Environment and Planning A 2014, volume 46, pages 2622 – 2637
doi:10.1068/a130007p
Transforming Macau: planning as institutionalized informality and the spatial dynamics of hypercompetition Kah-Wee Lee School of Design and Environment, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566; e-mail:
[email protected],
[email protected] Received 22 May 2013; in revised form 29 April 2014 Abstract. This paper examines the crucial years between 2002 and 2012 when land enclosures, reclamation works, and architectural production transformed the urban landscape of Macau. Building on the literature on urban informality, I first analyze how planning as institutionalized informality unmapped the city of Macau through a complex medium of neoliberal ethos, technical rationality, and geopolitical calculations. Then, I show how the casino concessionaires remapped the city in a highly competitive milieu by tracing how they maneuvered to secure relative locational advantage. This analysis shows the importance of framing mapping and unmapping as a simultaneous dialectical process so as to render the creative–destructive dynamic of capitalist urban transformation. It also suggests how we can further the analysis of urban planning as an informalized practice and institution. Keywords: Macau, urban informality, urban planning, production of space, casino industry
On 12 October 2010 I was received by an officer from the Land, Public Works and Transport Bureau of the Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR). He gave me an hour-long presentation about the history of the Bureau, the urban transformation of Macau since the 19th century, and the current efforts to plan the city. Before I left, he passed me a government report, “Dui goujian xiandaihua yu kexuehua de chengshi guihua tixi de tansuo”, which is a study into how to do urban planning in a “modern” and “scientific” way. The task ahead, he stressed, is to “diversify the economy”. In the course of my fieldwork in Macau I realized the gravity of this parting gift and message.(1) A decade after the casino industry was liberalized, the city had become the center of the global gaming industry. Between 2002 and 2009 tax revenue from casino gambling leapt by 500%—a sum three times more than the combined earnings of Las Vegas and Atlantic City—and the number of casinos grew from eleven to thirty three (Pinheiro and Wan, 2011; Schwartz, 2012). But it was the massive scale of urban development and the high-level corruption associated with it that led to growing public dissatisfaction. From this diagnosis of the etiology of Macau’s urban planning woes, recent debates within civil society and segments of the government had begun to juxtapose in opposition a model that extolled the values of transparency and public participation. When I spoke with Mr Cheang Kok Keong, President of the Association for Macau Historical and Cultural Heritage Protection, he stressed the values of good planning: toumingdu (transparency), kexuehua (scientificity), mingzong canyu (participation). Dr Jose Chui, brother of the current Chief Executive, published his doctoral dissertation which advocates replacing the current piecemeal model of (1)
This paper is based on fieldwork carried out between October and December 2010, and in March 2011.
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planning with a centralized and integrated model that can carry out long-term visions (Chui and Zhao, 1999). The debates and events unfolding in Macau echo in many ways the scenes in India used by urban theorist Ananya Roy to challenge the way we think about the relationship between formal and informal planning. She rejects the conception that informality belongs in certain sites that exist outside the formal channels of regulation and control. Reversing the gaze, she argues that the planning regime may itself be “an informalized entity, one that is a state of deregulation, ambiguity, and exception” (2009, page 76). She outlines a paradoxical situation whereby strategic deregulation becomes a way in which powerful interests can influence the direction of urbanization and, yet, it is also such deliberate ambiguities that create the “territorial impossibility of governance, justice and development” (page 81). Informal planning should therefore be understood as that mode of planning practice where value is always in negotiation and which produces, rather than exists in, certain kinds of spaces (AlSayyad and Roy, 2004; Bunnell and Harris, 2012; Dovey, 2012; McFarlane, 2012; Roy, 2005; Varley, 2013). Such a reconceptualization of informality is vital for an assessment of Macau’s urban transformation, not least so that one does not reproduce a pernicious form of postcolonial triumphalism whereby informal/bad planning is replaced with formal/good planning after the handover. As Clayton (2010, page 58) has cautioned, it is necessary to consider how the Portuguese administration operated “under different assumptions about the value of ambivalence, and a greater reliance on the blurring of boundaries”, and that this grew not out of a “Portuguese national character … but the contingencies of encounter in early modern Asia.” Indeed, the casino–government complex has survived and even thrived by minimizing administrative outlay and instituting ‘grey areas’ of tolerated illegalities (Eadington and Siu, 2007). These ‘grey areas’ functioned as an intermediate space between law and custom, where business operators could undertake illegal activities such as prostitution and junkets as long as they contributed a share of the profits towards public projects and social welfare. The analysis of urban transformation in Macau after the handover should address changing political–economic and social–historical milieus in which complex interactions between formal and informal channels find themselves embedded, rather than set fixed temporal markers or normative categories with which to separate the formal from the informal, the good from the bad. This paper contributes to the recent surge of scholarly interest in urban informality by examining the crucial decade from 2002 to 2012 when land enclosures, reclamation works, and architectural production transformed the urban landscape of Macau. By focusing on this period, this paper elaborates on how urban planning can be understood as the institutionalization of informality and traces the mode of spatial production under this regime. The paper is organized in two parts. I first show how the work of planning created the conditions for global capital to enter Macau, removed existing regulations on the forms of urban development, and dematerialized the city as an abstract space for investment. The overall effect of this process of ‘unmapping’ (Roy, 2009) was the destabilization of the value of space such that its volatility became the very currency for political manipulation. I then analyze how casino concessionaires, operating within this context, remapped the city as they tried to secure relative locational advantages through channels of formalization. The dialectical process between unmapping and remapping articulates the relationship between urban planning as institutionalized informality and its mode of spatial production. This paper also contributes to current academic debates on post-handover Macau which have generally focused on the postcolonial anxieties of a rapidly changing urban landscape fueled by global tourism and finance capital. Thus, Tieben (2009) examines how
