Download or read book Las Vegas in Singapore written by Kah Wee Lee and published by National University of Singapore Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Las Vegas in Singapore looks at the collision of the histories of Singapore and Las Vegas in the form of Marina Bay Sands, one of Singapore's two integrated resorts. The first history begins in colonial Singapore in the 1880s, when British administrators revised gambling laws in response to the political threat posed by Chinese-run gambling syndicates. Following the tracks of these punitive laws and practices, the book moves into the 1960s when the newly independent city-state created a national lottery while criminalizing both organized and petty gambling in the name of nation-building. The second history shifts the focus to corporate Las Vegas in the 1950s when digital technology and corporate management practices found each other on the casino floor. Tracing the emergence of the specialist casino designer, the book reveals how casino development evolved into a highly rationalized spatial template designed to maximize profits. Today an iconic landmark of Singapore, Marina Bay Sands is also an artifact of these two histories, an attempt by Singapore to normalize what was once criminalized in its nationalist history. Lee Kah-Wee argues that the historical project of the control of vice is also about the control of space and capital. The result is an uneven landscape where the legal and moral status of gambling is contingent on where it is located. As the current wave of casino expansion spreads across Asia, he warns that these developments should not be seen as liberalization but instead as a continuation of the project of concentrating power by modern states and corporations.
Download or read book Las Vegas in Singapore written by Kah Wee Lee and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reaching for the Sky written by Sheldon Adelson and published by Oro Editions. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marina Bay Sands, a $5 billion, high-density, mixed-use integrated resort that brings together a 2560 room hotel, convention center, shopping and dining, theaters, museum, and a casino across the water from Singapore's Central Business District, opened to the public on June 23, 2010. Designed by Boston-based, internationally renowned architect Moshe Safdie for the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, the 929,000 meter (10 million square-foot) urban district anchors the Singapore waterfront, creates a gateway to Singapore, and provides a dynamic setting for a vibrant public life. This new urban place integrates the waterfront promenade, a 74,000 square meter (800,000 square-foot), multi level arcade, and the iconic Museum of Art Science on the promontory. Located along the network of Public paths are also two theaters with a combined 4000 seats, a casino, a 9000 square meter (96,000 square-foot) convention center, and a hydraulically adjustable public event plaza of 5000 square meters (54,000 square-foot). Combining indoor and outdoor spaces and providing a platform for a wide array of activities, this vibrant, 21rst century cardo maximus, or grand arcade, also connects to the subway and other transportation.
Download or read book Las Vegas in Singapore written by Kah-Wee Lee and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. The 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. The 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. The 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.
Download or read book The Strip written by Stefan Al and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-03-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformations of the Strip—from the fake Wild West to neon signs twenty stories high to “starchitecture”—and how they mirror America itself. The Las Vegas Strip has impersonated the Wild West, with saloon doors and wagon wheels; it has decked itself out in midcentury modern sleekness. It has illuminated itself with twenty-story-high neon signs, then junked them. After that came Disney-like theme parks featuring castles and pirates, followed by replicas of Venetian canals, New York skyscrapers, and the Eiffel Tower. (It might be noted that forty-two million people visited Las Vegas in 2015—ten million more than visited the real Paris.) More recently, the Strip decided to get classy, with casinos designed by famous architects and zillion-dollar collections of art. Las Vegas became the “implosion capital of the world” as developers, driven by competition, got rid of the old to make way for the new—offering a non-metaphorical definition of “creative destruction.” In The Strip, Stefan Al examines the many transformations of the Las Vegas Strip, arguing that they mirror transformations in America itself. The Strip is not, as popularly supposed, a display of architectural freaks but representative of architectural trends and a record of social, cultural, and economic change. Al tells two parallel stories. He describes the feverish competition of Las Vegas developers to build the snazziest, most tourist-grabbing casinos and resorts—with a cast of characters including the mobster Bugsy Siegel, the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, and the would-be political kingmaker Sheldon Adelson. And he views the Strip in a larger social context, showing that it has not only reflected trends but also magnified them and sometimes even initiated them. Generously illustrated with stunning color images throughout, The Strip traces the many metamorphoses of a city that offers a vivid projection of the American dream.
