; Chinese and Indian managers and technicians are becoming a new mobile global elite as foreign investment from those countries grows; and Asian tourists are fast becoming the biggest travellers and the biggest spenders, both in their own countries and abroad. These new mobilities reflect deep-going transformations of Asian societies and their relationship to the world, impacting national identities and creating new migration policy regimes, modes of transnational politics, consumption practices, and ideas of modernity. The series will, for the first time, bring together studies by historians, anthropologists, geographers, and political scientists that systematically explore these changes. Series Editor Pál Nyíri, VU University, Amsterdam Editorial Board Joy Hendry, Oxford Brookes University Johan Lindquist, Stockholm University Tim Oakes, University of Colorado, Boulder Aihwa Ong, University of California, Berkeley Tim Winter, Deakin University Xiang Biao, Oxford University

Tourist Utopias Offshore Islands, Enclave Spaces, and Mobile Imaginaries

Edited by Tim Simpson

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Zeus sculpture located in the lobby of the Greek Mythology Casino, Imperial Palace Hotel, Macau Photograph by Adam Lampton, used by permission Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 90 8964 847 1 e-isbn 978 90 4852 701 4 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789089648471 nur 761 © Tim Simpson / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 9

Prolegomenon 1 Mapping Tourist Utopias

13

2 The Zone Is on Vacation

43

Tim Simpson

Keller Easterling

Enclaves 3 Instant Cities in the Jungle

55

4 After Utopia

75

5 Choreographing Singapore’s Utopia by the Bay

97

Fantasies of Modernity for Whom? Pál Nyíri

Post-Colonial Macau and Post-Socialist Chinese Tourists Tim Simpson

Daniel P.S. Goh

6 Cultural Utopia

Abu Dhabi’s Island of Happiness and the Development of a Cultural Enclave Yasser Elsheshtawy

121

Imaginaries 7 Disney’s Utopian Techno-Futures

Tomorrow’s World That We Shall Build Today Angela Ndalianis

143

8 Tourism and a Virtual Bulgaria

167

9 Sublimity, Sovereignty, and Sophistry

189

10 Macau Utopics

211

Benjamin Kidder Hodges

The Trouble in Middle-earth Margaret Werry

A Photo Essay Adam Lampton

Archipelagoes 11 From Dubai to Mount Athos

219

About the Authors

239

Carving Islands of Fear and Hope Veronica della Dora

Index 243

List of figures Figure 1.1

Faux Venice cityscape and indoor canal at the Venetian Macau resort

Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 2.4

Mexican maquiladora 44 Dubai zone aggregate 46 Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, India 47 Nova Cidade de Kilamba, Angola 51

Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3

A row of condos in Boten Golden City Abandoned shops at Boten The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, seen from the Thai side of the Mekong

36

58 60 62

Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2

Tourists enjoying the controlled risk of the skywalk at the Macau Tower, which also offers the world’s highest bungee jump Tourists taking selfies on the steps of Macau’s Ruins of St. Paul’s The choreography of utopia by the bay The spectacular consumption of the Bay at a National Day Parade dress rehearsal, 2013

88 93 109 114

Figure 6.1A Saadiyat Island as it appeared in 2010; sea barrier walls have been placed for both the Guggenheim and the Louvre in preparation for construction 123 Figure 6.1B Saadiyat Island as it appears a 2014 satellite image 124 Figure 6.2 Scaled models of Saadiyat Island showing how both museums may appear once completed 127 Figure 6.3 Exhibit showing the completed Saadiyat Island development 128 Figure 6.4 The Louvre Abu Dhabi emerging from the desert with the luxurious St. Regis Resort in the foreground, January 2015 132 Figure 7.1 Figure 7.2 Figure 7.3 Figure 7.4 Figure 7.5

The 18-meter/59-feet-tall RX-78 Gundam mecha-robot at the entrance way of Aqua City, Odaiba Bel Geddes’ Futurama ‘Highways and Horizons’ exhibit sponsored by General Motors for the New York World’s Fair of 1939-1940 Julian Krupa’s vision of ‘Cities of Tomorrow’ in the August 1939 issue of Amazing Stories Walt Disney presenting a map of EPCOT on the Wonderful World of Disney View of the transportation center below the urban center of E.P.C.O.T. Design by Herbert Ryman, 1965

146 150 152 158 160

Figure 8.1

Tsar Samuel statue by Alexander Haitov, Sofia, Bulgaria, c. June 2015

170

Figure 9.1

New Zealand film workers protest the union ‘boycott’ of The Hobbit, October 2010

200

Figure 10.1 ‘There is no more outside’: Joana Vasconcelos Valkyrie Octopus installation, mounted above cylindrical aquarium, inside the atrium of the MGM Macau Figure 10.2 The multitude? Tourists on red carpet in the lobby of Broadway Macau Figure 10.3 Tourist posing in front of the Fortune Diamond fountain at the Galaxy Resort Figure 10.4 The Venetian Macau’s Grand Hall and escalator, with faux ceiling fresco Figure 10.5 Hotel corridor labyrinth at Venetian Macau Resort Figure 10.6 Eiffel Tower under construction, Parisian Macau resort, c. June 2015 Figure 11.1 Figure 11.2 Figure 11.3 Figure 11.4

211 212 213 214 215 216

View of the western slope of Mount Athos 219 Palm Jumeirah 220 Aerial view of Docheiariou Monastery, Mount Athos 222 The peninsula of Mount Athos photographed from the ISS 223 Figure 11.5 Dubai’s artificial islands 225 Figure 11.6 Showcase island in ‘The World’, Dubai 225 Figure 11.7 Mount Athos portrayed as an island in Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s Liber Insularum Archipelagi, dating from c. 1430 228

Acknowledgements This project originated with research I conducted for an article comparing the tourist cities of Las Vegas, Dubai, and Macau, and pondering their relevance for understanding global urbanization. I wrote the article during a sabbatical leave from the University of Macau, when I was a visiting research fellow in the ‘Asian Urbanisms’ cluster at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. ARI offers a fantastic research environment, and I am grateful to Tim Bunnell and Chua Beng Huat for providing me with the ARI fellowship opportunity. An initial version of that article appeared in the ARI Working Paper series, and the final version was published as a review article in the journal Current Issues in Tourism. Most of the chapters in this volume started as papers prepared for a subsequent workshop on the subject of ‘tourist utopias’ held in Macau in April 2013. The workshop proposal was initially supported by Martin Montgomery and Yufan Hao (who at the time served, respectively, as head of the Department of Communication and dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Macau); and funding to conduct the workshop was approved by the University of Macau Research and Development Administration Office (RDAO). I would like to thank Rui Martins, UM vice rector of research, and Cindy Lam, head of the RDAO, for their support for the project. Edith Mok provided valuable administrative assistance for the workshop planning. The workshop was also generously supported by contributions from three prominent local operators in Macau’s gaming industry: Neptune Group Ltd., MGM China, and Galaxy Entertainment Group. I would like to personally thank Nick Niglio, Executive Director and CEO of Neptune Group; Grant Bowie, Executive Director and CEO of MGM China; and Buddy Lam Chi Seng, Executive Vice President of Public Relations, Galaxy Entertainment Group, for their support. This generosity proved invaluable for the participants’ ability to understand the inner workings of Macau’s gaming and tourism business, and no doubt contributed significantly to the quality of the chapters that follow. Tony Schirato has been instrumental in ensuring that the book is finally published, and his encouragement and advice is greatly appreciated. Finally, I am grateful for Pál Nyíri’s original support for the book project, and the helpful guidance provided by Saskia Geiling and her colleagues at Amsterdam University Press.

Prolegomenon

1

Mapping Tourist Utopias Tim Simpson Vacations remain one of the few manageable utopias in our lives. – Orvar Löfgren (1999: 7)

Orvar Löfgren’s characterization of vacations as ‘manageable utopias’ appears in his social history of tourism, in which he explores the emergence, beginning in the eighteenth century, of the peculiar tourist subject who has come to occupy such a central place in contemporary society and culture. Löfgren cautions that the attitudes, behaviors, and objectives typical of tourism today should not be taken for granted; rather, he argues that modern individuals had to self-consciously learn how to be tourists. This pedagogical process was a product of their practical experiments and engagements with potential tourist sites and recreational behaviors. The first such excursionists were men of leisure, for whom tourism was a serious intellectual and aesthetic pursuit: for them, the natural world revealed itself as a potent array of sublime sensations and picturesque, transformative experiences, at least for those who knew how to discover and appreciate those sights. By the nineteenth century, however, a general consensus had emerged that the pursuit of leisure should not be restricted by social class, but rather should serve as a universally available counterpart to, and compensation for, labor. As a result, tourist sites and their accompanying infrastructures reproduced exponentially. Compared with the increasingly arduous and alienating world of industrial work, the solitary visit to the Alps or Catskills, or the annual family trip to a Mediterranean beach or urban amusement park, had a palpable Arcadian quality which set it apart and constituted an escape from the daily grind. These efforts engendered and eventually naturalized what we might call a touristic subjectivity, predicated upon what Löfgren calls the ‘mindscape of modern tourism’ (73). Today this mindscape has evolved into a fullyrealized global tourist imaginary, which has itself recently become an object of study in the social sciences (Appadurai 1996; Crouch et al. 2005; Inglis 2000; Lean et al. 2015; Salazar 2010, 2012; Salazar and Graburn 2014b). This book takes seriously Löfgren’s playful suggestion that tourism has a utopian quality. However, the contributors look beyond specific tourists or their individual vacation practices in order to explore the spatial production of contemporary spectacular tourist sites. I have chosen to call these places

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tourist utopias for reasons that will be explained and developed here, and in more detail in the chapters that follow. The goal is to analyze the manner in which this utopian quality of travel, which first appeared in an industrial era, is intensified and commodified under a global post-industrial regime which has transformed the nature of labor, the temporality of work and leisure, and the very form of capital itself.

Asian Tourist Mobilities Mobilities has become a new code word for grasping the global. – Aihwa Ong (2006: 121)

These changes are particularly evident across Asia, which is the site of spectacular tourism development today, and the contributors to this book share a general focus on the region and its perimeter environs: from Byzantium to Oceania, Disney to Hollywood. Indeed, the aim is not to contain ‘the ambiguous nomenclature, “Asia”‘ (Roy 2011: 309), but to draw inspiration from the region’s kinetic dynamism and aspirations. As we will see, the fecund varieties of developmental, and post-developmental, state capitalism found across the continent today are unleashing an increasingly affluent and mobile population, with planetary reverberations. These new flows of Asian subjects and capital, coupled with the enhanced expectations engendered by emerging consumer desires, are transforming tourist sites as far afield as Eastern and Western Europe, the post-Soviet states, and Australasia. In the People’s Republic of China alone, domestic rural-tourban migration constitutes the largest movement of people in human history (Walker and Buck 2007). But even that exodus is being surpassed by the cross-border tourism of tens of millions of post-socialist Chinese citizens anxious to make up for a half century of scarcity and isolation. Their nascent travels animate the tourist imaginary and drive the global tourism industry today. The tourist locales explored in this book range from gritty Chinesefinanced ‘instant cities’ emerging in special economic zones carved from the jungles of Laos, to Singapore’s glittering waterfront Marina Bay total tourism environment; from Macau’s Venetian- and Parisian-themed casino megaresorts, to Abu Dhabi’s ‘island of happiness’, the site of a new Guggenheim Museum and Arabian Louvre; from Walt Disney’s experimental themed utopian urban prototype, to Bulgarian-designed video game sites that deploy motifs mined from the post-socialist urban landscape; from the

Mapping Tourist Utopias

15

sublime natural site of Aotearoa New Zealand, the rural setting for Middle-­ earth in the blockbuster Lord of the Rings trilogy, to the profane fabrications of Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah island. These sites offer a wide range of attractions: fine art exhibitions and wild-game dining, pristine enclosed tropical gardens and cigarette smoke-encircled baccarat tables, state-of-the-art Ferris wheels and old-fashioned sex tourism. The proliferation of such sites is no accident or arbitrary development. Though they share characteristics common to the touristic landscapes formed over the preceding two centuries, they are in other ways definitive products of our contemporary regime. These sites serve inadvertently as laboratories for experimental forms of governance, innovations in architecture and design, and the production of post-Fordist modes of subjectivity. While they certainly reproduce the inequities of global capitalism, they also harbor a palpable utopian affectation, which motivates the contributions that constitute this book.

Why Utopia? The premise here is then that the most noxious phenomena can serve as the repository and hiding place for all kinds of unsuspected wish-fulfillments and Utopian gratifications. – Fredric Jameson (2009: 415-416)

Sir Thomas More’s classic work Utopia, celebrating its 500-year anniversary in 2016, inaugurated a formative genre of literary and philosophical imagination, as well as inadvertently emboldening a variety of visionary political schemes that have aimed to construct perfect worlds. While the title of this volume indicates that Utopia is one important inspiration for this work, even a cursory review of the chapters herein should reveal that this book is not really concerned with Utopias per se, at least not those that deserve a capital ‘U’. Indeed, the sites analyzed in this volume might easily be dismissed as dystopian ‘evil paradises’ (Davis and Monk 2007) for the manner in which vast resources are deployed to benefit a few at the expense of many others, with often devastating social and environmental consequences. Billions of dollars have been squandered to construct Ibn Battuta-themed shopping malls, five-star Armani hotels, verdant desert golf courses, and exquisitely baroque casino resorts. Hidden beneath these gilded facades lie the ugly realities of resource depravation, labor exploitation, and cultural and economic dispossession, all of which belie their utopian status.

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Asia was the site of some of the twentieth century’s boldest utopian experiments. As a political telos, however, utopia has lost its luster. From the fanaticism of the Cultural Revolution, to the genocidal legacy of the Khmer Rouge, there are sufficient human tragedies to convince of the practical futility of utopian schemes. Forsaken utopian ruins continue to crumble around us, evidenced by the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc, the apostasy of China’s ‘market socialism’, and the ongoing radical transformations of peripheral communist states such as Laos and Vietnam. These developments seemingly announce the abandonment of the grand (leftist) utopian ambitions that animated the twentieth century: they have been replaced by the doxa of neoliberal ideology, which places our collective future in the precarious grasp of atomistic enterprising individuals and the ‘invisible hand’ of the unregulated market. In this increasingly Darwinian social world the tourist holiday may indeed be the only remaining ‘manageable utopia’.

Utopic Practice Distinguishing between utopia and utopic practice is the only way to arrive at a theory of utopia. – Louis Marin (1984: 196)

None of the contributors to this book claim to have discovered a pristine secluded beach, an uncharted desert island, or a secretive Shangri-La. But this volume joins a robust conversation that attempts to rescue some value from what might otherwise seem to be a thoroughly discredited concept (Gordin et al. 2010; Jacobsen and Tester 2012; Jameson 2005, 2009; Levitas 2013; Pinder 2005, 2013; Sargisson 2012; Tally 2013). What unites the contributors to this book is not so much their focus on realizable utopias, but rather an interest in utopic spatial play. Fredric Jameson, arguably the most prolific and influential contemporary voice of utopianism, poses utopia as a critical method rather than a mode of representation, ‘an operation calculated to disclose the limits of our own imagination of the future’ (Jameson 2009: 413). From this perspective, the shared interest in this volume is in the spatial play of utopia that animates the contemporary tourist spectacle, a process that Louis Marin (1984) refers to as utopics. Marin’s imaginative deconstructive reading of More’s text focuses on his understanding of utopia as a ‘poetic object’ (102), or ‘discursive organization of space’ (113), rather than an actual

Mapping Tourist Utopias

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place. His analysis is grounded in the discursive contradiction that More created with the clever play on Greek words that forms the title of his work. A conflation of both eu-topia and ou-topia, utopia is simultaneously both a good place and a non-place. Marin refers to this conceptual differance as the ‘neutral’. While More’s satirical work functions as a social critique, Marin characterizes it as a paradoxical ‘ideological critique of ideology’ (195), primarily because of its self-contained mode of literary production and lack of methodological transparency; that is, ‘[i]t does not produce the theory of its own production’ (196). For Marin, the importance of More’s book is not that it articulates a theory of utopia, or some program by which one might be realized; rather, as a discursive event it created the very conditions of possibility for utopics, or the ‘spatial play on the theme of utopia’ (Hetherington 1997: 11). It is this utopic spatial play, and not some overarching utopian program, which enlivens the production of the tourist sites explored in this book. These tourist utopias reveal both the unconscious social desires that are materialized in these spaces, as well as our spectacular failure to bring about their realization.

Heterotopia The spatiality of modernity, related to its processes of social ordering, often involves the idea of utopia but not the creation of utopias in themselves. – Kevin Hetherington (1997: 56)

As sites of utopic spatial play, the tourist destinations studied herein share some characteristics with those spaces that Michel Foucault (1986) referred to as heterotopia. Unlike utopias, or ‘sites with no real place’ (24), heterotopia are actually-existing spatial ‘counter-sites’, such as the carnival, brothel, or Persian garden, in which ‘all the other sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (24). In his inchoate ‘heterotopology’, Foucault recounts the characteristics of heterotopic spaces. First, heterotopia are a universal product of all cultural traditions, but they take a diverse variety of forms. Second, each society creates heterotopia that serve some specific function necessary for the maintenance of social order. Third, a defining characteristic of heterotopia is their plurality, the capability they have ‘of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites which are in themselves incompatible’. Fourth, Foucault suggests that heterotopia have distinct temporalities, or

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heterochronia; some, such as the library or museum, are characterized by excessive accumulations of time, while others are defined by the fleeting and transitory moment of the festival. Fifth, Foucault notes that all types of heterotopia, even those as apparently distinct as the cemetery or the Scandinavian spa, are marked by some form of enclosure which distinguishes the site from the spaces of everyday life, with rituals of passage which serve to preserve this boundary. The final principle of heterotopia regards their function in relation to ordinary social spaces. For Foucault their role is either ‘to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space’ of human life ‘as still more illusory’; or contrarily, ‘to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well-arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled’ (27). Among the many scholars who have taken up this object of study, Kevin Hetherington (1997) has called attention to the specif ic relationships among Marin’s utopics and Foucault’s heterotopia. Hetherington locates heterotopia in precisely the ‘neutral’ tension Marin observed between More’s good place and non-place. In his social history of some heterotopian ‘badlands of modernity’, Hetherington contends that nineteenth-century European sites such as the Palais Royale, the Masonic lodge, and the British factory may be understood as ‘sites in which new ways of experimenting with ordering society are tried out’ (Hetherington 1997: 12). For example, the Parisian Palais Royale was a spatial counter-site that combined a variety of distinct places, including public gardens, cafés, theaters, and shopping arcades. These articulated spaces functioned as a point of convergence for the activities of a diverse group of aristocrats, intellectuals, libertines, pamphleteers, revolutionaries, prostitutes, sightseers, and consumers, people who otherwise would not have found themselves gathered together in the same locale. As such, the Palais Royale clearly exemplifies Foucault’s observation that ‘[t]he heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single place several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible’ (25). The Palais Royale was no utopia, but it was a site of utopic social ordering in which individuals could experiment with identity and sociality. For Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (2008), who have compiled what is perhaps the most comprehensive account of present-day heterotopia, the contemporary network society has normalized these spaces such that they no longer resemble the non-routine, exceptional spaces described by Foucault or Hetherington (see also Palladino and Miller 2015). They contend that a broad assortment of heterotopian spaces now constitute the confines and contexts of our daily lives. Theme park streets, cinematic shopping mall

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motifs,1 a New Jersey gated neighborhood, a master-planned retirement community in Florida, Singaporean condominiums, Tel Aviv’s beach, French ‘new towns’, a revitalized London suburb, architectures of flow, Jakarta’s urban core, Dubai’s reclaimed islands, and liminal urban ‘dead zones’ all fall within their inclusive heterotopian rubric. While these are intriguing examples, the tendency to see ubiquitous heterotopian qualities in every social space risks exhausting the usefulness of the concept and undermining its quite potent critical value.

Experimental Laboratories Hetereotopia are sites associated with alternate modes of social ordering that are expressions of a utopic spatial play. [...] Almost like laboratories, they can be taken as the sites in which new ways of experimenting with ordering are tried out. – Kevin Hetherington (1997: 12)

Understood as a site of utopic spatial play, the heterotopia provides a useful model with which to conceptualize some characteristics of the tourist spaces explored in this volume. Indeed, Foucault’s own examples of this phenomenon appear almost like a pre-history or genealogy of the contemporary tourist enclave: the garden, museum, fairgrounds, honeymoon, motel, brothel, ship, and colony. One clearly useful heterotopian quality for understanding tourist utopias involves their experimental function. The heterotopia as social laboratory is strikingly evident in Peter Lamborn Wilson’s (2003) unconventional history of the sixteenth-century ‘pirate utopia’ of the African Republic of Salé. For Wilson, Salé not only served as a bacchanalian respite for a diverse group of Muslim corsairs and renegadoes, but also constituted a radical social experiment, with a proto-democratic system of governance that Wilson contends was a precursor to both the British Commonwealth and the American and French republics. The pirate utopia may be understood as a heterotopian counter-site that exemplifies what Wilson would refer to in his later work (published under the name Hakim Bey) as a temporary autonomous zone, an experimental, non-hierarchical social space existing outside of formal networks of discipline and control. Of course the tourist sites discussed here are 1 We can think of Woody Allen’s Scenes from a Mall or of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, in which an assortment of holdouts battle suburban zombies by barricading themselves inside a mall.

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not homologous with Salé, or with the Palais Royale for that matter. But these locales do rehearse emergent forms of sovereignty, governance, labor, and sociality. This observation locates these sites within the pedagogical dimension of leisure and the manner in which tourism functions as a sort of ‘cultural laboratory’ (Löfgren 1999: 7). For example, in an intriguing analysis that conflates heterotopian spatial play with the tourist locale, Rem Koolhaas (1994) contends that the turn-ofthe-century leisure site of Coney Island served as a ‘laboratory’ (49) to test themes and design motifs that would later be implemented in the borough of Manhattan, which itself became the paradigmatic twentieth-century city. Coney Island was a testing ground for all the elements of the modern metropolis. ‘Enclosure’ of various amusements and attractions on Coney Island created a thematic ‘park-enclave’ model that was repeated across the island and became the toolkit for the city. Here developers constructed prototype skyscraper towers, successfully managed the challenging density of an urban population, electrified and illuminated the night, foregrounded the role of the geometrical city block as primary urban actor, and enabled the more general ‘institutionalization of misbehavior’ (Koolhaas 1994: 49) that would become New York’s trademark. Coney Island unwittingly ‘defines completely new relationships between site, program, form, and technology’, says Koolhaas (1994: 62), which ultimately served as a blueprint for Manhattan. Much like Salé or Coney Island, the tourist sites explored in this book may be understood as laboratories for testing novel spatial formats, protocols, flows, mobilities, and subjectivities which may then be adopted and implemented elsewhere (see Easterling, this volume). While Disney’s utopic EPCOT is clearly a paradigm for the ‘learning cities’ that Angela Ndalianis explores in her chapter, for example, the ‘degenerate utopia’ (Marin 1984) of Disneyland itself also inspires the themed cityscapes of Las Vegas, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Macau. Dubai’s ‘instant city’ (Bagaeen 2007) growth strategy, in turn, animates the spatial production of far-removed Laotian special economic zones; and Macau’s remarkably lucrative post-colonial casino gaming-led development has motivated other Southeast Asian states, including Laos and Singapore, to experiment with aleatory economies. Finally, with its technocratic governance and Garden City urbanism, Singapore – which was dismissed by even Koolhaas (1998b) two decades ago as a ‘Potemkin metropolis’ – is today a model emulated by aspirational developing states around the world (Chua 2011); with the recent legalization of casino gambling, Singapore has become the apotheosis of a tourist state (see Goh, this volume). Therefore, the pirate utopia as laboratory of liberal governance informs the tourist utopia as testing room of design innovations and novel political programs.

Mapping Tourist Utopias

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Crisis Capitalism Utopic discourse makes its appearance only when a mode of capitalist production is formed. – Louis Marin (1984: 198)

For Marin, utopia could only emerge as a discursive object at a precise historical moment, the transition from feudalism to capitalism during which More penned his text. However, Marin notes that ‘[t]here are probably analogous examples of utopic discourses in formation corresponding to the passage between economic periods in history, especially between various Asian, classical, and feudal modes of production’ (199). Marin’s temporal periodization is important to understanding the formation of tourist utopias. There is an emerging consensus today that we are living through another economic transition of world-historical importance. The relatively brief period of stable post-war Fordist affluence the West enjoyed is over. We have entered an increasingly precarious, crisis-prone capitalist condition with numerous consequences for both labor and leisure. With the turn to specialized ‘flexible’ small-batch craft production, accompanied by the stark economic inequities typified by the rapid ascent of the 1 percent, in many ways it feels like our future may involve a reversion to some strange postmodern feudalism. For Peter Sloterdijk, however, what defines the present era is not so much the emergence of post-Fordist production, but our current location at the termination of the 500-year-long process of ‘terrestrial globalization’, during which humans circumnavigated, contained, and ultimately mastered the earth as a spherical object of knowledge and contemplation – a globe which we came to understand from the outside. That era was inaugurated by the Portuguese navigations and discoveries which, for Sloterdijk, both prompted the imagination of faraway island utopias, and subjected the globe-trotting tourist who might take to the seas in search of them. The era concluded with the post-war Bretton Woods agreement that managed to finally articulate all of the planet’s far-flung locales under the sign of the US dollar, the global reserve currency and universal signifier of value. Although they do not adopt Sloterdijk’s terminology, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000, 2009) take up the same narrative, observing a decisive shift in the global economy in the 1970s with the abandonment of Bretton Woods. The decision to delink the dollar from the gold standard destabilized value, prompting a transition from a stable post-war industrial ‘planner state’ to a post-industrial ‘crisis state’. In the planner state accumulation was based on the Fordist organization of labor on a national scale. This system

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was stabilized by a Keynesian macroeconomic bargain among the state, corporations, and labor, ensuring a workforce whose members enjoyed high rates of employment, and could therefore serve as a market for the products they produced. These were the workers who dutifully saved a portion of their annual wages in anticipation of a relaxing vacation in Miami or Disneyland. However, today we encounter a fundamental transformation of capital relations, across a set of interrelated trajectories that stretch from production to consumption, stability to mobility, savings to debt, the ‘real’ economy to financialization, and long-term planning to reactionary crisis management. ‘Crisis, then, becomes the normal condition of capitalist development and rule to the extent that the bilateral processes of economic and juridical organization that provided an organic relationship between labor and capital are abandoned’ (Hardt 2005: 11). If the discursive event of More’s Utopia was only possible at the transition from feudalism to capitalism (and the commencement of Iberian seafaring), the specific form of spatial play indicative of the tourist utopia is enabled by this post-Fordist and post-Keynesian transition that accompanies the resolution of the half millennia project of globalization.

Spaces of Exception Tourism spaces, set apart from the mundane world for the tourists, are in part spaces of the imaginary, of fantasy, and of dreaming. – Noel Salazar and Nelson H.H. Graburn (2014a: 17)

One way this political economy is manifested in these new tourist spaces is that each is in some way an autonomous ‘space of exception’ to normal political or juridical rule, an enclave or ‘offshore’ space that is distinct from a larger sovereign territory. We may understand the utopic spatial production of the exception to be one indicative element of post-Fordism, mirroring the ‘state of exception’ that Carl Schmitt (2006) contended was exemplary of the practice of twentieth-century sovereignty.2 These sites reveal ‘that intensified processes and patterns of uneven development today are increasingly expressed in enclave spaces’ (Sidaway 2007: 332). This condition is 2 At the same time, the discovery of the enclave is in many ways a retrograde reversion to earlier forms of medieval governance. Segmented or disaggregated spaces like the city-state or gated community are reminiscent of medieval sites. ‘What persists in the analysis of neo-liberalism’, argue Alsayyad and Roy (2006) in an analysis of what they call ‘medieval modernity’, ‘is a sense of newness: of a new mode of production, or a new production of space, of new forms of discipline and control. Our use of the “medieval” is mean to call into question this teleology’ (16).

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characteristic of any utopian totality: Jameson (2009) notes that all utopias are predicated on some sense of a ‘closure or enclave structure’ (415), which establishes the limit that separates utopian and non-utopian space. Aihwa Ong (2006) and Ronan Palan (2003) have highlighted in different ways the importance of such exceptional spaces to the contemporary global economy. For Ong (2006), neoliberal economic policies in Asia can be understood as the deployment of the exception as a post-developmental strategy of governance. South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and China in different ways pursue economic development via ‘zoning technologies’ that create special zones to entice transnational corporations with tax benefits and an available and flexible labor force, and ‘variegated citizenship’ that parcels out economic advantages or personal freedoms to select local groups. Palan (2003), on the other hand, describes the creation of distinct enclaves of financial activity that rely on a dialectical bifurcation between ‘onshore’ realms, subject to conventional state regulation and taxation, and ‘offshore’ realms where some degree of those regulations are withheld. Offshore does not describe a literal island locale; it is ‘not a territorial space but a juridical innovation’, a constructed legal or regulatory fiction that reconfigures conventional territory (Palan 2003: 162). These sites are figuratively ‘offshore’ in a manner similar to tax havens, free trade zones, duty free shops, and shipping ‘flags of convenience’. The key operation of both ‘neoliberalism as exception’ and offshore finance is an uneven disaggregation or division of a larger sovereign territory into constituent parts, and selective application of special regulations or liberties to a circumscribed component of that territory. This ‘juridical bifurcation’ (Palan 2003: 20) of the nation-state is indicative of both approaches: these tourist enclaves have developed as symbolically offshore ‘spatiojuridical enclosures’ (Palan 2003: 1), spaces of exception to conventional legal regimes, which are distinct from the state order to which they belong.

Pirate Governance Pirates, apostates, traitors, degenerates, heretics – what positive meaning could possibly be expected to emerge from such a dire combination? – Peter Lamborn Wilson (2003: 200)

This disaggregation of state spaces into constituent components has consequences for governance. David Harvey (1989) observes that in post-Fordist (and post-Keynesian) cities, the state’s role has mutated from manager

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of metropolitan social welfare, to an entrepreneurial stance that seeks to drive development and growth. One outcome of this process is the increased promotion of private sector projects. In pursuit of entrepreneurial finance and creative acumen, local officials, in a sort of Faustian bargain, increasingly conspire to share governance with non-state agents. Like other features of contemporary capitalism, this phenomenon is intensified in the development and administration of the tourist enclave. Much like the pirates of old, these non-state (or extra-state, or sometimes even effectively stateless) subjects blur the boundary separating public and private. Wilson’s pirate utopia was an offshore haven for a group of non-state actors who were actually crucial to the origins and development of capitalism in the Mediterranean, serving both sides of the hyphen that separates ‘non-state’. Pirates existed along a sliding scale of criminality and legitimacy, from bandit to buccaneer to privateer, sometimes sanctioned by the state in letters of marque, sometimes acting out of individual initiative or anarchist beliefs (Easterling 2005). This pirate shadow governance is a recurrent feature of capitalism’s development and expansion. Some historians contend that the Ming emperor’s motivation for allowing the Portuguese to occupy Macau in the seventeenth century was due in part to the Portuguese navy’s ability to thwart attacks by Japanese pirates who disrupted Chinese trade in the South China Sea; that is, the imperialist Portuguese actually served as privateers sanctioned by the emperor to fight other, unsanctioned pirates. Likewise, the British Royal Navy’s operations along the ‘Pirate Coast’ of the Persian Gulf in the early nineteenth century involved attempts to protect shipments of the East India Company from attacks by raiders whom both the British state and the corporation defined as pirates. These attacks, however, were sponsored by the ruling al-Qawasim family of Sharjah and were motivated by the British refusal to pay toll taxes to pass through the Strait of Hormuz (Onley 2005; see also Walcott 2006). From their perspective, the British sailors were simply freebooters, rather than a legitimate maritime security force. With such fluctuating and mutating partnerships among the state and its proxy agents, the distinction between the two categories becomes increasingly ambiguous. In tourist enclaves the state often colludes opportunistically with contemporary non-state actors – consultants (Sloterdijk 2013), ‘orgmen’ (Easterling 2005), entrepreneurs, gangsters, mercenaries, entertainment industry executives (see Werry, this volume) and the like, who sometimes even resemble landlocked pirates in a contemporary guise. For example, Chinese entrepreneurs are busy today developing extraterritorial tourism and gambling concessions in the ‘wild west’ border areas

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of Laos and Cambodia, in which ‘orchestrated land management under the guise of international development’ constitutes overt efforts of ‘social engineering’ (Lyttleton and Nyíri 2011: 1243; see Nyíri, this volume). Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino boss, ardent Zionist, and would-be American presidential benefactor, lobbies to repeal anti-smoking legislation in the EU, funds infrastructure development in Macau and Singapore, and in the case of Macau even provides a quasi-governance public security function (see Goh; Simpson, this volume). Soldier of fortune Erik Prince, founder of the Blackwater paramilitary force (now called Reflex Response), provides an 800-strong expatriate security force of Latin American mercenaries in Abu Dhabi (Mazzetti and Hager 2011). Ominously, the force is being trained not only for anti-terrorism operations, but also to control potential unrest in ubiquitous UAE labor camps that are home to foreign workers – and which may rightly be regarded as dystopian spatial inversions of the tourist enclave (see Elsheshtawy, this volume).3 Individuals such as Adelson and Prince embody Sloterdijk’s (2013) characterization of the contemporary ‘anarcho-maritime figure’ of the pirate as a retrograde neoliberal agent who ‘does as he pleases and then, quoting Ayn Rand, proclaims himself a man of the future’ (113).

Post-Civil Environments Heterotopia is the counterpart of what an event is in time, an eruption, an apparition, an absolute discontinuity, taking on its heterotopian character at those times when the event in question is made permanent and translated into a specific architecture. – Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (2008: 92)

As a leisure-oriented spatial exception, the tourist enclave is in one way fundamentally different from those enclave and offshore spaces described by Ong and Palan: these scholars have examined exceptional spaces of production, but the tourist enclave is an exceptional space of consumption.4 Those consumption activities increasingly occur within constructed 3 For a different valence of the inverted tourist enclave, see Gonzalez’s (2013) discussion of the conflation of United States military and tourism interests on bases in Hawaii and the Philippines. 4 ‘Ong’s focus on production also leaves those enclave spaces oriented towards consumption (such as enclaved tourist resorts) largely outside her vision’ (Sidaway 2007: 334).

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landscapes which may borrow features from the holiday camps, hotels, and Pink Palaces of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that are the subject of Löfgren’s analysis, but which in other ways belong precisely to the contemporary economic regime. Like Coney Island, today’s tourist enclave is a heterotopian laboratory for testing innovations in architecture and urbanism. Maria Kaika (2011) has called attention to the manner in which architecture functions as a component of the social imaginary that serves to naturalize a particular economic order. The twentieth-century corporate skyscraper was an iconic element of the modern skyline, a testament not only to overblown industrialist egos but also to their commitment to the social and cultural life of a particular city. Buildings constructed by the Carnegies or Rockefellers not only served as headquarters of business enterprise, but engaged with the surrounding city, functioned in social ritual, enhanced public space, and contributed to civic life (Kaika 2011: 982). However, the iconic buildings of the tourist enclave, such as the Las Vegas City Center project, or the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi (see Elsheshtawy, this volume), differ from the iconic buildings of industrial capitalism. These projects are initiated by companies whose actual operations are located elsewhere, funded by transnational elites with no real local commitment, designed by non-resident celebrity ‘starchitects’, and ultimately lack a distinctive role in the city in which they are located. Kaika imaginatively refers to these contemporary iconic buildings as ‘autistic architecture’, because they fail to communicate with the city to which they belong. Each is a temporary ‘totem for flexible capitalism’ (Kaika 2011: 976). Collectively, these structures produce what Cornelius Castoriadis (1998) called a social imaginary signification which naturalizes the imposition of a neoliberal regime. These elements of the built environment mimic the fate of the visitors and foreign workers who are temporarily located in the tourist enclave but do not actually live there. Those transient individuals increasingly find themselves in enclaved and interiorized spaces which are ‘formal overtones’ (Jameson 1998: 44) of the capital form. Hardt and Negri (2000) contend that ‘the capitalist market has always run counter to any division between inside and outside’ (190), thriving rather on commerce and interchange. Today we live under the real subsumption of society to capital, a transformation which precludes any vantage point ‘outside’ the capital relation. In the prophetic words of Hardt and Negri (2000), ‘There is no more outside’ (186). This condition of ‘no outside’ is immediately and intensely experienced in these tourist spaces (see Lampton, this volume). The construction of the typical tourist enclave deploys a grammar of architectural and design elements

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with such characteristic features as glass curtain walls, large enclosed atriums, and ubiquitous air conditioning, to produce the effect that the interior ‘is the privileged domain for the urban encounter’ (Koolhaas 1998a; see also De Cauter 2005). This enclosed interior is a materialization of the post-Fordist condition in the built environment, and is experienced by those tourists who sit under the expansive glass roof of Singapore’s indoor tropical garden to enjoy their lattes, navigate indoor Venetian canals inside a Macau resort, or enjoy the Dubai Mall’s indoor ski slopes. More importantly, this condition has consequences for civil society, which has historically required public spaces that are autonomous from the demands of the state and market, as well as a clear distinction among the private and public spheres (Douglass 2008). Such distinctions are effectively abolished in the tourist enclave, which in its most extreme form achieves the status of a ‘total landscape’ (Mitrašinović 2006). These characteristics attest to the distinctiveness of these enclaves when compared to the heterotopia of earlier eras. For Hetherington, the nineteenth-century Palais Royale functioned, among other things, as a site for an emergent bourgeois public sphere, even proving indispensable to the revolutionary movement that established the French republic. However, it is difficult to envision the revolution that might emerge from, say, Singapore’s pristine and disciplined tourist spaces. When privatized governance produces interiorized and encapsulated tourist experiences to serve a transient ‘multitude’ of mobile tourists and workers, none of whom have any real stake in the locale or commitment to the community, the result is akin to what Jameson calls ‘post-civil’ society (Jameson and Speaks 1990; see also De Cauter 2005).

Biopolitical Heterotopias of Crisis Capitalism Economic production is going through a period of transition in which increasingly the results of capitalist production are social relations and forms of life. Capitalist production, in other words, is becoming biopolitical. – Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009: 131)

Foucault’s insistence on the heterotopia’s ahistorical universality means that his heterotopology, unlike Marin’s utopics, does not foreground the significance of a political economy. However, reflecting on the current crisis state of capitalism, it may be helpful to recall that Foucault identified two specific types of heterotopia: those of deviation, such as hospitals and prisons, where societies relegate those individuals considered aberrant; and those of crisis, which are spaces for seclusion of the elderly, menstruating women, pubescent

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boys, or other individuals undergoing some kind of biological transformation. Although Foucault suggests that these latter heterotopia are typical of primitive societies, it may be useful to consider whether our (medieval) post-Fordist tourist enclaves function in part as biopolitical heterotopia of crisis, where the most dehumanizing and regrettable elements of crisis capitalism are ‘simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (Foucault 1986: 24). Crisis capitalism produces an array of affects that permeate the tourist enclave, itself serving as a synecdoche for an economic logic of intensification whereby financialization extracts profits directly from capital itself, without recourse to production of goods. ‘[I]n a world that contains no new territory – no new experiences, no new markets’, says Nealon (2010), in an analysis of the Las Vegas strip, ‘any system that seeks to expand must by definition intensify its existing resources, modulate them in some way. This, in a nutshell, is the homology between the cultural logic of globalization and the economic logic of finance capital.’ Indeed, in an era of ‘casino capitalism’ it is not surprising that Macau, Singapore, and Laos have turned to gambling to stimulate economic growth. But even sites where casino gambling is prohibited often encourage and enable highly speculative forms of accumulation that produce a palpable environmental sentiment or intensity. Dubai’s debt-financed cityscape of glass office towers and mega-shopping complexes resembles a high-risk game of chance played out on the scale of the built environment; this makes the formerly enduring ‘secondary circuit of capital’ prone to an inherent instability, with profound consequences for the itinerant workers and tourists who temporarily populate the city (Davis and Monk 2007; Bloch 2010). However, by assembling the diverse retinue of web designers, translators, English-language instructors, programmers, masseuses, architects, fashion models, Starbucks baristas, data miners, sex workers, medical technicians, hair stylists, Lamborghini salesmen, acrobats, flight attendants, security guards, hipsters, and the panoply of other immaterial and affective laborers necessary to stage a full-fledged tourist experience in a city like Dubai, this process potentially transforms the tourist enclave itself into a biopolitical repository or ‘artificial common’ (Hardt and Negri 2009: 250). This common is comprised of those ‘languages, knowledges, affects, codes, habits, and practices’ (250) in which these individuals are immersed. Precisely because of their tenuous instability, such tourist enclaves exemplify a ‘geography of intensities and thresholds’ (257) that potentially enables otherwise elusive encounters with alterity – among, say, Sri Lankan construction workers in Dubai, the city’s Filipina shop clerks, and visiting Yemini and Italian tourists. Even exploitative ground rent on Sheik Zayed Road, or extractive oil rent dispatched from Abu Dhabi to service Dubai’s debt defaults, or the obtuse abstractions of finance

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capital that nearly led to the city’s demise in the 2009 financial crisis, may each carry ‘spectres of the common’ (Hardt and Negri 2009: 153-159). This potential inversion of precarity and dispossession becomes visible when the tourist enclave is understood as a biopolitical heterotopia of crisis capitalism.

Post-Fordist Tourist Subjection It is enough to recall the admiration of Lenin and Gramsci for Taylorism and Fordism to be perplexed at this weakness of revolutionaries for what is most exploitative and dehumanizing in the working life of capitalism: but this is precisely what is meant by utopian here, namely that what is currently negative can also be imagined as positive in that immense changing of the valences which is the Utopian future. – Fredric Jameson (2009: 423)

This aspect of the discussion returns us to Löfgren’s study of relations among tourist sites and subjects. As a biopolitical enclosure, characterized by juridical exceptionalism, neoliberal political economy, and affective enticements, the tourist utopia may be understood, to borrow one more useful concept from Foucault, as an apparatus or dispositif of post-Fordist subjection. This apparatus produces a subject who is distinct from those tourists of industrial society. One crucial difference involves the post-Fordist displacement of material production by immaterial consumption as a mode of accumulation. This is accompanied by the concomitant transmutation of the temporality of the 9-to-5 work day (which, thanks to organized labor allowed the ‘eight hours for what they will’ necessary to drive a leisure industry) into a 24/7 ‘always-on’ capitalism in which ‘leisure time’ is increasingly diffuse (Crary 2013). Thus, the relationship between the tourist enclave and its corresponding subject effectively severs the connection between the ascetic Calvinist work ethic and the spirit of economic productivity which served, from Marx to Weber to Keynes, as a mainstay of the mythology of industrial capitalism; the tourist utopia revels instead in the promise of capital accumulation based on nothing but play. In an era with ‘no outside’, in which capitalism has colonized every facet of experience, cognition, and affect, and everyday life has taken the form of a generalized ‘social factory’, neither the traditional factory floor nor Castells’ spaces of ‘collective consumption’ serve as the locus of political action. As a ‘spatial exception’ and ‘interiorized outside’, the tourist utopia is located precisely at ground zero of the ‘neutral’ contradiction of our own era. It is simultaneously a diversion from the dispossessions of post-Fordist

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capitalism and a spectacular intensification of those very tendencies. In the prescient words of the Situationist Internationale – in a discourse that anticipated our current regime but with which we are only now coming to terms – the tourist utopia demonstrates that ‘leisure is the true revolutionary problem’ in contemporary capitalism.5

Tourist Utopology The space of leisure […] is the very epitome of contradictory space. This is where the existing mode of production produces both its worst and its best – parasitic outgrowths on the one hand, and exuberant new branches on the other – as prodigal of monstrosities as of promises (that it cannot keep). – Henri Lefebvre (1984: 385)

Given the preceding discussion, and in anticipation of the chapters that follow, we can now sketch a preliminary description of the tourist utopia. Following the instructive examples of Foucault’s ‘heterotopology’ and Jameson’s ‘utopology’,6 we might conceive of this compendium of spatial characteristics as something approaching a tentative and incomplete tourist utopology (see Simpson 2016). The tourist utopia is an extra-territorial ‘space of exception’, with an ambiguous sovereignty which may be disaggregated, ‘graduated’ (Ong 2006), ‘bifurcated’ or ‘commodified’ (Palan 2003). The tourist utopia is an enclave site of enclosure from everyday life, marked by ‘an edge where it meets another condition’ (Koolhaas 1998a). These localized ‘spatial products’ (Easterling 2005) are financed largely by transnational capital, and favor the neoliberal dogma of deregulation and privatization. The entrepreneurial partnerships that produce these sites create forms of shared governance, where the state cooperates with non-state actors, in both licit and illicit relationships, for mutual benefit. 5 ‘Une idée neuve en Europe’, Situationist statement published in Potlatch, 1954; quoted in De Cauter (2005: 57). 6 See also De Cauter’s (2005) ‘theory of capsular society’.

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Such spaces are populated by transient workers and nomadic tourists who have no real local stake, and who therefore unwittingly create a palpable atmosphere of impermanence and temporariness. These mobile individuals visit superlative attractions, iconic architecture, and themed environments, each of which are designed, narrated, and scripted to produce ‘experiences’. These attractions deploy a grammar of architectural features which reproduce the capital relation in the built environment, and create the infrastructure for a post-civil society. Each locale possesses an ‘economy of fascination’ (Schmid 2009) which depends on immaterial, affective, and cognitive forms of labor and consumption, focused on such activities as shopping, dining, gambling, sightseeing, relaxation, and amusement, which in turn may contribute to a biopolitical common. Finally, as a site of utopic spatial play, the tourist utopia is characterized by much the same paradox that Marin identified in More’s text: ‘It is an ideological critique of ideology’; this is true not only because the tourist site obscures the conditions of its own production, but because it assembles in exaggerated form all of the above regressive tendencies of late capitalism, in order to materialize a tourist imaginary that is driven by the desire to escape these very conditions in a moment of leisure diversion.

This Volume ‘Then let me implore you, my dear Raphael,’ said I, ‘to describe that island to us. Do not try to be brief, but explain in order everything relating to their land, their rivers, towns, people, manners, institutions, laws – everything, in short, that you think we would like to know. And you can take for granted that we want to know everything we don’t know yet.’ – Thomas More (1992: 30)

The pretext of Utopia is a lengthy conversation between More and one Raphael Hythloday (whose surname means something like ‘peddler of nonsense’), an itinerant Portuguese philosopher who has purportedly traveled the world with Amerigo Vespucci and who offers detailed observations of the place he considers to be the Best State of the Commonwealth, the island of Utopia.

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In the following brief chapter (which closes this prolegomenon and serves as a prologue to the remainder of the volume), Keller Easterling lays the groundwork for the study of tourist utopias by similarly narrating her own extensive travels to an astonishing array of economic free zones, from Dubai to the DPRK. While not quite achieving the status of Best States of the Commonwealth, these zones are exemplary of the globe’s most rakish extra-state spaces. For Easterling, however, the free zone is less a place than a sort of spatial software that facilitates contagious experiments in urban design. For our purposes, these curious geopolitical experiments exemplify contemporary utopic spatial play. While certainly no ‘Hythloday’, Easterling offers insightful descriptions of these zone iterations, including (to paraphrase More) everything we might like to know about their geography, people, manners, institutions, and laws. Easterling traces the free zone metamorphosis, from early-twentiethcentury entrepôt warehouses, to third world United Nations-inspired export facilities, to the total urbanism of ersatz Asian city-states like Shenzhen. These mutating heterotopias of crisis capitalism clearly serve as a model or inspiration for the exceptional leisure spaces explored in the chapters that follow. By opportunistically mingling state and non-state aspirations, free zones often merge the sober protocols of economic development with whimsical leisure fantasies, in the process smuggling into mundane global infrastructure bits of renegade spatial code that animate the utopic imaginary. The next section of the book, Enclaves, demonstrates different ways in which that spatial code enables production of utopic urban enclaves. In chapter three, Pál Nyíri explores ‘instant city’ enclave gambling environments recently constructed in the jungles of Laos. These Southeast Asian exemplars of Easterling’s free zones are ostensibly paragons of modernity authored by expatriate Chinese developers. These Laotian casinos serve predominantly Chinese travelers who venture to the Boten and Golden Triangle Special Economic Zones for gambling, sex tourism, wild game dining, and other holiday fantasies. Nyíri’s focus on these sites inadvertently reveals the genesis of places like Macau, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi, which are explored in the following three chapters – once obscure parochial enclaves of juridical exceptionalism which have successfully pursued global city ambitions. In chapter four I analyze the semi-autonomous Chinese ‘Special Administrative Region’ of Macau, and chart the tiny enclave’s remarkable recent transformation from Portuguese colonial backwater to global casino gaming paradise. Drawing on Sloterdijk’s philosophical account of globalization, I trace Macau’s crucial role in the globalization process, and the convergence in the city today of two antithetical modern utopian schemes which were

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inaugurated by Portuguese explorers half a millennium ago. I argue that the globalized proto-capitalist Iberian navigations and discoveries, on one hand, and interiorized Chinese revolutionary state socialism, on the other, are two complementary utopic projects which coalesce today in Macau’s phantasmagoric post-colonial and post-socialist cityscape. Since its independence from Malaysia, Singapore has pursued global city ambitions, and in chapter five Daniel Goh discusses the manner in which the spatial production of a global Singapore constitutes a literal instance of what Zygmunt Bauman has called ‘liquid modernity’. Goh pursues this argument by focusing on the city’s dynamic Singapore Bay waterfront development strategy, and the manner in which this ‘utopia by the bay’ is the materialization of a capitalist dream form. This specter not only attracts international tourists to the bay area’s lush indoor botanical gardens, iconic integrated casino resort, and Chingay cultural parades, but also symbolically sublimates the state’s endemic national anxieties about its global city status into the cascading Asian economic wave. In chapter six, Yasser Elsheshtawy explores the development of a cultural tourist enclave on Saadiayat Island, or the ‘Island of Happiness’, in the emirate of Abu Dhabi; this development strategy is increasingly common across Doha, Muscat, and a variety of other Arabian locales. Elsheshtawy follows the influences of the so-called ‘Guggenheim effect’, as the emirate seeks to increase domestic tourism and enhance a more general Arabian urban imaginary with construction of both a Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim art museum and an incarnation of the Louvre dedicated to celebrating the life of Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Zayed. The resulting development is exemplary of the ‘starchitect’-designed ‘autistic architecture’ described by Kaika (2011), and is consistent with emergent ‘post-civil’ forms of public life in the emirate. The chapters in the next section, Imaginaries, focus in different ways on the mediated production of utopic tourist spaces. In chapter seven, Angela Ndalianis addresses Walt Disney’s dream to design his own zone iteration, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), a utopian city of the future that he hoped would be a novel articulation of science, technology, and entrepreneurialism. Ndalianis demonstrates that the motifs of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century world’s fairs and expositions animated Disney’s imagination and his subsequent theme park design. Disney, in turn, inspired construction of futuristic and innovative enclave techno-parks, such as the reclaimed island of Obaida in Tokyo Bay, and Futurescape in Poitiers, France (not to mention Disney’s influence on each of the other tourist locales analyzed in this volume). Each of these proto-urban utopic projects attempts to realize Disney’s EPCOT

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vision to create a kind of urban laboratory, or learning city, which might function to educate visitors about the role of technological innovations in knowledge-based societies. In chapter eight, Benjamin Hodges studies video game production in Bulgaria during the country’s tumultuous transition from socialism to capitalism. Since the Byzantine era Bulgaria has served as the crossroads for migrants between Europe and Asia. Today, Bulgaria is also an unlikely but important site of software and game design for the global gaming industry, and these games often deploy locales from Bulgaria’s crumbling cities and pristine beaches as settings for virtual action. The games become destinations for young Bulgarian ‘post-tourist’ gamers who hope to escape the economic conditions of crisis capitalism at home by touring pristine desert islands with perfectly rendered polygonal palm trees, or post-apocalyptic urban spaces modeled after the postsocialist (i.e., post-utopian) metropolis. Indeed, with its open-ended imagistic possibilities, the virtual world is perhaps the ideal arena for utopic spatial play. Violence and criminality both within and outside the games perfectly channel the affect that emanates from the country’s post-Soviet market transition. While many of the tourist sites explored in this book are simulated ­post-Fordist locales, the undeveloped and sublimely natural Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand) – the site used to depict Tolkien’s Middle-­ earth in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, may be better understood as ‘pre-Fordist’. However, Margaret Werry contends, in chapter nine, that throughout the twentieth century New Zealand has utilized such heterotopic tourist enclaves in technologies of liberal and neoliberal governance. With the filming of The Hobbit, which is the focus of her chapter, director Peter Jackson emerged as putative ‘non-state’ sovereign, exercising considerable influence over New Zealand’s legislature and labor laws to facilitate film production, and serving as the personification of the broader public-private entanglements of transnational media corporations and national governance under the neoliberal regime. Tourist and cinematic spaces converged in the process. From Werry’s perspective, Jackson’s use of innovative film technologies not only constructs an idealized image of Middle-earth, sanitized of indigenous colonial and cultural politics, but also conspires to remake the film viewer into the sort of mobile and flexible subject idealized in fantasies of post-Fordist production. The entire population of New Zealand was thus mobilized in a utopic project of biopolitical tourist subjection. Adam Lampton’s Macau photo essay closes this section in a unique manner. Lampton provides an extended visual analysis of the built environment of a utopian tourist site, exemplifying many of the theoretical concepts

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discussed in the other chapters. Lampton’s photographs aptly depict the quirky poetics of spectacular excess common to such locales. In the final section of the book, Archipelagoes, Veronica della Dora concludes the volume with an imaginative meditation on the utopic articulations that reverberate among contemporary archipelagoes around the globe, specifically focusing on fabricated islands reclaimed off the coast of Dubai for the purposes of real estate speculation, and the ancient monastic Orthodox Greek enclave of Mount Athos. As the probable inspiration for More’s Utopia, Mount Athos is an apt locale for reflecting on the contemporary utopic tourist imaginary. Taken together, the natural environment of Mount Athos and Dubai’s artificial offshore archipelagoes (Petti 2008) ironically illustrate both the nostalgia about, and contemporary desire for, a pristine and authentic geographical ‘outside’ to the spectacular and commodified excesses of unbridled capitalism. These tourist utopias are leisure sites of utopic spatial play and imagination. As such, they function as social laboratories for experiments with juridical or governmental innovations; illustrate diverse forms of opportunistic extra-territorial and extra-state cooperation; serve as temporary home to transient, multinational populations; and feature architectural and design mutations, each fashioned to produce intensified and spectacular forms of relaxation and recreation. Of course, none of these sites constitute More’s ever-elusive Utopia; but they are enclaves of utopic spatial play and forms of tourist desire and affect where the tourist imaginary takes a concrete, material form. Taken together, these chapters chart an emergent geographical, political, and social terrain specifically designed to facilitate the explorations of an increasingly mobile population of travelers from Asia and elsewhere, and to devise new modes of escape and leisure accumulation.

