Social Fabric and Spatial Permutation — Ban Krua, Bangkok

Abstract

The community of Ban Krua has come to global attention through their successful resistance against a government proposal for a motorway that would have cut through their community on the banks of the Saen Saeb canal near Bangkok’s National Stadium. While academic studies attribute their erstwhile success either to the tactics of non-violent resistance sustained by community cohesion or to the communities’ longstanding ties with senior officials in the Thai military and bureaucracy, we were interested in the dynamic interrelationships between the social fabric that sustains this remarkable level of cohesion, and the spaces produced and inhabited by the community. Buildings are sometimes self-constructed and usually transformed over time; at the urban scale of the community the network of narrow alleyways is a direct extension of domestic space, subject to continuous permutation through dynamic processes of local connections triggering disconnection at urban level and vice versa.

Keywords

Social and Spatial Structure / Urban and Local Connectivity / Informal Urbanism / Shared Space / Marginal Communities

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press