5. Global Dynamics and Tropes of Place (original) (raw)
Related papers
Global Dynamics and Tropes of Place: ‘Touristed’ Spaces and City-Making in Macau
Ideas of the City in Asian Settings, 2019
Gambling in Macau was liberalised in 2002, when the People’s Republic of China was also campaigning for the city to be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. In 2005, while the opening of new monumental casino venues began to critically transform the cityscape, Macau’s Historic Centre became China’s 31st World Heritage site. In this chapter, I examine how the expansion of gambling and global recognition of the city’s heritage have generated urban and political ambivalences stemming from the intersections of global capitalism, identity formation, and development, despite new regulations and coordinated efforts across the fields of urban planning, heritage preservation, and land use. I analyse how China’s national program for Macau has entailed both the regeneration of gambling as a powerful regional industry and the ‘essentialisation’ of heritage, showing that the attendant processes of city-making and urbanism have continued to allow flexibility and improvisation under the pressures of tourism promotion.
2016
In the last 15 years, Macau has become widely known as a casino city with a bustling gaming industry. Before the construction of casinos are over 400 years of history of Portuguese and Chinese interchange, which has led to a unique social, religious, cultural and urban mixture. Macau also has a World Heritage Site. Twenty-two main buildings and public spaces representing the old trading port city are inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Currently, development pressures and property speculation are challenging the preservation and safeguarding of historical buildings in the city. With the choice of retaining the façade as a debated approach in conservation context, another situation has arisen in Macau - the purposeful construction of historic-looking façades in casinos, which lure gamblers into a world of entertainment. This paper explores how façadism influences the way heritage is perceived, amidst the conflicts between building preservation and demolition. It also explores the question of how the city and its people connect with its past, amidst rapid urban development. Contemplating the application of the Historic Urban Landscape Approach, the paper suggests a need for adaptive reuse of buildings, integrating different neighbourhood characters in future developments.
Spectacular Macau: Visioning Futures for a World Heritage City
Geoforum, 2015
This paper examines the conflicting sentiments generated by Macau’s recent developments and how these dynamics have helped galvanize particular visions amongst Macau’s residents holding different possessive relationships to the city. More specifically, it explores these processes through the simultaneous construction of two incongruent landscapes: a fantasyland of gaming and leisure propelled by the liberalization of the casino industry, and a ‘historic city of culture’ exemplified by Macau’s newly acquired UNESCO World Heritage City status. Building on Debord’s conception of the dialectic of the spectacle, this paper illustrates how the growing support for heritage conservation in Macau has been propelled by a shared anxiety over the phenomenal changes brought by an expanding casino industry and concomitant erosion of Macau’s cultural identity. Through extensive interviews with local architects, conservation experts and activists, I elucidate how the designation of Macau as a World Heritage City has helped consolidate particular sets of moral claims around heritage and culture as well as introduced new commodifications of the environment that cannot be easily delinked from other spaces of the ‘spectacle city.’
8. Encounter and Counter-Narratives of Heritage in Macau
ISEAS Publishing eBooks, 2017
At dusk, from the outer rim of Macau's Reservoir edging the Pearl River Delta, one can see the casino cluster on the opposite bank gradually light up, illuminating the darkening sky and projecting itself as a colourful sequin pattern over the still water. Next to it, a hill shrouded in darkness bears a solitary spot radiating a moving beam of light. Somewhat outshined by the LED panels and glittering signs that separate by a few hundred metres the casino district from the city's highest geographical point hosting one of its World Heritage sites, the Guia Lighthouse continues, nevertheless, to glow. This urban scene embodies the contrasting nature of struggles over space ensuing from Macau's drastic transformation over the last ten years. Materialized in this setting, the adjacent position of gambling and heritage is a powerful representation of the forces, complementary, but also uneven, which have marked their relationship throughout the integration of the Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR) into China. To some extent it signals the seemingly irreversible connection between the realization of capital and the (im)possibility of the social (cf. Bissell 2005: pp. 221-22). The ambivalences they evoke can, thus, be easily grasped in binaries, the old and the new, the colonial and the post-colonial, the past
The ‘gambling city': Geometries and geographies of urban instability in Macau
Macau’s latest phase of casino development, marked by the sector’s liberalisation in 2002, highlights gambling's hegemonic force over the city’s economy, with attendant revenues reaching roughly 88% of Macau’s GDP in 2013. While attracting large human flows to the city and producing architectural narratives of monumentality and wealth, casino development has fostered economic activities tied to a specific gambling culture, rapidly spawning strong spatial ambivalence and urban instability within the cityscape. Here I provide a brief overview of how the rise of Macau’s gambling economy, while virtually producing a ‘gambling city’ within the city, has come to increasingly embody contrasts in the daily geographies of urban life.
Heritage versus Gaming: Odds on winning a piece of the tourist pie
With the liberalisation of the gaming industry, Macao, a former Portuguese enclave for over four centuries and now a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China, is on the threshold of a major transformation. Do centuries of accumulated culture and legacy stand threatened in the wake of these developments? Will a once laid back, relatively sequestered small town lifestyle with its unique blend of customs be swamped by an influx of outside influences brought in by expatriates and visitors alike? An uneasy status quo of gaming and cultural tourism that has prevailed thus far, with gambling revenues contributing circa 60% of Macao's GDP, over 70% of its tourists and providing significant funding to cultural programmes and preservation could be unsettled. While the Macao Government are investing vast sums in the preservation and promotion of cultural tourism, there is the pending danger that it will be simply relegated to the backstage, with casino development taking the prime slot. Though the Macao government has over the years promoted Macao as a 'city of culture', the future reality of this message will ultimately lie with the attitudes of local residents, and particularly, its youth. This issue assumes further significance in light of the proposed listing pending with UNESCO to designate Macao a World Heritage City. In this paper, the authors highlight some of the more prominent issues emanating from this identity conundrum facing Macao.
