Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand 9780824888152

Citation preview

Citizen Designs

Citizen Designs City-Making and Democracy in ­Northeastern Thailand

ELI ELINOFF

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

© 2021 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21   6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Elinoff, Eli, author. Title: Citizen designs : city-making and democracy in northeastern Thailand / Eli Elinoff. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020051756 | ISBN 9780824884598 (cloth) | ISBN 9780824888152 (pdf) | ISBN 9780824888169 (epub) | ISBN 9780824888176 (kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: City planning—Thailand, Northeastern—Citizen participation. | City planning—Political aspects—Thailand, Northeastern. | Squatters—Political activity—Thailand, Northeastern. | Democracy—Thailand, Northeastern. Classification: LCC HT165.53.T5 E45 2021 | DDC 307.1/21609593—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051756 Cover art: A resident of the railway settlements looks across the tracks at Khon Kaen Central Plaza shopping mall under construction in 2009. Photo by author. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

Contents

Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Naming Abbreviations 1

Prologue: Disagreement in a Time of Happiness Designing the Political

2 3

Part I. Prototypes Infrastructures, Nation and Citizen From Crisis to Community

vii xiii xv 1 8 41 58

Part II. Assemblies 4 5 6 7 8

Citizen Designs Paper Communities Unity and Its Discontents Building Politics City of Disagreement

85 111 128 153 176

Part III. Fragmentations 9 Political Life in the Despotic City 10 Happiness Otherwise Epilogue: Legacies of Politics

197 217 232

Notes References Index

239 255 283

Acknowledgments

This project has taken more than a decade. It followed me as I followed work and research opportunities in four countries on three continents. My ability to move in search of work is rooted in a range of privileges, which many— including most of my friends and interlocutors in Khon Kaen—do not share. At the same time, my mobility also reflects something of the state of academic labor in these early decades of the twenty-first century; these moves have mostly been of necessity rather than of fancy. Yet these travels have brought many dear friends and intellectual comrades into my life. Where this book achieves its aims, I see the best of their intellectual influence and personal kindness; where it falls short, I see the limits of my own thought. My deepest debt is to the residents and activists living along the tracks in Khon Kaen. I am profoundly grateful for their generosity, honesty, and openness. They shared not only their time, thoughts, worries, joy, and sadness but also food, drink, and friendship. I am especially indebted to the many members of the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network and the United Communities Network, who have welcomed me into their homes and meetings for more than ten years. Their inclusive spirit, more than anything else, made this research possible. Additionally, I thank the Four Regions Slum Network and their advisors, especially Abhayuth Chantrabha, Kovit Boonjear, P’Pooh, P’Prathin, and P’Oye, who spoke at length to me about their work as activists and the history of slum mobilization in Thailand. This book, even where critical of this work, seeks to honor the complexity these activists’ efforts to make Khon Kaen and Thailand more just. Without the access provided to me by the Community Organization Development Institute, this research would have been impossible. CODI’s staff generously allowed me to participate in every level of the organization’s work, granting access to observe its internal processes, read its planning vii