Coda: Project Immersion Specialized tourist researchers often feel the need to legitimate their seemingly frivolous topic by pointing out its economic and social importance, but surely tourism is too important a topic to confine within the boundaries of ‘tourism research’. – Orvar Löfgren (1999: 6-7)

The contributors to this book represent a wide variety of academic disciplines, including anthropology, architecture, communication, cultural

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studies, geography, performance studies, photography, and sociology. As such, the authors bring a diverse array of methodological approaches and scholarly predispositions to the common problematic of exceptional tourist locales. Most of the chapters that follow began as papers prepared for a workshop that was held at the Adelson Advanced Education Center, an off-campus facility that Sheldon Adelson gifted to the University of Macau, and which is located within the labyrinthine retail ‘experience’ on offer in his gigantic Venetian Macau resort. The workshop site is a metonym of the tourist utopias that are the focus of the book (see Simpson, chapter four in this volume). As the world’s seventh-largest building, the Venetian is perhaps the largest themed environment on the planet. The structure has meticulously rendered architectural and design motifs that simulate the renaissance city of Venice, indoor canals plied by Puccini-singing Filipino gondoliers, and a realistic azure blue painted sky with billowing white clouds that float tantalizingly above Chanel, Tiffany, and Jaquet-Droz shops (see Figure 1.1). Period-costumed magicians, jugglers, opera singers, and yes, pirates, contribute to the Venetian’s interiorized and branded urban ‘streetmospherics’. The Venetian- and other European-themed sites in Macau are regular stops on the itinerary of what has become a sort of Grand Tour for millions Figure 1.1  Faux Venice cityscape and indoor canal at the Venetian Macau resort

Adam Lampton, used by permission

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of post-socialist Chinese tourists, who travel to Macau with special visas the central government grants to select affluent citizens. These newly bourgeois travelers, like those earlier Europeans in Löfgren’s study, are working out in real time what it means to be a tourist in the twenty-first century. In an effort to ensure total immersion in this tourism spectacle, workshop participants not only traversed the world’s largest casino, but also walked the length of the elevated pedestrian causeway that connects the Venetian with the Sands-Cotai, its sister resort across the street (and itself the world’s eighth-largest building), where we visited Himalayan caves, computerized waterfalls, and an interior Chinese Confucian garden. Taken together, these interconnected structures comprise what may be the world’s largest continuous interior space, and the perfection of the biopolitical tourist enclosure (Simpson 2014). We also marveled at the Wynn Resort’s pyrotechnic dancing water fountains; dined in a private restaurant normally reserved for highrolling VIP gamblers in the MGM property; chatted with executives from a company that arranges casino junkets for high-stakes gamblers; toured the ‘world’s largest elevated wave pool’ at the Galaxy resort; and even relaxed in leather recliners in one of the Galaxy’s private cinemas. Hopefully, these efforts to peek inside the utopic world of ‘elite mobilities’ (Birtchnell and Caletrio 2014) have productively informed the chapters that follow.

Works Cited Alsayyad, Nezer, and Ananya Roy. 2006. ‘Medieval Modernity: On Citizenship and Urbanism in a Global Era’. Space and Polity 10, no. 1: 1-20. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bagaeen, Samer. 2007. ‘Brand Dubai: The Instant City; Or the Instantly Recognizable City’. International Planning Studies 12, no. 2: 173-197. Birtchnell, Thomas, and Javier Caletrio. 2014. Elite Mobilities. London: Routledge. Bloch, Robin. 2010. ‘Dubai’s Long Goodbye’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34, no. 4: 943-951. Buckley, Michelle. 2012. ‘From Kerala to Dubai and Back Again: Construction Migrants and the Global Economic Crisis’. Geoforum 43: 250-259. Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1998. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Chua, Beng Huat. 2011. ‘Singapore as Model: Planning Innovations, Knowledge Experts’. In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, 29-54. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Crary, Jonathon. 2013. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. New York: Verso. Crouch, David, Rhona Jackson, and Felix Thompson, eds. 2005. The Media and the Tourist Imagination: Converging Cultures. New York: Routledge. Davis, Mike, and Daniel Bertrand Monk. 2007. Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism. New York: New Press. De Cauter, Lieven. 2005. The Capsular Civilization: On the City in the Age of Fear. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers. Dehaene, Michiel, and Lieven De Cauter. 2008. Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society. New York: Routledge. Douglass, Michael. 2008. ‘Civil Society for Itself and in the Public Sphere: Comparative Research on Globalization, Cities, and Civic Space in Pacific Asia’. In Globalization, the City, and Civil Society in Pacific Asia: The Social Production of Civic Spaces, edited by Michael Douglass, K.C. Ho, and G.L. Ooi, 27-49. New York: Routledge. Easterling, Keller. 2005. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Foucault, Michel. 1986. ‘Of Other Spaces’. Diacritics, Spring: 22-27. Gonzalez, Vernadette Vicuna. 2013. Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’I and the Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press. Gordin, Michael D., Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash. 2010. Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hailey, C. 2009. Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hardt, Michael. 1999. ‘Affective Labor’. Boundary 2 28, no. 2: 89-100. Hardt, Michael. 2005. ‘In the Factory: Negri’s Lenin and the Subjective Caesura (1968-1973)’. In The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice, edited by T.S. Murphy and A. Mustapha, 7-37. London: Pluto Books. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, David. 1989. ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’. Geografiska Annaler 71, B: 3-16. Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hetherington, Kevin. 1997. The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. London: Routledge. Inglis, Fred. 2000. The Delicious History of the Holiday. London: Routledge. Jacobsen, Michael Hviid, and Keith Tester. 2012. Utopia: Social Theory and the Future. Surrey: Ashgate.

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Jameson, Fredric. 1998. ‘The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism, and Land Speculation’. New Left Review 228: 25-46 Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 2009. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso. 2009. Jameson, Fredric, and Michael Speaks. 1990. ‘Envelopes and Enclaves: The Space of Post-Civil Society – An Architectural Conversation’. Assemblage 17: 32-37. Kaika, Maria. 2011. ‘Autistic Architecture: The Fall of the Icon and the Rise of the Serial Object of Architecture’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29: 968-992. Koolhaas, Rem. 1989a. ‘The Generic City’. In S, M, L, XL. New York: Monticello Press. Koolhaas, Rem. 1989b. ‘Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis’. In S, M, L, XL. New York: Monticello Press. Koolhaas, Rem. 1994. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: Monticello Press. Lean, Garth, Russell Staiff, and Emma Waterton. 2015. Travel and Imagination. Farnham: Ashgate. Lefebvre, Henri. 1984. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Levitas, Ruth. 2013. Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Löfgren, Orvar. 1999. On Holiday: A History of Vacationing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lyttleton, Chris, and Pál Nyíri. 2011. ‘Dams, Casinos, and Concessions: Chinese Megaprojects in Laos and Cambodia’. In Engineering Earth: The Impacts of Megaengineering Projects, edited by Stanley D. Brunn, 1243-1265. Dordrecht: Springer. MacCannell, Dean. 2012. ‘Commentary: On the Ethical Stake in Tourism Research’. Tourism Geographies 14, no. 1: 183-194. Marin, Louis. 2005. Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces. Amherst: Humanity Books. Mazzetti, Mark and Emily B. Hager. 2011. ‘Secret desert force set up by Blackwater’s founder’. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/ middleeast/15prince.html?_r=0 Mitrašinović, Miodrag. 2006. Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space. Surrey: Ashgate. More, Sir Thomas. Utopia. New York: W.W. Norton. 1992. Nealon, Jeffrey. 2010. ‘Empire of the Intensities: A Random Walk Down Las Vegas Boulevard’. Parallax 8, no. 1: 78-91. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Onley, J. 2005. ‘Britain’s Informal Empire in the Gulf, 1820-1971’. Journal of Social Affairs 22, no. 87: 30-45. Paladino, Mariangela, and John Miller. 2015. The Globalization of Space: Foucault and Heterotopia. London: Pickering & Chatto. Palan, Ronan. 2003. The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Petti, Allesandro. 2008. ‘Dubai Offshore Urbanism’. In Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, edited by M. Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, 287-295. London: Routledge. Pinder, David. 2005. Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power, and Politics in TwentiethCentury Urbanism. London: Routledge. Pinder, David. 2013. ‘Reconstructing the Possible: Lefebvre, Utopia, and the Urban Question’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39, no. 1: 28-35. Roy, Ananya. 2011. ‘Postcolonial Urbanism: Speed, Hysteria, Mass Dreams’. In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, 29-54. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Salazar, Noel. 2010. Envisioning Eden: Mobilizing Imaginaries in Tourism and Beyond. New York: Berghahn. Salazar, Noel. 2012. ‘Tourism Imaginaries: A Conceptual Approach’. Annals of Tourism Research 39, no. 2: 863-882. Salazar, Noel, and Nelson H.H. Graburn. 2014a. ‘Introduction: Toward an Anthropology of Tourism Imaginaries’. In Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches, edited by Salazar, Noel, and Nelson H.H. Graburn, 1-28. New York: Berghahn. Salazar, Noel, and Nelson H.H. Graburn, eds. 2014b. Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches. New York: Berghahn. Sargisson, Lucy. 2012. Fool’s Gold: Utopianism in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schmid, Heiko. 2009. Economy of Fascination: Dubai and Las Vegas as Themed Urban Landscapes. Trans. by John Stewart. Berlin: Gebruder Borntraeger. Schmitt, Carl. 2006. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans. by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sidaway, James. 2007. ‘Enclave Space: A New Metageography of Development?’ Area 39, no. 3: 331-339. Simpson, Tim. 2014. ‘Macau Metropolis and Mental Life: Interior Urbanism and the Chinese Imaginary’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 3: 823-842. Simpson, Tim. 2016. ‘Tourist Utopias: Biopolitics and the Genealogy of the PostWorld Tourist City’. Current Issues in Tourism 19, no. 1: 27-59.

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Sloterdijk, Peter. 2013. In the World Interior of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization. Trans. by Wieland Hoban. London: Polity. Stanek, Lukasz. 2014. ‘Introduction: A Manuscript Found in Sargossa’. In Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, by Henri Lefebvre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Strange, Susan. 1986. Casino Capitalism. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. Tally, Robert T. 2013. Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World System. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Virno, Paolo. 1996. ‘The Ambivalence of Disenchantment’. In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, 13-36. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Virno, Paolo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude. Los Angeles: Semiotexte. Walcott, Colonel T. 2006. ‘The Trucial Oman Scouts, 1955-1971: An Overview’. Asian Affairs 37, no. 1: 17-30. Walker, Richard, and Daniel Buck. 2007. ‘The Chinese Road: Cities in the Transition to Capitalism’. New Left Review 46: 39-65. Wilson, Peter Lamborn. 2003. Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes. New York: Automedia.

2

The Zone Is on Vacation Keller Easterling

The promotional videos are always the same.1 A zoom from outer space locates a point on the globe, and graphics indicating flight times demonstrate that this point is located at the center of the earth. As a deep move-trailer voice lists the requisite features, stirring John Williams’ compositions or the theme song from Bonanza accompanies the camera’s elliptical swoop through cartoon skylines, resorts, suburbs, and sun flares. The videos imaginatively describe the world’s most popular and contagious global city paradigm. It is the formula that generates Shenzhens and Dubais all around the world – a dominant urban software or template called the free zone. So contagious is this spatial technology that every country in the world today wants its own free zone skyline. While in the 1960s there were a handful of zones in the world, today there are thousands, with some measured in hectares and some in square kilometers. Zones in over a 130 countries handle a third of the world’s trade. Even as the world scrambles to adopt this urban form, no one really knows why we use it. As urban software, it resembles MS-DOS, but the world has become addicted to the promises it offers of what we might call ‘incentivized urbanism’. Operating under authorities independent of the domestic laws of its host country, the zone typically provides special infrastructures and a set of business incentives like tax exemptions, foreign ownership of property, streamlined customs, cheap labor, and the deregulation of labor or environmental laws. The proliferation of wild mutations of the zone over the last 30 years have pushed it from backstage locations on unpopulated islands or liminal customs areas onto global center stage. These mutations also make the form seem particularly penetrable to further manipulation. The primary site of headquartering, sheltering, and laundering capital for most global power players, the zone has become a self-perpetuating agent in the growth of extra-state territory. The zone has also become an essential partner for the state as it attempts to navigate and profit from the world’s shadow economies. So far from overwhelming state power, the state 1 This text is the transcript of a presentation made at the ‘Tourist Utopias’ workshop, Adelson Advanced Education Center, Venetian Macau Resort, 11-12 April 2013.

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and its new partners often strengthen each other by serving as the other’s proxy or camouflage. They pursue an extrastatecraft – a portmanteau that means both outside of, and in addition to, statecraft.

The Zone Is Breeding The zone has ancient roots in pirate enclaves and the free ports of Hansa traders, also called ‘Easterlings’. (Indeed, my people were the original free trade crooks.) Later, the entrepôts of empire, like Hong Kong and its cousin Macao, or Dubai and Abu Dhabi, served as their territorial offspring. In 1934, emulating freeport laws in Hamburg and elsewhere, the United States established a Foreign Trade Zone law to create warehouse compounds for storing custom-free trade and the zone adopted a different visage. At mid-century, the UN agency UNIDO promoted a novel form of the zone called the export processing zone, or EPZ, which merged warehousing and manufacturing into one logistical product. Using scripts about nation building and free trade, the UN and the World Bank promoted the Figure 2.1  Mexican maquiladora

Guldhammer, used by permission, Wiki Commons

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EPZ as one means by which developing countries might jump-start their economies, enter the global marketplace, and attract foreign investment. In the 1970s, UNIDO established a Free Zone Unit to disseminate the form. In its early assessments the UN and the World Bank were already concerned. They knew it was a suboptimal economic instrument but they thought these enclaves would merely be temporary mechanisms for growth. Meanwhile, the idea of the zone was embraced widely during the 1970s even as it also spread new waves of labor exploitation. For instance, in Latin American maquiladoras, capital segregates young women from their families as well as legal oversight and extracts their labor power to produce goods for export into the global economy (see Figure 2.1). After China adopted the form as a market experiment in the late 1970s the numbers of zones began growing exponentially. By 1984, China had established literally hundreds of special economic zones (SEZs). China now constitutes its own zone category; and it is an immense one, employing most of the zone labor in the entire world.

The Zone Is a City As interest in the classic EPZ waned in the 1980s and 1990s, the zone began to breed promiscuously with other enclave formats, or ‘parks’, merging with offshore financial areas, tourist compounds, knowledge villages, hightechnology campuses, museums, and universities. The zone is a warm pool for the latest cocktail of spatial products that migrate around the world (e.g., offices, factories, warehouses, call centers, software-production facilities, resorts, etc.). Most programs thrive in legal lacunae and political quarantine, enjoying the insulation and lubrication of zone exemptions. Having swallowed the city whole, the zone is now the germ of a citybuilding epidemic that reproduces glittering mimics of Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong. It now often calls itself a ‘city’ – an enthusiastic expression of the zone’s evolution beyond being merely a location for warehousing and transshipment. Perhaps even more than China, Dubai has used the zone to distinct advantage – it is an offshore financial center throughout its territory and an aggregate of zones, most of which are themselves called ‘cities’ (see Figure 2.2). Dubai has hosted zones for almost every imaginable program; there is Dubai Healthcare City, Dubai Internet City, Dubai Knowledge Village, Dubai Maritime City, Dubai Media City, Dubai Silicon Oasis, and Dubai Techno Park. In King Abdullah Economic City, on the Red Sea, near Jedda

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Figure 2.2  Dubai zone aggregate

Tim Simpson, used by permission

in Saudi Arabia, the zone is again an aggregate component of a full-blown city with housing education, resorts, etc. No longer in the shadow of the global city as financial center (New York, London, Tokyo, São Paulo), the zone as corporate enclave and (often a tax haven) offers a ‘clean slate’, ‘one-stop’ entry into the economy of a foreign country. Economic analysts now chase after scores of zone variants, even as they are mutating on the ground and oscillating between visibility and invisibility, identity and anonymity. Now major cities and even national capitals, supposedly the center of law, have created their own zone doppelgangers for legal exemption – like Navi Mumbai (see Figure 2.3). Or New Songdo City, a Seoul double that developer Stanley Gale considers to be a repeatable ‘city in a box’. Aspiring to the cosmopolitan urbanity of New York, Venice, or Sydney, the zone is a complete international city and is filled with commercial, residential, cultural, and educational programs. In Kazakhstan, Astana, the national capital and a free trade zone, has replaced the previous capital of Almaty. Surpassing irony, the center of law becomes the center of lawlessness. Astana is styled to send not only familiar Western signals in its architecture and urbanism but also embraces symbolic national heraldry as a part of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s paleo-Genghis competition with Dubai.

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The Zone Is on Vacation Operating in a frictionless realm of exemption and merging with other urban formats, the zone perhaps naturally adopts the scripts of the resort and theme park, with their ethereal aura of fantasy. The transient population of workers, businessmen, and tourists create temporary citizens that, like temporary agreements and laundered identities, are also good for business. IT campuses in India and Malaysia, like MSC Malaysia (formerly the Multimedia Super Corridor), sometimes refer to themselves as ‘IT resorts’, perhaps still responding to colonial expectations. The resorts offer lush vegetation and a mixture of small-scale vernacular buildings and mirrortiled office buildings. Even more extreme are those zones that merge with the offshore island retreats. Citing Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Hawaii, and Las Vegas as models, the South Korean island of Jeju, for instance, has transformed itself into a ‘free economic city’ with amnesty for golfing fees and the ability to host global soccer tournaments and political summits. In one of the most bizarre uses of tourism as a political instrument – one particularly hard to imagine now – in 1998, North Korea, in addition to Figure 2.3  Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Anurupa Chowdhury, used by permission, Wiki Commons

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constructing industrial zones along the Tumen River, also promoted a cruise ship resort, the now defunct ‘I Love’ cruise at Mount Kumgang. The project enticed potential tourists with the Island Princess, the actual cruise ship used in The Love Boat television series. The strange ‘I Love’ cruise was a global handshake synchronizing the disparate logics of shamanism, communism, Confucianism, neo-Christian mythology, Juche, and capitalism. A country in need of food, roads, electricity, telephones, and up-to-date factories, in this deal, skipped over the great body of free market practices to a peculiarly comfortable recognition of the most familiar spectacles of global commerce, bargaining with the extrapolitical territory of the free trade zone, casinos, airports, and cruise-ships. Kumgang was, they said sincerely, a ‘Special Tourist Zone’. Although still dramatizing production with the mid-twentieth-century heroics of the industrial or agricultural worker, the leaders of the DPRK transferred their faith to the tourist, the gambler, and the information specialist. The resort and the IT campus were the new factories of production. Did the mutual attraction between the DPRK and tourism expose the political disposition in both worlds? Did fiction, the cheerful friend of politics and tourism, generate symbolic capital not because the comedy of its fake crests, seals, and epaulets actually mean something, but precisely because there is a tacit agreement that they might mean nothing? Absurdist gestures and cultural gibberish are techniques in tourism’s sleight of hand, the means by which it floats irreconcilable motives over a revenue stream. Filled with so much elaborate fiction, it provides the perfect opportunity for playacting, for loudly chanting beliefs while looking the other way as they are unenforced. At Mount Kumgang, both sides pretended to be what the other wanted just long enough to make the deal. The fact that both masquerades require the complete obfuscation of meaning is not a tragedy of meaninglessness. It is the meaning and the opportunity for political leverage. On the island of Kish off the coast of Iran, the Kish Free Zone similarly attracts business to an island notorious for its relaxed religious standards. Here, there is not only a loosening of headscarves and a greater opportunity for socializing between men and women, but the standard set of exemptions to which the corporation has grown accustomed. Nearby fantasy residences like the Dariush Grand Hotel recreate the grandeur of Persian palaces with peristyle halls, gigantic cast stone sphinxes and ornate bas reliefs depicting ancient scenes. This is an appropriate destination where enervated petrodollars can get away to relax.

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The Zone Prefers Non-State Violence In the zone, wars are bad for business. The zone organizes its own more insidious forms of violence. The organizational and political constitution of the zone is often portrayed in terms of openness, relaxation, and freedom. Despite the scripts of freedom and openness, however, the zone maintains autonomous control over a closed loop of compatible circumstances; the zone embodies an isomorphic disposition – a naturalized form of lawlessness that rejects most of the circumstance and contradiction that is the hallmark of more familiar forms of urbanity. In its sweatshops and dormitories, it often remains a clandestine site of labor abuse. The zone is a geo-juridical formation within which poverty can be strictly maintained without the chaos of informal economies.

The Zone Is an Intentional Community In Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, the Alsunut Development Company Ltd. is building Almogran, a Dubai-style zone with 1660 acres of skyscrapers and residential properties. The new zone only underlines the extreme discrepancies between oil wealth and the exploitation of oil resources in the mostly non-Arab southern Sudan. Indeed, the overt, even hyperbolic, expressions of oil money are among the chief tools for instigating war and violence in the south. After many cycles of zone breeding around the world, recessive or unlikely traits begin to appear. Dubai Humanitarian City, as an outpost of relief agencies and NGOs, makes a tenant out of the chief critics of zone politics and abuses. Universities, like those in Qatar Education City, now join the zone habitat. And Masdar City is a demonstration of green technologies by the global architects Foster and Partners in Abu Dhabi. In some ways these are all strange intentional communities perhaps no different from many other species of enclave in history with highly specified planning parameters. Rome’s ideal military towns, Spain’s Laws of the Indies for developing pueblos and presidios in the New World, or the exclaves of defecting religious organizations in the New World are all examples of this. Tourism is now frequently a component of this intentional community. After all, what better than golf to demand loyalty and bring tears to men’s eyes? Or the enclave called Orange County just outside of Beijing?

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The Zone Has Special Stupidity Those who tend the self-referential organizations of the free zone are proud of the peaceful, robust, information-rich environments they have created. Yet only information that is compatible to a common platform qualifies for inclusion. Indeed, an enormous intelligence is deployed to reset or eliminate any errant or extrinsic information. While remaining intact, the hermetic organization develops shrewd auxiliary tactics and strategies to fortify its stupidity and defend against contradiction. This information paradox – this special stupidity – wherein an enormous amount of information is required to remain information poor – is a common tool of power and a special form of violence. Decades later, the poorer countries, are eagerly anticipating their fresh new zone skylines even while their own business and technical innovations may have outgrown the form. Georgia plans to build the new city of Lazika on a swamp area near the Black Sea that it had previous promised to conserve. Turning away questions about whether the swamps can support the weight of new buildings (the swamp may require foundations 80 feet deep), the city is seen as part of a new global reorientation and a means to bring the region out of poverty and unemployment. The deputy minister of justice ‘was browsing on the Internet when he came across the idea of a “charter city,” with distinct regulatory and judicial systems that could attract foreign investors to build factories’ (Barry, 2012). Kenya, newly rich in broadband and mobile telephony that potentially changes the very meaning of road, village, and city could develop new urban relationships in relation to these new technologies. Yet only the generic and outmoded zone is on offer – Konza Techno City or LAPSSET is treated like a good idea. LAPSSET is a transportation corridor between Lamu and Juba, the capital of South Sudan. Studded with zone cities and resorts, it would carry oil to the coast. While Kenya is poised to finally harness a technology that might provide intelligent forms of rural development to preserve wilderness and wildlife and tourism, it adopts an old and potentially dangerous development formula around heavy resource extraction. South Korean entrepreneurs have proposed a new science city called Yachay for the highlands of Imbabura north of Quito in Ecuador. The global video that surfaced for Nova Cidade de Kilamba, a new town outside the capital city of Luanda in Angola, was somewhat different. Grainy video moves through the streets of a city of candy-colored high rises, standing empty. Kilamba was intended to be one of China’s ‘satellite

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cities’ in Africa, but it seems to be joining a growing collection of Chinese ghost cities (see Figure 2.4).

The Zone Is Software For all of its efforts to be apolitical, the zone is often in the crosshairs of global conflict. While extolled as an instrument of economic liberalism, it trades state bureaucracy for even more complex layers of extra-state governance, market manipulation, and regulation. For all its intentions to be a tool of economic and logistical rationalization, it has become a perfect crucible of irrationality run with a silly patois of managementese. The zone is a major component of global matrix space – a bit of spatial code in this operating system. Contemporary matrix space is the secret weapon of the most powerful people in the world precisely because it orchestrates activities that can remain undeclared but nevertheless consequential. Some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in these spatial Figure 2.4  Nova Cidade de Kilamba, Angola

Santa Martha, used by permission, Wiki Commons

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infrastructural technologies. Often far removed from familiar legislative processes, the sometimes mundane, sometimes surprising infrastructures generate de facto forms of polity faster than even quasi-official forms of governance can legislate them. Matrix space is the generative medium or rules of the game in the urban milieu. We alter it with only object forms, like a new skyscraper, but the world could also use form in a different register, form in a different gear – active forms like multipliers, remotes, switches, functional expressions – software with time-released powers and remote controls. As an architect, I work on both object forms and active forms, not literal software but something like spatial software. We can use active forms like the zone as a germ or carrier of alternative politics. Given the zone’s ambition to be a city, it potentially even carries the genetics of its own reversal or antidote. Recently invited to the global conference of zone developers, I attended as a kind of Trojan horse. I only lied a little bit in my presentation when I said that the next smart zone entrepreneur might simply ask, ‘Why enclave? Why not locate the same incentives in the city?’ As if swapping out the topology or the wiring, the zone might be mapped directly onto Nairobi, Guadalajara, Moscow, Quito, instead of their exurban enclaves, thus returning more financial benefits to the domestic economy. Different from an object form like a master plan, an active form of this sort is positioned to be multiplier in a population of zones – not a single prescription but rather an explicit unfolding direction. Maybe it has to be that simple. While its irrationality, invisibility, and discrepancy make the zone the secret weapon of the powerful, two can play at this game.

Works Cited Barry, Ellen. ‘On Black Sea Swamp, Big Plans for Instant City,’ New York Times, 21 April 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/world/europe/in-georgia plans-for-an-instant-city.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

Enclaves

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Instant Cities in the Jungle Fantasies of Modernity for Whom? Pál Nyíri

Travelers who pass through northern Laos, one of the poorest and most remote corners of Southeast Asia, on the newly built but already severely potholed stretch of road that connects Mohan in China to Chiang Khong in Thailand – and by extension, Kunming, the capital of China’s Yunnan Province, to Bangkok – are treated to two unlikely urban visions rising out of a mostly single-storied countryside: rows of condominium-style buildings on a narrow strip of land near the border crossing with China and a sprawling development centered on two buildings, topped respectively with a crown and a golden dome, on the Mekong, near the Thai end of the road. These apparitions mark the first 2 of 40 special economic zones (SEZs) the Lao government has been recruiting private investors for since issuing a decree on SEZs in 2010 (Laos n.d.). The two enclaves, called the Golden Boten Specific (sic) Economic Zone and the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, had in fact first been granted in concession to private companies headed by investors from China and were subsequently given administrative autonomy as SEZs. The rapid urbanization of both zones has been driven by gambling. It has been argued that contemporary global capitalism, but especially its East and Southeast Asian varieties, work by creating ‘spaces of exception’ in which capital is given more room to operate, states loosen their rules, and the rights of labor are curtailed (Ong 2006). To an extent, particularly where states are weak and their control over national territory is recent or tenuous, such spaces may be seen as reflecting a (re-)emerging form of ambiguous sovereignty, where states share or devolve certain aspects of sovereign power to other states or to private companies (Nyíri 2012b). Laos and Cambodia, Southeast Asia’s two poorest countries, were the last to embrace this trend but have done so with particular gusto. Cambodia, which has a longer and more extensive history of economic land concessions – as of 2012, they totaled some 2 million hectares (LICADHO n.d.) – introduced the SEZ framework in 2005 and has approved 22 SEZs so far (Council for the Development of Cambodia n.d.). In Laos, land concessions granted to foreign companies totaled only 200,000 hectares in 2012, but the acreage had grown fiftyfold in the ten years since 2002. The highest number of

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land concessions, 299, totaling nearly 1 percent of Lao territory, belonged to Chinese companies (Xie and Xie 2013). But in Laos, SEZs figure far more prominently in the government’s plans to convert ‘land into capital’ than in Cambodia: they are expected not only to create about 50,000 jobs and ‘boost local per capita incomes to as much as US$2,400’ annually (Laos n.d.), but also to become hubs of urbanization in remote rural areas. Article 33 of Decree No. 443/PM sets out the criteria for transforming a special zone into a city: it must have a population of at least 80,000 and infrastructure that includes schools, hospitals, and preferably an international airport. According to the latest available population statistics, only two cities in Laos pass the 80,000 mark. It is here that the two special zones of northern Laos fit into a related but different trend: a sudden global enthusiasm in various quarters for instant cities and other feats of spectacular urbanism in rural settings. Such urbanism is most famously practiced in the Persian Gulf States but shared by the US-based charter city movement as well as Angolan and Belarusian state leaders who hope that such projects will catapult them into modernity. The purveyors of instant cities – as other large infrastructural projects – anywhere are increasingly Chinese, and the promise of modernity – which is rather explicitly part of the packages they offer, in addition to financing, know-how, and labor – is, in many parts of the world, also increasingly associated with China. Finally, the two sites bank on the continued expansion of tourism from China and – especially the Golden Triangle SEZ, designed in part by a Portuguese architect formerly active in Macau – on its diversif ication from gambling and sex tourism into nature and adventure tourism. The proposition is to combine in one enclaved site the fantasy of the notionally European loucheness of Macau with another fantasy, that of the wild: jungle, tribes, and in this case drugs and guns. Enormous enclaves targeting tourists from China are being constructed elsewhere in Southeast Asia, notably on the Cambodian coast, and are being planned in other regions, such as northern Europe. These sites will vary in theme and architecture, but they share an enclavic urbanism that has characterized tourism development in China (Nyíri 2006a). This chapter, based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork carried out at Golden Boten City and the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone between 2008 and 2011, is intended to shed light on the relationship between these trends, driven as they are in part by a global reconfiguration of the spatial relationship between states, capital, and mobile populations engaging in both labor and consumption, and in part by a more specific pattern of

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a regionalization of production and consumption practices characterizing the contemporary phase of capitalism in China.

Extraterritorial Spaces The website of the Lao Ministry of Planning and Investment lists the developers of both zones as ‘Chinese’, their years of establishment as respectively 2003 (Boten) and 2007 (Golden Triangle), and their land tenure as 50 years. The management of the two zones supplies somewhat different information. According to that information, Fokhing, a Hong Kong-registered company, was granted a 16 km² land concession across the main border crossing with China, at Boten in Luang Namtha Province, in 2007. The concession, called Golden Boten City, was for 30 years, with the option of renewing the lease twice. The Golden Triangle SEZ, in Bokeo Province, was granted as a 99-year concession to the Hong Kong-registered KingsRomans Group – with a 20 percent minority stake held by the Lao government – in 2007 and covers 103 km² (30 km² according to the ministry website). The management of both zones has used the term ‘special zone’ (Mandarin: tequ 特區) even before that concept was officially introduced in Laos, and both were gazetted as SEZs in 2010, making them the first two privately run special zones. (SavanXeno Special Economic Zone, in southern Laos, was initially intended to be government-run [Laos n.d.], but Japanese investors signed an agreement to develop part of that zone in May 2013 [Vientiane Times 2013].) The plans of both zones list a dozen areas of investment, from agriculture and manufacturing to tourism, real estate, and logistics, suggesting a comprehensive development typical of the breathlessness of special-zone development worldwide (cf. Easterling 2012). Both plans also specifically include a golf course. The images on the website of the Lao National Committee for Special Economic Zones (NCSEZ) – all of them graphic renderings of the future rather than photos of present conditions – foreground villas and entertainment complexes. The total committed investment figure reported on the site is $500 million for the Golden Boten project and $87 million for the Golden Triangle zone,1 but Golden Boten City’s management estimated that total investment by mid-2010, after which little new investment has arrived, was around $130 million. In contrast, Golden Triangle management claimed to have invested more than $500 million in the zone 1 http://www.sncsez.gov.la/index.php/en/boten-beautiful-land-sez and http://www.sncsez. gov.la/index.php/en/golden-triangle-sez.

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by late 2010 and speaks of an eventual investment of $2.2 billion, a figure comparable to Laos’ annual budget (Tan 2013). Under Lao regulations, the zones are governed by an Economic Committee (EC) and an Administrative Committee (AC). While the AC, which consists of Lao government representatives, exercises an overall supervisory Figure 3.1  A row of condos in Boten Golden City

Pál Nyíri, used by permission

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function, the EC, appointed by the investors, is in charge not only of the economy but also of ‘cultural, social, education and public health development’ as well as ‘security and order’ and land allocation (Article 94 of Decree No. 443/PM). In return for a yearly concession fee paid to the government, the EC has the right to levy its own taxes and administrative fees and enact legislation and issues license plates and ID cards that are different from those in the rest of Laos but are valid across the country. Initially, Chinese visitors to Golden Boten did not even need to go through Lao immigration to visit the zone, and they still do not have to clear Lao customs because the zone is located between the immigration checkpoint and the new customs house, built by the zone itself. Until the erection of a border checkpoint at the Golden Triangle SEZ in 2012, visitors entering the zone by boat from the Thai side of the Mekong did not have to go through Lao immigration. Although, to date, the zones do not resemble the promotional images, and little of the promised development has materialized, both have mustered impressive growth centered on casinos that attracted gamblers from China, and in their wake, merchants and service providers. Initially, Boten grew faster, and in the peak season of 2010, its resident population of shop- and stall keepers, prostitutes, and other workers from China numbered an estimated 4,800. To accommodate gamblers and workers, hotels with a total capacity of 2,700 rooms, condo-style apartment buildings, and workers’ dormitories were built on the site of the former village of Boten (see Figure 3.1). According to a report written for the visit of the chairman of the Lao National Assembly in November 2010, the investment also included construction of a school and groundwork for the houses of relocated villagers and a relocated iodization plant. In late 2010, however, Golden Boten City hit a snag. Following reports in Chinese media that security staff had detained and tortured Chinese gamblers, the Chinese foreign ministry issued a statement warning Chinese nationals against going to Laos to gamble. (Gambling, as well as inducement to gamble, is illegal in mainland China, but junket operators from Macau and Southeast Asia recruit customers in China in a semi-open fashion, generally with impunity.2) Chinese border guards began turning back Chinese citizens who had not obtained visas in advance (in Peking or Kunming), although under Lao regulations they could obtain a visa at Boten. Chinese mobile telephone companies operating in Boten, whose services were more 2 Junket operators are crucial in recruiting gamblers from mainland China because of currency controls and the fact that gambling debts are not legally enforceable. Junket operators provide loans and enforce debts by extralegal means.

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popular than those of Lao companies because of lower price, better service, and ease of communicating with China, were ordered to cut their services. Finally, Chinese police issued arrest warrants for some 50 gambling hall operators and employees wanted on charges of inducement to gamble and facilitating illegal border crossing. By April 2011, all twelve junket operators Figure 3.2  Abandoned shops at Boten

Danielle Tan, used by permission

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had closed down, small traders had left in droves, and the zone was deserted (see Figure 3.2). The zone’s management now appealed to the Lao government, with whose senior members it had cultivated cordial relations, for support, offering f inancing for the Lao section of a planned Yunnan-Singapore railway. This did not help, and provincial authorities, concerned about their international reputation, began negotiating with other investors. In March 2012, Haicheng Group, a real estate company based in the neighboring Chinese prefecture of Sipsongpanna, purchased the zone’s assets from Fokhing, and announced plans to invest $500 million to build a logistics hub. By July, earth-moving machinery was seen at work in the zone,3 and in November, the new AC was named, with Haicheng Group’s board chairman, Zhou Kun, as its chair. 4 By mid-2013, the management estimated that the zone’s population was back to 2,000 Chinese, mostly construction workers (Shiju Zhoukan 2013). With even more braggadocio than his predecessors from Fokhing, Kang Peng, the deputy general manager of Haicheng Boten, declared that the concession was for 21 (rather than 16) km² and 90 years and stressed that his company had been granted control of everything except foreign and military affairs, including the right to issue visas. Referring to the investors as ‘the Chinese side’, he emphasized that ‘the Lao side’ will not interfere in economic affairs, and that the agreement between the two was an ‘international’ one, which named a Singapore firm as mediator and made provisions for ‘international mediation’ if disagreements arose (Shiju Zhoukan 2013). Compared to the earlier proprietors (cf. Nyíri 2012a), the new management, which is rumored to have close ties to high officials in the Sipsongpanna prefectural government, thus attempts to make the zone’s extraterritorial jurisdiction even clearer and speaks of the concession in national terms. No sooner were the Boten casinos closed than Chinese traders’ nostalgia for the ‘golden days’ began, with Golden Boten remembered as the ‘Little Macao in the jungle’ and the hotel rooms, in reality rather shabby, as luxurious (Shiju Zhoukan 2013). At any rate, Golden Boten’s end meant a windfall for the Golden Triangle SEZ, which likely attracted many former customers and perhaps also some of the workforce and service providers from Boten 3 Danielle Tan, personal communication, 26 September 2012. 4 A Chinese news report (Shiju Zhoukan 2013) identifies Zhou as the chair of the new AC, which also includes the governor of Luang Namtha Province and other local and central Lao government officials. This would mean a departure from earlier practice at both zones, according to which the investors delegated members of the EC but not the AC.

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(Tan 2013). As of 2012, two large casinos – with a more upmarket décor than at Boten, modeled clearly on Macau – five hotels, a nightclub, two shopping arcades, several markets, and a large number of dormitories and single-story houses for families had been completed (see Figure 3.3). Much of the investment has been in basic infrastructure: roads, reinforcements of the riverbank, a water-bottling plant, and housing for farming households to be resettled within the zone. In 2010, according to KingsRomans chairman Zhao Wei, the company had 1,500 employees. In 2011, estimates of the zone’s migrant population – which, in addition to the majority Chinese, includes Burmese workers and some Thai petty traders – varied between 6,000 and 10,000; this excludes some 5,000 Lao peasants who inhabit seven villages in the zone. KingsRomans claims to have planted crops and introduced pig, cattle, and poultry farming, and there are plans to develop ‘organic sightseeing farming’ with the help of specialists from China. Two-thirds of the area consists of hills, which will be left undeveloped as a nature reserve where swidden – traditionally practiced by mountain dwellers in the area – will be forbidden. While many Figure 3.3 The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, seen from the Thai side of the Mekong

Danielle Tan, used by permission

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Chinese invest in rubber and other plantations in northern Laos, Zhao Wei has prohibited rubber planting in the zone, as he plans to develop it as a base for regional tourism.

From Macau-in-the-Jungle to a Lao Shenzhen In 2010, Golden Boten City’s rows of apartment buildings and neon lights offered a sight of urbanity, reminiscent of a Chinese town, that was unparalleled anywhere in Laos. Thanks to Chinese and Korean investment, Vientiane, the capital, has acquired some glass-and-steel shopping centers since, but at that time its architecture was limited to colonial- and a few Soviet-era buildings. This sense of urbanity, and of a specifically Chinese kind at that, was produced by the radical rupture of the visual, spatial, and social organization of the place compared to the surrounding Lao countryside marked by sparse wooden huts, lush nature, and dark nights, and strengthened and colored by the presence of English-Chinese bilingual signs, Chinese-looking uniforms of the security guards, the second-hand Chinese police van, and banners with political slogans in Chinese characters. Both Western journalists who wrote about the place and Lao workers noted a sense of being in China, but the sense of urbanity was equally striking. It was not without basis that the inaugural issue of the English-language Luang Namtha Provincial Tourism Magazine described Boten as the ‘most internationally modernized city in [L]ao’. Even on the eve of the closure of the casinos (which the article did not mention), People’s Daily (2011) enthused about the ‘two newly-built avenues […] lined with many stores […] two hotels […] unique in style [and] a few business-residential high-rises’, as well as the plans for warehouses, shopping, a convention center, and a topnotch golf course. Haicheng’s executives wish to shed Boten’s association with gambling but promise to turn it into a ‘Lao Shenzhen’ (Shiju Zhoukan 2013). Zhao Wei, for his part, has presented his urban vision in a report on CCTV, China’s central state television.5 Laos’ 2009 Law on Investment Promotion defines Special Economic Zones as ‘development zone[s] for urbanization’ that may consist of industrial, touristic, free trade, residential and other kinds of zones (Article 33). This vision is further elaborated in Decree No. 443/PM, which stipulates that a special zone may be transformed into a city if it has a population of at least 80,000 (Article 33). While Golden Boten has not disclosed such 5 http://w.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjY3MjY2MTI4.html.

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plans, the management of the Golden Triangle SEZ has declared a population target of 200,000 (Tan 2013). More recently, special zones focusing on high-end real estate and golf courses have been established in Vientiane with both Chinese and Vietnamese investment. That Luang SEZ in central Vientiane, a 99-year concession granted a Chinese company in 2011 with a committed investment of $1.6 billion, has in particular attracted much publicity because of rare public opposition to it. But the first two zones that promised, and to an extent delivered, urbanization were Golden Boten and Golden Triangle. Whose fantasies are these instant cities in the jungle? Developers’ promotional texts and images fuel more promises by them. These texts and especially the visuals that accompany them, like those made for other special zones the world over, situate them in an explicitly global landscape marked by concentric circles of distance from world capitals. The first brochure Golden Boten City produced for investors envisioned ‘thousands of people […] with various occupations and identities, to form a huge community, and a modern society’.6 A report on Phoenix TV, a popular Hong Kong-based Chinese satellite channel, compared Boten to Shenzhen, China’s first, legendary special zone, which grew from a fishing village to one of southern China’s largest cities (Phoenix TV 2010). The rows of Boten’s condo-like buildings replicate the ‘instant cities’ constructed by Chinese companies that, in the last few years, have spread from the outskirts of Kampala and Luanda to the Michigan rust belt. Some of these are related to government commissions and intended for the local middle class; others combine retail and exhibition spaces with residential and recreational ones marketed to relatively high-income buyers in China; yet others are intended as housing complexes for low-income populations displaced by infrastructure projects. The China-Africa Development Fund is currently financing and overseeing housing projects in Sierra Leone, Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Egypt, and Nigeria’s Lekki Free Trade Zone, the latter ‘a new offshore city’ with a planned occupation of 120,000 (Da Silva 2013; Hulshof and Roggeveen 2014). In Mozambique, CADFund, though its Real Property Projects, has invested US$880 million for a first phase project of 10,000 affordable units, which includes a school, shopping center and a hospital. In Johannesburg, a Shanghai-based company has announced the development of a ‘mini-city’ to include 35,000 houses, finance, industry, recreation, and education on 1,600 hectares. The company’s chairman said that the new city ‘will be on 6 English in the original.

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par with […] New York in America or Hong Kong in the Far East’ (Fin24 2013; Vallecillo 2013; Steyn 2013). Tanzania’s permanent secretary for foreign affairs was modest in comparison when he said he hoped the new $11 billion Chinese-built port of Bagamoyo, with its planned special industrial zone, will be a modern city like ‘Africa’s Shenzhen’ when it is completed in 2017 (Zheng 2014). In Sri Lanka, a similar agreement has been signed to build a port and a city on a landfill island off Colombo (Economist 2014). The core activities of these zones may be different – from industry to tourism and trade – but the rhetoric and the imagery they conjure up are the same. My first encounter with the instant city motive was in Southeast Fujian Television’s drama series Into Europe (走入欧洲). Produced in the late 1990s, it was one of a number of dramas about audacious Chinese migrants who make it in the world. There, the protagonist unveiled a similar scale model of urban modernity – for a Chinese trade city near Paris – to an applauding French audience (Nyíri 2006b). Since then, the fantasy of a Chinese hero bringing modernity to the West has come close to turning into reality. Ronja Yu’s documentary Chinatown chronicles the failed project of a large Chinese product-distribution hub combined with real estate development in the small town of Kalmar in eastern Sweden, which hoped it would revive its flagging fortunes. One of the returning motives in the film is the scale model of the new city, with tree-lined avenues, condos, and street lights: something clearly more metropolitan-looking than today’s Kalmar. The Kalmar project may have fallen through, but others are on the way in Illange-en-Moselle in France and in Milan, Michigan. Both are largely aimed at attracting Chinese investors an providing them with residential real estate; the Milan project has the additional selling point of in-state tuition at the University of Michigan (Springfield News-Sun 2012). In the Golden Triangle SEZ, a scale model very similar to that developed for Kalmar – but complete with schools, hospitals, and airport – is on display in a special building. Many of the newly announced ‘instant cities’, like Bui City in Ghana – planned in conjunction with the Bui Dam – may never materialize. They may, like the scale models so far, remain simulacra of a reality whose materialization is delayed indefinitely. Others are struggling. In Peru, the Chinese state aluminum company Chinalco is spending $50 million to build a new town next to the Morococha copper mine to resettle locals whose houses are in their way. With 1,050 new houses, the company describes this as the largest non-state ‘social project’ in the history of Peruvian mining. Nonetheless, it admits that not all locals have been persuaded to move (Guancha 2012).

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Even so, the appeal of instant cities, both as investment hubs and as modern places, seems wide. The way a journalist describes the Morococha new town is typical of the developmental enthusiasm of these stories: Unlike the precarious labyrinth of corrugated metal shacks and painted brick houses that make up the old town, the houses built by Chinalco all have quality inside plumbing and concrete walls. According to a […] mine official, most of Morococha’s residents used to rent their living spaces. After the construction of the new town, some families own their houses and enjoy modern comforts that had not existed in Morococha before, such as running water, sewage, 24-hour electricity, and a police office. (Guancha 2012)

While the residential appeal of instant cities, particularly their low-end rural versions, may not be as high as hoped by the investors, it would be a mistake to dismiss them summarily as prestige projects intended to whitewash extractive exploitation. Even in cases such as Boten, where they may in the end be abandoned as quickly as they were built, these projects are introducing a new form of urbanism, modeled in turn on cities that sprung up in China’s remote areas as a result of a sudden trade, commodity, or tourist boom, like Jiuzhaigou in Sichuan, Ordos in eastern Inner Mongolia, or Ereen on the Mongolian border (on the latter, see Lacaze 2012; on suburban ‘instant cities’, see Weston 2012). With the current acceleration of China’s urbanization project, this model and its export are likely to become even more ubiquitous, driven both by profit and government utopias. And as Chris Lyttleton points out, there is a connection between architecture and ways of seeing the world that are imported and gradually assimilated by local staff and visitors. In the case of Golden Triangle, The opulent surrounds are not casual whimsy. Staff and patrons respond to the trappings and they soon begin to aspire to this hyper-fantasized world. Most of the largely poor and relatively uneducated staff choose to work in the casino precisely because it is a high-paying job offering reminders of visceral pleasures at every turn, the plush panels, fauxEuropean artworks, fine marble, baroque staircases, boutique shops, exotic women and so forth. They sacrifice familiar aspects of a threadbare life for the sensory overload of consumer fantasy. […] A sense of self gradually changes. […] [W]orking in the casinos creates radically new forms of relating to the world for Lao staff as well. (Lyttleton 2014)

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As Aihwa Ong (2011) notes, spectacular architecture in contemporary Asian cities carries the dual symbolic meanings of capitalist modernity and national revival. This acquires a particular twist in the special zones of the borderlands where the ‘interactions between exception, spectacle, and speculation’ (Ong 2011: 207) are tied both to a discourse of the strong developmental state and one of freewheeling capital in particularly eloquent ways. Furthermore, in the borderlands, these feats of urbanization turn spatial hierarchies on their head: the remote frontiers of the nation are, by virtue of their closeness to China, beginning to look more metropolitan than its very center. Thant Myint-U, the US-educated grandson of UN SecretaryGeneral U Thant, makes this very point in a recent book: ‘It’s a stunning reversal in Burma’s geography. What had been remote is now closer to the new centre. What were muddy mountain hamlets are now more modern than Rangoon’ (quoted in Deb 2011). The Lao government, for one, sees special zones as models of national development (MqVU 2011), and this approach has been endorsed by UNIDO – the UN’s industrial development organization – and the Asian Development Bank, which has provided ‘capacity building’ assistance in 2008-2012 in drafting the SEZ decree and law and setting up the NCSEZ.7 Although this project was advised by a Thai expert and included site visits to Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, Chinese companies have been the most active in investing in special zones in Laos. In addition to those already mentioned, negotiations are underway between the Lao government and the management committee of Kunming’s large High and New Technologies Zone to set up a 1,000 hectare zone outside Laos, with Vientiane City and Yunnan Province’s overseas investment company holding 25 and 75 percent of the shares respectively (Chen 2013). This zone, with a registered capital of $128 million, would be Yunnan’s first ‘overseas cooperation zone’ under a Chinese government scheme that provides official recognition and some financial support to selected special zones run by Chinese companies abroad (so far mostly in Africa). Lao officials, too, associate the model with China more strongly than with Southeast Asian countries. The increasing popularity of China as a place to study for the children of the Lao elite is not unrelated to the appeal of Chinese developmentalism. In fact, Haicheng’s plans in Boten include a Lao-Chinese-English school, targeting primarily the children of Lao officials (Shiju Zhoukan 2013).

7

ADB T.A. Completion Report, TA 7188-LAO.

