Tourist Utopias
Offshore Islands, Enclave Spaces, and Mobile Imaginaries
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Amsterdam University Press
Published:7th Mar '17
Should be back in stock very soon
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.
"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
ISBN: 9789089648471
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
228 pages