Architecture, Building and Planning - Research Publications
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ItemResearching place history, memory and contested identities in urban design(Taylor & Francis, 2023-08-24)Places engender (carry, protect) memory; memory, in turn, determines identity, variously of the individual, the community and the nation. In the broadest sense, the task of urban design research is to identify and understand the carriers of memory in places. However, as memory is socially produced, urban design is routinely mobilised to manipulate memory, most notably in the (re)construction of community or national identity, especially in the interests of the politically hegemonic. In that sense, the task of urban design research is to ask the question: How is this place being manipulated to serve the production of certain memories (and, presumably, the suppression of others), and what competing interests and underlying values are involved? The task might be seen, methodologically, as located in the interstices of ethnography and architectural critique; in terms of methods, however, it will most readily be approached via a critical reading of political history.
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ItemInformality as process and the social construction of slums: Southeast Asian cases(Oxford University Press, 2023)Crucially in Southeast Asian cities, the production of alleged “slums” relates to rural-to-urban migration (rural decline, the allure of the cities), also to political and economic ight (Burmese and Khmer in Bangkok, for instance), less so to urban displacement (the de-industrialization prevalent in the West). However, in more recent times these processes intersect with counter-forces of middleclass gentrication, dreams of urban beautication, and fears of rural-to-urban invasion. There are simultaneously waves of the informal and the formal seen as process in urban space, accounting for entirely new imaginings of slums. The chapter uses a series of case studies to illustrate these processes: in Thailand, Sukhumvit and the Khlong Toei Slums of Bangkok, the cannal communities in Bangkok’s northern Bangkhen district, and conicts of the Chao Phraya riverbanks; in Indonesia, the kampung of Jakarta and the Kampung Improvement Programs of Surabaya; and in Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur’s Kampung Baru.
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ItemBANGKOK: Creative disorder and the military imagination(Routledge, 2023-01-01)This chapter addresses the disconnect between urban life and the real urban situation, and an ideologically informed imagining of what these things should be in Bangkok. To the conservative, elitist imagination, the city's urban life—its tourist appeal—presents as disorder, showing Thailand ‘in a bad light’, provoking the desire for a regime of discipline and ‘good order’, duly prosecuted by a military junta following a 2014 coup. Bangkok's streets have also long presented a different sort of chaos, in polluting gridlock where any resolution has been plagued by rivalries between competing politico-bureaucratic fractions, also duly confronted by the post-2014 junta. The streets and public places of Bangkok have long presented yet a further level of disorder that challenges the military mind, as these are the stage on which the theatre of national life plays out, in rallies, protests, uprisings, coups, and massacres. At a tactical level this has commonly manifested as royalist-elitist-military versus students. Thailand is almost completely dependent on imported fossil fuels, while its limited hydro is also mostly imported; hence addressing the city's inefficiencies through a metro and other electrification is fraught. Finally, the city is flood prone, facing existential catastrophe from global warming. So, is Bangkok sustainable?.