CASINO GAMBLING AS A “GROWTH POLE” STRATEGY AND ITS EFFECT ON CRIME*

ABSTRACT Casinos are often considered as a “growth pole” strategy to revitalize dilapidated regions. However, voters often reject casinos due to their perceived adverse impact on crime. Using a quasi-experimental design we analyze the impact of the casinos on crime spillover from Atlantic City to other localities in the region. We found that the level of crime in localities adjacent to Atlantic City and along the major nontoll routes to Philadelphia and New York City up to approximately 30 miles from Atlantic City rose significantly following the introduction of casinos. Crime levels are higher than they would have been in the absence of casinos.     

Envisioning Capitalism: Geography and the Renewal of Marxian Political Economy

This paper offers a reinterpretation of what critical theorist Moishe Postone calls 'the fundamental core of capitalism'. In so doing, it seeks to lay a set of theoretical foundations for a renewed Marxian political economy in geography, at a time when Marxism has been eclipsed as a leading critical paradigm within the discipline. The argument works on two fronts simultaneously. On the one hand, the ongoing hegemony of economic and political neo-conservatism is occluding the violent realities of a capitalist world economy behind the anodyne logics of free-market theory. These realities suggest the continued relevance of, and need for, a strong Marxian critique of political economy. But on the other hand, Marxism has been reprimanded by its erstwhile allies on the Left of geography for being too 'modern' and too capital- and class-centred. In light of this double challenge, the paper seeks to develop a 'both/and' Marxism for geography that can chart a third way between the antinomies of modern and after-modern modes of theorizing capitalism and class. A project of 'envisioning capitalism' is suggested on this basis, which combines the 'power' of modern theory with the epistemological reflexivity of after-modern theory. At the same time, capitalism and class are rethought at an ontological level and shown still to be essential features of the fin-de-millennium world, but far less closed and hegemonic than is suggested by modern modes of Marxism. Finally, a return to a class politics of redistribution is suggested, but in a way that draws in more recent Left geographical concerns with identity, difference and recognition.     

Manufacturing regional disparity in the pursuit of economic equality: Alberta's First Nations Gaming Policy, 2006–2010

The Province of Alberta in 2001 implemented the First Nations Gaming Policy (FNGP) to improve First Nations development potential by permitting the construction of reserve casinos. This article argues that during the policy development stages provincial and First Nations leaders failed to consider the geographic placement of reserve communities, both in terms of where casinos would be placed and how gaming revenues would ultimately be distributed. Therefore, a policy intended to assist with First Nations economic rejuvenation in Alberta has benefitted a small proportion of First Nations while exacerbating regional economic difficulties the policy was in part calculated to ameliorate. The authors recommend revisiting the FNGP to establish a more equitable revenue distribution formula, thus resulting in a greater distribution of gaming revenues to a larger number of First Nations.     

Crime and disorder, and house sales and prices around the casino sites in Windsor, Ontario, Canada

This study is an analysis of the impact of the opening or closure of a new urban casino on crime and disorder, and house sales and prices in its neighbourhood. The two sets of time-series data were the calls to the police about three types of offences and the house sales through the Multiple Listing Service in two neighbourhoods near the casinos in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Temporally, the weekly numbers of offences and the mean monthly house prices were oscillating almost randomly around their respective declining or stationary long-term averages with no impulse from when a casino either opened or closed. Geographically, only two types of offences increased in number nearer to a casino site, but their respective distance decays neither moderated nor steepened after a casino had closed or opened. Even so, the conclusion is premature that the open or closed casinos have had benign effects on offences and house sales in the neighbourhoods.     

The Effects of Foreign Expansion on Local Growth: The Case of Macao

Abstract

This paper develops a simple model to illustrate the scenario of unsustainable development in a foreign-dominated casino city. We argue that instead of allowing the uncontrolled expansion of foreign casinos, the host community should protect and promote local gambling businesses for the sake of promoting sustainable development. Macao is used as a case study.     

