Kah-Wee Lee

Kah-Wee Lee will spend his fellowship year on his new book, tentatively titled Casino Urbanisms. By examining the explosive growth of the casino industry in Macau, Singapore and Manila since 2000, the book charts the contours of a new capitalist frontier and asks how licit and illicit channels of money have reshaped the urban landscape and territorial governance of the metropoles of Asia. Lee argues that these transformations should be understood as a case of post-colonial rentier capitalism whereby states enter into monopolistic relationships with private corporations and extra-legal agents to do what they cannot do directly - taxing populations outside of their territories.

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. 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”. Lee is committed to critical pedagogy and strives to apply its lessons to the training of urban planners and architects. He is associate professor in the department of architecture at the National University of Singapore, and the National University of Singapore Fellow at CASBS for 2026–27.