BMA’s Mahakan mess
It is with deep disappointment that we have read Peerawat Jariyasombat’s strangely ill-informed article, “A lesson in development” ( BP, Jan 16, 2017). In a move that seems calculated to pander to the greed of developers rather than nurture the human resources represented by local populations, Khun Peerawat hails the efforts of Korean authorities to replace an existing population with an artist colony, but says nothing about the fate of the original residents.
What he so generously praises is a phenomenon social scientists the world over have denounced as “gentrification” — the expropriation, usually achieved through a calculated inflation of the financial value of “heritage” of the neighbourhoods inhabited and loved by generations of the urban poor. He then writes about Bangkok’s Mahakan community as though the community rather than the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration were to blame for the quarter-century of impasse. In so doing, he ignores what really happened and contradicts the strong, consistent, and ethical stand taken by the
Bangkok Post, in its editorial and reports by his colleagues for more than a decade and especially over the past year, in favour of the community’s long-standing efforts to negotiate a settlement.
The BMA refused to heed the opinions of many international and Thai experts, including officials of the Fine Arts Department. A cooperative agreement, which did gain the support of one governor (Apirak Kosayodhin) but was deliberately undone by myopically legalistic BMA bureaucrats, would have recognised the BMA’s ownership of the land but awarded the residents the stewardship of the historic site — a stewardship of which they have shown themselves eminently capable — and the right to remain in their homes. One glance at the appalling mess the BMA has created where it has taken over part of the site is sufficient evidence for the wisdom of the residents’ plan; we invite readers to visit the area between the fortress and the remaining houses to see for themselves.
What the BMA has wrought is an insult to the history and culture of Bangkok. What the residents offer could instead be a lesson in urban management for the entire world and the kind of tourist mecca that would far outshine the morally shabby, socially irresponsible, and culturally blind “development” that Khun Peerawat so ardently wishes on an already long-suffering city.
APIWAT RATANAWARAHA
Department of Urban and Regional Planning and the Urban Design and Development Centre,
Chulalongkorn University
CHATRI PRAKITNONTHAKAN
Department of Architecture and Related Art, Faculty of Architecture, Silpakorn University
GRAEME BRISTOL
Director, CAHR, Bangkok and Victoria, B.C.
MICHAEL HERZFELD
Ernest E Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences and Director, Thai Studies Programme,
Harvard University