Las Vegas in Singapore: Casinos and the Taming of Vice

This dissertation investigates the historical formation of the modern casino as a "dividing practice" that cuts society along moral, legal and economic lines. It analyzes specific episodes in Singapore's and Las Vegas' histories when the moral problem of vice was transformed into a series of practical interventions devised by lawyers, detectives, architects and bureaucrats to criminalize and legalize gambling. Spatial containment and aesthetic form are key considerations and techniques in these schemes. I show how such schemes revolve around the complex management of the political costs and practical limits of changing the moral-legal status of gambling, whether it is to criminalize a popular form of illegality or to legalize an activity that threatens the normative order of society. The rise of the modern casino as a spatially bounded and concentrated form of gambling that is seamless with corporate management practices and popular culture is an indication of how far such costs and limits have been masked and stretched./nThe dissertation proceeds by examining three historical projects telescoped through the wider lenses of colonialism (Singapore, 1880-1920), nationalism (Singapore, 1950-1980) and corporatization (Las Vegas, 1950-1990). The colonial project shows how a line was drawn between vice and crime through the political technology of the "Common Gaming House". By attaching criminality to the built environment and decoding the practices of the native gamblers through ethnographic work, colonial administrators devised a technique to criminalize selectively without sparing anyone. The nationalist project highlights the paradox between the intensified criminalization of vice and the heroism of nation-building. Continuing the analysis of juridical reasoning and police work, this chapter shows how crime was produced by changing the spatial registers of crime within the political technology of the Common Gaming House. At the same time, this attack on the people was ameliorated through the public performance of police work, as well as the sanitized rituals of the national lottery draw and its architectural forms./nThe chapter on corporate Las Vegas examines the formation of the dominant casino model today. By tracing the transformation of the industry brought about by the confluence of digital technology, corporate management techniques and changing market conditions, I argue that the modern casino form as devised in Las Vegas effectively defeated the geographical injunctions designed to separate gambling from other spheres of life. In this process, casino design was abstracted into a set of "scientific" principles whose claims of objectivity are often motivated by the industry's lust for profitability and respectability./nThe final chapter synthesizes and reflects on these histories by showing how the Las Vegas model was transformed in order to blend into the spatial-aesthetic order of Singapore's political and urban landscape. It analyzes state discourses, bureaucratic culture and planning practices in order to show how the components of the Las Vegas model were dismantled and reassembled to produce the "Integrated Resort" that the government wanted. I argue that the architecture hides the casino in plain sight and blends into the urban vision of Marina Bay. The Integrated Resort is a sanitized model that facilitates a new scale of expansion and legitimacy for a globalized casino industry.

Advisor: AlSayyad, Nezar