Released on the 500-year anniversary of the publication of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, this volume seeks to adapt and apply More's fecund imagination to the contemporary leisure landscape. The contributors to this volume theorize and analyze a variety of 'tourist utopias' - a nascent socio-spatial form crucial to a post-industrial global economy. From Disney World to Dubai, 'Middle Earth' to Marina Bay, Macau to Abu Dhabi, these sites share common characteristics that include their respective status as 'spaces of exception'; entrepreneurial governance regimes that rely on cooperation among state and non-state actors; transient, multinational populations; immaterial and affective forms of labor and consumption; superlative and iconic architecture; and economies devoted to such leisure activities as shopping, gambling, and spectacle. These locales are not only popular destinations for migrant workers and mobile tourists from around the globe, but also serve as cultural laboratories for testing new formats and protocols of an emergent post-Fordist form-of-life.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prolegomenon
- 1. Mapping Tourist Utopias
- 2. The Zone Is on Vacation
- Enclaves
- 3. Instant Cities in the Jungle
- Fantasies of Modernity for Whom?
- 4. After Utopia
- Post-Colonial Macau and Post-Socialist Chinese Tourists
- 5. Choreographing Singapore’s Utopia by the Bay
- 6. Cultural Utopia
- Abu Dhabi’s Island of Happiness and the Development of a Cultural Enclave
- Imaginaries
- 7. Disney’s Utopian Techno-Futures
- Tomorrow’s World That We Shall Build Today
- 8. Tourism and a Virtual Bulgaria
- 9. Sublimity, Sovereignty, and Sophistry
- The Trouble in Middle-earth
- 10. Macau Utopics
- Archipelagoes
- 11. From Dubai to Mount Athos
- Carving Islands of Fear and Hope
- About the Authors
- Index
- List of figures
- Figure 2.1 Mexican maquiladora
- Figure 2.2 Dubai zone aggregate
- Figure 2.3 Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
- Figure 2.4 Nova Cidade de Kilamba, Angola
- Figure 3.1 A row of condos in Boten Golden City
- Figure 3.2 Abandoned shops at Boten
- Figure 3.3 The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, seen from the Thai side of the Mekong
- Figure 4.1 Tourists enjoying the controlled risk of the skywalk at the Macau Tower, which also offers the world’s highest bungee jump
- Figure 4.2 Tourists taking selfies on the steps of Macau’s Ruins of St. Paul’s
- Figure 5.1 The choreography of utopia by the bay
- Figure 5.2 The spectacular consumption of the Bay at a National Day Parade dress rehearsal, 2013
- 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
- Figure 6.1B Saadiyat Island as it appears a 2014 satellite image
- Figure 6.2 Scaled models of Saadiyat Island showing how both museums may appear once completed
- Figure 6.3 Exhibit showing the completed Saadiyat Island development
- Figure 6.4 The Louvre Abu Dhabi emerging from the desert with the luxurious St. Regis Resort in the foreground, January 2015
- Figure 7.1 The 18-meter/59-feet-tall RX-78 Gundam mecha-robot at the entrance way of Aqua City, Odaiba
- Figure 7.2 Bel Geddes’ Futurama ‘Highways and Horizons’ exhibit sponsored by General Motors for the New York World’s Fair of 1939-1940
- Figure 7.3 Julian Krupa’s vision of ‘Cities of Tomorrow’ in the August 1939 issue of Amazing Stories
- Figure 7.4 Walt Disney presenting a map of EPCOT on the Wonderful World of Disney
- Figure 7.5 View of the transportation center below the urban center of E.P.C.O.T. Design by Herbert Ryman, 1965
- Figure 8.1 Tsar Samuel statue by Alexander Haitov, Sofia, Bulgaria, c. June 2015
- Figure 9.1 New Zealand film workers protest the union ‘boycott’ of The Hobbit, October 2010
- 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 Tourists 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 View of the western slope of Mount Athos
- Figure 11.2 Palm Jumeirah
- Figure 11.3 Aerial view of Docheiariou Monastery, Mount Athos
- Figure 11.4 The peninsula of Mount Athos photographed from the ISS
- Figure 11.5 Dubai’s artificial islands
- Figure 11.6 Showcase island in ‘The World’, Dubai
- Figure 11.7 Mount Athos portrayed as an island in Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s Liber Insularum Archipelagi, dating from c. 1430
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