Tourism and Entrepreneurialism in Southeast Asian Cities Jamie Gillen* Miami University, Ohio, USA Abstract This study reviews recent literatures related to entrepreneurship in the Southeast Asian urban tour- ism sector. The study is divided into three sections. The first section concerns urban identity. I outline recent debates surrounding the disparity between tourist stereotypes of the region’s cities and discursive attempts by the local governments to counter them. I argue that the twin themes of harmony and convergence are used by Southeast Asia’s urban governments to promote their cities as appealing, safe, and multicultural places to visit. In the second section, I present an alter- native approach to traditional understandings of state–society relations in the region. Instead of explaining local resistances to a predatory state, I highlight recent research that favors a relational, cooperative reading of the production of the tourism industry in Southeast Asia. Lastly, I intro- duce the political implications for urban tourism growth, focusing on the desires of the Southeast Asian urban population to use tourism as a tool to expedite their political goals. Introduction Scholars conducting tourism research in human geography, while often including the now mundane unifying principle that tourism research does not receive the respect that it deserves in the academy (Gibson 2008; Klak 2007), have nevertheless in recent years developed tourism studies from a peripheral avenue of inquiry into one that is perhaps uniquely situated to explore the links between human geography’s subdisciplines. Tour- ism – because it is considered one of the biggest economic sectors in the world (Winter 2007) and because more and more of the world’s population considers the world to be ‘travelable’ (Gillen 2008a) – has been used as both lens and as case study in a remarkable array of scholarly paths that transcend traditional boundaries between (among others) the political and economic, the political and cultural, the cultural and economic, the feminist and the economic, the urban and rural, and environment and society. Bridging and problematizing these ideas are key words that may more precisely represent the fluidity of tourism practices; terms like mobility / mobilities (Edensor 2007; Hall 2005; Urry 2007), embodiment (Crouch 1999), performance (Crang 2006), enjoyment (Kingsbury 2005), memory (Hoelscher 2003), sustainability (Calgaro and Lloyd 2008; Carr and Heyman 2009), and consumption (Freire-Medeiros 2009) have become useful concepts in marry- ing theory with practice in tourism studies (e.g. Creswell 2006). The dynamism of the aforementioned concepts have, along with providing a vocabu- lary for leisure studies, generated a template by which to rethink cities. Recent urban analyses use the terms mentioned above to disrupt the traditional binaries of culture and economy (Amin and Thrift 2007), tradition and progress (Lepawsky 2005), city and region (Wu and Zhang 2007), and identity and politics (Yeoh 2005). In this study, I intend to highlight trends in entrepreneurialism, another concept connecting tourism and cities, in the Southeast Asian region. I do so with the acknowledgement that rarely does Geography Compass 4/4 (2010): 370–382, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2010.00322.x ª 2010 The Author Journal Compilation ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd