Macau and the Casino Complex

Stefan Al, Stefan Al

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780874177084
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Special Award of the Jury Winner —2018 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards In only a decade, Macau has exploded from a sleepy backwater to the world's casino capital. It was bound to happen. Macau, a former Portuguese colony that became a special administrative region within the People's Republic of China in 1999, was the only place in China where gambling was legal. With a consumer base of 1.3 billion mainland Chinese deprived of casino gambling, and the world's largest growing consumer class, international corporations rushed in to enter the games. As a result, the casino influx has permanently transformed the Macau peninsula: its ocean reclaimed, hillside excavated, roads congested, air polluted, and glimmering hotel towers tossed into the skyline, dwarfing the 19th century church towers.Essays by a number of experts give a deeper insight on topics ranging from the myth of the Chinese gambler, the role of feng shui in casino design, the city's struggle with heritage conservation, the politics of land reclamation, and the effect of the casino industry on the public realm. Drawings and photographs in vivid color visualize Macau's patchwork of distinct urban enclaves: from downtown casinos, their neon-blasting storefronts eclipsing adjacent homes and schools, to the palatial complexes along a new highway, a Las Vegas-style strip. They also reveal how developers go to great lengths to impress the gambler with gimmicks such as fluorescent lighting, botanic gardens, feng shui dragon statues, cast members' costumes, Chinese art imitations, and crystal chandelier-decked elevators. It is a book that helps readers grasp the complex process of the development of the casino industry and its overall impact on the social and architectural fabric of the first and last colonial enclave in China.

CHAPTER 1

PETRI-DISH URBANISM

CATHRYN H. CLAYTON

“Macau is like a petri dish.”

Almost twenty years ago now, a Chinese acquaintance of mine (let us call him Kwan), born and raised in Macau, gave me that image with which to think about his city. It was the late 1990s, a year or two before Macau’s transfer from Portuguese to Chinese administration, and I was living in Macau, working at a local foundation and doing ethnographic fieldwork for my dissertation on cultural identity and political transition.

I was asking as many people as I could what, if anything, made Macau different from other Chinese cities. For this young man, the petri-dish image evoked something essential about Macau—the sense of both containment and diversity peculiar to daily life in a city that had, for over 400 years, existed on the shifting edges of overlapping empires and economies. It was small space, constrained by the sea on three sides and a closely patrolled border on the fourth. But in this space many different “organisms” had found fertile ground, such that each of them, as he put it, “keeps expanding upward and inward, and all their differences get magnified.”

As I have returned to Macau time and again over the years (first to teach at the University of Macau from 2001–2005, and afterwards for extended visits every year or so), I have continued to find Kwan’s image a useful way of thinking about urban change and cultural identity in twenty-first century Macau. First, because its resonances with other concepts that have been used to analyze contemporary Asian cities reveals the unique aspects of what appears to be a generic process of urban change and differentiation. Second, because it is this kind of petri-dish urbanism that some residents and observers of Macau fear may be disappearing with the advent of the casino complex. And third, because the tropes of expansion and magnification can help us to think more dynamically about urban change and continuity, culture, and identity, across time.

The petri-dish simile is, of course, hardly a new one in the study of cities. Rem Koolhaas uses the phrase to describe the apparent memorylessness of what he terms the “Generic City”: the apotheosis of contemporary urban space, in which “almost any hypothesis can be ‘proven’ and then erased, never again to reverberate in the minds of its authors or audience” (Koolhaas 1995:1255). This is not how Kwan meant it. Indeed, there are many ways in which a petri dish is not a good simile for Macau. The implication of a white-coated scientist hovering nearby, intentionally cultivating certain carefully selected organisms under sterile and closely controlled conditions, does not reflect the role of historical accident and human agency in shaping the culture and boundaries of any city, especially Macau. Certainly in Macau those boundaries have proven simultaneously more porous and less transparent than the smooth, clear, impermeable walls of a cell culture dish. And in the context of the biology laboratory, unlike in Macau, the accidental interaction or admixture between two strains can only be thought of in negative terms, as “contamination.”

What Kwan intended to emphasize was, rather, the laissez-faire nature of the petri dish—throw some bacteria in a cell culture dish, put on the lid, and leave it alone for a few days—as well as the chaotic and claustrophobic feeling that resulted. This was in stark contrast to the image of Macau that the Portuguese and Chinese governments were promoting at the time. Theirs was the image of the bridge, in which the intimacy of Macau’s urban spaces had led not to the magnification of differences but to the attenuation of difference through interaction, hybridization, and the “blending of East and West.”

Yet the image of Macau as petri dish—in which many distinct and self-contained colonies of organisms grow together in one small space—was the one that resonated more deeply with many Macau residents I spoke to in the late 1990s. Those who remembered Macau in the early and mid-twentieth century recalled more or less distinct ethnic neighborhoods—the Macanese in Lilau, the Portuguese in Barra, and the Cantonese along the Inner Harbour and up to the Border Gate. But, due to the small size of the city, these communities regularly rubbed shoulders in public spaces, and the well being of each depended on that of the others.

