Tourist utopias: biopolitics and the genealogy of the post-world tourist city

This review article locates urban tourism research within contemporary debates of critical urban studies. The review describes and analyses an emergent urban form – the “tourist utopia” – by focusing on the paradigmatic examples of Las Vegas, Dubai, and Macau. Though culturally, historically, and geographically distinct, these tourist cities share a set of characteristics which foreshadow more general global urban transformations. These characteristics include their juridical status as enclave “spaces of exception” within larger states; transnational investment regimes; public–private partnerships; transient multi-national populations; superlative and iconic architecture; and economies devoted to shopping, gambling, sightseeing, spectacle, and amusement. I explore the way each of these tourist cities functions as a metropolitan laboratory of urban futures and analyse them in terms of relationships among post-Fordist regimes of labour and consumption, themed environments and scripted experiences, mobilities of tourists and workers, and novel forms of sovereignty. The review highlights, in the tradition of the world city hypothesis, seven characteristics of these paradigmatic cities that are increasingly common to many global cities today; and speculates about the dialectic of dystopian and utopian valences in their post-world city futures. More generally, it introduces concepts from urban theory which may be relevant to research on tourism.