Associate Professor of Urban Design

Georg Simmel defined metropolitan life as in tension between the exertion of psychological individuality and intellectual independence and rapid change, conflict and the “violent stimuli,” characteristic of the modern European city. Simmel’s metropolitan figure replaces the loss of the rich social ties of the small town with a creative imagination and inner life. This categorical distinction between the social networks of the village and the solitary inner life of the metropolis has no application to the mega-cities of today. Bangkok, for instance, absorbs and mingles rural migrants, foreign refugees and cosmopolitan tourists and business travelers into a flotsam of canal and rail side villages set among gleaming hotels, condominiums and shopping malls linked by expressways and skytrains. Simmel might have found the sweet, bitter, sour and salty sensations of this mega-city too distracting and seductive to retreat to his mental bliss.

The colonial world system, centered on the great European metropolis, was shattered and unbound by the successive crises of the Great Depression and World War II. Two new urban systems emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century: the megalopolis and the mega-city. The former was identified first in the Boston-Washington corridor of the U.S. by French geographer Jean Gottman in his 1961 book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeast Seaboard of the United States. The latter was recorded by the anthropologist Janice Perelman, in her 1969 fieldwork in the informal favela of Rio de Janeiro’s published in The Myth of Marginality: Urban Politics and Poverty in Rio de Janeiro (1976). These twin urban phenomena emerged out of the explosion of automobile scaled ex-urbanism at the periphery of North American and European cities, and the implosion of the rural country side into self-built settlements around and with rapidly growing cities in Latin American, Asia and Africa. Both mega-urbanisms are marked by loosely organized heterogeneous spatial structures — radically different from the European capitals where nature and city, center and periphery, as well as inside and outside were carefully controlled.

The mental life of the mega-city does not rely on these crisp divisions that dominated Simmel’s metropolitan self examination. Instead, the Bangkok psyche moves in karmic cycles of birth, death and rebirth among the thirty-four planes of existence of the Therevada Buddhist cosmology. Instead of Simmel’s duality between inner and outer lives, these planes are hierarchically arranged among the three worlds of the Thai Tripitaka: the world of form and sensation, the world of form and no sensation, and finally the world of neither form nor sensation. In Bangkok, Simmel will not find “…an inexhaustible richness of meaning in the development of the mental life,” but multiple worlds of excessive forms and sensations with no meaning outside of the endless cycles of suffering and desire.

In the middle of the 20th century, Bangkok shifted from a semi-colonial, peripheral metropolis, squeezed between the British and French Empires, to a mega-city with a strategic alliance with the United States at the beginning of the Cold War. The modernizing Siamese Kings and Thai generals of the 19th and 20th centuries were able to chose from various European and American experts and advisors, rather than being subject to a single authority. This pattern of syncretism and plurality continued a long and rich Southeast Asian tradition of incorporating various forms of knowledge brought by traders and pilgrims from Persia to Japan. Instead of becoming a peripheral metropolis in the Eurocentric colonial system, various Amero-European ideas and things were instead incorporated into the layered Thai cosmology of multiple forms and sensations. This is physically evident outside many Bangkok temple compounds, where sculptures of Caucasian figures share the space with Chinese and Hindi deities.

America's hasty withdrawal from the Vietnam War in 1975 meant that American financial and cultural influence was quickly replaced by Japanese foreign investment, as the Eastern Seaboard of the Gulf of Thailand became the “Detroit of Asia.” Following 1997’s economic crisis, Bangkok became consumed by an ancient Khon dance between two masquerades of globalization: one, the sufficiency economy envisioned by the King, and another, an easy-credit, country-wide consumer society created by former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Instead of moving between an inner and outer life, the metal life of the mega-city must navigate between violent and sudden ideological shifts and ways of being in the world. Bangkok strives to hold in delicate balance the jarring juxtapositions of both a sprawling American megalopolis and hyper-dense Asian mega-city. The mental life of this mega-city endeavors to quiet the noisy nonsense of psychological individuality and intellectual independence either through acetic meditation practice or carnal sensorial excess.

Resources:

Bangkok: the Architecture of Three Ecologies, BFA Architectural Design Studio 5, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons The New School for Design

Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life"- Joseph Salvatore