Bangkok Precipitated: Cloudbursts, Sentient Urbanity, and Emergent Atmospheres

Abstract

Bangkok often floods. This paper examines the effects of city deluge as a result of urban assemblage: complex, distributed and disjunctive relations between the city’s amphibious ecologies and landscapes, its dilapidated drainage infrastructure, its varied transport systems, its weather patterns, and the movements of people. During cloudbursts, many of Bangkok’s missing masses become plainly and frustratingly, visible. Using ethnographic description as a “material diagnostics,” I explore how irritated, perturbed, urban atmospheres emerge out of disjunctive infrastructural constellations. Cloudbursts make perceptible such atmospheres as forms of sentient urbanism, in which distributed sensations are generated by intersecting material itineraries moving across multiple assemblages. As affects and agitations move from street level to social media, rain precipitates matters of urgent, urban concern and critique.

Keywords:

• Atmospheres
• flood
• infrastructure
• sentient urbanism
• Bangkok

1 Introduction

Bangkok is amphibious. Built on top of the swampy ground where the Chao Phraya River runs off to the Gulf of Thailand, urbanization has transformed the delta into a city. In addition to Bangkok’s delta ecology, the tropical monsoon climate provides this amphibious urbanity with particular characteristics. It is one of the most flood-prone cities in the world. Traditionally, rainfall and canals have played an important role in patterns of settlement, and the mobility, sense of community, and the economic activities of people. During the past several decades, however, rapid urbanization has led the city toward an unprecedented spatial transformation. Pressure from high-rise offices and residential buildings, the pumping of groundwater for industrial production, the expansion of the hard surfaces of roads and parking lots, land reclamation to cover former drainage areas, as well as a number of blockages such as walls and traffic barricades, have all helped to tame Bangkok’s fluid spatiality, building a seemingly solid ground for rapid development.

Today, Bangkok’s vulnerability profile clearly indicates increasing adversity for urban lives (Marks 2015; Thabchumpon and Arunotai 2017; Wongsa et al. 2019). The co-constitution of delta ecologies and landscapes, tropical rainstorm patterns, and urban situations and events – including land sinking, clogged drainage, the massive occupation of city dwellers, and crippled infrastructures – result in what can be described as a city deluge. Chronic floods are only one among a series of unprecedented challenges to the resilience of urban delta life (Morita and Suzuki 2019). On flooded streets, in the middle of this socioecological confluence of heavy rain, massive congestion and transportation failure, amidst huge crowds of people unable to escape the clogged sogginess, one experiences – and becomes part of – a distinctive social phenomenon, which I characterize as an emergent irritated urban atmosphere.

Irritation begins at street level but soon overflows roads and alleys. As it accumulates, it spills over into widespread social media expressions of political outrage over the inability of local governments to find long-term solutions to urban “problems.” Whenever heavy rains pour, the city precipitates intensities of feeling (Thrift 2004).

Over the last decades, Bangkok’s hydro-techno-bureaucrats came up with what can be called a mega-solution to save the city from drowning. So-called “giant drainage tunnels” were proposed and partly constructed. They were meant to mitigate hydrological, but also social and political, stresses. While material infrastructures, like tunnels and drainage networks, shape the flows and distributions of water, and thus the hydro-nature of Bangkok’s living spaces, they also interfere with urban atmospheres. And they become part of conflictual political entanglements with official authorities, managers, and experts (Amin 2014; Anand 2011; Harvey and Knox 2012; Knox 2017; Swyngedouw 2004). By tracing the intersecting but disjunctive material itineraries of city cloudburst, I show that these diverse systems, and their co-constitutive relations creates the flux and flow of Bangkok’s urban assemblage (Blok and Farías 2016) both in terms of its amphibious ecology and in terms of socio-political ambience and atmospheres.

I begin by characterizing Bangkok’s urbanity as a multiplicity of ecological, infrastructural, political, and affective assemblages. The relations between these assemblages can be understood in terms of “precipitation” whereby different ontological forces come together to create an emergent affect. Subsequently, I examine the material itineraries through which these assemblages came into contact during a Bangkok cloudburst. These precipitations create particular forms of sentient urbanity, through which some of the city’s usually missing masses become very tangible to city dwellers. The outcome is an irritated atmosphere, which moves from street-level frustrations to matters of urban concerns and critiques resonating across digital platforms.

2 The Flux and Flow of Assemblages

Let me begin by exploring Bangkok urbanism as a multiple assemblage. In an important contribution, the urban theorist Colin McFarlane (2011a) argued that assemblage thinking – oriented to “the urban” as a material and political process of becoming (see also Farías 2011; McFarlane 2011b) rather than determined by structures of political economy (e.g. Brenner, Madden, and Wachsmuth 2011) – makes it possible to attune both to urban “actuals” and “possible.”

Specifically, McFarlane suggested that an emphasis on how multiple urban agents and imaginaries are assembled can enable new forms of “generative critique.” Centering on relations between diverse forms of agency and the emergent capacities of the urban assemblage (see Amin 2014; Dovey and Ristic 2017; Farías 2009; Kamalipour and Peimani 2015), generative critique orients toward urban participation and citizens’ rights to the city (Marcuse 2009). The wager is that virtual possibilities for new politics and emancipatory movements reside within heterogeneous urban materialities and forms. In Bangkok, they might be catalyzed by dissatisfactions with the fragmentation of urban infrastructures and the inability of the authorities to manage the city fairly and efficiently. In the words of Bruno Latour (2004), they can be described as emergent matters of urban concern.

