Chapter 6 - Gateways, Hubs and Transport Interconnections in Southeast Asia: Implications for Tourism Development in the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

During the 1980s and 1990s, research within economic geography has focused on the concept of regional concentrations of economic activity that transcend national boundaries, in particular growth triangles (Tang and Thant, 1993) and extended metropolitan regions (EMRs) (see Douglas, 1995; Rimmer, 1995; Hall and Page, 2000). One dimension of this new spatial form of economic production has been the focus on transport hubs and gateways within these regional centres of production. The existing definitions of EMRs recognise that these urban agglomerations stretch for 20 to 100 km from the city core and are part of the wider development of global cities (Dixon and Smith, 1997). By the year 2015, of the 27 megacities predicted to exist worldwide, 17 will be located in Asia, many of which will use megaurban corridors of air, land and sea-based transport and telecommunication linkages to gain competitive production advantage (Forbes, 1999: 238). Global change and competition between transnational regions is not only assuming a greater role in the location of production in the global economy (Olds et al., 1999), but EMRs are taking on regional roles that transcend national boundaries and positioning themselves as having a primate role within the economic region or trading bloc in which they are located. According to Dick and Rimmer (1998), Southeast Asian cities have developed EMRs and what emerges is that these cities are far from ‘Third World’ in their characteristics. On the contrary, many of these cities have passed through a phase of decolonialisation which is accompanied by a more complex spatial structure that is unicentric and multi-nodal as wider regions and EMRs have emerged. Within the EMRs, the role of transport infrastructure is to support the growth of multinodal economic development. EMRs effectively collapse space and time to develop a territorial structure with linkages in the space economy where transport corridors and hubs form critical points in the spatial reconfiguration of economic activity. Within the literature on globalisation, this “time-space compression is characterised by capitalists stretching their economic relationships to all parts of the globe to quicken the circulation of capital and to sustain profits” (Teo and Chang, 1998: 126).