ORCHARD ROAD : A STUDY OF SINGAPORE'S CENTRAL TOURIST DISTRICT

Abstract

The study of urban tourism acknowledges the role of cities and urban areas as important sit.es of tourist concentration and development. This study focuses on one aspect of the urban tourist landscape, the Central Tourist District or the CTD (Burtenshaw et al., 1981: 72). The CTD is defined as a part of the city where the concentration of tourist facilities, development and activities is great.est. This thesis focuses on Orchard Road as a case study of Singapore's CTD. Four approaches are adopted to examine the many facets of this urban landscape (after Ashworth, 1989). The policy approach looks at the evolutionary and historic aspects of Orchard Road's temporal development as Singapore's tourist district. The facility approach examines the resources within the CTD with the aim of identifying tourist facilities, their spatial distribution and conceptualising location patterns. Finally, the user approach studies the tourists in the CTD, particularly their participation, perceptions, and profile. Policy implications are then derived. The thesis also provides an ecological approach which integrates the three above approaches. This approach examines how tourism policies, facilities and tourists are implicated with one another in the urban tourist system. Feedback loops and cause-effect links are examined in this regard. Four models are all constructed as a summary of the findings under each approach. They are the CTD evolutionary model which conceptualises the chronology of Orchard Road's development; the morphology model which captures land use patterns; the CTD tourist typology model which identifies the users in the CTD; and the CTD conceptual framework which serves as an ecological model tying together the first three approaches.