Reading Bangkok

Chapter 4. Landscapes of Ruin and the Fourth Level of Colonisation: Ratchadapisek, the Khlong Toei slums

126 Reading Bangkok Chapter 4 Landscapes of Ruin and the Fourth Level of Colonisation Ratchadapisek, the Khlong Toei Slums The fourth level of colonisation is that of the culture itself. Various of its manifestations have been observed in Chapter 3, in the context of an increasingly globalised world from the 1960s onwards: American R&R and then international tourism transformed long tolerated practices of polygamy and sexual dalliance, the shopping mall transformed old practices of trade, while land speculation and property development — long royally-led — shifted to a new order of magnitude as the city “internationalised”. The irresolvable tension between liberal democracy and elitist hegemony, exploding in the massacres and coups, can also be viewed as alien culture (the goodness of democracy) intruding into an older socio-political universe. All of these intrusions continue. However, Thai mimicry of mostly Western culture and practices, always aided by increasingly globalised media, has more recently vastly increased the scale of the erosions. The prostitution scene has assumed a Vegas-scale grandeur; property development “went feral”, only to crash destructively in 1997, leaving a landscape of ruins; the pursuit of the consumers littered the whole Bangkok region with shopping malls for the affluent to escape from the lower classes; the scale of the social class divide escalated after 2006 as the city became a realm of contestation and ultimately destruction in both physical space and cyberspace. The following will first address the production of this most recent manifestation of the city as a wrecked realm. The second part of the chapter scratches the surfaces of its grosser wreckage to reveal something 126 Landscapes of Ruin and the Fourth Level of Colonisation 127 of the material interests that have underpinned it but then, complementarily , the slums that are the by-product of modernity’s onslaught on Bangkok. The focus is on reading the ruins themselves — what lessons are to be drawn? 1. Colonising Ideologies and the Production of Ruins There are three interlinked stories to be told about the social construction of Bangkok’s ruins. The first, concerning the abandonment of the city and its life to the culture of the automobile, has been long-running. The second, even longer-running in its underlying causes, is of the herd mentality of property developers which, however, in 1997 yielded a dramatic moment of spectacular implosion. Both are stories of “learning from the West”. Third is a story, again of emulation of the West, that concerns erosions of both the life and the representation of the city — Vegas, Starbucks, franchises and concessions. Highways and the Mass Transit Fiasco The decline of European influence in Southeast Asia generally, as a consequence of the Second World War, yielded a vacuum that was rapidly filled by American ideas, institutions, corporations and products. This was the context for the production of the Bangkok Metropolitan Plan 2533, by American consultants Litchfield and Associates (1960). Released in 1960 after some three years of study, the plan was limited from the start: there had been no comprehensive base plan; results of the 1960 Population Census — the first by the Central (National) Statistical Office — were not available, nor were there other consistent population data; and there was a dearth of local expertise.1 It is therefore not surprising that the plan was essentially an American-style land-use plan with a highway network. It presented two disabling anomalies. First, a vision of neatly allocated land uses, to be supported by mechanisms of zoning and development control, represented the paradigmatic opposite of a Thai understanding of space and its occupation. Bewilderingly muddled Bangkok — the juxtapositions and superimpositions — presents a non-elite space where almost any activity may occur anywhere. The notion of zoned land use would be incomprehensible ; further, the mechanisms of local development control would defy administrative ingenuity. 128 Reading Bangkok Second, the future was seen to lie with the automobile; fixed-rail public transport should be abandoned and, in Bangkok’s case, some 30 highways should be built in a conventional pattern of radiating arterials and circumferential ring-roads overlaying the old pattern of khlong. As roads had come late to Bangkok, they are thin on the ground and unable, at the local level, to provide for an automobile city. The plan was never formally adopted although its assumptions certainly were: the automobile industry was encouraged, more khlong were filled in and the remaining trams removed. The various agencies continued to...