Culture/economy and spaces of economic practice: positioning households in post-communism

Many recent attempts to understand the role of household food production and forms of reciprocal inter-household networks in 'post-communist' East Europe have argued that such economic activities represent a rational response to the austerity brought by economic decline and contracting incomes during the 'transition to capitalism'. Through an exploration of the spaces of household economic practice concerned with food production on family plots of land and with inter-household networks of reciprocity, this paper argues that such activities can be better situated within the context of the articulation between deep-seated and long-standing economic practices imbued with cultural significance and current practices in the formal, emerging capitalist economy. The paper explores the inter-section and interweaving of these 'cultural' and 'economic' practices through the lens of the largely non-market production of surplus product, value and exchange in and between households. It draws upon research with households in two contrasting sites in Slovakia, and highlights the significance of an historical and more nuanced understanding of the constitution of conventionally conceived 'survival strategies' in East-Central Europe. Such a consideration of the almost 'mundane' practices of everyday household production and reciprocity enables an opening of our conceptions of economic forms in post-socialist societies.     

Hong Kong and Macao under Chinese Sovereignty

A team of Hong Kong-based geographers led by a noted specialist provides a comparative overview of Hong Kong and Macao under Chinese sovereignty (respectively, since 1997 and 1999). The authors outline the historical development of both cities, identifying their common legacies as colonial enclaves as well as shared economic experience as autonomous Special Administrative Regions (SARs) under the "one country, two systems" formula devised in Beijing. The paper includes up-to-date statistical information (some through March 2008) on per capita GDP, visitors from Mainland China and from abroad (for both cities), direct investment, employment in financial services, trade and logistics, and tourism (for Hong Kong) as well as revenues from gambling casinos in Macao that are reportedly surpassing those of Las Vegas. Journal of Economic Literature, O16, O18, O20, R11. Classification Numbers: 11 figures, 4 tables, 46 references.     

Recreational Business Districts in Gulf of Mexico Seaside Resorts

Within the body of literature addressing tourism imprints upon the cultural landscape, the recreational business district (RBD) has been identified as a key component of a resort area, and the seaside has been no exception. Comprised of tourist-oriented businesses and historically focused upon the beach, incipient RBDs evolved at seaside termini of railroads, highways, and footpaths. Construction of bathhouses, casinos or beach hotels at these sites was followed by nearby clustering of secondary and tertiary recreational enterprises. Lateral expansion of coastal roads often led to RBD elongation, but RBD core areas usually remained as the central focus of tourist activity. Variations in RBD development have resulted from shifts in beach access corridors and/or ‘redevelopment’ of older resort landscapes. Along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the RBD persists as an artifact of the touristic landscape.     

‘It's a public,I reckon’: Publicness and a Suburban Shopping Mall in Sydney's Southwest

Traditionally, public space has been perceived as an integral part of fully functioning liberal democracy. Yet much research argues that public space is in decline due to regimes of neoliberal governance paralleled with a growth in quasi-public spaces such as shopping malls, casinos and gated communities. It is argued that these new spatial forms posit a commercialised, sanitised and ultimately exclusionary urban form in place of more egalitarian, engaging and ultimately democratic public spaces. Increasingly, however, urban research has questioned the veracity of the claims made about the nature of traditional public space as well as investigating the marginal and contingent nature of publicness as constituted by and enacted in a variety of places. Drawing on Foucault's concept of heterotopic space, this paper reports on a qualitative study based on focus group interviews conducted with users of a suburban shopping mall in Sydney's southwest. The research uncovers both a more complex and less overtly deterministic publicness than has previously been identified in such spaces. From these findings the paper argues for a conception of publicity which moves beyond the zero-sum game approach endemic in much work in this area to one which analyses the qualitative effect quasi-public spaces are having on the nature of publicness in the Australian context. The paper concludes by arguing that a rethinking of publicness allows room for the emergence of a more progressive public ethic.     

