Bangkok's Two Centers: Status, Space, and Consumption in a Millennial Southeast Asian City

Abstract

Despite Bangkok's current incarnation as a globalized city of shopping malls and skyscrapers, indigenous concepts of power and space emphasizing center and hierarchy continue to pervade status differentiation in everyday social life. This is evident in tensions in the spatial‐symbolic relations between Bangkok's politico‐religious “old city” in Rattanakosin and the newer downtown consumption hub which emerged around the locales of Siam and Ratchaprasong, and highlights how urban and social transformations engendered by neoliberal market forces and embodied in downtown Bangkok's modern, consumerist milieu have mapped onto and exacerbated cultural logics of hierarchy drawn from much older notions of urban power and privilege in Southeast Asia. This produced modes of inscribing socio‐economic inequality into space and a striking culture of status display uniquely shaped by the intersection of modern capitalism and Bangkok's distinctive culture and history of indigenous urbanism and suggests that understandings of space, power, and consumption in today's cities may benefit from a less Western‐centric and more regionally sensitive conceptual framework.

Circuits of power: Environmental injustice from Bangkok's shopping malls to Laos’ hydropower dams

“…Malls become part of one's life from a young age onward: Thai middle‐class youth subculture almost exclusively revolves around them and other commercial spaces (Arvidsson and Niessen, ). For the adults, malls are ‘one‐stop complexes,’ where people meet, work, run errands, or spend leisure time … and indulge their consumer urges (Vorng, : 80). As one female office worker said: ‘Before I was so busy, I went shopping … every day.…”

“…As one female office worker said: ‘Before I was so busy, I went shopping … every day. So on the weekdays, I would go with my colleagues … On the days when I'm not going with them I'm busy meeting other friends in another shopping mall’ (quoted from Vorng, : 76–77). Shopping malls have become entrenched in the everyday life of the middle class who orient their life routines towards the rhythm, material offerings and physical environment of the malls.…”

“…Due to limited public external spaces, widespread air pollution and a lack of scenic environments, shopping malls have become, as Hewison () wittily declared, the new public parks of Bangkok. In this sense, the malls are the ‘foci of modern life in Bangkok’ (Vorng, : 80) and an expression of Thai's hyper‐modernity (Wilson, ). Furthermore, shopping malls are part of a vicious environmental cycle.…”

Also the Urban Poor Live in Gated Communities: A Bangkok Case Study

“…With a density of 3631 denizens per square kilometer, the Bangkok Metropolitan Area is home to 5.5 million people (Bangkok Metropolitan Administration BMA). It is a metropolis characterized by spatial chaos: Hundreds of "soi", smelly canals, traffic jams, busy streets, state-of-the-art shopping malls, tall office buildings, slums, condominiums, and highways (Vorng 2011). This chaos is a result of "unplanning".…”

Condominium development and gentrification in Bangkok, Thailand: a study of housing pathways

“…There is a history in Thailand of scholars drawing on Western interpretations of class to understand social differentiation and stratification (Evers and Korff, 2000;Juree, 1979;Ungpakorn, 1999), yet these have tended to seek to find a middle path that takes account of the importance of status, an aspect viewed as central to an understanding of the way that Thai society is structured and drives behaviour (Askew, 2002;Basham, 1989;De Wandeler, 2002;Juree, 1979;Klausner, 1993;Mulder, 2000;Vorng, 2011aVorng, , 2011b. The importance of status in relation to the stratification of Thai society can be traced back to the status hierarchies which dominated much of Asia up to and through most of the twentieth century (Pinches, 1999).…”