Urbanism – Bangkok as a Generic Society Essay

Introduction

Bangkok’s emerging spatial structure appears to be remarkably in line with recent urban theory on the post-modern city. According to such well-quoted authors as Davis, Sorkin, Sennett, Castells, Graham & Marvin and Zukin in this city the rich have separated themselves spatially from the poor, they abandoned public space and retreat in the pseudo-public spaces of shopping malls, golf clubs and gated communities. According to this argument, the adjustment of city space reflects a growing economic and social gap between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. Invariably, this observation is linked to fear for the disappearance of the public spaces of old, and with them, the changes for different social groups to meet. Historically, this argument is supported with reference to the emergence of modern society in the Medieval European cities (Sennett 1974). It is stressed that the necessary precondition for this emergence was especially those public places (the market square, the park, town hall) that are now disappearing.

As Amin & Thrift (2002: 32) show, a good many stories on modern urban life, and especially the most popular stories of writers like George Simmel and Walter Benjamin, tell a story of an authentic city, held together by face-to-face interaction whose coherence is now gone. In these stories, community and solidarity are depicted as a result of propinquity. In political theory, authors like Arendt (1958), Habermas (1989) and Sennet (1974) stress that the existence of a public sphere is a necessary precondition for democracy. In turn, the emergence of such a public sphere is easily linked to the sharing of physical places (the park, the coffee house, the conference room) where political ideas can be expressed and discussed.

Now, starting from this analysis, current spatial restructuring represents a grave danger. Depending on which author to quote, the current city can be described as a dual city, a partitioned city, a fragmented city or even a carceral archipelago (Sassen, Marcuse, Soja).

Regardless of the vocabulary applied, the bottom line appears to be that our cities are being pulled apart, that the different social groups that once mixed so freely are now separated from each other. According to the authors mentioned, this separation is caused by the changing organization of modes of economic production. With the quick transition from an industrial to an informational economy, both space and labour have been given different meanings. Space transits from place-based to flow-based (Castells 1996). The space of flows, in which the rich ‘haves’ live, demands different inputs of labour than the spaces of place, where the rest of unlucky society is left behind. Knowledge has grown in importance leading to ever-greater gaps in income between those who have the attributes to make it in this new economy and those who don’t (Sassen, Soja). With this growing income, the gap comes a wish to protect the privileges that have been gained; a wish to create spaces in which the privileges will not be challenged or spoiled by the less fortunate.

According to Castells, the global elite lives in the space of flows and feels more connected to their fellows in other world cities than to the men and women driving their taxi’s or filling their shopping bags. They make up a society separated from the rest by the means of money, culture and more and more by spatial barriers; barriers constructed around places that were once public assert the position of the elite as being in the same city but not sharing the same city. To minimize contact with the rest of society they only visit places exclusively designed for their specific purposes. They work in exclusive office towers, eat in fancy restaurants, spend their limited leisure time at their private country club, shop at exclusive shopping malls and live in their gated communities and guarded condominiums. Within the city, when in transit, they retreat into their private vehicle or when the conditions demand it switch to rapid mass transit. Public transport was once a place where different social classes could meet but in the post-modern city, public transport is hardly ever truly public. Visible and invisible barriers are present that keep the different social classes from mixing. Rapid mass transit services are supplemented by systems of sky-bridges which are created to provide direct excess from one privatized place to the next, surpassing the streets down there, and preventing the need to mix with the rest of the population. In this way rich public life is exchanged for a weak surrogate, creating what Trevor Boddy (1992: 125) termed the analogous city.

Various authors consider this separation the result of a deliberate attempt to re-establish the economic dominance of the elite. By physically separating themselves, their privileges don’t have to be shared and the status quo can be maintained. Separation is not only the outcome of dominance but it is seen as a prerequisite for maintaining this dominance (Castells 1996: 415). Because the elite requires spatial separation to maintain its privileged position, it creates gated communities and private shopping complexes in which to retreat. And by separating itself it automatically shuts out the rest of society, thereby separating them as well. So in the words of Ronald van Kempen (2002: 50): ‘Cities are not naturally divided: they are actively partitioned. There are those that do the partitioning and those that are subject to it’. Others have described this same phenomenon in different terms but the overall message remains the same: although in the post-modern city all groups are separated from each other, the initiative for this separation is taken by de urban elites that choose to separate themselves, thereby forcing their preferences upon all others.