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Instant Cities and Tourist Enclaves As Keller Easterling (2012) has noted, special zones are fungible places where industrial modernity can ‘breed promiscuously with other enclave formats […] merging with offshore financial areas, tourist compounds, knowledge villages, high technology campuses, museums and universities.’ She goes on to suggest that, ‘operating as it does in a frictionless realm of legal and economic exemptions, the zone, as it merges with other urban formats, perhaps most naturally adopts the scripts – the aura of fantasy – of the vacation resort and theme park’. Indeed, the economic and political seriousness with which the aims of the special zones are formulated might appear rather too ‘heavy’ for places that, after all, aim predominantly at tourists – whether the gambling or sex tourists of today or the imagined nature or adventure tourists of the future. Of course, developers’ promises of future international cities must be taken with a large pinch of salt. But their imagery of enclaved modernity is in line with the development of tourism in China in the past two decades or so, since domestic tourism as a mass phenomenon first took off. Although Chinese tourism is rapidly changing and diversifying, gated and themed spaces boasting eye-catching glass-and-steel infrastructure capable of receiving large groups remain what most Chinese tourists associate with and expect from tourist sites (Nyíri 2006a). Not unlike at Disneyland in the 1950s (see Angela Ndalianis’ chapter in this volume), a combination of exotic culture and nature, heavily scripted interpretation and performance, and impressive displays of urban modernity remains at the heart of the mainstream Chinese tourist experience even as alternative tourist cultures begin to thrive on the fringes (Lim 2008). In the last five years, the tropical island of Hainan in China has been the site of one of the fastest-growing real estate markets in China, and one entirely based on a holiday economy centered on the island’s tropical beaches. Hainan is one of China’s earliest special economic zones, but it is only recently that tourism – overwhelmingly domestic – has started to play a central role in its economic development. Beachfront development on the island is carved up into hotel and residential apartment zones, both of which have been developing explosively. Meanwhile, outbound tourism from China, too, has been growing rapidly: outbound border-crossings rose to 83 million in 2012, representing a more than eightfold increase compared to 2000 according to China’s National Tourism Administration, and Chinese travelers spent $102 billion abroad, making China the highest-ranked country in terms of tourist expenditure. Combined with the recent proclivity of

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affluent Chinese to invest in real estate abroad (see Shambaugh 2013: 259), this has prompted developers to undertake the first enclavic beachfront developments modeled on Hainan targeting Chinese holidaymakers. The first two such projects are under construction in Cambodia and include a 99-year, 360 km² land lease development with a total projected investment of $3.8 billion at Botumsakor in Koh Kong Province, according to official figures from the Council for the Development of Cambodia.8 This is the largest single foreign investment so far registered in Cambodia and the first large-scale tourism development investment abroad by a Chinese company. The developer, Union Development, based in Tianjin, which is also engaged in a large-scale development in Hainan, has received a loan from China Development Bank, a policy bank that has mostly disbursed concessional loans under foreign development assistance schemes. The project has also generated some controversy because of allegations of forced resettlement of fishermen from the area.9 According to Wang Chao, the communications manager of Union Development, the area will be divided into residential, hotel, shopping, and entertainment zones, as well as an airport and a port, with a total floor space of 50 million m². Residential zones will be further subdivided to cater to different nationalities (Chinese, Southeast Asian, Cambodian, and Euro-American): for example, Chinese are expected be more interested in apartments, while Cambodians will prefer villas.10 Enclaves have played a major role throughout the development of modern tourism (Edensor 1998), but the flexibilization of land arrangements, the globalization of the real estate market, the rapid growth of tourism and perceived preferences of Chinese tourists are particularly conducive to their proliferation. As in Boten and in the Golden Triangle, whether the grandiose plans and scale models of the developers will indeed materialize is an open question. But whether these particular projects succeed or fail, or even turn out to be fraudulent, enclavic development schemes favored by investors from China – but by no means limited only to them – are likely to expand into tourism farther afield, including Europe and Africa, in the coming years. The flamboyant real estate billionaire Huang Nubo has made attempts to acquire large plots first in Kyrgyzstan, then in Japan, and most recently 8 Information on this project is based on interviews conducted in Phnom Penh in August 2013. 9 See, e.g., the report ‘Some Return after Eviction from Coastal Development’, Voice of America, 27 July 2013, http://www.voacambodia.com/media/video/1711008.html. 10 See the developer’s website at http://www.sunnyunion.com/cn/show.asp?ShowID=995.

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in Iceland to develop resorts for Chinese tourists, the last of which would have been a 99-year lease of 300 km² of wilderness comprised to build one hundred villas, a golf course, a luxury hotel, and a mountain park (MqVU 2011). This plan appears no less far-fetched than Boten’s promises of a global city, and while this project has stalled – and resulted in the introduction of a law banning land ownership by non-resident foreigners – Huang has reportedly been approached by Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic officials, encouraging him to invest in similar projects in their countries (Ye 2012), and then setting off a new round of controversy as he announced plans for seaside and mountain resort complexes in northern Norway (Higgins 2014). It appears, thus, that officials and institutions concerned with economic development are beginning to be tempted by the potential of tourist enclaves built for Chinese consumers, and that the failure of Kalmar’s instant city project does not appear to have discredited such plans. These cases demonstrate how the proliferation of special zones as an instrument of reconciling flexible capitalism with the goal and capabilities of the neoliberal state, the modernist allure of ready-made cities, and themed development responding to the demand of tens of millions of new tourists follow logics that are distinct but intertwined in multiple ways. Remote as northern Laos may be, what is happening there is not just a freakish outcome of rogue capitalism on the margins of a weak state – although its specific form undoubtedly is. Rather, the developments in northern Laos fit into a global reconfiguration of the spatial relationship between states, capital, and mobile populations engaging in both labor and consumption. Simultaneously, they form part of a more specific pattern of a regionalization of production and consumption practices, in which the ‘frontiers’ of Southeast Asia become experimental grounds for the contemporary phase of capitalism in China.

Works Cited Chen Lingna. 2013. 云南承建国家及境外经济合作区 项目或落户老挝万象 [Yunnan gets contract to build national-level overseas economic cooperation zone; project may be housed in Vientiane, Laos], Yunnan Province official website, 13 March. http://yn.yunnan.cn/html/2013-03/13/content_2651371.htm. Council for the Development of Cambodia. n.d. ‘List of SEZ’. http://www.cambodiainvestment.gov.kh/list-of-sez.html. Da Silva, Issa Sikiti. 2013. ‘After Oil, Gas, Timber and Farmland, China Now Investing in Africa’s Housing’. Africa Daily, 23 October. http://www.theafricadaily.

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Nyíri, Pál. 2006b. ‘The Yellow Man’s Burden: Chinese Migrants on a Civilizing Mission’. China Journal 56: 83-106. Nyíri, Pál. 2012a. ‘Enclaves of Improvement: Sovereignty and Developmentalism in the Special Zones of the China-Lao Borderlands’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 3: 533-562. Nyíri, Pál. 2012b. ‘The Renaissance of Concessions’. Political Geography 31, no. 4: 195-196. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Sovereignty and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press. Ong, Aihwa. 2011. ‘Hyperbuilding: Spectacle, Speculation, and the Hyperspace of Sovereignty’. In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, 205-226. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. People’s Daily. 2011. ‘A Glimpse of Boten, Golden Triangle Special Zones in Laos’, 1 February (English edition). english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90780/91421/7278825. html. Phoenix TV. 2010. ‘Long xing tianxia’ [The dragon travels the world], 12 October 2010. http://v.ifeng.com/f/201012/abd93737-0ccf-4d01-b630-aa4f52ecbc51.shtml. Shambaugh, David. 2013. China Goes Global: The Partial Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shiju Zhoukan. 2013. 中国私企’接管’的老挝经济特区 [Private company from China ‘takes over’ Lao SEZ], 9 July. www.clady.cn/2013/shiju_0709/96375.shtml. Springfield News-Sun. 2012. ‘Michigan Town near Ohio Could Become “China City”’, 5 May. http://www.springf ieldnewssun.com/news/business/ michigan-town-near-ohio-could-become-china-city/nNrWn/. Steyn, Lisa. 2013. ‘Dai’s Vision for a Modderfontein Metropolis’. Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg), 8  November. http://mg.co.za/article/2013-11-08-00​ -dais-vision-for-a-new-metropolis. Tan, Danielle. 2013. ‘China in Laos: Economic Development, Internal Colonialism or Neo-Colonialism?’ Paper presented at the Global Encounters seminar, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 20 June. Vallecillo, Francys. 2013. ‘Chinese Firm to Develop Global Hub in Africa’. Africa Daily, 6 November. http://www.theafricadaily.com/11/post/2013/11/chinesefirm-to-develop-global-hub-in-africa.html. Vientiane Times. 2013. ‘Japanese Firm Inks Deal to Develop Lao Special Economic Zone’, 12 May. Weston, Timothy B. 2012. ‘China’s Historic Urbanization: Explosive and Challenging’. In China In and Beyond the Headlines, edited by Timothy B. Weston and Lionel M. Jensen, 134-153. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

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Xie Caiwen and Xie Shefei. 2013. ‘Zhongzi waizi zai Laowo huode tudi texu jingying xiangmu diaocha baogao’ [Survey report on Chinese and foreign companies holding land concessions in Laos]. Guangxi Ribao, 19 February. Ye Huijue. 2012. ‘Bei Ou san guo zheng Huang Nubo’ [Three Nordic countries fight over Huang Nubo]. 21st Century Business Herald, 7 May. Zheng Zhi 郑治. 2014. 坦桑尼亚外交部官员：期待中国为坦打造’非洲的深 圳 [Tanzanian Foreign Ministry official: We look forward to China creating an ‘African Shenzhen’ for Tanzania]. CRI Online, 26  March. http://gb.cri. cn/42071/201403/26/6071s4479433.htm.

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After Utopia Post-Colonial Macau and Post-Socialist Chinese Tourists Tim Simpson The pragmatic heart of the Modern Age lay in the new science of risk-taking. The globe was the monitor on which the field of generalized investment activities could be viewed. At the same time, it was already the gambling table at which the adventurer-investors place their bets. – Peter Sloterdijk (2014: 825)

The sixteenth-century Portuguese trans-Atlantic navigations and discoveries inaugurated the historical era that Peter Sloterdijk (2013) calls ‘terrestrial globalization’ (9). This phrase refers to the period stretching roughly from 1492 to 1945, defined by the circumnavigation of the globe and the concomitant spread of European colonialism, which together created the contours of the contemporary world system and sparked the modern imaginary. The Portuguese navigations produced the f irst global empire. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope in Africa and establishing eastern ports in Goa and Malacca, Portuguese explorers landed on the coast of China, and in 1557, on behalf of the Portuguese crown, they reached an agreement with the Ming emperor to create a port and trading post in the small Chinese territory that became the city of Macau. Macau initially served as a conduit for Catholic missions into China, yet the tiny enclave eventually mediated the vast majority of the isolationist Ming dynasty’s extensive trade with Europe and Japan, the latter of which was otherwise forbidden by imperial edict. After a prosperous Golden Age during which the city played a crucial role in the development of global capitalism, Macau’s maritime importance was overshadowed by the more desirable deep-water ports in Hong Kong and Shanghai which could facilitate larger and more technologically sophisticated ships, and the city faded into historical obscurity in a manner that paralleled the gradual waning of Portuguese empire itself. That process played out for several centuries as a weakened Portugal clung grudgingly to its imperial ambitions. But following the leftist Carnation Revolution in 1974, which ended the fascist military dictatorship of Marcelo Caetano, Portugal f inally began the process of decolonization the

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country had resisted throughout most of the twentieth century, and the movement was completed when the former empire returned Macau to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, two years after Britain’s handover of Hong Kong. Macau was the last European territory in Asia, and at the time of the handover the city was a largely forgotten colonial backwater whose palpably sleepy streets seemed a generation behind the frenetic East Asian Tiger economies of neighboring Hong Kong and Taipei. Tellingly, a scene from the 1984 film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was shot in Macau because the economically depressed city center resembled 1930s-era Shanghai. However, less than a decade after the territory was reunited with the PRC in 1999 as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) under the rubric of the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ regime – and with the concomitant culmination of not only the European colonial project, but of the reigns of both Keynesian industrial-capitalism, and totalitarian state socialism, that were its dizygotic progeny, Macau re-emerged suddenly on the world stage as a remarkably vibrant tourist destination, a global gambling paradise which in 2013 boasted the highest per capita GDP in Asia. While the city was once a conduit for the trade of goods produced by the travail of Chinese workers, today it serves as a gateway for the leisure travels of Chinese tourists. Macau’s phantasmagoric mega-resorts are now visited by more than 30 million tourists per year, the majority of whom are nationals of the PRC. These tourists produce phenomenal profits. Macau’s casinos generated revenues of $45 billion in 2013 alone, an amount that was seven times greater than the revenue produced that year by the casinos on the famed Las Vegas Strip. Today, this semi-autonomous Luso-Sino quasi state is the chimerical product of the utopian ambitions of both the maritime explorers who established the Portuguese empire, and the Chinese peasants who labored in support of the Maoist revolution. As such, Macau is perhaps the prototypical tourist utopia, and serves as an inadvertent exemplar for other tourist destinations dispersed around the world, whose similar physical, financial, and biopolitical contours are characteristic of the contemporary post-industrial, post-global ecumene. This chapter explores the trajectory of Macau’s development from regional trading post to global gambling hub, and the manner in which this development parallels the process of terrestrial globalization. This utopian archeology (Levitas 2013) of Macau’s evolution excavates the fossilized traces of Portuguese, Jesuit, and Maoist influence which underpin the city’s development and are latent within the contemporary simulated cityscape.

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Capital and Mobility For Sloterdijk, terrestrial globalization is but one phase of the more general history of spheric thought, the process by which humans came to understand the Earth as a self-contained and knowable globe. The globalization project originated with ancient philosophers who conceived of the Earth as the center of a vast cosmos ‘that humans could only observe from within’ (Sloterdijk 2013: 6). Terrestrial globalization is the modern process by which this original relation to the globe was inverted, and the Earth became knowable from the outside as ‘an eccentric orb whose roundness we could verify ourselves by external viewing’ (6); this process was corroborated by the Apollo 17 mission’s 1972 ‘blue marble’ photograph of the Earth illuminated from outer space. With the current phase of electronic globalization, aeronautical and telecommunications technologies designate the precise contours of the planet’s atmospheric bubble and map the virtual dimensions of cyberspace that actuate contemporary post-Fordist capitalism. Sloterdijk contends that the 500-year-long process of terrestrial globalization was driven by the Iberian explorers’ proto Christian-capitalist faith in globalization; that is, their commitment to the very idea of the world conceived as an observable, mappable, and ultimately knowable globe. The willingness of these visionary ‘globonauts’ (81) to depart from the relative safety (and boredom) of provincial home and community, and to plunge headfirst into the expansive ‘pure outside’ (109) of the ocean, was rooted in a conviction in the inevitability of their eventual return. Sloterdijk likens this impressive feat of oceanic exploration to a form of ecstatic religious ‘transcendence to the horizontal plane’ (79), contrasting with the vertical ascension to the extraterrestrial heavens idealized in ancient cosmology. This European global expansion was propelled by a peculiar propensity for risk-taking, and ‘the urge to generate profits in order to repay debts from investment loans’ (50) which funded the voyages. This circular process of debt-financed entrepreneurial departure and remunerative return, which promised to enrich the seafarers and their royal benefactors alike, beget modern capitalism and naturalized the circular monetary logic of the business cycle and return on investment. The process was animated with a missionary zeal that would reappear in the sober Protestant work ethic that for Max Weber was crucial to early industrial capitalism, and again in the Pentecostal spirit of contemporary neoliberalism, with its faith in the deistic global market. This trajectory of globalization not only marks humanity’s epic struggles with spherical consciousness, but also traces capital’s ‘fivefold

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metamorphosis’ during the process as it passes through the mediums of ‘commodity, money, text, image and celebrity’ (Sloterdijk 2013: 31). This process unfolds through the economic and social history of Macau, from the city’s original status as a global trading post, to its revivification as a post-war gold market, and finally to its contemporary guise as a gambling and welfare paradise where everyone is seemingly only one lucky baccarat hand, business deal, or government handout away from fame and fortune (see Sloterdijk 2013: 215).

Jesuits and Horse Heads Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci arrived in Macao in 1582 to further the expansionary efforts of ecclesiastical European Christianity. He planned to study Chinese language and customs in Macau in preparation for proselytizing in China. A number of other Jesuit scholars followed, studying Chinese at Macau’s Colégio de São Paulo, the first Western university in East Asia, before venturing into the Middle Kingdom. One key to the success of the Jesuit missions was Ricci’s initial decision to adopt an accommodative style (Mungello 1999). Rather than introduce Catholicism as a foreign doctrine in competition with indigenous Chinese beliefs, Ricci explained the tenets of the faith through existing Chinese precepts and practices, creating, in essence, a syncretic gospel, a European Tao. Ricci’s evangelism was an early example of the coexistence of seemingly incompatible belief systems in Macau, a trait that reappears in China’s ‘One Country, Two Systems’ policy, and enables its current tourist function. The Ming and Qing emperors allowed the Jesuits to reside in the empire, fostering intercultural interchanges with reverberations for the scientific knowledge and artistic and architectural practices of both Europe and China. One such product was the Jesuit-designed and Versailles-inspired European section of the emperor’s expansive Yuanmingyuan Summer Palace near Beijing. Giuseppe Castiglione constructed an ornate mechanical water clock at the palace that featured bronze busts of the twelve animals of the zodiac; a rotating stream of water would spout from the open mouth of each respective animal in order to mark the appointed hour. The water clock was one component of a vast trove of architectural wonders, art works, and curios from around the world that the emperor collected and stored on the palace grounds. In 1860, at the end of the second Opium War, the palace was looted and tragically burned to the ground by British and French troops under Lord

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Elgin’s command in a three-day orgy of needless ‘liberal barbarism’ (Ringmar 2013). The bronze animal heads from Castiglione’s clock that survived the pillage were taken to Europe and some of them eventually found their way into museums and private art collections. Contemporary attempts by collectors to sell the pieces have sparked protests from China, which managed to repatriate some of the plundered art works. Today only seven of the fountain’s bronze busts are accounted for. Castiglione’s horse head now adorns the lobby of Macau’s Grand Lisboa Casino; it was purchased at auction in 2007 for nearly $9 million by the casino’s billionaire owner, Stanley Ho, a gift intended for the PRC that currently serves as a source of fascination and nationalistic sentiment for Chinese tourists in Macau. Like the Chinese emperors before him, Ho has amassed a vast collection of unusual art objects which are displayed in his casino properties, including ornate jade sculptures, ornamental Victorian side tables, and creepy busts of old men carved from ancient tree trunks. The horse head sits next to the ‘Star of Stanley Ho’, the world’s largest cushion-shaped diamond, a 218 carat stone Ho purchased for $50 million (Hu 2007). The diamond was mined in the former Portuguese territory of Angola, where Ho also owns a casino concession in partnership with the daughter of the nation’s president. (While China insists on the rightful return of the Jesuit-designed bronze zodiac busts, there are apparently no plans to repatriate the gem to Africa.) The incongruous presence of the Jesuit-designed horse head and superlative Angolan diamond in a Macau casino highlight the arc of the Portuguese explorations that linked Africa with the Middle Kingdom, as well as Macau’s mediating role at both the origins and termination of this historical process.

Macau Medievalism Ricci’s accommodative evangelical style perhaps provided the cultural context for Macau’s opaque geopolitical status; this status, in turn, enables the city’s current tourist function. Although it was a Portuguese territory for nearly half a millennia, Macau was never technically a colony. When the Portuguese first settled in Macau, China did not formally yield power to the Europeans, and ‘there was no agreement whatsoever specifying the size of the territory and its boundaries’ (Breitung 2007: 33). No existing historical records document the exact administrative agreement concerning Macau that was forged between the Chinese and Portuguese, and the territory never clearly belonged exclusively to one or the other power. Cathryn Clayton (2009) refers to Macau’s indefinite geopolitical status as the

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city’s ‘sort of sovereignty’. ‘The details surrounding the earliest Portuguese settlement in Macau are lost, or, more likely, were never recorded’, notes Clayton. ‘To many historians, the haziness of this origin story is the origin of Macau’s sovereignty problem. To others, this haziness was the condition of possibility for the very existence of Macau’ (41). Sometimes jointly ruled by both states in a creative diplomatic partnership, but more often jointly ignored in an unoff icial policy of willfully indifferent opportunism, Macau existed as an indefinite hybrid Sino-Luso locale with respective dual allegiances typical of medieval cities (Alsayyad and Roy 2006; Henders 2001). Macau capitalized off the laissez-faire administration of both empires and tolerated vices otherwise forbidden in surrounding territories; such questionable commercial activities included smuggling, gambling, prostitution, opium production, and indentured servitude. Because of Portugal’s declaration of neutrality during World War II, Macau was relatively free from wartime Japanese occupation and served as a haven for spies, gamblers, and drifters from across the globe. Smugglers took advantage of the city’s strategic location and indefinite political allegiances to move goods through Macau into China. Even after China’s socialist revolution, Macau maintained its status as an entrepôt for business and trade carried out secretly by the Communist Party. Due to the economic blockade of China by Western powers in the 1950s, Macau served as a site of transport for significant amounts of products that were needed by the communist regime (PinaCabral 2002). During the Korean War, the city served as a conduit for smuggling weapons into China in an effort to circumvent United Nations mandates (Dicks 1984). Later Macau’s ambiguous sovereignty allowed the city to serve as a conduit for North Korea’s diplomatic and financial concerns. In fact, the eldest son of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il lived in Macau for a number of years before fleeing to the mainland after his estranged younger half-brother assumed leadership of the Stalinist dynasty. In 2007 the US State Department used the USA PATRIOT Act to blacklist Banco Delta Asia, a family-owned Macau bank, for allegedly laundering counterfeit US$100 ‘supernotes’ for North Korea, as well as ill-gotten gains earned from the regime’s state-sanctioned trade in counterfeit Viagra (Gaylord 2008). Perhaps both spurious enablers circulate through the saunas, massage parlors, nightclubs, and karaoke lounges which comprise Macau’s lucrative commercial sex industry. When Macau was eventually unif ied with the PRC and became an SAR under the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ policy, this designation legally

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formalized the city’s exceptional status, officially confirming its paradoxical identity as both/and – a part of China, and yet apart from China. Macau’s transformation into a tourist locale today results, in part, from this status as an extra-judicial ‘space of exception’ (Ong 2006) to normal socialist logics, a semi-autonomous city-state with its own Basic Law, (inconvertible) currency, passport, and police force.

Pirate Governance Some historians suggest that the Ming emperor allowed the Portuguese to occupy Macau in the seventeenth century because he believed the Portuguese could control Japanese pirates operating in the South China Sea; that is, from the Chinese perspective the Portuguese were not maritime colonial conquerors, but rather privateers sanctioned by China to fight other pirates (Clayton 2009: 42). Retrospectively, on the other hand, from the perspective of international law the lengthy Portuguese presence in Macau could also be understood as ‘a single act of piracy sustained over 450 years’ (Clayton 2009: 66), authored by Portugal to illegally occupy a Chinese territory which never formally succumbed to colonial rule. Both interpretations suggest the ambiguous distinctions among criminal pirates and sovereign states in the formative years of global capitalism (see Braudel 1992). The pirate-functioning-as-privateer serves as an apt analogy for the other ‘non-state’ actors who continue to play an integral role in Macau governance today. Throughout its history, Macau’s gaming industry has enriched a variety of privateers who work with the state both licitly and illicitly. Gambling was legalized in Macau in the mid-nineteenth century and operated as a monopoly concession granted by the Portuguese administration to an individual in exchange for a share of the profits. Horse head and eponymous diamond owner Stanley Ho controlled the monopoly for 40 years prior to the territory’s return to the PRC in 1999. In the 1970s, Ho decentralized management of private VIP gaming rooms in his casinos to middlemen with alleged associations to Chinese organized crime. Once these groups had control over their respective VIP gaming rooms, they began violent campaigns to protect their turf. This created a lawless atmosphere in Macau in the years leading up to Portugal’s return of the territory, marked by kidnappings, firebombing of cars and motorcycles, and bold assassinations of government officials and gaming industry regulators. ‘Broken Tooth’ Koi, Macau’s most notorious gangster of the era, even financed an autobiographical film about his rise to power in the Macau underworld. The film Casino capitalized off of

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the Chinese mythology surrounding criminal brotherhoods, depicting the state as corrupt, inept, and decadent, and Broken Tooth as a loyal local hero. As a semi-autonomous foreign enclave, Macau today retains its status as the only site of legal casino gaming in China, the key to its current economic success. Following Portugal’s return of the territory to the PRC in 1999, the Macau government ended Ho’s casino monopoly and liberalized the gaming industry, granting gaming concessions to six entities. The new casino licenses were issued to Ho; Ho’s son Lawrence Ho, in partnership with Australia’s Crowne gaming company; Ho’s daughter Pansy Ho, in partnership with Las Vegas-based MGM; Steve Wynn, a Las Vegas entrepreneur who introduced luxury resorts, upscale restaurants, and fine art exhibitions to the North American casino industry; and Sheldon Adelson, the brash billionaire owner of the Las Vegas Sands company, who pioneered the city’s weekday convention industry. The Macau government awarded gaming concessions to Adelson and Wynn in hopes that their investment in Macau would not only professionalize the industry and develop the economy, but would also restore law and order to the territory (Lo 2005). Since casino operators with licenses in North American gaming jurisdictions must abide by the regulatory statutes of those jurisdictions when operating properties abroad, the Macau government licensed these foreign regulatory regimes in an effort to indirectly police Macau gaming operators. This gambit has rid Macau of the violent crime that plagued the city – by 2012 Macau was ranked the ‘safest city in China’ – but not of Chinese triads. Indeed, by working with ‘junket’ operators who fund high stakes VIP gambling, organized crime figures play a crucial role in the gaming industry. The Macau government’s collusion with an oligarchy of casino concessionaires, North American gaming regulators, and organized crime is an example of what Ong (2000) refers to as a ‘statetransnational network whereby some aspects of state power and authority are taken up by foreign corporations located in special economic zones’ or outside the territory (57). This network is a formalization of the informal varieties of piracy that historically characterized Macau governance. This arrangement is enormously lucrative for all involved. When Adelson opened the Macau Sands Casino in 2004, the city’s first foreign-owned casino after the industry liberalization, the crush of Chinese tourists eager to enter the property on opening day prompted the security guards at the venue to literally rip the glass doors off their hinges to prevent visitor injuries from the stampede (Cohen 2014). Adelson recouped his initial $260 million investment in only ten months. Forbes estimated that from 2004 to 2006, Adelson earned $1 million per hour from his investments. When

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MGM Macau launched an initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2001, the sale of a portion of partner Pansy Ho’s original $5 million dollar investment in the venture returned her a profit $1.5 billion, making her Hong Kong’s wealthiest woman (Gough 2011). By 2010 Macau’s annual gaming revenue was quadruple that of Las Vegas, and by 2014 Macau casino returns dwarfed the combined revenues derived from all commercial casino gambling operations in the entire United States. The booty earned by these landlocked privateers does not only serve as a source of personal enrichment. The extent of Adelson’s profits from Macau’s casinos came to the attention of US regulators when it was disclosed that, in an effort to unseat Barack Obama in the 2010 presidential election, Adelson exploited new campaign finance laws to donate more than $100 million to Republican candidates, including a $10 million donation to Newt Gingrich. Adelson’s conservatism stems not only from a desire to protect his vast wealth, but from his ardent Zionism, including ownership of an Israeli newspaper and generous donations to related causes. Though he is a United States citizen, with his transnational business operations and attempts to intervene in the affairs of multiple states, Adelson belongs more to the transnational space of flows than to a traditional sovereign state.

Global Enclosure Biopolitics begins as enclosure-building. – Peter Sloterdijk (2013: 170)

For Sloterdijk, terrestrial globalization is the story of capital’s eventual enclosure of the totality of the social sphere. This process of enclosure originated with the Portuguese seafarers’ experience in the ship’s hold, which served as the f irst component of the ‘spatial poetics’ (121) by which these European explorers managed the globalization project and transported the spherical domestic bubble to destinations abroad. The mariners were protected in their voyages by the symbolic ‘canopies’ provided by the onboard ship’s clergy, and the hierarchical ‘dynastic models’ (128) the crew inherited from their allegiance to the crown of the mother country. Together, these canopies assured the seafarers of their divine provenance. The project of empire saw Europeans gradually expanding this virtual bubble of home until it eventually covered vast colonial territories. Colonial conquerors used the nascent empirical sciences of anthropology and

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geography to transform ‘all outside conditions into observations’ (132) and deployed linguists and translators to render this outside accessible and legible so that all phenomena could gradually be incorporated into grand European theory concerning the science of Man. In so doing, the Europeans eventually enclosed the commons within the possessive and privatized logic of capital. In this manner, European empires expanded geographically through conquest and the seafarers returned home to share the spoils of their adventures with the investors who financed the trips. For Sloterdijk, the physio-symbolic apogee of this process of global enclosure was construction of the Crystal Palace, which was erected in London’s Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Crystal Palace, a massive glass edifice which housed exhibits displaying the products of modern industry and colonial conquest, was both a gigantic interior consumer space and the most potent and expressive metaphor for the capitalist system’s determination of all life conditions under globalization processes. In Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who had visited the Crystal Palace in 1862, borrowed the name of the structure to characterize Western civilization itself. The palace structure expanded the capitalist interior beyond Walter Benjamin’s insightful observations’ of bourgeois European salons and Parisian glass shopping arcades, until it managed to ‘endow the outside world as a whole with a magical immanence transfigured by luxury and cosmopolitanism’ (170). The gigantic Crystal Palace structure ‘invoked the idea of an enclosure so spacious that one might never have to leave it’ (175). The end of terrestrial globalization, and capital’s concomitant enclosure of the entire globe, is symbolized by a variety of concurrent twentiethcentury phenomena, including Portugal’s decolonization after 1974 and NASA’s photo of the Earth from outer space. However, Sloterdijk precisely dates the consummation of the process in 1944, ‘with the establishment of the gold-based monetary system by Bretton Woods’ (12) that finally integrated the global economy. Agreements signed at the post-war Bretton Woods Conference established the International Monetary Fund, fixed an international exchange rate based on the gold-backed US dollar, and therefore tightly regulated the price of gold on the world market. Interestingly, Portugal’s neutrality in World War II meant the country did not sign the post-war agreement. Therefore, Macau took advantage of its ambiguous geopolitical status and favorable maritime location to exploit its role ‘outside’ the international system as an ‘overseas province’ of Portugal, and to enjoy an economic renaissance enabled by becoming a global hub for the gold trade. As such, Macau somehow remained outside of the containment of globalization.

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From 1949 to 1973, 934 tons of gold was legally imported into Macau and never seen again. Presumably the gold was smuggled overseas into Hong Kong for resale, though no official records document this process. ‘If all that bullion had stayed in Macau’, mused Pina-Cabral (2002), ‘the city would now be paved in gold’ (6). Visitors today to Macau’s glittering mega-resorts might not find that sentiment so far-fetched. Seventy-eight (supposedly) gold bars rest under a glass floor in the lobby of the colonial-themed Emperor Hotel, while the palatial Galaxy Resort features six gold turrets that the company’s marketing department claims are coated in enough 24 karat gold plate to cover 87 football fields. Richard Nixon’s ‘shock’ termination of the gold standard in 1971 eventually prompted the demise of Macau’s gold trade, and finally integrated the medieval city-state with the twentieth-century global economy. With the Faustian bargain the Macau government struck with transnational financiers like Adelson and Wynn, it seems that Sloterdijk’s terrestrial globalization process has culminated in contemporary Macau. The complete enclosure of the city by transnational capital is remarkable. Today Macau is an airconditioned ‘hothouse’ of accumulation where every aspect of life has been brought within the ‘comfort sphere’ of capital. Adelson’s Venetian Resort – which is the world’s seventh-largest structure – is a gigantic encapsulated city, featuring themed reproductions of the architectural and artistic wonders of Venice, and several indoor canals. The $4.4 billion Sands-Cotai property, which is the world’s eighth-largest structure, sits directly across the street from the Venetian; the buildings are connected by an elevated pedestrian walkway, creating a seamless amalgamated pseudo-urban interior experience in Macau joining more than 2 million m2 of space. This Macau structure dwarfs Paxton’s 92,000 m2 Crystal Palace, and constitutes perhaps the world’s largest enclosure (Simpson 2014). This encapsulated city-within-the-city includes nearly 10,000 hotel rooms, four casinos, and 600 retail shops. The vast scale of this enclosed urbanity is all the more remarkable given the tiny size of Macau’s total land mass; the total interior space of these rooms, shops, restaurants, promenades, auditoriums, and so on, over the myriad levels and floors of these buildings, is equal to nearly 8 percent of the entire surface of the territory of Macau. The Venetian Sands-Cotai complex embodies the notorious observation by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s observation in Empire that under current conditions of global capitalism ‘there is no more outside’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 186); that is, no way to exempt oneself from the capital relation. Even Macau, which only 50 years ago was still beyond the bounds of the global economy, has been encapsulated by this totalized interior. Complacent

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tourists happily experience this commodious Elysian ‘inside’. They shop and dine under the vibrant and cloud-flecked ‘wild blue yonder’ which is painted on the Venetian’s ceiling, and reminiscent of the ‘portable symbolizations of the sky’ (Sloterdijk 2013: 120) which once protected Portuguese explorers.

Post-Civil Troposphere The gambling activities that occur inside this pseudo-urban space exemplify the ‘motif of income without performance’ that for Sloterdijk defines the comfortable ‘pampering space’ of a fully globalized world (216). The public funds generated by the sizeable 40 percent tax the Macau government collects on casino revenues earned in the territory ensures that this capitalist comfort sphere is enjoyed by locals who live in a sort of welfare paradise. In 2014 Macau boasted the world’s fourth-highest per capita GDP. The average life expectancy of 82 years for Macau residents is the second longest in the world, just behind Monaco. Jobs are abundant for Macau workers, who enjoy an unemployment rate of less than 2 percent. Protectionist labor policies prevent non-residents from working as casino croupiers; therefore, competition among transnational casino companies for this limited local pool of largely undereducated and semi-skilled workers has increased croupier salaries high above Macau’s median wage, with compensation packages that include annual bonuses and stock options unheard of for their counterparts in other gaming jurisdictions. Education, health care, and electricity consumption are partially subsidized by the government, which also recently spent nearly $2 billion to construct a new campus for the University of Macau on the nearby island of Hengqin. Young local entrepreneurs under the age of 35 qualify for MOP 300,000 interest-free small-business start-up loans from the government. Finally, a Macau ‘wealth-sharing scheme’ implemented in 2008 perfectly epitomizes the logic of ‘income without performance’. The scheme returns an annual cash payment to residents, a sum that in 2014 amounted to MOP 9000 (US$1100) for every man, woman, and child in the city. The composition of Macau’s diverse population within this tiny and overpopulated interiorized comfort sphere produces a subjective ‘spatial alienation’ within the city, with large numbers of residents who seemingly have no stake in urban politics and no real relation to each other. Significantly, 60 percent of the current population of the city was born outside of Macau, including more than 175,000 non-resident workers drawn largely from mainland China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand,

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Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, and Eastern Europe. With a rapidly growing population of 624,000, living in a mere 30 km2 of space (half of which is reclaimed land), Macau is the world’s most densely populated sovereign territory. The city’s mega-resorts continue to attract ever-larger numbers of visitors, with 31 million tourists in 2014 alone. Ultimately, to speak of Macau today as a ‘city’ is to reify what is really a dense nexus of circulations of people, capital, and affects moving according to different logics of residence, work, and leisure (LiPuma and Koelble 2005). With this interior space increasingly inhabited by temporary visitors it is understandable that the resulting intersubjective relation among locals and the tourist other is experienced as a mostly tolerant form of ‘post-civility’ (Jameson 1990). Here ‘post-civil’ refers not to a historical moment that emerges after development of a mature civil society, but to a contemporary alienated spatial relation forged under the canopy of the capitalist enclosure. Macau’s post-civility is the product of the logic of interior urbanism aligned with a transient population of tourists and workers who lack a genuine stake in the city and whose primary purpose is to relax in the comfort bubble provided by ‘the immanence of spending power’ (Sloterdijk 2013: 176).

Capital’s Final Mutation All contemporary relations are finally mediated by money; ‘we reach people predominantly to the extent that we can afford admittance to the sites of possible encounter with them’, says Sloterdijk (2013: 208). Macau’s stratified spaces of consumer excess cater to this social fact. As a global gaming hub, Macau today embodies the ‘stepping-up of the capitalist markets from the consumption of goods to a consumerism of experiences and risks’ (Sloterdijk 2013: 218). Visitors to Macau may take in the panoply of pointless superlative attractions, viewing the world’s largest crystal chandelier at the Sands Casino, swimming in the world’s largest elevated wave pool at the Galaxy Resort, and enjoying the controlled risk of the world’s highest bungee jump from the top of the Macau Tower (see Figure 4.1). Some lucky tourists may even travel in style from site to site utilizing the world’s largest fleet of RollsRoyce Phantoms; 30 of the luxury cars were recently ordered by one Macau resort. This $20 million collection of bespoke automobiles constitutes the single largest purchase in the history of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, Ltd., and includes two gold-plated models that are the most expensive Phantoms ever commissioned.

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Figure 4.1 Tourists enjoying the controlled risk of the skywalk at the Macau Tower, which also offers the world’s highest bungee jump

Adam Lampton, used by permission

The excess is unparalleled. However, for casino tycoon Wynn, the key to the success of luxury resorts is not such superlative accoutrements, but the

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personal touch provided by employees. Wynn dismisses the importance of the physical attractions on offer in his Macau properties – ‘mechanical trees that rise out of the floor, hand woven carpets, marble and onyx’ – and contends instead that human contact is the most important element. ‘What really matters is the people’, he said (without irony) in a 2014 speech commemorating his MOP 1 billion (US$125 million) donation to the University of Macau; ‘only people can take care of people’. To augment this customer care, Wynn’s company emphasizes a daily activity of staff ‘storytelling’, during which employees recount notable customer experiences. When a frontline staff member relates an interesting anecdote that illustrates the company motif of personal care, the employee is singled out for praise by the boss. ‘We publish that story in the back-of-the-house newspaper, or on a bulletin board’, said Wynn, ‘and we make that person famous’. Sloterdijk suggests that such manufactured celebrity is the final form of capital’s mutation, made possible today by ubiquitous social media outlets which focus the combined power of images and narrative, and the instantaneous presence of electronic communication, on the increasingly narcissistic individual. ‘With the establishment of self-referential media worlds in the interior of the crystal palace’, says Sloterdijk (2013), ‘a relieving effect has also become evident with the phenomenon of celebrity, severing the earlier connection between achievement and prestige’ (220). As such, this form of celebrity constitutes another example of the motif of income without performance. Wynn has used such fame to profitable effect in his corporate branding. Wynn’s immaculately coiffed hair, botoxed and tanned skin, capped teeth, and expensive suits are featured prominently in company promotions, and his personal signature comprises the company logo displayed on the exterior of his eponymous Las Vegas and Macau resorts. This experience of corporeal capital embodied in the form of mediated celebrity is available for ordinary Macau tourists to sample at the Soho neighborhood attraction in the aptly-named City of Dreams resort. Soho is a food-and-beverage experience offered inside a faux New York-meetsLondon-themed cityscape, complete with retro British phone booths, graffiti murals, and break-dancing performances. Soho provides a ‘post-civil’ interior urban experience emptied of all possibility of potentially dangerous inter-class encounters – the mean streets in the City of Dreams are merely another experiential attraction of the crystallized comfort sphere. An innovative Soho visual attraction allows visitors to operate wallmounted cameras to capture personal digital photographs; the tourist ‘selfie’ is then uploaded into a photo collection displayed on a large screen

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above, and the montage of tourist photos takes the form of a spinning globe, stopping periodically to foreground an image of an individual person. This technology transforms each tourist into a temporary celebrity whose mediated image is prominently displayed for all to see. Much as gambling offers the promise of wealth without work, the Soho attraction offers notoriety without actual achievement, closing the circle on capital’s five-stage metamorphosis: to be famous one need only be a tourist.

After Utopia Tourism today constitutes the pinnacle of the capitalist way of life. – Peter Sloterdijk (2013: 195)

In circling the globe and establishing colonies, trading posts, and multiethnic progeny in such seemingly exotic places as Senegal, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, the Azores, Brazil, Timor-Leste, and Nagasaki, the Portuguese seafarers not only brought home the lucrative treasures of the New World; they also unwittingly animated the very idea of utopia as a philosophical concept and literary genre. Utopia is an imaginative discursive form, ‘where alternative worlds could be constructed without the need for a context – according to the taste of the terrestrially discontent’, says Sloterdijk (2013), but always grounded in the ‘real-life discovery of the New World in the inexhaustible diversity of its insular and continental manifestations’ (79). With their journeys to exotic locales, the Portuguese explorers augured Arcadian fantasies of ideal tourist destinations located somewhere in the expansive ‘no place’ of the pure outside, ultimately captivating the imaginations of political theorists, armchair anthropologists, and eager travelers. As the imaginary of Marxism, this Iberian utopic motif emboldened radicals around the world, including not only sober Continental intellectuals and committed Bolsheviks, but Mao Tse-Tung’s band of revolutionary Chinese peasants. The Chinese communists would eventually overcome a century of European-induced humiliations, and wrest control of their erstwhile ‘middle kingdom’ from both foreign interlopers and their own cosmopolitan Chinese comrades, Sun Yat Sen’s bourgeois Republican nationalists. In overt opposition to the logics of acquisitive European territorial expansion, these Chinese revolutionaries created an ascetic and egalitarian People’s Republic, and retreated into the insular and encapsulated Maoism that characterized China for the second half of the twentieth century.

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Nevertheless, in a startling world-historical reversal that somehow mirrored the Ming emperor’s fateful decision to open China to global trade via Macau, in 1978 Deng Xiaoping initiated a capitalist caesura in the PRC’s permanent revolution, and exposed China once again to the barbarian West. This time China embarked on a utopic economic experiment that would create ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, perhaps the contemporary world’s most revolutionary and dynamic form of enterprise. Sloterdijk (2013) rightly observes the inherent ‘symmetry between the capitalist and socialist programmes’ that merge today in the interstitial city of Macau. ‘[T]he socialist-communist project was simply the second building of the palace project’, he says: ‘After its closure, it seemed likely that communism was a stage on the way to consumerism’ (176). In order to complete this capitalist transformation, the PRC anticipated the eventual reunification with the colonial concessions of Hong Kong and Macau that would mediate the country’s nascent relations with global capital. In 1999, after more than 500 years of rule, Portugal finally returned Macau, the last remaining European concession in Asia, to the PRC. Less than ten years later, tiny Macau would be transformed into the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming revenue. Transnational investment today has created the phantasmagoric contemporary Macau cityscape of iconic glass structures and themed mega-resorts which sit astride pastel-colored colonial-era buildings, and decrepit imperial monuments (Simpson 2013b). Perhaps the most prominent marker of the Portuguese presence in the city is the Ruins of St. Paul’s, the façade of a oncemagnificent baroque cathedral built in honor of the Virgin Mary, which was destroyed by fire in the mid-nineteenth century and never rebuilt. All that remains today is the stone frontispiece, which stands at the end of a narrow winding lane where Dairy Queen, Forever 21, Samsung, and Nike stores are crammed next to cosmetics outlets and shops selling cookies and trinkets to huge crowds of tourists. The empty St. Paul’s structure stands in testament to the decline of a decadent European empire, and its unlikely contemporary guise as merely an attraction for Chinese tourists (Simpson 2013a). The same year that the Ruins of St. Paul’s was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, a group of international investors (including the king of Morocco) broke ground nearby on a huge $154 million Fisherman’s Wharf, an expansive monument to the colonial project. The attraction features themed reproductions of the Roman Coliseum, Tang dynasty Chinese architecture, a Babylon casino, an ‘Afrikana’ village, a Victorian hotel, and buildings from Amsterdam, Lisbon, Cape Town, and Miami. These

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structures ostensibly evoke the geography and history of terrestrial globalization. Workers are busy adding new venues to the attraction, including Czech and Middle Eastern-themed hotels, a yacht club and (of course!) a dinosaur museum; the latter inadvertently echoes the Crystal Palace’s own Dinosaur Court, which featured the globe’s first prehistoric models and celebrated the scientif ic achievements of European paleontology. Fisherman’s Wharf effectively buries the Iberian imperial project under a mound of symbolic artifice. Today the heroic, remunerative, and redemptive journeys of the Iberian explorers in Macau have been subsumed by the perhaps more pointless perambulations of Chinese tourists. ‘Following the creation of circumnavigability, the tourist experiences the Earth – even in the furthermost corners – as a mere epitome of situations that the daily papers, travel writers and encyclopedias have long since portrayed more comprehensively’, says Sloterdijk (2013: 37-38). The termination of terrestrial globalization means that there is no more heroism inherent in discovery, no longer any travail in the act of travel (Boorstin 1961). Under such conditions, the tourist travels ‘neither for their own amusement nor for business reasons, but rather for the sake of travel as such’ (Sloterdijk 2103: 38). The contemporary circulations of Chinese tourists in Macau complete the logic of the business cycle that was initiated by the Portuguese globonauts. While the proto-capitalist Portuguese sought to further terrestrial globalization by (to paraphrase Vasco da Gama) converting heathens to Christianity and trading their spices, the post-socialist Chinese tourists travel in search of capital that has taken the form of consumable experiences (see Figure 4.2). Against a recent legacy of socialist scarcity and deprivation, these nascent tourists energetically seek access to the comfort sphere: plush luxury, brand-name consumer goods, and the titillation of heightened affect. Perhaps not surprisingly, a newly minted Chinese billionaire has even proposed to rebuild Paxton’s Crystal Palace in London. If the project is approved, the Palace which once displayed the spoils of empire will now house the Chinese tycoon’s personal art collection, as well as convention and hotel space to accommodate more tourists. The revived crystallized structure will function ‘like a tree from which the whole world will enjoy the shade’ (Simpson 2013), he claimed, in a metaphor that perfectly naturalizes capital’s enclosure. The mobilization of Chinese tourists in Macau today in pursuit, not of communism but of the utopian promise of the unfettered market, may arguably be understood as a contemporary ‘effort to realize modern utopias by decidedly postmodern means’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000:

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Figure 4.2  Tourists taking selfies on the steps of Macau’s Ruins of St. Paul’s

Adam Lampton, used by permission

299). Therefore, the two antithetical trajectories of ecstatic utopianism – globalized entrepreneurial Iberian seafaring, on one hand, and interiorized domestic revolutionary state socialism, on the other – coalesce today in Macau in a world-historical denouement of the globalization processes that began in 1492. ‘As for capitalism, we can only now say that it always meant more than the relations of production’, contends Sloterdijk (2013): [I]ts shaping power had always gone much further than can be encapsulated in the thought figure of the ‘global market’. It implies the project of placing the entire working life, wish life, and expressive life of the people it affected within the immanence of spending power. (176)

Today the myriad attractions on offer in the tiny city of Macau – Wynn’s ‘mechanical trees that rise out of the floor, hand woven carpets, marble and onyx’ – testify to the biopolitical troposphere of tourist consumption. Conflating both origin and demise of terrestrial globalization, the risk and reward of capital, and the unlikely chimerical convergence of the Portuguese and Chinese utopic imaginaries, Macau has achieved the ironic status of tourist utopia.

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Works Cited Alsayyad, Nezar, and Roy, Ananya. 2006. ‘Medieval Modernity: On Citizenship and Urbanism in a Global Age’. Space and Polity 10, no. 1: 1-20. Boorstin, Daniel. 1961 The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Harper. Braudel, Fernand. 1992. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. London: HarperCollins. Breitung, Werner. 2007. Overcoming Borders/Living with Borders: Macao and the Integration with China. Macau: Instituto cultural do governo da R.A.E. de Macau. Clayton, Cathryn. 2009. Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau & the Question of Chineseness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen, Mohammed. 2014. ‘Time of Sands’. Inside Asian Gaming, 13 May, 10-21. http:// www.asgam.com/cover-stories/item/2350-time-of-sands.html. Comaroff, John, and Comaroff, Jean. 2000. ‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming’. Public Culture 12, no. 2: 291-343. Dicks, A.R. 1984, ‘Macao: Legal Fiction and Gunboat Diplomacy’. In Leadership on the China Coast, edited by Göran Aijmer. London: Curzon Press. Easterling, Keller. 2005. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gaylord, Mark C. 2008. ‘The Banco Delta Asia Affair: The USA Patriot Act and Allegations of Money Laundering in Macau’. Crime, Law, and Social Change 50, no. 4-5: 293-305. Gough, Neil. 2011 ‘Pansy Ho’s bet on MGM China pays billions. South China Morning Post, 20 May: B-1. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Henders, Susan. 2001. ‘So What if It’s Not a Gamble? Post-Westphalian Politics in Macau’. Pacific Affairs 74, no. 3: 342-360. Hu, Fox Yi. 2007. ‘“Star of Stanley Ho” a heavy dose of bling. South China Morning Post 19 July. http://www.scmp.com/article/601061/star-stanley-ho-heavy-dose-bling Jameson, Fredric. 1990. ‘Envelopes and Enclaves: The Space of Post-Civil Society – An Architectural Conversation’. Assemblage 17: 32-37. Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. ‘Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32: 203-205. Levitas, Ruth. 2013 Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Basingstroke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. LiPuma, Edward, and Koelble, Thomas. 2005. ‘Cultures of Circulation and the Urban Imaginary: Miami as Example and Exemplar’. Public Culture 17, part 1: 153-179.

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Lo, Sonny. 2005. ‘Casino Politics, Organized Crime and the Post-Colonial State in Macau’. Journal of Contemporary China 14: 207-224. Mungello, D.E. 1999. The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Ong, Aihwa. 2000. ‘Graduated Sovereignty in South-East Asia’. Theory, Culture & Society 17, no. 4: 55-75. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press. Pina-Cabral, João de. 2002. Between China and Europe: Person, Culture and Emotion in Macao. London: Continuum. Ringmar, Eric. 2013. Liberal Barbarism: The European Destruction of the Palace of the Emperor of China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Simpson, Peter. 2013. ‘Residents Wary of Chinese Developer’s Plan to Rebuild Crystal Palace’. South China Morning Post, 6 October. http://www.scmp.com/news/world/ article/1325336/residents-wary-chinese-developers-plan-rebuild-crystal-palace. Simpson, Tim. 2013a. ‘Chinese Tourists, Themed Casinos, and Consumer Pedagogy in Macau’. The Communicative City and Urban Communication in the 21st Century: Urban Communication Reader III, edited by Matthew D. Matsaganis, Victoria J. Gallagher, and Susan J. Drucker. New York: Peter Lang. Simpson, Tim. 2013b. ‘Scintillant Cities: Glass Architecture, Finance Capital, and the Fictions of Macau’s Enclave Urbanism’. Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 7-8: 288-316. Simpson, Tim. 2014. ‘Macau Metropolis and Mental Life: Interior Urbanism and the Chinese Imaginary’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 3: 823-842. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2013. In the World Interior of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization. Trans. by Wieland Hoban. London: Polity. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2014. Spheres, Volume 2: Globes. Trans. by Wieland Hoban. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

5

Choreographing Singapore’s Utopia by the Bay Daniel P.S. Goh

Introduction Shortly after Lee Hsien Loong took office as prime minister in August 2004, his government began to make moves to consider the building of casinos in Singapore. In April 2005, the government announced its decision to develop two casinos, one on the theme park island, Sentosa, and the other in the new commercial district, Marina Bay. It was a momentous reversal in policy that sparked strong public opposition. In response, the government stressed that the casino was only a part in the larger whole of the ‘integrated resort’, as the two developments were billed. The casino was to be a side attraction to the convention centers, hotels, restaurants, museums, shopping centers, theaters, and theme parks aimed at drawing tourists and MICE (meetings, incentives, conferencing, and exhibitions) visitors as well as providing jobs and leisure activities for citizens. For Marina Bay Sands specifically, the vision sold to the public was a national icon that would anchor the cosmopolitan utopia of living, working, and playing in Marina Bay. Officially opened in 2010 to great fanfare, the authorities celebrated the Marina Bay Sands as the crown jewel announcing Singapore’s arrival as a global city. This chapter analyzes the spatial production of the Marina Bay ‘tourist utopia’ as an instance of the Asian developmental state’s attempt to transform and consolidate Singapore’s nodal position in the networks of capital and talent in the Pacific Rim region. Instead of merely mapping the new Asian urbanism and echoing the organizing concepts of the utopian planners and architects, my approach combines the insights of Bauman (2000) and Lefebvre (1991) to show that the urban form is being reconfigured to facilitate, direct, manage, and choreograph the flow of capital freed up by globalization. I argue Marina Bay exemplifies an emergent form of state-driven liquid urbanism that we are seeing in Asian cities, which in its very utopian character invites contradictions that may or may not open up spaces of hope. I first show that, through a series of economic crises, the state transformed the Urban Redevelopment Authority from a zoning and planning

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instrument into a corporate marketing unit responsible for branding and selling Singapore in its very spatiality. I then look at three aspects of this utopian spatiality. The first involves the staging of liquidity organized symbolically and materially in and around the dammed waters of the right-sized bay. The second aspect is the interweaving of arts and science ornaments through the utopian space to conjure the Asian renaissance by symbolic association. The third expresses spectacular consumption of the hyperbolic commodity to create intimate memories and thus cosmopolitan subjects for the global city. I conclude by reflecting on this urban choreography and its discontents.