viii Acknowledgments

documents, interview its staff and project participants, and learn from its efforts both when they were successful and when they missed their mark. I am especially grateful for the warmth of the entire staff of CODI in Khon Kaen. At CODI in Khon Kaen, I thank Siam Nonkhamjan, Sakkarin Saphu, Kitty Nongpon, Phricha Saenawiang, Ed, Art, Joop, Pim, Oi, P’Phuey, and Somsak. Thanks to others in the CODI community: Somsook Boonyabancha, Tanoo Ponwat, Aphisak Dhiravisit, Sek, Chang, Go, Them, and Mae Sanong. Kitty (Tik) Nongpon deserves special mention for his friendship and kindness: Tik’s willingness to share his thoughts, to challenge my assumptions, to disagree with my ideas, and to reflect on the limits of his own work impressed me and deepened my perceptions of Thailand. In Thailand, this research was supported by the National Research Council of Thailand, Khon Kaen University’s Faculty of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Center for Well-Being in Economic Development. Buapun Phromphakping deserves special mention for facilitating my affiliations and for welcoming me to KKU. The staff from the Council on International Educational Exchange’s Khon Kaen study center were instrumental in introducing me to Isaan and to the communities along the tracks in 2001. Thanks, in particular, to Decha Premrudeelert, Arunee Sriruksa, Philip Mangis, and John Mark Belardo. David Streckfuss has been a mentor, friend, and critical intellectual interlocutor for nearly two decades. As a teacher, he opened my eyes, to Isaan’s political history and its people’s visions of a more just future. During my fieldwork, he helped me make contacts, provided engaged feedback, and was always available for a beer and a conversation. Since then, he has become one of my favorite intellectual collaborators. He generously read and commented on an entire draft of this book. I hope that the best of this book reflects his commitment to Isaan, social and environmental justice, and human engagement. I am also grateful to the wider community of Thailand scholars who have engaged with this project in various ways, including: Saowanee Alexander, Diane Archer, Ian Baird, Janepicha Cheva-Isarakul, Amanda Flaim, Daena Funahashi, Tyrell Haberkorn, Rachel Harrison, Andrew Johnson, Charles Keyes, Prajak Kongkiriti, Erik Kuhonta, Leedom Lefferts, Vanessa Lamb, Danny Marks, Duncan McCargo, Mary Beth Mills, Michael Montesano, Boonan Natakun, Yoshinori Nishizaki, Rachel Harrison, Aim Simpeng, Apiwat Ratanawahara, Jonathan Rigg, Boonlert Visetpricha, Peter Vandergeest, and Thongchai Winichakul. The Thai Studies writing group, Felicity Aulino,

Acknowledgments ix

Malavika Reddy, Ben Tausig, and Claudio Sopranzetti, have been an amazing cohort of readers, intellectual collaborators, and friends. Giuseppe Bolotta’s intellect and friendship have been a well-spring of inspiration that has nourished this project. Sidhorn Sangdhanoo and the late Kannikar Elbow’s expert Thai instruction was essential to my ability to carry out this project. Like most first books, this one began as a dissertation and was shaped by the wonderful scholars on my committee: Suzanne Brenner, Gary Fields, and Gillian Hart offered intellectual guidance and important advice as I formulated the project, conducted fieldwork, and drafted previous versions. James Holston has had a strong intellectual influence on my thinking about citizenship, democracy, law, housing, architecture, and much more. Jim’s uncompromising mentorship and intellectual rigor transformed me into a scholar. Last, but most significant, this book is the product of an incredible intellectual apprenticeship and friendship with Nancy Postero. For more than ten years, I have learned from her generous spirit and inquisitive, critical mind. She has carefully read and enthusiastically discussed nearly everything I have produced. Nancy’s mentorship sharpened every aspect of this book by deepening its analysis and honing its politics. Nancy, thank you for your profound faith in my work, your devotion to your students, your curiosity, your intellectual intensity, and your friendship. Thanks to my colleagues and friends at UCSD, especially Elana Zilberg for her energy and collaborative spirit. I also thank John Bialecki, Waqas Butt, Ted Gideonse, Joe Hankins, Naomi Haynes, Amy Kennemore, Julia Klimova, Tim Karis, Edward Kennedy, Jess Novak, Ana Paula Pimental-Walker, Cody Petterson, and Alicia Vacca. Special thanks to Allen Tran who is a staunch critic and a steadfast supporter. In Singapore, this project received incredible engagement from my colleagues at the Asia Research Institute and the National University of Singapore’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Thanks, in particular, to Bernardo Brown, Céline Coderey, Michael Douglass, Philip Fountain, Marco Garrido, Jamie Gillen, Maureen Hickey, Kong Chong Ho, Erik Kerr, Chris McMorran, Muhammad Arafat bin Mohamad, Jason Morris-Jung, Rita Padawangi, Jonathan Rigg, Catherine Scheer, Gerard Sages, Eric Thompson, and Tyson Vaughan. Tim Bunnell and Michelle Miller encouraged my thinking, offered gracious mentorship, and been generous friends. Malini Sur read these pages many times over and has argued with me about each one; they are all better because of her sharp-eyed engagement and friendship.

