Suchergebnisse

Cities carry traces of their pasts; they also carry traces of imagined pasts, inscribed on them by authoritarian regimes to suppress other imaginings. Bangkok in the early 20th century displayed the signification of a Buddhist royalty and imagined origins, subsequently suppressed with the imposition of new emblems of democracy following a 1932 overthrow of monarchical absolutism. Democracy was to be signified as founded in the common people. In the 21st century, a military junta dressed in the clothes of a pseudo-democracy re-writes the emblems of democracy, now to signify that democracy is not based in the people but, rather, is the gift of a benevolent monarch. The subverting of democracy is to be read from the monuments of the city, which highlight the specific strategies that the authoritarian state invokes in re-writing the national history.

Bangkok presents a rich history of popular uprisings directed against its periodic military dictatorships. Then, in 2006 and 2010 there were uprisings of increasing theatricality, playing to a hoped-for global audience, but now against democratically elected governments. January 2014 saw this insurrectional performance art raised to a new plateau where the city itself became the stage and the portrayed villain no longer the government, but government as such— against electoral democracy and for some vague, imagined ideal that might be seen as post-electoral democracy based in civil society rather than political parties. An ensuing military-drafted constitution built on this rejection, leading to manipulated elections in 2019 and a new, quasi-elected, monarchist-military government scarcely understandable outside the context of the dark euphoria of 2014. Then in 2020 the tide of insurgence turned again, against the military hegemony but also against the monarchy—a seismic shift. The paper's focus is on these events of 2014 and their 2020 denouement, also on their implications for both the space and the form of the city in a digital age.

This paper explores the aesthetics and politics of slum tourism — what are the attractions and what are the dangers of aestheticizing poverty? We first present eleven images of slums and informal urbanism in south and southeast Asia and suggest a complex mix of attractions for Western tourists. On the one hand informal urbanism can be picturesque with elements of nostalgia and a quest for authenticity; on the other is the shock of the real, the spectacle of intensive labyrinthine urbanity and an uneasy voyeurism. We suggest the attraction is more the anxious and awe-filled pleasure of the sublime than any formal beauty. The paper then changes scale to connect such imagery to the political economy and geography of the city where the visibility of slums and urban informality is linked to state and market ideologies. Informal settlements generally have negative symbolic and political capital; the developing state paradoxically needs tourists yet seeks to control the urban image for purposes of branding and to signify law and order. The slum is often hidden from the public gaze in a manner that is complicit with the reproduction of poverty. While the voyeuristic gaze of the Western tourist produces an aestheticization of poverty this does not depoliticize so much as it opens up new connections and potential transformations.