In the following, I consider what generative critique might mean beyond public participation, in terms of the ontological multiplicity provoked or perturbed (Bryant 2011) by unwanted association of human and non-human actors during flooding events. In these situations, affective urban atmospheres emerge out of infrastructural constellations (Jensen and Morita 2015). As expressions of outrage and political frustrations overflow social media, we are confronted with a form of sentient urbanism – the capacity of Bangkok as an ontologically multiple assemblage to generate affects and sensations.

However, I am less interested in assemblage as an overarching theory of urbanism, than as a device for becoming sensitive to dynamic itineraries – the fluxes and flows – of materially heterogeneous urban processes. My specific focus is on the itineraries that are precipitated – set in motion – during a very common event: a Bangkok cloudburst. As I show in the following, whenever Bangkok “wakes to rain” (Sudbanthad 2019), one is brought face to face with its “missing masses” (Latour 1992).

I use the notion of “precipitation” as a heuristic lens through which to perceive the becoming of the Bangkok – the momentum of its assemblages – when it wakes to rain. In general usage, we often talk about precipitation in relation to meteorological conditions. Precipitation describes the condensation of atmospheric fluid vapor that falls to the earth; it can take forms like mist, drizzle, rain drops, snow, or hail. In the context of political climates and crises precipitation has different connotations. It usually means to cause an event or situation, typically one that is troublesome and happens abruptly, or unexpectedly. Indeed, there are also a few attempts to combine the ecological and political features of precipitation in analyses of ecological politics (Smirnov et al. 2018; Turton 2000). Building on, and extending these efforts, I use the concept to characterize dynamic processes of practical ontology (Jensen 2014), in which different political and ecological agents and agencies come together. The intensity of their associations generates urban, infrastructural events that, in turn, act as material catalysts for irritated urban atmospheres, the affects and agitations of which spill over into social media politics.

Humidity, heat, and sogginess are everyday experiences for Bangkok’s inhabitants. People also suffer from what they view as the ineffectiveness, if not outright failure, of drainage infrastructure, from the disruption of mass transportation, and from the lacking responsibility of city officers, among others. The sense of being wronged, not only by changing climates but also by public officials, accumulates and condenses into an irritated urban sentience and disruptive atmosphere, which finds expression in massive online showers of political commentary about what a good city is and isn’t like. This relation between the material itineraries of infrastructure, and political imagination and articulation can be captured by what Hannah Knox (2017: 378) calls “material diagnostics,” in which “the affective engagement with material environments that characterized people’s experiences […] had the effect of producing a rupture or gap between expectation and actuality.” In the following, I engage in material diagnostics, by tracing the movement from climatic to political precipitation, set in motion by the perturbation of urban assemblages by cloudbursts. Since both the processes and resulting atmospheres are effects of changes to Bangkok as a distributed whole, I refer to sentient urbanity. Urban sentience is neither individual nor social but traverses the entire urban assemblage.

To depict the dynamic movements and material itineraries through which urban atmospheres are assembled, the concept of affect is also important. Studies of affect have been crucial to understand how both human and nonhuman agents shape landscapes, relations, and sensations of urban space. Rather than separating material and non-material domains, these studies depict social life and the sociality of multiple agents as co-constituted. Atsuro Morita and Wakana Suzuki (2019), for example, have considered the affective relations between environmental change and emergent imaginaries, such as resilience thinking, in environmental knowledge production, and Weik Von Mossner (2017) has explored how environmental narratives reflect and encourage peoples’ engagements with ecology. Many other scholars have used affect to explore mediated manifestations and transformations of emotion, relation and expectations within different urban landscapes and infrastructures (e.g. Amin 2014; Anderson and Holden 2008; Harvey and Knox 2012; Simone 2004; Street 2012). And when it comes to atmosphere, quite a few works try to capture the social and political effects of being enveloped or submerged in a particular affective ambience shaped by material constellations (Anderson 2009; Ash 2013; Bille, Bjerregaard, and Sørensen 2015; Navaro-Yashin 2009; Thibaud 2015; Thrift 2004, 2014). All of these aspects: the dynamism of urban assemblage as ontologically co-constituted by multiple agents, the movement between material and non-material assemblages, and the emergence of affect; an irritated sentient urbanity and a disruptive atmosphere, will be visible as we turn to the precipitations of Bangkok’s cloudburst.

3 Bangkok’s Amphibious Nature

To begin the itinerary, this section considers the socioecological assemblage of Bangkok’s amphibious urbanity. I begin by describing interrelated ecologies, landscapes, weather patterns, and the general trend of climate change, and how material flows, circulations and precipitations form composites with people and urban development. These are scenes that make many of the city’s “missing masses” visible matters of public concern.

For most Bangkok dwellers, the word “rain” has negative connotations. The Thai saying “fon kamlang ma” – “rain is coming” – can be interpreted as a blessing for rural agriculturalists. For office-workers and street-mongers in the city, however, it is more often viewed with alarm. On websites, apps, and social media, live streams of traffic conditions and weather events from JS100 Radio, Thailand’s most trusted traffic news organization, provoke anxiety. As the rain comes, the usually bright and lively sentience of the city suddenly turns dull and hectic. How does this happen? Why is Bangkok’s mood so quickly transformed by the onset of rain?