From Urban Renewal to City Marketing In 1959, Singapore attained autonomous self-rule with the People’s Action Party forming the first government elected by universal suffrage. In 1963, the city-state attained independence from the British and joined the Federation of Malaysia. In 1965, full independence as a sovereign nationstate was attained after an acrimonious separation from the federation. Through these years, nation building was very much coterminous with the redevelopment of the city center through the clearance of slum quarters, resettlement of residents into new public housing, and the building of a modern commercial district. The Urban Renewal Unit, which was quickly restructured into a full department called the Urban Renewal Department, was formed as part of the Housing Development Board to take on this task. In 1971, the inaugural Concept Plan was drawn up with the help of the United Nations. The plan envisioned a ring of satellite towns and industrial estates, buffered by green spaces and connected by public transportation and expressways, fanning out from the city center in the south of the island, thus freeing up the center for commercial redevelopment. The Urban Renewal Department was upgraded to the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) in 1974 to accelerate resettlement and city center redevelopment. Land reclamation to expand the city center also began in this period. Importantly, instead of expanding the shoreline, as land reclamation did in Hong Kong and narrowing the Victoria Harbor, land reclamation to expand Singapore’s city center wrapped around the old Port of Singapore at the mouth of the Singapore River and the Kallang Basin at the mouth of the Kallang River to the east. By the end of the 1980s, land reclamation created three land parcels named Marina South, Marina Centre, and Marina East. The three landmasses created the Marina Bay fronting the city center, and

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enclosed the Kallang Basin, the waters of both flowing through the Marina Channel to form a Y-shaped water body at the heart of the city. While the bay area took form, the Singapore economy saw a major recession in 1985, its first since it began industrialization and urban renewal. A committee was immediately convened to review the economic progress, determine the causes of the recession and recommend new directions for growth. The committee determined that the period of easy growth was over and that the recession was caused by the loss of competitiveness due to high wage costs, a slump in the construction industry in an economy driven by it, and oversaving in a slowing economy. More generally, the committee thought that the recession made apparent the rigidities in the economy and the inflexibility of the system in adapting to changing circumstances (Economic Committee 1986: 2-3). A number of important trends were highlighted. The committee observed that Singapore was no longer just competing with the other Asian newly industrializing countries but also Western cities for investment by multinational corporations. World trade in merchandise goods was slowing, in part due to increasing protectionism, but the trade in financial, professional, and tourist services was booming (Economic Committee 1986: 5-6). The recommendation was to aim for a developed economy ‘with an edge’, by transforming Singapore into an ‘international total business centre’ and a major exporter of services, while pushing local enterprises to globalize so that the GNP would become more important (Economic Committee 1986: 6-7). Though it could not foresee the demolition of protectionist walls and the boom in world trade after the end of the Cold War, the committee report was prescient in prefiguring the trends and opportunities of post-industrial globalization. Its most significant contribution was not in the specifics of diagnosis and prescription, but the paradigm of liquidity that it promulgated to solve the problem of rigidity in Singapore’s economy. The committee (1986: 8) called for centralized economic planning to be decentered into a flexible governance framework to tap on the flows of enterprise ideas, labor skills, and capital looking for better rates of return. The reforms toward the total international business center and service and knowledge economy were to be redoubled modernization, or as Bauman (2000: 6) puts it, borrowing from Marx’s metaphor, a ‘liquid modernity’ that involves redistribution and reallocation of modernity’s melting powers. These would melt away the rigidities of the fixed-wage industrial economy dependent on heavy infrastructural development and the welfare state. However, Bauman’s (2000: 9) dichotomy of time and space, in which time acts as mobile, dynamic weapon in the conquest of defensive, solid space, is

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overstated. For Bauman (2000: 11), power ‘has become truly extraterritorial, no longer bound, not even slowed down, by the resistance of space’. But this underestimates the need for extraterritorial global powers to pass through network hubs where different fluid powers can meet and recombine to redirect and accelerate their flow in the search for profits. There is still a need for a spatial fix, or rather, for such space to be produced. For Lefebvre (1991), the production of space cannot escape the historicity of society and capital depends on that historicity for commodity fetishism. In contrast, time in Bauman’s liquid modernity is the carrier of history turning space into inert passages of time. The network hub must be produced with both logics in tension, filled with the historicity of its host society and yet with the historicity ready to be vacated and carried off by the flows of capital, such that society is transformed in the process. Marina Bay, a carte blanche site abutting the historic central business and civic district of Singapore, seemed like a perfect location for the production of the network hub of liquid capitalism. It took a while for the URA to finalize and implement the staging of liquidity, which will be the subject of analysis in the next section. In 1989, a draft Master Plan for the Urban Waterfronts at Marina Bay and Kallang Basin was developed with the help of acclaimed architects Kenzo Tange, the 1987 Pritzker laureate, and I.M. Pei, the 1983 laureate (Cheong 2013: 8). In 1990, the URA presented a massive model of the Marina Bay waterfront framed by three distinctive landmark buildings at the Singapore 2000 – Global Technopolis Exhibition (Straits Times 1990) to give the public a preview of the new business district of the year 2000 and beyond, which was officially announced in the 1991 Concept Plan. But it was only in 1996 that the government announced a new waterfront around Marina Bay deserving of a ‘great metropolis’ would be built in ten years’ time (Lim 1996). In 2006, the URA announced a blueprint for plans for sports, river taxis, and new pedestrian bridges to bring life to the Marina Bay water body to complement the Singapore Flyer Ferris wheel, Marina Bay Sands integrated resort, Marina Bay Financial Centre and the Sail luxury condominium developments to be completed by 2010. It took 21 years from the publication of the draft Master Plan to the development of the waterfront core. The problem was that at the beginning of the new century, Singapore’s prospects dimmed. Still feeling the effects of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the economy reeled from another major recession in 2001 and the SARS epidemic in 2003. The URA had to transform itself into a ‘city marketing’ (Chong 2006) agency tasked to brand, manage, and sell Singapore as a place to investors and developers to rescue Marina Bay, the planning idea for which was a ‘hard sell’ that threatened to turn

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the barren reclaimed land into an ‘urban wasteland’ (Wong 2010). It was officially appointed as Marina Bay’s development, promotion, and place management agency in March 2004. Two months later, the URA put the large 3.55 hectare site for the business financial center up for sale, touting it as a ‘natural extension’ of the existing financial district at Raffles Place well connected by rail, an underground pedestrian network, and the waterfront promenade (URA 2004: 57). Officials on an overseas marketing blitz also touted the site for its proximity to the heritage and cultural life of the civic district (Wong 2010). The historicity of Singapore as a grand dame of mercantilist hubs and hybrid colonial port city was not good enough. In April 2005, after a year of exploration and solicitation of the interest of potential investors, the government decided to proceed with the development of the massive integrated resort and convention center on the waterfront next to the business financial center. This would be Singapore’s prime passageway for the global flow of capital’s knowledge, networks, leisure, and celebrities. Soon after, in July 2005, the business financial center was sold to a consortium of Hong Kong and Singapore developers.

Staging Utopia Utopias are overdetermined imaginations, part reality and part fantasy. In the case of Marina Bay, land reclamation produced both a land mass and a water body, two very real blank slates inviting the fantastical projections of urban possibilities. Initially, the bay was driven by the nation-building discourse predominant in the 1970s and 1980s. By the mid-1980s, Singapore’s urban waterways, including the Singapore River, had been ‘permanently’ purged of ‘flotsam and jetsam’, ‘filth and stench’. This occasioned the drafting of the Master Plan for the Urban Waterfronts at Marina Bay and Kallang Basin, aimed at optimizing the newly found ‘physical assets’ to provide ‘tranquil contrast and visual relief’ to the city (URA 1989: 5). The utopia envisioned was for Marina Bay to become ‘the Bay for Events and National Celebrations, ideally set against the majestic backdrop of the city’ (URA 1989: 3). Together with the Singapore River as ‘River for History and Entertainment’ and the Kallang Basin as ‘Basin for Fun and Recreation’ (URA 1989: 20), it was to be a recreational utopia for Singaporeans to picnic, jog, swim, fish, shop, eat, and celebrate. It was to be the culmination of all the hard work in building the modern nation, with the panoramic view of the skyline evoking ‘a sense of grandeur and achievement’ (URA 1989: 9) as the citizens

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play and celebrate. In the long term, the extension of the business district would be built into this predominantly national space of fun and leisure. The guest architects made comparisons to Baltimore, Sydney, and San Francisco. Two essential physical principles were established to guide development. First, the water body should be complemented by public open spaces. Second, the waterfront developments should be low-rise and should emphasize pedestrian movement (URA 1989: 17). But a more fundamental principle was introduced in the Master Plan. Arrowed lines indicating restricted pedestrian access to Marina South and good vista views of the cityscape filled the analytical diagram for Marina Bay. At the center was a doubled-arrowed line captioned, ‘Bay is too wide (780 m across)’ (URA 1989: 8). The architects advised the bay was too large, ‘resulting in loss of scale and spatial definition’ (URA 1989: 10). The government quickly took action, committing to the reclamation of another 38 hectares of land to reduce the bay to 48 hectares that would also create a waterfront promenade all around the bay to fulfill the two advised principles (Chan 1989). Looking back in 2010, the URA chief executive officer Cheong Koon Hean used the metaphor of a chef cooking a Chinese herbal soup – ‘Cities are like a stew, to be brewed slowly and double-boiled’ – to describe the right-sizing and development of the Bay (Wong 2010). I prefer to describe the fundamental principle introduced by the architects in their advice to right size the Bay as choreographing the production of space. The Master Plan process was not simply an exercise in top-down technocratic planning and implementation, in cooking to recipe, but one that designed sequences of movements to be performed so as to achieve the intended visual impact and effervescent emotional outcome. In this sense, Marina Bay is an urban theater choreographed by the URA for the staging of liquidity, performing Singapore’s reengagement with global capital. The URA did not adopt the choreographer role from the beginning, but grew into the role after the 1989 Master Plan. In 1992, the Development Guide Plan for the Downtown Core and Portview – encompassing the old business district, the new business area around the bay, and the area south of it facing the Port of Singapore – was published and an exhibition launched to elicit public discussion. The plan was already described in terms of sequences of motion and form: ‘The development will begin near the Marina Bay MRT [Mass Rapid Transit] station, fan out to wrap round Marina Bay, then move towards Portview.’ As development moved toward Portview, which would feature mixed business-residential-recreational developments, the pace of urban life would slow down to one emphasizing arts and culture (Dhaliwal 1992).

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The published plan was itself a departure from the usual planning document filled with technical jargon and diagrams. A particular section titled ‘A Day in the Life of the Downtown’ and filled with sketches of urban scenes, narrated the meeting of two friends, Gopal, who lives in Portview, and Kim Seng, who lives in a satellite public housing town, at the MRT station to go to work in the new downtown. They meet to witness the city waking up: ‘Witnessing the spectacle of one of the world’s commercial centres coming to life is something Gopal and Kim Seng never tire of’ (URA 1992: 14). They rest at the foot of one of the landmark twin office skyscrapers, the tallest in Singapore, to watch the waters. They work at one of the skyscrapers ‘with spell-binding views of Marina Bay’ (URA 1992: 15) and watch the world buzz with activity down below. Gopal meets his girlfriend, May Ling, for lunch, at the galleria overlooking the City Mall, avoiding the midday sun by taking the underground and covered walkways. Later, they walk outdoors in the cool of the evening and meet friends for dinner under a canopy of trees off the City Mall. ‘People have been attracted from all parts of the island – and the world – to be part of the action’ (URA 1992: 16). They watch a play after dinner at the art house. After bidding May Ling goodnight, Gopal meets Ahmad, his neighbor and cycling friend, to walk home to Portview. As clichéd as the story appears today, the staging of ‘A Day in the Life’ shows that the choreography of the city was already taking hold in 1992. The plot of the urban play was still very much anchored in the national imagination. Kim Seng, Gopal, and Ahmad represented the Chinese, Indian and Malay figures of the corporatist multiracialism of the nation-state. However, they were prefigured not as racial subjects, but as incidental ethnics now interacting in a cosmopolitan utopia. The interracial dating between Gopal and May Ling was deliberately introduced to color the urban scenes with the air of worlding romance. Yet, the vantage point remained anchored by the central positions of the landmark twin skyscrapers and the City Mall. Gopal and Kim Seng saw the city only when they stood still at these locations. The Development Guide Plan was confirmed in the 1997 Planning Report with no significant changes, except for the renaming of Portview to Straits View to further emphasize the use of water bodies as visual focus (URA 1997). However, in the crisis years of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which stalled development of the area, the choreographers appeared to countenance rethinking the design of the bay. In 1998, the Harvard Graduate School of Design collaborated with the URA to organize a studio to generate creative design ideas for the future downtown core. The experimental studio of Harvard students traveling halfway round the world to distill the essence

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of Singapore and design its extension into the world brought out intense, pure images that, in the words of studio professor Rodolfo Machado (1999: 9), ‘infiltrate, whisper, seduce and convince, they question reality as known to be, make ‘other’ realities perhaps easier to conceive of, easier to design.’ In most of the proposals, the landmark towers were gone. In one proposal, the promontory protruding into the bay on which the landmark towers were sited became an island that was a giant shell, like ‘a fossil uncovered in the land-reclamation process’ (Bancalari and Storm 1999: 11), of an amphitheater for performances. The shell island would be linked to the mainland by pedestrian bridges of different character constructed organically over time to cater to different needs. Another proposal staggered buildings of different heights seemingly jumping into the bay ‘in a celebratory gesture’, thus engaging in ‘a dialogue between the new and existing skylines’. The same proposal superimposes ‘urban information layers’ to connect a pedestrian with the city ‘at different levels and through different devices, allowing him to experience and consume the city in different ways’ (Allard and Mesa 1999: 19). A proposal for an ‘urban biome’ had ‘plant buildings’ embedded in ‘heavily planted ground’ growing and dancing around the waterfront (BelikFirebaugh 1999: 27). Made of glass to allow unobstructed views through to the bay, the organically shaped plant buildings had self-shading leaf planes that would turn the waterfront promenade into a see-through forested arcade. These imaginations decentered the URA’s original choreography. Soon, a rethink saw the choreography come closer to the principles laid out by the architects in the 1989 Master Plan: to design the sequences of movement of audiences themselves, the pedestrians, such that the city skyline and the bay would be moving and dancing in their visual field. Plans for the landmark twin skyscrapers reaching 80 stories to frame the bay were scrapped. Instead, the URA planned to step up building heights gradually from the waterfront, ‘much like how seats are arranged in a theater’ (Tan 2009). The framing no longer took a static central position on the waterfront at the landmark towers on the promontory. The waterfront promenade ringing the bay, like the edge of a stage, was now the defining frame. The bay itself was no longer the sole visual focus, like a stage in a Broadway theater, but a stage in an amphitheater that collects and throws the gaze of the audience round for everyone to look at each other. The other major rethink was the plans for the Bayfront site. Up to 2004, at least on paper, the site remained zoned for lower density office buildings mixed with low-rise lifestyle and recreation developments emphasizing arts

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and culture (URA 2004: 39). The original choreography staged the slowing down of urban rhythm. As one moves along the waterfront promenade anti-clockwise around the bay, the intense wheeling and dealing of the commercial districts would gradually and seamlessly give way to the leisurely life of cultured consumption. Temporally, the day began at the old downtown waterfront facing the sunrise, peaked at the central promontory at midday, and ended at the Bayfront promenade watching the sunset. After 2004, with the development of the integrated resort decided, a massive singular iconic complex replaced the gentle ending of soft notes. The new choreography echoed one of the Harvard student proposals, creating a dialogue between the new and old city skylines across the bay. Harmonically interdependent, but independent in contour, rhythm and accent, a contrapuntal performance between the Marina Bay Sands and the skyscrapers of the downtown skyline was staged. There was to be no slowing down of urban rhythm, only the perpetuation of baroque effervescence (Ong 2006: 180).

Urban Fugue, Renaissance Singapore Amid the public furor over the decision to build the casinos, the government reaffirmed the vision that the integrated resort was a component of a larger plan to build Marina Bay as a ‘waterfront city in a garden’ and transform Singapore into a ‘vibrant global city’. The URA was to spearhead the building of a ‘truly distinctive waterfront city’. Because the waterfronts would be ‘Singapore’s face to the world’, the URA would encourage landscaping and skyrise greenery, hold more activities and ‘mega festivities’ to create ‘sense of place’ and ensure excellent architecture and urban design (Straits Times 2005). It was not a ruse to distract and assuage public opinion. The government stressed to the casino developers bidding for the integrated resort project that it did not want a resort building to imitate Las Vegas but one to represent ‘the spirit of Singapore’ (Safdie 2013: 28). The original design of the winning developer, Las Vegas Sands Corporation, according to architect Moshe Safdie (2013: 26) intimated the spirit of Vegas: ‘a themed facility with a single large tower in the center, somewhat introverted in character’. Sheldon Adelson hired Safdie to change the design to meet the expectations of the Singapore government, telling him to design ‘an iconic museum’ rather than an iconic hotel (Pedersen 2013: 18). An iconic hotel would not be adequate for the urban fugue being staged around the bay. Directly across from Marina Bay Sands, at the junction of

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the Singapore River and the bay, an iconic hotel already stood. The Fullerton Hotel was a stately colonial building built in 1928 on the site of a fort as the General Post Office and Exchange Building. It was named after the first governor of the Straits Settlements. In the urban renewal of the downtown core, it was sold to Hong Kong property developers to be conserved and converted into a luxury hotel of Old World elegance in the ‘classic, classy’ league of Hong Kong’s Peninsula and New York’s Waldorf Astoria (Yeo 1996). The hotel opened in 2000 and had yet to displace Raffles Hotel as the premier heritage hotel of Singapore (Goh 2010). However, it was a crucial centerpiece of the urban jigsaw situated at the junctions of the Singapore River and Marina Bay districts and commercial district on the right bank and the cultural district on the left bank, articulating the past and the future, and the economic and the cultural. It was not that Marina Bay Sands should represent a fantastical future. The urban fugue demanded Marina Bay Sands become an iconic museum that would take the history of mercantilist capitalism and the heritage of colonial high culture across the bay to project the Singaporean-Asian renaissance to the world. The golden age of Singapore’s new urbanism was imagined explicitly in terms of the fusion of science and art in architecture and design. Safdie’s architectural principles for building Marina Bay Sands expressed the Asian renaissance art-science theme in three ways: humanizing the mega-scale, axial town planning, and the Gothic integration of art. Humanizing the mega-scale has been Safdie’s commitment in contemporary architecture. His aim was to make large-scale buildings ‘legible, self-orienting, clear’, ‘to give people the capacity to know where they are and understand the parts so they can easily move about, use, and inhabit’ (Safdie 2013: 31). His methodology was to maximize ‘penetration of daylight, contact with nature, and openness to views’, and avoid ‘a sense of crowding to make people feel more comfortable and less overwhelmed’ (Safdie 2013: 33). Faced with a site that was a tabula rasa, Safdie could have easily projected this commitment with a fantasy building purely of his imagination. But, with his sensibilities honed by residential projects he had worked on in Singapore, Safdie sought to incorporate specific characteristics of tropical architecture, especially the historical architecture of European colonists in accommodating nature – generous use of shades and overhangs for protection from the sun, opened up spaces for ventilation, copious integration of plant life in the architecture. Over 50,000 vines, palms, and trees were landscaped to ‘knit Marina Bay Sands back into the existing city fabric’, integrating the Sands with Garden

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City Singapore (Walker and Greenspan 2013: 55). But the key expression in the accommodation of nature was the curving of the straight waterfront, which Safdie (2013: 36) thought was ‘impressive in its length but oppressive in its relentlessness’. Safdie sought to render a gentle curve reminiscent of a natural bay, to give the pedestrians walking on the promenades the experience of ‘the magic that occurs when a sweeping bend foreshortens perspective’ (Safdie 2013: 36). The URA quickly consented to the audacious request to reshape the bay itself. The Grand Arcade retail area of the Marina Bay Sands followed the curve. Its glass façade opened up along its length to the promenade, allowing easy access to pedestrians as well as giving shoppers the sense of wide spaciousness. The three retail levels were split and terraced to create an airy central atrium running through the curved length. Protection from the sun was provided by louvered canopy and shading sails. The central atrium was envisioned as the principal spine of Marina Bay Sands with two perpendicular corridors connecting it to the three towers and the MRT station. Sands, Safdie (2013: 35) realized as the design process advanced, was a town and a good town, for him, was one with main spine of activity that gave the town its ‘sense of orientation and location’ and ‘clarity through hierarchy’. Safdie cited the classical Roman cities organized by the cardo maximus (or main, north-south street) and other examples, such as Byzantine Jerusalem, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia. With the Grand Arcade opened up to the promenade, Safdie (2013: 35) saw the two as forming an integrated ‘single, grand indoor-outdoor urban space of unprecedented scale, partially air-conditioned, partially open to the sky’. Placing the spine at the edge right up to the waterfront oriented the Sands and its visitors to the bay and the downtown across it. The Sands therefore played its part in the urban fugue. Furthermore, the extroverted space stood in contrast to the introverted space of the large casino, which the government wanted hidden from sight and tucked away from public concourses, and also ‘the introverted malls that proliferate in Asian as well as Western cities’ (Safdie 2013: 46). The third Asian renaissance attribute was the seamless integration of art and architecture as a single experience. Safdie cited the Gothic cathedral as an example, in contrast to the more applied approach of painting frescoes and placing sculptures in the buildings. Safdie (2013: 45) sought ‘Gothic-style integration’ in the Sands. Ned Kahn’s Wind Arbor was cited as the prime example. Built into the window wall of the hotel atrium, it provides shading from the sun while its aluminum flaps respond to the wind to create a pleasing visual effect. Antony Gormley’s Drift was another. The seven-story,

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three-dimensional stainless steel sculpture was made up of rods and nodes forming a ‘packed polyhedral that follow bubble matrix geometry’ (Hodge 2013: 248). It intimated a cloud filling up the large atrium of the main lobby of the hotel and was intended by Gormley to represent ‘an emergence of form from chaos that is both cosmological and biological’ (Hodge 2013: 251). Commentators have described the architecture itself as a move orchestrated by Safdie from Euclidean to curved Riemannian forms underpinned by ‘a distinctly organic-mathematical approach’ (Rowe 2011: 110). Completing the renaissance choreography, Safdie placed a flowerlike building of ten fingers rising skyward in different heights at the promontory where the bay meets the channel shared with the Kallang Basin. It was proposed to be the ArtScience Museum, the first of its kind exploring ‘the quest of knowledge and the passion for innovation that form the shared foundation of art and science’ (Safdie 2013: 45). The dishlike roof collects water to create a beautiful indoor fountain and pond as well as to recycle it for use in the museum. The tips of the petals are crowned by windows letting in skylight to illuminate the galleries and save on lighting. This was Safdie’s Gothic cathedral of the Singaporean renaissance. It has become a popular symbol inviting interpretations – a friendly hand welcoming the world to Singapore for supporters, the outstretched hand collecting money for those opposing the casinos, a lucky lotus rising from the bay for believers in feng shui geomancy. The pedestrian Helix Bridge, its structure bending and curving like a double helix, linked the museum and the Sands to Marina Centre, thus completing the walking loop around the waterfront in a gestural nod to the genomic enlightenment ahead. The Gardens by the Bay complemented the Sands monument to the Singaporean renaissance. Built by the National Parks Board and located immediately east of the Sands, the Gardens enveloped the monumental Sands back into the Garden City. It was no ordinary park. The design was sourced through an international competition in 2006 to ensure its world-class status and it won the World Building of the Year award at the prestigious World Architectural Festival in 2012. The waterfront gardens also housed conservatories with cool-moist and cool-dry biomes and concrete 50-metertall ‘supertrees’ supporting vertical greenery to provide shade. It was the botanic gardens of the future. Its colonial counterpart, the Singapore Botanic Gardens, is located directly in a northwesterly line perpendicular to the Sands waterfront of the bay, passing through the Fullerton Hotel, running parallel along the main commercial section of the Singapore River dividing the business and

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cultural districts, and through to the other side on the edge of the downtown area. Application was made to UNESCO to list the Botanic Gardens as a World Heritage Site, which if successful would be Singapore’s first. Its claim to fame was its horticultural and agricultural research, which led to the successful cultivation of commercial rubber in Southeast Asia. Together, the two gardens embraced the whole downtown district, dancing on an axis perpendicular to the main Marina Bay axis formed by the Flyer, the Helix Bridge, and the Sands itself, in the urban fugue of cultural-commercial heritage and art-science renaissance (see Figure 5.1). Figure 5.1  The choreography of utopia by the bay

From left to right, the Flyer, the Helix Bridge, and the Sands form the main axis of the new Marina Bay developments. The curved biomes of the Gardens by the Bay can be seen rising beyond the axis. The grand hotels and the Esplanade Theatres on the Bay of older global city vintage are in the foreground Yudhishthra Nathan, used by permission

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Hyperbolic Commodities, Spectacular Consumption Between the colonial heritage and the Asian renaissance produced into the space of the old downtown and Marina Bay, the historical material thread that ties them together spatially, symbolically, and ideologically is the circulation of commodities. The inaugural exhibition that opened the ArtScience Museum in 2011 was Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds. A consortium organized the exhibition. The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution provided the curatorial expertise. The Asian Civilisations Museum of Singapore’s National Heritage Board provided support and would eventually house the Chinese artifacts salvaged from a shipwrecked ninth-century Arabian dhow in Indonesian waters near the island of Belitung south of Singapore. The Singapore government, through Sentosa Leisure Management, a wholly owned subsidiary of its statutory board, Sentosa Development Corporation, in charge of developing and managing attractions on the theme park island of Sentosa, bought the artifacts from a private salvager based in New Zealand. They were then loaned to the Singapore Tourism Board. The artifacts were essentially purchased state treasures, but used in a way not to boost the imagination of Singapore as a nation, but to promote Singapore as a global city. It was a blockbuster exhibition intended to be an archaeological coup that would place the ArtScience Museum and Marina Bay on the international museum and culture map and thus Singapore on the global city map. But what has an Arabian dhow loaded with Chinese goods sunk a thousand years ago got to do with modern-day Singapore, the origins of which official history had adamantly traced to the founding of the settlement by Stamford Raffles in 1819? The chief executive of the Tourism Board waxed (Aw 2010: x), Cities represent the diversity of lives within shared spaces. They are special because they contain the collective experiences of many communities over centuries. Since ancient times, cities have been the site where talent congregates and creation takes place. They have inspired great inventions, from scientific discoveries to innovation in pottery, art, and craftsmanship. We understand this because Singapore, a citystate on an island in Southeast Asia, is one such place. […] By presenting the collection first in Singapore and subsequently to a global audience through a world tour, we hope to give audiences a different and deeper perspective of our island-nation. We believe the artifacts will help draw the link between the city-state that exists today and the rich historical narrative of the past.

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The exhibition was to place Singapore in the longue durée of successive waves of globalization led by trade that gave rise to empires, nations, and, most importantly, great cities. Julian Raby (2010: xii), director of the Sackler Gallery, saw the ‘genealogical and geographical link’ between the ninthcentury dhow and present-day Singapore quite clearly in the Marina Bay developments. He noted that the Belitung wreck was part of the global shipping trade route through Southeast Asia that gave rise to the Srivijaya Empire, a prince of which later founded the ancient kingdom of Singapura (from which the name of Singapore was derived) in the early fourteenth century. He also noted that the Srivijayans were the builders of great temple complexes, ‘just as Singapore is now expressing itself in major architectural projects’ (Raby 2010: xii). But it was the sunken trade goods displayed in the exhibition that carried the symbolic overload. There were tens of thousands of artifacts: coins, Changsha ceramics, celadon, green-splashed wares, white wares, Tang blue-and-white, mirrors, gold and silver wares. Three hundred of the ‘rare and strange goods’ (Guy 2010) were exhibited. The ‘pearl cups like the moon’ were said to have brought a spurt of manufacturing innovation and a golden age of the arts and economy to the Abbasid Empire, which was made possible by imperial patronage and ‘inventive individuals’ skilled in pottery and linked to ‘the educated elite and the merchants involved in overseas trade’ in the port city of Basra (Hallett 2010: 79). The hope was for the same to happen in the space of Marina Bay, forged by state patronage, inventive foreign talents, educated elites running the civil service and cultural institutions, and global capitalists. These were not just commodity fetishes transcending historical time, sensuous objects made more valuable by the trade in antiquities. They were also hyperbolic symbols, their metaphorical significance and associations exaggerated to leave a strong emotional impression. The spectacular consumption, in the Debordian sense of the spectacle of commodity-image fetishism, induced by the hyperbolic commodities is not about the momentary thrill of opulent and conspicuous enjoyment. It is not postmodern consumption of the simulated that has no depth. On the contrary, it evokes the intimate and resolves to create lasting memories, thus shaping our very subjectivities. As eminent urban planner Gary Hack puts it, Marina Bay Sands exemplifies ‘the architecture of memorability’. Hack (2013: 136) describes the highlight of resort lifestyle at the Sands: ‘couples talking quietly at the razor’s edge of an outdoor swimming pool fifty-seven stories above the ground, with Singapore’s skyline across the bay seemingly almost close enough to touch’. The architecture meant to

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intimate rather than to create awe and intimidate. For Safdie, this was part of his program to humanize the mega-scale. For the government and the planners, the architecture of memorability burns the impression of Singapore into the minds of visitors, both foreigner and local, and turns the merely monumental into the compelling iconic. Safdie (2013: 38) differentiated the Sands hotel building into three towers, each twisted to create ‘a dancelike relationship’ between the two slabs of east-facing and west-facing rooms. This was to avoid building a massive wall shielding Marina Bay from the world. For the URA planners and the government, the design won their approval partly because the two gaps between the towers framed ‘the spectacle of the proposed Gardens of the Bay right behind it’ (Loo 2006). The gaps also put the city in a welcoming frame for those approaching from the sea on the historical gateway route to enter the city or for those looking at the downtown from the gardens. From either direction, a picturesque framed painting was visually produced. Spectacular consumption becomes intimate and memorable. Safdie had wanted to build extensive gardens around the Sands interlaced with swimming pools and jogging paths, because of his own fond memories of staying at Singapore’s Shangri-La located between Orchard Road and the Botanic Gardens. But constraints on space meant that he would have to build the gardens and swimming pools on the podium roof of the casino and convention center, which would be ‘overshadowed and overpowered by the adjacent hotel’ (Safdie 2013: 38). Facing the conundrum of where to place the swimming pool, Safdie and his team, with the model of the three towers in front of them, cut a plank of wood and placed it on top of the towers. The idea of the SkyPark was born. It resulted in a megascale 150-meter-long ‘infinity’ pool that allowed for intimate views of the city skyline over its edge. Some 250 trees and 650 plants were planted on the SkyPark, and the many lounging spaces, Jacuzzis, and celebrity chef restaurants to break up and soften the massive roof. In the first year of its opening, one million visitors, foreign and local, who were not guests of the Sands, paid to enter the SkyPark to enjoy the ‘tropical oasis in the sky’ and take in the ‘unforgettable sights’ of the city and country (Marina Bay Sands 2012: 62, 60). The SkyPark was itself a hyperbolic commodity. The bay itself became the venue for spectacular consumption. Safdie’s design did not just curve the bay to make it more organic. He built a semicircular Event Plaza into the curve and then playfully added two islands made of steel and glass to the north and south. The Crystal Pavilions are accessed by tunnels at the lower level of the Grand Arcade and offered all-round views of the downtown core and Sands. One pavilion houses Louis

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Vuitton’s largest flagship store and the other the world-famous Pangaea and Avalon nightclubs. They ‘appear to float on the bay’ (Marina Bay Sands 2012: 83), glistening in the sunlight at day or reflecting the city lights at night, beckoning to the world pedestrians around the bay to the spectacular consumption taking place at the Sands. The nearly 300 luxury boutiques and bistros in the Grand Arcade are symbolically linked to the Crystal Pavilions by the 150-meter-long canal that runs through the lower level of the Arcade. For ten dollars, one could ride along the canal in a Malay-style sampan navigated by a paddler dressed in old Chinese peasant costume and leisurely soak in the architecture and window-shop the spectacle of luxury goods. This was no mimicry of the Venetian of Las Vegas or Macau (see Simpson, chapter four in this volume), but a hyperbolic invention of an Asian Venice. By 2006, the bay was dammed up to create both a reservoir and a grand stage. Clifford Pier, a ferry terminal on the old downtown core waterfront dating from the colonial era, was moved to the southern tip of Marina South to serve as one of four eventual terminals making up the maritime hub serving the region. The bay would serve as a grand stage. In 2007, the annual National Day Parade organized by the state to showcase its military defense capabilities and mobilize citizens as actors and spectators for national identity formation was held for the first time in Marina Bay. The Float, a 130-meter by 100-meter platform, was constructed to stage the event, themed the City of Possibilities. Built on the Marina Center waterfront, it adopted the entire downtown core stretching from the Fullerton to the Sands as the U-shaped backdrop. The float sat 27,000 official spectators, but over a 100,000 additional spectators could watch the parade from around the waterfront. The National Day Parade was supposed to open up the bay to the megafestivities envisioned to take place on and around the water. To date, no major concerts or cultural performances have yet been staged on the water or the Float, except for the opening and closing of the disappointing inaugural Youth Olympics held in Singapore in 2010, and the many dressed rehearsals for the parade (see Figure 5.2). The only festivity worth its salt has been the annual ‘I Light Marina Bay’ event, supposedly Asia’s first and only sustainable light art festival, which in 2012 involved some 30 installations using green materials. The festival purportedly brought more than 500,000 local and international visitors to the bay to ‘revel in Singapore’s signature cityscape’ (Straits Times 2012), though the accounting methods are not clear. Filling in the gap is the Sands’ nightly Wonder Full – The Light and Water Spectacular show, which employs cutting-edge technology such as lasers, video projections, and giant water screens held at the Event Plaza (Marina

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Figure 5.2 The spectacular consumption of the Bay at a National Day Parade dress rehearsal, 2013

Marina Bay Sands (left) and the Marina Bay Financial Centre (right) framed the stage, while the ArtScience Museum (center) provided the stage backdrop Daniel P.S. Goh, used by permission

Bay Sands 2012: 113). Mandated by the URA, it was to become a ‘must-see’ show on par with Las Vegas’ dancing fountains and Hong Kong’s A Symphony of Lights (Goh 2007). Here, the choreography of ‘utopia by the bay’ goes off-key, since the show manages to make neither the water nor the city skyline dance like the two reference shows. In other words, the art-science hyperbole fails to signify either the bay or the city, only the colorful lights and cutting-edge technology. Wonder Full becomes a mere spectacle.

Conclusion: Reflections on Urban Choreography Through the spatial production of Marina Bay, the Singaporean developmental state has taken its historical legacies – land reclamation, the downtown commercial and cultural districts and waterways – and built its aspirational utopia on and around them. I argued that the production of space was not only functional for a liquid, globalizing capitalism, but it also

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stages a liquidity play of seamless flows and the effervescent transformation of Singaporeans into cosmopolitan global subjects. I also showed that this utopia dreams an art-science renaissance in which spectacular consumption gives rise to a great commercial and cultured global city and yet affords intimate experiences and lasting memories for individuals. The instrument in this exercise of choreographing utopia by the bay, the URA, has since taken a global consciousness of its own. It prides itself for ‘place making’, creating a ‘sustainable high-density city’ that was achieved ‘in tandem with economic growth, the protection and enhancement of environment, and societal cohesion’ (URA 2008: 23). In 2009, it formed the URA Consulting Group to export its planning expertise. For the URA, Singapore had become a brand in itself, needing no tagline or slogan, with values such as ‘transforming’, ‘nurturing’, ‘collaborating’, and ‘daring to dream’. Marina Bay had become a brand-name place-commodity for other government agencies to market the city – the Economic Development Board promoting business investments with its tagline ‘Singapore, Future Ready’ and the Ministry of Manpower attracting local and foreign talents to collaborate for ‘collective creativity’ (Straits Times 2010). But the trouble with the hyperbolic commodity is that its trader can believe his own created hype so much that public opinion gets ignored or dismissed. The initial unpopularity of Marina Bay due to local opposition to the casinos was brushed away by a member of URA’s International Panel of Architects and Urban Planners advising the government as a matter of the locals taking time to like the place and realizing the casino is more than just a gaming floor and that the place is being built for them (Teo 2005b). Amid talks of holding the 2020 World Expo on or under the waters of Marina Bay, prominent public figures lament the lack of the ‘X-factor’ of love allowing creativity and mistakes, a Singapore that would be a great place to live and not just a great place to stay, and more landmark buildings built by local and young Asian architects (Teo 2005a). There were also earlier criticisms in the 1990s of URA planning for being merely technical and aesthetic and ignoring social, cultural, and political factors (Raman 1992), followed by alternative imaginations of Marina Bay development by four architects stressing chaotic creativity, organic community focus, local sensibilities, and small-scale sustainability directly involved in the production of knowledge, as well as artistic and cultural diversity (Ho 2002). All these were ignored in favor of the mega-scale, the global, the spectacular, and mall culture, albeit humanized. Even the art park next to the Float featuring 27 artworks by youths with the theme ‘Aspirations for Life in Singapore’ was choreographed to the

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mega-scale. Initially named the ImagiNation Park to encourage community ownership of place at the Bay (Straits Times 2008), it is now the Youth Olympic Park with professional enhancements and additions to the public art to make the Olympic theme more pronounced. It is important to note that all the choreographic moves by the URA described in this essay began with the nation and went on to the global city with the nation elided, trading one teleology for another all the while neglecting the truly local and cosmopolitan. There is thus a lingering feeling for Singaporeans that Marina Bay caters to jetsetter international elites and they do not have a stake in the space. Worse still, reactions to the bay are inevitably cloaked in nationalist dress, caught between the two moments of the choreography. When a local businessman brought the Dîner en Blanc event to Singapore and staged it at the Marina Bay Sands promenade in 2012, it raised some hackles. The event was invented in Paris as a flash mob urban picnic by participants dressed in white told the secret location at the last minute. The aim was to claim collective ownership of public spaces and rejuvenate them with the experience of the unexpected. Its franchises in other cities have taken lives and meanings of their own. In Singapore, it was turned into yet another lavish party for yuppies, expatriates, and poseurs, and celebrated as yet another Singaporean first – the first flash mob dinner in Asia. Marina Bay Sands promenade was not reclaimed for collective ownership, but was simply the most logical choice for the staging of spectacular consumption. The event became controversial when prominent local food bloggers demanded favorite local foods such as chicken rice and soya bean curd dessert be allowed and they and the foods promptly got banned for not keeping up with taste. It quickly descended into shrill nationalism with critics accusing Dîner en Blanc organizers for disrespecting Singapore and being highhanded and elitist. The organizers and the central organizers in Paris eventually apologized and re-invited the bloggers, though the damage was already done and calls to boycott the event and hold alternative flash mobs celebrating national foods persisted (Mahtani 2012). In 2013, the event was held at the Marina Barrage, far enough from the bay and out of its spectacular consumption grid, but with the Sands and the city still visible as the backdrop. It took place without controversy. Urban choreography, in its directorial projection of aesthetic obsessions and symbolic fantasies unto urban agents with diverse interests and motivations, is prone to errors and missteps. The Sail luxury condominium, which was completed in 2008, had faced serious allegations by its resident-owners of poor maintenance and workmanship. In 2013, after failing to address the issues, the owners prepared to do legal battle with the developers over a

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burst pipe, shattered glass canopies, and other defects. Residents also took aim at property agents and non-resident owners who had been subletting the units like serviced apartments, leading one resident to compare Marina Bay to Geylang (Lim and Yong 2013), a red-light district at the edge of the Kallang Basin popular with low-income migrant workers. After the Marina Bay Sands opened, it became a popular icon featured in artists’ impressions in advertisements for condominium launches. This led to pressure on the government to curb such ‘visual tricks’ (Teo 2011). Even authentic though hyperbolic commodities can be wrecked on unpredictable rocks in international waters. Shipwrecked, the exhibition with great archaeological significance, was supposed to have launched Singapore into the international museum and culture scene. The next stop for its international tour after the ArtScience Museum premiere was the Smithsonian to coincide with the latter’s silver jubilee celebrations. But months into the Marina Bay Sands exhibition, controversy erupted. The Society for American Archaeology, the Council of American Maritime Museums, the International Committee on the Underwater Cultural Heritage, and scientists within the Smithsonian called on the institution to cancel the exhibition. The critics did not like the fact that the wreck’s artifacts were commercially salvaged for profit and under less-than-scientific conditions and time to ensure minimum loss of data (Taylor 2011). The 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage, which disallowed the treatment of underwater cultural heritage as commercial goods in any form, was cited. It was lost or it did not matter to the critics that the Singapore state was the de facto owner of the artifacts by proxy of a subsidiary company of one of its statutory board. Backed by UNESCO, the Smithsonian canceled the exhibition after months of debate and recommended scientific re-excavation of the remaining wreck to be led by Southeast Asian scientists (Pringle 2011). Notwithstanding the missteps and errors, utopia by the bay is now a fait accompli. Singapore and Singaporeans have to live with its success and failure. There are no possibilities for heterotopia. But the choreography has moved on. A new Draft Master Plan released by URA in 2013 envisioned Marina South to be characterized by fenceless private housing and mixeduse developments and focused on a slower urban pace conducive for social interaction and recreation. The original plans for Bayfront, the site of the Sands, have moved south. So has the discontent, as ‘jaded’ locals called for less crowdedness, more space for scenic exercise routes, less costly dining options, and greater community-oriented activities (Ong 2013). The choreography of utopia begins anew.

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Works Cited Allard, Pablo, and Francisco Mesa. 1999. ‘Urban Information Layers’. In Singapore’s Marina Bay: Urban Conditions Recreated, edited by Rodolfo Machado, 18-25. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design. Aw Kah Peng. 2010. ‘Foreword’. In Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds, edited by Regina Krahl, John Guy, J. Keith Wilson, and Julian Raby, x. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Bancalari, Claudia, and Kevin Storm. 1999. ‘Leaf, Room, Tower’. In Singapore’s Marina Bay: Urban Conditions Recreated, edited by Rodolfo Machado, 10-17. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Oxford: Polity Press. Belik-Firebaugh, Eva. 1999. ‘Urban Biome’. In Singapore’s Marina Bay: Urban Conditions Recreated, edited by Rodolfo Machado, 26-33. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design. Chan, Caroline. 1989. ‘180m URA Project to Create New Downtown for the 21st Century’. The Straits Times, 1 October. Cheong Koon Hean. 2013. ‘Marina Bay: A New Waterfront for the Garden City by the Bay’. In Reaching for the Sky: The Marina Bay Sands Singapore, 8-15. Singapore: ORO Editions. Chong, Vince. 2006 ‘Selling Singapore to the World’. The Straits Times, 27 September. Dhaliwal, Rav. 1992. ‘Unveiled: New Downtown S’pore for 21st Century’. The Straits Times, 26 August. Economic Committee. 1986. ‘Adapted Executive Summary’. In The Singapore Economy: New Directions: Report of the Economic Committee. Singapore: Ministry of Trade and Industry. http://www.mti.gov.sg/ResearchRoom/Documents/app. mti.gov.sg/data/pages/885/doc/econ.pdf Goh Chin Lian. 2007. ‘Nightly Show to Set Marina Bay Abuzz’. The Straits Times, 26 July. Goh, Daniel P.S. 2010. ‘Capital and the Transfiguring Monumentality of Raffles Hotel’. Mobilities 5, no. 2: 177-195. Guy, John. 2010. ‘Rare and Strange Goods: International Trade in Ninth-Century Asia’. In Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds, edited by Regina Krahl, John Guy, J. Keith Wilson, and Julian Raby, 19-27. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Hack, Gary. 2013. ‘The Architecture of Memorability’. In Reaching for the Sky: The Marina Bay Sands Singapore, 136-145. Singapore: ORO Editions. Hallett, Jessica. 2010. ‘Pearl Cups Like the Moon: The Abbasid Reception of Chinese Ceramics’. In Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds, edited by

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Regina Krahl, John Guy, J. Keith Wilson, and Julian Raby, 75-81. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Ho, Karl. 2002. ‘Four Architects and a City’. The Straits Times, 1 October. Hodge, Brooke. 2013. ‘Art at Every Turn: The Marina Bay Sands Art Path’. In Reaching for the Sky: The Marina Bay Sands Singapore, 244-261. Singapore: ORO Editions. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Lim, Allison. 1996. ‘Towards a Great Metropolis: Singapore to Get New Waterfront’. The Straits Times, 11 July. Lim, Joyce, and Charissa Yong. 2013. ‘Condo Sails into Troubled Waters’. The Straits Times, 8 September. Loo, Daryl. 2006. ‘Architecture Fits Well with Plans for Area’. The Straits Times, 27 May. Machado, Rodolfo. 1999. ‘Introduction’. In Singapore’s Marina Bay: Urban Conditions Recreated, edited by Rodolfo Machado, 8-9. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design. Mahtani, Shibani. 2012. ‘Diner en Blanc Cooks up a Fuss in Singapore’. The Wall Street Journal. 28 August. Marina Bay Sands. 2012. Marina Bay Sands: A Pictorial Journey. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press. Ong, Cheryl. 2013. ‘New Marina South Draws Keen Interest’. The Straits Times, 23 November. Pedersen, Martin C. 2013. ‘The Making of Marina Bay Sands: Sheldon Adelson in Conversation with Martin C. Pedersen’. In Reaching for the Sky: The Marina Bay Sands Singapore, 16-23. Singapore: ORO Editions. Pringle, Heather. 2011. ‘Smithsonian Scuppers Shipwreck Exhibit, Plans to ReExcavate’. Science, 16 December. Raby, Julian. 2010. ‘Foreword’. In Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds, edited by Regina Krahl, John Guy, J. Keith Wilson, and Julian Raby, xii-xiii. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Raman, P.G. 1992. ‘Singapore’s Urban Challenges’. The Straits Times, 26 January. Rowe, Peter G. 2011. Emergent Architectural Territories in East Asian Cities. Basel: Birkhauser GmbH. Safdie, Moshe. 2013. ‘Rethinking the Public Realm’. In Reaching for the Sky: The Marina Bay Sands Singapore, 24-51. Singapore: ORO Editions. Straits Times. 1990. ‘Waterfront City Centre of the Future’. The Straits Times, 30 May. Straits Times. 2005. ‘Waterfront City Will be Venue to Mega Festivities’. The Straits Times, 4 October.

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Straits Times. 2008. ‘Help to Name Two Marina Bay Attractions’. The Straits Times, 18 November. Straits Times. 2010. ‘Rallying Cry’. The Straits Times, 10 July. Straits Times. 2012. ‘i Light Marina Bay Wins Award’. The Straits Times, 23 September. Tan Dawn Wei. 2009. ‘What’s Up at the Bay’. The Straits Times, 15 November. Taylor, Kate. 2011. ‘Archaeologists Criticize Smithsonian over Java Objects’. The New York Times, 10 March. Teo, Esther. 2011. ‘More Can Be Done to Curb Showflat Tricks’. The Straits Times, 7 March. Teo, Joyce. 2005a. ‘Ideas Aplenty on How Singapore can Up Its X-Factor’. The Straits Times, 5 April. Teo, Joyce. 2005b. ‘Sydney Took Six Years to Give its Harbourside Casino the Nod’. The Straits Times, 19 March. URA. 1989. Master Plan for the Urban Waterfronts at Marina Bay and Kallang Basin (Draft). Singapore: Urban Redevelopment Authority. URA. 1992. Downtown Core & Portview Development Guide Plans (Draft). Singapore: Urban Redevelopment Authority. URA. 1997. Planning Report. Downtown Core (Central & Bayfront Subzones), Straits View & Marina South Planning Areas. Singapore: Urban Redevelopment Authority. URA. 2004. Skyline Reflections: A Year Into Being 30 and the Vision That Lies Ahead. URA Annual Report 2003-2004. Singapore: Urban Redevelopment Authority. URA. 2008. ‘Marina Bay: Towards a Sustainable High-Density City’. Place Making for the Future: 14 Case Studies in Sustainable Urban Design. Sydney: Place Leader Association, 21-27. Walker, Peter, and Greenspan, Adam. 2013. ‘The Landscape of Marina Bay Sands’. In Reaching for the Sky: The Marina Bay Sands Singapore, 52-65. Singapore: ORO Editions. Wong, Tessa. 2010. ‘From a Hard Sell to a City Symbol’. The Straits Times, 18 August. Yeo, Stephanie. 1996. ‘History Jazzed Up into a Hotel?’ The Straits Times, 27 July.

6

Cultural Utopia Abu Dhabi’s Island of Happiness and the Development of a Cultural Enclave Yasser Elsheshtawy

Introduction Cities in the Arabian Peninsula in their quest for global and regional significance have embarked on an urban development drive characterized by elaborate and utopian urban visions. Abu Dhabi in particular has been at the forefront. Learning lessons from its neighbor, Dubai, the city is promoting a strategy that is, on the face of it, measured, sustainable, and geared toward cultural development. The cultural district in Saadiyat Island offers a prime example for the extent to which cultural policies are transformed into urban spatial strategies to promote the city as a tourist destination, and in the process create an enclave that is primarily geared to cultural connoisseurs, tourists, and the like. In its articulation of a vision that is grounded in a top-down notion of cultural development, and by being deeply embedded in a global capitalist system, Abu Dhabi is promoting social exclusion and urban inequality. Moreover, such enclave-like settings involve laborers as well. They are imported from Southeast Asia to realize this vision and are housed in specially constructed labor camps. In other instances they are relegated to invisible locales in the desert, or crammed into apartments within the city center. This chapter will discuss these issues using Abu Dhabi as a case study, focusing on the Saadiyat Island development. This will be contextualized by interrogating its urban spatial policies, identifying key stakeholders engaged in these undertakings, and defining the role of the state in developing the islands. Moreover the role of culture and museums in promoting and branding cities will be tackled as well. Indeed, developments in Abu Dhabi are part of a worldwide trend in which the meaning and significance of the museum has been reconstituted as a result of globalizing influences and the shift toward a business-based model. Moreover, these trends suggest a redefinition of culture and its larger meaning within post-colonial and transnational systems. This began in New York in the 1990s with many museums experiencing financial difficulties. Such developments were further exacerbated following

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9/11 and the subsequent economic downturn (Kimmelman 2002, 2004).1 Such a fundamental conceptual change was based on the ways in which the premonitory theoretical writings of postmodernist writers Frederic Jameson and Rosalind Krauss were applied to the museum as an institution (Jameson 1984; Krauss 1990). Furthermore, these developments need to be understood within the larger context of an ‘urban cultural economy’, an idea introduced by Andrew Ross, who notes that one of the main outcomes of this new formulation is the ‘cultural quartering’ through which policy makers mark out an area within a city based on cultural products (Ross 2007). This cultural quartering leads to fragmentation, gentrification, and a loss of heterogeneity. The New York-based Guggenheim Museum, for example, was at the forefront of this trend since this served its global expansionist strategy which included the Bilbao branch (Fiss 2009). The chapter is structured in two parts: first I will discuss the Saadiyat Island development, focusing on its history and origins; the extent to which theming plays a major role in its architectural and urban development; and the various ‘troubles’ plaguing the venture, such as labor strife, media exposés, and human rights protests involving migrant laborers. This section will also examine the extent to which culture is being used to market the city as a destination and a new center in the region. The second part will offer an assessment of the development, arguing that it is more or less a cultural enclave/ghetto that caters to the rich, the enlightened, and the cultural tourist – a cultural quarter. Architectural and urban strategies used to ‘create’ this special zone are discussed. The chapter concludes by looking at how the island development furthers the urban vision of Abu Dhabi in its efforts to become a world-class city. It should be noted that I will not discuss the history and urban development of Abu Dhabi, which I have addressed elsewhere (Elsheshtawy 2008b), nor will I look at the efforts of its next door neighbor, Dubai, which has engaged in a slightly different approach, although as in all such ‘tourist utopias’, the notion of creating enclaves has been part of its urban development paradigm as well (Elsheshtawy 2010).

Constructing Cultural Infrastructure: Saadiyat Island Harking back to its conservative and traditional role, Abu Dhabi always saw itself as the center of culture in the UAE. In the 1970s it hired a well-known 1 Numerous commentators have taken to analyzing and documenting these troubles – financial and otherwise. See, for example, Ostling 2007.

