The blight of beautification: Bangkok and the pursuit of class-based urban purity

Abstract

‘Beautification’ is often invoked as a justification for forms of urban reorganization that threaten existing ways of life and ignore the aesthetic values and social needs of poorer residents. The case of Bangkok, dramatically exemplified by the official campaign to evict the community of Pom Mahakan, shows how little attention is paid either to the social problems that such modernist uses of ‘tradition’ are likely to cause or to the vernacular architecture that is being destroyed in the name of ‘development’ and of a harshly selective conservation regime. The future of Bangkok’s vernacular past looks decidedly bleak.

Acknowledgements

A version of this paper was presented at a conference titled ‘Asian Cities: Hubs of Interaction, Tradition and Transformation’, at the University of Tokyo, Japan.

Notes

1. OTOP, a policy initiated under the now-disgraced prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, was an attempt to encourage individual rural communities each to produce a single product that would represent local tradition as part of the larger diversity that officially characterizes ‘Thainess’. The policy and associated institutional support have been substantially revised since Thaksin’s fall, but the emphasis on locality and tradition remains firmly in place as an anchor for the aggressive export of nationalistically conceived tradition.

2. Greece, mentioned previously, is certainly another example of this phenomenon.

3. On the history and significance of Rachadamnoen Avenue, see Wong (2006); Koompong (2012).

4. For a recent discussion of the significance of roads for the anthropological analysis of power, see especially Dalakoglou (2017).

5. The phrase occurs in a discussion reported in a volume of the Royal Institute of British Architects reporting on a Town Planning Conference in October 1910 (384). Variants of it have appeared subsequently, including in my own paper in Harrison and Jackson (2010), i.e. exactly a century later! However, it appears to be a phrase in fairly common use.

6. One exception is the Crown Property Bureau’s preservation of a set of Chinese-style shophouses in Tha Tian, Bangkok, where arrangements were made for residents to move back in, at affordable rents, after the renovations had been completed. However, this is a rare example of enlightened action in this context, and may have been motivated by the shophouses’ proximity to, and architectural compatibility with, the neighbouring Grand Palace and associated religious buildings. See Yongtanit (2006).