Urban Image Construction in Macau in the First Decade after the “Handover”, 1999-2008
Casino capitalism has its dialectical tendencies in Macau. On the one hand, it stimulates economic growth, provides employment, and strengthens the post-colonial state in Macau during the period of economic boom. On the other hand, casino capitalism can widen the income gap between the rich and the poor, generate addictive gambling, and de-legitimize the post-colonial state in Macau during the global and regional economic downturn. The weaknesses of the politico-administrative state in Macau, including the absence of institutional checks and balances, the frail civil society and the relatively docile mass media, have magnified the negative impacts of casino capitalism on Macau. In response to the negative ramifications, the Macau government has taken measures to be more interventionist, to enhance social welfare, and to prepare contingency plans that would tackle the sudden bankruptcy of any casinos. The central government in Beijing also displays contradictory considerations when it deals with Macau’s casino development, supporting the casino industry while simultaneously encouraging the Macau government to diversify its economy. Overall, casino capitalism not only has contradictory impacts on the Macau city-state but also reveals the inherent contradictions of Beijing’s policy toward the territory’s over-dependence on the casino economy.
Current Issues in Tourism Reinventing Macau tourism: gambling on creativity
The paper identifies some major economic, social and environmental effects of gaming related tourism in Macau, the world’s largest gaming location in respect of casino turnover. The main types of effects of casino development are typically those associated with growth machine theory. The paper also identifies major threats to the sustainable development of Macau as a gaming/tourism destination, arising from a narrow industrial base, competing destinations, community alienation, and what is referred to as the ‘China factor’. The paper discusses the types of strategies that are required if Macau tourism is to counter these threats and develop successfully as a ‘World Centre of Tourism and Leisure’. It is argued that Macau can most effectively achieve this goal if it develops its tourism and gaming industries to be consistent with the key attributes of a creative city.
Reframing and Reconceptualising Gambling tourism in Macau as a Chinese Pilgrimage
Tourism Geographies, 2019
While dominant discourses, media representations and corporate entities in China downplay the presence of Chinese mainland gambling in Macau, Beijing sanctions millions of its citizens to make the journey to Macau to gamble each year. While Macau's success is often put down to the extent to which visitors are drawn to a secular destination with integrated resorts to engage in individualistic activities, our approach explores Chinese gambling tourists' movements, rituals and behaviours along poststructuralist lines, so as to generate new insights. The analysis shows how the metaphor of pilgrimage is an important lens to address individual and communal practices amongst outbound Chinese gambling tourists and brings to light the hyper-meaningfulness, shared values, ritualization, play, risk, and liminal conditions that characterise the processes of their entanglements and the centrality of commercial and political interests. In particular, the analysis indicates the need to explore the significance of cultural, spiritual, economic and social dimensions of Chinese outbound tourism, as well as the unique discourses of power and control affecting their movement and practices. By reframing and reconceptualising gambling tourists as a Chinese pilgrimage, we account for manifestations of culture, governmentality and intentional ritualization as well as contribute an alternative construction of pilgrimage beyond euro-centric accounts, which in turn, will stimulate discussion on geographies of pilgrimage.
The fast growth of contemporary Macau, accompanied by a strong transformation of its spatial conditions, is making the city one of the foremost urban 'theatres of consumption'. This concerns two main processes: the expansion of the tourist oriented and gentrified area of the historic centre, and the exponential growth of the urban " maze of inauthentic fake landscape ". The latter mainly refers to two new urban clusters of large Integrated Resorts (IRs). These IRs are autonomous and discreet urban elements that are becoming increasingly all-encompassing, introverted and disjoined. They are peculiar spatial assemblages characterized by strong segmentation and paratactic composition, with parts juxtaposed and inserted into original 'grand plans' in an utterly opportunistic, yet scarcely integrated manner. This paper foregrounds the spatial implications of the ongoing urban spectacularization process, providing a critical interpretation of one particular contradictory aspect: the spatial re-combination occurring inside and between those increasingly interiorised and privatised " spaces of exception ". A nascent phenomenon, it occurs noticeably in over-determined enclaves with distinctive hyper-experiential/allegoric spatial conditions that transform space into an emotional/textual device for new forms of consumption-based socialization. This phenomenon combines both the finiteness of the IR sphere with the openness of the consumer experience; and the IRs' secured spatial segregation with the visitors' integration within the relevant cultural context and social infrastructure, generating situations of displacement, ambivalence, and ambiguity. The paper also discusses the early results of a comparative evaluation on Macau's IRs that analyses key spatial means of the three different relevant IR assemblage types. This provides empirical validation of the interpretation of the new recombinant processes in these 'spectacular othernesses', contributing to the descriptions of their sophisticated material and experiential spatial systems. URBAN CELLULATION IN MACAU'S " THEATRE OF CONSUMPTION " The outstanding economic growth of Macau since its 1999 handover to China has been led by the development of the tourism industry and, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, in 2013 it is expected to achieve the second world's fastest regional GDP increase. Yet this excessive expansion, strongly unbalanced due to a dominance of the gambling component of the leisure and entertainment sector, is exerting strong effects on the physical transformations of the city geography, urban structure and infrastructures. The transformations include the steady growth of a seamless unrestrained, spectacle-driven " theatre of consumption', where the radiating iconic casino landmarks that have supplanted the hilltop fortresses and lighthouses in the city image, the urban space constitutes