Tourist Utopias
Title
Tourist Utopias
Subtitle
Offshore Islands, Enclave Spaces, and Mobile Imaginaries
Price
€ 45,95 excl. VAT
ISBN
9789089648471
Format
Hardback
Number of pages
228
Language
English
Publication date
Dimensions
15.6 x 23.4 cm
Discipline
Asian Studies
Also available as
eBook PDF - € 45,99
Table of Contents
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Prolegomenon 1. Mapping Tourist Utopias (Tim Simpson) 2. The Zone is on Vacation (Keller Easterling) Enclaves 3. Instant Cities in the Jungle: Fantasies of Modernity for Whom? (Pal Nyiri) 4. After Utopia: Macau as a Tourist Utopia (Tim Simpson) 5. Choreographing Singapore's Utopia by the Bay (Daniel P. S. Goh) 6. Cultural Utopia: Abu Dhabi's Island of Happiness and the Development of a Cultural Enclave (Yasser Elshewtawy) Imaginaries 7. Disney's Utopian Techo-Futures: Tomorrow's World that We Should Build Today (Angela Ndalianis) 8. Tourism and a Virtual Bulgaria (Benjamin Kidder Hodges) 9. Sublimity, Sovereignty, and Sophistry: The Trouble in Middle Earth (Margaret Werry) Archipelagos 10. From Dubai to Mount Athos: Carving Islands of Fear and Hope (Veronica della Dora) Macau Utopics: A Visual Essay (Adam Lampton)

Reviews and Features

"Although scholars working at the intersection of critical tourism and borderlands studies may be interested in the volume as a whole, academics in other fields are more likely to be drawn to selected chapters. Social scientists will appreciate the analyses of the co-production of tourism and physical space found in "Enclaves," while humanities specialists will find "Imaginaries" of particular relevance." - Nicole Currier, H-Borderlands, H-Net Reviews. July, 2019. "This is an important cross-disciplinary collection of essays that tackles one of the most significant of contemporary scholarly subjects: the construction of a global landscape of post-Fordist tourist utopias. The authors in this wonderful volume provide vivid examples of these contradictory extra-territorial 'spaces of exception' framed by Tim Simpson's lucid theoretical delineation of 'tourist utopology.' This book will be of great interest to sociologists, anthropologists and geographers, as well as to urbanists, planners, designers, and architects." - Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at Parsons The New School for Design "Theoretically informed and imaginatively argued, Tourist Utopias excavates a history of utopian urbanity since Thomas More by focusing on new global utopias envisioned by the colluding forces of transnational corporations, city-states, emerging nations, post-Socialist and post-capitalist states, intent on creating ideal enclaves that cater to a new breed of 21st century mobile consumers." -- Panivong Norindr, author of Phantasmatic Indochina

Timothy Simpson (ed.)

Tourist Utopias

Offshore Islands, Enclave Spaces, and Mobile Imaginaries

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.
Editor

Timothy Simpson

Tim Simpson is Associate Professor of Communication, and Associate Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Macau, where he has worked since 2001. He is the co-author (with photographer Roger Palmer) of the volume Macao Macau (Black Dog Publishing).