Now, this urban ‘splintering’ is viewed with great care. Since splintering hinders face-to-face interactions between various groups – mind you, the sort of interaction that supposedly was constitutive of the emergence of a society in the first place – it is easily perceived as a threat to community and democracy. This analysis is easily linked to the idea of a radical split between the rich ‘haves’ that go and live in preferred and walled enclaves, linked by privatized infrastructure, and the poor ‘have-nots’ that stay behind in an increasingly less attractive public domain. In this respect, Davis (1992) chooses the depiction of future space in the movie Blade Runner as a metaphor for things to come in the current real world. In this movie, the rich and happy live above the ground, while the unlucky flock the sewers. Blade Runner depicts a world in which inequality is reproduced in the breaking up of space. Therefore, spatial segmentation gets a leading role as a cause of social bads: it spells loss of community, loss of public sphere, and in the end loss of solidarity and even democracy. And this critical overtone in the analysis of spatial developments in urban fields seems to be widely supported. Crawford (1999) therefore signals that the analyses of developments in space are framed by a ‘narrative of loss’. This narrative “contrasts the current debasement of public space with golden ages and golden sites – the Greek agora, the coffeehouses of early modern Paris and London, the Italian piazza, the town square. The narrative nostalgically posits these as once-vital sites of democracy where, allegedly, cohesive public discourse thrived, and inevitably culminates in the contemporary crisis of public life and public space, a crisis that puts at risk the very ideas and institutions of democracy itself” (ibid: 23). The spatial development of Bangkok seems to be totally in line with this storyline in urban theory.

The Respace Project

At first glance, the framing of spatial changes through the narrative of loss might fit in with intuition. However, on closer look, it contains serious flaws (Wissink 2003: 7-9). First of all, it suggests the disintegration of a previous existing unity. However formerly space very definitely was segmented as well (by the borders of the nation-state of cities and of neighbourhoods, and the question arises what integrated those spatially segmented societies socially. Second, the narrative of loss wrongly links former ‘integrated’ space with inclusive deliberation. This doesn’t seem to be true because exclusion has always been part of the urban world, and the question arises of how old forms of power and inequality related to space. Third, the narrative of loss wrongly links spatial changes directly to community and democracy. It has a strong orientation on propinquity – face-to-face contacts in physical places – as the prerequisite for specific characteristics of social action like solidarity. However, as is shown often before, no direct and one-directional link between spatial form and the characteristics of social practices can be assumed. Therefore the question arises of how people behave within specific spatial forms in places and what – if any – are the results for social interaction. Fourth, the narrative of loss seems to be based on a general linear view of history that doesn’t take local outcomes of global phenomena into account. In this unilinear view, differences between city regions are differences in time, and eventually, every city will acquire the same characteristics. However, from an institutional point of view, it seems clear that political regimes and the characteristics of the organization of building have a profound influence on the local outcomes of general global influences. An analysis of these influences calls for a detailed comparative local analysis. And fifthly, the narrative of loss also overlooks variations in the local valuation and in the political attitudes towards spatial segmentation.

So, as Crawford (ibid: 23) observes, the “perception of loss originates in extremely narrow and normative definitions of both ‘public’ and ‘space’ that derive from insistence on unity, desire for fixed categories of time and space, and rigidly conceived notions of private and public. Seeking a single, all-inclusive public space, these critics mistake monumental public spaces for the totality of public space”. Now, understanding the specifics of the development of spatial forms, of the valuation of these forms, of possible consequences for social life, and of the in specific places asks for detailed empirical research. So we need to complement the literature on the general similarities of trends in global spatial restructuring with a detailed analysis of the contingent ways in which specific sets of actors in specific contexts try to restructure the physical and socio-technical fabric of cities in specific places around the world, of the ways they use the resulting places and of the valuation of these places. They can only be answered with detailed comparative empirical research into the politics of spatial segmentation. Interestingly, in their seminal work on new spatial dynamics, Graham & Marvin (2001: 417) point to such a need as the main challenge to urban research: “This book suggests, then, that a central challenge for urban research is to undertake detailed and comparative empirical investigations into the ways in which physical and socio-technical shifts towards splintering urbanism, and unbundled networked infrastructures, are being politically and socially constructed in profoundly different political, cultural, economic and historical contexts. Such research needs to encompass developed nations, newly industrializing nations, developing cities, and post-communist metropolitan areas embedded within different state, political, cultural and urban traditions”.