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the representations of casino architecture intersect with corporate interests and geopolitical affiliations across various translocal and transnational players, while Chung (2009) articulates the rivalrous and contradictory relationship between heritage conservation and casino development. This relationship, by no means unique to Macau, is also echoed in other analysis whereby politics of identity and questions of sovereignty are buttressed in specific projects such as the Macao Museum and the Macau Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo (du Cros, 2009; Law, 2013; Ong and du Cros, 2012). Simpson (2008; 2009) suggests that Macau’s urban development can be read as a particularly revealing instance of the enclavic logic of financial capitalism. Macau functions, he argues, as a “didactic laboratory for nascent Chinese consumerist pedagogy” where “Chinese subjects who produce the bulk of mass consumer items for the world economy encounter the commodity instead as individual consumers” (2008, page 1072). While academic literature has both accounted for and theorized the urban transformation of Macau, debates on urban planning still tend towards a dualism wherein good and bad planning is unquestionably evidenced in contemporary problems. Tieben (2009, page 10) argues that “the proliferation of casino clusters together with unregulated and opportunistic property developments began to threaten the city’s physical environment and urban heritage.” Pinheiro and Wan (2011, page 28) argue that, due to the lack of planning oversight, “great swathes of prime public land have been eaten up by real estate and gaming interests.” This framing skews the analyses of urban planning of Macau as either a failure or nonexistent, which forecloses deeper understanding of how such a planning regime is intimately tied to a specific mode of spatial production. As I will show, a series of calculated decisions at different levels of governance created a hypercompetitive environment where casino concessionaires could build anywhere and as many casinos as they wanted provided they could secure the land and capital. The decade between 2002 and 2012 remains a crucial period to understand the power dynamics that shaped Macau and will continue to do so into the future. Urban planning as the institutionalization of informality Roy (2009, page 81) suggests that analyses of planning as “calculated informality” should focus on the “forms of deregulation and unmapping that … allow the state considerable territorialized flexibility to alter land use, deploy eminent domain, and acquire land.” Such discretionary, exceptional, and opaque exercise of power operates across different scales and at the intersections of different kinds of agential practices. Whether it is in the entanglements between everyday livelihood and formal place management (Devlin, 2011; Dovey, 2012; Ghertner, 2010; Yeo et al, 2012), or state–society territorial ambiguities between more horizontal networks of actors and practices (Demirtas-Milz, 2013; Fairbanks, 2011; Soliman, 2010), such processes of calculated informality produce dynamic spatialities that are symptomatic of the power relations that undergird these practices. Planning as the institutionalization of informality is deeply embedded in the spatial production of Macau before and after the handover. One famous case illustrates this. In 1991 the Portuguese government decided to sell seven plots of land in the Novos Aterros Porte Exterior (NAPE) through a public auction with a ‘favored party’ rider attached. Under this mechanism, if the ‘favored party’ is not the highest bidder, he or she has the opportunity to buy the land at the highest price. Stanley Ho, the operator of the casino monopoly in Macau since the 1960s, was listed as a ‘favored party’ and was therefore able to buy six of the seven plots. This was heavily criticized by the pro-Beijing constituencies
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which led to the auction being voided.(2) In the subsequent public auction, competitors were able to outbid Stanley Ho and buy several land parcels at prices far higher than was the norm. This led to a surge in property prices in NAPE and subsequently several relaxations to urban planning controls as developers pressed for higher densities to make good on their investments (Clayton, 1999). In the next big urban development at the Nam Vam Lakes in 1992 the government allocated the project to a company in which Stanley Ho was a major shareholder—a move to compensate for the voided auction which caused him to “lose” what he had originally won. Again, this came under much criticism from the pro-Beijing constituencies who saw this as an unfair arrangement that protected Portuguese interests. As a result, the company underwent internal restructuring and pro-Beijing constituencies were able to control 49% of the shares (Zu and Xin, 2005, pages 191–197). Thus, although master plans had been created for NAPE and Nam Vam Lakes, the informalized regime of planning made them either irrelevant or impractical.