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Books by Kah-Wee Lee

Las Vegas in Singapore looks at the collision of the histories of Singapore and Las Vegas in the ... more Las Vegas in Singapore looks at the collision of the histories of Singapore and Las Vegas in the form of Marina Bay Sands, one of Singapore’s two Integrated Resorts.

The first history begins in colonial Singapore in the 1880s, when British administrators revised gambling laws in response to the political threat posed by Chinese-run gambling syndicates. Following the tracks of these punitive laws and practices, the book moves into the 1960s when the newly independent city-state created a national lottery while criminalizing both organized and petty gambling in the name of nation-building. The second history shifts the focus to corporate Las Vegas in the 1950s when digital technology and corporate management practices found each other on the casino floor. Tracing the emergence of the specialist casino designer, the book reveals how casino development evolved into a highly rationalized spatial template designed to maximize profits. Today an iconic landmark of Singapore, Marina Bay Sands is also an artifact of these two histories, an attempt by Singapore to normalize what was once criminalized in its nationalist past.

Lee Kah-Wee argues that the historical project of the control of vice is also about the control of space and capital. The result is an uneven landscape where the legal and moral status of gambling is contingent on where it is located. As the current wave of casino expansion spreads across Asia, he warns that these developments should not be seen as liberalization but instead as a continuation of the project of concentrating power by modern states and corporations.

Las Vegas in Singapore: Violence, Progress and the Crisis of Nationalist Modernity, 2019

Papers by Kah-Wee Lee

City

This paper presents a pedagogy of anachronism where learning occurs through a misfit between theo... more This paper presents a pedagogy of anachronism where learning occurs through a misfit between theory and practice. It was developed and tested in a class taught from 2016 to 2019, where students repeated Kevin Lynch’s original 1960 experiment on cognitive mapping in a location much smaller in scale and with a very different social composition from the cities that Lynch analyzed. The deliberate misfit transformed a method designed to understand user perception into the very problem itself, provoking students to ask important epistemological questions and recognize the situatedness of theory. A pedagogy of anachronism resists the uncritical instrumentalization of canonical ideas and trains students to think deeply about the normative and epistemological basis of design/planning practice. The paper ends by suggesting different types of misfits that can extend this pedagogy for other learning objectives.

City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action, 2023

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

Although public transport development has been widely addressed in extant urban research, everyda... more Although public transport development has been widely addressed in extant urban research, everyday practices in transport spaces and their broader implications for urbanizing China are relatively less studied. Building on de Certeau’s concept of “tactics” and the literature on urban mobility, this study employs spatial analysis and ethnography to investigate the case of the Shanghainan Railway Station (SHNS) in China that had become underused after its traffic was directed away to new stations in the same network. By 2017, this decline had turned an architectural icon designed for efficiency and speed into a place where many unlikely social groups gathered daily. We followed a charity team serving the homeless seeking shelter there to understand how this modern structure was appropriated to cater to those who survived in the trails of development. The case of the SHNS reveals the uneven consequences of urbanization brought about by increasing connectivity in Chinese society and high...

Asian Cities

ABSTRACT Scholars of nationalism have linked projects such as urban renewal, public housing and a... more ABSTRACT Scholars of nationalism have linked projects such as urban renewal, public housing and architectural modernization to the production of a common national identity. Few have examined the forms of state violence targeted at popular illegalities enjoyed by different classes of citizens. The intensification of the criminalization of gambling from the 1960s to the 1980s in Singapore was part of this complex phenomenon where the very notions of morality and legality had become bound up in the processes of urbanization and nation-building. Rather than interpreting this as part of the growing political and ideological dominance of the ruling party, I analyse the discourses and programmes centred around crime, cleanliness and the built environment so as to construct the positive order against which gambling was posed as a danger. Then, I use media reports to parse the different spatial zones that described a specific relationship between vice and crime. These zones were neither discrete nor hierarchical; instead they were relational and unstable, such that a similar act could be tolerated at one place but criminalized at another. Writing the history of the control of vice opens a window into a process whereby the terrain of popular illegalities was slowly but thoroughly rearranged, and how this unstable process expressed both the limits of criminalization in the context of a strident nationalism, and the relationship between the spatial order of the city and the symbolic order of the nation