The importance of location and scale in rural and small town tourism product development: The case of the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre,Manitoba, Canada

This paper begins with a review of the literature on tourism in rural economies, to establish a framework for analyzing large‐scale tourism products in rural and small town regions. The review is followed by the development of a typology of large‐scale attractions in rural and small town regions, including parks, casinos, events, heritage, and cultural products. The typology leads into the example of the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre (CFDC) in Manitoba, Canada. Located in an agricultural region of south‐central Manitoba, the community of Morden is located 125 km from the provincial capital city, Winnipeg, which had a population of 811,900 in 2016. Morden is also located 35 km north of the border with North Dakota. Thus, while a small town in a traditionally rural region still dependent upon an agricultural economic base, Morden has been recently successful in diversifying its economy, including through manufacturing, services, hospitality, and tourism. In part, this success is due to a south‐central Manitoba location; however, it is also the result of innovative local leadership, including the prioritization of hospitality and tourism related to the CFDC. This paper describes the case study as an example of successful tourism development within an already economically and socially diversifying region.     

Rethinking Whiteness and Masculinity in Geography: Drinking Alcohol in the Field in Vietnam

This paper evaluates the spatial politics of fieldwork in Vietnam in order to think through the connections between whiteness, masculinity, and geography. In drawing attention to how the consumption of alcohol underwrites daily activities in Vietnam, as well as fieldwork activities, I show that research ethics are underpinned by unique spatial contexts that do not conform to conventional accounts of masculinity and whiteness in the global North. I make three interrelated arguments. First, I argue that debates in geography about whiteness and masculinity must be understood alongside fieldwork experiences in the global South. Second, I invite geographers to think through how research ethics are shaped by spatially contingent productions of whiteness and masculinity. Lastly, I challenge geographers to keep pace with how disruptive categories like whiteness and masculinity are produced outside of the global North.     

Some Personal Reminiscences and What They Meant for Me

There are those who have said I should write a book, and there are those—about the same in number—who have said I should not write a book. Those in the negative assert that my “book” already is written in the several hundred opinions (majorities, concurrences, dissents) I have filed over the years, and in my public utterances. There are valid arguments, I suppose, on both sides. I certainly do not wish to write anything that merely seeks to explain further my vote in decided cases, or to comment—supportively or adversely—on colleagues' votes, or to express little more than after‐the‐fact criticism. In that context, what might be said belonged in the decisional process itself. But there are other things in Supreme Court experience. Law students are inclined to ask questions. Example: “Tell me, how does one come to be a federal judge?” Justice Tom Clark had a direct response: “One has to be on the corner when the bus comes by.” One federal appellate judge plaintively said to me: “The only reason I am on the federal bench is because I was a close friend of a United States Senator.” (He had served for a time as the Senator's administrative assistant.) It may perhaps be said that every federal judge comes by his status in his own way. Of course, there are things one must not do, but I doubt that there is a specific path one must follow to be eligible and seriously regarded as a candidate for federal judicial service.     

The ‘R-Word’ and ‘E-Word’ Definitional Controversies: A Dialogue with My Five Interlocutors

In this piece, I reply to the principal criticisms made by my five interlocutors regarding my conception of Eurocentrism. This entails two key aspects with the first section discussing the ‘E-Word definitional controversy’, where I argue, in the light of the forum, that there are various competing definitions of Eurocentrism in postcolonialism which yield commensurable competing non-Eurocentric antidotes. While I defend my own position, I am interested in revealing this complex picture because it has not been brought to light before and I urge postcolonialists to debate these different conceptions. The second section considers the ‘R-Word controversy’ wherein my interlocutors want me to row back on my claim that post-1945 social science theory is founded on subliminal Eurocentric institutionalism rather than scientific racism or neo-racism. There I consider some of the issues that are stake while concluding that modern Eurocentrism is indeed embedded in racialised thought.     

Ideology and the Retreat From Personhood

Abstract

In this paper I make two primary arguments. First, I argue that what makes totalitarian regimes distinctive and leads to their hyper-repressive atmosphere is ideology. Such regimes are totalitarian precisely because they are ideological. These regimes are thus better termed and understood as “ideocracies.” Second, I attempt to depict in precise terms how ideological regimes attack the human person to disable agency and responsibility. Numerous authors such as Václav Havel and Czeslaw Milosz have argued that living in an atmosphere saturated by ideological lies has a very profound effect on the human person. Very few authors, however, have even attempted to delineate how ideology does this work. First, I examine one such attempt by Hannah Arendt. Then I use the resources of phenomenology and the work of Robert Sokolowski to give my own account of how ideological thinking and ideological language attack human agency.     