(3) In lieu of publicly visible and legally binding documents, opaque decision making and political manoeuvring through the planning process maintained the territorialized flexibility that defined a certain model of urban development. This example highlights the need to examine unmapping and remapping as a dialectical process, rather than focus only on unmapping as the central feature of planning as institutionalized informality. The planning process selectively unmapped the existing city— plans, policies, regulations, and imaginings that held together an idea of the city were wiped away, in whole or in part, by financial calculations and geopolitical contestations. At the same time, through sales mechanisms like the auction or direct allocation, the city was remapped, in a fractal fashion, as the various actors occupying different positions of power began to shape the city in their interest through formal means. Just as informality as a mode of urbanization should not be fixated on the illegible, interstitial, and illegal, the processes of unmapping and remapping should be analyzed as simultaneous, though not always symmetrical, processes. Remapping does not mark the end or outside of unmapping, but is part of the process of the production and arrangement of space within a regime of institutionalized informality. In Macau the post-handover convergence between an inherited model of planning, a general faith in the self-regulating market, and the geopolitics of the casino industry expresses a specific articulation of neoliberal experimentation at the urban scale. As Brenner and Theodore (2002, pages 369–372) argue, analyses of the spaces of neoliberalization should encapsulate the dynamics of creative destruction, rather than overemphasizing its destructive character. Similarly, grasping unmapping and remapping as “dialectically intertwined but analytically distinct moments” (page 362) is necessary to flesh out the incessant shifting of legalities and territorialities that characterize the production of space within an informal idiom. How, in other words, does the unmapping and remapping of space maintain structures of power such that urban planning can maintain its formal authority without giving up its self-styled prerogative to act outside its own rules? What are the logics and interests that undergird the remapping of space, and how do these remappings negate or overlap onto what was previously destroyed? (2)
While it is not within the scope of this paper to delve into the specifics of the parties involved, some background information is useful. The political constituencies operating in Macau are extremely diverse and numerous. Scholars generally identify the Chinese General Chamber of Commerce, Federation of Labor Unions, and neighborhood associations as amongst the most powerful groups. In the years leading up to the handover Chinese businessmen with ties to the central government in Beijing were especially influential. See Chou (2005, pages 191–205). (3) Master plans for NAPE and Nam Vam Lakes were drawn up by Portuguese architects Alvaro Siza and Manuel Vicente respectively. See Prescott (1993, pages 52–55).
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I have thus organized my empirical analysis in two parts—one showing the unmapping of space rolled out through strategic deregulation, and the other showing the remapping of space by powerful casino concessionaires. In the first part I analyze in detail the politics of the tender mechanism. Through selective disqualification and a restricted set of evaluation criteria, the tender mechanism was an assemblage of technical rationality, neoliberal ethos, and geopolitical calculations where the drive to maximize monetary value came into a relationship with concerns over territorial sovereignty at the urban and national scale. Then, I analyze how the six concessionaires remapped the city of Macau, paying attention to how, like a game of chess, series upon series of strategic moves were made to rearrange the urban landscape to consolidate territorial control and weaken competitors. Finally, as conclusion, I reflect on how the case of Macau contributes to the current turn in urban informality. Unmapping the city In his response to the media in 2002, when the casino licenses were up for bidding, then-SAR chief executive Edmund Ho argued that putting strict upper or lower limits on the number of casinos and gaming tables would interfere with the business strategies of the concessionaires. Espousing a free market logic, he argued that the role of the government was to encourage “benign competition” (liangxing jingzheng) among the concessionaires so as to serve the greater interest of Macau in terms of its urban development and tourism industry (Lin, 2002). In various Chinese media reports, liberalization was often conflated with modernization and competitiveness, and the way to bring about liberalization was to import foreign capital and expertise and transform Macau into the gaming center of Asia. Though Edmund Ho reiterated how the casino industry must contribute to the urban development of Macau, by the time the tenders were awarded and the conditions negotiated, the primary parameters of control were simplified to one of investment amount—successful concessionaires were bound only by their promise to invest a declared amount within a given time period with some indication of the kinds of projects to be undertaken (see also Pinheiro and Wan, 2011). They were also required to build at least one flagship development, though the location and exact business model of such a development were not prescribed (Comissão, 2002a). This was a crucial moment in the dematerialization of land and the decanting of its sociohistorical content—the city simply ceased to figure in the imagination and calculation of government. A lawyer who was involved in managing the tender process explains: ““The problem, mind you, is that there was and there still is, a lack of land in Macau. So most of the proposals don’t have [sites]. The subconcessions have executive summaries that state ‘we intend to have a five-star hotel with 5000 rooms, three restaurants, and so on’ … the interesting thing here is that one of the scoring weights of the tender was the investment [amount]. During the tender we found out that most of the investments that were proposed by the bidders, candidates, were overpriced. A lot. So, the idea, instead of having them bound to a specific investment, they were bound to a specific amount of investment. This means that instead of having SJM build the Grand Lisboa, we don’t care if it costs 100, 200, or 50 billion Patacas. You say that you are going to spend 10 billion, OK, so put it on the paper, and you are bound to spend at least 10 billion.”(4) Technical rationality in the form of legal reasoning and practical administration had the effect of deleting land and architecture from the very calculations of government. In order that all eighteen bidders who entered the field with unequal strengths be treated equally, in order that the government could extract the most benefit from the bidders based on what they could offer individually, and in order that all these be done with minimal effort in a (4)
Interview with Mr Antonio Lobo Vilela, March 2011. For the conditions imposed on concessionaires, see also Pinheiro and Wan (2012).
