For the first time in my life, I'm counting down the days before I leave Bangkok. The question of this week is which of us has changed the most?
It all began with the
Skytrain and its comfortable, anonymous, rapid transit. Then came the MRT, with
no sense of place at all. Now if you take a bus, or a riverboat, you can
plainly see that Bangkok is being erased. A chaotic, wonderful, horizontal city
is becoming a franchised, sterile, vertical one. When I saw the pseudo-colonial
shopping mall (complete with Starbucks) that has replaced the dark sprawl of
old ugly buildings that used to border Pak Khlong Talad's market, my heart splintered.
Fifty new shopping malls
are scheduled to be built in Bangkok over the next year. Since I arrived last
month, at least two more market areas have been removed. Bring on the
air-conditioned brave new world.
5 comments:
Somehow, I missed a whole section of posts. I'm reading to catch up. Interesting that what I was thinking from the FB postings while you were there was so along the lines of this post. The nature of the city is being erased. Cleaned of dirt and anything reminiscent of personality. Homogenized. Disinfected. Deprived of its' humanity. I can understand the loss.
I feel the same way, Janet. I never would've believed Bangkok could end up looking like just another city.
It's spreading so quickly--why actually improve the city when you just tear it all down and replace it with shopping palaces?
Seems to be a modern passion, not so much improvement as sterilization. Once it looks and feels like a hospital, they may regret removing what has made it distinctive...
Not these bastards--they're military men. They like sterile--destroy it in order to save it.
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