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architectural firm to design a cultural center and a national library. This would become a main venue for staging classical concerts, art exhibits, as well as a major book fair. It seemed only natural that its sights would turn toward creating a more substantive venue for culture. Most significantly, in 2004, the newly formed Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority (ADTA) embarked on a project to develop Saadiyat Island – located approximately 500 m from the main shoreline of Abu Dhabi and encompassing an area of 25 km 2 – into a ‘world class’, ‘environmentally sensitive’ tourist destination that included as its centerpiece the creation of a new cultural district for Abu Dhabi and the UAE (Figures 6.1a and 6.1b). In July 2006 an agreement was signed between another agency operating under ADTA, the Tourism and Development Investment Company (TDIC) (both under the chairmanship of Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan), and the New York-based Guggenheim to establish a museum devoted to modern and contemporary art to be built as part of the cultural district and to be designed by Frank Gehry. In addition, the development would include a classical museum designed by Jean Nouvel (later affiliated with the French Louvre) and a museum dedicated to the life of Sheikh Zayed designed by Foster Architects. To rationalize the project two lines of argument were put forward: the first was political, suggesting that it will contribute to ‘cultural enlightenment’. Figure 6.1A Saadiyat Island as it appeared in 2010; sea barrier walls have been placed for both the Guggenheim and the Louvre in preparation for construction

Yasser Elsheshtawy, used by permission

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Figure 6.1B  Saadiyat Island as it appears a 2014 satellite image

Google Earth

The notion of Abu Dhabi becoming a ‘new’ cultural center in the Middle East has occupied a central position in justifying such a massive undertaking. This point has been put forward by officials in different formats, suggesting that this will provide a counterpoint to fundamentalist tendencies. The second argument was economic, where the entire development is viewed from a profit-making perspective. The cultural district is seen as part of a larger phenomenon involving the role of the museum within a globalized world. The Guggenheim, in particular, which occupies a dominant position within the island, has become symptomatic of what has been described as the ‘McDonaldization’ of culture. It has in effect been turned into a brand that can be placed anywhere. Abu Dhabi, by acquiring this brand, is thus plugging itself into this global cultural network – becoming another stop on the global art circuit. The urban strategy for realizing this vision centers on the creation of an enclave, a physically distinctive space that stands in opposition to the actual city; a utopian space of sorts whose reliance on themes culled liberally from Arab history would, it is hoped, resonate with visitors’ urban imaginary of a modern and enlightened Arabia, in clear distinction from

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the crumbling and decaying traditional centers of the Arab world (Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, etc.).2

Background and History Saadiyat Island is no stranger to utopian visons. As far back as 1970, when the country had not yet been fully formed, Sheikh Zayed, then ruler of Abu Dhabi, heard about agricultural experiments taking place in the University of Arizona, involving growing vegetables in a desert environment. He promptly invited the university to come to Abu Dhabi and set up the Arid Lands Research Center on Saadiyat Island. It was described by The Times as one of the ‘world’s most remarkable horticultural experiments’, and because of the giant storage tanks and polythene-covered houses it is ‘something distinctly from the next century, the moon age’. The aim of the center was to demonstrate ‘reversing nature and proving that the desert can be made fertile’ (Frenchman 1971). The experiment was short-lived and proved to be more of a pipe dream. Indeed Saadiyat turned into another utopia of sorts, a weekend getaway for weary expatriates, seeking to escape the confines of Abu Dhabi and let loose along its sandy beaches, away from prying eyes (Tatchell 2009). More serious development plans for Saadiyat Island go as far back as 1992 when it was conceived initially as a major financial center (White 2000). The island was described by The Economist in 1999 as an ‘an elongated triangle of desiccated scrub and scorched sand criss-crossed by camel tracks’ but where ‘skyscrapers will sprout, bankers and stockbrokers will congregate – and a financial center on the scale of New York, London or Tokyo will blossom’. In 1996, authorities created the Abu Dhabi Free Zone Authority to regulate the development. It, in turn, hired legal and financial consultants to develop the island’s financial infrastructure. It seemed the project was well under way in spite of concerns that it would compete with Bahrain, the traditional financial center of the area. More significantly, however, were developments taking place in Dubai, which was more attractive to foreigners for a variety of reasons, representing a counterpoint to what Abu Dhabi was trying to achieve. Completion of the project was expected by 2002, with an entire city planned to house 25,000 people; it was also described as a ‘digital city’ (White 2000). The entire project faltered, however, and developments were put on hold. Soon thereafter the Dubai Financial Market was founded in 2

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2000, and in 2002 the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) was announced, opening officially in 2004 in a state-of-the art building meant to be a contemporary interpretation of the Arc de Triomphe. Saadiyat Island it seemed was destined for bigger, and more ambitious, plans. Changes following the death of Sheikh Zayed in 2004 involved the redevelopment of the islands surrounding Abu Dhabi, resulting in a series of projects announced on an almost daily basis which included Saadiyat Island. The proposed project contained an array of features and amenities, such as commercial and residential properties, resort hotels, recreational facilities, nature preserves, and perhaps most significantly, the creation of a cluster of ‘world class’ cultural facilities and institutions that would be operated in partnership with established museums and performing arts institutions from around the world. One of those museums was designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry and would be called the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (GAD); covering an area of 30,000 m2, it would be the largest of that franchise of museums. Sheikh Mohamed, Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, noted that this project ‘will become an international cultural hub for the Middle East on par with the best in the world’ (Ameen 2006). Statements as to the significance of this project were characteristically hyperbolic, emphasizing its global dimensions, with Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation, arguing that ‘when this comprehensive and inclusive vision is realized, it will set a standard for global culture that will resonate for decades to come’ (Property World Middle East 2006). Gehry, after admitting that he knew little about the place, stated that his initial reluctance was overcome by three hours of ‘quality time’ with Sheikh Sultan, chairman of TDIC, in his office in California, which convinced him otherwise (Krane 2006). Asked about his vision for the project, he said that its main ‘draws’ ‘were the “magic” of the Arabian desert – with its undulating peach-colored dunes and the turquoise Persian Gulf’ – a curious statement given the fact that there is no immediate desert surrounding the island, which is for the most part a barren landscape. In another context he claimed to be influenced by Abu Dhabi’s outdoor café culture. The announcement was met with widespread acclaim in the local media, with pictures of Gehry standing in the opulent Emirates Hotel lobby appearing in a variety of newspapers. Criticism came from abroad with some noting that the project by its very nature could ‘arouse conservative sensibilities’. For example, the depiction of nude paintings or religiously sensitive subjects. Or, that it has ‘brought striking cultural juxtapositions’ since the museum is ’named for a major Jewish-American family and designed

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by a Jewish-American architect’ and that it ‘would rise in the capital of an Arab country’ (Israel Insider 2006). Furthermore, many critics argued that Abu Dhabi (and others) are simply buying art and culture without having a substantive indigenous cultural scene. Adding another twist to the project was the New York-based organization Human Rights Watch, which called on the Guggenheim Museum board to publicly pledge that it would enforce labor rights during construction and maintenance – which they promptly did. The project in its final form was unveiled in 2007 (Figures 6.2 and 6.3). In addition to Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, the development initially included a classical museum by Jean Nouvel (affiliated with the French Louvre), a maritime museum by Tadao Ando, and performing arts center by Zaha Hadid. In addition, nineteen art pavilions, designed by an assortment of international architects (only one UAE local architect was included – Khalid Al-Najjar, and, interestingly, not a single Arab architect) were proposed along a meandering water canal within the cultural district (alluding to the Venice Biennale). The original masterplan was revised by US-based firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, which was described as a disappointment since it ‘represents nothing so much as an outmoded 19th-century planning formula – an axial Beaux-Arts scheme with hotels, Figure 6.2 Scaled models of Saadiyat Island showing how both museums may appear once completed

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Figure 6.3  Exhibit showing the completed Saadiyat Island development

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marinas and cultural monuments sprinkled along the edges’ (Ouroussoff 2007). Some observers noted that ‘it probably would be hard to build them all in one district anywhere else’ and that taken together ‘it could be the world’s largest single arts-and-culture development project in recent memory’ (Fattah 2007). This initial vision which did take culture as its main departure point has been considerably revised, as I will detail in the following section.

The Theming of Saadiyat Given the desert locale and the absence of any substantive urban history architects had free reign in configuring their creations. Also considering that the client – TDIC – was a developer whose sole aim is to maximize profit on investment, theming as a strategy was inevitable. Similar to a shopping mall which is in need of a draw to attract shoppers; framing a purely commercial enterprise within a cultural and/or historical context is a well-worn strategy known among retailers and is applicable in real estate as well. Of course, none of these financial factors were discussed in the architectural press. Instead, they offered glowing reviews overlooking the clichéd versions of respective architectural visions and, more significantly, labor abuses.

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The architectural designs are signature pieces characteristic of the architects chosen; each is a unique tribute to his/her style and taken together are a fascinating display of state-of-the-art architectural design in the twentyfirst century. They represent, as New York Times Middle East correspondent Hassan Fattah poignantly observes, ‘a striking departure from Abu Dhabi’s crumbling 1970s-style concrete buildings and more modern glass-andsteel high-rises’. The notion of the tabula rasa, i.e., designing within an unconstrained setting, figures prominently in the design discourse of some architects. Yet as architectural critic Charles Jencks observed, in effect there is no such thing as a tabula rasa – there are always contextual constraints of some sort, which seems to be the case in the conceptual ideas proposed.3 Architects create their own context. In an internet blog titled ‘My Abu Dhabi Adventure’, Frank Gehry argues that his design alludes to the traditional alleyways of Arab towns, as well as paying homage to traditional ways of cooling and controlling climate (Gehry 2007). 4 None of these images have existed in any way in Abu Dhabi – they are more an evocation of towns in Syria and Egypt. Similar contextual references are made by Nouvel (an ‘Arabian’ town covered with a gigantic dome, an homage, perhaps, to Buckminster Fuller’s 1950s proposal for a dome covering the city of New York), and Ando (evoking the shapes of the dhow, the traditional Gulf boat). Zaha Hadid, on the other hand, utilized an organic growth metaphor – which could be applicable anywhere. Norman Foster used the shape of the falcon as an inspiration as well as the desert dunes from which these wings emerge. In short, conceptually, all architects involved provide vague and generalized contextual references for their buildings. Frank Gehry argues that his design alludes to the traditional alleyways of Arab towns. Nouvel fluctuates between re-creating an image of an Arabian town, copying the waterways of Venice, the discovery of objects within a forest, and a rain of 3 A conversation with Charles Jencks, speaker at a symposium organized by Ajman University of Science & Technology. ‘Architectural & Urban Development in the UAE’, Fairmont Hotel, Dubai, 19 March 2007. 4 The complete statement is quite fascinating: ‘Abu Dhabi’s going to be very different – a take on a traditional, spread out, organic Arab village or town. Not literally, but it’ll have the equivalent of streets and alleys, souk-like spaces and plazas, some shaded and others covered. It’ll be the biggest Guggenheim yet. There’ll be fresh air and sunlight, and we’ll be bringing in cooling air through a modern take on traditional Middle Eastern wind towers. Of course, the core of the building, or complex, will need to be air-conditioned, but this won’t be a hermetic building; it’ll be an adventure, a kind of walk through a town with art along the way’ (Gehry 2007).

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light resulting from perforations in the gigantic dome covering the entire complex. Interestingly, both buildings are projected out onto the water on an artificial island, thus away from Abu Dhabi proper. Foster’s Sheikh Zayed Museum – revealed among much fanfare during a visit by the queen of England – suggests falconry through the creation of gigantic winglike structure emerging from an artificial hill. Whether the references are regional or universal, the significant aspect of these pronouncements is twofold: first, by evoking linkages to traditional towns the project positions itself as the region’s center, and second, the universalizing aspect of these designs establishes the project’s global credentials. Taken together these two factors supposedly show that the project represents a perfect fusion between East and West – a model of happy co-existence and a politically correct hybrid. Yet it is also a perfect example of theming: supposedly Arab architectural features are liberally re-used and re-configured. In the process a themed environment is created; a fantasy setting that bears no relation to a surrounding context but is a place that creates its own reality. In many ways it is similar to a shopping mall or a casino.

Transformation and the Realization of a Neoliberal Vision The first signs of trouble emerged in 2009 when Human Rights Watch issued a scathing report exposing the dire conditions to which laborers brought in from South Asia were subjected. The report, titled ‘“The Island of Happiness”: Exploitation of Migrant Workers on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi’, outlined in detail the severity of labor conditions and practices (HRW 2009). Up until that point the focus of such investigations had been on its neighbor Dubai. The report urged Western institutions, namely the Louvre, the Guggenheim, and New York University, to ensure that workers would be treated fairly. These were not the only issues, though. The financial crisis of 2008 caused quite a stir in the real estate market, affecting not just Dubai but also Abu Dhabi. And while there were assurances that Saadiyat would be unaffected, this proved to be incorrect. Over the course of several years rumors swirled that the project would be cancelled or delayed. This continued up until 2012, when substantive changes were announced. The opening of only three museum would be staggered: the Louvre in 2015, the Zayed museum in 2017, and the Guggenheim in 2019. Ando’s maritime museum and Zaha Hadid’s performance center were shelved. Also gone were the cultural pavilions dotted along a snaking

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canal. Instead, a large luxurious mall, named The District, would fill the area between the three museums; appropriately, the developer is a firm linked to the luxury brand Louis Vuitton. Outdoor spaces have as their vista/view the Guggenheim Museum, which is prominently highlighted in promotional architectural renderings. Another major entrant in the Saadiyat development scheme is NYU-Abu Dhabi which will occupy a specially built campus not far from the cultural district. Surrounding these institutions are multi-million-dollar luxury residences, five-star resorts and golf courses, and exquisite beaches. The cost for this ‘cultural metropolis’ is $27 billion, all funded by the Abu Dhabi government. Yet for all of this glamour and extravagance, a recent article in The Guardian labeled Abu Dhabi ‘a place of misery’ for migrant workers (Carrick and Batty 2013). The report shows that workers live in an alternative reality divorced from Abu Dhabi, in specially designed labor camps, which may be understood as a dystopian spatial inversion of the utopian cultural and tourist enclave. One is located ‘offshore’ on the island while others are in hidden in remote desert outposts. Andrew Ross, an academic at NYU, wrote a piece in The New York Times titled ‘High Culture and Hard Labor’ critiquing labor conditions and the fact that luxurious and elite institutions are being built without regard to workers’ basic rights. In essence a critique of neoliberal visions, championed by David Harvey and others, such projects are seen as benefiting a select few at the expense of the larger society. Indeed, a strong protest movement has emerged, engaging in various symbolic stunts such as occupying the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The New York Times also published another investigative report which focused on the building of the NYU campus in Abu Dhabi. The utopia that is Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island thus seems to be a realization of the dystopian vision of ‘Metropolis’, a place that is free of worry where inhabitants are free to engage in leisurely pursuits, while sampling the finer things in life. However, down below in the deep bowels of the city, workers toil in miserable conditions unable to enjoy the results of their labor. While this may be an exaggerated version of what actually takes place, there is no doubt that Saadiyat represents a space of exception and a place where global capital, and an urbanity of spectacle, collude to create a ‘tourist utopia’. What is fascinating in all of this is how culture, a supposedly noble and egalitarian pursuit, is used to serve neoliberal visions and how this is spatialized though the creation of cultural quarters or enclaves (Figure 6.4).

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Figure 6.4 The Louvre Abu Dhabi emerging from the desert with the luxurious St. Regis Resort in the foreground, January 2015

Yasser Elsheshtawy

Cultural Quarters The developments discussed above can be understood within the larger context of the idea of an ‘urban cultural economy’ triggered by the widely cited but now largely discredited work of Richard Florida, centering on the creative economy and the creative worker (Florida 2002). Darla Decker has not only debunked the work of Florida, but has also identified the characteristics and problems associated with these new cultural clusters (Decker 2008; also see Glaeser 2005; Peck 2005).5 She strongly identifies with the work of Andrew Ross, who notes that one of the main outcomes of this new urban cultural economy is ‘cultural quartering’ through which policy makers mark out an area within a city based on cultural products (Ross 2007). This cultural quartering leads to fragmentation, gentrification, and a loss of heterogeneity. The Guggenheim was at the forefront of this trend since this served its global expansionist strategy manifested in its Bilbao branch (also see Fiss 2009). 5

Also, for a thorough criticism, see Jacobs 2005.

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Another downside is the affirmation of class distinctions. Culture-based urban developments are considered to be both cause and effect of ‘an uneven distribution of economic gains and cultural forms’ (Decker 2008: 231). Moreover they reinforce existing power structures by catering to the interests of ‘urban elites’ who determine both the type of development as well as its location. In this sense they confirm neo-Marxist theories dealing with the impact of capitalism on urban space (e.g., Harvey 2006; Davis and Monk 2008). Interestingly, in an effort to counter these perceptions officials have been engaged in a massive effort aiming to educate the public through exhibitions taking place in the über-luxurious Emirates Palace, and in a remote outpost on the island itself known as ‘Manarat Saadiyat’. These exhibits range from a display of Picasso’s work, telling the story of the Guggenheim and abstract art, to the emergence of civilization in Mesopotamia. The remoteness of these districts, and their disengagement from the city, underscore the fact that they are meant to be displayed as precious objects, to be admired from a distance for the local population, and that ultimately they will serve transient residents and tourists. Rather than build inside the city, for instance next to the existing cultural center, a decision was made to develop an isolated district in the service of, and responding to, global capital. Thus Fares Braizat, a Jordanian professor at Qatar University, notes that in spite of the extraordinary buildings that are being built, a much more concerted effort needs to take place whereby local people are persuaded that they have a stake in this future. Otherwise such endeavors may end up reinforcing ‘cynicism about engagement with the West that brought down Western-style modernism in this part of the world decades ago’ (Farhat 2007). Physical infrastructure in and of itself will not be enough to contribute to cultural enlightenment. What is needed is a much broader social and cultural engagement, otherwise culture may simply be used to mask unpleasant socio-political realities. Yet while no one can discount such critiques, they do not take into account agency – the extent to which citizens can resist or subvert change, for example. The notion of a passive consumer accepting helplessly what is presented in front of him or her underlies much of the discourse concerning the new ‘urban cultural economy’. As Arjun Appadurai (1996) noted, an emphasis solely on the triumph of multinational corporations assumes a consumer complicity that denies individual agency and the various identity negotiations and altercations that occur as the consumer encounters the product.

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A New Cultural Center The notion of Abu Dhabi becoming a ‘new’ cultural center in the Middle East has in fact occupied a central position in announcing the project and in providing a justification for such a massive undertaking. Officials note that ‘culture crosses all boundaries and therefore Saadiyat will belong to the people of the UAE, the greater Middle East and the world at large’, thus effectively establishing the project’s main credentials (Haider 2007). Taking this a step further, the chairman of the TDIC proclaimed that ‘What is happening is unfortunate in places like Beirut. […] [W]e want it to come back to its old days.’ Nicholas Ouroussoff, The New York Times architecture critic, in a major article on this development titled ‘A Vision in the Desert’, offers a similar view, arguing that the traditional centers of the Middle East could effectively be replaced by Abu Dhabi, which offers ‘the hope of a major realignment, a chance to plant the seeds for a fertile new cultural model in the Middle East’ (Ouroussoff 2007). The project raises another interesting issue, namely the role of the museum within a global world. The Guggenheim has in fact become symptomatic of what has been described as the ‘McDonaldization’ of culture. It has in effect been turned into a brand that can be placed anywhere. By acquiring this brand, Abu Dhabi is thus plugging itself into this global cultural network – becoming another stop on the world circuit of art aficionados. However, Thomas Krens, former director of the Guggenheim, argues that this is not about ‘exporting a commodity’ or ‘setting up a franchise’. Instead, it becomes a tool for communication – the museum brings modern works of art to local settings, and in return these institutions help to foster and nurture local talent.6 There are many who disagree, however. One art critic sarcastically observed that ‘it’s people here who would like to think that if they send this stuff to the other side of the world, it’s going to have some impact. […] I think the other side of the world isn’t the slightest bit interested’ (Taylor 2007). Others dispute the notion of cultural exchange, pointing out that ‘there are very few exhibitions at the Guggenheim Bilbao, the much cited example, which relate specifically to Spanish artists and many of the exhibitions are the same ones that rotate to other Guggenheim sites’ (Hynes 2006). In the 6 Thomas Krens, Interview on the Charlie Rose television show, aired 3 January 2006 on PBS. He further notes: ‘[T]his interest in using culture as a tool for communication as a vital part of the urban fabric is taking place all over the world, all over the world. In the last – in the last three years, we have been approached by more than 120 cities from around the world that wanted to do this sort of thing.’

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end, it is all about attempting to ‘juice up, globalize, and glamorize the museum, to market it, turn it into a world wide entertainment network […] and pad the pockets of this institution’ (Saltz 2002). In this context the French reaction was quite interesting. Jean Nouvel’s classical museum, proposed for the island, was envisioned as carrying the Louvre name. Naturally, a French resistance emerged which attempted to derail these attempts on the grounds that France was selling its culture. A website was created to rally support for the cause, enlisting more than 4,700 petitioners; the website was in turn promptly blocked by UAE authorities. However, French government support was strong and, for a reported price tag of $0.5 billion, French president Jacques Chirac agreed to the deal, thus allowing for the creation of a Louvre franchise in the UAE. While dismissed by some as typical French snobbery, it shows an intersection of local resistance, global capital, and neocolonial ambitions. In the end, culture and art become pawns within a global market – Abu Dhabi is simply catering to this emerging trend. There were also talks with people from the British Museum to open another franchise; however, the parties involved ended up as consultants for the Zayed Museum instead. Abu Dhabi is of course not the first city in the world to embark on such an ambitious venture. Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum is perhaps one of the first attempts to use both a signature architect and an art institution to establish global significance for a city. More recent efforts – such as the Galician City of Culture by Peter Eisenman – are on a much larger scale. A more poignant example – and perhaps aligned with the scale attempted by Abu Dhabi – is Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, designed by Norman Foster. The project was conceived as an attempt for Hong Kong to become a world city and to further enhance its status as a major global financial center. Thus, private corporations were invited to build a series of world-class museums, among them the Guggenheim. Interestingly a similar strategy of ‘spectacular’ architecture (for example, the world’s largest outdoor roof) was adopted to enhance the project’s appeal. However, as Cecilia Chu (2007) pointed out, the project was met with widespread opposition questioning its scale and relevance within the context of Hong Kong, which in her view led to the opening ‘of new spaces to imagine alternative modernities based not on the official “world city” rhetoric but on social responsibility and ongoing cultural work’ (19; emphasis added). Such debates – for a number of reasons – could not be conceived in Abu Dhabi. However, critical discourses need to be adopted in order to effectively plan the Saadiyat Island project with the general objective of making it ultimately useful for everyone. If these buildings were to emerge

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from being a mere spectacle, or a pawn within some global cultural scheme, a local art scene needs to be nurtured which would in effect sustain such a development. Schools of art and architecture as well as an openness toward the exploration of ideas are necessary ingredients for a vital art scene. Furthermore, a more effective and substantive engagement with Arab talent would add significance and perhaps address concerns that Abu Dhabi is simply using its ‘oil money’ to buy art. It should be noted that when the project was unveiled in February 2007, a large exhibition dedicated to the development, displaying the architects’ models and renderings, was held at the opulent Emirates Palace Hotel. The exhibition has in fact stirred a debate among residents and intellectuals. Perhaps unprecedented in the history of the UAE – projects in Dubai, for example, are simply unveiled without any public participation – such events need to be substantiated by being accompanied by debates about their merits and relevance. Hong Kong may offer some lessons in this regard.

Eastern Promise: The Ascendancy of Abu Dhabi Abu Dhabi’s foray into culture is based on several integrated and interrelated factors: economic, educational, and political. Yet it is also part of a much larger trend whereby an East-West realignment is taking place, with countries or regional blocs such as China, India, and Southeast Asia asserting their power not just economically but also culturally. Abu Dhabi and the larger Gulf region are important players in this realignment, which is seeing the rise of such cities as Mumbai, Bangalore, and Beijing, major centers of trade and commerce, gleaming with newly built skyscrapers and shopping malls. Economist Ben Simpfendorfer notes that we are witnessing a ‘global historic rebalancing’ as a result of three factors: the rise of the China growth model; the rise of Arab wealth funds; and the rise of what he calls an ‘Islamic corridor’ (Simpfendorfer 2009). Such economic dominance will inevitably lead to a focus on culture as well. This shift is particularly visible in Abu Dhabi, which has taken advantage of the financial crisis in the West and positioned itself along with its neighbors, Doha and Dubai, as a center for the sale and exchange of art in the region (Morris 2010). In an essentially top-down manner, governments in the region are engaged in a process seemingly grounded in noble cultural and educational objectives, but it is in fact deeply embedded in a global capitalist discourse. Spectacular architecture and urbanism play a complicit role in furthering and promoting this vision – leading to ‘geographies of

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exclusion’ and the creation of enclaves catering to tourists and the culturally enlightened – a space of exception whose utopic promises are premised on the fact that it is designed for and accessible to a select group of elites. At a local level, Abu Dhabi learned lessons from the failed experiment of its neighbor, Dubai. With one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world, managed through the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), it can afford to be deeply involved in these projects. Indeed, in spite of the financial crisis which has affected the city, the Saadiyat Island development continues unabated, since, according to government officials, it is considered to be ‘cultural infrastructure’. Accordingly, its continuation is a matter of national pride. However, inclusive approaches are possible and may offer an alternative for these Westernized visions. Indeed, they do not have to be based on an illusive past; they could be inspired by the rich urban tapestry characterizing cities such as Abu Dhabi (Tatchell 2009; Elsheshtawy 2010; Elsheshtawy 2011). Thus, instead of urban cultural quartering, spaces may be set up in the margins, in industrial districts and in unremarkable sites. In such settings, a truly locally inspired art scene could flourish, which would ultimately make the city’s forays into the realm of culture sustainable and more effective.

Works Cited Ameen, A. 2006. ‘Frank Gehry to Design Guggenheim Museum’. Gulf News, 9 July, 3. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Carrick, Glen, and David Batty. 2013. ‘In Abu Dhabi, They call It Happiness Island. But for the Migrant Workers, It Is a Place of Misery.’ The Guardian, 22 December. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/22/abu-dhabi-happiness​ -island-misery. Chu, Cecilia. 2007. ‘Heritage of Disappearance? Shekkipmei and Collective Memory(s) in Post-Handover Hong Kong’. Traditional Dwelling and Settlements Review 18, no. 2: 43-55. Davidson, Christopher 2005. ‘After Shaikh Zayed: The Politics of Succession in Abu Dhabi and the UAE’. Middle East Policy 18, no. 1: 42-59. Davidson, Christopher. 2007. ‘The Emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai: Contrasting Roles in the International System’. Asian Affairs 38, no. 1: 33-48. Davis, Mike, and Bertrand Monk, eds. 2008. Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism. New York: New Press.

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Debord, Guy. 1970. The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. Decker, Darla J. 2008. Urban Development, Cultural Clusters: The Guggenheim Museum and its Global Distribution Strategies. PhD diss., New York University. Elsheshtawy, Yasser. 2008a. ‘Cities of Sand and Fog’. In The Evolving Arab City: Tradition, Modernity and Urban Development, ed. by Yasser Elsheshtawy, 258304. London: Routledge. Elsheshtawy, Yasser, ed. 2008b. The Evolving Arab City: Tradition, Modernity and Urban Development. London: Routledge. Elsheshtawy, Yasser. 2010. Dubai: Behind an Urban Spectacle. London: Routledge. Elsheshtawy, Yasser. 2011. ‘(In)formal Encounters: Mapping Abu Dhabi’s Urban Public Spaces’. Built Environment. 37:1. pp. 92-113. Fahim, Mohammed. 1995. From Rags to Riches. London: The London Centre of Arab Studies. Farhat, Maymanah. 2007. ‘‘The Louvre Abu Dhabi, Exploitation and the Politics of the Museum Industry’. ZNet, 27  March. https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/ the-louvre-abu-dhabi-exploitation-and-the-politics-of-the-museum-industryby-maymanah-farhat/. Fattah, Hassan. 2007. ‘Celebrity Architects Reveal a Daring Cultural Xanadu for the Arab World’. The New York Times, 1 February. Fiss, Karen. 2009. ‘Design in a Global Context: Envisioning Postcolonial and Transnational Possibilities’. Design Issues 25, no. 3: 3-10. Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books. Frenchman, Michael. 1971. ‘The Desert Yields Rich Food Crop – at a Price.’ The Times. 21 December. Gehry, Frank. 2007. ‘My Abu Dhabi Adventure’. The Guardian. 5 March. https://www. theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2007/mar/05/myabudhabiadventure. Glaeser, Edward. 2005. ‘Review of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class’. Regional Science and Urban Economics 35, no. 5: 593-596. Haider, Haseeb. 2007. ‘Saadiyat Projects’ Designs on Show’. Khaleej Times, 1 February. http://www.khaleejtimes.com/article/20070201/ARTICLE/302019927/1002. Harvey, David. 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. London: Verso. HRW. 2009. ‘“The Island of Happiness”: Exploitation of Migrant Workers on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi’. Human Rights Watch, 19 May. https://www.hrw. org/report/2009/05/19/island-happiness/exploitation-migrant-workers-saadiyat​ -island-abu-dhabi. Hynes, Francesca. 2006. ‘The Goog Effect – American Imperialism or Visionary Museum Practice?’ The Business of Art, 28 August. http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/ bizart/2006/08/the_goog_effect_american_imper_1.html.

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Israel Insider. 2006. ‘Jewish Architect Builds Guggenheim’s Largest Museum in Booming Abu Dhabi’. Israeli Insider, 9 July. http://web.israelinsider.com/ Articles/Briefs/8833.htm. Jacobs, Karrie. 2005. ‘Why I Don’t Love Richard Florida’. Metropolis, March. http://www. metropolismag.com/March-2005/Why-I-Don-rsquot-Love-Richard-Florida/. Kimmelman, Michael. 2002. ‘An Era Ends for the Guggenheim’. The New York Times, 6 December. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/06/arts/critic-s-notebook-anera-ends-for-the-guggenheim.html. Kimmelman, Michael. 2004. ‘New York’s Bizarre Museum Moment’. The New York Times, 11 July. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/arts/art-architecture-newyork-s-bizarre-museum-moment.html. Accessed February 7, 2011. Krane, Jim. 2006. ‘Frank Gehry Wonders Whether He Can Top Bilbao’. The China Post, 10 July. http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=371953 Krauss, Rosalind. 1990. ‘The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum’. October 54: 3-17. Mathur, Saloni. 2005. ‘Museums and Globalization’. Anthropological Quarterly 78, no. 3: 697-708. Morris, Ian. 2010. ‘Here Comes the East’. The New York Times, 21 December. http:// www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/opinion/22iht-edmorris22.html. Ostling, Susan. 2007. ‘The Global Museum and the Orbit of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York’. The International Journal of the Humanities 5, no. 8: 87-94. Ouroussoff, Nicolai. 2007. ‘A Vision in the Desert’. The New York Times, 1 February. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/arts/design/04ouro.html. Peck, Jamie. 2005. ‘Struggling with the Creative Class’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 4: 740-770 Poulin, Taylor L. 2010. ‘An Oasis in the Desert? Issues and Intricacies Concerning the Louvre-Abu Dhabi Museum Expansion’. StudentPulse: Online Academic Student Journal 2, no. 2. http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/177/3/anoasis-in-the-desert-issues-and-intricacies-concerning-the-louvre-abu-dhabimuseum-expansion. Property World Middle East. 2006. ‘Abu Dhabi to Build Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum’. http://www.wam.ae/en/news/emirates/1395227681396.html. Ross, Andrew. 2007. ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It: The Mercurial Career of Creative Industries Policy’. Work Organization, Labour and Globalization 1, no. 1: 13-30. Saltz, Jerry. 2002. ‘Downward spiral’. Village Voice. 21 February. http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/downward-spiral-7142554. Simpfendorfer, Ben. 2009. The New Silk Road: How a Rising Arab World Is Turning Away from the West and Rediscovering China. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Tatchell, Jo. 2009. A Diamond in the Desert: Behind the Scenes in the World’s Richest City. London: Sceptre. Taylor, Kate. 2007. ‘Abu Dhabi Lures Western Museums’. The New York Sun, 1 February. http://www.nysun.com/arts/abu-dhabi-lures-western-museums/47795/. White, Allison. 2010. ‘Cultural Evolutions in the United Arab Emirates’. E-merge: Journal of Arts Administration and Policy, 18 May. http://blogs.saic.edu/emerge/2010/05/18/ cultural-evolutions-in-the-united-arab-emirates-by-allison-white/.

Imaginaries

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Disney’s Utopian Techno-Futures Tomorrow’s World That We Shall Build Today 1 Angela Ndalianis

In 1962, Walt Disney began planning the most challenging project of his career, EPCOT – the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow – a prototype community that was inspired by his utopian ideas and which would encapsulate the possibilities of the future through the combined forces of science, technology, and corporate enterprise. Disney’s dream, however, would not come to fruition due to his death on 15 December 1966. This chapter focuses on the construction of such futuristic cities, and the manner in which they serve, like many other ‘tourist utopias’, as laboratories for testing utopic urban and architectural innovations. My particular interest is in Walt Disney, the utopian vision that drove his creation of his theme parks and his plans for EPCOT, which was to be built in Kissimmee, Florida. To explore Disney’s vision, I will also travel back in time to examine the world’s fairs and expositions that influenced his thinking, as well as forward to Odaiba in Japan and Futuroscope in France – both of which inherited aspects of Disney’s urban planning ideas. In taking this journey, it will be argued that the theme park as conceived by Disney reflects the concerns of world exposition predecessors that visualized the possibilities of scientific advancement, technological progress, and human ingenuity and how such developments could shape future human civilization. Since the late nineteenth century and the opening of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, science-fiction themes and utopian ideals have been integral to the rationale that drove the design of the fairs.2 Expositions like the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the New York World’s Fair of 1939 relied on combinations of theming and emergent ride 1 This is taken from the theme song of the New York World’s Fair. The complete passage is: We’re the rising tide coming from far and wide Marching side by side on our way For a brave new world, Tomorrow’s world that we shall build today. (Rydell 1993: 132) 2 Amusement parks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – predecessors to the contemporary theme park – were more overtly science fictional in the design of rides such as the 1902 ride ‘Trip to the Moon’ at Coney Island, and the rides themselves were an important showcase of advances in engineering and technology.

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technologies that took participants on journeys into future cities, and that offered potential consumers an ‘educational’ spectacle of how US industry and corporate power could – and would – shape the future. Leaving aside the fact that the theme park itself would become an embodiment of the affiliation of corporations and industry as producers of wondrous, innovative technologies, as will be argued, the exposition’s focus on corporate sponsorship of industry was a model that would later be adapted by Walt Disney and the Disney Corporation in the theme parks. When EPCOT opened in 1982 – not as a city, but as a theme park in Orlando – it was very much an homage to the exposition tradition and its belief in scientific and technological progress. The concept of the science-fictional future city that’s integral both to the theme park and the exposition has more recently found a new form of expression in the guise of the ‘learning city’ that aims to showcase the utopian future in a living city environment. The themes, narratives, and technologies that are contained and rehearsed within the parameters of science fiction here slip into the public sphere in more architecturally and socially invasive ways. The issues that concern me in this chapter center around our fictions of science, and their new forms of expression in our urban spaces.

Astro Boy, Odaiba, and Futuricity Tetsuwan Atomu first came to life within the panels of a science-fiction manga in 1951.3 This super-boy robot, who came to be known in the Western world as Astro Boy, was the creation of Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka later gave Astro Boy movement in the form of a science-fiction animated television show, Astro Boy (1963-1966). Astro Boy’s fictional birthday – 7 April 2003 – finally arrived when reality caught up with fiction and, to make this reality even more ‘real’, the urbanscape of the future envisioned by Tezuka (super-transport systems, gleaming architecture, and a world where human and robot live in harmony) also appeared to have arrived. Having influenced an entire generation of Japanese roboticists, it comes as no surprise that Astro Boy has become an iconic figure who embodies the future now. Astro Boy’s birthday celebrations began on 6 April 2003 ‘with the launch of a new Tetsuwan Atom Japanese animated series on the Fuji TV network’ (Nakada 3 Sections of this article appeared in Angela Ndalianis, ‘Tomorrow’s World that We Shall Build Today’, in Screen Consciousness: Cinema, Mind and World, edited by R. Pepperell and M. Punt (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 41-64.

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2003). Beyond the robot star that it promotes, the Fuji Television head office, designed by Kenzo Tange, itself recalls classic tropes of science fiction as it rises majestically like a network matrix in all of its metallic glory. Crowning its peak is a mega-ton globe that appears to defy gravity; the structure is one of many impressive symbols that reflect the utopian-inspired, futuristic imperatives that drive urban development on the island of Odaiba, a manmade island that is situated just outside Tokyo in Tokyo Bay. The lesson of Odaiba is that science fiction no longer exists beyond our reach, far into the future: it is with us now. To emphasize the point further, in 2009 an 18-meter/59-feet-tall RX-78 Gundam mecha-robot (based on the 1979 anime series Mobile Suit Gundam) was placed at the outside entrance way of Aqua City, a retail complex in Odaiba (see Figure 7.1). Original plans for Odaiba were to develop it as ‘a “teleport”, as a main information hub and to build clusters of highly intelligent buildings in response to the development of the information age in the late 1980s’ (Murayama and Parker 2007: 73) and a showcase for futuristic living; however, the collapse of the economic bubble led to delays in development. Again in 1996 there were plans to hold an international exposition in Odaiba called ‘Tokyo Frontier’, but funding problems stalled its development. Nevertheless, an exposition building did eventually come to light in Odaiba in the form of the Tokyo Big Sight (the Tokyo International Exhibition Center). And just like many of the expositions of earlier times, both the Tokyo Big Sight and Odaiba came to be perceived as places of grand innovation that were nurtured by corporations, science, and technology. Muruyama and Parker explain that by 1999, the plan was ‘to reposition Odaiba as the strategic hub for leading industries for the 21st century, including IT and the creative industries’ (Murayama and Parker 2007: 74). The idea was, by 2016, to make Odaiba into a self-contained ideal urban center that included residential, shopping, and leisure facilities, and attracted major industry innovators, including telecommunication centers (Telecom), broadcasting stations (Fuji Television), universities, and research facilities (the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology), museums (the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation) and entertainment complexes (Decks, Aquacity, and Mediage) (Murayama and Parker 2007: 76). The central logic behind emerging cities such as Odaiba is the principle of the ‘learning city’ – a city that promotes scientific and technological innovation by integrating it into its economic plans and by educating citizens about the importance that innovations in media and communication technologies have within the context of the global market. Combining retail developments with industry and technology, to quote Kurt Larsen, ‘learning

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Figure 7.1 The 18-meter/59-feet-tall RX-78 Gundam mecha-robot at the entrance way of Aqua City, Odaiba

Angela Ndalianis

cities’ act ‘as drivers for the knowledge-based societies of the 21st century’ (Larsen 1999). Yet, while situated in the present, because they borrow so many tropes from science fiction these ‘learning cities’ are imbued with an undeniable ‘futuricity’. This feature is clear in the intentions that drive Odaiba’s MIRAIKAN – the National Museum of Emerging Science and

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Innovation – whose construction was supported by the Japanese government ‘to prepare its country for the transition into the scientific society’ (Max Planck Society 2005), and which has held numerous exhibitions that use science fiction in order to tell a story about the real possibilities of science and technology. Past exhibitions have included ‘Science + Fiction’ (2005), ‘Terminator – Battle or Coexistence? Robots and Our Future’ (2009), ‘The World of Manga Experienced through Science’ (2012), ‘Thunderbirds Expo – Special-effects of the Century Depict our Future’ (2013), ‘Android: What Is a Human?’ (starring the uncannily human-looking robots of Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University), and daily performances by Asimo the Honda robot whose design is clearly modeled on Astro Boy and who is the official ambassador of robots. The one powerful memory that is reignited every time I visit Odaiba is the extent to which it feels like I’ve entered a series of science-fiction films from the post-1950s period. The mise-en-scène is indisputable: the spotless, meticulously manicured urbanscape with the metallic and monochromatic building surfaces of structures like the Tokyo International Exhibition Center (known as the Tokyo Big Sight) and the Telecom complex 4; the expedient people movers littered throughout Aqua City and Decks Tokyo Beach (the two destination shopping malls); the super-velocity, Yurikamome train that travels from mainland Tokyo to Odaiba, a driverless train that relies on the maglev system which was perfected by the Disney Corporation in the early 1960s and which levitates above the tracks via magnets; the massive-architectural structures that stand as monuments to corporations like Fuji TV, Telecom, Panasonic and telecommunication companies like NTT, which has its offices in the skyscraper called ‘Tokyo Teleport’ – all seem to be straight out of films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969), Logan’s Run (1976), and Minority Report (2002), or television shows like Star Trek. The technologically controlled, computer-reliant infrastructure of the entire city, which includes the visible presence of robots, computer games in the Joypolis game city, cutting-edge entertainment complexes such as Mediage, Toyota’s Mega Web, the Panasonic Center and the Sony Complex, as well as the high-tech surveillance system that monitors every move that citizens make, recall The Forbin Project (1969), Westworld (1973), and THX 1138 (1971). This science-fiction mise-en-scène speaks of a utopian existence – an environment where human and machine come together in perfect unison for the betterment of human kind. The flip side, of course, is the dystopian

4

See http://www.bigsight.jp/english/index.html

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narratives that the films insist underlie the utopian surface; these urban spaces, on the other hand, refuse to acknowledge any dystopian narrative.

I Have Seen the Future … at the World’s Fair In words that are consistent with Marin’s (1984) conceptualization of utopics, Kihlstedt (1986) has stated that: ‘Mass utopias are mere figments of the imagination, and most are embodied only in literature. Even in the nineteenth century, when some small utopian communities were actually built, utopian endeavors remained primarily literary. In the twentieth century, however, visionary images of the future were brought to life and offered to the public at world’s Fairs’ (Kihlstedt 1986: 97). In the early twentyfirst century this is even more the case. Being influenced and also imaged by the imagined cities of science-fiction cinema, projected utopias have escaped the confines of the fairs and expositions and entered actual urban environments; however, before returning to our time I’d like to travel back to some of those earlier visions of utopian communities. Since the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, world’s fairs and expositions returned continuously to the concern with creating idealized cities. The Chicago World’s Fair was especially significant in establishing what would later become integral not only to the logic of expositions, but to theme parks like Disneyland and EPCOT and urban destinations like Odaiba that would follow in their wake: in all instances, a ready-made ideal city was created, one that was technologically driven and reliant on commercial imperatives and popular culture (Gilbert 1991: 15).5 As James Gilbert has explained when discussing early exposition visitors, ‘the visible future they encountered was a carefully engineered vision, a prophecy […] of the coming relationship between work, leisure, and culture’ (Gilbert 1991: 37). But unlike the dystopian futures often delineated in science fiction, in the future visions of the expositions, the inclusion of technological and scientific innovation within the social environment was intended to inspire the creation of utopian spaces. 5 Despite these imperatives, however, as Gilbert explains ‘the Chicago World’s Fair… proposed an ideal city in which popular culture was controlled and limited. If the format of the Chicago Columbian Exposition was a carefully calculated balance between the neoclassical White City and the commercial Midway there remained a serious problem. Trying to create a controlled fair (a contradiction in terms, perhaps) and a careful cultural environment did not always work… This meant that there were two Chicago fairs coexisting in Jackson Park: the first celebrated control and high culture; the second fantasy, liberation and ethnicity.’

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Events like the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933-1934 (also called the Century of Progress International Exposition) and the New York World’s Fair of 1939 took the first important steps not only in forging a relationship between science, technology, industry, and society, but also integrating these concerns with the visions and consumer pleasures offered by science fiction and entertainment. Rydell explains that, in the wake of the Great Depression, ‘1930s scientists, confronted by a “revolt against science”, joined corporate backers of the fairs in trying to pin popular hopes for national recovery on the positive results expected from the fusion of science and business’ (Rydell 1993: 526). Specifically, combining the speculation familiar to science fiction with the realities of the scientific and technological innovations of the time, these fairs specialized in presenting the public with future utopian realities made possible through technological advancement. It was the New York World’s Fair of 1939 that became one of the most famous examples to showcase a new urban landscape, one that featured the utopian possibilities of technology and science. On the opening night, after Albert Einstein switched on the lights that would bring life to the fair’s motto – ‘Designing the World of Tomorrow’ – the fair proceeded to create a vision of a world in which ‘science could become a way of life and utopia would be nigh’ (Rydell 1993: 111). The fair showcased the latest technologies offered by corporations (such as Rotolactor, an automatic cow-milking machine). Numerous other technological inventions were presented to an eager public as well: Voder, a synthetic human-speech device by AT&T; television sets by RCA, GE, and Westinghouse; and Elektro, a walking and talking robot by Westinghouse (Kuznick 1994: 341). However, it was the representation of a ‘city of the future’ that drew crowds by the millions (see Figure 7.2). The plans for this city of the future, which were conceived by the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, set the foundations for cities that were riddled with massive freeway systems, cars, and soaring skyscrapers. Preempting many of the later rides in Disneyland, in Geddes’ Futurama ‘Highways and Horizons’ exhibit sponsored by General Motors, viewers sat high above a miniature city of the future in 1960 while a motorized belt moved them along in a full circle. As they looked down on a 36,000-squarefoot model city of superhighways and skyscrapers designed by Geddes, through speakers built into the backs of their seats, a narrator asked the audience to imagine how the traffic and housing problems of the present United States would be solved through these technological and industrial wonders by the year 1960. Provided with souvenir pins that read ‘I have seen the future’, as Morshed explains, the Futurama exhibition reinforced

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Figure 7.2 Bel Geddes’ Futurama ‘Highways and Horizons’ exhibit sponsored by General Motors for the New York World’s Fair of 1939-1940

Available at the New York Public Library’s Biblion online: http://exhibitions.nypl.org/biblion/ world-of-tomorrow

two things: ‘The first is the idea of the Future as spectacle, and the second is the process of seeing that spectacle’ (Morshed 2004: 74). Significantly, Morshed draws attention to the fact that the Futurama exhibit deliberately placed the viewer not only at a vantage point of height, but also of flight: ‘Bel Geddes had his protagonist – the Futurama’s spectator – literally fly to an American utopia’ (2004: 77). The exhibit was, in fact, typical of the era’s obsession with flight as representative of a new mode of being. A new type of ‘aerialized’ spectatorship came to life in this exhibition, one that would not only influence the design of rides in theme parks but one that opened up the possibility of new modes of architectural and urbanistic imagination. To quote Morshed: ‘The fantastic idea that the view from above would somehow facilitate the process of designing the ideal future city became an enduring fascination among utopias architects, planners, and science-fiction writers’ (Morshed 2004: 80). Like the cult figure of the aviator as embodied in the persona of the American Charles Lindbergh, the comic book superhero joined other popular icons of the time – Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon – in representing

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the eugenicist concept of the New Man, which had gained popularity since the early 1920s and found new expression in the New York World’s Fair of 1939 (Morshed 2004: 82). Projecting Social Darwinism into a yet-to-be-seen future, many of these superbeings conquered the laws of gravity, physics, and biology; ‘physically evolved, and standing on a high moral ground, the New Man was projected as the harbinger of a Future Western industrial society’ (Morshed 2004: 82). Actor Ray Littleton even donned the cape of Superman who made his first appearance at the world’s fair in 1939, as did Batman, Robin and the Sandman in the pages of New York World’s Fair Comics. In addition to inspiring Walt Disney’s design of Disneyland in the 1950s, and in presenting a glimpse of the highways and skyscrapers of the metropolis that would later dominate our contemporary city spaces, the ‘World of Tomorrow’ theme of the New York World’s Fair of 1939 was a mediator that provided a bridge between science fiction and reality. It was the stepping-stone to later urban designs and its inspiration came directly from the realm of science fiction. Geddes drew inspiration from Le Corbusier (in particular his Ville contemporaine of 1922 and Ville radieuse of 19306) and other utopian urban planners of the 1920s and 1930s but, whereas Le Corbusier’s inspiration for the transcendental themes that are evident in his ideal cities drew directly on religious traditions and iconography, Geddes turned to another form of religious experience – that provided by the prophetic wisdom of science fiction and popular culture. In this ‘ride’ into the future the audience entered a science-fiction narrative of the future. Walt Disney would take the premise of this ride in creating the Magic Skyway ride for Ford for the New York World’s Fair of 1964, a ride that took travelers on a journey from humanity’s caveman technology past to the utopian Space City of their future (see Figure 7.3). The futuristic, technologically reliant cities that populated the Buck Rogers comic strips of the 1920s and film serials of the 1930s had a great impact on this glimpse into the world of tomorrow, as did the science-fiction novels of Edward Bellamy and H.G. Wells. In Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), Julian West wakes up to find himself in the year 2000, a ‘“high-tech” world of soaring skyscrapers, streets covered with transparent material, and music piped into the home’ (Kihlstedt 1986: 100). Similarly, in Wells’ novel When the Sleeper Wakes (1910), the hero falls into a trance and comes to in 2100. The technological city he finds himself in relies on windowless houses, central lighting, air conditioning, and an urban environment that 6 For more on Le Corbusier, see Frampton 2001.

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worships mechanization and the wonders of science and technology, very like the Futurama exhibit of the New York World’s Fair of 1964 (Kihlstedt 1986: 101). Again, like the participants in the Futurama ride, Bert Smallways, the central character in Wells’ novel The War in the Air (1908), explores the futuristic city from the window of his aircraft, and in 1939, the artist Julian Krupa’s vision of ‘Cities of Tomorrow’ was published in Amazing Stories, one of the first science-fiction magazines. ‘The city of tomorrow, Amazing Stories prophesied, would consist of an idyllic, vertically stratified urbanscape in which “dwellers and workers [….] may go weeks without setting foot on the Figure 7.3 Julian Krupa’s vision of ‘Cities of Tomorrow’ in the August 1939 issue of Amazing Stories

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ground, or the ground level”‘ (Morshed 2004: 78-80). In addition, the moving chairs in the General Motors Futurama display (which would become integral to Disneyland and later theme park ride technology) were called Time Machines in a deliberate allusion to Wells’ novel of the same name. It was no surprise that, during the fair, H.G. Wells was asked by The New York Times to write a lead article (titled ‘World of Tomorrow’) about the fair and how it equated with his version of the future (Wells 1939).7 Notably, the first science-fiction convention was held at this fair and included participants who were to become famous authors of science fiction, influencing generations with their visions of the future: Isaac Asimov, John W. Campbell, Ray Bradbury, and famed pulp science-fiction artist Frank R. Paul.

When You Wish Upon a Star: Disney, Disneyland and the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow Much as Rem Koolhaas (1997) contends that the Coney Island amusement parks served as a laboratory to test planning motifs that would be applied to the design of Manhattan, expositions like the New York World’s Fair of 1964 would have a dramatic impact on real-world spaces that would be built a decade later – most memorably in the form of Walt Disney’s Disneyland, which finally opened its doors to a utopian landscape in Anaheim, California, in July 1955. Clearly, in his conception of Disneyland, Walt Disney was inspired by the exposition structure: the pavilions and corporate-sponsored exhibits were transformed into ‘lands’ – Adventureland, Tomorrowland, Frontierland, Fantasyland – the corporate sponsor was now the Disney Corporation and its technologies now took the form of cutting-edge rides that were ‘themed’ according to Disney films, including Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland, and The Scary Adventures of Snow White. In addition, many of the utopianist writings of the late nineteenth/ early twentieth century, especially the ideas of Ebenezer Howard, Victor Gruen, Le Corbusier, and the Archigram Group, also had an impact on Disney. What was most interesting was that while Disney embraced the desire to build the future now and to construct utopian environments that pushed the envelope when it came to scientific and technological 7 For detailed accounts of the impact of science-fiction literature, see Nancy Knight, ‘“The New Light’: X-Rays and Medical Futurism’, and Folke T. Kihlstedt, ‘Utopia Realized: The World’s Fairs of the 1930s’, in Imagining Tomorrow: History Technology and the American Future, edited by Joseph J. Corn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 10-34 and 97-118.

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innovation, he rejected many of the popular visions of how this future would be conceived.8 By the 1950s, the freeways riddled with automobiles and super-scrapers that towered toward the heavens, which had been central tropes of science-fiction writers, utopianists, and expositions, had become a reality and Disney was not impressed with this version of the future. Instead, in Disneyland, Disney set about creating his version of a science-fiction future, one that later filtered into his conception of EPCOT and contemporary urban spaces. Tomorrowland at Disneyland was a place in which Disney was to test out some of his ideas about realizing utopia through science and technology. In the 1950s he made his futurist views clear in his Wonderful World of Disney television show, stating that: Tomorrow can be a wonderful age. Our scientists today are opening the doors of the Space Age to achievements that will benefit our children and generations to come. The Tomorrowland attractions have been designed to give you an opportunity to participate in adventures that are a living blueprint of our future. (Walt Disney Studios 2004)

In the Carousel of Progress attraction in Tomorrowland, which was originally created for the General Electric Pavilion for the New York World’s Fair of 1964, Disney pushed his interest in the possibilities of technology into new directions. Like Geddes’ Futurama, the attraction was a rotating theater that thematically adopted the role of time machine, however, this time the audience rotated around a circular stage that presented a series of families spanning from before the arrival of electricity in the nineteenth century up to current times. However, it’s not just the subject matter depicting the advancement of electricity across the ages that was the truly radical element of this attraction. What was astounding was the presence of Disney’s famous audio-animatronic system of robotics that now operates throughout the Disney parks. Working with NASA scientists and Disney animators who formed the Disney Imagineers during this period, the team devised a system that relied on electricity and pneumatics to move puppetlike figures so they appeared to talk, sing, and move. The ride would end with the current era and the family home showcased the presence of cutting-edge technologies. First opening in 1967 at Disneyland in Anaheim after its world’s fair debut, as each year past, the ‘present’ part of the attraction aged dramatically and 8 At the New York World’s Fair, ‘Disney was represented by a specially commissioned Mickey Mouse cartoon in the Nabisco pavilion’ (Marling 1997: 35).