This paper interrogates the relationships between architectural representation, spatial productio... more This paper interrogates the relationships between architectural representation, spatial production and state power in the context of the making of Marina Bay Sands. I critically analyze and unpack the micro-politics of the planning and competition process around 2005 that transformed the Las Vegas casino-resort into the “Integrated Resort” at Singapore’s Marina Bay. My analysis reveals how the “Integrated Resort” – as discourse, image and building was not merely discovered elsewhere and imported into Singapore. Rather, it had to be manufactured through a hidden process of negotiations, contestations and misrepresentations. I argue that this process should be seen as an “art of blending” by hiding the casino and blending into the aesthetic order of Marina Bay, the architectural design of Marina Bay Sands was an attempt to resolve the crisis of representation produced by locating the controversial casino on this prominent site. Rather than interpreting the art of blending simply as a mystification of structural political economic forces, I show that this process was fraught with unlikely alliances and inexplicable contingencies such that it cannot be reduced to a single ideology or economic model. Architects, planners, bureaucrats and developers found themselves in shifting and differential power-relations mediated by the administrative procedures of the competition. Though the success of Marina Bay Sands lay on how well the crisis of representation was ultimately resolved, a constructivist critique provides a way to unravel what appears to be coherent representations of the state as a monolithic and univocal entity and its sponsored narratives of nationalist modernity. ARI Working Paper No. 242 Asia Research Institute ● Singapore 2 At that point [of the meeting], there was no mention of a casino. So we spent a long time talking about that side of Marina Bay, the sea side, as to how to handle it in urban design terms...and then of course it was completely blown away by the decision to put this vast casino concept there! I mean you’ve got an interesting concept, but it’s an entirely different concept to the one we spent a long time discussing! I think that’s the only time in my experience where all the thinking and conceptual thinking was in effect totally altered by a major strategic decision that came up and just [bangs fist on palm] did that! Sir Peter Hall, 30 August 2011 (Yap E, 2013) “Do you dare to place the casino at Marina Bay?!” Government Planner, 2010, interview with author When the competitive tender was launched in 2007 for the casino license at Marina Bay, Singapore, only four developers submitted their bids. Steve Wynn had withdrawn after what he thought was excessive interference by Singaporean planners on his architectural design. Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas Sands had replaced his architect, Paul Steelman who specializes in casino design, with Moshe Safdie, known ironically for designing social housing and cultural institutions. Though Las Vegas Sands eventually won and built Marina Bay Sands, it looked nothing like a typical Las Vegas Sands project, both in its architectural form and spatial organization. The proposal to build a casino in Singapore has surfaced several times over the course of its postindependence history – in the 1960s, 1980s and again in 2000s. In each instance, it was raised as a way to boost declining tourism receipts, but always turned down on moral grounds. Over the years, along with other social and cultural policies on housing, education and censorship, the anti-casino policy has helped to construct a narrative of the state as the moral foundation of the nation, birthed together at the point of independence and which continues to be wedded to the ruling party’s identity. Thus the reversal of this policy was controversial because it threatened the moral pillar of nationalist modernity. It is significant that, despite historical repetitions, the “Integrated Resort” only appeared in the latest iteration. As this paper shows, the emergence of the Integrated Resort as architectural form and representation is crucial to taming this threat. By drawing a fine distinction between the Integrated Resort and the casino, and materializing this distinction through architecture and urban form, the moral authority of the state can remain somewhat unblemished. Indeed, saying ‘yes’ to the Integrated Resort is not quite the same as saying ‘yes’ to the casino. As the above quotes show, the decision to place a casino at Marina Bay in 2004 was a political decision completely unanticipated by government planners and bureaucrats. Like many megaprojects carried out under the rubric of Asian developmentalism, Marina Bay was to be a cosmopolitan hub of financial centres, cultural institutions and luxury residential developments (Shatkin 2011; Yeoh, 2005; Douglass, 2000, among others). It was also planned as the site of national 1 Sir Peter Hall is an urban planner and theorist and Professor…