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compressed timeframe, an administrative procedure was set up that reduced the elements of consideration to monetary value. The antipolitics of such administrative procedures produced political effects which were both contradictory and necessary to its smooth functioning. On the one hand, the bidders and the government negotiated and settled on a whole series of urban improvements and economic benefits that were specific to each bidder. Steve Wynn promised to invest MOP$4 billion in a theme park at Taipa and to produce a total of 6500 jobs in the casino industry while Sociodade de Jogos de Maccu (SJM) promised to invest a total of MOP$4.7 billion in seventeen different projects around Macau and to maintain the jobs of its current employees. On the other hand, these different promises were subsumed into a numerical score that determined who would win the bid, such that their very tangibility became irrelevant. Indeed, 54% of the total score was given to the company’s track record in the casino and entertainment industry (Comissão, 2002b). This decontextualized the final product from the concrete materiality of the city of Macau. What the judges most valued was not so much a physical product as the intangible experience of building and running this product. This mode of valuation assumed the reproducibility of products and located corporate identity as a guarantee of reproducibility. The literature on urban informality and the examples of NAPE and Nam Vam Lakes might suggest that the unmapping of the city can often be found in the discrepancy between the plan and reality, or between the desired image and the arbitrariness with which the image is materialized through the exercise of formal institutions and state power. Yet, as this case shows, the erasure of existing plans was neither the beginning nor the logic of unmapping—it was the consequence of an earlier strategic move on the part of the SAR administration that made it impossible to maintain the visibility and practicality of these plans; instead of blueprints for the future, they became obstacles to development. Rolled out at the very start of the casino liberalization process, the tender mechanism made the material and sociohistorical conditions of the city fade into the background, while the maxi mization of monetary value took over as the common denominator for all assessments of social, economic, and cultural benefits. This combination of neoliberal logic and technical rationality operationalized through the tender mechanism unmapped the city by undermining the inherited foundations of urban imagination and governance. Though the criteria and scope of evaluation were public knowledge and designed as a performance of objectivity and excitement, the tender mechanism also functioned as a gatekeeper that determined who could or could not participate in the casino industry based on considerations that had nothing to do with these openly declared criteria. Reflecting geopolitical calculations at multiple scales, such considerations pursued objectives of capital accumulation, political autonomy, and territorial consolidation, often in contradictory ways. Planning can be seen as a process of unmapping when it changes the very frame of reference on which earlier urban schemes and relations of governance were based and becomes an ambiguous space for the reworking of power dynamics between old and new actors. This ambiguous space opened up by the tender mechanism can be seen in how the incumbent monopolist, Stanley Ho, almost lost in his bid for a concession. For forty years, the economy, social welfare, and urban development of Macau were indivisible from the performance of Ho’s casino monopoly. Based on the judging criteria, it would seem that his company SJM would have no problem winning one of the three concessions. As mentioned earlier, more than 50% of the score was given to track record in the casino and entertainment industry, thus favoring him heavily. Yet, in the context of postcolonial Macau, Stanley Ho’s monopoly was suddenly seen as a legacy of weak Portuguese rule, triad violence, and bureaucratic corruption (Lo, 2005). As the newspapers had picked up, SJM’s position in the top three was a close shave (Macau Daily News 2002). The original score given to the
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category of ‘experience in the industry’ was a shockingly low figure of 63.09.(5) This score was only subsequently increased to 84.40 which barely won SJM a spot in the top three (Comissão, 2002b). As Lo (2005, page 217) notes, the Macau SAR government had intended to reform the casino–government complex by maintaining “a degree of autonomy vis-à-vis all the casino capitalists”. Even though Ho won a license, the tender mechanism delivered a symbolic slap indicative of the changing power dynamics in the postcolonial regime. Through the tender mechanism, certain sources of capital and expertise that could reposition and rescale the economy of Macau in a global and regional context were privileged. Right from the beginning, the casino industry of Macau acquired an extranational status: it was an industry to be run by foreigners, or Chinese capitalists from ex-colonies, for the greater good of one of its own special administrative zones while casino gambling remained illegal in mainland China. The preferred sources were hinted at just before the tender was launched, when the SAR government approached casino developers in the United States, South Korea, Malaysia, Australia, and Japan to gauge their interest in Macau (Lo, 2005, page 215). This strange set of geopolitics produced a series of contortions where bidders, governments, and other investors sought to create and influence partnerships that would appeal to decision makers at different levels of governance. Initially, Venetian, headed by the chairman of Las Vegas Sands Sheldon Adelson, had partnered with Asian American Entertainment for the bid. The financial support for this joint bid was underwritten by the China Development Industrial Bank, a Taiwanese lender. However, in the midst of the bidding process, Adelson abruptly shifted his partnership to Galaxy Entertainment, a company run by a Hong Kong entrepreneur, fueling speculations about the sensitivity of Taiwanese capital.