The images that flash through peoples’ mind when they think of Bangkok rain are likely to be of congestion, roads and footpaths flooded with murky water, crowds of people trying to hide under insufficient covers, and dirty streams with floating trash. If you live in Bangkok, chances are that you will experience the inconvenience and chaos that come with heavy rain. Maybe you were stuck in an endless row of cars in the Sukhumvit or Lad Phrao areas. Maybe you were trapped in your office, or in the classroom, because of flooding. Or maybe you were crammed together with many others under a tiny cover, impatiently waiting for a bus that would not arrive for another hour. At times like that, you might have thought to yourself: “Why? Why is Bangkok like this? Why is this happening to me?”

Why, indeed, do Bangkok’s inhabitants have to suffer from flooding almost every time it rains? As mentioned, geographical location, landscape, and climate are all part of the answer. First, Bangkok is located in the lower Chao Phraya River Basin. The river flows through the middle of the city into the Gulf of Thailand, which separates the city into two sides. Second, the delta area where Bangkok is now located was originally swampland with fertile soil. It used to be perfect for agriculture, especially rice farming (Thaitakoo and McGrath 2010). However, what was previously an advantage has now become a liability, and a major reason for the city’s long-standing flood problem. Bangkok’s close proximity to the sea makes it very prone to flooding due to tidal bores from the sea during high tide. The high tide can make Chao Phraya River overflow. Combined with heavy rain, the city floods (Lu and Flavelle 2019; World Bank 2009). Again.

Apart from physical geography, climate is another important factor. The city is in a tropical monsoon zone. Thailand’s central region area is affected by seasonal monsoon rain during mid-May to mid-October. The Southwest monsoon means that 85% of the annual rainfall – 1130 mm with variations between 1000 and 1600 mm – occurs in this period (Weather Atlas 2019). During the monsoon season, there is regular heavy downpour, and it seems to be increasing. According to data collected by the Meteorological Department (2015), Bangkok saw annual rainfall over 2000 mm for three years in a row between 2009 and 2011. In May 2017, Bangkok received more than 504 mm, the highest for the month of May over a 26-year period of recording (Khoasod 2017; MGR Online 2017).

Urban change adds further dimensions to the chronic flood problem. Typically, Bangkok’s stormwater is either directly discharged to rivers or transported through combined sewage overflow (Kumar and Satoh 2005; Maneewan and Van Roon 2017; Saraswat, Kumar, and Mishra 2016). Buildings, roads, and concrete act as blockades that prevent the natural flow of water into the river, canals, and drainage system, and traps excess water in the city area. Thanawat Jarupongsakul, head of the Disasters and Climate Change Department at Chulalongkorn University, has argued that a “failure in urban planning” (Ippoodom 2017) means that urban expansions are now beyond the capacity of the city drainage system. The same point was made in a study of Bangkok urban flooding, which cited unplanned building as an important factor in increasing the city’s vulnerability to flooding (Thanvisitthpon, Shrestha, and Pal 2018). Not only does urban construction obstruct the city drainage system; making matters worse it happens on lands that were previously used as water retention areas.

On top of this there is the not insignificant detail that Bangkok is sinking. Built in a delta, Bangkok was always low-lying, averaging only about 1.5 m above sea level. But due to extensive, unregulated pumping of groundwater for factories and to increasing population, the ground has subsided more than one meter in certain areas (Marks 2016). During a critical period in the 1980s, areas with severe land subsidence sunk more than 10 cm per year (Lorphensri, Ladawadee, and Dhammasarn 2011). While groundwater pumping was banned in 1997, land subsidence continues, in part unavoidably, since the city is built upon the soft clay of swampland. Today, Bangkok land subsidence still occurs at a rate of one to two cm per year (Gluckman 2019; Suzuki, Kishimoto, and Endo 2019).

And then there is climate change, since the rising sea level also threatens the city. Since Bangkok is located close to the Gulf of Thailand, and since the Chao Phraya River connects the city to the sea, this steady rise potentially puts the city underwater. This risk is one of the reasons that Thailand has the dubious honor of being on the top 10 list of countries most affected by climate change according to the 2017 Global Climate Risk Index (Eckstein, Hutfils, and Winges 2018). Some predict that up to 40% of the city will be submerged by 2030 (Ayanaputra and Lohatepanont 2019; Suzuki, Kishimoto, and Endo 2019).

All of this is testimony to Bangkok as a vast and complex socioecological assemblage. Urban transformation affects ecological resilience, and vice versa, in ways that increasingly put urban dwellers at risk. To deal with these ecological threats, city authorities have developed various technical and social interventions. In the next section, I discuss the development of urban infrastructure and management systems introduced to regulate these material itineraries and heterogeneous forces by channeling excess water into multiple amphibious infrastructures and drainage systems.

4 Disjunctures of Drainage

Bangkok’s amphibious urbanity is aptly described as an assembly of natural forces and concatenated social and material agents – urban infrastructures. Numerous drainage infrastructures and network systems have been built in the attempt to handle flooding. This sociotechnical assemblage, however, has brought along its own problematic consequences. Focusing on infrastructural rupture (Knox 2017) and failure (Star and Ruhleder 1996), this section describes what happens when diverse infrastructural elements come together in a flooding event, or cloudburst.

