Place-making or place-faking? The paradoxical effects of transnational circulation of architectural and urban development projects

Today one can see the steady increase in the transnational circulation of similar ideas, design schemes and solutions for generating tourism-related urban environments. Contemporary design technologies as well as building technologies contribute to the world-wide spreading of this trend, which, since modern times, has been quite common for standardized hotels, shopping malls and other generic places (or eventually for non-places - such as airports, theme parks or other leisure attractions - which are functional to the global tourism system) for middle-income tourists and consumers (Judd & Fainstein, 1999; Smith, 2009). The mushrooming of these potential place-homogenizing technologies seems to involve high-end types of environments and tourist compounds (e.g. resorts, golf courses, fashion-branded luxury hotels, marinas and the like, Klingman, 2007). The growing number and the changing nature of such environments raise new questions regarding the agents of the abovementioned circulation, such as investors, local governments and design service providers. This chapter focuses on and discusses the role played by architectural/urban design specifically in creating and recreating such global tourist landscapes. The study of the circulation of one megastructure (namely the project for the Marina Bay Sands compound designed by Moshe Safdie, and currently being reproduced in the Raffles City project in Chongqing, China) and of one master plan (namely the plan for False Creek, designed in the former site of the Vancouver’s 1986 Expo and reproduced for the Dubai Marina project) will provide clear evidence in this respect. These case studies will consist of the analysis of both the local policies and planning activities involved in the circulation of the master plan, and of the effects displayed at urban level. Besides analysing relevant contextual political, urban-morphological and economic issues in the planning of such urban transformations, this chapter illustrates an evident but hardly considered urban paradox: these projects are intended to distinguish tourist destinations as unique, but on the contrary they tend to dramatically homogenize the urban landscapes of cities world-wide, and in particular those cities wishing to distinguish themselves are becoming more and more similar.