Gambling Harms and Urban Growth

Project Summary:

Gambling is a fast-growing global industry worth $540 billion.  However, around 450 million people around the world now suffer from gambling related harm and 80 million have a gambling disorder. Gambling is associated not only with financial losses and the risk of financial ruin, but with relationship and family breakdown; heightened risk of domestic violence; increased crime against property and people; and physical and mental health problems.  It is a serious public health issue. 

Casinos are part of this landscape but the complex role of large-scale global casinos and their entanglements with urban development is under-researched.  Host Agnes Nairn, Marketing Professor and Co-Director of the Bristol Hub for Gambling Harms Research and guest Dr Kah-Wee Lee, world expert on global casino projects from National University of Singapore’s Department of Architecture, aim to fill this gap. 

The project is fundamentally about social injustice.  Nairn and Lee are developing a novel interdisciplinary perspective, positioning casino projects as an analytical lens through which to make international comparisons of the unequal distribution of costs and benefits among urban casino stakeholders.  At the same time, they examine the challenges for national and local regulatory systems to navigate the (often competing) interests of citizens and highly profitable global gambling businesses with large marketing budgets.   

The project brings together a team of 13 Bristol academics from all career stages and a wide range of disciplines including Law, Anthropology and Geography.     

Over the next 12 months Dr Lee will visit Bristol twice and Professor Nairn will visit Singapore once.  All visits will include meetings with a very wide range of stakeholders including regulators, local and national governments, those with lived experience and a rich community of academics in both places.  A large-scale bid will be the focus of the final visit in June 2026. 

Visitor Biography:

Kah-Wee Lee is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning at the National University of Singapore. As an interdisciplinary scholar, he works on the relationships between space and power, particularly through the lenses of modern expertise such as architecture, urban planning, law and public administration. The focus on techno-politics runs throughout his work, ranging from how vice is criminalized to how urban experience is regulated. Since 2017, Lee has been researching the expansion of the casino industry across Singapore, Manila and Macau. Through situated perspectives and comparative analysis, the project asks how illicit and licit channels of capital are transforming these cities, and what kinds of urban politics have emerged in the wake of this expansion. The monograph is slated to be completed in 2026.  

Lee’s research has been published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environment and Planning A and C, Geoforum, Cities and Critical Gambling Studies. He is the author of Las Vegas in Singapore: Violence, Progress and the Crisis of Nationalist Modernity (2019). In 2021, he was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. In the classroom, Lee is committed to critical pedagogy and strives to adapt its precepts to planning and architectural curricula. His recent paper—“A Pedagogy of Anachronism: learning through a misfit between theory and practice” (2023)—details one pedagogical experiment that ran from 2016 to 2019. 

At the University of Bristol, Lee will collaborate with Prof. Agnes Nairn to build an interdisciplinary project on casino development and gambling regulation.