As noted, Bangkok’s flatness and proneness to flooding, combined with monsoon rain, and land subsidence makes future submergence a palpable risk. Not surprisingly, numerous initiatives and plans aim to prevent or mitigate flooding. After 1983, when a cyclone flooded Thailand for five months and caused over 6.6 billion baht of damage (World Bank 2012), Bangkok began setting up a network of public drainage systems.

The importance of canals for the city drainage system is still very evident in the city (Unakul 2012). As part of the 1983 public drainage development, new canals were dug to assist flood prevention, along with the constructions of tunnels, retention ponds, and pump stations. With inspiration from the Netherlands, the city also built a polder system in inner Bangkok, and on the western and eastern sides of the city (Charoenwong 2019). The system works by using dykes built around the city to block out the excess water, and pumping stations to direct excess water into canals and the sea (Fernquest 2011).

In 2011, Bangkok experienced yet another more than three-month inundation due to water from the northern part of the country. This happened, though there had been both political and technical initiatives to protect the capital city from drowning. Afterward, the Thai government came up with several new plans and infrastructural projects to mitigate future flooding. They included building flood walls and dikes around Bangkok, restoring waterways and sluice gates, heightening major highways, as well as expanding water retention areas around Bangkok. However, these mitigation projects do not prevent future floods. Rather, as Marks and Elinoff (2019) argue, they “splinter disaster” by redistributing risk and affects in different ways. Following this proposition, I explore the relation between splintering flood mitigation infrastructures, annual inundation, and emergent effects and affects in Bangkok. But while Marks and Elinoff show post-disaster infrastructural projects to have become critical sites of politics and action due to “socio-spatial, political and biophysical fracturing” (Marks and Elinoff 2019: 4), the following analysis is oriented toward the precipitation of atmospheres out of Bangkok’s urban assemblages.

The governmental authority directly responsible for flood and drainage issues is the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA). The BMA has recently allocated a budget of 61 billion baht for various flood prevention projects. Apart from canals and polders, Bangkok’s public drainage system consists of numerous structures including a pipe system of more than 6400 kilometers, 1682 ditches and canals, 158 pumping stations, 25 retention areas capable of containing over a 12.88 million cubic-meter volume of water, and seven drainage tunnels (Department of Drainage and Sewerage 2019a). The system, however, faces many problems. Because the pipes have a diameter of only 50 to 80 cm, the system is too slow to drain excess water during severe flood events. Canals and sewers are often clogged by garbage and wastewater, which lowers their flow capacity. As for the pumping stations, they sometimes lack power to efficiently get rid of the excess water. And while the water retention areas can hold up to 10 million cubic meters, this is still too little, as projections estimate a need for 15 million cubic meters (Thai Publica 2019).

For these reasons, the city administration has continuously initiated new projects and constructions. The giant drainage tunnels project was initiated 34 years ago to great public and media fanfare. The first tunnel was connected with the flooding infrastructure of Sukhumvit in central Bangkok. It was, however, quite an average sized tunnel of only one meter in diameter. Later, five more average size drainage tunnels of diameters from one to three meters were added.

Bangkok’s first truly “giant” drainage tunnel was completed in 2010. Spanning five inner districts, it runs for five kilometers under Rama 9-Ramkhamhaeng. With a diameter of around five meters, it has the capacity to drain over 60 cubic meters of water per minute. It was followed by the Makkasan tunnel, which retains water from the central business districts including Watthana, Pathumwan, Ratchathewi, Phayathai, and Din Dang. The most recent addition is the Khlong Bang Sue tunnel, also at a size of five meters diameter, which was officially put into operation in 2017 (Department of Drainage and Sewerage 2019b).

Five more giant drainage tunnels are either proposed or under construction. Closest to completion is the Khlong Nongbon drainage tunnel, which is expected to be in full operation by 2021. It is meant to help prevent floods in eastern districts including Prawet, Suan Luang, Phra Khanong, and Bangna, which cover over 85 square kilometers of land. The other four tunnels are Khlong Thawi Watthana tunnel, Khlong Saen Saep-Khlong Lat Phrao tunnel, Khlong Prem Prachakon tunnel, and Khlong Phraya Ratcha Montri. The first two have been approved by the cabinet and are waiting for 2020 budget approval. At a cost of 9600 million baht, the Khlong Prem Prachakon tunnel is currently awaiting budget approval and review for environmental impacts. The construction is expected to commence in 2020 with a completion date of 2024. This tunnel is expected to help with flood prevention in the upper area of Bangkok. Finally, a proposal for the Khlong Phraya Ratcha Montri tunnel, in the east side of Bangkok, is still being developed …

The operating principles of the giant tunnels are relatively simple. They are built underground and run across the flood-prone area. They have a downward slope so water flows toward the end, where a pumping station drains the water by pumping it into the river. Along the length of the tunnel, several intake channels drain excess water from their respective areas. In terms of mechanisms, there is really not much new about Bangkok’s drainage tunnels. They are very similar to the G-Cans Project in Japan, which is said to be the model for drainage tunnels worldwide (Saraswat, Kumar, and Mishra 2016).