Developmentalist Cities? Interrogating Urban Developmentalism in East Asia, 2018

Planning Theory & Practice, 2018

TRaNS: Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia, 2015

Environment and Planning A, 2014

This paper examines the crucial years between 2002 and 2012 when land enclosures, reclamation wor... more This paper examines the crucial years between 2002 and 2012 when land enclosures, reclamation works, and architectural production transformed the urban landscape of Macau. Building on the literature on urban informality, I first analyze how planning as institutionalized informality unmapped the city of Macau through a complex medium of neoliberal ethos, technical rationality, and geopolitical calculations. Then, I show how the casino concessionaires remapped the city in a highly competitive milieu by tracing how they maneuvered to secure relative locational advantage. This analysis shows the importance of framing mapping and unmapping as a simultaneous dialectical process so as to render the creative–destructive dynamic of capitalist urban transformation. It also suggests how we can further the analysis of urban planning as an informalized practice and institution.

Critical Gambling Studies

The expansion of the casino industry in Asia over the last two decades has purportedly given rise... more The expansion of the casino industry in Asia over the last two decades has purportedly given rise to a new development model known as the “Integrated Resort” (IR). Within state, professional and public discourses, the IR is often defined in three ways: 1. it evolved from large multi-attraction casino projects in Las Vegas; 2. it is distinguished by the fact that the casino occupies a small area of the property but makes a large contribution to its total revenue; and 3. the casino helps to make non-gaming attractions like museums financially viable. While not all factually inaccurate, I argue that these claims are strategic representations that legitimize and promote the IR in this part of the world. By triangulating different sets of discourses and participating in industry events like the Global Gaming Expo, I unravel the politics of these claims and trace their shifting effects as the IR is translated into various forms of regulatory controls and corporate practices. The emergenc...

Planning Perspectives, 2019

This article examines how ‘urban experience ’ is objectified and transformed into something that ... more This article examines how ‘urban experience ’ is objectified and transformed into something that is legible to the state and its experts. It conceptualizes design guidelines as a political technology where bodies of expert knowledge, emplaced in a planning bureaucracy, shape the way the built environment is produced and experienced. Using Singapore as an example of a centralized planning bureaucracy, I analyze how lighting, public art and advertisement signs are targeted to produce a total environment with normative narratives. This article makes two contributions. First, it unpacks the processes that translate different modes of legibility in an attempt to make ‘experience’ legible for planners. The political efficacy of guidelines and pre-established bureaucratic boundaries means that planners can only intervene through a series of combinations, mediations and approximations. Thus, legibility proceeds in a way that is akin to ‘feeling around’. Second, it foregrounds the ‘middle la...

This paper examines how the casino industry was transformed by slot technology between 1950 and 1... more This paper examines how the casino industry was transformed by slot technology between 1950 and 1990. The criminalization of slot machines in the 1950s led to their massive evacuation into Las Vegas casinos. In this concentrated environment, slot machines revealed to casino operators an automated surveillance technology that could disassemble the player into streams of virtual data, not through any overt means, but through the very activity of play itself. Slot managers and gaming technologists found themselves empowered professionally as they experimented with ways to transform data into profits. From the 1970s to the 90s, this technological development effectively linked up every economic activity in various casinos across the US, creating a virtual network that defeated the geographical injunctions designed to segregate gambling from other spheres of life.

Author(s): Lee, Kah-Wee | Advisor(s): AlSayyad, Nezar | Abstract: This dissertation investigates ... more Author(s): Lee, Kah-Wee | Advisor(s): AlSayyad, Nezar | Abstract: This dissertation investigates the historical formation of the modern casino as a "dividing practice" that cuts society along moral, legal and economic lines. It analyzes specific episodes in Singapore's and Las Vegas' histories when the moral problem of vice was transformed into a series of practical interventions devised by lawyers, detectives, architects and bureaucrats to criminalize and legalize gambling. Spatial containment and aesthetic form are key considerations and techniques in these schemes. I show how such schemes revolve around the complex management of the political costs and practical limits of changing the moral-legal status of gambling, whether it is to criminalize a popular form of illegality or to legalize an activity that threatens the normative order of society. The rise of the modern casino as a spatially bounded and concentrated form of gambling that is seamless with corporate...

