Description
In this work, I examine how tourism development produces hybrid space in Borobudur, Indonesia, and how this condition is experienced through everyday life across changing tourist seasons. Borobudur is not only a heritage site that must be preserved and controlled, but also a major tourist destination and a place where residents continue to live and work. These functions do not exist separately. Instead, they function in the same spaces, shaping how those spaces are used, managed, and understood. I use the idea of hybrid space to describe that condition: a situation in which the same place serves at once as a protected heritage area, a tourism landscape, and a setting for daily life. Yet this condition is not stable. It becomes more intense or less visible depending on tourism seasonality.I argue that hybrid space is not a fixed outcome of tourism development, but a changing spatial condition produced through the interaction of policy, tourism activity, and local practice over time. In Borobudur, this is especially visible through seasonality. During busier tourist seasons, local spaces are reorganized to accommodate visitor movement, commercial activity, access arrangements, and public display. Homes may function as homestays or places of trade, village streets may become routes for tourism circulation, and shared spaces may take on meanings tied to visitors and economic opportunity. During quieter seasons, many of these spaces return to residential and local uses. Hybrid space, therefore, is not constant, but shifts in intensity as tourism rises and falls across the period.
Drawing on ongoing dissertation fieldwork, including interviews and field observations, I explore how residents experience and respond to these changing spatial conditions in practice. I focus on how daily routines, livelihoods, and uses of space shift with tourism seasonality. These changes are not only economic. They also affect how people move through the area, organize their time, interact with others, and interpret the transformations taking place around them. By paying attention to these everyday experiences, my work shows that tourism development is not only a matter of policy or growth, but also a lived process that reshapes how space works over time.
This work offers a grounded account of tourism-led change in a heritage setting. I argue that hybrid space is produced through the coincidence of preservation and tourism agendas, but is most encountered through its changing intensity across tourist seasons.
| Period | 27 Apr 2026 → 28 Apr 2026 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Conference Program Sensing Space, Ritual, & Economy International Research Symposium |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Jakarta, IndonesiaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |