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About this talk

Over the last twenty years, the centre of the casino industry has relocated from Las Vegas to three cities in Asia-Pacific, namely Singapore, Macau (PRC) and Manila (Philippines). In the wake of this relocation is the production of an extensive infrastructure of extraction that moved the private wealth of foreign (predominantly Chinese) citizens into the casinos of these hosting cities. In this presentation, Dr Kah-Wee Lee will explore how this move should be understood as a case of post-colonial rentier capitalism whereby states enter monopolistic relationships with private corporations and extra-legal agents to do what they cannot do directly – taxing populations outside of their territories. Such infrastructures operate at different scales and articulate a paradox of separation and connection. In this presentation, he will focus on one site – the free shuttle bus (FSB) – and ask how an infrastructure that is private but free materializes this paradox in different ways. In Macau, legions of FSBs moved gamblers between the casinos and the various ports of entry, displaying most directly an extraterritorial scale of extraction. In Manila, FSBs congregated at major shopping malls and, strangely enough, McDonald’s outlets. And in Singapore, FSBs were banned. These differences arise from the inherent tensions of the state-concessionaire relationship threaded through the material conditions of urban infrastructure and everyday life. This lecture is a joint event between Sustainable Urban Development, Oxford University and the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford’s Economy and Society Research Group.

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