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frequently had to be replaced. It came as no surprise to me that when I visited Disneyland in 2006, the ‘present as indicative of the future’ had been replaced by Asimo the robot. The once cutting-edge audio-animatronics had been superseded by the latest in robot design. In Tomorrowland, Autopia, a mini-freeway and automated car introduced visitors to what would soon become the National Interstate System. Monsanto’s ‘House of the Future’ introduced the world to a plastic house that seemed to float above a central base, and which had in its interior stylish plastic furniture, a microwave oven, and a wall-mounted television screen. And on 14 June 1959, the Disneyland-ALWEG Monorail System opened. According to Karal Ann Marling, [Disneyland] presented a powerful critique of the manifest ills of Los Angeles in 1955 […] [and] included pedestrian spaces free from vehicular traffic. In the form of rides (or ‘attractions’, in park lingo), it spotlighted every imaginable kind of people-moving device that did not entail a driver piloting himself through increasingly congested streets – and chewing up the landscape in the process: trains, monorails, passenger pods, canal boats, riverboats, and double-decker buses. (Marling 1997: 30)

But for Disney, the monorail became the vehicle that had the potential for real-world application beyond the walls of the theme park and in the city environment. In the late 1950s, Disney negotiated a deal with ALWEG, the Cologne company whose owner Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren had developed a monorail prototype, that would allow the Disney designers to develop the prototype further. Influenced by comic books and science-fiction pulp magazines in the tradition of Amazing Stories that saw the future as being full of slick, metallic machines that freed up humanity from their boring everyday tasks, Disney designer Bob Gurr designed a streamlined, rocketlike train that would have done any cover of Amazing Stories proud. Some years later it would be practically incorporated not only into theme parks, but places like Las Vegas and Odaiba. In Disneyland, not only did Disney create ‘the happiest place on earth’ – a place that repurposed nostalgic images of old America and Europe as well as fictional perceptions of the future within a contained utopia – but Disneyland also became the testing ground for the development of cutting-edge technologies that had previously been considered to belong in the realm of science fiction. As soon as the possibilities for such advances became clear, Walt Disney set up his own company (that was independent of Walt Disney Productions, which had other controlling owners including ABC and his

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brother) which was called WED (Walter Elias Disney) Enterprises and it’s within this structure that the Imagineers worked on their technological breakthroughs. In his keynote speech before the 1963 Urban Design Conference at Harvard University, James W. Rouse, developer of the new city of Columbia, announced that: ‘I hold a view that may be somewhat shocking to an audience as sophisticated as this: that the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today is Disneyland’ (Mannheim 2002: 17). Ironically, most of Disneyland’s designers were neither urban planners nor architects. Both were rejected by Disney for their conservative approach to design and he instead used animators to create the world that became Disneyland. Perhaps it’s the fact that Disney and his animators came to architecture with animators’ minds that freed them up to think of new possibilities; true animation artists know that when drawing fictional worlds anything is possible – you can even defy the laws of gravity. Disneyland made Walt Disney think about what was possible and through the fantastic possibilities of animation and animated worlds his approach to architectural design wasn’t constricted by conventions and rules. The lessons learned from Disneyland inspired Disney to develop his fascination with the synergy of science, technology, and industry as generator of utopian cities. EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) – also known as Project X – was based on Walt Disney’s plans to create a futuristic community, plans that never came to be according to Disney’s vision because of his death in 1966. Wanting to escape the increasing encroachment of the Los Angeles urbanscape and the invasion of cars and freeways on Disneyland, in the 1960s Walt Disney Productions purchased 27,443 acres of land in Florida, an area ‘roughly twice the size of Manhattan’ (Mannheim 2002: 72). As Steve Mannheim explains in his comprehensive book about the project: As early as 1959, the Disney organization began looking for a site in the eastern United States where it could build another theme park. A joint venture opportunity to develop 12,000 acres with RCA and investor John D. MacArthur presented itself in Palm Beach in that year. Both economist Harrison Price and company attorney Robert Foster recall that the RCA deal ‘contemplated the development of the “City of Tomorrow”’. (Mannheim 2002: 67)

The opportunity at Palm Beach would not eventuate but a few years later plans for a ‘City of Tomorrow’ would begin to solidify with the purchase of

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property in Kissimmee, Florida. At a conference held in Orlando in 1965, Walt Disney announced that ‘I would like to be part of building a model community, a City of Tomorrow, you might say, because I don’t believe in going out to this extreme blue-sky stuff that some architects do’ (Mannheim 2002: 7). Having total control of the property that surrounded the new development for miles in any direction, here, the realities of Norman Bel Geddes’ imagined skyscrapers and automobile society would find it difficult to infiltrate Disney’s vision of the future now.9 Disney’s ‘utopian dream of a real city’ not only focused on building a community with ‘dependable public transportation’, but this perfect city would also be ‘covered by an all-weather dome’ and its factories and key industries (which would be ‘concealed in greenbelts that were readily accessible to workers housed in idyllic suburban subdivisions’) would embody the latest innovations in science and technology (Marling 1997: 31). Disney’s Project X was the original ‘learning city’ that would later influence cities like Odaiba. Disney’s fascination with urban planning and the future is perhaps best encapsulated by this quote by Mannheim: The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) was entertainment industry pioneer Walter Elias ‘Walt’ Disney’s (1901-66) final dream. After more than forty years in the entertainment industry, Disney wore the hard hat of a builder. He had acquired experience in the planning and development of various projects, including private residences; advanced motion picture studios; motion picture sets; Disneyland, the world’s first theme park; a redevelopment project in St. Louis, Missouri; four notable 1964-65 New York World’s Fair pavilions; the Mineral King Valley, California, ski resort; the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) campus; and other projects. His development concept at the time of his death would combine company town, visitor attraction, and a device with which to help solve the problems of cities (Mannheim 2002: xiii ) (See Figure 7.4) 9 Nevertheless, as was the case with Geddes, Disney’s allegiance with science fiction was clear when he asked the famous science-fiction author Ray Bradbury to work at the Disney Imagineering Studio. Bradbury had met Disney when Tomorrowland was being conceptualized and Bradbury had expressed his interest in collaborating on its design. But, while recognizing the value of such an alliance, Disney had insisted that such a partnership between two geniuses would be doomed to failure. Nevertheless, Bradbury’s talents as creative consultant were later put to use not only in the design of the US Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, but also in the planning of Spaceship Earth – one of the central attractions at Disneyworld’s EPCOT theme park – in 1982 (Bradbury 1999: 7).

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Figure 7.4 Walt Disney presenting a map of EPCOT on the Wonderful World of Disney

The city would feature ‘new ideas and technologies’ emerging ‘from the creative centers of American industry’. Disney explained his desire was that EPCOT ‘would never be completed’ and would ‘be producing, testing, and demonstrating’ (Walt Disney Studios 2004). In his presentation on the Wonderful World of Disney television show, he proclaimed: EPCOT will be an experimental city that would incorporate the best ideas of industry, government, and academia worldwide, a city that caters to the people as a service function. It will be a planned, controlled community, a showcase for American industry and research, schools, cultural and educational opportunities. In EPCOT there will be no slum areas because we won’t let them develop. There will be no landowners and therefore no voting control. People will rent houses instead of buying them, and at modest rentals. There will be no retirees; everyone must be employed.

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One of the requirements is that people live in EPCOT must keep it alive. (Walt Disney Studios 2004)10

Taking quite a few leaves out of science-fiction films and literature, Disney wanted to create a private community of 20,000 inhabitants who would live and work with the latest cutting-edge technology – this would be what he called a laboratory city that showcased to the world the possibilities of new science and technology in combination with free enterprise. EPCOT would be the world’s first glass-domed city (an idea he developed from visionary architect Buckminster Fuller) in which one could totally control the temperature; like Disneyland, the city would be based on a radial design with the inner sector including high-rise apartments, retail, entertainment and the business district; a greenbelt parkland and recreation lands created a perimeter around this, and the next level was followed by low-density, neighborhood residential zones; and the outer perimeter was populated by an industrial zones. A network of transportation systems would radiate from the central hub and would take people to and from the central city underground. The high-speed monorails like those invented for the Disney parks would take commuters to work from the outer suburbs and WEDWAY people- mover system (which had also been tested in Disneyland) would transport pedestrians from destination to destination in the inner-city zone without causing traffic build-up. And even though cars and trucks were permitted in EPCOT, they would travel below the pedestrian level on special underground roadways: the primary form of transportation would be the electrically powered people movers and monorails.11 (See Figure 7.5.) As was the case with the design and planning of Disneyland, for Walt Disney architects lacked the versatility to think outside his box. The result was the formation of WED Enterprises (Walter Elias Disney Enterprises), which would later become the Disney Imagineers. This became the research and development arm of Disney, and it was responsible for the design of the Disney theme parks, the rides, the audio-animatronics and, later, the Disney resorts. The soon-to-be Imagineers, who included Marvin Davis, Herbert Ryman, John Hench, and Bill Evans, all contributed to the planning and development of Progress City. As Mannheim explains: 10 The footage is also available on YouTube at: https://w w w.youtube.com/ watch?v=sLCHg9mUBag 11 See Mannheim 2002 for a detailed account of the plans for EPCOT. Mannheim points out that ‘EPCOT’s three-level transportation hierarchy’ was influenced by Le Corbusier’s Contemporary City multi-level transportation lobby and the Archigram Group’s 1963 Interchange (Mannheim 2002: 10 and 33).

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Figure 7.5 View of the transportation center below the urban center of E.P.C.O.T. Design by Herbert Ryman, 1965

© The Walt Disney Company. Available at: https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/ conceptual-drawings

While Marvin Davis’ conceptual EPCOT plans feature lakes, trees, and turf in the greenbelt, industrial park, and ‘radiential’ areas, detailed landscaping remained for a later stage in the planning process. In addition, Herbert Ryman’s Progress City paintings, early expressions of Disney’s thinking about EPCOT, include lakes, trees, and abundant green space, although they are highly conceptual. The Progress City narration states that landscaping was used to make industrial areas more like parks. (Mannheim 2002: 83)

The utopian vision according to Walt Disney’s view consisted of the radial plan and landscaped environments that would make their presence felt across the city – from residential to industrial areas.

The EPCOT Theme Park and Town of Celebration Disney died on 15 December 1966, and soon after Roy Disney, his brother, announced that the Disney Company would build an ‘entertainment center’ based on Disney’s dying wishes which would include the world’s first ‘glass-domed city’. The reality, however, was different. An aging Roy caved in to the company concerns and when EPCOT finally opened on 1 October 1982 it was a theme park that refashioned world expositions as its primary theme by devoting the park to the future, new technology, and industry – specifically, a future supported by the possibilities of scientific

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and technological advancement in the hands of multinational corporations. As Marling has stated, EPCOT ‘became a kind of permanent World’s Fair’ complete with corporate sponsored pavilions (Marling 1997: 31). Both ‘lands’ at EPCOT – Future World and World Showcase – owe a great deal to the conventions and philosophical concerns established in the fairs. World Showcase, which themes the world by including miniaturized versions of France, Morocco, Japan, and Germany, updates the displays of different cultures that were found in the Midway section of the expos and fairs in the twentieth century. But it is Future World that displays the most dramatic inspiration of fairs and science fiction. Radiating around Spaceship Earth, the giant geosphere that dominates the theme park, are numerous themed attractions – Innoventions, Journey into the Imagination, Universe of Energy – all of which are sponsored by major corporations. The geodesic dome that stands at the center of the theme park doesn’t house a city, but instead stands as emblem of the park, also recalling the Perisphere of the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Called Spaceship Earth, the structure was designed with the help of science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who also helped write the storyline for the attraction that was contained within. Taking his cue from his friend Walt Disney, Bradbury would address the visitors as if they were characters in a science-fiction film. The earlier Futurama ride of 1939 took visitors forward in time to experience the city of the future in 1960. On Spaceship Earth, seated on cars in the newly designed Omnimover system, guests entered a time machine that took them on a ride that revealed advancements in human technology and communication from the days of prehistoric man to the dawn of the twenty-first century. Displaying this history through a series of audio-animatronics, and beginning with a Cro-Magnon shaman who recounts the story of a hunt while others record it on cave walls, viewers witness a series of communications milestones: the Phoenician and Greek alphabets, the printing press, the telegraph, radio, film, television – even outer space where the power of satellite systems is on display. True to its exposition roots, exiting the ride, participants find themselves in a pavilion sponsored by corporations like AT&T and are invited to sample a range of technological goodies – from computer games to simulation rides – all made possible by the company’s electronic network. The second revision of Project X came in the form of the town Celebration, which occupies Disney property in Florida and which went through various stages of development in the 1990s and early 2000s: this community attempts to bring life to Walt Disney’s dream by time traveling back to a utopian and idealized version of a non-existent past when small town America embodied the aspirations of the American Dream. While fascinating as a

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study of utopian ideals, its conception of a ‘future now’ is, in actuality, more about the ‘past now’. Celebration, in fact, is more aligned with Disney’s vision of ‘yesterday’ rather than ‘tomorrow’ and, as such, lies beyond the scope of this essay – only to say that, it comes as no surprise that the kind of community it ended up idealizing was the stuff of horror in episodes of The X-Files and Millennium and films like The Truman Show and Pleasantville.

Futuroscope and Experiential Architecture Since Disneyland opened its doors in 1955, the theme park slowly became an important feature not only of contemporary retail and leisure culture, but also as venues, which – like their world exposition predecessors – showcased the possibilities of new technologies. For film studios such as Universal, Warner Brothers, Paramount, and 20th Century Fox, the theme park became both a marketing tool for its film products (where popular films were ‘themed’ as rides or environments), and a spectacular symbol of the power and economic potential of cutting-edge technology delivered in an entertainment package, a concern that obviously drives EPCOT. Since entering the new millennium, our urban spaces have continued to embrace the logic of the theme park with amazing zeal. One of the most fascinating revisions of the theme park/ exposition foray into science-fiction realities is the ‘theme park’ Futuroscope, which is situated in Poitiers, France, and was heavily modeled on the EPCOT concept. Initiated by a local politician, René Monory, who wanted to build a park that was the ‘centrepiece of a new-tech industrial estate’, Futuroscope, which opened in 1987, was built with the support of the local council of Poitiers and assisted by national government funding. Over the last decade, it has become radically revised as a ‘learning city’ more aligned with Odaiba. Futuroscope is situated 200 miles outside Paris. In the 1990s it offered Disneyland Paris some serious competition while also boosting the local economy in the role it serves as an entertainment destination. The theme park’s premise is to use entertainment attractions in order to educate and acclimatize audiences to new imaging technologies. Scattered across an idyllic landscape are a series of futuristic-looking buildings that appear to be part of a science-fiction film set (one is shaped like a giant crystal, another like an enormous set of glass organ pipes, and another still looks like a 1950s spaceship), and within these buildings, audiences can experience some of the most amazing audio-visual technologies that the entertainment industry has to offer. The attractions (which are sponsored by high-tech corporations) include: a 360-degree cinema; a 3D cinema experience; a Kinemax-IMAX

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Theater; a Dynamic Motion Simulator using the Showscan system devised by Douglas Trumbull (the effects guru who was responsible for the effects of films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner); a dual IMAX cinema with one vertical and one horizontal screen; a multi-screen show with ten 35 mm projectors projecting onto ten screens of different sizes (including the hemispherical Omnimax screen); the ‘Cineautomate’, an interactive film; and an hourly night show that features a computer-generated ‘water symphony’ (à la the Belaggio in Las Vegas, the Dubai Mall, and Macau’s Wynn Resort) that comprises dancing water fountains, laser lights, fireworks, and music. The park director between 1987 and 2000, Daniel Bulliard, stated that ‘The park’s theme of image is based on the observation that “easy, daily access to reality or dream, the omnipresent image is the backdrop to our lives and changes how we see the world. It seduces, captivates and invades our professional being and devours our leisure time.”‘ Isabelle Houllier, assistant to the director, extends on this: ‘By offering a wide array of contemporary images, the park educates as well as entertains. “People have a tendency to not understand technology they see every day. […] Here, they can learn and see technology through cinema, and have fun at the same time”‘ (O’Brien 1992). Clearly, Futuroscope has adopted an identity as a ‘learning city’ in that it aims to promote innovation through its showcase of cutting-edge technologies. But, in addition to what is contained within the walls of the theme park, unlike EPCOT or the expositions of the past, it extends the promotion of innovation beyond its walls into the social realm that contains and surrounds it. The park itself has become a hub around which an entire industry in multimedia, computer, and communication technology has evolved. Larsen explains that for Futuroscope ‘research and development with education and leisure activities, is the focus of its strategy. Thus far, it has attracted 70 firms and created 1,500 jobs in the park and 12,000 jobs indirectly in the whole region. It is also a major tourist site, drawing visitors from around the world’ (Larsen 1999). Importantly, since 2000, the area around the theme park has undergone a dramatic transformation: hotels, residential areas, universities, big business sectors have flourished. Recalling Star Trek, ‘Teleport’ is the technology park near the theme park that companies like Telecom France and e-Qual (a company with specialization in IP-based network solutions and satellite communications) call home. Near Teleport – and part of the training and research area – is France’s first combined experimental high school and university ‘where students matriculate from high school directly into the same area of study in college. Engineering and technology degrees are emphasized’. Also included as part of the complex is the International Institute of Long-Term Forecasting (Larsen 1999).

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Like the New Bad Future films of the 1980s (Glass 1990) – Robocop, Total Recall, Blade Runner – and consistent with the public-private partnerships typical of tourist utopias, corporations combine forces with the government to control the products of science and technology and, in turn, the shape of the society that develops around them. In doing so they demonstrate the manner in which such spaces may function as laboratories of technological or political innovations. Whether these cities offer a path to utopian living or dystopian malaise, only time will tell. Walt Disney was certainly a visionary in taking major steps toward creating a fully functional city that brought to life his own thoughts on utopian living. Using Disneyland as an experimental space to provide entertainment to a mass audience that embraced what it offered with open arms, Disney also considered Disneyland as a testing ground where he could trial his ideas about technology, urban space, transportation, and future living. He certainly wasn’t the first to be inspired by utopian visions and was, in many respects, the product of his times, being inspired by architects, philosophers, and urban planners dating back to the nineteenth century. However, he was one of the first – if not the most significant of firsts – to unite his utopian dreams with a touristic focus. Being one of the most popular and well-known global tourist destinations, Disneyland was to serve as a gateway into utopian living in the future.

Works Cited Bradbury, Ray. 1999. ‘Free Pass at Heaven’s Gate’. In You Are Here, edited by the Jerde Partnership International, 6-7. London: Phaidon. Frampton, Kenneth. 2001. Le Corbusier. London: Thames & Hudson. Gilbert, James Burkhart. 1991. Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Glass, Fred. 1990. ‘Totally Recalling Arnold: Sex and Violence in the New Bad Future’. Film Quarterly 44, no. 1: 2-13. Kihlstedt, Folke T. 1986. ‘Utopia Realized: The World’s Fairs of the 1930s’. In Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future, edited by Joseph J. Corn, 97-118. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Koolhaas, Rem. 1997. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: The Monacelli Press. Kuznick, Peter J. 1994. ‘Losing the World of Tomorrow: The Battle over the Presentation of Science at the 1939 New York World’s Fair’. American Quarterly 46, no. 3: 341-373.

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Larsen, Kurt. 1999. ‘Learning Cities: the New Recipe in Regional Development’. OECD Observer 217/218 (Summer). http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/archivestory.php/aid/57/Learning_cities:_the_new_recipe_in_regional_development. html. Mannheim, Steve. 2002. Walt Disney and the Quest for Community. London: Ashgate. Marling, Karal Ann. 1997. ‘Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks’. In Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance, edited by Karal Ann Marling. 29-177. Paris: Flammarion. Max Planck Society. 2005. ‘New “Science Tunnel” Goes to Tokyo on its World Tour’. Press release, 15 September. Morshed, Adnan. 2004. ‘The Aesthetics of Ascension in Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63, no. 1: 74-99. Murayama, Meiko, and Gavin Parker. 2007. ‘Sustainable Leisure and Tourism Space Development in Post-industrial Cities: The Case of Odaiba, Tokyo, Japan’. In Tourism, Culture, and Regeneration, edited by Melanie K. Smith, 69-84. Oxfordshire: CAB International. Nakada, Gail. 2003. ‘Birthday ‘Bot’. Japan Inc., April. http://www.japaninc.com/ article.php?articleID=1055. O’Brien, Tim. 1992. ‘Futuroscope Combines Fun, Education; Boon to Local Economy’. Amusement Business, 11 May. http://business.highbeam.com/53/ article-1G1-12413311/futuroscope-combines-fun-education-boon-local-economy. Rydell, Robert. 1993. World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walt Disney Studios. 2004. Walt Disney Treasures – Tomorrow Land: Disney in Space and Beyond. Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment. DVD Wells, H.G. 1939. ‘World of Tomorrow’. The New York Times, 5 March.

8

Tourism and a Virtual Bulgaria Benjamin Kidder Hodges The city splits into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room. – Walter Benjamin (1999: 417)

While the other chapters in this volume explore existing tourist enclaves, my focus is on the design and spatial production of virtual touristic and gaming spaces in Bulgaria, and the specific manner in which these sites deploy Bulgarian locales and motifs. These range from mythic wilderness landscapes to post-apocalyptic urban scenarios that mine the post-socialist, post-utopian cityscape of Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia. To that end I analyze the utopic (Marin 1984) construction of tourist locales which are perhaps only possible in virtual play. In the virtual world we can actually achieve that elusive Utopian conflation of ‘good place’ and ‘non-place’, the very impossibility of which created the ‘conditions of possibility’ for More’s original utopic spatial play. After all, as Marin argues, ‘Utopia is a discourse’ rather than a geographic place; a discourse rendered via ‘multiple and varied literary spatial play’, which is comprised of ‘historical narrative, travel narrative, description, illustrating narratives’ and the like (61). For this reason, the virtual worlds of video games, with their own combination of text, images, and travel, may be understood as the contemporary discursive counterpart to the narratives that More deployed in his seminal text. For its part, Bulgaria is both an important site of game design for the global video gaming industry, and an unlikely subject of that design whose urban surfaces and details are used in the construction of virtual environments. Today in Bulgaria, in both its actual and virtual iterations, a socialist utopia has been supplanted by utopic virtual worlds that deploy the dystopian motifs of violence and criminality that characterize the country’s uneasy transformation from socialism to capitalism. This economic transition is an historical and temporal caesura not unlike the transition from feudalism to capitalism in which More penned his text (Marin 1984: 198). In his study of Utopia, Marin highlights the physical violence that was necessary to wrest the island of Utopia from the continent to which it originally belonged, thus creating the enclave character of the site that is necessary for any subsequent utopian scheme (Jameson 2009), and the concomitant fictional

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subjective violence perpetrated on the natural inhabitants of that land which was necessary to render them a civilized people: in Marin’s words, ‘the savages of Abraxa become wise Utopians’ (1984: 110). My chapter traces a homologous trajectory of violent agency that traverses both real and virtual spaces, channeling the affect pulsating through Bulgaria’s post-socialist transition in order to design virtual enclave worlds set apart from the everyday, thus animating the country’s contemporary post-tourist function.

Introduction: The Threat from the East Bulgaria has a long tradition of tourism, both for its own domestic population and as a popular tourist destination for a wider, mostly European, international market. During the summer months, traffic is funneled to the Black Sea coast to the east. Students, families on vacation, and returning members of the wider Bulgarian diaspora make their way by train, plane, or automobile to the sea to live the dream of life in and around the many beaches and resorts. Under socialism, in a utopic system aspiring to realize a communist paradise, it was equally important to perform and manifest leisure just as much as work. Resorts were designed for particular professions: journalists and factory workers enjoyed their summer vacations with their colleagues (Löfgren 2002; Ghodsee 2005; Neuburger 2012). Bulgarians also worked to provide leisure opportunities for foreigners, the state-run Balkantourist brought mainly package tourists from East Germany and other Comecon countries; resorts like Sunny Beach, Golden Sands, and Albena catered to tourists for whom Greece and other Western locales may have been out of reach (Beyer 2013). In the public imagination and in popular films such as Orkestar bez ime (A nameless band) from 1982, audiences found humor in this annual migration to the sea. They parodied the easily sunburned northern European travelers, calling them ‘butter’ tourists, and played up the travails that might befall them on their pilgrimage to the coast. The literal distance between the Black Sea coast and the capital city of Sofia to the West underlined the ephemeral nature of the summer vacation and the tourist economy that supported it. The capital city with all its industry, pollution, and traffic contrasted with the idyllic nature and simple pleasures that the coast had to offer. For local and foreign tourists alike, the Black Sea represented time away from everyday concerns. The perfect vacation is, however, sometimes punctuated by instances of unforeseen interruption. It can be as simple as the anxiety provoked by the possibility of missing a flight, or the inconvenience and discomfort of

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sleeping on the floor of a foreign airport when a flight is canceled. At other times interruptions can be more serious: a robbery, a traffic accident, or even a terrorist bombing. The instances of violence inflicted upon tourists appear to be increasing; or at least our attention to them has, as witnessed by the flurry of media reports around the Sousse beach resort shootings in Algeria and the bombing of the Erawan shrine in Bangkok, Thailand, both in 2015. The 2012 Burgas bus bombing saw the first instance of such terrorism in Bulgaria’s Black Sea tourism corridor. The attack on a bus full of Israeli tourists was first linked to Hezbollah and then to a network of foreign suspects thought to be operating around the country. Whatever the initial motivations and conspiratorial realities, the reverberations of the violence remain. As of 2015, Bulgaria, along with Romania, Greece, and Cyprus, marks the edge of the European Union in the southeast corner of Europe. Positioned as such, it continues to attract tourists seeking to escape the everyday realities of work in northern Europe, and from the other direction, is newly positioned as an outlet for package tourists from the People’s Republic of China; at the same time it attracts refugees attempting to escape the economic, political, and military problems in the Middle East. During the refugee crisis of 2015, the direct route through Bulgaria to more western parts of the European Union was avoided by many refugees: they preferred to make their way through Macedonia. An online Arabic-language pamphlet, or ‘refugee handbook’, pointed out the negative reputation of Bulgarians and warned against their xenophobia and ‘Islamaphobia’ (Andreev and Vaksberg 2015). Within some corners of Bulgarian nationalist discourse, politicians have placed this crisis in line with a long line of threats from the east. The legacies of enslavement under Ottoman rule and Byzantine conflicts are used to justify taking a harsh line on refugees. This perceived threat parallels nationalist discourses in Western Europe that characterize Bulgarians themselves, along with other groups from Eastern Europe, as unwanted additions to the domestic labor market. From the perspective of some Europeans, the possibility of Bulgarian migration constituted yet another ‘threat from the East’. Narratives of migration, as both teleology and jeremiad, have played a significant role in European and world history, from the Aryan-inspired myths of the great folk movement of Indo-European peoples during the fourth millennium, to the overtly racist warnings about hordes of Asian immigrants flooding into America, Australia, and New Zealand at the beginning of the twentieth century. Bulgaria is no stranger to these migration stories: the movement of the Bulgars into southern Europe in the first

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century BC is a significant part of Bulgaria’s ‘myth of origin’. The story of the journey of Khan Asparuh leading his people across the Danube into what would become the Bulgarian state was celebrated under socialism, and is still a foundational part of the nation’s history. The historical epic film Han Asparuh (1981), produced as part of a larger celebration of the Figure 8.1  Tsar Samuel statue by Alexander Haitov, Sofia, Bulgaria, c. June 2015

Benjamin Kidder Hodges, used by permission

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anniversary of the founding of Bulgaria, chronicles the Bulgars’ journey from the steppes of Asia to Europe; this was accompanied by the construction of numerous monuments to Bulgaria’s ancient origins and promising future. More recently, a new monument to one of Bulgaria’s other early rulers, Tsar Samuel, was erected in the capital and drew renewed attention to Bulgaria’s embattled history (see Figure 8.1). Tsar Samuel’s reign was marked by war with the Byzantine Empire; a fact commonly evoked through the story of his soldiers’ return from battle blinded by the Byzantine Emperor Basil II. The sculptor Alexander Haitov chose to further evoke this cruelty by adding LED lights to the eyes of the otherwise bronze sculpture. The public and press were quick to critique this added technological feature as a kind of kitsch. Whatever the reception, the new monument serves as a reminder of a different, but equally persistent, perception of the East as a threat to the Bulgarian state. While Bulgaria was successfully admitted into the EU in 2007, it is still not a member of the Schengen area, which would allow its citizens unrestricted movement throughout the region: the country’s participation in this arrangement was opposed by other member states due to concerns about corruption, safety, and threats to the rule of law. Bulgaria is castigated in the West for its supposed culture of violence and corruption. Bulgaria, and the Balkans more generally, have historically been represented and characterized by Western Europe as the threatening edge of European civilization, a region somehow destined to conflict (Todorova 1997). This Balkanist discourse parallels, and is easily equated with, the kinds of Orientalist discourses that Edward Said (1978) identifies as part of the European (and more generally, Western) tradition of representing the Orient as a place of fantasy and mystery, but also of barbarism, irrationality, ignorance, and violence.

Tourism and Post-Socialism My own introduction to Bulgaria started in the late 1990s with annual summer trips that soon turned into research trips that were a component of my doctoral thesis about Bulgaria’s post-socialist media and popular culture. This research often felt like a kind of tourism. Urban discoveries interspersed with time spent on Bulgaria’s Black Sea beaches and the occasional mountain hike revealed the quickly aging legacies of socialist infrastructure and a new emergent commercial tourist industry. The daily experience of life in Sofia, however, was textured by a sense of anxiety

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regarding economic instability, an anxiety visible in the form of urban decay with buildings no longer maintained by the former socialist state’s earlier ambitions. Nonetheless, both the Black Sea’s tourist areas and the capital city of Sofia were being virtually reconstructed at that time in the form of music videos, reality shows, and other new media. Discussions among friends, artists, and professionals working in these media industries regularly took the form of a critique of the new aesthetics that emerged depicting commercial utopias. In architecture, a ‘mafia baroque’ style of opulence characterized castle-like private homes and gated communities (Hirt 2008; Holleran 2014; Stoyanov and Frantz 2006); while in music, debates formed around chalga or pop folk and its mixture of pop styling and Oriental motifs. In both areas, people debated the kachestvo (quality) of the material, and provided their own theories about the source of the money behind these new buildings, images, and industries. The traditional Bulgarian socialist-era vacation was a paired set, a promise provided by the state as a reward for the workers’ labor. Today both the vacation and the labor, and socialism more generally, have been replaced by capitalism and its logics, imperatives, and values and – by way of extension – its economic hardships. One bright spot in this story of decline are the successes achieved by the video game industry in Bulgaria and other neighboring former socialist countries. New local companies were started and international companies were drawn into the region for good capitalist reasons: its lower overhead costs and rates of company taxation, its lack of industrial relations safeguards, and the computer-savvy and artistically talented workers who provided a standing reserve of cheap labor. These skilled workers are a direct product of Bulgaria’s earlier designation as a site of the Soviet Bloc electronics industry. ‘As a consequence, in the late 1970s, Bulgaria (the most rural of all East European economies) flowered into an unlikely center of the magnetic disk and computer industries’ (Glenny 2008: 6). This fact ensured a generation of IT professionals who use their know-how today to create software, design games, or join the global legions of criminal hackers. Companies have come and gone, been bought and sold, but Bulgaria remains a site where the utopic work of creating virtual worlds in conducted. The dismantling of the ideological structures of the former socialist state provided the impetus, disposition, and opportunity for Bulgarian game developers, artists, and programmers to create a new kind of imaginary and virtual space, one in which violence often serves as a mode of interaction between people and places. These digital spaces offer themselves as re-imaginings of the mundane: they are not so much representations of a

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displaced real, but more material extensions of the world, a kind of alternative neighborhood with its own properties, pathways, and residents. This constitutes an enticing attraction for gamers as well as virtual tourists. Academics may seek to turn the images, spaces, and affects of video games into something else: an idealized community, a site of power struggles, or a political space. From the perspective of non-representational theory (Thrift 2008), the virtual tourism of traveling to and participating in these spaces often remains effectively ‘affective’: in other words, the experiences of virtual game play constitute a combined spatial affect similar to the joys of discovery and sense of adventure that we know as tourism. In these video game spaces there is a clear parallel with the ‘shadow archipelago’ of mock metropolitan military training sites that Stephen Graham has outlined, where American soldiers tour faux Middle Easternstyle locales to rehearse protocols of urban warfare (Graham 2007). Virtual environments can be used to train people, at levels of both technique and affect as in the virtual reality simulations used by the US military both before and after deployment. Harun Farocki’s video installation Serious Games I: Watson ist hin (Serious games I: Watson is down) explores ways in which the city functions both as a site for virtual mobility and as a violent space from which one must escape. Virtual tourists from around the world can travel to these urban zones to experiment with, experience, and indulge in new forms of mobility and violence. The two poles of the utopic and dystopic are manifest in the tropes of the post-apocalyptic city. Virtual game space requires, and perhaps even produces, literate and savvy post-tourists, tourists who escape from the city and seek out new spaces in which to play out their fantasies, violent and otherwise.

Virtual Bulgaria The post-apocalyptic affective terrain of video games is constituted out of the imbrication of digital technologies and the traces of everyday memories, fears, disappointments, betrayals, stresses, disaffections, phobias, prejudices, and practices; and in a sense they are as demanding as they are inviting. They demand that we learn how to operate, how to move and navigate, in these new spaces. The motivation and effort required to inhabit and negotiate these spaces should not be overlooked: video games, like other media, require long hours of invisible, immaterial labor, and demand that players develop new skills and sensibilities in order to acquire the level of literacy required for participation.

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Whether rendering the walls of a post-apocalyptic city or the digital palm fronds of an exotic desert island, the labor behind their creation is much the same. An artist draws from references to model, sculpt, or otherwise construct the virtual game asset. Such 3D digital assets are made of the same polygons which programmers then subject to artificial forces, from virtual wind and waves to the logics and routines of artificial intelligence. Video game companies provide the kinds of spaces and forms of mobility desired by virtual tourists. Whatever the particular environmental theme, it would appear that gamers are drawn in a more general way to violence and mobility: video games offer travel without the mundane, violence without the pain, and transgression without the threat of retribution. Much like the mythic desert island and its utopian liminal boundary, the beach, video game environments expand the concept of leisure into new forms of virtual mobility. Like a tourist on vacation, the gamer might explore aquatic life under the sea, sky-dive from the heavens, or otherwise subject the body to intense new velocities. In video game scenarios one similarly explores such extremes of movement, only it is often framed in the conceit of life as a virtual refugee trying to escape the confines and dangers of a city under siege. Whatever the challenge or imperative to escape, the player as virtual tourist or virtual refugee is put into new spaces that demand new forms of mobility. While the motifs of modern video games readily revert from postapocalyptic dystopias to historical epics, the sense of urgency behind the game-play remains little changed: at every turn a trap, a problem, or an enemy could appear. Paradoxically, this very urgency, this frenetic pacing in video games, often turns into its opposite. As Deleuze puts it by way of Dostoyevsky: In Dostoyevsky, there are always characters caught up in very urgent situations that require immediate answers. Then, all of a sudden, the character stops and seems to waste time for no reason: he or she has the impression that they have not yet found the hidden ‘problem’ that is more urgent than the situation. (Deleuze 2006: 211)

Video game play is punctuated by this rift between an exigent sense of urgency and an aimless search for purpose. So-called ‘open world’ games are designed around this paradox: characters are free to roam around the game structuring their journey with periods of idleness, discovery, and distraction. Such distracted squandering of time is where video game characters meet up with Benjamin’s flâneur, Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo, and

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MacCannell’s post-tourist. All wander around the city, skimming over its perfectly rendered surfaces. In the work of these authors, aimless wandering is a counter move to the actualized theories that privilege instrumental labor and cultural practice. As Benjamin puts it succinctly: ‘The idleness of the flâneur is a demonstration against the division of labor’ (Benjamin 1999, 427). Similarly, the skittish attention of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizosubject energetically explodes the purpose-driven narratives of psychiatry, capitalism, and Marxism. In the case of Sofia, the construction of video game space and game play mirrors the situation of post-socialist subjects. And it is not only Bulgarian teenagers logged onto the latest first-person shooter (FPS) for whom this comparison holds true: the relation between game space and Sofia is also an expression of post-industrial employment options and the stark economic realities of Bulgaria. Daily economic choices and routines are underpinned by questions about the point and effectiveness of these choices; a kind of urgent distraction constitutes the normal state of mind. The work of the shop floor, or at least the image of the work of the shop floor, as it was characterized under the utopic discourse of state socialism, is no longer an effective guarantor of social and economic security. While searching around for answers to larger political and economic problems, one is left, like a character in Dostoyevsky, with the feeling that the underlying ‘hidden problem’ remains elusive. ‘Utopia’, contends Marin, ‘never admits to anything exterior to itself; Utopia for itself is its own reality’ (1984: 102). In video games, when every subject, object, and surface is comprised of the same polygons, there is no inside or outside, or rather inside and outside are the same: every surface is constructed so that it may be traversed. There is no place for repose, only places in which to hide for a moment, from which to plot one’s next move; space here is more maze than map. The player runs through a labyrinth of possible choices. And in many video game scenarios the player is equipped with a gun, a violent instrument through which to channel interactions with the world. This turns every game into a virtual Wild West story, and every street into the site of a potential showdown. In this world, violence is actually agency; literally a line of sight and flight, one’s vision continuously marked by the crosshairs of a gun sight. With the gun permanently in hand, the moral choice involved in choosing to shoot or not is minimized. Like Chekhov’s gun, once it appears it will be shot (Bill 1987). The presumably innocent, blank utopic space of the beach makes violence within it all the more jarring. It is this openness that also makes it a perfect location for staging philosophic questions. Whether it be Camus’ stranger

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finding the chance loaded weapon, or J.G. Ballard’s retirees who commit crimes in their retirement village in the south of France just to breathe life back into the community, the beach provides a potent backdrop for considering the incongruous role of violence in paradise. Is it a coincidence that Jessica Fletcher’s idyllic Cabot Cove saw so many murders; that Magnum P.I. discovered so much trouble in paradise; or that Gilligan’s ‘three-hour tour’ met with disaster? The prototypical desert island has been since More the utopian space par excellence. However, as conceived by Deleuze or Daniel Defoe, it is a site where the link between nature, man, and violence can be explored. Islands are places where fantasy meets violence (Deleuze 2004: 9-14). The tropical island creates the perfect canvas for philosophers and gamers. The fantasy of a tropical vacation was also sold to post-war America, by way of musicals, films, and television shows that depicted its tropic locales, Hawaii and Florida featuring prominently as America’s own slice of paradise. And in places where the weather and irrigation would allow, palm trees were planted like flags marking California and other parts of the American Southwest as potent tourism sites. Television shows from The Love Boat to Fantasy Island presented idyllic fantasies of island life. Palm trees, beaches, and other exotic tropical fauna were proof that the vacationing family had arrived in paradise. Tourist photos made their way back to North American and European winters. The accompanying narratives sometimes told of the seedier side of life: a noir world of crime, corruption, and endemic violence. The indigenous, local problems of communities reliant on tourism were used to mark the border of the island utopia. The privileged global mobility of the cosmopolitan tourist contrasted with the stasis of the relatively lowwage jobs used to support and run a tourist industry. There are two kinds of escape: there is escape from a place, and to a place. In the former, refugees like those from Syria seek to flee violence, persecution and other kinds of threats. In the latter, tourists look to momentarily leave behind the daily concerns of work and the stress of urban life. Whether going or coming, the utopia of vacation is dialectically related to the dystopia that surrounds it. Interestingly, Bulgaria works with and accommodates this same dissociation. It offers an Eastern escape to European tourists and marks the boundary of a threat from the East. The Black Sea resorts offer a semitropical fantasy. From the botanical gardens of Balchik with their large collection of cacti set up by Queen Marie from Romania in the 1920s to the municipal gardens of Varna, and to the more recent groves of faux palm trees that anchor utopian-themed bars and beach cabanas, the Bulgarian coastline has been overtly designed as a space of leisure. The Black Sea is sold

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as a Mediterranean fantasy alongside an imagined parallel tourist fantasy of Pacific Island life. It now competes with Thailand and Cambodia for the package tourist dollar as much as it does with Greece and Spain. But what do the palm fronds of the coast, whether artificial or transplanted, have to do with the video game spaces constructed in the offices of cities like Sofia? At first glance, Sofia itself would appear the more typical video game space: the decaying modernism and desolate government housing projects of the city mirror the post-apocalyptic spaces of science fiction so typical of video games. These spaces, like the barren zones of dystopic pulp fiction, represent a kind of free space: the space invites the viewer in, with the promise that ‘anything goes’. This geography of violence relies on a series of moralities, theories of affect, and presumptions that are not often subjected to any form of reflexive thought or interrogation. The naturalized locations of violence are as much driven by cultural politics as they are a by-product of it. Inner cities, urban decay, and third world-ness are often considered and presented as natural sites of violence; this attitude makes Brazilian favelas and other such locales attractive sites of ‘slum tourism’, just as they render Sofia as a prime site for post-socialist ruin tourism and virtual mayhem. The task here is to interrogate the discursive presumptions that link cultural and geographical spaces with violence; in other words, how might we imagine an alternative geography of violence?

Sofia as Video Game So what if Sofia was a video game? What would it look like? How would you play it? There’s no need to speculate: Sofia already is a video game. In Half-Life 2, Valve Software created a hugely popular futuristic virtual dystopia, a city modeled in part on contemporary Sofia (Valve 2004). In the game version, however, the apocalypse comes in the shape of an alien insect-like infestation rather than the collapse of the socialist state and the dissipation of the communist imaginary. While no explicit reference is made to Sofia, or any other post-socialist city for that matter, the same unique mix of Austro-Hungarian architecture, Soviet-style housing blocks, and cobblestone streets signal the ancestry and identity of this virtual city, known in the game only as City 17. The art director, Viktor Antonov, himself a Bulgarian, notes: One of the reasons that we liked Eastern Europe as a setting was that it represents the collision of the old and the new in a way that is difficult to

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capture in the United States. You go over there, and you have this collision between all of these things, the new architecture, the old architecture, the fall of communism. […] [T]here’s a sense of this strongly-grounded historical place. We left out the Gothic themes associated with Prague and vampires and looked into a different aspect of the region. (Hodgson 2004)

In creating a mash-up of Eastern European environments, he and his team mimicked the decay and age of the Bulgarian capital. Every stain, crumbling wall, and graffiti-covered street corner has been meticulously designed and detailed, in some cases with photographic references and textures drawn directly from locations in Sofia. In my discussions with other game developers working for studios in Bulgaria, they suggested that you could visit particular neighborhoods and buildings and see where the game assets had been sourced. That is, you could become a tourist of the virtual and look for the origins of this dystopic space in real utopic suburban housing projects. And while the surfaces of this virtual post-apocalyptic city are different than the everyday spaces of Sofia, the temporality of urgent distraction remains, in the sense that they are ‘anxious spaces’, where players seeking urgency and exigency are required to negotiate both the world and its endemic violence. Like many of the sites explored in this book, the virtual version of Sofia in Half-Life 2 may be understood as a sort of urban laboratory, where players may experiment with alternative forms of the post-socialist landscape, and where virtual post-tourists may take a respite from the mundane hardships of life in the capital. These daily hardships do not always escalate to the level of violence, they are also manifest in the inconveniences and routines of daily work and urban life that is experienced in a multitude of forms and other cities. In the game space of post-apocalyptic grime, decay, and poverty, players are liberated from cultural and moral expectations: the narrative logic here is that after the apocalypse, pretty much anything goes. These predominant motifs of destruction and decay in video games echo the aesthetic that Deleuze noted in his study of neo-realist cinema. As he writes: ‘In the city which is being demolished or rebuilt, neo-Realism makes any-space-whatever’s proliferate – urban cancer, undifferentiated fabrics, pieces of waste ground – which are opposed to the determined spaces of the old Realism’ (Deleuze 1986: 212). Video game players and designers take advantage of the same motif of decay to create an open space for play and mobility in their games. This is made explicit in the design of video game space. A designer from Valve software explains that, ‘all content is distance based, not time based,

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and no activities are started outside the player’s control. If the players are in the mood for more action, all they need to do is move forward and within a few seconds something will happen’ (Birdwell 1999). The player determines the direction and pacing of their game. Video game players produce their game narrative by moving through space, much like the tourist generates a story by traveling, selecting elements of the landscape or specific leisure diversions as plot devices that move their personal narrative forward. The three-hour-long take of an FPS video game is decidedly lengthier than the longest take in the modernist cinema of duration. The wide angle of view and near total mobility of players gives them a kind of God-like situated omniscience. The goal is to traverse the entire level, to see everything, to be an intrepid tourist. The record of one’s game play also resembles the adventure tourism of safaris and more recent extreme sports and urban mobility of parkour and rooftopping of tall building. Players earn virtual trophies for discovering hidden items or executing certain techniques, such as a fatal head-shot of an enemy or a particularly dexterous sequence of moves. These trophies are visual reminders of gaming acumen, much like the stag heads that hunters mount on their living room walls. Screen shots or videos are also used to record instances of game play. Entire sessions and singular events are shared and streamed online. This is similar to the way that extreme sports tricks and the inevitable accidents they spawn are covered by amateur athletes and in the media. In this genre of action photography, cameras placed in multiple positions may capture the action from a variety of perspectives, much like More presents the island of Utopia ‘from a point of view where one can surmise it from every angle’ (Marin 1984: 99). Slow motion is also often used to make the otherwise fleeting events more visible. In the case of the virtual tourist, video clips are shared of mistakes and surprises, glitches and exploits in the game design that were never intended by the developers. This makes the discovery of an oddly twitching game character or the distorted body of an NPC (non-player character) all the more worthy of attention. The very existence of this genre of exploit, glitch, or trick videos suggests that there is a ready and willing audience. Their witnessing helps to close the circuit between the event and its confirmation. These images, just like a family slide show or photo album shared from a recent vacation, shout ‘Look, I was there! Look, I did it!’

A Post-Apocalyptical Aesthetic Sofia’s motto is that the city ‘grows, but does not age’. Looking around, it would seem that this motto has not held true. The grandeur of

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early-twentieth-century townhouses and the smooth surfaces that initially covered the proletarian projects of socialism have not fared well in recent years. The housing complexes that once stood as rectangular testaments to the efficiency of communist humanitarianism are literally falling apart at the seams, their modular concrete construction showing through the civic reminders and industrial slogans that once plastered their sides. The state of housing is a particular problem in Bulgaria. In contrast to other post-socialist states, many Bulgarian workers bought apartments from the state in the 1980s: however, the state absolved itself of responsibility for the buildings constructed to facilitate the mass urbanization of its population. This ownership model has left buildings without a landlord interested in or capable of maintaining the structure as a whole. These crumbling testaments to modern architecture have long outlived the ‘end of architectural modernity’ that Charles Jencks famously dated ‘at precisely 3:32 pm on July 15, 1972’, when ‘a housing complex was demolished in Saint Louis, Missouri that had been built twenty years before but was rapidly deemed inapt’ (Ardenne 2004: 103). However, unlike this infamous failure of modern architecture in Missouri, whose destruction supposedly inaugurated the postmodern moment, Bulgaria’s experiments in modern housing have not been demolished, thus positioning the country in a peculiar gap: no longer ‘modern’ nor ‘socialist’, it is not quite ‘post-’ either. The buildings remain, not so much as monuments to the success or failure of any one theory or style, but rather as real spaces, lived with and within. What exactly is visible in this decaying modernity: a chance, or the loss of one; a future, or a past? In a world in which there is not time for things to age before they are replaced by the next, the new, whatever remains and ages takes on a rarefied air. Value is bound up with the process of the thing turned antique; modernity, itself, vulnerable to the temptation to become a nostalgic memory, kitsch, an object of tourist fascination. This modernity, which lingers in buildings that stick around longer than their intended use, can be found elsewhere too. It is there in the ghosts of fortress Europe cemented into the Normandy coast (Virilio 1994). It is in the Japanese fascination with haikyo, a genre of photography and writing that centers on the ruins of industrial Japan. And it is to be found in every city haunted by its past, a phantom presence that Rem Koolhaas chronicles in his retroactive manifesto for New York (Koolhaas 1978). The phantom presence in Bulgaria, of course, is directly related to the projects of socialism and the current geography of European development. It is there in once-grand state theaters converted, in a manner reminiscent of the heterotopian Palais Royale, into markets and cafes (see Simpson, chapter one in this volume).

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And it inhabits a new generation of unfinished ruins, apartment blocks whose construction commenced but was never completed. These structures were built on investment plans which were not unlike pyramid schemes, both designed to ultimately collapse. However, unlike the ephemeral networks of investors these unfinished ruins remain, material reminders of the difficulties of renovating the Bulgarian landscape. A new Bulgarian aesthetic is emerging which is designed in response to the instability of recent history and current events: everything is built with permanence and quality in mind. In studying the visual economy of post-soviet Russia, Aliana Lemon has shown that ‘currency is a sensual substance’ (1998: 39). The materiality of cash embodies the desires and possibilities that its abstract value represents. Post-socialist Bulgaria also operates with this kind of visual economy, where money flows outside of a banking industry that is still recovering from the catastrophic collapse of the early 1990s. The economy is built on the assurance of appearance. Of course, businesses everywhere bank on the appearance of success, selling customers, stockholders, and workers an image of integrity and potential. However in the smaller, developing networks of Bulgaria, quality and appearance more clearly constitute a guarantee of integrity and potential. The cut of one’s suit, the brand of one’s cigarettes, and the model of one’s car testify to the quality of one’s business (Yurchak 2003). Thus investment in appearance is money in the bank, just as the presence of a tinted black Mercedes is the surest economic indicator of success. In the same way, corruption is both a source of outrage and a comforting proof that there is power still to be had.

Post-Apocalyptic Futures The relation between gamers and video game violence has an interesting parallel to the affective terrain of Sofia as a post-socialist city. The built environment is composed of decaying socialist-era projects and new suburban enclaves of wealth. New shopping malls dot neighborhoods, foreign transplants of products and design. It is also punctuated by moments of abject violence. Since the political transition away from communism in 1989, a number of high-profile assassinations have taken place that have prompted much speculation and media-fueled intrigue. These assassinations involved snipers, radio-triggered bombs, and other such scenarios straight off the pages of an international espionage thriller. The slow transition of the Bulgarian state from socialism to a privatized market economy

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saw a small group of individuals monopolize businesses and industries. These instances of violence are reminders of underlying illegal competition and were a major obstacle in Bulgaria’s official ascension into the European Union. There are, of course, two types of management involved here: there is the actual detecting and prosecuting of murderers and other criminals, a task that presents its own set of logistical tasks and investigative struggles; and there is the management of the public perception of these crimes and the appearance of Balkan criminality more generally. The latter of these two takes place not only on the small scale of the local realities of criminality, but rather on the stage of international perception, and within the context of European Union politics. The reality of organized crime is compounded because, from a Western perspective, it is filtered through an association of Bulgaria with the conflicts in the neighboring former Yugoslavia and the assumption of endemic inter-ethnic violence in the region. This violence is often naturalized and imagined as part of the texture of life in the Balkans. This assumption has roots in the long history of contact between Balkan and West European nations. In the case of the British in the nineteenth century, it meant sympathy with Ottoman officials in the region and a relative disdain for the perceived primitivism of the local Slavic populations (Todorova 1997). This construction of a savage other is also related to the kind of naturalism used to sell a landscape unspoiled by modern development to tourists. Nature is part of the appeal to tourists from Western Europe. More recently, the figure of the ‘Balkan other’ has taken on a new form in West European media as an economic threat of cheap labor and immigration, inverting the host-visitor relationship that drives tourism in the region. The specter of Eastern European immigration and competition is given a shadowy yet public face in the form of the mafia. Each nation is called out, and the naming of the Albanian, the Serbian, and the Bulgarian mafia gives a distinct set of faces, however amorphous, to this more generalized fear. The international perception of the mafia in Bulgaria builds on the traditional image of ultra-secretive, ultra-powerful Cold War-era espionage. Fears of subterranean Balkan networks infiltrating international trade are born of the same stuff as the fear of a Red menace spreading from Eastern to Western Europe. Florent Emilio Siri’s 2002 film Nid de guepes (The nest) embodies this new fear. It depicts the (in this case Albanian) mafia as an inhuman swarm of covert warriors: ordinary Western criminals and law enforcement officials are forced to unite to repel an attack by Albanian mafioso seeking to free their boss from authorities who are trying to transport him to the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague. Further

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proof of the savage nature of this group is present in the corporeality of the Albanians, who leap about with a faceless inhuman speed and resilience. Their bodies disappear after being shot, as if they were some real-life manifestation of virtual video game enemies. They exist only as threat and not as material form. The filmmaker’s intentional exaggeration of the mafia’s inhumanity trades on the fact of a similar exaggeration outside the confines of the film world. Whether or not Siri’s treatment functions as critique or mirror of Western European fears of the threat of Eastern European masses is largely irrelevant: the spectral threat remains. These fears are predicated on a temporality of capitalist teleological development that divides post-socialist states from Western Europe. Bulgaria and other post-socialist states are often treated as naïve inductees into the frenzied world of late capitalism. Much like the ‘growing pains’ language used by the Bush administration to account for the violence in Iraq, the Balkan states are treated as teenagers in an arrested state of development, not yet able to properly manage their own desires, struggling with bad skin and other unfortunate manifestations of adolescence. Clearly, such metaphors are at best a weak strategy to refer to the problems of transition and at worst part of an insulting paternalism. On the scale of international publics, crime and violence are seen as manifestations of a premature state, one not yet fully integrated into the global free market. By the same token, ‘Liberal arguments for free-market principles are seen as the nonviolent successors to a separate, discrete, violent past, to which they are radically opposed’ (Klima 2002). Thus, the removal of violence is at the heart of modernization and globalization discourse, with the state a stern warden. There is no doubt that violence is an everyday reality in Sofia: but it is not some Wild West town where trigger-happy, murderous citizens roam around looking for trouble; that is what happens in video games. The affective terrain that results from this violence is not a simple story of barbarism or the growing pains of a young free market. The specifics of Bulgaria’s organized crime are not easily stated but it has been pointed out that ‘It does not have the ethnic flavor common to the Chechen and Georgian mafias, nor is it structured around kinship networks, as is Albanian organized crime. What is special about organized crime in Bulgaria is the way it was created by the “transitional state” (Nikolov 1997). There are daily manifestations of preemptive power, meant to deter violence, not foment it. The caravans of tinted Mercedes and entourages of bodyguards that follow in the wake of some of the wealthiest citizens are not unique to Sofia. Nonetheless, these movements circulate the latent possibilities of criminality. Instances of violence are interwoven into the texture of everyday existence and affect

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the aspirations and desires of ordinary Bulgarians. The assassinations, remote- controlled bombs, and drive-by shootings of the transition are certainly the stuff of pulp f iction. Gossip about the motives for these murders abound, full of tales of drug deals, old debts, and bitter rivalries. This talk suggests exotic secret networks, clandestine meetings, and hidden forces. Like Dostoyevsky’s characters, one finds oneself caught up in a moment of intensity, looking for some other underlying cause. At both the personal scale of lived experience and the national scale of domestic politics, management of violence and criminality are necessary for success and survival. One’s life is not necessarily at stake but participation in the new economies of international politics and tourism is.