Download or read book Diary of An Expat in Singapore written by Jennifer Gargiulo and published by Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This hilarious new book records the tongue-in-cheek journey of an expat in Singapore, told through vignettes, snapshots and Top 10 lists: “10 sure signs you’re in a Singapore taxi”; “Things first-time visitors to Singapore say”; “10 signs you’ve overstayed”; “Politically-incorrect expat profiling by nationality”; and many more. Based on the author Jennifer Gargiulo’s popular blog of the same name, Diary of an Expat in Singapore packs in a wealth of quirky observations, witty one-liners, and laugh-out-loud misunderstandings as the author tries to adjust to life in a strange new land and raise two kids while at it. Marvel as Jennifer enlists the help of her young son, Alexander (who learns Chinese at school), to find out what her hairdressers are saying about her at the salon! Expats will share many of the experiences of the author told in this book, but few will have heard them told with more humour and flair. And Singaporeans will also find much to enjoy and laugh over, when local customs and foibles are seen anew through the author’s eyes
Download or read book Roll the Bones written by David Schwartz and published by . This book was released on 2013-01-07 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roll the Bones tells the story of gambling: where it came from, how it has changed, and where it is now. This is the new Casino Edition. which updates and expands the global history of gambling to include a greater focus on casinos, from their development in European spas to their growth in Reno and Las Vegas. New material chronicles in greater depth the development of casino resorts on the Las Vegas Strip and their spread throughout the United States. A new chapter better places Atlantic City's casinos into their correct context, and new material accounts for the rise of casinos in Asia and online gaming. From the first modern casino in Venice (1638), casinos have grown incredibly. During the 18th and 19th century, a series of European spa towns, culminating in Monte Carlo, hosted casinos. In the United States, during those same years, gambling developed both in illegal urban gambling halls and in the wide-open saloons of the western frontier. Those two strands of American gambling came together in Nevada's legal casinos, whose current regime dates from 1931. Developing with a healthy assist from elements affiliated with organized crime, these casinos eventually outgrew their rough-hewn routes, becoming sun-drenched pleasure palaces along the Las Vegas Strip. With Nevada casinos proving successful, other states, beginning with New Jersey in 1976, rolled the dice. From there, casinos have come to America's tribal lands, rivers, and urban centers. In the last decade, gambling has moved online, while Asia--with multi-billion dollar projects in Macau and Singapore--has become a new casino frontier. Reading Roll the Bones, you'll get a better appreciation for how long casinos and gambling have been with us--and what they mean to us today.
Download or read book The Singapore Wink written by Ross Thomas and published by Overamstel Uitgevers. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stuntman searches for a colleague whom he thought he killed long ago Two pirates do battle on an old junk ship in Singapore Harbor. They leap nimbly from deck to rigging, crossing swords like fencing masters. And then one surprises the other, slicing a rope and sending the unfortunate pirate tumbling into the bay. This is how stuntman Angelo Sacchetti dies. Edward Cauthorne was his opponent, a fellow stuntman whose career died along with Sacchetti. He’s selling used cars when two thugs approach him. They’re emissaries from Sacchetti’s godfather, a Mafia don. Sacchetti is alive after all—alive enough to be blackmailing the don—and they firmly request that Cauthorne find him. The search takes Cauthorne back to Singapore, to risk his own life for the sake of the man he thought he’d killed.
Download or read book Fungible Life written by Aihwa Ong and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-13 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Fungible Life Aihwa Ong explores the dynamic world of cutting-edge bioscience research, offering critical insights into the complex ways Asian bioscientific worlds and cosmopolitan sciences are entangled in a tropical environment brimming with the threat of emergent diseases. At biomedical centers in Singapore and China scientists map genetic variants, disease risks, and biomarkers, mobilizing ethnicized "Asian" bodies and health data for genomic research. Their differentiation between Chinese, Indian, and Malay DNA makes fungible Singapore's ethnic-stratified databases that come to "represent" majority populations in Asia. By deploying genomic science as a public good, researchers reconfigure the relationships between objects, peoples, and spaces, thus rendering "Asia" itself as a shifting entity. In Ong's analysis, Asia emerges as a richly layered mode of entanglements, where the population's genetic pasts, anxieties and hopes, shared genetic weaknesses, and embattled genetic futures intersect. Furthermore, her illustration of the contrasting methods and goals of the Biopolis biomedical center in Singapore and BGI Genomics in China raises questions about the future direction of cosmopolitan science in Asia and beyond.
Download or read book Nobu written by Nobu Matsuhisa and published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In this outstanding memoir, chef and restaurateur Matsuhisa...shares lessons in humility, gratitude, and empathy that will stick with readers long after they’ve finished the final chapter.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Inspiration by example” (Associated Press) from the acclaimed celebrity chef and international restaurateur, Nobu, as he divulges both his dramatic life story and reflects on the philosophy and passion that has made him one of the world’s most widely respected Japanese fusion culinary artists. As one of the world’s most widely acclaimed restaurateurs, Nobu’s influence on food and hospitality can be found at the highest levels of haute-cuisine to the food trucks you frequent during the work week—this is the Nobu that the public knows. But now, we are finally introduced to the private Nobu: the man who failed three times before starting the restaurant that would grow into an empire; the man who credits the love and support of his family as the only thing keeping him from committing suicide when his first restaurant burned down; and the man who values the busboy who makes sure each glass is crystal clear as highly as the chef who slices the fish for Omakase perfectly. What makes Nobu special, and what made him famous, is the spirit of what exists on these pages. He has the traditional Japanese perspective that there is great pride to be found in every element of doing a job well—no matter how humble that job is. Furthermore, he shows us repeatedly that success is as much about perseverance in the face of adversity as it is about innate talent. Not just for serious foodies, this “insightful peek into the mind of one of the world’s most successful restaurateurs” (Library Journal) is perfect for fans of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table. Nobu’s writing does what he does best—it marries the philosophies of East and West to create something entirely new and remarkable.