These descriptions, however, only pertain to the technicality of the flooding infrastructure. As science and technology studies have shown, however, the technical operations of infrastructure always encounter unpredictable material emergences and sociological entanglements (e.g. Medina, Da Costa Marques, and Holmes 2014; Sangkhamanee 2017, 2018). As I shift my attention to how the flooding infrastructure is assembled with other infrastructures, ecology, and city management, the consequences of these entanglements for flood-prone Bangkok become evident.

Given all the initiatives listed above, it might seem that Bangkok is pretty well-equipped to handle floods. Its techno-ecological urban assemblages appear up to speed. So why does the city still flood constantly? According to the director of Department of Drainage and Sewerage, the answer is found in certain infrastructural disjunctures. For the entire drainage system to function to full capacity, three systems – sewer system, canal system, and pumping stations – need to function properly together (Songsakul 2017). As I have already hinted, however, each individual system is still riddled with its own problems. The sewers, which are supposed to drain water from the streets are either too small, or they are clogged with waste and garbage. The canals, too, are clogged with garbage, and due to land subsidence they have sunk to lower levels than the pipes, which makes it difficult to drain water into the canals. In any case, as noted, the pipes are too small to drain properly. The drainage tunnels are, of course, helpful; yet it is not rare for pumping stations to lack power to pump out the excess water in time. During the flood incident on 7 June 2019, for example, the tunnels failed to drain any water. This appeared to be due to an electricity malfunction and the fact that the tunnels had no emergency generator (Daily News 2019).

There is thus both an internal and an external aspect to the situation. Internally, the infrastructures are not coherent. Moreover, these internal, technical, components cannot be cleanly separated from the messy urban environment (see also Jensen 2017), as illustrated by excess trash constantly entering and clogging drainage tunnels. On top of this, modern buildings and hard (“impervious”) surfaces, like pavements, have significantly reduced Bangkok’s “natural” water-absorbing capacities. At the same time, city drainage is continuously overworked due to the excess release of water from expanding residential areas, especially from condominiums. The consequence of these interlocking elements, according to the disaster expert Thanawat Jarupongsakul is that “Bangkok cannot be drained fast enough even with only 40 millimeter of rainfall” (Ippoodom 2017).

These disruptions and disconnections significantly impede Bangkok’s flooding assemblage from working effectively. In turn, drainage disjunctures generate ruptured material itineraries that, to use the words of Levi-Bryant (2011) manifest as “perturbations” – signs of affect. But how, exactly, do the material itineraries of water and infrastructure coalesce to create a perturbed, irritable urban atmosphere? The next section explores this question.

5 When Bangkok Wakes to Rain

The recent climate-fiction novel Bangkok Wakes to Rain (Sudbanthad 2019) vividly describes how Bangkok dwellers contend with the problems of flooding. The novel depicts temporal and spatial encounters in a tumultuous urban ecology shaped by tropical rain, the rhythms of rivers and canals, and the rising sea. The novel clearly shows the agency of weather and water in shaping Bangkok’s affective, amphibious atmospheres. When Bangkok wakes to rain, feelings and anxieties are aroused. In this section, I offer an ethnographic description of how Bangkok’s disconnected drainage infrastructures, cramp transportation networks and ecologies precipitate affectively charged atmospheres (Schroer and Schmitt 2018).

To set the scene, let me provide a picture and some statistics of the city’s transportation and commuting condition. Bangkok metropolitan area is 1569 square kilometers with a population of more than 5.6 million people. Streets cover 113 square kilometers, which is only 7 per cent of the city space. In 2018, the city had more than 10 million registered vehicles: approximately 5.5 million private cars, 3.6 million motorcycles, 80,000 taxis and 43,000 buses (Traffic and Transportation Department 2019). During traffic congestion, travel by road in inner Bangkok happens at a mere 15 km/hr.

Besides road transportation, the major commuting options are Bangkok’s skytrain (BTS) and underground train (MRT). In 2018, the number of passengers using BTS was 252 million and MRT carried more than 100 million people. However, not everyone can afford this kind of commute. The prices of both BTS and MRT are widely considered quite expensive. Moreover, limited coverage makes the trains inconvenient for many people who live at a distance from rail lines. In 2018, more than 510 million people relied on public buses, motorcycle taxis, and boats (Traffic and Transportation Department 2019).

As these numbers indicate, Bangkok’s traffic system is overloaded even at the best of times. When rainstorms enter the calculation, disrupting already perturbed infrastructure and commuting networks, the mundane experience of traffic congestion turns into a more harrowing experience. The effect is a perturbation not only of transportation networks but also of Bangkok’s urban atmospheres. By tracing a domino effect of perturbation, which begins even prior to the first drop and lasts until the streets are completely flooded, it will become clear why Bangkokians are not very happy at the prospect of waking to rain.

Although they are not happy with it, Bangkokians are quite accustomed to rain. When the rainy season rolls in they know what to expect. Warnings about rain conditions in specific areas, and live updates about traffic conditions and public transportation propagate through social media. Online posts and tweets offer tricks and tips for handling floods.

Cloudbursts tend to form during late afternoon rush hours. Rain clouds gather moisture over the Andaman Sea in the morning and move northeastward in the early afternoon. By the time they reach Bangkok, it is often late in the afternoon, which unfortunately coincides perfectly with the always massive rush hour (Marukatat 2019). Despite advance warnings, street-vendors, office-workers, and students alike cannot avoid getting stuck among huge crowds of people and cars.