Conclusion: Virtual Tourism My own first encounter with violence in Sofia involved a number of evenings of game play. One of the first things I realized playing modern FPS and open-world video games is that there is never a need for the game to end: the action takes place in an alternative temporal mode where even the death of one’s character is but a brief pause to reboot before reentering the game. This meant that only the setting sun bouncing off the neighboring apartment block and onto my computer screen or the rumble in my stomach, and the blurriness of my eyes reminded me of my actual embodied self. The game character’s health could be easily revived by typing in a cheat code or returning to some save point. After this, one is immediately off and running again, recklessly moving through the city. In the virtual world of the game, every object is an obstacle or a potential target, and every new weapon provides a new level of mobility. After a few nights of avoiding my own ethnographic field work while binge-playing video games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, I got pretty good at avoiding the cops, stealing cars, and sniping off innocent bystanders. Like many others, I had long since given up on the mission-based system of advancement that drives the game’s narrative, preferring to simply run rampant through this virtual Miami Beach. I kept tempting fate and suffering one gruesome death after another at the hands of police helicopters and multi-car pile-ups without any kind of retribution. Video game characters are blessed with immortality, even if it’s sometimes hard for the players who inhabit these virtual personas to keep up with an infinite life cycle. Instant death and rebirth don’t allow any real time for recovery or reflection. Players are immediately returned to the action to try and correct mistakes from their past lives. Perhaps the

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games of the future will need to have programmed naps: if our polygonal counterparts don’t take breaks, how will we? On one such break from virtual looting and pillaging, I went to refuel at the local 24-hour grocer in my Sofia neighborhood. Returning in the late summer evening, I marveled at the realism of the actual moonlight, with perfectly mapped shadows hinting at the future realism of gaming. Deeply breathing in the fresh air, I imagined myself the most dangerous agent in the neighborhood through which I had previously hurried, a video game action hero and foreign ethnographer struggling to adjust to the micro-politics of my new home. Returning to my building and opening the door leading to my fourth floor walk-up apartment, I noticed a strange flushing sound, as if the neighbor’s toilet was running. Thinking nothing of it, I made my way upstairs. As I turned past the third floor, I was suddenly confronted with the source of the sound: a stranger was sprawled awkwardly on the landing just above me, gasping for air as his blood dripped down the staircase to horrific effect. Struck by this startling image, my immediate thought was that this was some kind of real-life retribution for the thousands of murders I had committed in the video game. It seemed like some sort of cosmic penalty had been leveled on my illicit activities, and this man was the unfortunate and mistaken recipient of punishment that was surely meant for me. My game play was not simply squandering my leisure time through touristic travel to a virtual Miami Beach; rather, I had stumbled upon my own Dostoyevskyian ‘problem’ that was more urgent than my real-life ethnographic situation. Only after frantically looking for help to call an ambulance and talking with my neighbors did I learn that his injuries were not the result of an assassin’s gunshot, but emanated from an unfortunate fall that was the byproduct of an epileptic seizure. After processing the commotion, and ensuring my own body was indeed intact, I settled back into another long night of murder and mayhem. This instance of unexpected violence demonstrates the permeable boundary that separates virtual game space from the spaces of everyday life, and the peculiar gap within which the game player is located. In the case of Sofia, the perceived criminality of the post-socialist everyday intersects with the violence of the leisure spaces of gaming and tourism. I, in turn, inhabit a subjective caesura between ethnographer studying Sofia’s postsocialist transformation, and post-tourist in the video game’s violent virtual city. In an arena of international politics, in which intra-state violence circulates as a sign of state immaturity, is outrage the only imaginable response to instances of violence? Does our affective register always need to be greater than or equal to its surroundings? If we begin to think along

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with video game players of violence as virtual mobility, it appears as a kind move executed against everyday anxieties. The real-world violence of corruption, and the virtual violence of video games, are at opposite poles: one is the negative result of instability, and the other a positive move to progress, even if it just means skimming over the surface of things. The anxious desire of post-socialist citizens for stability, and the post-tourist’s desire for adventure and discovery, find expression in the virtual realm of video games: the skittish ducking and weaving of video game players is set against the confusion of everyday choices, making the video game space – whether pristinely rendered desert island, or dystopian post-socialist urban landscape – its own odd sort of post-tourist utopia.

Works Cited Andreev, Alexander, and Tatiana Vaksberg. 2015. ‘Why Do So Many Refugees Avoid Bulgaria?’ Deutsche Welle, 10  September. http://www.dw.com/en/ why-do-so-many-refugees-avoid-bulgaria/a-18707897 Ardenne, Paul. 2004. Codex: Rudy Ricciotti. New York: Springer Science & Business Media. Bell, Jeffrey A. 1997. ‘Thinking with Cinema: Deleuze and Film Theory’. FilmPhilosophy 1, no. 1. http://www.f ilm-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/ view/23/8. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Beyer, Elke. 2013. Holidays after the Fall: Seaside Architecture and Urbanism in Bulgaria and Croatia. Berlin: Jovis. Bill, Valentine T. 1987. Chekhov: The Silent Voice of Freedom. New York: Philosophical Library. Birdwell, Ken. 1999. ‘The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process for Creating Half-Life’. Game Developer Magazine, December. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974. Edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Michael Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. Two Regimes of Madness, Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e).

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ghodsee, Kristen. 2005. The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea. Durham: Duke University Press. Glenny, Misha. 2008. McMafia: A Journey through the Global Criminal Underworld. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Graham, Stephen. 2007. ‘War and the city.’ New Left Review, 44: 121-132. Hirt, Sonia. 2008. ‘Landscapes of Postmodernity: Changes in the Built Fabric of Belgrade and Sof ia since the End of Socialism’. Urban Geography 29, no. 8: 785-810. Hodgson, David. 2004. Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar. Roseville: Prima Games. Holleran, Max. 2014. ‘“Mafia Baroque”: Post-Socialist Architecture and Urban Planning in Bulgaria’. British Journal of Sociology 65, no. 1: 21-42. Jameson, Fredric. 2009. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso. Klima, Alan. 2002. The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Koolhaas, Rem. 1978. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lemon, Alaina. 1998. ‘“Your Eyes Are Green Like Dollars”: Counterfeit Cash, National Substance and Currency Apartheid in 1990s Russia’. Cultural Anthropology 13, no. 1: 22-55. Löfgren, Orvar. 2002. On Holiday: A History of Vacationing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marin, Louis. 1984. Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces. Amherst: Humanity Books. Neuburger, Mary C. 2012. Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Nikolov, Jovo. 1997. ‘Crime and Corruption after Communism: Organized Crime in Bulgaria’. East European Constitutional Review, vol. 6, no 4: 80-84. Rockstar Games. 2002. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. New York: Take 2 Interactive. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Stoyanov, Petar, and Klaus Frantz. 2006. ‘Gated Communities in Bulgaria: Interpreting a New Trend in Post-Communist Urban Development’. GeoJournal 66, no. 1: 57-63. Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space/Politics/Affect. London: Routledge. Todorova, Maria. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press. Valve Software. 2004. Half-Life 2. Los Angeles: Vivendi Universal Games. Virilio, Paul. 1994. Bunker Archaeology. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

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Yurchak, Alexei. 2003. ‘Russian Neoliberal: The Entrepreneurial Ethic and the Spirit of ”True Careerism”‘. Russian Review 62, no. 1: 72-90.

Filmography Nid de guêpes [The nest]. Directed by Florent-Emilio Siri. Lions Gate Entertainment, 2002. Orkestar bez ime [A nameless band]. Directed by Lyudmil Kirkov. Boyana Film, 1982. Serious Games I: Watson ist hin [Serious games I: Watson is down]. Directed by Harun Farocki. Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, 2010.

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Sublimity, Sovereignty, and Sophistry The Trouble in Middle-earth Margaret Werry No one’s going to believe it’s real, that’s what’s so ridiculous. I mean it’s so breathtaking. You can use that as an advert for New Zealand if you want. I mean, succinct, snappy, all positive. And cut. Brilliant. Trademark. – Martin Freeman 1

The case of Aotearoa New Zealand might seem a surprising addition to this collection. Its destination image is of an island underpopulated, uncommercialized, untouched: not urban but primeval, not post-Fordist but preFordist, not artificial or simulacral but quintessentially, sublimely natural. Yet this image, and its meticulous production as the virtual architecture of New Zealand’s (neo)liberal modernity, is precisely what warrants the attention of scholars of ‘tourist utopias’. Nature, and its primary visual technology landscape, are supremely cultural artifacts, their invention coterminous not only with the onset of industrial capitalism but also with its cognate spatial practices, principally tourism.2 Lacking population density and urban infrastructure, disadvantaged by geographical distance and a comparative lack of easily extractable primary resources, New Zealand has for more than a century and a half made nature central to its attempts to insinuate itself into regimes of global circulation. The elaboration of ‘the national brand’ has, for much of this period, assumed the status of a national project, uniting state and non-state actors in the production of a utopic imaginary that makes of epic, pristine nature a signif ier of investment opportunity, economic dynamism, and social harmony. The centrality of tourism to both the workings of the state and the more ephemeral domain of ‘national identity’ suggests that it has operated for New Zealand as a technology of governmentality. The country’s two most intensive periods of state making have also been periods of intensive investment in tourism: the ‘Liberal Era’, 1890-1914 (in which New 1 Actor Martin Freeman, in New Zealand: Home of Middle-earth, dir. Peter Jackson, Warner Bros., 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsUlHilL0Is. 2 See Andrews 1989, Green 1990, Schama 1995, Urry 1990, and Williams 1973.

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Zealand forged the strong, protectionist, managerial, welfare-democracy that would define much of its twentieth century) and its neoliberal renaissance, 1984 to the present. Tourism was in both these eras an eminently biopolitical enterprise, called on to manage ethnic dissent, shape citizen conduct, define and legitimize the terms of racial and spatial value, and fashion idealizations of both state and citizenry. The state designed its first heterotopic tourist enclave (the township of Rotorua) in the early twentieth century, using it to pioneer initiatives in public health and urban planning, and economically instrumentalize Maori cultural difference. But arguably, New Zealand as a whole could be considered a tourist enclave: a place apart, an island on the world’s leisure periphery, a utopian recreation of an ideal Britain-that-never-was (in the early twentieth century), and an ideal projection of the nation-state that Chicago School economists were trying to usher into being, in the later twentieth century. If the nation touted itself abroad as a ‘social laboratory’ in which ambitious experiments in liberal government were carried out, tourism was surely the ‘cultural laboratory’ in which those experiments were taken up – performed and embodied – by nationals and non-nationals alike (Löfgren 1999: 7; Werry 2011: 6). The synchronicity between the neoliberal structural adjustment policies of the last 30 years – what became known as ‘The New Zealand Experiment’ – and the coining of a new marketing campaign, ‘100% Pure New Zealand,’ epitomizes this tendency. The campaign was initiated in 1999 and continues to this day to unify the marketing efforts of Tourism New Zealand (TNZ), the state agency that oversees tourism promotion. It yoked the brand values of ‘New Pacific Freedom’ – ‘contemporary and sophisticated, innovative and creative, spirited and free’ – to purity of landscape, powerfully naturalizing these idealized neoliberal conducts, subjectivities, and structures of feeling (Morgan and Pritchard 2002). For its critics (myself included), the new national brand bore neocolonial overtones, targeting Euro-American elites, encouraging luxury consumption, alluding to racial homogeneity, and replicating colonialism’s terra nullius imaginary (of unpopulated Arcadian isles awaiting white possession). For others, the whole campaign, and the national pride it attempted to cultivate, was a disingenuous ‘greenwash’, an imagined utopia that not only veiled the increasing fragmentation, immiseration, and inequity of a post-welfare society, but also participated in it by proffering New Zealand workers as vulnerable, low-wage service providers on the leisure periphery of more affluent global powers (Bell 2006; Wedde 2005; Werry 2011). Regardless, the national brand swiftly became what Žižek called a national Thing, the locus of shared enjoyment that creates a sense

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of national belonging, and a medium, organizing relationships, networks, and information flow (Žižek 1993; Lury 2004). It was under the auspices of this neoliberal rebranding that the alignment between tourism marketing and film production that is the focus of this chapter first took hold. When Peter Jackson (a local boy made good) struck the deal to locate production for the blockbuster Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy in New Zealand, TNZ seized the opportunity to leverage the films’ profile. New Zealand became ‘Home of Middle-earth’: welding the film’s spectacular advances in production technology and the natural sublimity of the locations themselves to the ‘100% Pure’ brand values emphasizing luxury consumption, innovation, freedom (deregulation), and world-girdling (implicitly economic) ambition. The films were the perfect vehicle to sell a struggling knowledge economy as a tourist destination. But at what cost? What, I ask here, are the consequences for state sovereignty when global Hollywood dictates the terms of a national tourist utopia? How does New Zealand’s second ‘grand experiment in the fusion of film and government’ (Cieply and Barnes 2012), the filming of The Hobbit trilogy, make visible the new shape that sovereignty has assumed? And what is the form-of-life, the modes of conduct, and the structure of economic experience and aestheticpolitical vision that these filmic utopias usher into being?

Middle-earth Mark I The mammoth triumph of the LOTR trilogy ‘fundamentally changed the game’ with regards to the way the state saw the screen as a player in the nation’s neoliberal renaissance (New Zealand Institute of Economic Research 2002: v; Thompson 2007). The vast production budget alone (some US$250 million spent within New Zealand) transformed local economies, while the scale of the enterprise raised industry capability, up-skilled a crosssectoral workforce, capitalized on ‘underutilized’ national assets (namely scenery), and marketed the nation abroad as a competitive production base. The triumph was equally symbolic: a success story of the judicious marriage of entrepreneurial initiative and state cultural investment, the symbiosis of new public agencies and corporate entities, and the new primacy of knowledge-based industries over the agrarian extraction of the previous Fordist era. But the Rings model of runaway production (in which major Hollywood studios outsource production abroad) troubled many in the industry who feared that NZ was positioned as a service provider to US-based multinationals, attracted by the low dollar and generous tax

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incentives (which substantially subsidized LOTR, with New Zealand taxpayers bearing the risk), a cheap, deregulated, but skilled and English-speaking labor force, weak unions, good infrastructure, and eye-boggling scenic beauty (Campbell 2000; Baillie 2002).3 Runaway investment is short term and intermittent; quality employment often goes to extranationals, while newly ‘up-skilled’ nationals flee the country for better wages and regular employment; and production companies often believe they ‘are entitled to work outside the standard bureaucratic controls’ (Venture Taranaki 2004: 52). The runaway enterprise is premised on economic subordination and the lack of bargaining power of the host country, perhaps even reinforcing it. We might understand the screen (with Toby Miller) as ‘the newest component of sovereignty, a twentieth-century cultural addition to ideas of patrimony and rights that sits alongside such traditional topics as territory, language, history and schooling’ (Miller et al. 2001: 15). At issue in runaway production, then, is not just the declining sovereign power of the deregulated state over its economy (Sassen 1998: xxvii-xxviii), but also its threat to cultural sovereignty, a state’s capacity to manage and symbolize its population and territory, in part secured by such technologies of cultural citizenship as the screen. Aotearoa New Zealand was cast as ‘Home of Middle-earth’, a place of infinite scenic beauty available to the global adventurer and the global imagination, and Tolkien/Jackson’s imagined land swiftly became the optic through which the nation addressed itself to global markets, and a fantasy object of intense national identification. As it did so, it came to condition the national imaginary in ways that, given the ideological content of its narrative, ran squarely against New Zealand’s status as a post-colonial and, constitutionally, a proudly bicultural nation. 4 Researchers noted that international visitors encountering New Zealand through the films formed an image of the country as ‘magical and mystical’, a ‘land of make believe’; the films imaginatively transformed it into a ‘moral’ landscape, an ‘utopian’ place (Larsen and George 2006: 127, quoted in Goh 2014: 276; Barker and Mathijs 2007). What they often failed to note was that this utopia was premised on a signally modernist racial logic. Tolkien’s novels and Jackson’s faithful films are heroic racial melodramas pitting swarthy hordes of debased miscreants (cross-bred Orcs, slant-eyed 3 Thompson (2007) estimates the savings at 50 percent. 4 State biculturalism names the constitutional arrangement that has prevailed in Aotearoa New Zealand since the mid-1980s, when the rehabilitation of the Treaty of Waitangi (signed between many Maori tribes and the British Crown in 1940) led to legislation that obliged all state agencies to include Maori representation and to serve Maori in a way consonant with Maori cultural frameworks.

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Southrens, and so on) against Aryan elves, noble humans, Celtic dwarves, and yeoman Hobbits. The cozy, rustic innocence of pastoral Hobbiton (modeled after Shropshire) was an artifact of British white nativist nostalgia, from Tolkien’s troubled post-imperial mid-twentieth century (see Werry 2011). For tourists entering the ‘immersive simulation’ that was ‘Home of Middle-earth’, and the nationals shilling for it, the dissonance between the socio-cultural spaces of the film and those of the post-colonial nation onto which they were superimposed, was rarely remarked upon.5 But upon analysis, it is vivid and often ironic. The location for Mordor, for instance, was on the slopes of Mount Ruapehu, a storied and sacred place only recently acknowledged as under the joint guardianship of Ngāti Tūwharetoa and the state. And while location scouts claimed to have miraculously ‘found’ their ideal Hobbiton in Matamata, Matamata itself was violently colonized in the mid-nineteenth century through the suppression of local Ngāti Hauā, and transformed from dense forest to a simulacrum of southern Britain’s rolling hillsides to support the settler agricultural economy. The film’s tourist utopia essentially recolonized these spaces. Both film and tourism have profound effects on space. In the case of literal film-location tours, tourists develop a bifurcated or ‘irreal’ mode of perception, that strives to find filmic fantasy in the real spaces before their eyes (Goh 2014; Tzanelli 2004). For the general public interpellated by the ‘Home of Middle-earth’, however, the effect was less one of irrealism and more one of misrecognition, as socio-cultural space was overwritten, ‘creat[ing] a duality that challenges and undermines historical claims, affective attachments and local engagements with the land’ (Goh 2014: 280). The effect was untimely for Māori trying to find a foothold in tourism: as they struggled to find a semiotic that would make contemporary Māori culture deliverable to tourists, the colonial racial imagination of Middleearth worked to return them to either invisibility, or a savage and alien past. This was not just a popular fad: the utopic racially exclusive remake of the national symbolic was state-sanctioned and manipulated for large-scale buy in. ‘It wasn’t the filmmakers who made this film, it was the general public of New Zealand’, the minister of tourism – dubbed by the press the ‘Minister of the Rings’ – claimed, citing citizens working gratis as extras, and the state pitching in with national resources. ‘Almost everyone in the country has been touched by it, feels part of it. This has become part of our very culture.’6 The state issued Rings-themed stamp and coin series, 5 ‘Immersive simulation’ is the Rings’ designers’ phrase, quoted in Davis 2001. 6 Video clip on www.purenz.com.

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and facilitated an exhibition by Weta Workshop at the national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, that bestowed all the pride and reverence upon this manufactured tradition that it could not lend to the nation’s own conflicted, contested bicultural history. A global fantasy of whiteness, then, became the ‘glimmering object of tradition’ (Povinelli 1999: 22) that secured national attachment and solidarity; a surrogate insinuated into local imaginaries, routed through the apparatus of tourism.

Middle-earth Mark II What has changed in the interregnum between the first trilogy and its prequels? The Fifth National Government of New Zealand took power in 2008 under Prime Minister John Key (also minister for tourism, as was his Labour predecessor, Helen Clark, marking the significance of this industry not only in the economy but also in representing the nation). Where the previous administration governed in what some scholars have called a ‘post-neoliberal’ mode (Larner and Butler 2005), balancing core neoliberal precepts with a desire for inclusive social democracy, the Fifth National Government has adopted strictly foreign direct investment-led, probusiness policies, which have seen a ‘inexorable erosion of employee rights over the two years, and a concomitant rise in the power of the employer’ (Haworth 2011: 102). While the economy strengthened, along with the New Zealand dollar, over the first decade of the century, economic fortunes have since flagged with the global recession. Tourism has suffered: while visitor numbers are stable, the average visitor ‘spend’ is in decline (Ministry for Economic Development 2011). Thanks largely to Peter Jackson’s efforts, the screen industry has remained healthy (in 2011, for instance, screen industry revenue accounted for roughly NZ$3 billion of the NZ$170 billion GDP). Jackson himself, meanwhile, is hailed as a national treasure; his outsized domestic influence in both politics and popular opinion is matched only by his pivotal position in a Hollywood apparatus increasingly dependent on blockbuster productions, and those like Jackson, who can deliver them. When, in 2010, Jackson announced that the long-rumored, then longdelayed LOTR prequel, The Hobbit, would commence production with himself as director, the scent of opportunity was strong in the national air. The NZ$80 million in tax breaks and marketing assistance offered up front by the National government was a measure of the productions’ perceived importance. It was not only the portion of the projected NZ$600 million production budget that would trickle down to NZ businesses that

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enticed, but more importantly the secondary benefits to the ailing tourism industry, which accounts for a vastly greater share of the GDP than screen production (18 percent as opposed to roughly 2 percent). As a government report in the wake of LOTR had shown, explicitly film-related tourism enterprises (such as Red Carpet Tours or the Hobbiton set at Matamata) were only the tip of the iceberg: the films had had a significant (if difficult to measure) effect on visitor arrivals, which had increased by 25 percent for each of the years of the films’ release.7 Underlying it all, however, was a very present anxiety. Just as Jackson’s studios were a global industry asset only contingently located in New Zealand (rather than a domestic resource with international status [Haworth 2011: 104]), Middle-earth was a virtual projection without an unbreakable association with the nation. How would it be possible to capture both capital flow and place-differentiation effects if a shift in exchange rates or new tax subsidies or simple economic events made somewhere else cheaper for film production? The refrains of advance publicity were anxious apotropes: ‘I know I’m a Kiwi, but I can’t imagine making these films anywhere else but New Zealand’; ‘There’s something about New Zealand and Middle-earth that makes sense’; ‘New Zealand is Middle-earth’.8 Middle-earth was such a national Thing, such an item of public identification, with such vast economic stakes, that any threat to the utopian simulacrum seemed a threat to the nation itself. While LOTR undermined sovereignty at a largely cultural level, events preceding the production of The Hobbit trilogy demonstrated that the economic, juridical, and governmental processes of neoliberal regimes are inextricably intertwined with their cultural ones. If LOTR was located in NZ because the sovereign protections that NZ offered its workers, its environment, and its taxpayers were weak, The Hobbit (and the neoliberal machinery that drove its production) worked to keep them so; subtly, in the marriage of runaway production and the tourist utopia, sovereignty had mutated. What subsequently became known as ‘The Hobbit Affair’ made this mutation visible.

PJ and the PM The Hobbit Affair began in June 2010, as the stalled production process of The Hobbit gathered momentum. New Zealand Actors’ Equity (NZAE) 7 For a skeptical assessment of these figures (from the 2002 NZIER report), see Lawn 2005. 8 The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, Home of Middle-earth Pt II, dir. Peter Jackson, Warner Brothers (extra feature on DVD release). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D94vqe8Xesw.

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had been long-concerned about NZ-based producers’ flouting of the terms outlined in the ‘Pink Book’ (a non-binding agreement between unions and the Screen Production and Development Association (SPADA) offering guidance in crafting actors’ contracts). It asked its membership to delay signing contracts with Jackson’s company until talks had been held to establish a standard contract for NZ workers. Members of the International Federation of Actors (FIA) followed suit in support of their NZ colleagues, resulting in what an outraged Jackson (who refused to meet with NZAE) called a manipulative ‘boycott’ of the production. Jackson accused the union of putting thousands of jobs at risk, and irreparably damaging the reputation of the NZ film industry which stood to be ‘humiliated on the world stage’ should it lose The Hobbit enterprise (Tyson 2011: 6).9 The standoff lasted until early October, when talks were held between what was, by this time, a score of parties to the dispute. After a 14 October meeting between representatives of NZAE, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (NZCTU), and SPADA, facilitated by Minister for Economic Development Gerry Brownlee, NZAE rescinded the do-not-sign order. Far from being resolved, however, the conflict escalated. In covert dialogue with vehemently anti-union state officials, and in the midst of a massive PR firestorm which his own colleagues vigorously fanned, Jackson shifted the goalposts, using his economic leverage, and his power to symbolize the nation through the narrative and ideological troping of the f ilms themselves, to transform the legal foundations of the industry, ensuring that the claims of workers would never again impede the ease with which media multinationals could do business in New Zealand. The rescinding of the do-not-sign order was immaterial, Jackson now argued, as the damage to the nation’s reputation as a stable place to produce film had already been done. At issue now, he claimed, was a 2005 ruling against his company (Three Foot Six) by the Supreme Court, which had determined that regardless of the wording of a specif ic contract, film workers could be classified as ‘employees’ rather than independent ‘contractors’ if the conditions of their work conformed to the definitions of ‘employee’ laid out in the Employment Relations Act (2000). Thus, they were entitled to employee protections (rights to sick leave, to appeal 9 Tyson (2011) offers a well-researched summary of these events, as represented in the New Zealand press. Other ‘insider’ accounts include film scholar Kristin Thompson’s blog (http:// www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2010/10/31/new-zealand-is-still-middle-earth-a-summary-of-thehobbit-crisis/), which narrates events from Jackson’s perspective, and NZCTU president Helen Kelly’s biting analysis (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1104/S00081/helen-kelly-the-hobbitdispute.htm).

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unfair dismissal, or to collectively organize). This, according to Jackson, created a prohibitive climate for film industry leaders by leaving them vulnerable to arbitrary industrial action. Without ‘certainty’ on Warner Brothers’ part, he claimed, the production would surely move offshore. On cue, his colleagues Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens announced that Warner Brothers was eyeing up possible successors, such as the United Kingdom or Croatia. Minister Gerry Brownlee followed Jackson’s script, including his imputation that the ‘blacklist’ (as it was now, tellingly and ironically, being called) was the machination of an Australian ‘bully boy’ union trying to sabotage its neighbor industry (in fact, NZAE had long been affiliated with the Media and Entertainment Arts Alliance [MEAA], the union in question). PM John Key went further, blaming unionism in toto: ‘to have the film industry destroyed on the back of the actions of the unions is, I think, reprehensible’ (Cardy and Johnston 2010). Meanwhile, Jackson called on his employees to mount a march to the steps of parliament, staged managed by Weta Workshops (another arm of the Jackson production apparatus) and widely televised. A nationwide series of rallies was held on Labor Day in support of Jackson’s efforts, with punters bearing banners announcing ‘New Zealand is Middle-earth,’ and ‘Save Our Films. Save Our Jobs.’ YouTube trailers expertly edited by fans, backed by the magisterial strains of Howard Shore’s f ilm score, appeared before and after these events, using the films’ epic rhetoric to depict the industrial dispute as an urgent and epochal conflict, and echoing a deafening storm of vox pops on Jackson’s side of the dispute. In a quintessentially neoliberal move, the events appealed to a sentimental and defensive proxy nationalism (what I have called elsewhere ‘soft belonging’ [Werry 2012]) to justify what was essentially an assault on the sovereign rights of New Zealand workers, for the benefit of an American company. Amid appeals to the ‘love’ and sense of ‘family’, the passion and commitment of film workers, Jackson proclaimed: New Zealand is ‘where Middle-earth was born and this is where it should stay’. ‘Turning us into another state of Australia under the sway of a destructive organisation carries the very real risk of destroying the great big heart that beats inside our films’ (Broun and Watkins 2010). The stage was set for the arrival of a party of Warner Brothers executives and lawyers, who were ferried straight to the prime minister’s office, emerging hours later with a further NZ$34.5 million in subsidies from the state and a promise that an amendment to the ERA would be swiftly pushed through parliament, ensuring that film workers would be legally deemed independent contractors unless their contracts explicitly stated

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otherwise.10 For his part, Key secured Time Warner’s support in leveraging the films in tourism promotion, including the promise that a special Jackson-directed feature promoting NZ as a tourism destination would be included on all DVD releases and downloads. Over the next four years an orgy of tourism promotion ensued. Air New Zealand, the national airline and flag carrier (majority government owned) became the ‘official airline of Middle-earth’, its fleet sporting decals with characters from the films, its signature tongue-in-cheek in-flight safety videos featuring the cast of the films, and Wellington International Airport made over as ‘The Middle of Middle-earth’, with a vast model of Smaug breathing smoke in the ticketing area. ‘Welcome to Wellywood!’ The premier of the first film in Wellington (part of Key’s deal with Time Warner) was an event to rival any royal tour, and the premiers of the later films in London and Beijing (China is NZ’s most elusive emerging tourism market) were attended by the prime minister. Tourism New Zealand’s ‘100% Pure Middle-earth’ campaign has invested in excess of NZ$8 million per year welding Jackson’s simulacral creation to NZ’s actual topography. John Key was true to his word: the ERA was promptly amended. Under the pretext of urgency (to protect a threatened ‘national’ industry and NZ’s ‘reputation for innovation and ease of business’, and capture a revenue stream [Wilkinson 2011: 34]), Key suspended normal legislative procedure: there was no Select Committee hearing, no public debate, no opportunity to consult with the workers affected. At least one legal scholar has roundly called it an ‘abuse of constitutional power’ (Wilson 2011: 91). It prompted accusations from the Labour opposition that NZ is a ‘client state’ of Hollywood (Charles Chauvel, quoted in Itzkoff 2010), and later suspicion that John Key’s cooperation with controversial US intelligence efforts (exposed by WikiLeaks) was motivated by more than a concern for international security. (His accusers point to Key’s handling of the extradition case of Kim Schmitz, aka Kim Dotcom, a multimillionaire wanted for media piracy charges in the US for his file-sharing site). In filming LOTR, some have wryly (indeed uncritically) noted, Jackson had control of the army, which for the princely rate of NZ$8 per man hour, showed up to hew Hobbiton into the rolling hills of Matamata. With The Hobbit, he had control over the legislature. But dubbing Jackson the new sovereign misses the point: the far-reaching networks of transnational media conglomerates reach across sectors of information and entertainment, enmeshing the interests 10 Interestingly, the deal effectively made the New Zealand state a co-promoter of the films, the first time (according to Kristin Thompson) that such an arrangement has occurred.

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of state and non-state actors, power brokers and popular constituencies, at once national and transnational (Arsenault and Castells 2008). The state is one actor among many, and the preservation of the freedoms of capital over those of labor an imperative that unites them: in this instance, the subordination of the domestic political order to either an individual or a corporation’s interests was not so much a loss of sovereignty (either national or popular sovereignty), as indicative of its new shape (Ong 2012). The jobs that Key’s deal ‘protected’ epitomize the precarious, nonstandard, casualized work that is increasingly becoming the norm in many sectors (McChrystal 2014; Walker and Tipples 2013). Film workers labor in difficult conditions with unpredictable remuneration, intermittent employment, few protections, and little to no power to negotiate the terms of contracts. Jackson’s runaway success has exacerbated these issues: in what has commonly become known as the Peter Jackson Effect, young hopefuls will work for free, so professionals feel they have no option but to take the contracts they are offered (Rowlands and Handy 2012). In fact, in line with ‘creative economy’ policy sophistry, Jackson and his state supporters were at pains in the protests to characterize film work as a form of non-labor or play, undertaken out of passion, for pleasure, self-fulfillment, and commitment to the success of the team. Such statements crystallize the argument that scholars have made about the ground-shifting innovation of Jackson’s production model (Thompson 2007): it not only acknowledges, but necessitates and realizes enormous profit from the affective and immaterial labor of a broad national and transnational constituency beyond its waged creatives – the vast fan base who labored relentlessly to hype the films, the New Zealand public, and so on. Here, Jackson used the public buy-in to this model (long-sanctioned by state rhetoric) to undermine the legitimacy of workers’ demands: if everyone was delighted to contribute their creative energies to realize this utopian vision without compensation, what bargaining ground did the unions have? (See Figure 9.1.) At issue for NZAE were particulars such as cancellation fees, liability for personal injury, and rights to residuals; at issue for Jackson, Key, and Time Warner, was the larger question of workers’ freedom of association and their rights to collectively bargain. Jackson and Key dramaturged the affair to thoroughly discredit unions in the public eye, and they presented the contractor status rule as an outright injunction against future industrial action in screen production (even though such an interpretation runs nonsensically against both NZ common law and the provisions of the ILO, which affirm the rights of workers to organize, regardless of ‘labels’) (Nuttall

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Figure 9.1 New Zealand film workers protest the union ‘boycott’ of The Hobbit, October 2010

Stas Kulesh, used by permission, Wiki Commons

2011: 23). Although the ERA amendment applied exclusively to film workers, effectively creating a ‘state of exception’ for the industry, the affair sent a clear message to any union trying to organize transnationally or to engage with a transnationally organized industry: contract labor is the new normal – you are supplicants for your jobs, and as the forces of the state are aligned with those of global capital, you cannot rely on your political rights to guarantee your rights as workers.

PJ’s Magnificent Apparatus If The Hobbit Affair made visible the neoliberal architecture of power structuring NZ’s tourist utopia, the aesthetic of the films themselves tell us a great deal about its virtual architecture, the apparatus that conditions the spatial experience, perception, and conduct of those who inhabit it. The hallmark of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien franchise is, famously, the marriage of old-fashioned, epic storytelling with industry-changing advances in production technology. Where the LOTR was a pioneer in performance capture and CGI techniques, The Hobbit trilogy made its mark with its 3D release in high frame rate (HFR) at 48 frames per second (FPS), an innovation that

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required theaters around the world be upgraded to screen the new films. Just as tourist sites function more generally as laboratories and testing grounds for innovations in governance, labor, and sociality, Jackson’s films are positioned as both harbingers and drivers of epochal transformation in the culture industries. The director is ambitiously manipulating the cinematic apparatus that organizes the relationship between spatial representation, modes of perception and subjectivization, technology, and political economy – an apparatus of which tourism is necessarily a part. Cinema has, historically, been both tourism’s enabler and its competition: from the camera obscura and the panopticon, to stereoscope views, Hales’ Tours, and travelogue actualities, cinema and tourism’s visual technologies emerged in tandem. Imaging generates desire for the elsewhere, and the capacity to capture and commodify it. The cinematic image also stands in virtually for that elsewhere, both conditioning and mimicking the privileged perceptual experience of travel, of vivid motion, visual command, and imaginative flight. That cinema offers only a narrow spectrum of the rewards of travel – visual gratification and spectacular consumption, rather than, say, the embodied encounter with difference – is precisely the point: cinema’s utopic apparatus evolved as part of a specific ideological formation – Euro-American modernity – and produces and serves subjects specific to that formation (Rabinovitz 2012). Jackson’s attempt to change the way the big screen (and, by implication, tourism) works, then, demands our attention as an index of a new formation, and a form-of-life, in the making. I will forward three points here about the formation that The Hobbit’s utopian apparatus gestures toward. First, its dominant aesthetic produces a particular kind of spectator, a mobile, adrenalized, risk-seeking subject attuned to the affective demands of neoliberal life. Second, it recalibrates expectations for realism and presence, with the intention of capturing profit through creating a technological bar to entry, but with the effect of engineering a closer convergence of tourism and cinema such that tourism is increasingly defined by fantasy and narrative frames, extrinsic to socio-cultural space, and mediated by imaging technologies, and that cinema is increasingly oriented toward the effects of kinetic presence rather than psychic transport. And third, it pioneers a new mode of digital vision orientated toward the occupation, penetration, and surveillance of space – a mode that is poised to become the new norm of digitally mediated tourism, consumption, and imaging. First, motion. Filming at 48 FPS, rather than the industry standard 24 FPS, delivers an abundance of visual data, resulting in more richly detailed and precise images, and allowing for swifter camera movement. It also

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solves some of the problems of 3D exhibition (the disorientation or even nausea sometimes experienced by viewers). While variable frame rates were used in special effects and experimental film for much of the twentieth century, the first attempts to introduce HFR into mainstream exhibition were made by David Trumbull in the 1980s. His motives were to better cinematically capture the experience of motion, in what he called ‘liquid realism’: ‘the key was to remove the “distracting” flicker effect in order to smooth out the illusion of motion. With this visual interference removed, cinema images would flow naturalistically into the next, creating a visceral effect of motion, allowing the viewer to feel more mentally involved and physically immersed in the action’ (Turnock 2013: 37). Combined with 3D exhibition, the implications of the contemporary rehabilitation of HFR are both phenomenological and ideological in their refiguration of representational space and interpellation of a mobile subject of perception. HFR 3D presumes ‘a layered, material, yet also mobile and pliable space. It signifies […] the thrills and threats of floating, falling, disorientation, and realignment that we know from blockbuster spectaculars and animation films. As the default value of post-pictorial spatial vision and in-depth sensation in the digital age, 3D would be retooling the semantics of embodied perception’ (Elsaesser 2013: 238). The reorganized medium abandons the grounded observer of traditional perspective: the subject as a fixed point of (visual) knowledge and command is no longer the reigning perceptual model. Instead, 3D HFR film produces a particular kind of spectator, kin to the flexible citizen and mobile subject of the neoliberal imagination, ‘floating, gliding, or suspended’, in perpetual, precipitant motion (238). This mobile subject is one increasingly familiar to tourism, and to NZ tourism in particular where adventure travel (with the lure of bungee jumping, jet boating, and black water rafting) has been a staple since the 1980s. The LOTR films coincided with a brief moment in which TNZ de-emphasized the adventure tourism market, focusing instead on older, wealthier luxury travelers. The 2001-2003 ‘Home of Middle-earth’ campaign borrowed the static panoramas and slow pans of the first trilogy, emphasizing the majesty, scale, and serene beauty of the landscapes it advertised. The 2012-2014 campaign, by contrast, focuses on younger travelers and borrows immersive swoops, and plummeting, penetrating, adrenalized camera movements of the second trilogy, enabled by 3D HFR. The webbased and DVD promotional features position the viewer as following other fans as they follow in the footsteps of the characters, the ultimate adventure travelers, or track the journey of the actors on location, who are pictured as being on one long adventure holiday. ‘I can’t believe this is a job!’ a dwarf

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in heavy prosthetics shouts as he floats down an Otago river in a barrel, followed by a raft of cameras. The campaign is a call to participation and presence rather than contemplation: NZ’s time-worn touristic topoi are reactivated through kinesthetic intensification – what Claudia Bell and John Lyall (2001) call the ‘accelerated sublime’ in which consumption occurs not through pictorial capture but through embodied motion. National space is figured as a playground of sensation and speed, a locus of utopian freedoms of body, affect, and capital. Second: recalibrating realism. Jackson has been a tireless advocate for HFR 3D technology, as he was for CGI and performance capture before it. His aesthetic aim, he claims, is to create more ‘lifelike’, ‘unmediated’, even ‘hyper-real’ cinema. In fact, much of the most compelling footage of The Hobbit (the mountain interiors, the CGI-animated Gollum) is pure fabrication, pure mediation, absent a ‘real’, ‘living’, or ‘unmediated’ referent. This is beside the point: the goal is an intensification of the effect of presence and an attempt to erase the marks of mediation (even though absence and mediation are the ontological signature of the cinematic apparatus), through the technological enhancement and perfection of the image (Roof 2014). This drive puts Jackson’s films into paradoxical competition with the tourism initiative they were supposed to support, tourism being a practice and discourse that privileges bodily presence and unmediated witness. The symptom is an almost hysterical insistence on the reality of NZ’s landscape in the promotional videos on the TNZ website and included with the DVD releases: ‘I took a photo that I sent to some friends, and they refused to believe that it was an actual photograph, that I hadn’t photo-shopped it.’11 ‘At first, you think, wow what a good job they made. But it’s not. It’s real!’12 ‘Its beauty was not lost on us. And the fact that it sort of looked like CGI, kind of looked more perfect than nature. It was just funny, we were looking at mountains, and nobody was going to believe it was real.’13

The digital perfection of reality, hyper-reality, is the experiential norm against which tourism now pits itself, but which also fuels it. To the 11 http://www.newzealand.com/us/feature/real-middle-earth-diaries/. 12 New Zealand: Home of Middle-earth, dir. Peter Jackson, Warner Bros., 2012. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=hsUlHilL0Is. 13 http://www.newzealand.com/us/take-a-flight-through-middle-earth/.

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discourses of the natural sublime and accelerated sublime, The Hobbit added a third: the technological sublime, denoting a phenomenon so perfect or beautiful as to exceed the capacity of both verbal and technological representation, and thus to precipitate a crisis of belief. There was some irony, then, that audiences resisted Jackson’s move to HFR precisely because of its erasure of the marks of cinematic mediation. HFR, with its extraordinary clarity and surfeit of visual information, more closely resembles high-definition television (where higher frame rates are the industry norm) than cinema. Habituated to the dreamy, textured, blur and grain of traditional 24 FPS film, critics who saw the films in 48 FPS sneered at Jackson’s films’ chintzy, ‘oddly theatrical look’ in interiors and unsettling resemblance to sports video in exteriors (McCarthy 2012). Such comments reveal realism as a historically contingent aesthetic technique; the filmic reality effect to which we have become culturally habituated is the effect of 24 FPS. Further, because of the high-cultural imprimatur of film (in comparison to the plebian reputation of television), value has accrued to that effect. For many critics, the first Hobbit film looked too really real, rather than cinematically real: more like being on a film set or even at a live event than a fully realized imaginative world, encountered in the space of representation. The film seemed to expose its own construction, its own apparatus. ‘The movie looks so hyper-real that you see everything that’s fake about it’ (Travers, quoted in Roof 2014: 645), one critic complained. For another, it revealed film itself as an ‘elaborate hoax’ without magic (Laforet 2012). This poses a particular problem for fantasy, but not for tourism. For A.O. Scott (2012) of The New York Times’ HFR had an ‘almost hallucinatory level of clarity’, that ‘robs Middle-earth of some of its misty, archaic atmosphere, turning it into a gaudy high-definition tourist attraction’. While Scott dismissively invokes tourism here as film’s ‘low cultural other’, he points to one of the ramifications of Jackson’s modifications of the film apparatus: the convergence of the ‘real’ of tourism and of cinema. What the deals behind The Hobbit’s production accomplished in politics and economy – the deeper integration of tourism and cinema as interlocking components of the global culture industries – HFR 3D is accomplishing technologically and aesthetically. Tourism appears now as one mediated platform of leisure consumption among others. Despite critical push-back, Jackson’s goal – behind which he is putting all his considerable industry muscle – is to normalize this new perceptual apparatus, ‘to the point that other film experiences look a little primitive’ (quoted in Turnock 2013: 41). If he succeeds in this recalibration of realism,

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Jackson stands to capture profit in the midst of a rapidly democratizing landscape of imaging practices, through creating a technological economy of scale. Few can afford to replicate the production values of Weta Studios – the bar to entry will, at least temporarily, be too high for many competitors. But in helping to change the organization of imaging practices and the perception and conducts of consumers, he is ensuring that his studios’ corner of the market will not remain exclusive for long – bringing me to my third point. Third: remaking image-space. The common wisdom among film industry commentators is that the recent renaissance of 3D is a last-ditch attempt to give theatrical exhibition an edge over other proliferating forms of media consumption, from home-streaming to small-screen viewing. In a recent essay, film historian Thomas Elsaesser presents a powerful counter-narrative: while marking out an exclusive cinematic province in the short term, 3D exhibition will in the longer term establish a ‘new default value of digital vision’ whose effects will be felt on small screens, mobile devices, and other platforms, and in any number of commercial applications, such as home videos, shopping, gaming, or (importantly) tourism. 3D, he argues, ‘should be regarded as part of and symptom for a broader change in our perceptual and sensory default values [including] a different awareness of bodily orientation and physical location. Embedding in layered spaces, navigating multiple temporalities, and interacting with data-rich, simulated, and hybrid environments probably requires redefining what we mean by seeing, by images’ (Elsaesser 2013: 245). Pointing to a century-long history of non-entertainment uses of 3D (in flight training, military surveillance, or medicine, for instance), Elsaesser details the ways the 3D image operates as a medium for controlling and occupying space: ‘nonentertainment uses of 3D imaging constitute a multifaceted appropriation and mapping of any territory whatsoever – on, above, and below ground, in which physical space, deep space, and virtual space are hybridized and matched, stitched together or played off against one other’ (248). The spectatorship associated with 3D, meanwhile, is ‘probing, penetrating, processing and possessing’, where the image is an invitation not to contemplate, but to interact, to mine for information and data. The TNZ website featuring the ‘Home of Middle-earth’ campaign has, in deference to the f ilms themselves, styled itself on this ­perceptual model (albeit in a stripped-down, 2D iteration). Much like a video game or a sophisticated shopping interface, the user is presented with an op­ portunity to penetrate and mine the nation-space of New Zealand/Middleearth. In the avatar of one of Gandalf’s familiars, the giant eagles who

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transport him majestically over Middle-earth, the user swoops over a map of New Zealand with cursor controls, using the supplied icons to hone in on the gleaming hidden treasures of NZ’s landscape, constellated around and superimposed onto the scenes and locations of the movies. Each click pulls up images from the movies and from the site itself, along with narrative information. This hybrid, data-rich, simulated space is as much a virtual stand-in for New Zealand/Middle-earth as an invitation to physically explore it: only the tiniest fraction of tourists can access these isolated locations. But the experience of playing spy, shopper, voyeur, adventurer, treasure seeker in this hyper-commodification and virtualization of national space, is a touristic one nonetheless. And, if Elsaesser is correct, it may be the dominant experience of tourism in the future.

Conclusion As much as the ‘bricks and mortar’ utopias described elsewhere in this volume, a tourist utopia realized in cinematic fantasy and projected over an entire nation imagines – or performs into being – a form-of-life together with the regime of governance that enables it. No less than the magnificent architectural totems of Boten, Macau, or Abu Dhabi, the natural sublimity of the ‘Home of Middle-earth’ and the technological edifice through which it is produced, distributed, and capitalized, is an iconic construction. It superimposes itself on lived socio-cultural and socio-political space, evacuating the claims of history, and of citizen’s quotidian spatial practice. And in their place it offers a vision of freedom, mobility, pleasure and luxury, where capital appears to miraculously blossom from pure ideas, communal fantasy, creatives doing ‘what they love’, and fans and consumers joyfully participating. Like these other tourist utopias, the cinematic utopia is a transient space through which laboring bodies, bodies at leisure, and capital itself can swiftly pass, but it ensures that mobility’s privileges are unequally enjoyed. Like these other spaces, it feeds on the immaterial and affective labor (of tourists, fans, and workers alike), and – as The Hobbit Affair clearly showed – is ruthless in creating the juridical frameworks that enable profit from it to be concentrated, unimpeded, in the hands of transnational elites. Finally, the cinematic utopia also requires that the ground on which it establishes itself (here an entire nation) be construed as an enclave: set apart, on the geopolitical margins, and subject to an encompassing biopolitical and governmental authority that is the joint preserve of state

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and non-state actors, with the power to put states of exception into laws, accepted practices, and constitutional standards. The cinematic utopia, then, poses a challenge to all the liberal norms of sovereignty: popular, cultural, economic, or political. A tourist utopia on the model of Middle-earth, however, also tests the paradigm of the enclave. The cinematic utopia is extensive rather than intensive: as a virtual entity, it extends outside the physical territory of a state, expanding the possibilities for participation in and profit from a tourist resource. It is not set apart from, but laid over the quotidian lifespaces and practices of a nation, permeating and subtly transforming the expectations and values by which they operate. The utopia that is ‘Home of Middle-earth’ promises leisure, play, and luxury, freedom and exhilaration, but also comes with a narrative and ideology, its own brand of sorts: ‘natural’ morality, white supremacy, and imperialist nostalgia. The result is not just spatial misrecognition on the part of the citizenry (Goh 2014), but also ultimately the virtual, albeit partial, privatization of a national commons: certain views, certain places, certain feelings associated with the New Zealand landscape are now indelibly associated with Jackson’s films (property of Time Warner), while others such as Matamata are no longer spaces available for civic contestation (by Māori or others), their meanings now firmly locked down. Harder to grasp, but perhaps the most significant aspect of the cinematic tourist utopia, is its invention of a new aesthetic apparatus fitted to the subjects and forms of post-Fordist life. Every aesthetic articulation, Jacques Rancière (2004) has argued, is a political act, ‘redistributing the sensible’ to make new operations, orders, and arrangements of power imaginable. What politics does Jackson’s Middle-earth aesthetics of acceleration, immersion, surveillance, and recombinance, its new figurings of presence and realism, make imaginable? Rather than looking backward to the ephemeral vistas of world’s fairs or the idealizations of modernist urban planners, New Zealand’s tourist utopia looks forward to the virtual architectures that will establish the horizon not only for future tourism, but also for consumption, entertainment, warfare, and perhaps even government of all kinds.

Works Cited Andrews, Malcolm. 1989. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape, Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800. Aldershot: Scolar Press.

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Arsenault, Amelia H., and Manuel Castells. 2008. ‘The Structure and Dynamics of Global Multi-Media Business Networks’. International Journal of Communication 2: 707-748. Baillie, Russell. “Rules Could Stifle Next Blockbuster,” New Zealand Herald, January 22, 2002. Barker, Martin, and Ernest Mathijs. 2007. ‘Seeing the Promised Land from Afar: The Perception of New Zealand by Overseas The Lord of the Rings Audiences’. In How We Became Middle-earth: A Collection of Essays on The Lord of the Rings, edited by A. Lam and N. Oryshchuk, 107-128. Zollikofen: Walking Tree. Bell, Claudia. 2006. ‘Branding New Zealand: The National Greenwash’. British Review of New Zealand Studies 15: 13-26. Bell, Claudia, and John Lyall. 2001. The Accelerated Sublime: Landscape, Tourism, and Identity. Westport: Praeger. Broun, B., and T. Watkins. 2010. ‘Hobbit Fans Warned We Could Lose It All’. The Dominion Post, 26 October: 1. Campbell, Gordon. 2000. ‘Lord of the Tax Deals’. New Zealand Listener, 21 October: 18-24. Cardy, Tom, and Kirsty Johnston. 2010. ‘Hobbit Looks Headed Overseas’. The Dominion Post, 21  October. http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/4255670/ Hobbit-looks-headed-overseas. Cieply, Michael, and Brooks Barnes. 2012. ‘New Zealand Wants a Hollywood Put on Its Map’ The New York Times, 24 November: A.1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/ business/media/new-zealand-wants-a-hollywood-put-on-its-map.html?_r=0. Davis, Erik. 2001. ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’. Wired, 1 October. http://www.wired. com/2001/10/lotr/. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2013. ‘The “Return” of 3D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty-First Century’. Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2: 217-246. Goh, Robbie B.H. 2014. ‘The Lord of the Rings and New Zealand: Fantasy Pilgrimages, Imaginative Transnationalism, and the Semiotics of the (Ir)real’. Social Semiotics 24, no. 3: 263-282. Green, Nicholas. 1990. The Spectacle of Nature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Haworth, Nigel. 2011. ‘A Political Economy of “The Hobbit” Dispute’. New Zealand Journal of Employment Relations 36, no. 3: 100-109. Itzkoff, Dave. 2010. ‘Labor Bill Promised for ‘Hobbit’ Films Passed’. The New York Times, 20 October: C.2. Laforet, Vincent. 2012. ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Masterclass in Why 48 FPS Fails’. Gizmodo, 19  December. http://gizmodo.com/5969817/ the-hobbit-an-unexpected-masterclass-in-why-48-fps-fails.