(6) After winning one of the three concessions, the partnership between Galaxy Entertainment and Venetian eventually fell through. A subconcession system was created so that Galaxy Entertainment could sell a subconcession to its ex-partner, thus retaining Venetian as a market player in Macau. It was later revealed that Sheldon Adelson had allegedly gained access to high-ranking politicians in Beijing and worked his connections to help Beijing clinch the 2010 Olympics bid (Bruck, 2008). It was through this sleight of hand that three concessions doubled into six as the other two original winners insisted on this right to sell a subconcession. Stanley Ho’s daughter and son partnered with MGM Mirage and PBL/Melco, respectively, and managed to win both subconcessions. In a bid to match the competition, local players also sought out foreign investors who had both the capital and expertise desired in the new geopolitical environment. As scholars have shown, shifting geopolitical forces continue to shape the border-crossing development of China’s Special Economic Zones and SARs (Ong, 2004; Yang, 2006). The geoeconomic integration of Taiwan and China, for example, does not override geopolitical calculations concerning territorial consolidation and sovereignty (Lim, 2012; Yang and Hsia, 2007). The fact that Taiwanese companies had played an important role in the information technology and manufacturing industries of the Greater Suzhou Area since the 1990s and continue to do so into the 21st century suggests that a different set of geopolitics was at work in the context of Macau’s casino industry. The tender mechanism became a way to reject Taiwanese capital while retaining the Venetian product. It also became a way for local players to reemerge in a ‘modern’ postcolonial guise through association with preferred foreign partners. (5)
In contrast, the top bidders Wynn Resorts, MGM Grand, and Galaxy Entertainment scored 75.33, 70.62, and 60.46, respectively, for this criterion. (6) This abrupt change in partnership happened five days before the announcement of the results. Asian American Entertainment alleged that “this is proof the concessions was somehow rigged in Las Vegas Sands’ favor, since Galaxy had already failed in its solo bid earlier in the process” (Ward, 2007).
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In 2010 a government officer revealed during an interview that the three winners represented “a careful balance of local and foreign interests”.(7) It is perhaps impossible to gauge whether these decisions were indeed carefully orchestrated or contained a degree of shortsightness and accident. Nevertheless, the doubling of casino concessionaires married the neoliberal ethos that ‘natural’ market forces would create a dynamic equilibrium regardless of the number of competitors, with geopolitical calculations about the choice of competitors and their partners. The tender mechanism was thus a strategically ambiguous zone where the geopolitics of postcolonial Macau and the casino industry entered into a relationship with the drive to maximize capital accumulation. In the absence of the physical city in these considerations, this process of unmapping ushered in a new urban typology and scale of development into the city. Remapping the city Despite the spectacular buildings promised in their proposals, the winners of the concessions were not keen at all about building at Cotai or Taipa, since these sites were too far removed from the Hong Kong and Chinese customers who entered Macau at the peninsula.(8) They also quickly realized that much of the existing land was owned or controlled by Stanley Ho. Ho himself was publicly dismissive about developing Cotai and sought to consolidate his dominance by resisting the sale of land to his competitors. This set up a brief impasse where Ho, the government, and the new casino concessionaires struggled to find available land to build new casinos. My analysis focuses on the strategic moves taken by the concessionaires to break this impasse and secure relative locational advantages for their casinos. Given that all concessionaires were offering, at the basic level, the same product, entered the market at the same time, and had no restrictions on where and how much to build, this remapping of the city illustrates what I call the ‘spatial dynamics of hypercompetition’. I identify at least five distinct dynamics: penetration, containment, interception, clustering, and circumvention. To break the impasse and test the market, Sheldon Adelson’s plan was to quickly and cheaply convert a warehouse in Taipa into a casino-hotel. In the meantime, he hired Macau Professional Services, a company that worked closely with the government on urban planning projects, to find a site for its first casino.(9) The company recommended that a triangular body of water at the plaza of the Macau Cultural Center, if reclaimed, would be a prime location for a casino (figure 1). It was close to the ferry terminal and the Gongbei Customs, prominent, and, most importantly, uncontested by anyone. Casino designer Paul Steelman spent one weekend developing a design proposal and was awarded the project.(10) Within a year the first foreign-owned casino, Sands Macau, opened for business. Sands Macau has often been cited as being immensely profitable, recouping its cost within nine months of operation. However, it is far more significant than that. The location of Sands (7)
Interview (anonymous), November 2010. Explaining why the three winners were chosen, the interviewee said that Steve Wynn’s concept of family entertainment was a “clear winner”. Galaxy Entertainment represented a “local interest group”. However, since it had no experience in the casino industry, it would not be able to win the concession by itself. “Someone from the top” spoke with Venetian and Galaxy Entertainment and encouraged them to submit a bid as partners. Finally, it was in the interest of “stability” to keep SJM. To dismiss Stanley Ho might create social chaos as his casinos employed many locals and were linked to many businesses and politicians. (8) Macau consists of a peninsula attached to mainland China by a narrow isthmus and two islands to the south, Taipa and Coloane. Cotai was created around 2002 by reclaiming the sea between Taipa and Coloane, thus merging the two islands into a single land mass. (9) Interview with Mr Campina Ferreira, Managing Director of Macau Professional Services, November 2010. (10) Interview with Mr James Wong, Managing Architect of Paul Steelman Design Group, October 2010.