This analysis has resulted in the project on The politics of spatial segmentation in the Asian metropolis. This project sets out to empirically study the consequences of changing spatial forms for the public sphere. It focuses on the Asian metropolis because in some of these the current spatial developments mentioned in urban theory play out very drastically here. At the same time, the variation in spatial forms and social life seem to vary markedly. With this in mind, Bangkok, Tokyo, Shanghai and Mumbai have been selected as research locations. From the start, it has been clear, that the research in these cities consists of various questions that need to be individually answered but are interlinked at the same time. How does spatial form develop and what factors do cause this form to emerge? How are social groups distributed within this spatial form and again what causes this distribution? What do the social networks of these social groups that are distributed within this spatial form look like? How can the public sphere in the city under study be characterized? How are spatial form and the public sphere valued? And what are the causal relationships between these factors (spatial form, group distribution, social networks, the public sphere, valuation)? So in all, this makes up for quite a complex research that consists of various steps that need to be taken at each of the places under study.

Since the start of the Respace project at the end of 2003, Bangkok has so far been the main centre of research (in 2006 our attention will shift to include Tokyo). The initial project (conducted in 2004) showed Bangkok to be the splintered metropolis that was described above. It also showed that income differences seemed to be paramount in social stratification and spatial distribution. Then, the next step was to research the social networks of groups within this splintered spatial form. For that reason, during the spring of 2005, in cooperation with Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, a research group consisting of eight Dutch and ten Thai junior and senior researchers was established. At first, a general division was made into four types of neighbourhoods: informal settlements, mubahnchatsan for the low- to a middle class, mubahnchatsan for the middle- to the high middle class and condominium complexes. In determining specific research areas, excess and contacts were guiding. In total ten neighbourhoods were selected: two informal settlements, one mubahnchatsan type low-income government housing project, two middle middle-class mubahnchatsans, three high middle-class mubahnchatsans, and two condominium complexes (one low and one high middle-class).

Then four mixed teams of Dutch and Thai researchers were created to visit the neighbourhood types under study. They had to establish the characteristics of the neighbourhoods and their inhabitants under study; study social networks; and study perceptions of self and others. For this, we partly relied on diverse research methods. First, we went into the neighbourhoods for observation of houses, roads, facilities, people, sounds, smells and the like at different moments during the week. Through interviews with the developers, the National Housing Authority and property managers, we gained extra information on the neighbourhoods like prices and sizes of plots and houses. Meanwhile, a questionnaire (in English and Thai) was put together that was used in every research neighbourhood. The questionnaire included questions on general characteristics of the residents of neighbourhoods (income, age and household composition), on the reasons people lived in their neighbourhood, on the amount and type of contacts with neighbours, on the contact with people with other social characteristics (income e.g.), on the perceptions of the different types of neighbourhoods in Bangkok and on solidarity (proud of their neighbourhood e.g.). One part of the questionnaire included marking the locations where the respondents shop, eat and work on a map, providing an impression of the scale and scope of the networks people move around in. And finally, with the help of the Thai researchers, in each neighbourhood we interviewed a few residents to gather specific information on residents to supplement the general information gathered by the questionnaire. What follows is a presentation of a first analysis of the resulting research material.

