"Rural tourism has contributed to the income generation of countries in Asia thereby reducing poverty and improving quality of life. This book explores the fundamentals of responsible rural tourism. It covers a range of Asian countries and examines both successful and failed attempts in developing responsible rural tourism"--

Released on the 500-year anniversary of the publication of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, this volume seeks to adapt and apply More's fecund imagination to the contemporary leisure landscape. The contributors to this volume theorize and analyze a variety of "tourist utopias"--A nascent socio-spatial form crucial to a post-industrial global economy. From Disney World to Dubai, "Middle Earth" to Marina Bay, Macau to Abu Dhabi, these sites share common characteristics that include their respective status as "spaces of exception"; entrepreneurial governance regimes that rely on cooperation among state and non-state actors; transient, multinational populations; immaterial and affective forms of labor and consumption; superlative and iconic architecture; and economies devoted to such leisure activities as shopping, gambling, and spectacle. These locales are not only popular destinations for migrant workers and mobile tourists from around the globe, but also serve as cultural laboratories for testing new formats and protocols of an emergent post-Fordist form-of-life.

Annotation This cultural critique of HIV/AIDS prevention programmes targetting sex tourism industries in Southeast Asia posits a new place for a speaking sex worker subject. Provides vital up-to-date research for scholars in many disciplines.