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Macau penetrates deep into the controlled territory of Stanley Ho’s casinos. It is immediately next to the ferry terminal and closer to the main Chinese customs than any of the existing large casinos, thus intercepting the stream of customers entering into the Macau peninsula. Importing the standard Las Vegas practice of providing free shuttles between the point of entry and the casino, Sheldon Adelson was able to funnel customers to Sands Macau before they even saw Stanley Ho’s casinos. Thus, Sands Macau subverted the territorial control of Ho’s casinos by making use of existing infrastructure to its own benefit. This strategy did not need to transform the physical city too much, but it certainly was cheap, quick, and effective (figure 1). Seeing the immense profitability of Sands Macau, the response by other concessionaires was immediate. One of Stanley Ho’s partners resuscitated the plan to develop a large themepark along the Avenida Dr Sun Yat Sen. This proposal had been floating around for years before the handover but it remained only on paper. Immediately after the success of Sands Macau, the “Macau Fisherman’s Wharf” project kicked into action. Pushing out further into the sea and extending the entire length of the Avenida, the sprawling development obstructed the visual prominence of Sands Macau with fake volcanoes, Tibetan temples, and Roman arches. More than just intercepting customers, the development was one part in a larger strategy of containment—it created a new impermeable boundary along the waterfront that began at the ferry terminal and terminated at the Macau Science Center. At the important ferry terminal Stanley Ho further activated his influence and resources to contain the competitor. By redeveloping several parcels of land that he owned, he intended to build a huge casino-hotel that would act as a dam, straddling the Avenida and directing the flow of capital into its halls. Named Oceanus, this massive structure designed by French architect Paul Andreu did not come to pass, but its monumentality spoke of the intended retaliation by Stanley Ho to protect his territory against Sands Macau. Retaining the same strategy but at a reduced scale, what Ho eventually did was to convert the Yaohan supermarket on a site he owned into an instant casino. Adelson responded by building an underpass to facilitate pedestrians’ passage to Sands Macau. The battle over infrastructure only exacerbated the congestion and chaos at this road junction (Macau Daily News 2006). The six competitors were not all so openly antagonistic to each other. Steve Wynn, for example, famously declared that the only way to succeed in Macau was to learn from Stanley Ho. There seems to be an informal alliance between Ho and Wynn, which explains how Wynn was able to buy a large plot of land to build his casino directly opposite Stanley Ho’s flagship casino, the Grand Lisboa. Similarly, MGM Mirage and Galaxy Entertainment were able to build close to the Avenida da Amizade and NAPE, either by converting existing buildings or building on vacant land. This resulted in a clustering of large casinos owned by different concessionaires in the NAPE area. Enemies and allies, however, are not mutually exclusive statuses. At the peninsula Stanley Ho clearly had no intention of relinquishing his dominant position—besides building close to the ferry terminal, he also quickly developed a large casino-hotel, the Ponte 16, at the Inner Harbor, right next to the customs where Chinese workers entered via barges. Thus, while casino concessionaires clustered in areas where land, infrastructure, and supporting facilities were already available, Ho’s larger strategy was nothing less than total containment. The development of Cotai should be seen in the context of struggle over the control of land and infrastructure by different casino concessionaires. Sheldon Adelson’s initial success at Sands Macau convinced him of the profitability of the Chinese market. Yet, to continue to build at the peninsula would be to play on uneven tactical terrain. Observers remarked that, at a time when no concessionaires were willing to build outside of the peninsula, Adelson alone had the vision, capital, and guts to build at Cotai. While the role of this single man cannot
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1. Jai Alai; 2. Oceanus (built) (in the original proposal by Paul Andreu, the Oceanus was designed to occupy both sites 1 and 2 and span the Avenida Dr Sun Yat Sen); 3. Ferry Terminal; 4. Fisherman’s Wharf Theme Park; 5. Sands Macau; 6. Macau Science Center; 7. Gongbei Customs; 8. Inner Harbor (Wan Zai) Customs and Ponte 16 Casino-hotel; 9. Grand Lisboa; 10. Wynn Macau; 11. MGM Grand; 12. Macau Tourism Tower; and 13. Macau Cultural Center
Figure 1. [In color online.] Map showing locations of all casinos on the peninsula in 2010 (source of base map: Macao Special Administrative Region Government—Cartography and Cadastre Bureau).