x Acknowledgments

Victoria University of Wellington has been a tremendous place to work thanks to my colleagues in the School of Social and Cultural Studies, the Anthropology Programme, and beyond: Nayantara Sheoren Appleton, Caroline Bennett, Brigitte Bönich-Brednich, Lorena Gibson, Liam Martin, Grant Otsuki, Jennifer de Saxe, Jeff Sissons, Dylan Taylor, Catherine Trundle, Tara­ puhi Vaeau, and Dave Wilson. Thanks to the wider community of anthropologists and urbanists who have contributed to my thinking, among them Nikhil Anand, Andrea Ballestero, Neil Brenner, Vivian Choi, Kerry Ryan Chance, Nicholas D’Avella, Jenna Grant, Sarah Grant, Chris Kortright, Keith McNeal, Edward Murphy, Silvia Nam, Anne Rademacher, Ananya Roy, Daromir Rudnykckyj, Christina Schwenkle, Anke Schwittay, Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, Michelle Stewart, and Jerome Whittington. Tania Li’s work has served as a model for my own; her advice during the time we shared at ARI was essential to my rethinking of this text. Erik Harms has consistently offered important interventions and necessary support at critical junctions. Michael Herzfeld has been tremendously generous with his ideas over the last several years. I am also grateful to Donna Goldstein, whose courageous, critical approach to ethnography sparked my interest in anthropology many years ago. This project also benefited from feedback as it evolved through engagements at numerous conferences, workshops, and seminars at Bucknell University, National University of Singapore, University of Wisconsin, Yale University, McGill University, and Harvard University. Thanks to Masako Ikeda, Grace Wen, Helen Glenn Court, and the two anonymous reviewers from University of Hawai‘i Press. Research for this project was funded through the support from a number of grants and agencies, including the University of California Pacific Rim Dissertation Grant, UCSD’s Department of Anthropology’s F. G. Baily Dissertation Fellowship, the UC Friends of the International Center Diane Lin Scholarship, UCSD’s International Institute for Comparative and Area Studies Grant, and the Foreign Area and Language Studies grants. Follow up trips were funded by research grants from the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute, the Singapore Ministry of Education’s Tier 2 grants “Aspirations, Urban Governance and the Remaking of Asian Cities” (MOE2012-T2–1–153), “Governing Compound Disasters in Urbanising Asia” (MOE2014-T2–1-017). Additional support was provided by the Mars-

Acknowledgments xi

den Fund Council from Government funding, managed by Royal Society Te Apārangi. Parts of chapters 2 and 3 appeared previously as “Ecologies of Possibility: Dwelling, Politics, and Government, along Khon Kaen’s Railway Tracks” in Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism, edited by Anne Rademacher and Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan (Hong Kong University Press, 2017). Thanks to HKU Press for allowing that material to be reprinted. Chapter 7 previously appeared as “A House is More than a House: Aesthetics Politics in a Northeastern Thai Railway Settlement” in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Chapter 7 also contains a section that originally appeared in “Sufficient Citizens: Moderation and the Politics of Sustainable Development in Thailand” in Political and Legal Anthropology Review. They appear here with permission and my thanks to the publishers. Personal thanks are due to Mark Culyba, Aris Garrison, Jesse Stansfield, and Kris Thomas for their friendship and reminding me to return to the sea and the mountains from time to time. Aaron Brownell and Seth Kane frequently opened their homes to me in Bangkok, offering good cheer and a place to crash. Jeff Abbot has been a friend from Khon Kaen to Wellington. Thanks also to Sarah Starkweather, Mike Jeffe, Amron Gravett, and Anna Halligan for help with the text at various stages. My deepest love and abiding gratitude are due to my family, who have been supportive, interested, and generous with me as I have navigated my way through this project and building a life as a scholar. You have encouraged me beyond what any human deserves. Thanks to Jed, Katie, Adam, Nerissa, Nora, Amara, Anya, Lila, Levi, Barbara, Kenny, and Lucy. My parents, Victor and Cissy, have always been my biggest champions. Finally, were it not for the loving kindness of my wife, Ashley, I may have given up on this project long ago. When have I gotten lost, she has reminded me of why this work is important and pushed me to keep me moving forward. Her sense of justice is sharp and her heart is always nearest to the ground. Her adventurous spirit and joyful compassion inspire me to do my best. Thank you for all of your love and support, and so much more.

