Modelling Urban Tourism in Historic Southeast Asian Cities

Older cities with significant physical historic resources have become increasingly important centers for urban tourism, though contemporary attractions and events are often important in their own right. It is acknowledged that urban areas are multifaceted agglomerations where tourism complements other economic sectors and competes with them for limited resources. A limited investigation of the temporal dynamics of change of tourism in cities has been undertaken in the several countries in Europe and North America. Much less has been studied for the countries of Southeast Asia where tourism has expanded rapidly over the past several decades, a trend that is projected to continue. Urban tourism has and will continue to be important in Southeast Asia. This paper reports on the spatial modeling of the evolution of tourism in two historic cities in Southeast Asia that seeks to better understand the dynamics of temporal change of tourism within their respective urban contexts. The cases of Bangkok and Jakarta have been compared with the Ashworth and Tunbridge model to identify conformity and otherwise of Asian cases with the European theory.