Slums in Bangkok

"The root cause of urban slumming seems to lie not in urban poverty but in urban wealth"

Gita Verma

With over ten million inhabitants, Bangkok, capital of Thailand, is a greatly populated city, where both ends of the economical spectrum coexist. Poverty is well spread in the capital, where it is not unusual to find vast numbers of people crammed into the city’s numerous slums.

According to Planet of Slums by Mike Davis (2006), slums are a type of informal housing that is the frequent and sometimes inevitable result of deficient housing policies and inadequate job markets in cities. Such informal settlements house great numbers of people, sometimes millions, over very limited space, making them really dense settlements. They may be located near the center of the city or in the periphery, usually on land that had been ignored and was inexpensive but now may have high value to urban developers and/or the government. This causes conflict over the land rights between slum inhabitants, the people who live there and actually develop the land with their own efforts and means, and the legal owners, developers or governments that wish to profit from it. As a result of these conflicts, as cities develop, the slums and their inhabitants, who are a very vulnerable population, often face eviction or relocation to the periphery of the city, where they have poor access to employment.    

Slums in the city of Bangkok are prevalent, housing today well over a million people in the metropolitan area of the city alone. These slums do not only house the poor population of the city, they are also the places where they pursue a livelihood. It is common for informal markets to develop in these kinds of settlement, as well as street vendors or food stands.The enterprises that include the infrastructure of most of these settlements are usually illegal and self-made, and their development is completely neglected or overlooked by government officials, who have been known to state, according to “Thailand: High cost of living in Bangkok affect many people” by Asia News Monitor, that “communities should be encouraged to get organized and to take care of their own problems instead of waiting for a top-down solution form the authorities” (4/29/2012). Such an attitude legitimizes ongoing neglect by the government.     

Because of their informality slums residents face a great insecurity of tenure, are often overlooked by authorities and excluded from the access to basic necessities, which puts most of their inhabitants in a very vulnerable position. Lacking a long-term housing policy, Bangkok’s government solutions to informal housing have often been unsuccessful. Instead of listening and working with the slum dwellers to achieve a solution, the government has failed to address the multiple and complicated issues faced by slum dwellers, and has offered alternatives, that realistically do not work for them, such as public housing located too far from their income source.

One of the popular alternatives adopted by the government to address the issue of informal housing in Bangkok is resettlement. In “Suwan Prasit 2: a resettlement project in Bangkok revisited”, Leeruttanawisut and Yap (2016) evaluate the situation of a resettled community more than ten years after its creation and whether or not it was a successful endeavor. The article explains several downsides of resettlement plans. They place a great debt burden on the affected people, which sometimes they are unable to repay. This may result in long-term tenure insecurity. Some slum households are not eligible for resettlement and therefore are excluded from any possible solution. The unfavorable new location also prevents some people from moving or staying at the new community. Because of these reasons, and mainly because of the financial resources needed to invest and maintain a new house, the author finds that resettlement projects usually only benefit those slum dwellers with higher economic means. All these result in the impossibility for many slum dwellers to move to the resettlement communities or in the loss of their newly acquired home, while newcomers with higher economic means cannot move into the community.

These kinds of failed strategies are also implemented in slums all around the world, and not only by local governments, but by international organizations and agencies too. Chapter 4 of Davis’s Planet of Slums illustrates the failed international efforts to solve urban poverty and the issue of slums in cities, especially in cities of the Global South. These efforts were conceptualized by big international organizations, such as the United Nations, focusing on the autonomy of the slum dweller. Davies argues that they were applied with a western mentality of pro-independence that romanticized the individual efforts of slum inhabitants and therefore legitimized a “withdrawal of state and local government intervention and support” (72), as if they didn’t need any more help. Policies abandoned aims of slum removal and instead sought to improve slum living conditions. The upgrading programs were enforced and failed abysmally, either because they were often coopted to benefit middle class people instead of the target people at the bottom of society, or because they involved highly bureaucratized and ineffective NGOs.