Las Vegas in Singapore: Violence, Progress and the Crisis of Nationalist Modernity, 2019

City

City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action, 2023

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

Asian Cities

Developmentalist Cities? Interrogating Urban Developmentalism in East Asia, 2018

Planning Theory & Practice, 2018

TRaNS: Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia, 2015

Environment and Planning A, 2014

Critical Gambling Studies

Planning Perspectives, 2019

Planning Theory & Practice

This is a presentation I gave at the Myths Seminar series in Singapore. In the presentation, I un... more This is a presentation I gave at the Myths Seminar series in Singapore. In the presentation, I unpack the myth that Singapore had always said "no" to the casino, and ask how it is part of a larger narrative of progress. It has been modified to become a chapter in a book to be published at the end of the series.

Information about "Myth" seminar series:
This forum series unpacks the myths of Singapore history.
Description
LIVING WITH MYTHS

Claims that Singapore was a backward fishing village before the arrival of Raffles, or a dangerous place in the 1950s are commonplace today. These claims are made in discussions of the current state of affairs or future course of Singapore. They go beyond the past and reflect (and reinforce) our perspectives and identities. We call such claims ‘myths’ in the manner that they render history useful for non-historical pursuits.

This forum series unpacks the myths of Singapore history. By myths, we do not mean fabrications, but discursive devices that have become accepted as part of our ‘common sense’. Myths are a shorthand for official discourses and policies; they thus mask countervailing views of history and obscure other possibilities for the future. As Singapore celebrates 50 years of nationhood in 2015, being aware of myths is an important social project that will make us a more mature, self-reflexive and inclusive people.

B Yuen and S Hamnett (eds.) Planning Singapore: The Experimental City (NY and London: Routledge), 2019

"Planning Singapore", edited by geographer Belinda Yuen and planner Stephen Hamnett, sets out to ... more "Planning Singapore", edited by geographer Belinda Yuen and planner Stephen Hamnett, sets out to achieve two objectives. First, it consolidates the key tropes scholars have used to describe and analyse Singapore-exceptionalism, success, vulnerability and developmentalism. Second, it aims to "stimulate a discussion beyond the 'known knowns' of Singapore issues and examines future aspirations and challenges" (Foreword). The range of essays attests to the wide-ranging issues that impinge on urban development, the interdisciplinarity of professional and academic discourse, and as the title suggests, the experimental nature of Singapore's planning model. The volume contains ten essays from economists, political scientists, geographers, planners, anthropologists and sociologists. As a set, they cover most of the topical issues today-from immigration and disruptive technology to climate change, housing, nature conservation, transport, energy and land value. Each essay takes stock of the existing situation or provides a historical background before giving a prognosis of how to deal with future challenges. What do these scholars have to say about the future of Singapore? To summarize broadly, it would seem that Singapore's planning process should become more inclusive and participatory, its economic model less dominated by the state and state-enterprises, its urban development more integrated with flora and fauna, its investment in and commitment to renewable energy increased, and its recycling initiatives more localized and community-led. Some essays are more pensive, electing to diagnose the problem thoroughly than provide a clear prognosis. Thus, the essay by Tan and Seah reiterates the tricky balancing act that will continue to position public housing as something between welfare and asset, while the essay by Barter lays out the diversity of transport options today and their emerging contradictions. Both essays resist the temptation of providing easy solutions, though one might say that the way they frame the analysis already encloses a horizon of possible options. Finally, the essay on transit-oriented development and land value capture is more interested in distilling Singapore's experience as lessons for cities in the region than thinking about where Singapore can go in the future. Thus, despite the basic template provided by the editors, there is a range of positions about Singapore as an object of speculation. On one hand, there appears to be some kind of consensus amounting to changing the role of the state, that it should step back from some domains while digging into others. On the other, this consensus, if pressed further, reveals divergent ideological positions and political possibilities. Should the government move toward socialism when it comes to public housing, but become more neoliberal (entrepreneurial?) in industrial, environmental and economic policies? Is this the updated version of "socialism that works", the political-economic model that guided Singapore's post-independence transformation? Even something as technical as the development charge-a tax levied on private property due to increased land value caused by government action-is thoroughly ideological and can only be justified in a context of public trust and accountability in state institutions. It is not surprising that, without it being said, the main protagonist in these essays is not some faceless external force (like globalization or climate change) but the state. To rethink urban planning in

