July 22, 2023

On 22 July 2020, the Singapore government announced the SingapoRediscovers campaign to revitalise the local tourism industry, which had come under immense strain during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the campaign includes tourism packages in the Singapore heartlands, heartland tourism is not a new initiative in Singapore.

In ‘Discovering the ‘Heart’ in Heartland Tourism’ (Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 2022), Associate Professor T. C. Chang and Ms. Faith Oh (both NUS Geography) investigate the authenticity of tourist experiences in the Singapore heartlands. Adapted from Ms Oh’s undergraduate thesis, the study employs a variety of methods including participant observation, interviews, and surveys to draw insights into the heartland tourism experience.

The article focuses on the distinction between ‘place-making’ (with the hyphen) and ‘placemaking’ (without the hyphen). Place-making refers to spontaneous, bottom-up initiatives to create authentic and personal meanings of a place; placemaking, in contrast, refers to authority-led and often professional efforts to shape people’s perceptions of a place.

The researchers focus on the heartlands, places that are not in the mainstream of Singapore’s tourism scene; rather, they are where locals, not tourists, might spend most of their time. In this sense, the heartlands present opportunities for tourists to experience Singapore authentically. Indeed, the guided tours of the heartlands which the researchers investigate allow tourists to hear stories about local areas. Some of these stories are told by residents themselves, further inviting impressions of authenticity and creating opportunities for organic place-making by visitors.

However, the guided tours might themselves be somewhat complicit in creating placemaking rather than place-making experiences for their patrons. The tour guides who facilitate these tourist ventures into the heartlands are licensed by the Singapore Tourism Board, the government agency regulating tourism activities in Singapore. For the researchers, this means that the tour guides are both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated to present the best possible image of Singapore to their patrons, and therefore tend to omit negative portrayals of the country.

The researchers further explore barriers to authentic place-making on the part of the visitors. They find that prior knowledge of Singapore affects the extent to which visitors can make sense of less savoury aspects of local life. They point out that tourists themselves seek experiences that corroborate with what they may already know about the country they visit.

Another factor in tourists’ ability to participate in place-making is mastery of the local language. While some tourists note that learning to order coffee and tea in Singaporean parlance is enough to make them feel like a local, others note that Mandarin Chinese is spoken more often in the heartlands—indicating that linguistic mastery over local parlance and to some extent local languages are required for full immersion.

The researchers show that authenticity and place-making through heartland tourism can be constrained both by the local guides (in how they curate experiences) and tourists’ backgrounds. Authentic place-making is a complex issue for tourism: tourists may hope to come close to it in some aspects, but not others.

Read the article here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/04353684.2021.1929383