Research Neighbourhoods

In Bangkok, informal settlements vary tremendously in size and standard, ranging from the enormous Klong Toey neighbourhood to little pockets along railway lines and underneath elevated highways. These areas all have in common that densities are enormous; at the same time, basic facilities cannot be taken for granted. The informal settlements we chose to research are both in Klong Toey. One is the 70 Rai community, the area where Kuhn Vichai lives, and the only part of the Klong Toey settlement that actually has formal contracts now; the other Lock 1,2,3 which is totally informal. The Klong Toey settlement is located south of Sukumvit on land that was formerly owned by the port authority. It is Bangkok’s largest and most famous informal settlement and exists since the 1930s. Most households are at the economic bottom of the urban hierarchy. The quality of housing in Klong Toey varies considerably from small wooden shacks to relatively well-maintained stone row houses. Facilities are very basic and many households suffer from overcrowding. Our research in two parts of Klong Toey showed that the average households consist of 5,8 persons with extremes going as high as twenty people in houses that are no bigger than 30 square meters. This means that a lot of activities spill over onto the street causing a very lively atmosphere. Klong Toey’s continued growth is mainly the result of natural growth. Most of the respondents in our research indicated that there were born in Klong Toey and didn’t expect to be leaving the neighbourhood anytime soon. The reasons indicated for living in Klong Toey are dominated by the wish to live close to work (58%), and the wish to live in close proximity to family members (55%), with all other factors playing only a minor part (<10%).

Condominiums and apartments can be found in all parts of Bangkok. However, there is a significant difference between those found in the central areas of the city and those elsewhere. In close proximity to the city’s sky train system condominiums offer tremendous luxury at premium prices and most of the residents are well off businessmen and expatriates. Away from the nodes the glitter and glamour are exchanged by bare concrete and residents are more likely to be factory workers and taxi drivers. So the condominium market is subdivided on the basis of price levels and this division is closely related to location (expensive spells central and vice versa). In our research, we studied two condominiums complexes: Sunisa apartments, located in the northern parts of Bangkok near Don Muang international airport and Baan Chan located centrally in one of the soi of Sukumvit road. The difference in price level is considerable with unit prices at Sunisa ranging between 1100 and 2500 Baht per month while prices at Baan Chan are in the 4,0-8,5 M Baht range. These price differences are also reflected in the available living space with an average unit size of 20 square meters at Sunisa against 70-150 square meters at Baan Chang. However, regardless of these prices, in Bangkok condominiums are generally regarded as a temporary place of residence that mainly fulfils the need to live in close proximity to work. They are not considered good places to raise a family. This view is supported by the relatively small household size (4,0 persons at Sunisa and 2,9 persons at Baan Chan). And living in close proximity to work was by far the strongest motivation for families to live here (60-55%). Furthermore, between 40-55% of the residents didn’t expect to still be living at their current residence in three years time (in comparison, in all the other researched neighbourhoods more than 95% of the residents expected to be living in their current house in three years time). There are some differences though between the two types of condos: where safety plays only a small part in the choice of residence at Sunisa (28%) it is a major factor for the residents of Baan Chan (56%). The reverse goes for affordability with 51% of the residents of Sunisa indicating it as an important motivation and only 18% at Baan Chang.

As was explained above, the mubahnchatsan is the Thai equivalent of the American gated community. They are by far the most popular housing type with about 65% of all newly registered houses (in 2004) being located within a mubahnchatsan. It is estimated that close to 25% of all houses in Greater Bangkok are located within mubahnchatsans (Wissink, 2004). The mubah-chats is a single developer housing project, aimed at a small economic group and strongly separated from its surroundings by walls and gates. Unlike the gated community, in Bangkok the mubahnchatsan isn’t just for the privileged classes; almost every social class has its own type of mubahnchatsan and the government currently even supplies mubahnchatsan houses for the very poor. So the subdivision in price levels is also very prominent in the mubahnchatsan market. In our research, we studied five mubahnchatsans ranging in price from 0.9-1,7 M Baht for the cheapest to 10-25 M Baht for the most expensive. The more expensive mubahnchatsans (including Baan Lad Prao where Kuhn Chat lives) contain bigger houses (up to 480 m² instead of 84m²), and more luxurious facilities. And most of all they are located closer to important nodes. For the purpose of this article, the five neighbourhoods are divided into two groups with the two mubahnchatsans for the middle-middle-class in one group (including Wararak where Kuhn Rungrote lives) and those for the higher-middle class in the other. The two mubahnchatsans in the first group are both located in the far northern part of Bangkok at more or less the edge of the city while the other three projects are located closer to important nodes: far more centrally or in close proximity to one of the major tollway entrances.

