The ‘mega’ tourist spaces of Las Vegas and recently Dubai and Macau are significant examples of new forms of urban landscape created by global capitalism that attracts huge sums of investment and employ spectacle, theming and consumer experience to extract massive profits from tourism. These regions are significant as they constitute a new way of making money from a spatial location.

Mega Tourist Metropolises is the first book to thoroughly examine and compare these three ‘mega’ tourist spaces together in the context of the scale of their respective development for tourism, massive global investment and new urban theories to reveal how they emerge, work and result in massive profits from tourism. It achieves this by evaluating these landscapes from multidisciplinary perspectives concerned with the economic, political, cultural socio-spatial factors that influence the production of these spaces. It analyzes the use of signs and the consumption of these signs to market these places and attract tourists as well as drawing on primary research with tourists in these regions to shed light on why they choose to visit these places and experience they have had. By looking at the urban growth and change in these regions as well as tourism experience it contributes to a greater understanding of these contemporary urban landscapes that extends beyond these geographical locations and will contribute to the development of these spaces in other regions.

Written by leading authorities in this area, this book will be a valuable resource for students and academics interested in Tourism, Urban Studies, Geography, Cultural Studies and Urban Sociology.