That this is expected does not make the situation any less stressful. As rain clouds roll over the city, people know very well that they must hurry to their destinations or risk immobilization for an indefinite period. The first domino falls: Everyone becomes hectic. As slightly panicked people rush onto the streets, there are even more cars than normal, leading to worse than usual traffic jams. Those who rely on public transportation hurry to get on buses, underground, or sky trains, worried that they will end up huddling somewhere on the streets.

The second domino falls: When the rain comes, those who rely on public transport are hit first. Some search for taxis, using apps like Grab, Line Man, or Get as possible escape routes. But as the number of people looking for a taxi service exceeds the number of drivers, algorithms increase the price. According to Grab (2018), this policy, which is known as “surge” price was introduced to quickly attract more drivers, and “make sure you get a ride as fast as possible.” But while some customers do not mind paying extra, others are far from happy. After a cloudburst, one customer tweeted that he had to pay 1300 baht for a 120 baht ride. “This [price] is equal to an airplane ticket,” he wrote, adding the sarcastic hashtag “Bangkok, city of good life” (Pohnongpat (@Mercedesbeersod) 2018).

Surge prices can be avoided by going with a metered taxi. In Bangkok, however, taxis are notorious for rejecting customers as they please, and they are even pickier when it rains. So, the third domino falls. This is shown clearly in a video recorded during a night of heavy rain and flood, which featured people lining up to hail taxis, only to be rejected by multiple drivers one after another. Testifying to the exasperation and frustration of commuters, the video went viral, quickly gaining more than a million views. It was accompanied by thousands of angry comments and descriptions of similar experiences (Coconuts Bangkok 2018).

Many people simply cannot afford taxis, whether by meter or app. Instead, they depend on buses, MRT underground train, and BTS sky train. Some rely on private van services, which are usually as cheap as public transport. But whether one is sitting in a private car or a van, a taxi or a bus, rain will get you stuck in traffic. The fourth domino falls: Traffic slows, as more cars fill the streets, and rain slows down the traffic even more. If you look at a realtime Google map of Bangkok during the rain, you can see the streets becoming red one by one, indicating heavy traffic and congestion practically everywhere.

As buses and vans slow down, passengers have to wait in the rain. This is the fifth domino. Commonly, people crowd at bus stops, seeking shelter to stay dry. There is never sufficient cover for everybody since Bangkok bus stands usually have a very small ceiling and no walls. Even so, large crowds huddle together as the rain beats down on them from all sides. Usually, the footpath by bus stop stands is flooded after the first downpour. The large advertisements at the back of the bus stops offer no solace. They may, rather, add irony to the situation by displaying glamorous city life or, even better, promotion for a new giant drainage tunnel (Figure 1)!

Figure 1 At the BTS Mor Chit bus stop after the downpour, 7 June 2019 (Source: Twitter, https://twitter.com/Addy_ATC/status/1136953418294018050?s=20)

People who use public transportation like BTS or MRT might be able to avoid the traffic jam on the streets. Yet, they cannot fully escape the water either. Sky train stations are lashed with wind and rain since the platforms are open on all sides. A recent article by Thai PBS newspaper discussed how this affects sky train passengers: As a safety precaution, the BTS station had requested passengers not to use the umbrellas while they were on the platform. Passengers loudly protested that the umbrellas were “badly needed” due to the open platforms and leaking roofs. The accompanying photo displayed the wet and slippery station and numerous passengers seeking shelter (Thai PBS 2019).

Indeed, the open platform design is also problematic for pedestrians who have no intention to board the sky train. Office-workers, students and tourists all use the sky walkway, which is far more convenient and less hazardous than walking at street level. The walkway at Siam Square, for example, connects five major department stores and several famous attractions. It is chockful of both locals and tourists. But as it has no draining channel it floods, it leaves sky-walking pedestrians almost as vulnerable to rain and wind as those at street level. Perhaps the most vivid illustration of a flood-perturbed urban assemblage is at Victory Monument, a major connecting hub of buses, vans, taxis, and sky trains. From the BTS sky train station, you can survey a wet platform, dense with people trying to stay dry by huddling together in a small corner with a roof. The station is crowded to capacity. There are simply too many people, so some block others, and others get angry about the inconvenience and indignity of it all. If you look further away toward the walkway, you will notice drenched people wading through puddles of water. The many bus and van stops are crowded with people waiting. As waiting times extend, sometimes to more than an hour, the lines get longer and longer until even pedestrians can’t pass by. Imagine yourself soaking wet, surrounded by hundreds of other equally wet and exhausted people, impatiently waiting for a bus that may never arrive. Unable to avoid yet another muddy splash, you keenly feel the atmosphere tensing. You are part of this affective change. At Victory Monument, it is abundantly clear that irritated urban atmospheres emerge out of disrupted, perturbed and lived (Simone 2004) infrastructural relations.