What unites these projects is that they all have a similar physical structure; all are demarked by 15 feet walls and guarded around the clock by onsite security guards. The houses are single detached and large to very large and facilities consist of a well-kept park. The expensive projects contain a swimming pool. While the projects look very similar there are differences as well. For instance, the more expensive projects have slightly older residents (37,4 against 34,4) and slightly bigger households (5,0 against 3,3) than the less expensive projects, indicating their different stage in the household cycle. But there are also some bigger differences between the different projects. While security is the dominant motivation in the expensive mubahnchatsans (57%) it is of much less importance in the less expensive projects (30%). The same goes for proximity to work (46% against 26%). The reverse applies to the role of affordability. 78% Of the residents of the first group of mubahnchatsans see affordability as a major motivation for their choice, while less than half (37%) of their counterparts in the second group share this motivation. But one of the most striking differences in the presences of live-in maids which were present in 39% of the more expensive projects against only 2% in the less expensive projects.

Mubahnchatsans are not only developed by project developers and aimed at the middle to the high middle class. Government is also active in the same field but their target group consist of people with low incomes. Klong Saam is such a ‘Baan Uhr Athorn’ project, located at the far northern edge of the city of Bangkok the project consists of 477 tiny two-storey single-detached houses. Although the prices (400.000 Baht) of the houses are considerably lower than in the privately developed mubah-chat sans the structure is very similar. The project is located in the same area as the two aforementioned cheaper projects (north of the city) and although the average house is smaller the facilities and look of the project is very similar. The average household size is at 3,7, which is comparable to the middle middle-class mubahnchatsans. And also the motivation for their residential decision is very similar to that of the residents of the cheaper privately developed mubahnchatsans with affordability the main factor of choice.

In conclusion, the Bangkok housing market is split up into various units that consist of uniform units, income being the main characteristic. The expensive houses are located in proximity to infrastructure nodes. Cheap housing has to be found at the borders of Bangkok’s extensive urban field. In their choice of residence, all social groups seem to make a trade-off between affordability and proximity to work (measured in time and price). For the lowest income groups, this results in houses in a central slum that is close to the workplace or in a remote government housing project. For the middle classes, the choice is between a centrally located condominium and a suburban mubahnchatsan. Different income groups hardly seem to be mixed so Bangkok’s spatially splintered structure goes hand in hand with the distribution of income groups over spatial units. At the same time, in the uniform neighbourhoods of cheap and expensive housing, types can be located directly next to each other, or next to almost any other activity for that matter. As a result, Bangkok’s housing market can be perceived as very segregated or very mixed, depending on the scale of analysis used.

Conclusion

To conclude, the research showed that in housing Bangkok’s spatial development resulted in a variation of neighbourhood types, most of them bordered by walls and gates. Within these neighbourhoods, units are remarkably similar, income and housing prices being the determining factor.

Now, according to what has been called a ‘narrative of loss’ concerning the spatial restructuring of the cities of our time, this splintered spatial structure is perceived to result in a lack of social integration. Our empirical research presented in this paper especially focuses on that specific part of the argumentative chain linking spatial form to the public sphere. This research shows that indeed there are remarkable differences between the social lives of the inhabitants of various neighbourhood types. In general, it seems, that the lower the income, the smaller the daily urban networks, but also the more integrated. In informal settlements, social life is rich and thriving; inexpensive mubahnchatsan seems to hardly exist. However, at the same time, it was concluded on the basis of the unanimous evaluation of all social groups, that people of the various neighbourhoods do meet each other. But at the same time, it turned out that the perception of inhabitants of informal settlements, and of these settlements themselves in particular didn’t conform to the lived experience of informal settlement inhabitants themselves. In modern-day marketing terms: the informal settlement of Bangkok and its inhabitant have an image problem. Now, this state of affairs leads to some very interesting conclusions. For instance, it shows that spatial form itself doesn’t prevent people from meeting each other. Spatial form doesn’t have a determining influence on social networks that can always still link. But at the same time, it indicates that meeting itself is not enough for cross-group understanding. In Bangkok, groups do meet, but perception – especially of and on the inhabitants of informal settlements – don’t seem to fit. This is all the more remarkable because in general, people can go into slum areas, but maybe nobody does.

References

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