Explorations 6: The Spectacularization of Urban Development on the Las Vegas Strip

Kurt Kraler

The Las Vegas Valley, a region where the population has doubled every decade since its settlement in 1911, continues to experience tremendous urban transformation and growth while political and financial forces sustain its economic center, the infamous Las Vegas Strip. As its population balloons beyond 2 million inhabitants, tourism remains the area’s dominant industry, employing nearly half of its residents while boasting the nation’s highest proportion of undocumented labor (Pew Research Center, 2012). This explosive growth has thrust the Las Vegas metropolitan area into a process of rapid urbanization, most of which occurs out-side of the city limits in unincorporated townships with minimal master planning and zoning restrictions—appealing to powerful developers and private interests. The Las Vegas region as an urban and economic model emerged following the widespread loss of manufacturing jobs beginning in the 1980s; such losses introduced a service economy largely dependent on gaming venues as seen in Detroit, Atlantic City, and Joliet, Illinois.

The development of the Las Vegas Strip and its recognition as an urban and economic business model can be understood as a product of capital culture as detailed by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle (1967, 1994). Debord warns of the influence of commodities increasing to the point at which the image prevails through the subsequent downgrading of having into merely appearing, where social relationships between people are mediated by images. In Las Vegas, the dominance of the image grew as roadside signs surpassed the significance of the building itself in attracting potential customers arriving by car. The roadside sign came to form entire atmospheres and buildings under the guise of themed spaces; the spectacle enfolded the physical realm of architecture, as documented by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Steven Ize-nour in Learning from Las Vegas (1972).

The historical development of Las Vegas can be shown to satisfy the two foundational conditions of Debord’s concept of the spectacle, as identified by Anselm Jappe: “incessant technological renewal and the integration of the State and economy” (1999). The rapid pace of development and renovation has become a symbol of progress for the Strip, establishing a constant renewal and continuing to attract the attention of tourists from around the world. Images and signs can be easily replaced in the rebranding of entire buildings, further increasing revenue and discarding the old in favor of the new.

More intriguing, however, is the integration of State and economy in the development of the region through the prevalence of unincorporated townships. Such integration privileged greater private control over the provision of non-essential services, in addition to more relaxed land-use and zoning regulations. Unincorporated townships are a designation “originally authorized to assist in the conveyance of land and are commonly thought of as a rural form of government with limited power” (Clark & Sharp, 2008), a clause that the Las Vegas region has come to define.

It is no coincidence that the vast majority of what has become the Las Vegas Strip sits outside of Las Vegas city limits in an unincorporated community known as Paradise. Paradise was established in 1951 in response to several annexation efforts by the City of Las Vegas. The City claimed that the growing popularity of the Strip directly benefited from the tourist draw of the city’s downtown Fremont Street, the key tourist destination at the time, and should be expected to support the street’s maintenance and expansion. Strip casino owners convinced local residents, many of whom were also casino employees, that higher taxes would be imposed upon annexation, cementing support for the area’s unincorporated status.

Paradise has since grown to become the most populated unincorporated township in the United States, maintaining its continued status as an informal city (US Census, 2010). As documented by Jill Clark and Jeff Sharp in City & Community, “unincorporated townships have grown so large that they are functional equivalents of cities, providing a broad range of services beyond their original ‘rural’ responsibilities” (2008). The unincorporated township, once a state of economic and political exception, has since become an acceptable form of city-building with essential services offloaded to the county. Several adjacent communities in Nevada have been formed under a similar guise to that of Paradise in an effort to maintain unincorporated status. The trend further restricts the expansion of the City of Las Vegas given residents’ preference for reduced property taxes in exchange for the absence of a municipal government.

These seemingly contradictory political interests bore the liberalization of the leisure economy in Nevada. By the 1950s and 1960s the state’s history of legalized gambling and prostitution in rural areas had fostered a reputation of hedonism, a reputation that proved increasingly attractive to tourists of the time. Economic and social liberalization flourished from the strategic un-incorporation of Paradise and the de-regulation of the labor force.

Though the city had been unionized labor stronghold harkening back to its roots in the railroad industry, the liberalization of labor laws in the 1950s, specifically with the introduction of right-to-work state legislation, threatened the union grasp on the region. After the passing of the federal Taft-Hartley Act of 19491 came the unpopular dispute by the Culinary Union, fueling anti-labor sentiment. The impact of this legislation would be later exploited in the 1990s with the opening of the MGM Grand, Aladdin, the Venetian resorts, and others that employed entirely non-unionized labor forces.

The de-regulation of labor and the dependence on a tourist-based service economy engenders the increased exploitation of migrant workers who may accept labor-intensive work in exchange for low pay. Alarmingly, 10.2% of the working population in Nevada is classified as unauthorized immigrants, forming the highest proportion in the United States (Pew Research Center, 2012). This leisure illusion proliferated by the manu- factured fantasy of the spectacle society forces labor to the sidelines and minimizes its presence in a city focused solely on the provision of leisure.

Debord states that “everything life lacks is to be found within the spectacle,” allowing it to thrive despite the degradation of life and the continued separation of the laborer from the product of their labor (Jappe, 1999). One only need consider the inability of the low-paid service worker to access the activities they provide to tourists to understand that such separation exists in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas Strip operates as the spec-tacularization of the city, possessing what all others lack: on a superficial level, it is a city seemingly free of labor in its strict devotion to the provision of leisure. Critical to its success is maintaining a certain leisure illusion, one that requires service staff to don ridiculous costumes, casting them as actors against an all-encompassing thematized backdrop. The intensification of this system of leisure demands and supports a labor class through increasingly exploitative means.

The combination of economic integration and the production of a spec-tacularized urban form have profoundly shaped the Las Vegas region. The influence of the labor force on the urban development of the region was particularly felt during in the sub-prime mortgage crisis of the late 2000s. Las Vegas was routinely ranked as having some of the highest rates of homeowner vacancies in the United States during that time, as reported by the US Census Bureau (2005-present). Additionally, the relative absence of municipal planning bodies for the region’s unincorporated townships has resulted in urban sprawl largely dispersing the population beyond ever-expanding clusters of abandoned homes. This has meant further separation of laborers from each other, a key urban development Debord highlights as critical to the production of the spectacle society. Perhaps we have identified the great paradox of the spec-tacularized city: the production of a region that only appears to prosper while withering in the desert.

1             The authority of individual states to restrict the ability of unions to impose membership on employers and all of their employees.

References

Clark, J.S., & Sharp, J.K. (2008). “Between the country and the concrete: Rediscovering the rural-urban fringe.” City & Community, 7(1), 61-79.

Debord, G. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle. (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). New York, NY: Zone Books. (Original work published 1967).

Gottdiener, M., Collins, C. C., & Dickens, D. R. (1999). Las Vegas: The Social Production of an All-American City. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Hess, A. (1993). Viva Las Vegas: After-Hours Architecture. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

Jappe, A. (1999). Guy Debord. Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of California Press.

Moehring, E. P., & Green, M. S. (2005). Las Vegas a Centennial History. M. S. Green (Ed.). Reno: University of Nevada Press.

Pew Research Center: Unauthorized Immigrants in the U.S., 2012. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.pewhispanic.org/interactives/unauthorized-immigrants-2012/.

US Census Bureau. “Homeowner vacancy rates for the 75 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas: 2005-Present.” Housing Vacancies and homeownership (CPS/HVS) Table 7. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/ann14ind.html (accessed April 6, 2015).

Venturi, R. (1972). Learning from Las Vegas, Scott Brown D., Izenour, S., and Dendy, W. (eds.). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.