The local identity change of rural-urban transformational tourism development in Chiangmai heritage city : local residents' perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to obtain an empirical understanding of the local identity changes of Chiang Mai heritage city from residents' perspectives. The city is pushed forward to the inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List in period of transformation tourism development. Moreover, this paper was also to explore the variable causes of identity change while emerging of tourism development to propose the designing socially sustainable future tourism development policies regarding to the UNESCO WHS criteria under culture values, impact of tourism and identity change in traditional way of life. In this study, the qualitative approach was applied to understand insight of local residents. Three methods were selected; 22 semi-structural interviews were conducted with local residents who has transformational experiences of the city and life-changing tourism with the mixtures of senior citizens who was born in the city, the migrants who worked for living and the native experts in different fields such as town planning, UNESCO working groups and sustainable tourism development. Each interview was reviewed and summarized to find connections, patterns and relationships. The site observation and secondary data were supplemented the interview to crosscheck the identity change during transformational tourism period for 20 years ago. Collected data were analyzed using NVIVO 12 to organize and identify core themes. Due to the rapid transformational tourism, it causes many problems such as the value of tradition, culture, waste, likelihood, migration and displacement in general contexts. The finding outcomes revealed the identity changes from the way of life, tradition and culture and more urban environment. The variable factors caused local identity change came from this study consisted of; tourism demand, national policy, and new critical emerging issues of capitalism and education which were discussed. This study underlined the way of life in local community transition, tradition and culture has been distorted by effective destination marketing such as Yee Pang festival. The landscape and town planning were changed as well as environment both green agriculture, air quality, pollution is affected to local lifestyle. However, the positive perspectives of identity changes were explored referring to preserving their cultures, nature and local dialect