Hill Stations as Subaltern Urbanization. Crossing National Borders to (re)Discover Small and Medium Cities at Tourist Fringes.

Our paper focuses on the convergences between urban and tourist logics looking at hill stations created during the colonial period in South and South-East Asia. Hill stations profoundly disrupted mountains, historically thought of as relegation areas for ethnic minorities (Scott’s “zomia”, 2009). In this respect, they have pushed mountains into global capitalism, leading to an unprecedented urban growth. This interdependence between tourism and urbanization in spaces as vulnerable as mountains leads to obvious sustainability issues, such as inter-ethnic tensions between local actors in the sharing of wealth, the over-exploitation of natural resources or the artificialization of mountains. Despite these challenges, mountain urbanization has been under-researched essentially because it occurs in the fringes, away from major cities. However, choosing those small and medium-sized cities as our fields of study not only allows documenting one of the fastest-growing urban regions in the world, but also learning from these cities. Adopting a critical postcolonial perspective on the urban process (Yeoh, 2011), our Urbaltour’project attempts to reconsider hill stations as ordinary ones (Robinson, 2006). It will contribute theoretically to urban studies by enriching the concept of “subaltern urbanization” (Mukhopadhyay, Zérah and Denis, 2020 ; Roy, 2011). In that perspective, we form the two following hypotheses: tourism acts as a powerful vector of globalized urban models and contributes to profound restructuring of local stakeholder systems. We will present our initial results from Garut (Indonesia) and Sapa (Vietnam).