By the 1990s, population growth meant that only vestiges of those distinct neighborhoods remained. Spatially, the colonies had grown into each other, making the distinctions between communities social rather than geographic. As one Portuguese acquaintance put it in 1998, it was as if there were multiple cities within the confines of one little urban footprint.¹ It was this plurality of urbanisms that the petri-dish metaphor expressed so concretely: the sense that several cities occupied the same physical space, each with its own linguistic, economic, and cultural identity, each one nourished by different elements of a shared nutrient mix, growing and changing shape and shifting position in relation to the others, sometimes dominating the landscape and at others getting crowded out of existence.

In its emphasis on codependent diversity, Kwan’s invocation of the petri dish seems to have more in common with Koolhaas’s notion of the “City of Exacerbated Difference©,” a form of urbanism that does not strive for balance and homogeneity but is “based on the greatest possible difference between its parts” and on “the opportunistic exploitation of flukes, accidents, and imperfections” (Koolhaas in Chung et al., Great Leap Forward:29). According to Koolhaas, although such urban formations appear chaotic, they in fact form a delicate system in which “the slightest modification of any detail requires the readjustment of the whole to reassert the equilibrium of complementary extremes” (Chung et al. 2001:29).

The COED^© concept was advanced as a model to explain the new urban formations engulfing the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region just to Macau’s north. Yet aspects of the COED© certainly find echoes in Macau, and it is especially useful in conceptualizing Macau’s position within the broader PRD region in the years since the handover. But this model assumes the self-conscious engineering of difference in response to the call of a highly ideological state. In short, it suggests an authority, or series of authorities, who defines the identities and boundaries of each of the various parts and then cultivates (or encourages others to cultivate) difference between them.² By contrast, the twentieth-century process of magnification that Kwan was talking about did not arise from deliberate experimentation or from a purposeful attempt to encourage diversity as a strategy of capital accumulation. Rather, it resulted from the very weakness of the modern Macau state and its capacity for standardization and systematization.

For centuries, Macau was the farthest-flung piece of a global Portuguese empire, a tiny peninsula clinging to the southern edge of the vast Qing realm, and a trade entrepôt located along East Asia’s busiest shipping lanes. As a result, people and commodities from Europe, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, Japan, Korea, and many parts of China found their way to Macau through their own volition or otherwise.³

During most of the twentieth century, the city’s official language was spoken by less than 5 percent of the population; there was no public school system for the 95 percent of school-age children whose mother tongue was Chinese; no unified history curriculum, no attempts to inculcate in residents a sense of belonging to the city or allegiance to any overarching state ideology; and few urban plans that outlasted the tenure of any single governor. The Portuguese state in Macau looked after its own citizens, who accounted for only about 3 percent of Macau residents. For the rest, Chinese civic organizations stepped into the breach. Native-place organizations, lineage organizations, labor unions, guilds, charities run by the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), mutual aid associations run by the Communist Party, as well as Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Baha’i and other religious institutions ran schools and provided the social services and senses of community and identity that the state did not. In doing so, they did not just perpetuate but actively strengthened a wide range of distinct but overlapping forms of social, political, cultural, and linguistic identification among Macau residents.

In short, radical heterogeneity and a kind of contained and delicate chaos are hardly new in Macau. What does seem new is the deliberate attempt to sort and separate this heterogeneity, both conceptually and spatially.

. . .

This book is based on the premise that the casino complex is a distinct form of urbanism in which a single industry has, in the period since the gaming sector was opened to competition in 2001, remade the city of Macau in its own image. As the essays in this book show, the changes wrought by the casino complex are to be found not just on the skyline and in the economy but in forms of political engagement, quality of life, consumer preferences, patterns of movement, and expectations of “the good life.” Observers have emphasized the transformative and totalizing nature of this process. Some laud it as the opening up of a seedy, corrupt, and closed society to the fresh air of globalization. Others malign it as evidence of the relentless speed and potency with which corporate capital creates new frontiers of exploitation and accumulation at the expense of just about everything else. In both cases, there is a sense that new regulatory mechanisms, new urban infrastructures, and new market forces are homogenizing, standardizing, integrating (both internally and externally), and differentiating the city to an extent that the state has never before managed, or even cared, to do.

For many Macau residents, too, this narrative of sudden, transformative impact rings true. The speed of economic, political, and social change has opened previously unthinkable opportunities for some while creating pressures that many others find difficult to endure. For most, the effects of this change are inescapable. Economically speaking, residents have witnessed seemingly impossible growth rates that have given them, by some calculations, one of the highest per capita GDPs in the world.

Yet, especially in the wake of the 2009 downturn, when one of the two largest casino operators teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and laid off 11,000 employees, there is a heightened awareness of the unstable, boom-and-bust nature of this prosperity. The high wages paid by casinos have changed the employment structure. Government bureaus, foundations, nonprofits, even restaurants and others in the service industry have had their most capable junior staff “poached” by casinos hungry and willing to pay top dollar for talented, experienced, bi- or tri-lingual local employees. Casino liberalization has changed the aspirations of Macau’s youth: high school students who might have once aspired to a college education and a career in business or public service can now earn more straight out of high school as dealers, and at the University of Macau the major in Gaming Management regularly attracts the best students.

Yet even these high wages have not been able to keep up with the skyrocketing real estate prices, driven by investment and speculation from Hong Kong and mainland China. Although the government has built more public housing to accommodate low-income residents, young middle-class couples planning to marry and start a family are having to either delay doing so until they can save enough for a down payment or buy a condominium across the border in Zhuhai and commute through the immigration checkpoint every day.

At the same time, many feel that their options have narrowed: career paths outside the casino and entertainment sector that will pay enough for a young family to live a relatively comfortable middle-class life are becoming increasingly difficult to find, while even within that sector, competition from the huge numbers of imported workers (some 28 percent of the labor force now hails from outside of Macau) make salary increases, promotions, and job-hopping opportunities increasingly difficult to secure.⁴ The high profile corruption case in 2008 of the Secretary for Transport and Public Works, Ao Man Long, who was convicted of accepting over U.S.$3 million in kickbacks from the construction of projects such as the Venetian and Galaxy StarWorld (among others), shook public faith in the city’s post-handover political leaders and laid bare the troubling extent of collusion between the state and private capital. While it may be that these changes were foreseeable and temporary signs of an economy in transition, they have led some residents to lament that the small-town, intimate sensibility they once enjoyed in Macau is being replaced by a more competitive, exploitative, materialistic ethos. Less like a petri dish, more like a cattle car.

These economic developments are manifest through equally transformative changes to the urban environment. The casino boom has brought a population boom (from around 430,000 in 1999 to around 600,000 in 2016), which has in turn necessitated a boom in construction of high-rise condominium towers and public housing blocks in neighborhoods throughout the city. Automobile traffic on the narrow downtown streets has become a knotted mess: the sharp rise in population and in the number of tourists (from around 7 million per year in the late 1990s to 31 million in 2014) has strained public transportation, while new employment, housing, and traffic patterns mean that increasing numbers of residents feel the need (and have the means) to own private cars.

The most spectacular changes to Macau’s cityscape, however, have happened at a distance from the most densely populated residential areas: the construction of the casinos themselves—buildings on a scale previously unthinkable in a space as small as Macau—on massive tracts of landfill conjoining what were once two separate islands. Whereas in the pre-2001 era, Macau’s ten casinos were all within easy walking distance of some of the most densely populated parts of the peninsula, the Cotai Strip is designed to be most easily reached by bus or automobile. Indeed, one of the principal changes that distinguishes the casino complex in Macau is the expansion of automobile urbanism: unlike the narrow roadways and pedestrian-only zones that make it easier to walk than drive on the Macau peninsula, the Cotai Strip is ringed by intersecting six-lane, high-speed thoroughfares where the paucity of crosswalks and absence of stoplights facilitate the quick movement of cars and buses to and from the border and residential areas in the north (where many casino workers live) but constrain pedestrians’ ability to move between the casinos and the closest, newest residential areas on Taipa, just across the street.⁵

In this regard, it appears that one of the main effects of casino development is the exacerbation of the difference between Macau’s gaming economy and its historical and cultural identity. For decades, Macau has relied on both its casinos and its architectural heritage as resources for economic development. For many, it was the juxtaposition of the two—the “churches alongside brothels,” in W. H. Auden’s words—that contributed to the city’s petri-dish sensibility.⁶ But the increasing dependence on the casino sector has led the Macau government to pursue cultural tourism as a means of economic diversification (Tam 2014:306). This has led to the spatial and conceptual separation and purification of these two aspects of the Macau experience: the “old Macau”, intimate cradle of culture and identity, versus the “gambling city”, exemplified by the Cotai Strip, a vast “cultural desert” that trades on its ability to detach markers of cultural identity (the Venetian?) from any possible sense of belonging.

The “Old City”: crowded outdoor street markets; cobblestone plazas; quiet churches; narrow, crooked lanes lined with stalls selling cheap factory overruns of textiles from China; rundown shops whose rows of salt fish hanging from the ceiling and sacks of dried medicinal herbs crowding the storefront advertise themselves to the noses of passersby long before they come into view; back-alley shrines to local deities; and quiet parks where elderly men walk their birds at sunrise. Here, carefully cultivated signs of “history” and “local culture” permeate the outdoor spaces, and the pedestrian has the distinct advantage.

The gambling city: air-conditioned simulacra of street markets; wide hallways lined with boutiques selling brand-name European and American merchandise; ventilation systems that whisk away unsettling smells; and back alleys accessible only to the maintenance crew. Here, pedestrian space is largely indoor space. It can take longer to walk from one end of the Venetian to the other than to walk from Leal Senado to the São Paulo Ruins. Even the walkways that connect neighboring casinos to each other and to Taipa Village are enclosed, and great care has been taken to anonymize the environment. The premise of this division both rests on and reinforces the idea that, to...