This article talks about Singapore’s Hawker culture being officially added to Unesco Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Since August 2018, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced in his National Day Rally speech that Singapore will be nominating hawker culture to the Unesco list. The following year in March 2019, Singapore submitted nomination documents to Unesco for consideration which included a 10-minute video and 10 photos depicting hawker culture. Finally after nearly three years of work by the National Heritage Board, the National Environment Agency and the Federation of Merchants’ Associations, the addition of hawker culture was finally added to the Unesco list after fulfilling all the criteria during the review at the 15^th session of the intergovernmental committee. This new addition will look to boost businesses and tourism as Singapore prepares for an influx of visitors at Hawker Centres. Planning for the influx of visitors when global travel resumes have already begun, as more frequent maintenance and repair work are being conducted and Issues like the adequacy of parking and traffic obstruction are being looked into. Finally, FMAS will continue to work with the authorities to look into ways to rejuvenate and sustain the hawker trade and safeguard our hawker culture through traineeship programmes and monetary subsidies, to lower the barriers to entry for young aspiring hawkers.

The first takeaway is Culture Tourism. Over the years, there have been an expanding number of travellers that is more interested in cultural heritage and cultural activities when planning for a trip. With Singapore's Hawker Culture being added and promoted in UNESCO, it will finally be a prized tourism asset and will look to increase the number of tourists visiting Singapore once global travel resumes as they look to satisfy their cultural exposure and search for authentic experiences. All these will lead to tourists learning something new when visiting hawkers which further enforcing Singapore's Hawker Culture.

The second takeaway is cultural tourism sustainability. With the increasing number of tourists that will visit hawkers in the near future, it will hopefully promote the preservation of local tradition, customs and culture. Thanks to UNESCO now recognising intangible cultural heritage as being as important as buildings, it creates a market for experiences and traditional projects that provides the economic support for keeping these skills and traditions alive at these hawkers. Finally, this will help encourage the development and maintenance of new/existing hawkers from the government seeing how popular it is.

The last takeaway is tourism resources. From the article, we can see that hawker centres are expected to be more popular among tourists given their addition to the Unesco Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Besides tourists, we have local Singaporeans who are everyday visitors to these hawkers and because of this, there might be an increase in competition for seats during peak hours. Tourists are also unfamiliar with some common practices in Singapore like using tissue papers to reserve seats and this may cause some unnecessary misunderstanding. Hence, the management of these resources must take into consideration these users.