Note on Transliteration and Naming

The transliteration of Thai is notoriously fraught; even the most elaborated systems have inconsistencies and often conflict with competing elaborations. One way around this quandary would be to simply reproduce the Thai text, but this is of little help to the English speaking and reading audience for whom this text written. Yet some systems of transliteration though consistent, can often lead English readers astray. To make matters worse, differences in the ways that many official systems of transliteration work and the ways in which many proper Thai nouns are rendered are idiosyncratic. This introduces the potential for contradictory renderings of the same words in a text. For example, the housing policy that I analyze throughout this book (บ้านมั่นคง) is transliterated as Baan Mankong by the agency in charge of the project but, depending on the transliteration system, could also be rendered as ban mankhong, bān mankhong, or some combination of these versions. The chief complication is that the word house บ้าน contains an elongated vowel that is acknowledged in the agency’s transliteration via a doubled “aa” and in other systems by a macron (ā). The Royal Thai General System does not acknowledge the difference between elongated and shortened vowels at all. All of this is to say nothing of tones. To address some, but of course not all of these concerns, I based my transliteration system on the American Library Association and Library of Congress system, which includes macrons to demonstrate the length of the vowels in words (but not the tones). However, I include some modifications to help with readability these include: “j” instead of “ch” for จ; “aw” instead of “ǭ” for the vowel อ. I also chose to use more commonly rendered transliterations where they deviate from the ALA system and to adopt the official transliteration of words for names and proper nouns even where they deviate from common transliterations. Thus I transliterate Baan Mankong (Secure Housing) using the agency’s transliteration, but “house” as bān and “secure” xiii

xiv

Transliteration and Naming

as mankhong. Although this approach inserts some ambiguity in the text, it maintains a certain fidelity to wider literatures while enabling the reader a clearer sense of most words’ pronunciations. The names of individuals and settlements in the text have been modified to disguise them. I make an exception here for public figures speaking on record.

Abbreviations

Asian Development Bank: ADB Community Organizations Development Institute: CODI Four Regions Slum Network: FRSN Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network: KKSRN Human Settlements Foundation: HSF National Housing Authority: NHA Nongovernmental organization: NGO People’s Alliance for Democracy: PAD People’s Democratic Reform Committee: PDRC Social Investment Fund: SIF State Railway of Thailand: SRT United Communities Network: UCN Urban Community Development Office: UCDO

xv

Prologue Disagreement in a Time of Happiness

In late 2016, nearly two hundred families living along the railway tracks in the growing provincial capital of northeastern Thailand, Khon Kaen, were evicted from their homes. Across the year, a long line of muscular pilings replaced numerous densely clustered, low-slung houses built of concrete block, tin, and wood. With the support of the then military-led government, the State Railway of Thailand (SRT), the agency that owns the land along the tracks, began the project without a formal environmental impact assessment. The raised double-track project runs the entire length of the city. The agency hopes that a high-speed train line will eventually parallel this project, offering new links to Thailand’s regional neighbors and to China. Although most residents living in the railway settlements continue to occupy the space as they did before, the project initiated a dramatic shift in how people thought about their futures. Destroying the homes of some of the city’s poorest residents, the evictions also signaled a major rupture in twenty-five years of democratic ferment that had begun in the narrow strip of land paralleling the rail line. That period was marked by tremendous engagement by residents, activists, and new kinds of participatory architects seeking to improve these settlements and to support contested visions of democracy within the city and across the country. These changes manifest themselves in the physical spaces of the settlements and in the personal lives of residents. In short, with these evictions the erasure of one of the most vibrant sites of democratic experimentation in the city had begun. 1

2 Prologue

To begin to understand what is at stake in this history, it is best to start along the tracks: Boonma’s restaurant is filled with plants and traditional herbs. Strings of incandescent lights glow over rough-hewn, wood tables where diners share phad thai, tom yum, stir-fried vegetables, and cold beer late into the night (figure 0.1). Scattered amid the hanging plants are small laminated signs with images of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Mao Zedong, and Lee Kuan Yew along with descriptions of their accomplishments. On one wall there are images of Boonma with his neighbors, friends, and collaborators participating in slum rights demonstrations all over Southeast Asia. Boonma transformed the space behind his restaurant into a kind of sustainability lab, rotating through various projects including cultivating mushrooms, planting a large urban garden, and raising frogs. The restaurant has hosted touring mawlam singers, contentious community meetings, and, every Friday night for the last few years, a contingent of nongovernmental organization activists who bring organic produce from the city’s green market for Boonma’s wife, Thawng, to cook while they debate politics and the transforming city around them.

Figure 0.1  Boonma’s Restaurant. Photo by the author.

Prologue 3

The space exudes a kind of dusty warmth that is punctured only when a train rushes by—horn shrieking, wheels gnashing, and warning bells ­blaring—less than twenty meters from where diners socialize. Although this distance has been a common topic of conversation among residents as they tried to organize themselves into official communities capable of signing leases with the SRT, it became inescapable when SRT officials began surveying the land in preparation for the double-track project. They marked the twenty-meter line in bright orange surveyor’s paint on the wall next to the kitchen, where an aging sticker of Yingluck Shinawatra, the prime minister whom the military removed from power in 2014, still hangs on the door. The slash of paint highlighted precisely how much of the structure would need to be destroyed for Boonma and Thawng’s, restaurant and house to be brought into compliance with the community’s land lease agreement. In July 2014, just six weeks after the coup, the plans for the track were still vague. Boonma sat across from me, his face lit by the string of lights hanging above our table. Then in his late forties, he wore a T-shirt bearing an image memorializing the late Suwit Watnoo, a well-known housing rights activist who helped start the national Four Regions Slum Network, to which Boonma’s community belonged. Over dinner, Boonma explained what the coup meant for his community: The previous government’s plan would only use the twenty meters closest to the tracks for the high-speed rail and the double-track projects. But the military has already changed the project design and now they want all forty meters on either side of the track. We don’t know what to do now since we cannot protest [referring to the junta’s ban on public assembly of five or more people]. . . . We have done so much work here since you first came, lots of projects. People have improved their homes. The municipality wants us to relocate, but none of us want to do that. If we have to move out of here, I don’t know what we will do. Where will we go?

I have known Boonma since 2008, when I began conducting fieldwork along the tracks and meeting frequently with him and his neighbors in a settlement I call the Rail’s Edge Community.1 We met at a meeting of the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network (KKSRN)—one of the city’s two slum activism networks—that I was attending in an effort to understand the relationship

4 Prologue

between those activist movements and Thailand’s nationwide experiment in participatory urban planning, the Baan Mankong (Secure Housing) project. The residents of Rail’s Edge had just joined the KKSRN and the national Four Regions Slum Network in the hopes that through collective mobilization they, like some of the network’s other members in Khon Kaen, would be able to secure leasing rights to their land from the SRT and access Baan Mankong project funds for home and infrastructural improvements. At the time, Boonma and his neighbors were new to organizing at both local and national scales; by 2014, they were seasoned leaders. As I describe throughout this book, residents of the Rail’s Edge and the adjacent railway settlements organized, protested, and negotiated with each other in an effort to become legitimate residents of the city and, just as important, be seen as legitimate political subjects. When he began working with these slum networks, Boonma was unsure about his role as a community leader; years later, he and his neighbors had become savvy in the arts of politics. They vigorously disagreed, critiqued, and debated. Often these debates spilled over into acrimonious disagreements, but just as often they proceeded to struggle together anyway, mobilizing against the larger forces conspiring to push them off their land. Through the hard work of disagreement and consensus, residents of Rail’s Edge signed a three-year renewable lease with the SRT in 2009 that gave residents permanent housing registration (thabīan bān thāworn)—an essential document for Thai citizens—that legitimized their presence in the city and gave them access to a range of entitlements, including recognized connections to urban service and funds from the Baan Mankong project. They used Baan Mankong’s housing grants to buy new zinc sheets for their roofs, tiles to cover bare concrete floors and walls, and earth to raise their floors and stave off the acute seasonal flooding common in this urban interstice. Material transformation marked residents’ intense efforts to upgrade (prabprung) their communities and make them legitimate in the eyes of the SRT, the municipality, and their fellow citizens. These political and material practices transformed the settlements into spaces of democracy in the richest sense of the word. It was from within these spaces that residents began to not only demand equality, but also debate how such a thing might be achieved and what it might mean in the first place. They began to reconfigure their senses of themselves and their place in the country. As Boonma and his neighbors along the tracks took up organizing,