As torrential rain stuns traffic and major transportation veins, flooding leads to one of the things most despised by Bangkokians: dirtiness. Flood water in Bangkok is dirty because water flows through trash and mud, not to mention clogged sewage drains. Nobody wants to wade through muddy water worrying about ruined clothes and infectious diseases. But many have no choice. Clogged sewage pipes are a long-standing problem in Bangkok. The city is known for inefficient waste management, and there is plenty of evidence such as overfilled dumps and lacking waste bins on the streets, which contribute to trash being littered all over the place. Part of the problem is that sewage and rainwater share the same pipe in drainage systems leading to the canals. Sewage and drainage problems have been discussed for more than 20 years but not much has been accomplished (Techawongtham 2017). According to Atthaseth Petmeesri, advisor to the Bangkok city governor, part of the sewage that clogs up the drainage system is grease from food waste and waste water, which mostly come from street food vendors who pour it directly into the drain (Thai Publica 2019). A senior technician from the Department of Drainage and Sewerage has stated that this problem is worst in areas filled with street-vendors and restaurants such as Yaowarat Road in Chinatown and Victory Monument (Srimote 2017).

Photos posted on Thailandfootpath, a Facebook page promoting pedestrian rights to the city, show sewers on the side of footpaths littered with trash and what looks like waste water. Irritated captions describe how dirty the walkway is due to food vendors, and how flooding makes it even worse. Frustrated commenters add that trash and littering makes Bangkok’s flooding problem even worse. Some call Bangkok’s streets a “slum” (Thailandfootpath 2018). Navigating streets in flooded areas, cars and motorcycles create waves of flood water. Unfortunate motorcyclists are splashed, as are pedestrians and vendors. Pictures posted in Matichon from the large flood event in May 2019 showed street-vendors standing knee-deep in murky water, a gas station employee trying in vain to pour flood water into the drain, and flooded footpaths splashed by rows of cars passing by (Matichon 2019).

Cloudbursts initiate a series of perturbations of Bangkok’s material itineraries, leaving people stranded in unpleasant situations, stuck in traffic, waiting for hours, or walking in black water. The rain forces throngs of people to involuntarily share inhospitable surroundings. As each quietly ponders “Why is this happening to me – again?” an increasingly irritated urban atmosphere emerges. However, even if the irritation is palpable at street level, it is rarely loudly expressed. Instead, as I now discuss, the affective surplus is displaced and discharged along social media itineraries.

6 Online Precipitations

Data collected for the Digital 2018 global overview (Kemp 2018) shows that people in Thailand on average spend 9 hours 38 minutes online every day. This is the highest amount in the world (followed by the Philippines, Brazil, and Indonesia). Thailand is also in the top ten in terms of penetration as measured by active accounts on social media (Kansirisin 2019). When it comes to active Facebook accounts, Bangkok is ranked first in the world, clicking in at 22 million according to the We Are Social digital report (Leesa-nguansuk 2018).

People mostly access the internet by smartphone. A report by the National Statistical Office in 2018 showed that more than 90 percent of internet users in Thailand used their smartphones to get online (National Statistical Office 2018). Given the heavy adoption of internet and social media combined with easy accessibility, it is hardly surprising that Bangkok’s inhabitants use online worlds to express their emotions and opinions whether joyful, happy, annoyed, or angry. It is also not very surprising, therefore, that Bangkokians are quick to use social media and online platforms as a way to cope with the irritations of flooding.

I have described urban irritation as an assemblage effect, a consequence of weather, climate, topology, and transport and sewage infrastructures forming disjunctive, perturbed relations. Whether dealing with Bangkok’s horrific traffic jams, unreliable public transportation, or just the muggy climate and generally chaotic atmosphere, as emerging bodies and things are brought “into conjunction in a relationship of adjacency” (Thrift 2014: 3), we are confronted with forms of distributed, sentient urbanity. But if transport and sewage stop working well when Bangkok wakes to rain, there is one infrastructure that continues to operate flawlessly: telecommunications. This means that social media offer by far the most effective and affective way of responding to the situation.

Online connectivity helps spread news and information, and it enables people to exhibit empathy with others who are angry or frustrated. When posting on social media, people open up to connection and sharing affects with others in similar situations. As messages and complaints are uploaded to the virtual cloud in large numbers, information and affects both condense and precipitate. Affects amplify as they travel through online networks. Furiously captioned images of streets and footpaths submerged under water rapidly reach hundreds of thousands of people.

It is very common to observe people having what looks like deeply affective relations with their phones while stuck during a flood. While bodies are immobilized, mobile networks facilitate the mobility of affect by channeling the charged atmosphere. Around major transportation connecting spots such as Victory Monument or Chatuchak Park, one sees row after row of impatient people scrolling through their phones to escape boredom or vent frustration. On packed stations and slippery platforms, while waiting for trains without an updated schedule, people pass their time by surfing the internet, posting about their situation, or sharing information. For those driving, the most important is realtime traffic updates covering congestion and flooded streets. During the flood on 7 June 2019, people used online platforms from Facebook and Twitter to the JS100 radio to post captioned pictures with location and water levels (Prachachat 2019).

Apart from information sharing, a torrent of online posts feature expressions of outrage. What on earth, people ask, is the city governor doing? How can the administration let Bangkok suffer such a severe flood? One recent social media explosion prompted the city governor, Aswin Kwanmuang, to apologize to Bangkok residents through his own Facebook page (National News Bureau of Thailand 2019).

