On Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok by Claudio Sopranzetti (review)

Review Essay: Charles Keyes

Claudio Sopranzetti's Owners of the Map is at once two different books. As a contribution to scholarship it explores how motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok epitomize an aspect of the urban environment given little attention by other scholars—namely, the way mobility shapes urban life. It is also a unique first-hand account of a momentous political movement—the 2010 uprising of those known as Red Shirts against a government installed after a military coup in Bangkok in 2006. This account differs from other accounts of that uprising in that Sopranzetti was an active participant observer in this momentous event.

In the first part of the book, Sopranzetti shows how Bangkok was transformed from a traditional city originally organized around waterways—the Chao Phraya River and canals (khlong)—to a city modelled on colonial cities organized around major roadways (thanon) and then to a modern city with buses and trams and more recently the skytrain. As public transportation significantly expanded in an ever-enlarging city, there developed the need for people to get from their homes to nodes in the system. Even as early as the 1950s, some young men primarily from villages in northeastern Thailand took up jobs in pedicabs to meet this growing need.¹ As the Thai economy continued to expand, the demand by urban dwellers for transport between homes, markets, bus stops and later skytrain stations also grew exponentially. Pedicabs disappeared and were initially replaced by taxis. But taxis in the enlarging urban world had difficulty navigating the small lanes known as soi that lay between the main roads. Enter the motorcycle taxi.

In the 1960s, as wealthier urban Thais acquired private cars, the Bangkok dwellers who made their living by working in recently established factories, hotels, stores, shopping malls and the rapidly growing service sector made up of small cafes, food stands, clothing shops and sundry shops catering to the needs of all urbanites needed to travel from their homes to places of work. As members of this class began to gain some additional money, they increasingly spurned walking great distances—often in stifling heat or monsoonal rains—to get to work. To meet this need, some young men and a few young women from rural (mainly northeastern) Thailand first rented and later purchased motorcycles to meet a growing transportation need that was cheaper and more convenient than regular taxis.

By the 1990s, motorcycle taxis had become an essential part of the Bangkok transportation system. Sopranzetti seeks to demonstrate that the choices made by young men (and a few young women) to become motorcycle taxi drivers were shaped by a significant change in the Thai economy—a shift away from wage labour in factories (themselves a relatively recent phenomenon in Thailand) to 'post-Fordist' entrepreneurship. Despite the importance of this insight, entrepreneurship does not appear in the index, nor does the concept of itsaraphap—'independence' or 'freedom' as the drivers themselves characterized their choice to be taxi drivers (see, for example, p. 146). This is unfortunate because it underlies the praxis (a Marxist term meaning action as contrasted with theory), a term that Sopranzetti makes much use of (see especially pp. 270–80), that has shaped the political economy of the taxi drivers.

Those who became taxi drivers did not do so simply because the work offered them the opportunity of itsaraphap; rather, it was because through this work they learned how to mobilize for collective and subsequently political action. Motorcycle taxi drivers "could also take control of flows and reclaim their centrality by adopting mobility as a tool of political mobilization, not just a form of labor or a locus of capitalist accumulation" (p. 12).

In part two of his book, Sopranzetti traces the significant role motorcycle taxi drivers played in the political upheaval of...