Culture Heritage Tourism Engineering at Penang: Complete The Puzzle Of "The Pearl Of Orient"

Cultural Traits and Heritage recently has become an important topic and concept to tourism development especially in Penang especially after Georgetown, Penang was awarded as Heritage City by UNSECO in 2008 July. Penang is well known for its heritage character especially in the city of Georgetown with more than 200 years of urban history. The cultural heritage tourism in urban setting act as an engineering tool to uplift the cities for better future in a globalizing world. Once the initial euphoria upon being inscribed into UNESCO's World Heritage List subsides, the harsh reality and challenges that be approaching in conserve the authenticity and integrity of the cultural heritage become a daunting prospect. Today, Penang is facing surmountable development pressure, such as intensive exploitation of their cultural heritage in the face of accelerating economics demands resulting from continued growth, industrial, urban development and the rapidly growing impacts of global tourism. Hence, this paper aims to explore how such heritage themes and resources are treated in rapidly urbanizing cities to rectify the creation of tabula rasa. With the case study of Georgetown, Penang's which latest attempt to build a distinctive historic city, the paper will analyze the culture heritage of Penang which miss out by the local tourism authority from tourism perspective and how these heritage and multiculturalism are packaged as part of tourism products for Penang. For discussion purpose, the issue of urbanization will also be taken into consideration together with the dilemma of preservation faced by the local tourism authority.