Seminar: Gambling Harms and Urban Development in Singapore

The session will be led by visiting lecturer from National University of Singapore, Dr Kah Wee Lee. It will include a seminar presentation followed by time for discussion and reflection on the potential lessons and learnings that the UK might draw from the Singapore context.

Academics of all levels interested in gambling harms and urban development are invited to attend this seminar.

This is a hybrid event, though in person attendance is strongly encouraged. Lunch will be provided for those who attend in person.

Online attendees can join via Microsoft Teams using the following link:

Join: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/339350344685935?p=8Wp1mjPPoBLc7B2kiKMeeting ID: 339 350 344 685 935Passcode: Vm2uq2yR

Seminar Details

The Free Shuttle Bus: infrastructures of extraction in three casino cities and some implications for "gambling harms"

Over the last twenty years, the center of the casino industry has relocated from Las Vegas to three cities in Asia-Pacific, namely Singapore, Macau 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. Such infrastructures operate at different scales and articulate a paradox of separation and connection. In this presentation, I focus on 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 reflect the inherent tensions of the state-industry relationship threaded through the material conditions of urban infrastructure and everyday life.

I end with two reflections on what this work brings to research on gambling harms. First, we need to understand the gambling industry as a global industry where a range of actors operate in and outside of jurisdictional boundaries and where "harms" are often exported elsewhere. Second, we need to expand "gambling harms" in ways that account for the different urban conditions in which the industry is embedded. While the case of the FSB might not appear relevant to the UK context, it draws out the patterns of segregation and over/dis-investment that speak to many cities dependent on the gambling industry for jobs and tax revenue.

Biography

Dr Kah Wee is an interdisciplinary scholar who works on the relationships between space and power, particularly through the lenses of modern expertise such as architecture, urban planning, law and public administration. His research is split between the techno-politics of urban planning and design in Singapore and the rise of the casino industry in Asia. He is the author of “Las Vegas in Singapore” (NUS Press, 2019) which casts a critical light on the histories of the control of vice across colonial, nationalist and corporate contexts. Lee is committed to critical pedagogy and strives to translate its precepts for the training of urban planners and architects. He was a 2021 Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.

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