Rethinking (with) hill stations. How tourism is urbanising South and Southeast Asian mountain areas

Beyond national and former imperial borders, this position paper aims for a conceptual reappraisal of South and Southeast Asian hill stations. We propose an innovative way of studying these hill stations not as isolated cases, but as an urban and tourist model. Our transregional approach enables us to track these models and their various pathways since independence. First built for medical and tourism purposes, these hill stations have often transformed into small and medium-sized towns and they continue to play a central role for domestic tourism and local inhabitants. In this respect, they are markers of globalised urban societies in mountain areas. Breaking away from a Western-centric vision, we focus on local reappropriations of these hill stations through domestic tourism and the subalternity of their urbanization. This position paper outlines our theoretical stance and our main investigations based on a hybrid methodology: the analysis of colonial archives, the use of statistical indicators and the preliminary results of our fieldwork in Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, India and Sri Lanka. In doing so, our aim is to think with and through South and Southeast Asian hill stations, in order to better understand the links between tourism and urbanization from the standpoint of the Global South.