The Philosopher's Stories: The Role of Myth in Plato's Pedagogy

In this essay I will argue that Platonic myths are a useful tool not only in the education of the ignorant but for the philosophical mind as well. To do this I will first examine the limitations and problems that Plato sees in written communication, and I will then argue that myths avoid these problems by undermining their own validity. If they are to avoid the problems that plague the written format, myths must show themselves for what they are: inadequate tools for giving a complete account of a particular subject. Myths, I will argue, are those shadows (to use the term from the story of the Cave in the Republic) that show their own shadow-like nature. In this way the myth is able to work hand-in-hand with dialectic to educate philosophers.     

Transcendent myths,mundane objects: setting the material scene in rock,soul, and country museums

The many varied myths of origins, aesthetic transcendence, and greatness that surround popular music continue to proliferate in a variety of forms. One comparatively recent type of institution producing such forms of mythology is the popular music museum. This article uses the familiar idea of the ‘experience economy’’ to examine how three popular music museums produce experiences through objects that, while they are deliberately cast as mundane and everyday, work to support widely-shared narratives of the musical traditions of which they are a part. I argue that they do so in the service of larger myths of popular music. In each case I examine, I show that the myths on display are specific to the music that forms that content of the exhibitions. I argue that the specific kinds of spectator experiences these museums seek to produce are designed to enhance the value of these museums and their collections through claims made on specific types of musical patrimony made material through carefully contextualized objects of display. As such, traditionalist myths of musical greatness and aesthetic transcendence are well-served by the forms of exhibition and display produced by these institutions.     

The Power to Plunder: Rethinking Land Grabbing in Latin America

In this paper I rethink land grabbing in Latin America by decentering the rhetoric of novelty and the tendency to focus on large‐scale land transactions. To do this, I attend to the longevity of racial thinking bound up in everyday forms of land control. I look at the ways race is salient in the making of land and territorial arrangements. Drawing on my own research in Honduras and Panama, I situate land grabbing in relation to a range of scholarly insights that disclose how the early postcolonial dichotomy of “civilization” and “savagery”, and its inherently whitening logics, re‐appear in contemporary development projects of biodiversity conservation, land administration, and residential tourism. I argue, therefore, that land grabbing is a longstanding process that is routinely operationalized through the state and naturalized through development practices that are underpinned by ongoing racial hierarchies.     

The Archaeology of Immateriality

Despite changes in archaeological theory and practice over the past 40 years, most archaeologists are still not very good at acknowledging that “significance” is context-dependent and non-material. In this paper I present two cases studies from New England where archaeologists collaborated with Native peoples on sites that had significant preservation concerns. I evaluate to what extent these projects were successful in their goal of decolonizing archaeology. I call for a definition of materiality that acknowledges that tangible objects and their intangible contexts and meanings are inextricable, and that values are continuously created and recreated in the present by a variety of memory communities.     

Political Involvement and Religious Compromises

Abstract

The risks of modern politics are significant enough that religious believers ought to be making greater efforts than many of them are currently doing to think soberly about the effects of their political participation. In this article I argue that Stanley Hauerwas’s most recent approach to political participation is a promising one but that there are further measures that are equally profitable as ways of facilitating the public witness of the faithful. I develop out of my discussion of Hauerwas some participatory guidelines for religious believers. First I suggest that they ought to be abiding by a worldview integrity condition, and then I argue that they ought also to be subjecting themselves to the assessments of a critical community.     

Tek Down Nelson! The Struggle for Repair in Barbados

In this article I explore how the decommissioning of the statue of Lord Horatio Nelson captures some of the ways justice is envisioned within Barbados. I ask: How does the decommissioning generate more attention to the reparations question? How is repair and sovereignty conceptualised through the performances that animated and structured the event? What do these performances suggest about the Barbadian geographic-historical foundation? I engage theorists of Black geographies and Black studies to work through the above questions. I do close readings of the performances featured in the ceremony, to illuminate how the decommissioning gestured to a range of histories and struggles that are punctuated by political transformation. My reading draws attention to how the statue's removal builds on regional demands for reparations and Barbadian struggles for sovereignty, which I argue are complementary aims.