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be refuted, it ignores the fact that this decision to build Cotai was also a result of his tactical disadvantage vis-à-vis other concessionaires. It seems that his arrogance and brusqueness had infuriated the rest of the concessionaires, some of whom were old enemies from Las Vegas. Therefore, Adelson’s turn to Cotai was as much an act of inspiration and courage as it was a form of exile.(11) By exiting the crowded peninsula and reclaiming land to build a Las Vegas Strip at Cotai, Adelson repeated the story of Las Vegas in the 1950s. Then, the pioneers of the Las Vegas Strip built outside the boundaries of Clarke County in order to escape taxation, access large parcels of cheap land, and tap into the flow of customers from Los Angeles. Fifty years later in Macau, Adelson used the same strategy to change the very rules of the game, creating his own territory outside of the control of Stanley Ho. In order to displace the center of gambling from the peninsula to Cotai, Adelson imagined a critical mass of developments in the model of Las Vegas (figure 2). It was not just the buildings, but the entire ecology of infrastructure, spectacle, and environmental condition. Having defined the main axis of the Strip, he immediately developed a second ferry terminal that would bring customers from Hong Kong and China directly to Cotai, circumventing the peninsula altogether. Exercising his influence in China, he further proposed to develop Hengqin Island, the part of China directly connected to Cotai through the Lotus Bridge, into a 1300-acre hub for conventions, universities, nongaming hotels, and resorts. Known as the “Shizimen” project, this extraterritorial extension of the Macau economy westwards seems to complement its casino-based industry with non-casino-based ones, but Adelson’s ambitious strategy should be obvious: by building a critical mass of activities in his territory, Cotai and Shizimen would dramatically change the terrain of competition in Macau. This account of the remapping of Macau highlights the spatial maneuvers of the casino concessionaires in an environment of hypercompetition. Containment, interception, clustering, penetration, and circumvention spatialize the different business strategies, institutional capacities, and power relationships between casino concessionaires and other actors. While they may be analytically distinct, they often overlap each other in practice, such that at any one point in time the city often exhibits multiple dynamics at play. A simple schematic helps us to visualize how each distinct spatial dynamic shapes the power relationship between the competitor and its milieu (figure 3). It categorizes containment and circumvention as ‘strong’ strategies that require vast amount of resources with correspondingly large implications on urban transformation, penetration, and interception as ‘weak’ strategies that require minimal resources and result in localized interventions, and clustering as an in-between category that can exhibit features of either strong or weak strategies. Strong and weak, however, do not determine in any way the effectiveness of such strategies—as the case of Sands Macau shows, weak strategies can radically change the competitive milieu through a single localized intervention. Also, one strategy can morph into another as the relative strengths of the players and institutional conditions change. As Stanley Ho’s and Sheldon Adelson’s moves suggest, interception can, over time and at a larger scale, become a strategy of containment or circumvention. In the case of Macau the creation of Cotai as a strategy of circumvention arguably had the greatest impact on the spatial dynamics of hypercompetition and the logic of Macau’s urban transformation. The remapping of the peninsula generally created a mixed terrain of contesting and cooperative forces, where relationships of symbiosis and parasitism subsisted within a hegemonic environment. But Adelson’s ‘strong’ strategy of circumvention was aimed toward (11)
In a 2008 interview Sheldon Adelson said, “At first, I thought it was political exile. I thought (rival Chinese casino developer) Stanley Ho had some influence that he got me off the peninsula because that’s where the center of everything is. All I was hoping was that I could get a location in which I could really do something” (Stutz, 2008).
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1. Macau International Airport; 2. Hengqin Island (also the location of the “Shizimen” project); 3. New ferry terminal; 4. SJM casinos in Taipa (Altira and New Century Hotel)
Figure 2. [In color online.] Casino development in Cotai and Taipa, 2010. Though the land was allocated, not all sites in Cotai were developed by 2010 (source of base map: Macao Special Administrative Region Government—Cartography and Cadastre Bureau).
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containment
circumvention
clustering
Strong
penetration
interception Weak
Figure 3. A schematic of the spatial dynamics of hypercompetition.