Technology and Culture, Jan 2014

Based on fifteen years of ethnographic work, Addiction by Design is an ambitious and thought-prov... more Based on fifteen years of ethnographic work, Addiction by Design is an ambitious and thought-provoking book that challenges the neoliberal ethos currently governing the ways in which governments and professionals think about gambling addiction. This ethos frames gamblers as consumers who can choose to gamble responsibly with the help of experts and good business practices. Problem gamblers, by extension, are a minority who exhibit a psychological affinity toward addiction. On the contrary, Natasha Schüll argues that addiction is not an internalized psychological state of the individual, but a result of the interaction between humans and machines. This relationship is interdependent but not symmetrical. Thus, while slot machines are designed to place the gambler in a state of “continuous productivity” in order to extract maximum value from extended periods of play, gamblers seek out these machines in order to enter a self-liquidating psychosomatic state (the “zone”) which is an end in itself. This perverse relationship of “asymmetrical collusion” reveals itself only at the end when the gambler’s funds are depleted. The machine becomes inert and unresponsive, and the gambler is forced to economize on real life in order to reenter the zone.

The 2nd Southeast Asia Architecture Research Collaborative (SEAARC) Symposium was held in the Nat... more The 2nd Southeast Asia Architecture Research Collaborative (SEAARC) Symposium was held in the National University of Singapore from 5-7 Jan 2017. The theme - "Modernity's Other' - challenges the participants to disclose the submerged, erased or neglected aspects of architectural and urban histories. 20 papers were presented around four themes - 'Challenges of the Archive', 'Teleology fractured and abandoned', 'Architecture and Violence' and 'Types, minor types and non-types'. Each theme is an attempt to undermine the internal structures of architectural historiography as well as build bridges with adjacent disciplines that have also grappled with the challenges of postcolonial and subaltern theory. As an interdisciplinary symposium, participants were drawn from architectural history, art history, history, anthropology, urban studies and cultural studies. Carl Trocki and Abidin Kusno provided some reflections on the theme as keynote speakers. As the second in the series of symposiums organized by the SEAARC, it is part of a longer project to foreground Southeast Asia as an important intellectual nexus in architectural/urban research and bring scholars within and outside the region into dialogue with each other.

Modernity’s ‘Other’ – Disclosing Southeast Asia’s built environment across the colonial and postc... more Modernity’s ‘Other’ – Disclosing Southeast Asia’s built environment across the colonial and postcolonial worlds

A selection of the papers from this symposium has been extensively edited and published in Jiat-H... more A selection of the papers from this symposium has been extensively edited and published in Jiat-Hwee Chang and Imran bin Tajudeen eds., South East Asia's Modern Architecture: Questions of Translation, Epistemology and Power (Singapore: NUS Press, 2019).

https://www.academia.edu/38187116/Historiographical_Questions_in_Southeast_Asias_Modern_Architecture

1st SEAARC (Southeast Asia Architecture Research Collaborative) Symposium
Questions in Southeast Asia’s Architecture / Southeast Asia’s Architecture in Question
Dates: 8-10 January 2015 (Thursday to Saturday)
Venue: Department of Architecture, SDE, National University of Singapore
Convenors: Chang Jiat Hwee, Imran bin Tajudeen and Lee Kah Wee

Book includes Call for Papers, programme and abstracts

Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 2019

Critical Gambling Studies, 2022

The expansion of the casino industry in Asia over the last two decades has purportedly given rise... more The expansion of the casino industry in Asia over the last two decades has purportedly given rise to a new development model known as the "Integrated Resort" (IR). Within state, professional and public discourses, the IR is often defined in three ways: 1. it evolved from large multi-attraction casino projects in Las Vegas; 2. it is distinguished by the fact that the casino occupies a small area of the property but makes a large contribution to its total revenue; and 3. the casino helps to make non-gaming attractions like museums financially viable. While not all factually inaccurate, I argue that these claims are strategic representations that legitimize and promote the IR in this part of the world. By triangulating different sets of discourses and participating in industry events like the Global Gaming Expo, I unravel the politics of these claims and trace their shifting effects as the IR is translated into various forms of regulatory controls and corporate practices. The emergence of the IR signals a historical moment in the normalization of commercial gambling in Asia, and shows how this transition can proceed through an architectural medium.