Abstract
Software is re-coding and
re-scaling island space, assembling islands in new configurations of
territoriality and governance while generating new kinds of atmospheres of
place, landscape, and nature. Travel and leisure destinations, especially in
the Caribbean, are being disembedded from national territories and repackaged
as "natural" enclaves that are connected to "global" metropolitan transport,
media, and data flows. This paper explores how informational space and tourist
space are converging in new fantasies of mobility, accessibility, and island
paradise. It aims to show how new metropolitan spatialities are affecting
remote Caribbean islands and other dispersed enclaves as much as "advanced"
urban regions, as Caribbean states and territories adjust to complex new
infrastructures and architectures of mobility. The paper first reviews recent
developments in contemporary architectural theory associated with Computer
Aided Design (CAD) and "liquid" or "mobile" architectures of hyper-urbanism,
cyberspace, virtual reality, computer gaming, and evolutionary software. The
empirical analysis then turns to two specific Caribbean examples of the
disembedding of island space from structures of local governance and
territoriality through which new virtual islands - amalgams of infrastructure,
architecture, and software - are unbundled from local communities, citizenries,
and publics, and repackaged as intensely capitalized destinations of "untouched
natural paradise". The first vignette concerns Zaha Hadid's masterplan for a
new resort on Dellis Cay in the Turks and Caicos Islands. The second refers to
the new massive resorts such as "Atlantis" at Paradise Island in the Bahamas,
and "AtlanticA" on the north coast of the Dominican Republic, especially their
relation to computer gaming and fantasy spatiality. The paper concludes by
drawing comparisons with other global island developments in regions such as
China's Pearl River Delta and the United Arab Emirates (Dubai and Abu Dhabi),
showing the wider implications of the emergent mobile infrastructures and
virtual realities of the imagined island. |
