TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING? GEORGE TOWN’S TOURISM BOOM
On any given weekend, a 15-metre-long queue of international tourists materialises at the upper corner of Armenian Street, an atmospheric road packed with tourist shops and cafes at the heart of George Town, the capital of Malaysia’s Penang State.
Selfie-stick-toting visitors wait patiently to snare shots next to George Town’s most iconic piece of street art, “Two Kids on a Bicycle”, a life-size mural showing two children riding a bicycle into the wall. Meanwhile, local motorists curse the artwork — and the tourists — for contributing to traffic gridlock.
The mural, voted one of the world’s best graffiti in a 2013 poll by the UK newspaper The Guardian, was created in 2012 by Ernest Zacharevic, a Lithuanian artist, as part of that year’s George Town Festival — a month-long carnival of international art that celebrates the city’s listing as a Unesco World Heritage site on July 7, 2008.
A decade on from the listing, murals such as Zacharevic’s have led to a boom in street art that has helped to make George Town one of Southeast Asia’s coolest creative locations. But the city’s emergence as an open-air street art museum has also shifted its focus from the multiethnic cultural heritage and colonial architecture that led to the listing to a short-term fixation with easy tourist dollars.
“It’s interesting how Penang has become one of the biggest open-air art galleries in the world, but how do you control this? How to decide what stuff should really go on the wall?” said Joe Sidek, director of the George Town Festival, who was responsible for helping to kick-start the street art mania.
“The sad thing is that people don’t come to see the beautiful architecture, peoples and food of Penang any longer. The relevant authorities should really look at a master plan for tourism, and not just at increasing the numbers.”
Penang Airport last year registered 7.2 million tourist arrivals, up from 6.7 million in 2016. “But you want better quality tourists,” said Sidek. “Penang is very sensitive, [George Town is] a small city with small lanes that can’t sustain the current number of tourist buses.”
Penang Global Tourism, the state tourism bureau, did not respond to questions from the Nikkei Asian Review. However, former Penang chief minister Lim Guan Eng, now Malaysia’s finance minister, claims the development of the state has been a great success. “From being the dirtiest state in the country, we are now one of the cleanest cities, not only in Malaysia but also in Asean,” Lim says on his personal website.
“Penang is now acknowledged by the [Malaysian] Auditor-General’s Report as the best financially managed state, with annual budget surpluses every year since 2008. ... Investments have gone up by 90% and tourism more than doubled.”
Zairil Khir Johari, another politician from the state’s ruling Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope) coalition, said the problems of development should be seen in the context of major economic advances.
“Some of the positives include a revival of the inner-city economy, the booming of heritage tourism and the emergence of new forms of tourism based on arts and culture,” he said. “On the downside, there has been significant gentrification: Many old traders have been priced out, and George Town has become a tad more expensive compared to before. But that is the price of development.”
To some long-term residents, and to those who work in tourism and the arts, the picture looks very different. George Town’s Unesco-protected area has been transformed into a patchwork of tattered shophouses awaiting restoration and shiny, gentrified and refurbished commercial lots.
Real estate prices have risen tenfold in a decade thanks to investment by foreign investors, mainly from China, Singapore and the West. Shophouses within the Unesco heritage area now sell for between 3 million and 6 million ringgit, and monthly rentals hover between 4,000 and 8,000 ringgit.
“George Town is in danger of being turned into a spectacle of consumer culture, driven by market forces,” said Gareth Richards, co-founder of the city’s new Hikayat arts space, who co-curates the successful George Town Literary Festival.
Development within the Unesco-protected area is subject to regulations. But the rules are less well-defined outside its boundaries, and tension is growing between those who want to preserve what they see as authentic and those who favour vigorous development.
In one well-known case, development forced the relocation of a traditional coffee shop called Kong Thai Lai, which had dished up Penang roti bakar — toasted bread with coconut jam and half-boiled egg — from a traditional shophouse in Hutton Lane for nearly a century. The shop moved in 2016 after Singaporean developers bought a row of shophouses in the street.
“I was very sad at the beginning, but in the end I bit the bullet,” said Gary Tan Jeng Seow, the manager of Kong Thai Lai. “The new location is closer to the tourist enclave of Chulia Street, and we get more business.”
In February 2016, six heritage buildings — including a bungalow that was once home to Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of the British settlement in Singapore — were bulldozed to make space for new condominiums. “George Town’s Special Area Plan was only gazetted in 2016: that’s like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted,” said Khoo Salma Nasution, vice-president of Penang Heritage Trust.
“Penang’s heritage is that of a port city set between the hills and the sea, a historic urban landscape composed by many scenic attractions and cultural landscapes. But the number of residents living within the world heritage site has declined to less than 10,000, and many traditional crafts are already lost. In order to get back on track, we need to carefully balance the historic urban landscape with a new urban agenda.”
For sceptics about the benefits of development, it is time for George Town — and the rest of Penang — to stop chasing tourist dollars.
“To achieve this, Penang will require a decoupling of heritage from mass tourism, and a real focus on those communities that have evidently been marginalised in the great heritage game,” said Richards.
“George Town is in danger of being turned into a spectacle of consumer culture, driven by market forces” GARETH RICHARDS Co-founder, Hikayat arts space