Heritage and Identity in Contemporary Thailand: Memory, Place and Power by Ross King (review)

Ross King, architect, urban planner and former Dean of the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne (1995–2002) has a penchant for exploring Asian urban spaces. A frequent traveller to Asia, his most recent book explores Seoul (2018), while earlier books interrogated Bangkok (2011), and Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya (2008).

King came to prominence arguably through his work Emancipating Spaces (1996). That book explored 'stories of the representation of the experience of the times, in architecture and urban design, and the spatial expression of the emancipatory endeavour in the context of that experience' (p. 4) primarily through economic, political and social processes. His books on Asian urban spaces revisit this theme through different lens. While the lens for analysis may differ, one cannot but help notice that King certainly has a fascination for understanding and theorising power relationships; whether it is advocating for a better world by designing spaces based on utopian or emancipatory theories in Emancipating Spaces, or describing the maze of power relations and its impact in Seoul, Reading Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya, or in this book under review.

In this book, Heritage and Identity in Contemporary Thailand: Memory, Place and Power, King—together with 12 co-authors—explores urban spaces in Thailand. The twelve co-authors (all of Thai nationality) are King's former PhD students. Capable and credible in their own right, King supervised two of them at the University of Melbourne (Boonanan Natakun and Cuttaleeya Jiraprasertkun), and the other ten (Weeraphan Shinawatra, Sakesit Paksee, Sompong Amnuay-ngerntra, Supatra Boonpanyarote, Ratchaneekorn Sae-Wang, Sakesit Paksee, Rathirat Khewmesuin, Pumin Varavan, Pensiri Chartniyom, Jinnapas Pathumporn, and Sairoon Dinkoksung) at Silpakorn University. Co-authoring each chapter with King, they provide the twelve 'data' chapters that form the substance of the book, enabling King through his editorial of the book and prior to this the thesis supervision to set the context, identify the framework for analysis in the first chapter (Chapter 1), and draw conclusions in the final chapter (Chapter 14).

The organization of this book is straightforward. In Chapter 1, King provides the key argument of the book, 'that memory is socially produced and that its production is inevitably linked to power, whether domestic, communal or national, or else to that pervading, subliminal power of custom and self-discipline' (p. 3). The book makes a further argument that the production of memory and its power-relations 'become inextricably tied up with issues of dependency, and thereby, at the economic level, with uneven development – the prospering of one group or community at the expense of another' (p. 3). Heritage is, therefore, the intersection between memory and power. We see here King's fascination with understanding and theorising power.

Chapter 1 also outlines the framework. Pierre Nora's Lieux de memoire (realms/sites of memory) and milieux de memoire (milieus of memory) are used to organize the chapters in the book. Nora's central argument that 'the idea of sites of memory (heritage?) as compensation for a profound loss: in the modern age most people no longer live in milieux de memoire, environment is memory…Lieux de memoire exist because there are no longer any milieux de mémoire settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience' (p. 6) becomes the focus.

However, this idea is then challenged through the chapters in the book, which, therefore, confronts 'that difference between history (the scientific search for an understanding of the past) and memory (heritage, tradition – the desire to return, vicariously, to a selected past)' (p. 7).

The porousness between lieux de memoire and milieux de memoire requires a supporting theory that is functional but sufficiently flexible to bring together disparate ideas, especially when written over a period and looking at many different aspects of urban space. Hence, Nora's approach is then linked to Deleuze's assemblage theory. 'Heritage as assemblage is constituted of always unstable, always ambiguous lieux...