Megalopolis: The Giant City in History pp 143-165 | Cite as
Bangkok: From Primate City to Primate Megalopolis
Chapter
Abstract
As late as 1960 Bangkok was far from being a megalopolis, far even from being a dynamic modern city of the sort familiar in the west. A 1959 report from an American group of consultants to the Thai Ministry of the Interior noted that
to a person accustomed to Western standards, the city is remarkable for its compactness. A vigorous walker can traverse it from north to south in three hours or less. The country, in the form of village-like settlements, can be found within many parts of the city. There is little in the way of an urban fringe, except for strings of village settlements along major canals and roads. Internal organisation generally lacks the zonal or sector character of most western cities. There is the old city area, the Chinese quarter, a western type residential area and formal political districts, but within large parts of the city thatched indigenous housing in rice paddies alternate with modern roads, western housing and shop houses, creating areas which seem neither rural nor urban. Social zones, as yet, with the exception of the Chinese Sampeng district, do not exist.1
Keywords
Cheap Labour Land Prex Eastern Seaboard Eastern Economic Review Primate City
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Notes
- 1.Litchfield Whiting Bowne and Associates, Bangkok-Thonburi City Planning Project, mimeographed, Government of Thailand, Bangkok, 3 September 1959, p. 13.Google Scholar
- 2.Calculated from M. Dogan and J. D. Kasarda (eds), The Metropolis Era, vol. 1: A World of Giant Cities (London: Sage Publications, 1988) pp. 15–16.Google Scholar
- 3.An interesting study of the absorption of the Pak Kret district into Bangkok’s urban nexus is Thiraret Pramuanratkarn, ‘Impact of Urbanization on a Peripheral Area of Bangkok, Thailand’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis. University of Washington (1979).Google Scholar
- 4.There is no satisfactory study of the economic history of Bangkok. Much useful information is contained in the writings of L. Sternstein. See especially Portrait of Bangkok (Bangkok: Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, 1982); Thailand: The Environment of Modernization (Sydney: McGraw-Hill, 1976); Planning the Developing Primate City: Bangkok 2000, Australian National University, Department of Geography, Occasional Paper 9, June 1971. See also B. London, Metropolis and Nation in Thailand: The Political Economy of Uneven Development (Colorado: Westview Press, 1980).Google Scholar
- 5.For example. United Nations, Population Growth and Policies in Mega Cities: Bangkok (New York: 1987) p. 1; D. W. Fryer, ‘Cities of South-East Asia and their Problems’, in Y. M. Yeung and C. P. Lo (eds). Changing South-East Asian Cities: Readings on Urbanization (Singapore: OUP, 1976) p. 9.Google Scholar
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- 11.G. W. Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957) p. 173.Google Scholar
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- 33.L. Sternstein, Planning the Developing Primate City, op. cit., p. 115, and Statistical Yearbooks (Bangkok).Google Scholar
- 34.L. Sternstein, Portrait of a City, op. cit., p. 91 and Bangkok Post, 11 July 1990.Google Scholar
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- 36.C. Madge, Village Communities in North-East Thailand, mimeographed (New York: United Nations Technical Assistance Programme, 1958) p. 12.Google Scholar
- 37.IBRD, Toward a Development Strategy (Washington, 1978) p. 62.Google Scholar
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© Theo Barker and Anthony Sutcliffe 1993