Free hybrid lecture: The Free Shuttle Bus: Infrastructures of Extraction in Asia-Pacific Casino Cities

“The Free Shuttle Bus: Infrastructures of Extraction in Asia-Pacific Casino Cities”

Join us online or in Oxford for a free one-hour hybrid lecture with Dr Kah-Wee Lee, Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture and NUS College, National University of Singapore.

This lecture is a joint event between Oxford Lifelong Learning’s Sustainable Urban Development programmes and the School of Geography’s Economy and Society Research Group.

Event details

When and where

Thursday 18 June 2026, 17:30-18:30 BST.

This event can be attended in-person or online.

If attending online, we recommend joining 5-10 minutes before the lecture starts. 

If joining us in person at Rewley House, doors open at 5.20pm.

Rewley House
1 Wellington Square
Oxford
OX1 2JA

For details of parking and accessibility, please see the University's access guide.

How to book your place

We hope to record the lecture and, if so, this will be shared with all who register after the event.

About the event

Over the last twenty years, the centre of the casino industry has relocated from Las Vegas to three cities in Asia-Pacific, namely Singapore, Macau (PRC) and Manila (Philippines). In the wake of this relocation is the production of an extensive infrastructure of extraction that moved the private wealth of foreign (predominantly Chinese) citizens into the casinos of these hosting cities. In this presentation, Dr Kah-Wee Lee will explore how this move should be understood as a case of post-colonial rentier capitalism whereby states enter monopolistic relationships with private corporations and extra-legal agents to do what they cannot do directly – taxing populations outside of their territories. Such infrastructures operate at different scales and articulate a paradox of separation and connection.

In this presentation, he will focus on one site – the free shuttle bus (FSB) – and ask how an infrastructure that is private but free materializes this paradox in different ways. In Macau, legions of FSBs moved gamblers between the casinos and the various ports of entry, displaying most directly an extraterritorial scale of extraction. In Manila, FSBs congregated at major shopping malls and, strangely enough, McDonald’s outlets. And in Singapore, FSBs were banned. These differences arise from the inherent tensions of the state-concessionaire relationship threaded through the material conditions of urban infrastructure and everyday life.

About our speaker

Dr Lee is an interdisciplinary scholar who works on the relationships between space and power, particularly through the lenses of modern expertise such as architecture, urban planning, law and public administration. His research is split between the techno-politics of urban planning and design in Singapore and the rise of the casino industry in Asia. He is the author of “Las Vegas in Singapore” (NUS Press, 2019) which can be read as a very long preface to his current project on “Casino Urbanisms”. Dr Lee is committed to critical pedagogy and strives to translate its precepts for the training of urban planners and architects. He was a 2021 Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. In 2026, he will commence a fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Study in Behavioural Sciences, Stanford University (2026).