There were several more flooding events in 2019 alone. Each time they prompted heated social media responses. After torrential rain on 22 July 2019, a Facebook video showing the BTS Bangna skywalk flooded with water gained over 1.8 million views and 14,000 shares. Comments ranged from the sarcastic “Bangkok, city of good life” and “Thailand only” to more heated ones like “Is there anything that isn’t in crisis in Thailand?” and “Do I really have to live like this?” (Phongsay 2019). The flood on 3 November 2019, also sparked numerous outraged tweets. One image of a flooded footpath and the bare feet of the tweeter who walked in murky rainwater was retweeted 50,000 times with angry captions. (Muad (@oopspolice) 2019). A few years back, during the large flood of 2016, the Twitter hashtag Na thwm น้ำท่วม (flood) became popular as innumerable tweets described Bangkokians’ frustrations and hardships.

The pattern is recurrent. Each time there is heavy rain, the city floods. Each time it floods, online responses go through the roof. And almost every time, the city governor has made an apology. The current city governor has apologized repeatedly not only for the flood on 7 June 2019, but also for previous ones in May and October 2017, about which he posted: “don’t blame anyone, just blame me” (Daily News 2017). The previous governor, Sukhumbhand Paribatra apologized for the city flood in 2016, and promised at the time that work was done to improve the drainage system (Thai PBS 2016). The angry social media responses and humble apologies form something like an epi-cycle that complements the cycle of the city flood itself in another medium.

It is interesting to observe just how the previous city governor, Sukhumbhand Paribatra, tried to soothe angered residents and calm the online outrage. Illan rua Wall (2019: 143) has described “atmotechnics” in the realm of police work as material interventions “specifically designed to affect the crowded atmosphere of protest or other disorder.” In contrast, Sukhumbhand’s approach to “atmotechnics” was to rhetorically douse the heated social media atmosphere. Thus, he asked city dwellers and the media to not say that Bangkok was flooded but rather describe it as “water waiting to be drained” (Raksaseri 2016). This strategy, alas, was not successful, as the phrase was widely mocked and made into popular joke. As the Twitter user @bkksnow twitted “From now on, Thais can be more optimistic. Overwhelming debt = money waiting to be cleared; overdue assignments = work waiting to be done” (AsiaOne 2016).

The ebb and flow of urban precipitation – of climatic and political atmospheres – thus filters and alters through multiple assemblages. Starting from street level cloudbursts, they end up as rounds of social media outbursts and apologies. At one level, Bangkok sentient urbanism is provoked by heterogeneous assemblages of nature, infrastructure and urban development causing disruption and dissatisfaction over city management. At another level, material perturbations generate not only atmospheres but also emergent matters of urban concern that tie together a changing climatic situation, crippled drainage infrastructures, and transportation in a cloud of political contention.

7 Bangkok Sentient Urbanism

Bangkok’s recurrent cloudbursts create scenes, where the entanglements, and mutual perturbations of ecologies, climate, weather, urban landscapes, and disjunctive infrastructures are clearly visible. Deploying ethnography as a tool of material diagnostics, I have characterized a city deluge in terms of ontological precipitation. Rather than an inert, spatial container, the city appears as an entity with its own assemblage momentum, generated from innumerable material itineraries. Rather than an individual or socio-psychological phenomenon, irritated atmospheres appears as an effect of assemblage, and the city itself as a distributed, sentience.

Thus, I have depicted Bangkok’s sentient urbanism from the double vantage point of moments and movements of its practical ontology. The dynamism of urban assemblages is vividly visible during cloudbursts, where numerous material itineraries come together, creating a trajectory from climatic precipitation over perturbed atmospheres and onto political precipitation. The conjunctive and disjunctive elements of Bangkok’s urban assemblages – at once socionatural, sociotechnical, and atmospheric – shape daily events at street level, generate moments of frustration and anger, and catalyze impromptu political movements across social media, as people collectively give voice to matters of concern.

Overall, this paper has attempted to rethink Bangkok’s transformations through the idea of sentient urbanism. The city, I have shown, is more than a structured pattern of relations between people in a clearly defined physical space. Rather, urbanity is a dynamic process, in which heterogeneous socionatural entities – transport infrastructures, digital apps, rainstorms, and people – converge and collide. Out of these processes emerge forms of urban sentience, like the irritated atmospheres that have held my attention here. The itineraries (movements) and diagnostics (moments) of assemblage catalyze the city’s missing masses and make urban matters of concern visible.

The analysis has shown that events like Bangkok city’s deluges can be conceptualized in terms of both material and non-material precipitations. To think precipitately means nothing less than orienting to the movement and moments that surface the missing masses of urban assemblages and allow us to articulate the roles they play in the practical ontology of the city.

In the case of Bangkok cloudbursts, precipitations from multiple, interacting assemblages stimulate city dwellers to continuously articulate concerns about urban politics and forms of governance. We might speak of an atmospheric politics in a double sense: emerging from weather patterns it both transforms urban ambience at the street-level and shapes the political mood of the city.

Acknowledgements

The research is supported by the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University and Chulalongkorn University Center of Excellence on Resource Politics for Social Development. I also thank Casper Bruun Jensen and the anonymous reviewers for their critical comments and insightful suggestions.

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Jakkrit Sangkhamanee

Jakkrit Sangkhamanee is an associate professor in anthropology at the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. His recent researches deal with the issues in science, technology and society (STS) especially the studies of water engineering and infrastructures in state-building, hydro-bureaucracy and everyday practices in Thailand.