Transforming Macau: planning as institutionalized informality and the spatial dynamics of hypercompetition (original) (raw)
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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.
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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.
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Gambling has been Macau's principal industry and a major source of income for the city for nearly 180 years. However, surprisingly little has been said about its urban impact and connections to a wider economy of vice, e.g. opium, pawnbroking and prostitution, which was consolidated in the second half of the nineteenth century mostly by the hands of a Chinese entrepreneurial elite. This article takes a novel approach to examining Macau's early colonial development by historicizing the city's modern economy from a different, mostly neglected urban angle. It shows that the development of vice businesses promoted the diversification of commercial activity, real estate development and the creation of public facilities, defining a type of ordinary urbanization, business-led rather than government-oriented, that affected Macau's urban character and identity in durable ways.
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Macau’s Urban Image Production Before and After the Credit Crunch
2009
Macau is one example of a rapidly transforming cit y in Asia. In competition with other cities in the region, it capitalizes on its role as the on ly place in China where casino gambling is legalise d. Since the handover of the former Portuguese enclave to th e People’s Republic of China (PRC), Macau has experienced various deregulations ranging from the end of its gambling monopoly, and the liberalisatio n of planning regulations, to the easing of travel restr ictions. These liberalisation s were followed by an inflow of foreign direct investments (FDI) and visitors, and eventually led to a significant change of Macau’s u rban landscape. Macau’s urban image construction can be discussed in the context of neo-liberalism under consideration of its specific characteristics as a free port, offshore haven and “free market” which h owever is manipulated by casino corporations, a small local e lite, and the Chinese government in Beijing. The pa per investigates how changes of Macau’s urba...
From Casino Wars to Casino Capitalism: Sovereignty and Gaming in Macau
2018
In 1999, after nearly half a millennia of administration, Portugal returned the citystate of Macau to the People’s Republic of China, and it was designated a Special Administrative Region under the PRC’s “one country, two systems” regime. Less than a decade after the handover Macau was transformed into the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming, and today the city is visited by more than 35 million annual tourists, the majority of whom are from mainland China. Macau’s remarkable economic expansion may be in part attributed to the city’s ambiguous sovereignty, an endemic characteristic which dates to the city’s founding in 1557, and which has long been its most advantageous asset. In this paper I analyze a three-year wave of violent crime, known colloquially as the Casino Wars, which was attributed to Chinese organized crime groups and which plagued Macau’s casino gaming industry in the period just prior to the handover. I seek to understand the relevance of the Casino Wars for...
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
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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.’