ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of tourism in four ASEAN capital cities: Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta. A foundation approach employed to assess the images of cities was first developed by Lynch in his book The Image of the City. Bannerjee and Southworth describe Kevin Lynch as the leading American urban design theorist of his times. In Lynch’s view, cities are best understood visually. His coding scheme used a five-part system with the following elements: nodes, landmarks, districts, paths, and edges. Following Clark, and an array of researchers who assess the destination image characteristics of tourism places, there are several key additional elements, beyond the key classifications provided by the Lynch model. These include the readiness of the city for tourism growth, and some specific parameters such as perceived climate, air pollution, food styles and safety.
