ARI Working Paper Series

This paper adopts a comparative approach to analyze an emergent urban form – the tourist utopia – by focusing on the paradigmatic examples of Las Vegas, Dubai, and Macau. Though culturally, historically, and geographically distinct, these “post-world cities” of neoliberal capitalism share a set of common characteristics. These characteristics include their respective status as “spaces of exception” within larger federalist states; transnational investment; state facilitation of public-private partnerships; transient multi-national populations; superlative and iconic architecture; and economies devoted to such heterotopian leisure activities as shopping, gambling, sightseeing, spectacle, and amusement. The paper analyzes these cities in terms of interrelationships among urban morphology and design, themed environments and scripted experiences, post-Fordist regimes of labor and consumption, mobility of tourists and workers, novel forms of sovereignty and citizenship, and the production of new spaces and subjects.

Full text is not available, this working paper is withdrawn, as it has now been published online:
‘Tourist utopias: Biopolitics and the genealogy of the post-world tourist city’, Current Issues in Tourism, March 2015, pp 1-33