This study investigates the sometimes-competing and sometimes-complementary images of utopia that developed in the Thai capital, Bangkok from 1910 until 1973. Expressed in built forms as well as architectural drawings, building manuals, novels, poetry, and ecclesiastical murals, these images of an ideal society attempted to reconcile urban-based understandings of Buddhist felicities such as Nibbana, Uttarakuru, and Phra Sri Ari with worldly models of political community.1 Using Thai- and Chinese-language archival sources, this book-length study demonstrates how these strivings to create an ideal society made common cause with the interests of the monarchy, the marketplace, and the military to produce new opportunities for both social play and political conflict in urban space.
From the miniature democratic city built by Siam’s last fully reigning absolute monarch in 1917 until the installation of a national infrastructural network of roads and hotels in the 1970s, changes in the Buddhist spatial imagination re-shaped the city’s urban fabric and produced new models of political community.2 The city was no longer presented as the center of a pre-ordained sacred geography, but was imagined as a designed cosmography produced by human labor. While the geometries of the mandala governed the organization of the town, the palace, and the wat or monastic complex in 18th-century Siam, 20th-century Bangkok expanded to incorporate new symbolic centers of political power as well as modern arenas of public assembly like the cinema and the stadium. Built and un-built utopian projects developed in the Thai capital that reconfigured the relationship between the Siamese ruling class and its subjects by reconciling modern architecture’s rationalist tendencies with older cosmologies.
The interplay of Buddhist culture, modern economic, political, and social change, and speculative thinking about the future can be traced back to the beginnings of print capitalism in 19th-century Bangkok but by the 20th century, thinking about the past, present, and future of Bangkok society came to be expressed in distinctly spatial terms.3 The second was the reorganization of the building trades and the transition from craftsman to architect as chief purveyor of built works. The third was the change in social relations between the monarchy and the diverse peoples it ruled over. Together these events produced a form of nationalism that re-imagined the bonds between the Siamese ruling class and its subjects as participants in a shared utopian project.
Utopian nationalism was part of a broader cultural and economic campaign on the part of the Siamese monarchy to assert their relevance in a turbulent urban landscape transformed by extraterritorial laws, migrant Chinese labor, and the rise of new urban classes. The old economic and political machinery of the state was rendered obsolete by the integration of Siam into the world capitalist economy, but a new system had not yet fully developed to replace it. In reaching back to an imagined past as well as projecting into a modern future, utopian nationalism filled this caesura, allowing the old regime to revive itself, albeit in an adjusted form.5 By examining the ways that the new spaces of the city became arenas for modern subject-formation, utopian desire, political hegemony, and social unrest, this study outlines a theory of the modern city as a space of antinomy, able to sustain not only heterogeneous temporalities but also support conflicting world views within the urban landscape. Underscoring the paradoxical character of utopias and their formal, programmatic, and narrative expressions of both hope and hegemony, Bangkok Utopia provides a new way to conceptualize the uneven economic development and fractured political conditions of contemporary global cities like Bangkok.