negating the existing center at the peninsula with another self-sufficient ecosystem outside of it. By 2012 the effects of this strategy were obvious. Some of the new casino developments in the peninsula deteriorated rapidly as they were abandoned for new projects at Cotai. The Macau Fisherman’s Wharf, for example, never went into full operation, its theaters, retail shops, and themed rides locked up between faux architecture. The Ponte 16 and Oceanus both shrank in scale from the original visions published by SJM. Their anticipated urban revitalization effects never materialized. Recognizing the threat posed by Cotai, other concessionaires realized they could no longer afford to remain in the peninsula and had to join the game where Adelson was dominant. Thus, a new round of capital diversion and spatial maneuvering happened in 2010 at Taipa and Cotai. The location of Stanley Ho’s new casinos in Taipa, for example, repeats the strategy of interception, for they were placed to filter off customers travelling down from the peninsula to Cotai (figure 2). Together with PBL/Melco, Stanley Ho’s son managed to secure a site at Cotai where he built the City of Dreams. New parcels of land around Cotai were awarded to other concessionaires, while some promised to Sheldon Adelson were withdrawn. The spatial dynamics of hypercompetition continues to shape the city of Macau. Conclusion While the conceptualization of calculated informality is often pinned down as the “constant negotiability of value and the unmapping of space” (AlSayyad and Roy, 2004, page 5), I have argued that it is important to counterpoise the simultaneous process of remapping as the temporary and strategic reterritorialization and fixing of value. Urban planning becomes the institutionalization of informality precisely because it constantly alternates between strategic deregulation and reregulation. Though the case of the remapping of Macau seems to be the primary activity of developers rather than planners, it is clear that the conditions for such remapping were made possible through strategic deregulation that replaced planning rationality with market logic and geopolitical calculations—a move that should not be misinterpreted as the lack or failure of planning. Rather than focusing on the practice of unmapping as the exercise of power, it is also in the ability to remap in the interest of specific parties that the exercise of power reappears in another form. Pockets of ambiguity close off temporarily; negotiations seem to dissipate; normalcy appears to return. Yet, as the ongoing disputes over urban planning and political corruption in Macau show, these moments of formalization and remapping do not so much mark the end of ambiguity as sustain the inner energy of institutionalized informality, one where unmapping and remapping precede and anticipate each other and where the boundaries of legality and legitimacy become impossible to ascertain. It is imperative, therefore, to show how the persistence of ambiguity and opacity both contradict and support the legitimacy of planning to act outside its own rules, how this paradox becomes a regime of spatial production, and what kinds of urban forms and spaces emerge as a result.
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In analyzing the process of remapping, I have described and identified a set of dynamics that spatializes the relentless pursuit for relative locational advantage in a context of physical constraint, strategic deregulation, and shifting geopolitical conditions. The identification and conceptualization of these dynamics continue to be useful in analyzing the transformation of Macau. With the current rescaling of geoeconomics across the neighbouring Hengqin island, the Zhuhai–Macau Cross Border Industrial Zone, and the larger Pearl River Delta, the dynamic has become an extraterritorial force, merging into and co-opting neighboring geographies. Within the smaller scale of the city of Macau itself, the proposal for a new monorail system presents another opportunity for powerful interest groups to shape the urban infrastructure to their advantage. Meanwhile a relatively new actor has entered the scene—the heritage industry led by local activists, architects, and international nongovernment bodies is lobbying for more stringent planning controls to protect the World Heritage Sites of Macau, resulting, for example, in regulations to limit the height of buildings around the historic Guia Lighthouse. All of these are part of the multiscalar, creative–destructive dynamic of Macau’s urban transformation. One of the challenges of the current turn to informality is to situate it in the heart of First World planning epistemology. To that effect, it is necessary to look elsewhere and to look anew at planning practices and scenarios that seem all too familiar to planning practices in the Global North. My analysis of the tender mechanism as a medium of geopolitical calculations, neoliberal ethos, and technical rationality offers a way to think critically about these common techniques of governance. The space of ambiguity is often hidden in, and generated through, the technical fine-print of highly calibrated procedures. One direction, therefore, is to broaden the current focus on property laws (Porter, 2011) by analyzing the technopolitics of planning practices such as economic modelling, architectural competitions, and urban design guidelines, to name just a few (Christophers, 2014; Lee, 2014; McNeill and Tewdwr-Jones, 2003). Finally, the spatial dynamics of hypercompetition can be useful as concepts with which to analyze urban transformation at the confluence of neoliberal reform and institutionalized informality. For example, the suspension of planning norms to create Business Improvement Districts and other pockets of privatized urban governance can be more finely analyzed by drawing out the tactical spatial moves cities, corporations, and proprietors make to secure locational advantage, maintain symbolic distinction, and gain access to resources. This imbues a sense of dynamism to the unstable and porous boundary between the norm and the exception, collaborator and competitor, urban and exurban. The large-scale purchasing of foreclosed properties by developers in the United States or brownfield sites undergoing rapid gentrification in New York and London can be spatialized along the lines of these concepts. How do these powerful actors contain, intercept, penetrate, and circumvent each other’s access to these devalued properties, and how does urban planning create the conditions for such rapid remarketization of land? While none of these cases may reflect the peculiar mix of geopolitics, market reform, and planning practice in Macau, a broader vocabulary of the dynamics of change can lend more specificity to how we understand spatial production within a regime of institutionalized informality. Acknowledgements. The author would like to thank the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program for the fellowship that made this research possible. He is grateful to the various informants, named and anonymous, who eagerly shared their views of and concern for Macau, as well as the three reviewers for their helpful feedback. All errors and misrepresentations are his own.
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