Bangkok – Intentional World City (original) (raw)

From the 1850s onward Bangkok has shifted from being a center of a re-emerging Southeast Asian empire toward a cosmopolis on the edge of the expanding global system of trade, production and finance. The transformations have come in episodes, beginning with the intrusion of European imperialism to the most recent chapter of integration into global circuits of finance capital that led to a massive restructuring of the city and new images of Bangkok as an emergent world city. Neighborhoods were replaced by tall buildings, toll roads were constructed to link the core to vast new towns built for the suburbanizing urban middle class, big box stores and shopping malls joined to further suburbanization while international hotels, Euro-design fashion complexes and convention centers began to fill the urban field. All of this came to an abrupt halt with the first of successive economic crises impacting Pacific Asia from the end of 1997 to the present, leaving a landscape of empty buildings, u...