Download or read book Spatial Planning for a Sustainable Singapore written by Tai-Chee Wong and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-02-28 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses and provides an insight to Singapore’s planning system and practices associated with sustainable development. It takes a reflective approach in reviewing the direction, impact and significance of sustainable development in Singapore planning and the future challenges facing the city-state, which is often looked upon by many developing countries as a model.
Download or read book Gambling in America written by Earl L. Grinols and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-12 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gambling in America carefully breaks ground by developing analytical tools to assess the benefits and costs of the economic and social changes introduced by casino gambling in monetary terms, linking them to individual households' utility and well-being. Since casinos are associated with unintended and often negative economic consequences, these factors are incorporated into the discussion. The book also shows how amenity benefits - for casinos, the benefit to consumers of closer proximity - enter the evaluation. Other topics include agent incentives and public decision making, conceptual clarifications about economic development, cost-benefit analysis, and net export multiplier models. Professor Grinols finds that, in considering all relevant factors, the social costs of casino gambling outweigh their social benefits.
Download or read book Come from Away written by Genevieve Graham and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Tides of Honour and Promises to Keep comes a poignant novel about a young couple caught on opposite sides of the Second World War. In the fall of 1939, Grace Baker’s three brothers, sharp and proud in their uniforms, board Canadian ships headed for a faraway war. Grace stays behind, tending to the homefront and the general store that helps keep her small Nova Scotian community running. The war, everyone says, will be over before it starts. But three years later, the fighting rages on and rumours swirl about “wolf packs” of German U-Boats lurking in the deep waters along the shores of East Jeddore, a stone’s throw from Grace’s window. As the harsh realities of war come closer to home, Grace buries herself in her work at the store. Then, one day, a handsome stranger ventures into the store. He claims to be a trapper come from away, and as Grace gets to know him, she becomes enamoured by his gentle smile and thoughtful ways. But after several weeks, she discovers that Rudi, her mysterious visitor, is not the lonely outsider he appears to be. He is someone else entirely—someone not to be trusted. When a shocking truth about her family forces Grace to question everything she has so strongly believed, she realizes that she and Rudi have more in common than she had thought. And if Grace is to have a chance at love, she must not only choose a side, but take a stand. Come from Away is a mesmerizing story of love, shifting allegiances, and second chances, set against the tumultuous years of the Second World War.
Download or read book Garden City Mega City written by Patrick Bingham-Hall and published by . This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: tête-bêche Book. One half depicts the mega city problems, but when the book is flipped over, the other half provides the garden city solutions.Packed with photographs, diagrams, and colourful info-graphics, Garden City Mega City presents a compelling case for re-examining and re-planning the mega cities of the 21st century.
Download or read book Sustainable Urban Development in Singapore written by Melissa Liow Li Sa and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-09-28 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers theoretical and practical insights into land use, transport, and national policies in one of world’s well-known urban concrete jungle, none other than the Singapore city. The emphasis is situated on Singapore’s attempt to promote walking and cycling. Greater appreciation of walkability thrives on Singapore’s rich history, green city, people and the gastronomic kopitiam and hawker culture. The book offers a comprehensive coverage of walkability as a crucial component of urban design to reduce vehicular congestion with the associated carbon emissions, foster a healthy lifestyle and community participation and create jobs to help the economy. A high income per capita and an aging society, lessons drawn from Singapore’s experience will be useful to other societies. Scholars in sustainable tourism field, urban planners, government bodies, tourist boards, entrepreneurs, national parks board, residents, and inbound travellers will benefit from reading the book.
Download or read book Singapore in the Malay World written by Lily Zubaidah Rahim and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-11-09 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new appraisal of their relationship offers groundbreaking new insights into the way in which the Malaysian and Singapore states see both themselves and each other.
Download or read book Billion Dollar Whale written by Bradley Hope and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of 2018 by the Financial Times and Fortune, this "thrilling" (Bill Gates) New York Times bestseller exposes how a "modern Gatsby" swindled over $5 billion with the aid of Goldman Sachs in "the heist of the century" (Axios). Now a #1 international bestseller, Billion Dollar Whale is "an epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale" (Publishers Weekly), revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history. In 2009, a chubby, mild-mannered graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business named Jho Low set in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude--one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system. Over a decade, Low, with the aid of Goldman Sachs and others, siphoned billions of dollars from an investment fund--right under the nose of global financial industry watchdogs. Low used the money to finance elections, purchase luxury real estate, throw champagne-drenched parties, and even to finance Hollywood films like The Wolf of Wall Street. By early 2019, with his yacht and private jet reportedly seized by authorities and facing criminal charges in Malaysia and in the United States, Low had become an international fugitive, even as the U.S. Department of Justice continued its investigation. Billion Dollar Whale has joined the ranks of Liar's Poker, Den of Thieves, and Bad Blood as a classic harrowing parable of hubris and greed in the financial world.
