Overview

Las Vegas is famous for its glitter and greed, but it rarely gets the recognition it deserves for another specialty: inventing a globalized corporate model of institutional control. For decades, the gambling mecca has perfected the concept of the casino-hotel, which has been exported to countries around the world, including Singapore with the opening of the Marina Bay Sands. When this luxury resort opened in 2010, it was the convergence of two cities' very different histories of gambling. Las Vegas in Singapore looks at moments in Singapore's and Las Vegas' pasts when the moral and legal status of gambling changed significantly, and examines how modern states and corporations capitalized on it. The book begins in colonial Singapore in the 1880s, when British administrators revised the law in response to the political threat posed by Chinese-run gambling syndicates. It then looks at the 1960s when the newly independent city-state created a national lottery while at the same time criminalizing both organized and petty gambling. From there the focus moves to corporate Las Vegas in the 1950s. The book reveals how the Las Vegas model of casino development evolved into a highly rationalized template designed to maximize profits. It all comes together when the Vegas model is architecturally re-fashioned into Singapore's Marina Bay Sands. Ultimately, Lee Kah-Wee argues that the historical project of the control of vice is also about the control of space and capital. The result is an uneven landscape where the legal and moral status of gambling is contingent on where it is located. As the current wave of casino expansion spreads across Asia, he warns that these developments should not be seen as liberalization but instead as a monopolization by modern states and corporations.

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Reviews

This is an innovative project about the development and (place-specific) legalization of casino gaming in Singapore. It is comprised of extensive, well-supported, quality scholarship, which will certainly be of interest to scholars in a variety of academic fields, and to non-specialist local readers in Singapore as well. --Timothy A. Simpson, University of Macau In this provocative and engaging book, Lee Kah-Wee expands the horizons of postcolonial theories of architecture and urbanism, while providing an exemplary model of situated scholarship that reveals how morality, legality, and space are conjoined in the making of Singapore's urban history. --Greig Crysler, University of California, Berkeley Lee takes an unusual look at the spatial history of gambling in Singapore and Las Vegas, tracing a path from 1880s colonial Singapore--when British administrators revised gambling laws in response to the political threat posed by Chinese-run gambling syndicates--to corporate Las Vegas in the 1950s and the emergence of specialist casino design. --Straits Times A fascinating study of gambling's long history in Singapore, as well as the government's paradoxical, love-hate relationship with the 'vice' of gambling. --Rice Is the Marina Bay Sands Singapore's mirage of 'progress without crisis'? In a style as postmodern as casino architecture, Lee Kah-Wee highlights how gambling instigates state efforts to shape moral citizens and to position the nation in the world. Viewing the casino as architecture and as model, Las Vegas in Singapore explores the exciting nexus between the taming of chance at the gaming table and the taming of the future in the global marketplace. --Aihwa Ong, author of Fungible Life: Experiment in the Asian City of Life

This is an innovative project about the development and (place-specific) legalization of casino gaming in Singapore. It is comprised of extensive, well-supported, quality scholarship, which will certainly be of interest to scholars in a variety of academic fields, and to non-specialist local readers in Singapore as well. --Timothy A. Simpson, University of Macau In this provocative and engaging book, Lee Kah-Wee expands the horizons of postcolonial theories of architecture and urbanism, while providing an exemplary model of situated scholarship that reveals how morality, legality, and space are conjoined in the making of Singapore's urban history. --Greig Crysler, University of California, Berkeley Is the Marina Bay Sands Singapore's mirage of 'progress without crisis'? In a style as postmodern as casino architecture, Lee Kah-Wee highlights how gambling instigates state efforts to shape moral citizens and to position the nation in the world. Viewing the casino as architecture and as model, Las Vegas in Singapore explores the exciting nexus between the taming of chance at the gaming table and the taming of the future in the global marketplace. --Aihwa Ong, author of Fungible Life: Experiment in the Asian City of Life

Author Information

Lee Kah-Wee is assistant professor at the Department of Architecture in the School of Design and Environment at the National University of Singapore.

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