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Larner, Wendy, and Maria Butler. 2005. ‘Governmentalities of Local Partnerships: The Rise of a “Partnering State” in New Zealand’. Studies in Political Economy 75: 75-101. Larsen, Gretchen, and Veronica George. 2006. ‘The Social Construction of Destination Image: A New Zealand Film Example’. In Creating Images and the Psychology of Marketing Communication, edited by Lynn R. Kahle and Chung-Hyun Kim, 117-140. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Lawn, Jennifer. 2005. ‘Arts Culture and Heritage’. Social and Cultural Studies 5: 16-34. Löfgren, Orvar. 1999. On Holiday: A History of Vacationing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lury, Celia. 2004. Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy. London: Routledge. McCarthy, Todd. 2012. ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: Review’. The Hollywood Reporter, 3  December. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie/ hobbit-an-unexpected-journey/review/397416. McChrystal, Shae. 2014. ‘Organizing Middle Earth? Collective Bargaining and Film Production Workers in New Zealand’. New Zealand Universities Law Review 26: 104-131. Miller, Toby, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell. 2001. Global Hollywood. London: BFI Publishing. Ministry for Economic Development. 2011. ‘Tourism Portfolio: Briefing for Incoming Minister, December 2011’. http://www.mbie.govt.nz/publications-research/ publications/tourism/bim-tourism.pdf. Morgan, Nigel, and Annette Pritchard. 2002. ‘New Zealand, 100% Pure: The Creation of a Powerful Niche Destination Brand’. The Journal of Brand Management 9, no. 4/5: 335-345. New Zealand Institute of Economic Research. 2002. ‘Scoping the Lasting Effects of The Lord of the Rings’. Report to the New Zealand Film Commission, April. Nuttall, Pam. 2011. ‘“... Where the Shadows Lie”: Confusion, Misunderstanding, and Misinformation about Workplace Status’. New Zealand Journal of Employment Relations 36, no. 3: 73-90. Ong, Aihwa. 2012. ‘Powers of Sovereignty: State, People, Wealth, Life’. Focaal 64: 24-35. Povinelli, Elisabeth A. 1999. ‘Settler Modernity and the Quest for an Indigenous Tradition’. Public Culture 11, no. 1: 19-48. Rabinovitz, Lauren. 2012. Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum. Roof, Judith. 2014. ‘The Actor Who Wasn’t There: Economies of Absence in Virtual Ecologies’. University of Toronto Quarterly 23, no. 3: 625-644.

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Rowlands, Lorraine, and Jocelyn Handy. 2012. ‘An Addictive Environment: New Zealand Film Production Workers’ Subjective Experiences of Project-Based Labour’. Human Relations 65: 677-697. Sassen, Saskia. 1998. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: New Press. Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. New York: A.A. Knopf. Scott, A.O. 2012. ‘Bilbo Begins His Ring Cycle’. The New York Times, 13 December. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/12/14/movies/the-hobbit-an-unexpectedjourney-by-peter-jackson.html. Thompson, Kristin. 2007. The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood. Berkeley: University of California Press. Turnock, Julie. 2013. ‘Removing the Pane of Glass: The Hobbit, 3D High Frame Rate Filmmaking, and the Rhetoric of Digital Convergence’. Film Criticism 37-38, no. 1: 30-59. Tyson, A.F. 2011. ‘A Synopsis of “The Hobbit” Dispute’. New Zealand Journal of Employment Relations 36, no. 3: 5-13. Tzanelli, Rodanthi. 2004. ‘Constructing the “Cinematic Tourist”: The “Sign Industry” of The Lord of the Rings’. Tourist Studies 4: 21-42. Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Venture Taranaki. 2004. ‘Economic Impact Assessment for the Filming of The Last Samurai in Taranaki’. Commissioned by Venture Taranaki in partnership with Investment New Zealand and New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, February. http://www.taranaki.info/admin/data/business/the_last_samurai_eia_report_full_version.pdf. Walker, Bernard, and Rupert Tipples. 2013. ‘The Hobbit Affair: A New Frontier for Unions’. Adelaide Law Review 34: 65-80. Wedde, Ian. 2005. Making Ends Meet: Essays and Talks, 1993-2004. Wellington: Victoria University Press. Werry, Margaret. 2011. The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism, and Race in New Zealand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Werry, Margaret. 2012. ‘Nintendo Museum: Intercultural Performance, Neoliberal Pedagogy, and a Theatre without Actors’. In Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations, edited by Lara Nielsen and Patty Ybarra, 25-41. London: Palgrave. Wilkinson, Kate, 2011. ‘One Law to Rule Them All’. New Zealand Journal of Employment Relations 36, no. 3: 34-36. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Margaret. 2011. ‘Constitutional Implications of “The Hobbit” Legislation’. New Zealand Journal of Employment Relations 36, no. 3: 91-99. Žižek, Slavoj. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham: Duke University Press.

Adam Lampton, used by permission

Figure 10.1  ‘ There is no more outside’: Joana Vasconcelos Valkyrie Octopus installation, mounted above cylindrical aquarium, inside the atrium of the MGM Macau

10 Macau Utopics A Photo Essay

Adam Lampton

Adam Lampton, used by permission

Figure 10.2  The multitude? Tourists on red carpet in the lobby of Broadway Macau

Adam Lampton, used by permission

Figure 10.3 Tourist posing in front of the Fortune Diamond fountain at the Galaxy Resort

Adam Lampton, used by permission

Figure 10.4  The Venetian Macau’s Grand Hall and escalator, with faux ceiling fresco

Adam Lampton, used by permission

Figure 10.5  Hotel corridor labyrinth at Venetian Macau Resort

Adam Lampton, used by permission

Figure 10.6  Eiffel Tower under construction, Parisian Macau resort, c. June 2015

Archipelagoes

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From Dubai to Mount Athos Carving Islands of Fear and Hope Veronica della Dora

The pairing ‘Mount Athos-Dubai’ has an odd, cacophonic sound that brings to mind a series of contrasting images: on the one hand, the largest Christian Orthodox monastic enclave in the world, a 50-km peninsula in northern Greece hosting twenty Byzantine monasteries and almost 2,000 monks of different nationalities; on the other, the largest and most spectacular business and leisure hub in the Gulf, with a cosmopolitan population of almost 2 million, 83 percent of whom are expats; a former coastal village that, having ‘learnt from Las Vegas’, has become the ‘prototype of the new post-global city’ (Davis 2007: 52). On the one hand is a majestic 2,033-meter-high peak known also as the Holy Mountain in the Orthodox world since the tenth century (see Figure 11.1); on the other, a group of brand new artificial islands hosting unholy gated communities and five-star hotels, or simply on sale for private development (see Figure 11.2). Figure 11.1  View of the western slope of Mount Athos

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Figure 11.2  Palm Jumeirah

Wikimedia

Mount Athos is sacred space par excellence, while Dubai’s artificial islands are commodified places (and ‘tourist utopias’) par excellence. Mount Athos embodies a spiritual tradition that has lasted for more than a thousand years; it is often narrated as a living relic of Byzantium, as a fragment of the past, as a ‘fossil with flesh’. By contrast, the artificial islands of Dubai have no past and are conceived of as spaces of pure futurity. They are built only to be shaped and reshaped, tailored to tourists’ fickle tastes and capitalism’s phantasmagoric fantasies. Mount Athos has long been deemed a naturalistic oasis. Forbidding terrain, geographic isolation, absence of grazing animals and an environmentally friendly monastic way of life have all contributed to the preservation of ancient endemic species and attracted botanists for nearly five centuries (della Dora 2008). By contrast, Dubai’s islands are pure artifice, built by dredging the sand from the ocean floor, and fiercely attacked by environmentalists for disrupting fragile sea ecosystems. Dubai and Mount Athos offer only contrasts: the permanence of rock and the ephemerality of sand; the harmonious continuity of prayer and the volatile discontinuities of real estate fluctuations; the monks’ renunciation of personal possessions and the investors’ relentless accumulation of private property and individual notoriety; the harmony of ancient ecological balances and the hubris of twenty-first-century capitalism. Put simply, what does a monastic enclave have to do with simulated tourist utopias? What do tourist utopias have to do with monasticism? Perhaps little. Maybe nothing. And yet, the shared self-enclosures of these two so different kinds

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of spaces uncannily point to each other. They also seem to point to broader, more pervasive imaginative geographies. The keyword here is ‘separation’ – separation from the world, separation from society, separation from the everyday, separation from the self. This chapter uses these two extreme spaces to interrogate such imaginative geographies. I take Dubai’s artificial islands as the prototype of the tourist utopia; and I take Mount Athos as their opposite, a mirror reflecting the failures of the world of which these islands are part and stand for, and as an alternative to that world.

Islands and Islanding Separation from society is a precondition for monastic life. Separation is necessary to free one’s mind from worldly distractions; it is necessary to achieve spiritual quietness, to turn one’s gaze inward. Separation can be attained geographically. Since at least the fourth century, Christian solitaries have left the inhabited urban or suburban world for the desert, the wilderness, the periphery (Endsjø 2008). Separation, however, can also be attained through physical boundaries. Setting a boundary is the primary act of separation: the wall of a monastery, but also the precinct of the Mount Athos peninsula, which is de facto regarded as a single large monastery delimited by the sea and a land boundary demarcated by a wall (see Figures 11.3 and 11.4). Within these boundaries an internal rule is implemented. Mount Athos’ twenty monasteries are all coenobitic. They are organized communities in which monks follow a very strict program of intensive prayer and manual labor with only few hours of sleep, they pay total obedience to an abbot, and they own no private possessions (for all the goods belong to the monastery). Separation is also a precondition for any social experiment and dream of escapism. For Guy Debord (1970), the society of spectacle refers to the way that capital has inserted itself into every relation, creating a social marked by relentless separation. Yet ironically, separation is also a primary component of any utopian scheme (Jameson 2009). Such detachment finds its most obvious geographical expression in the self-enclosed shape of the island. Islands have long haunted the Western geographical imagination – from Plato’s Atlantis to Thomas More’s Utopia, from mythical islands in the Atlantic, anticipating geographical discoveries, to Pacific islands envisaged as new paradises during eighteenth-century explorations (Gillis 2004; Segal 2012). The world, however, has never been so full of islands as it is today. Increasing numbers of private islands are now available for purchase. Dedicated

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Figure 11.3  Aerial view of Docheiariou Monastery, Mount Athos

I.M. Docheiariou archives, used by permission

web pages feature selections of Caribbean islands in all shapes, sizes, and prices, alongside Greek clad-covered islets put on sale to help the country weather the financial crisis (Private Islands Online n.d.; Sheller 2009). Profiting from the crisis, a Qatari emir recently purchased a lot of six islands in the Ionian Sea for €8.5 million. The purchase was said to be the largest private investment in Greece. ‘The first island, Oxia, initially came with a price tag of 7 million Euros before its Greek-Australian owners agreed to let it go for just under 5 million Euros’. Others were sold for €3.5 million (Smith 2013). More significantly, the past few decades have witnessed an increasing proliferation of ‘islands on the land’. Gated communities, tourist villages, and mega shopping malls have become ubiquitous features of twenty-first-century landscapes, from Los Angeles to Mumbai (Jackson

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Figure 11.4  The peninsula of Mount Athos photographed from the ISS

Commander Valery Korzun, used by permission

2010). Furthermore, new islands are also rapidly emerging from the sea, as if the world had run out of space. Dubai’s artificial islands are probably the most spectacular example of these spaces. But they are not unique. Similar projects have been implemented (or announced) in other parts of the Gulf and in other parts of the world (Jackson and della Dora 2009). Islands, it seems, have become emblematic features of the new geographies shaped by neoliberalism (Sidaway 2007). These spaces look inward. They are conceived for private profit and exclusive pleasure. Yet, they ultimately speak of delusion and anxiety: they give up the world to create their own safe, privatized, illusory microcosms. Islands are the favorite sites for loss and recovery, for visions of the past and of the future (Gillis 2004). Islands, or rather ‘islanding’ (that is, thinking by means of islands), does not only characterize a social condition, but also our contemporary relationship to nature. Wilderness is no longer perceived and experienced as a threatening unbounded terra incognita, but as a precarious archipelago of threatened parks, protected areas, and natural oases; as fragile islands on the land, as the vestiges of a lost world to be preserved from the evils of modernity. Whether carved out from the ‘empty’ sea surface, or from the crowded oceans of the ‘planet of slums’ (Davis 2006), these insular spaces present themselves as the last ‘protected areas’, as the ultimate retreats from a world perceived as

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polluted, degenerated, and dangerous, as an escape from the very harm humans have created.

The Palms and The World Dubai’s artificial islands are perhaps the most extreme fulfillment of such ‘insular’ vision. The country, and in particular Dubai emirate (which boasts only 5 percent of Abu Dhabi’s oil resources and lower petrodollar incomes than the other neighboring emirates), is struggling to transform its economy from fossil fuel export into tourism and finance. Islands have thus been constructed as part of a larger urban program aimed at creating ‘superlative’ tourist attractions and landmarks (including the world’s highest tower, the only seven-star hotel, an indoor ski slope in the desert, etc.) and enticing foreign investment. The ‘island boom’ was thus encouraged by a recent change in the law making it possible for foreigners to buy property on freehold ownership (Ouis 2011: 60). Engineered as the new ‘cultural icons’ of a city in search of new ways to reinvent itself in the global environment, Dubai’s artif icial locales include two palm-shaped islands and a world-map-shaped archipelago (see Figure 11.5). The first of them, Palm Jumeirah, was completed in 2006. Other projects were delayed or halted with the 2008 global financial crisis, with property’s prices falling 58 percent within less than five years. A larger palm, Jebel Ali, for example, is still under construction, whereas a third palm, Deira, originally designed to accommodate a population of 1.7 million by 2020, was initiated but later remodeled into a much more modest ‘Deira Island’. The World is an archipelago of private artificial islands arranged in the shape of a world map located 4 kilometers off the coast of Dubai. It is literally a cartographic utopia; a collection of potential miniature paradises available for cash; miniature worlds to be possessed and shaped according to personal dreams and visions. Dredging of these islands started in 2003, but, as with the Palms, work was suspended in 2009 due to the effects of the crisis, leaving the archipelago with only one ‘colonized’ island (a show home – see Figure 11.6). The following year The World was reported to be sinking back into the sea (even though this was denied by the developer and the government). By July 2012, a second island (Lebanon) was developed and used for private corporate events and public parties. Up to today, all the other islands remain uninhabited.

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Figure 11.5  Dubai’s artificial islands

Google Earth

Figure 11.6  Showcase island in ‘The World’, Dubai

http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/10/dubai-enormous-world-artificial.html

In spite of delays and failures, The World continues to be marketed to private investors as an opportunity to build their ‘own little dream world’,

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a self-enclosed cartographic world set aside from the surrounding world, and yet shaping a new paradigm to inhabit the world: ‘The World reinvents the earth and offers the ultimate in privacy and exclusivity’ (The World Islands – Dubai n.d.). A peculiarity of these islands is that they can be seen in their entirety only from above. The World implies a dialectic relationship between an elevated observation perch and the sea surface; a panoptic structure akin to Mount Athos and its peak overseeing the whole peninsula. Yet, the islands of Dubai require a new type of godlike viewer; not a fit pilgrim-mountaineer, but the millionaire enjoying a bird’s-eye view from his private helicopter or seven-star hotel window, the tourist in flight approaching Dubai’s International Airport, or standing on the observation deck of the tower; or, more commonly, an increasing global population of Google Earth armchair travelers navigating cityscapes in search of ‘new wonders’. Visibility is produced and mediated through new economies and technologies of space. Ironically, Dubai itself is invisible from much of The World archipelago. The most expensive islands are those that face the open ocean, away from Dubai’s emerging skyline. The rationale is that exclusivity demands as complete a visible separation as possible; in other words, the illusion of separation. The ultimate backdrop of this separatist lifestyle is one constructed without reference to an extant world. Apparently, a photograph from Dubai without an iconic backdrop is today the most sought after experience in the Emirate. ‘Dubai without Dubai’ (Bouman, Khoubrou, and Koolhaas 2007: 276). Strange hybrids of sand and technology, these islands muddle traditional definitions of and approaches to nature (Ouis 2011). They are also marketed as social experiments ‘reconfiguring the world’; as places offering a lifestyle that combines leisure with fortressing; ‘community living’ with protection from perceived external threats. A recent advert of Palm Jumeirah properties proclaimed: ‘Community living is the trend of the moment, with people all over the world relocating to gated or managed communities. [...] People move towards community living for various reasons: safety and security, leisure and recreation facilities, convenience and exclusivity’ (http://www.propertyfinder.ae/en/rent/villa-for-rent-dubai-palm-jumeirah-1256035.html?img/0).

Mount Athos That the exclusivity of these privatized utopias demands separation and exclusion is no novelty. Thomas More’s Utopia was also an artificial

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island. Its king, Utopus, cut it off from the mainland through a canal so that its inhabitants could attain civic perfection (More 1965). The story was inspired by pre-Christian Athos. According to Herodotus, after the famous shipwreck occurred off Athos’ stormy point in 492 BC, Xerxes, the king of the Persians, decided to cut a canal on the neck of the peninsula, in order to remove the need for its circumnavigation and the repetition of a similar disaster (Herodotus 1987: 425). The canal collapsed soon after its excavation, leaving no visible trace. From temporary island, Athos returned to its original peninsular status. Since it became populated by Christian hermits, however, Athos has been treated as an island ‘out of this world’. The first testimonies of monastic life on Athos date back only to the ninth century. However, it is believed that the first Christian hermits were already reaching its shores at least a century earlier, seeking a place in which to conduct a quiet solitary life, and possibly escape iconoclastic persecution. They were attracted by the peninsula precisely because of its extreme seclusion. Saint Athanasius, the founder of the first coenobitic monastery on Athos in 963 AD, explained how he had deliberately selected one of the remotest and most difficult sites on the peninsula for his monastery: The seashore along the mountain was precipitous and without any harbours on both sides, to the north, that is, and to the south, for more than eighty miles. [...] The islands in the sea, Lemnos, Imbros, Thasos, and the rest are a great distance away. Because of this, when winter comes, a ship is unable to sail from the mountain to the mainland to procure necessary provisions or to sail back from there to the mountain. It cannot find any sort of anchorage because the seashore on both sides provides no shelter. On the other hand, there is absolutely no way for a person to transport his own provisions by dry land, partly because the road is so long, and partly because the mountain is practically impassable for pack animals. From the mainland to the tip of the mountain facing the rising sun, where the sea forms a deep gulf, and where the Lavra is built, is a distance, more or less, of a hundred miles. (Athanasius 2000: 253)

Late Byzantine authors described the peninsula as a paradise on earth; Western Renaissance mapmakers portrayed it in an oval insular shape, tenuously attached to the mainland through a thin isthmus, or even totally encircled by the sea (see Figure 11.7). Modern and contemporary maps continue to mark the invisible presence of Xerxes’ canal (della Dora 2011). And, more significantly, today local residents and visitors are allowed to

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Figure 11.7 Mount Athos portrayed as an island in Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s Liber Insularum Archipelagi, dating from c. 1430

Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana lat. X.215, used by permission

enter the peninsula only by ferry from the border town of Ouranoupoli. The land border is closed and patrolled by the local police, making the peninsula, in effect, an island. Access to Mount Athos is strictly regulated, thus preserving the peninsula from mass tourism and allowing the monks to pursue their vocation free of distractions. Women have not been admitted for the past thousand years and male visitors need to be in possession of a special permission. Up to 120 Orthodox Christian pilgrims are allowed each day, whereas foreigners of other religious affiliations are limited to 10 per day. Standard permissions are restricted to three days, during which all visitors receive free hospitality by the monasteries. As opposed to Dubai’s artificial islands, which are created primarily to attract tourists, Mount Athos has been striving for decades to ‘defend’ itself from tourism. Exclusiveness, Graham Speake notes, is essential to its very survival. ‘If it were to be compromised, there is no doubt that within a very short space of time the only surviving holy mountain would suffer the same fate as [...] countless other monasteries in Greece and the Middle East that are now either museums of Byzantine art or deserted ruins’ (Speake 2002: 265). While obeying similar logics of enclosure and separation, Mount Athos and other such spaces incarnate the antithesis of Dubai’s artificial islands. They enshrine values opposite to those spaces and ways of life that stand in stark contrast to the logics that underpin contemporary Western society:

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spirituality as opposed to worldliness; free hospitality and the renunciation of private property as opposed to capitalist accumulation; continuous prayer and celibacy as opposed to leisure and entertainment; physical labor as opposed to relaxation; preservation of tradition as opposed to fetishization of permanent change; modesty as opposed to glamour; and so on. As such, Athos has been repeatedly perceived as a ‘fragile island’ threatened by secularization, by tourism, and by modernity in general – in other words, by the very forces that shape Dubai’s artificial islands. In the first half of the twentieth century many Western visitors to Athos predicted that the peninsula would become a ‘tourist utopia’, and that its monasteries would turn into luxury resorts and casinos. ‘In all probability’, wrote eclectic traveler and writer Richard Halliburton in 1936, Mount Athos, with its unspoiled and indescribably beautiful scenery, its marble mountain and its purple seas, will develop into one of the most ideal summer resorts in Europe. Think of the girls who would come here for romance! [...] And as for that particular skyrocketing monastery where for nearly a week I prayed all night and pursued celibacy and piety and poverty all day – I’ll not be surprised to see, before many Junes have passed, a rash of posters in every travel bureau, with the behest: ‘Bring your brides to Simonopetra for that heavenly honeymoon!’ (Halliburton 1937: 208)

Similar forebodings intensified in the 1960s, with numbers of monks in steady decline. Half a century later, however, the exact opposite has happened and Athos has witnessed a huge revival over the past three decades. Numbers of monks have almost doubled, whereas numbers of visitors have grown exponentially. In the early 1970s no more than 3,000 of them came each year. By the mid-1980s that number had multiplied by ten. Ten years later, as many as 40,000 entry permits were issued each year and the trend has since then continued to increase (Speake 2002: 232). Why is this the case? Is the proliferation of simulated and spectacular tourist utopias generating a new demand for alternative types of spaces, like Athos and its monasteries? Are these spaces actually improbable models for tourist utopias, or is their resurgence simply a symptom of the failures of modernity?

‘Islands of the Mind’ Sara Lipton, a medievalist, recently noted an increasing popularity of monastery retreats in North America. She sees this as a paradoxically

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neoliberal fashion. The monastery, she argues, is seen as the antithesis of the current neoliberal world, and the retreat is seen as a flight from that world – the ultimate antidote to twenty-first-century materialism. A closer look at contemporary practice, however, suggests that this is more familiar than one might think: security through fortification, order through homogeneity, exclusivity through selectivity, tradition through nostalgia. This observation demonstrates the medieval affectations of neoliberalism (Alsayyad and Roy 2006; see also Simpson, chapter four in this volume). Americans booking weekend retreats, Lipton notes, are after silence, after a moment of stillness. Many of them are not Christians. Others are not even religious. ‘The need so many people feel for monastic retreat’, she concludes, ‘highlights the failures of our neoliberal society to bring the promised happiness. The historicism of monasticism counters the rootlessness and novelty of contemporary life; its silence is a protest against the hegemony of information technology’ (Lipton 2007: 249); its routine a way to slow down and reconnect with the rhythms of nature and the cosmos. However, by going to these kinds of retreats, Lipton claims, many modern Americans do not negate their current way of life; they simply replicate it in a different setting – through comfort and isolation; individualism and lack of community; short-term commitment. The motivations and typologies of visitors to Mount Athos span a wider range. Some fall in the category described by Lipton; many others do not. Some of them are short-term visitors after their own version of Eden. Artists, trekkers, and environmentalists look back at Athos as an insular remnant of a greener world, as environmental destruction encroaches. Emblematically, since 2012 the villages near Athos’ land boundary have become theaters of violent protests against the devastation of hectares of forested land produced by a Canadian gold mining company in the surrounding area, for many ‘a symbol of Greece’s willingness these days to accept any development, no matter the environmental cost’ (Daley 2013). Likewise, historians and scholars of religion are ‘anxious to experience this last surviving fragment of Byzantium’ (Speake 2002: 234). Others see in the monastic genre de vie, including organic farming and eating habits, a recipe for physical well-being – the authors of a recent cooking book titled The Mount Athos Diet: The Mediterranean Plan to Lose Weight, Feel Younger and Live Longer, for example, promise their readers ‘the secrets of good nutrition from this ancient community’ (Storey et al. 2014). These visitors all share a collective sense of longing for a lost past and the belief that a vestige of this idealized past (whether natural, cultural, or spiritual) survives within the precinct of Athos’ quasi-insular space – in other words,

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that past time can be territorialized and physically experienced within well-defined boundaries. If the islands of Dubai are utopian (or dystopian) spaces of futurity, then, in the Western geographical imagination Athos is a place for nostalgia. Yet, as Tonya K. Davidson, Ondine Park, and Rob Shields (2011) observe, these two dimensions can coexist. Memories and hopes are often simultaneous; they can converge in the same place – and place does often hold a transformative function. The largest category of visitors to Mount Athos is that of Orthodox pilgrims heading to the Holy Mountain and other monasteries in mainland Greece on a regular basis and for exclusively spiritual reasons. Unlike the American retreaters described by Lipton, however, these are mostly suffering individuals with a long-term commitment: parents of drug-addicted teenagers, the terminally ill, couples who have lost their only child, victims of domestic violence or depression, drug addicts who have decided to change their lives, ordinary people vexed by everyday problems exacerbated by the financial crisis, or simply individuals searching for direction in life. Their experience of the monastery is not ‘aesthetic’ but deeply participatory. It generally involves attendance at church services (especially on major feast days), veneration of icons and relics, confession, and close interaction with a spiritual father (with whom the pilgrim discusses his personal problems) and often with other monks and pilgrims (Gothóni 1998: 38). The monastery to which they are affiliated thus becomes a point of encounter and the center for broader networking – a reference point, as well as a sort of ‘extended family’. Mari-Johanna Rahkala-Simberg (2012) usefully refers to such visitors as ‘everyday pilgrims’, that is, not seekers for a one-off life-changing experience (though visitors to Athos include some of these as well [Andriotis 2009]), but habitual visitors after continued spiritual support or ‘maintenance’ (Ron 2012). The social function of Athos and other Orthodox monastic centers has a long history that stretches back to Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, from pilgrimage to living saints in the Egyptian desert of early Christianity (Frank 2000) to the proliferation of holy mountains in the medieval period. Scattered across the Byzantine Empire, from Asia Minor to Greece, the latter operated as important centers of spiritual resource, pilgrimage, and endowment. They were initially attributed an aura of holiness because of the presence of charismatic ascetics and saints (who dwelled in caves, wooden shelters, and even on the top of pillars), and later because of the establishment of organized monastic communities. Once a mountain was established as ‘holy’, faithful from different strata of society (including

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peasants, generals, and even emperors) sought the prayers and advice of its elders and monks (Talbot 2001; Greenfield 2006). In a sense, holy mountains were ‘islands on the land’, ‘spaces of exception’ inhabited by exceptional people. While most of these holy mountains vanished with the Ottoman occupation, Mount Athos, which since the tenth century had became known as the Holy Mountain par excellence (a title which it continues to retain), managed to maintain its special semi-autonomous status in exchange for the payment of an annual tribute to the Porte and thus continued to survive. Throughout history its survival and revival have depended precisely on its ‘insularity’, that is on its ability to control external forces. As Speake observes, this is particularly true of the last century: The monks succeeded in fending off the attacks of ill-informed politicians who saw the Mountain as a cheap way of boosting the country’s tourist industry. They resisted suggestions that they needed reform – that they should become more ecumenically minded, that they should adopt European time, that they should do something about their economy, sell off their treasures, invest more heavily in timber industry, build proper roads, even admit women. Athos needed none of these things. And more to the point, Athos was once again responding to a need that clearly existed, a need for a radical alternative to the fast-growing, fast-moving secularization of modern society in the outside world. (Speake 2002: 194)

As such, unlike neoliberal utopias aiming at invisibility, Athos is perceived by many Orthodox faithful as a spiritual landmark and a beacon of hope. Rather than a utopian escape, it is experienced as an elevated platform from which to put life into perspective and learn to face it in a new light. For the thousands of pilgrims who visit Athos every year, René Gothóni argues, ‘pilgrimage is the first step in the direction of filling emptiness with meaning and depth, transforming gloomy melancholia into open-eyed enthusiasm’ (1998: 39). If Dubai’s artificial islands are built to be transformed, Athos is there ‘to transform’. In this sense, the Holy Mountain is not so much an island or an archipelago of islandlike monasteries, as a peninsula separated and yet at the same time tied to society in different ways. By setting up walls and boundaries, the monks ultimately keep alive an alternative to modernity that transcends those same boundaries. Likewise, their perceived ‘immobility’ (in space and time) perhaps offers a counter-imaginary to tourists’ anxious circular mobilities (‘tour’ is derived from the Latin word tornus, a tool for describing a circle; the notion of a

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circuitous journey ending back to its starting point is in fact the essence of tourism [Smith 1992]).

Conclusions: Tourist Utopias Setting Dubai’s artificial islands side by side with Mount Athos highlights two fundamental dimensions that underpin modern experience and its imaginative geographies: on the one hand, anxiety for a rapidly changing present and an uncontrollable future, and thus a progressive retreat into privatized fortressed spaces (such as gated communities); on the other, nostalgia for the past and a continuous and circuitous search for authenticity, which is likewise imagined to be found in self-bounded spaces different from their outside (such as natural parks and protected heritage sites). At the core of the modern geographical imagination is therefore a tension between Eden and Utopia. John R. Gillis (2004) makes a useful distinction between the two. Both, he argues, are spaces of desire, and yet they come in different shapes and enshrine different expectations. According to the American historian, terrestrial paradises represent the ‘no longer’, whereas constructed utopias represent the ‘not yet’. Eden is a place that stands for what has been lost to corrupted mankind; utopia is a non-place for rational redemption. Like Mount Athos, biblical Eden was a God-ordained verdant garden. Renaissance utopias, by contrast, were man-made ideal cities, technological spaces whose geometrical patterns were made visible only through the map. Like Dubai’s artificial islands, utopias presupposed the cartographic gaze of a godlike viewer (Cosgrove and Fox 2010). If Eden was God’s creation lost to humans, utopias position the human subject in God’s hierarchical place. The modern Western geographical imagination lingers between these two poles. In both cases, the paradigm is that of the island, or rather, using Gillis’ phrase, the ‘island of the mind’. ‘What is irresistible’, Gillis argues, ‘is not real islands, but the idea of the island. […] Western culture not only thinks about islands, but thinks with them. […] Western thought has always preferred to assign meaning to nearly bounded, insulated things, regarding that which lies between as a void’ (2004: 1-2). According to Bruno Latour (1993), a characteristic of modernity is ‘purification’, that is, the continuous effort to create discrete ontological zones (by separating, for example, ‘nature’ from ‘technology’ or ‘culture’) – in other words, ‘conceptual islands’. Likewise, tourism is an inherently modern phenomenon in that it entails a continuous search for authenticity, for an ‘other’ radically different from the ‘self’ (whether be it natural, historical, or cultural).

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While Dubai’s Palms and The World intrigue and appeal to the popular imagination as utopian (or dystopian) hybrids of nature and technology and invite the (post)tourist to give up any search for authenticity, Athos intrigues and appeals modern tourist imagination as a ‘purified’ premodern space, a place in which ‘time has stopped’. Thus, while accepted, even welcomed, by the monks and generally passed unobserved by ‘everyday pilgrims’ focused on personal problems and spiritual matters, ‘traces of modernity’ on the peninsula tend to be seen as ‘out of place’ by tourists. Technologies and modern gadgets in general have always been despised by ‘modern’ external observers as dissonances. ‘Once landed [on Athos] you are quit of modernity’, observed Frederick William Hasluck, librarian and assistant director of the British School at Athens in the early twentieth century. ‘There are few reminders of the outside world: tea, tinned fish, and even condensed milk and picture postcards, but these are incidental anachronisms’ (1924: 81). Nowadays many Western visitors remain ‘disappointed’ or puzzled that monks use electrical light, speedboats, and cell phones (Vitaliev 2012). And one might wonder why: are these visitors after a lost sense of authenticity? Is Athos the ultimate tourist destination? Is it the last Eden of Western imagination? Insularity is a mental construct, before being a geographical object. Electricity, speedboats, and cell phones are reminders of modernity and the world tourists decided to leave at home. As such they disturb the ‘purified’ image the tourist is after. Yet, today nowhere is an island, even Mount Athos. But we like islands; we need islands; we find them reassuring – even if they are more imagined constructions of our mind than they are apprehendable geographic locales. An American blogger writes: A few of the many monkish incongruities we have noticed as we travel the Mountain: a monk driving a backhoe, a monk operating a forklift, and – most curious of all! – a monk at the helm of a speedboat. Or are these incongruities? It has been difficult to understand how, or why, the fathers have begun to allow so much of the ‘world’ to intrude into their life here. While readily acknowledging the problems this poses, one monk with whom we discussed the question observed that historically the technological ‘level’ of Athos has been more or less ‘up to’ that of the outside world, the only real exception being during the period of decline from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, when the Mountain became, unintentionally, more of a Byzantine museum than a living community. (Cutsinger 2010)

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Works Cited Alsayyad, Nezer, and Ananya Roy. 2006. ‘Medieval Modernity: On Citizenship and Urbanism in a Global Era’. Space and Polity 10, no. 1: 1-20. Andriotis, Konstantinos. 2009. ‘Sacred Site Experience: A Phenomenological Study’. Annals of Tourism Research 36, no. 1: 64-84. Athanasius. 2000. ‘Typikon of Athanasios the Athonite for the Lavra Monastery’, translated by G. Dennis. In Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika and Testaments, edited by J. Thomas and A. Constantinides Hero, 245-270. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Bouman, O., A. Khoubrou, and Rem Koolhaas, eds. 2007. Volume / Al Manakh. Amsterdam: Stichting Archis. Coleman, Simon, and Mike Crang. 2004. ‘Grounded Tourists, Travelling Theory’ In Tourism: Between Place and Performance, edited by Simon Coleman and Michael Crang, 1-17. Oxford: Berghahn. Cosgrove, Denis, and W. Fox. 2010. Photography and Flight. London: Reaktion. Cutsinger, James S. 2010. ‘The Pilgrimage to Mount Athos (Part 5)’. Agion Oros – Mount Athos blog, 23  June. http://holymountain-agionoros.blogspot. com/2010/06/pilgrimage-to-mount-athos-by-professor.html. Daley, Suzanne. 2013. ‘Greece Sees Gold Boom, but at a Price’. The New York Times, 12 January. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/world/europe/seeking-revenuegreece-approves-new-mines-but-environmentalists-balk.html?_r=0. Davidson, Tonya K., Ondine Park, and Rob Shields, eds. 2011. Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Davis, Mike. 2007. ‘Sand, Fear and Money in Dubai’. In Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, 48-68. New York: The New Press. Debord, Guy. 1970. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. della Dora, Veronica. 2008. ‘Domesticating High Places: Mount Athos: Botanical Garden of the Virgin’. In High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice, and Science, edited by Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora, 105-125. London: I.B. Tauris. della Dora, Veronica. 2011. Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place from Homer to World War II. Charlottesville: Virginia University Press. Endsjø, Dag Øistein. 2008. Primordial Landscapes, Incorruptible Bodies: Desert Asceticism and the Christian Appropriation of Greek Ideas on Geography, Bodies and Immortality. New York: Peter Lang.

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Frank, Georgia. 2000. The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gillis, John R. 2004. Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gothóni, René. 1998. ‘How Mount Athos Becomes the Holy Mountain of Athos: The Experiences of Athos Pilgrims. Temenos 34: 33-40. Greenfield, R. 2006. ‘Galesion: Opposition, Disagreement and Subterfuge in the Creation of a Holy Mountain’. Paper presented at the Twenty-first International Congress of Byzantine Studies, London, 21-26 August. Halliburton, Richard. 1937. Seven League Boots. New York: Garden City Publishing Co. Hasluck, F.W. 1924. Athos and Its Monasteries. London, Kegan Paul Trench and Co. Herodotus. 1987. The History. Translated by D. Greene. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jackson, Mark. 2010. ‘Live the Way the World Does: Imagining the Modern in the Spatial Returns of Kolkata and Calcutta’. Space and Culture 13: 32-53. Jackson, Mark, and Veronica della Dora. 2009. ‘“Dreams So Big Only the Sea Can Hold Them”: Man-made Islands as Cultural Icons, Travelling Visions, and Anxious Spaces’. Environment and Planning A 41, no. 9 : 2086-2104. Jameson, Fredric. 2009. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso. 2009. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lipton, S. 2007. ‘Monastery Chic: The Ascetic Retreat in a Neoliberal Age’. Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, 241-250. New York: The New Press. More, Thomas. 1965. Utopia. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ouis, Pernilla. 2011. ‘“And an Island Never Cries”: Cultural and Societal Perspectives on the Mega Development of Islands in the United Arab Emirates’. Macroengineering Seawater in Unique Environments: Arid Lowlands and Water Bodies Rehabilitation, edited by Viorel Badescu and Richard B. Cathcart, 59-75. Berlin: Springer. Private Islands Online. N.d. website. www.privateislandsonline.com. Rahkala-Simberg, M.J. 2012. ‘On an Everyday Pilgrimage: A Suburban Greek Convent as a Pilgrimage Site’. International Journal of Tourism Anthropology 2, no. 2: 94-107. Ron, Amos. 2012. ‘Revisiting the Holy Land and Spiritual Maintenance’. Lecture delivered at the Loch Lectures: Spirituality and the Life Cycle, Ouranoupolis, Halkidiki, Greece, 25-26 May. Segal, Howard. 2012. Utopias: A Brief History from Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Sheller, Mimi. 2009. ‘Infrastructures of Imagined Islands: Software, Mobilities and the Architecture of Caribbean Paradise’. Environment and Planning A 41: 1386-1403. Sidaway, James. 2007. ‘Enclave Space: A New Metageography of Development’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39, no. 3: 331-339. Smith, Helena. 2013. ‘Qatari Emir Buys Six Greek Islands for a Song’. The Guardian, 4 March. Smith, Valene. 1992. ‘Introduction: The Quest in the Guest’. Annals of Tourism Research 19, no. 1: 1-17. Speake, Graham. 2002. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press. Storey, Richard, Sue Todd, and Lottie Storey. 2014. The Mount Athos Diet: The Mediterranean Plan to Lose Weight, Feel Younger and Live Longer. London: Vermilion. Talbot, Alice Mary. 2001. ‘Les saintes montagnes à Byzance’. In Le sacré et son inscription dans l’espace à Byzance et en Occident, edited by M. Kaplan, 263-276. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Urry, John. 2002. The Tourist Gaze. London, Sage. Vitaliev, Vitali. 2012. ‘Mobile Monks and the Modernisation of Mount Athos’. Engineering and Technology Magazine 7, no. 5. http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2012/05/after-all.cfm. World Islands – Dubai, The. N.d. Private Islands Online website. www.private­ islandsonline.com/islands/the-world-islands-dubai.



About the Authors

Veronica della Dora is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research interests and publications span historical and cultural geography, the history of cartography, and Byzantine studies, with a specific focus on landscape, sacred space, and the geographical imagination. She is the author of Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place from Homer to World War II (University of Virginia Press, 2011), Landscape, Nature and the Sacred in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Mountain: Nature and Culture (Reaktion, 2016). Keller Easterling is an architect, writer, and professor at Yale University. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity. Another recent book, Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse. Other books include: Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (MIT Press, 2005) and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT Press, 1999). Yasser Elsheshtawy is Associate Professor of Architecture at the United Arab Emirates University, where he runs the Urban Research Lab. He has been appointed as curator for the UAE National Pavilion for the upcoming Venice Architecture Biennale (2016). Elsheshtawy’s scholarship focuses on urbanization in developing societies, informal urbanism, urban history, and environment-behavior studies. He authored Dubai: Behind an Urban Spectacle (Routledge, 2010). Additionally, he edited The Evolving Arab City (Routledge, 2008) and Planning Middle Eastern Cities (Routledge, 2004). He has been invited to present his research at numerous international institutions such as Columbia University, Harvard Graduate School of Design, the ETH/Zurich, the Louvre Auditorium/Paris, and the Canadian Center of Architecture/Montreal. Daniel P.S. Goh is Associate Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. He is a comparative-historical sociologist who specialises in the study of state formation, post-colonialism, urbanism, and religion. His publications on urbanism and culture have appeared in various international journals and edited volumes. His recent book is the edited volume Worlding Multiculturalism: The Politics of Inter-Asian Dwelling (Routledge, 2015). His full profile can be viewed at www.danielpsgoh.com.

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Benjamin K. Hodges is an anthropologist with research and artistic interests in visual culture and digital media. He earned his PhD in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he wrote a dissertation on Bulgaria in the early 2000s. He now works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Macau in Macao SAR, China. His research, teaching, and artistic work span emergent and historic approaches to imaging. This often entails a particular focus on the practices and pedagogy behind 3D animation, filmmaking, and photography. Adam Lampton is an Assistant Professor at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, where he serves as Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. In addition to exhibiting internationally, Lampton’s work has been seen in publications including Art in America, Maisonneuve Magazine, and the journal Polar Inertia. He was a recipient of a 2006-2007 J. William Fulbright fellowship to Macao SAR, China, and a finalist for a 2007 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant. He lives in Maine. Angela Ndalianis is Professor in Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on entertainment culture and media histories as well as the transhistorical and transcultural nature of the baroque. Her publications include Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (MIT Press, 2004), The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses (McFarland, 2012), Science Fiction Experiences (New Academia, 2009), and, as editor, The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (Routledge, 2008). She has also published numerous essays in journals and anthologies, and she is currently working on two books: Batman: Myth and Superhero and Robots and Entertainment Culture. Pál Nyíri is Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. His main current interest is the emergence of globally mobile elites in China. His latest book, Reporting for China: How Chinese Correspondents Work with the World, is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press. Tim Simpson is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Macau, where he has worked since 2001. He is the co-author (with UK-based photographer Roger Palmer) of the volume Macao Macau (Black Dog Publishing), and is currently writing a monograph, to be published by University of Minnesota Press, entitled Macau: Casino Capitalism and the Biopolitical

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Metropolis. His recent research on architecture and urban political economy has appeared in journals in the fields of urban studies, critical theory, cultural geography, sociology, and tourism studies. Margaret Werry is Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance. Her book, The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism, and Race in New Zealand (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) examines the relationship between tourism, performance, indigenous politics, and (neo)liberal statehood. She has published on this topic and on others – critical pedagogy, spatial theory, photographic criticism, multimedia performance, museums, new materialism, performance historiography, and cultural policy – in a range of US and international journals.

Index 3D 162, 174, 200, 202-204 Abraxa 168 Abu Dhabi 14, 20, 25-26, 28, 32-33, 44, 49 – Tourism Authority (ADTA) 123 Adelson, Sheldon 25, 36, 82-83, 85, 105 apparatus 29, 194, 197, 200-201, 203-204, 207 Amazing Stories 152, 155 Ando, Tadao 127 Archigram Group 153, 159n11 architecture 15, 19, 26, 31, 33, 46, 52, 56, 63, 66-67, 91, 105-108, 111-113, 135-136, 144, 156, 172, 177-178, 180 – glass 27-28, 63, 68, 82, 84-85, 91, 104, 107, 112, 117, 129, 159-160 – iconic 31 Astro Boy 144, 147 biopolitics, biopolitical 27-29, 31, 34, 37, 76, 83, 93, 190, 206 Bauman, Zygmunt 33, 96, 99-100 Bel Geddes, Norman 149, 157 – Futurama 149-150, 152-154, 161 Bellamy, Edward 151 – Looking Backward 151 Benjamin, Walter 84, 167, 174-175 Black Sea 50, 168-169, 171-172, 176 Blackwater Worldwide 25 Bretton Woods Agreement 21, 84 casino 25, 32, 37, 48, 59, 61-63, 66, 76, 79, 81-84, 86-88, 97, 105, 107-108, 112, 115, 130, 229 – capitalism 28 – concession 82 – croupier 86 – developer, development 20, 105 – industry 82 – gambling 20, 28, 32, 82-83, 91 – junket 37, 59-60, 81-82 – resort 14-15, 33 – revenue 86, 91 – tycoon 88  Castoriadis, Cornelius 26 Celebration, Florida 160-162 Chicago School of Economics 190 China, Chinese 14, 33, 37, 56, 60-70, 75-76, 79, 81-82, 90-91, 93, 102-103, 110, 113 – Communist Party 80 – Cultural Revolution 16 – developer, entrepreneur 24, 32, 55-70, 92 – foreign investment 14, 64-65 – Foreign Ministry 59 – gambler 59 – ghost city 51  – organized crime 81-82

– People’s Republic 76, 79-82, 91 – tourists 32, 37, 59, 68-70, 75-76, 79, 82, 91-92 – trade 24 City Center see Las Vegas Cold War 99, 182 Coney Island 20, 26, 143n2, 153 Crystal Palace 84-85, 89, 92 Debord, Guy 111, 221 Deleuze, Gilles 174, 176, 178 – and Felix Guattari 175 Disney 14, 20, 143-144, 147, 154, 157n9, 159-160 – Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) 20, 33, 143-144, 148, 154, 156-157, 157n9, 158-163 – land 20, 22, 68, 148, 151, 153, 155-156, 159, 162, 164 – The Wonderful World of Disney 154, 158 – Walt Disney 14, 33, 143, 151, 153, 157-159 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 84, 174-175, 184-185 DPRK 32, 48 Dubai 15, 19-20, 28, 32, 35, 43-47, 49, 121-122, 125-126, 129n3, 130, 136-137, 219-221, 223-226, 228-229, 231-234 – Jebel Ali 224 – Mall 27, 163 – Palm Jumeirah 15, 220, 224, 226 dystopia, dystopian 15, 25, 131, 147-148, 164, 167, 174, 176-177, 186, 231, 234 Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) see Disney Florida, Richard 132 Foster, Norman; Foster and Partners 49, 129, 135 Foucault, Michel 17-19, 28-30 Fuller, Buckminster 129, 159 Futurama see Bel Geddes, Norman gambling see casino Garden City 20, 108 Gehry, Frank 26, 33, 123, 126-127, 129 General Motors 149-150, 153 ghost city see China globalization 22, 28, 32, 69, 77, 83-84, 92-93, 97, 99, 111, 183 – globonaut 77, 92 – terrestrial globalization 21, 75-76, 83-85, 92-93 gold trade 84-85 Golden Boten City see Special Economic Zone Golden Triangle see Special Economic Zone governmentality 189 Grand Tour 36 Gruen, Victor 153

244  Guggenheim – Museum 14, 26, 33, 122-124, 126-127, 129n4, 130-135 – effect 33 – Foundation 126 Hadid, Zaha 127, 129-130 Hakim Bey see Wilson, Peter Lamborn Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 21-22, 26-29, 85 Harvey, David 23, 131, 133 Hetherington, Kevin 17-19, 27 heterotopia 17-20, 25-29, 32, 117, 180  – heterotopology 17, 27, 30 Ho Hung Sun, Stanley 79, 81 Hong Kong 44-45, 47, 57, 64-65, 75-76, 83, 85, 91, 98, 101, 106, 114, 135-136 Howard, Ebenezer 153 iconic architecture see architecture imaginary 22, 26, 31-33, 35, 75, 90, 124, 172, 177, 189-190, 192, 232 – tourist imaginary 13-14, 31, 35 IMAX 162-163 Jackson, Peter 34, 189n1, 191-192, 194-207 Jameson, Fredric 15-16, 23, 26-27, 29-30, 87, 122, 167, 221 Jebel Ali see Dubai Jencks, Charles 129, 180 Kaika, Maria 26, 33 Keynes, John Maynard; Keynesian economics 22-23, 29, 76 Kim Dotcom 198 Kim Jong-il 80 KingsRomans Group 57, 62 Khmer Rouge 16 Klima, Alan 183 Koolhaas, Rem 20, 27, 30, 153, 180, 226 Krauss, Rosalind 122 laboratory – cultural 20, 190 – social 19, 190 – urban 20, 34, 153, 159, 178 see also learning city Las Vegas 20, 28, 47, 76, 82-83, 89, 105, 113-114, 155, 163, 219 – City Center 26 – Strip 28, 76 Le Corbusier 151, 153, 159n11 learning city 34, 144-145, 157, 162-163 Looking Backward see Bellamy, Edward Macau 14, 20, 24-25, 27-28, 32-34, 36-37, 43n1, 56, 59, 62-63, 75-93, 113, 163, 206, 211-216 – Venetian Resort 14, 27, 36-37, 43n1, 85-86, 113, 214-215

TOURIST UTOPIAS

Marina Bay Sands Resort see Singapore Marin, Louis 16-18, 21, 27, 31, 148, 167-168, 175, 179 More, Thomas 15-18, 21-22, 31-32, 35, 167, 176, 179, 226-227 MacCannell, Dean 175 McDonaldization 124, 134 MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, Events) 97 Middle-earth 15, 34, 189, 191-195, 196n9, 197-198, 202, 203n11-13, 204-207 neoliberal, neoliberalism 16, 23, 25-26, 29-30, 34, 70, 77, 130-131, 190-191, 194-195, 197, 201-202, 223, 230, 232 New Songdo City see Special Economic Zone non-place 17-18, 167, 233 non-state actor 24, 30, 189, 199, 207 Nouvel, Jean 123, 127, 129, 135 Odaiba, Japan 34, 143-147, 155, 157, 162 Ong, Aihwa 14, 23, 25, 30, 55, 67, 81-82, 105, 117, 199 Orthodox (Greek; Christian) 35, 219, 228, 231-232 Palais Royale 18, 20, 27, 180 Palan, Ronan 23, 25, 30 Palm Jumeirah see Dubai Pei, I.M. 100 Persian Gulf 24, 56, 126 petrodollar 48, 224 Pink Palace 26 pirate 23-25, 36, 44, 81 – utopia 19-20, 24 political economy 22, 27, 29, 201 post-apocalyptic 34, 167, 173-174, 177-179, 181 post-civil 25, 27, 31, 33, 86-87, 89 post-Fordist, post-Fordism 15, 21-23, 27-29, 34, 77, 189, 207 postmodern, postmodernism, postmodernity 21, 92, 111, 122, 180 post-tourist 34, 168, 173, 175, 178, 185-186 Prince, Erik 25 Ross, Andrew 122, 131-132 Safdie, Moshe 105-108, 112 Schmitt, Carl 22 Shenzhen 32, 43, 63-65 Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan 33, 123, 125-126 – Museum 130 – Road 28 Singapore 14, 19-20, 23, 25, 27-28, 32-33, 45, 47, 61, 97-117 – Housing Development Board 98 – Marina Bay Sands Resort 97, 100, 105-107, 111-117

245

Index

Situationist Internationale 30 Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill 127 Sloterdijk, Peter 21, 24-25, 32, 75, 77-78, 83-93 South China Sea 24, 81 sovereignty 20, 22, 30, 55, 80, 189, 191-192, 195, 199, 207 Soviet Union; Soviet Bloc 14, 16, 34, 63, 172, 177, 181 space of exception 22, 30, 81, 131, 137 Special Administrative Region 32, 76 Special Economic Zone (SEZ) 14, 20, 32, 43, 45, 48, 50, 55-57, 62-63, 68, 82, 125 – Golden Boten City SEZ 56-57, 59, 63-64 – Golden Triangle SEZ 32, 55-57, 59, 61-62, 64-66, 69 – New Songdo City SEZ 46 spectacle 16, 37, 48, 67, 103, 111-113, 131, 136, 144, 150 – society of spectacle 221 subjectivity 13, 15 suburb, suburban 19, 19n1, 43, 66, 157, 159, 178, 181, 221 Temporary Autonomous Zone 19 territory 22-23, 28, 43, 45, 48, 55-56, 75-76, 79, 81-82, 85, 87, 192, 205, 207 The Hague 182 The Hobbit 34, 191, 193-207 The Lord of the Rings 15, 34, 191 The Love Boat 48, 176

The Truman Show 162 The Wonderful World of Disney see Disney themed environment 15, 20, 31, 36, 68, 70, 85, 89, 91-92, 105, 113, 130, 153, 161-162, 176, 193 tourist imaginary see imaginary United Nations 32, 44-45, 80, 98 urban – design 32, 105, 151, 156 – ism 21, 26, 32, 43, 46, 56, 66, 87, 97, 106, 136 – ization 55-56, 63-64, 66-67, 180 – laboratory see laboratory – planning 143, 157, 190 utopic, utopics 16-22, 27, 31-35, 37, 90-91, 93, 137, 143, 148, 167-168, 172-173, 175, 178, 189, 193, 201, 211 – spatial play 16-17, 19, 31-32, 34-35, 167 – utopology 30 Venetian Resort see Macau Wilson, Peter Lamborn 19, 23 World Bank 44-45 World’s Fair – Chicago 143, 148-149 – New York 143, 149-154, 157, 161 Wynn, Steve 37, 82, 85, 88-89, 93, 163 zoning technologies 23