Prologue 5

they improved their homes, experimented in new forms of collective relations, and reconsidered their political capacities by making broader claims to equality. They challenged the authority of the SRT to recognize their longstanding presence. They argued with the government’s participatory housing agency and its vision of citizenship. They disrupted the mobilizations of the city’s competing slum network. They challenged the housing activists they collaborated with. At times, they argued with their neighbors. As they debated highly local concerns, they were also reimagining the very nature of citizenship in early twenty-first-century Thailand. In short, through these practices, residents transformed themselves. Despite this powerful collective work, the homes that line the tracks became much less secure when, on May 22, 2014, the Thai military ousted Yingluck’s Pheu Thai Party–led government. This coup was Thailand’s nineteenth since 1932 and the second in ten years.2 The ouster not only nullified electoral democracy, but also ushered in a new era of urban growth that threw decades of democratic experimentation in places like Khon Kaen’s railway tracks into question. Calling itself the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), the military junta’s first decree, 1/2557, declared that the objective of the coup was “to ensure a prompt return to normalcy in the nation, harmony and unity among Thai citizens, to reform political, economic, social, and other national structure [sic], as well as to ensure fairness to all sides” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2014). The decree ended electoral democracy and announced the regime’s intention to restore order by obliterating the practice of politics in both large and small ways. The NCPO issued a series of announcements implementing martial law, restricting media, constraining internet activity, and banning political gatherings. Section 44 of the junta’s interim constitution, in particular, had powerful effects, granting its leader Prayuth Chanocha absolute power to “strengthen public unity and harmony” (Fifield 2015). Detentions, harassment, and attitude adjustment camps were the military’s central techniques for restoring “harmony” (Amnesty 2014) to a population it believed beset by a surfeit of disagreement. Beginning in 2005, cycles of protests by both conservative royalists and pro-democracy supporters of Thaksin Shinawatra became common in the Thai political landscape, as did military and court interventions into electoral politics. These cycles of volatility exposed deep fractures within the Thai polity surrounding the question of democracy, the boundaries of ­political

6 Prologue

belonging, and the broader shape of the political community. They also offered a keen justification for the 2014 military coup, to restore “beauty and order” to a country that was awash, as the coup-makers put it, in “too much democracy” (Khaosod 2015). After the coup, the junta embarked on the surreal task of “returning happiness to the people.” It handed out free movie tickets to nationalist films. It organized “happiness festivals.” It broadcast the 2014 World Cup free on national stations. It produced and aired nationalist soap operas. General Prayuth even penned a cloying happiness song that played endlessly on national radio stations. The military also “enlisted” young women dressed in camouflage bikinis as part of a squadron of “pretties” assigned the mission of spreading the military’s post-coup cheer. Sitting in Boonma’s restaurant discussing the implications of the coup, I tried to cut the tension by asking (tongue in cheek) if the then-proposed double-track project was part of the military’s happiness project. Hearing me from the kitchen, Thawng stormed out, hair dyed red, and red apron wrapped around her waist: “How can we have happiness with all these double standards?” she fumed. “Eli, it’s not even a double standard [sawng mātrathān] anymore. Now there is no standard at all.” Her use of the phrase sawng mātrathān echoed the 2010 Red Shirt protest, a six-week occupation of Bangkok that aimed to restore democracy to the country, which at the time was governed by a party placed in power through judicial maneuvers that ousted a sitting government and overruled the will of the electorate (Hewison 2014). That protest galvanized vast regions of the country, especially in Khon Kaen and the rest of Thailand’s northeast, where people’s changing attitudes about politics and their own sense of belonging had brought Thaksin and his successors to power in every election since 2001. Made up of the rural and urban poor, the upwardly mobile aspiring working classes, and Thaksin loyalists from the north and northeast of the country, the Red Shirts used this new sense of belonging as part of a new language of citizenship to showcase the contradictions that enabled the military to ignore their votes through military coups and to highlight a wide range of everyday inequalities (see Nishizaki 2014; Sopranzetti 2018; Tausig 2019). Supporters of the Red Shirts, such as Thawng, Boonma, and many of my other interlocutors along the tracks, used the notion of double standards to frame their understanding of Thailand’s uneven political, economic, and social structure (see also Saowanee and McCargo 2016). In the wake of the

Prologue 7

2014 coup, they argued accurately (see Amnesty 2014) that Red Shirts and other critical voices were targeted more vigorously than the anti-democratic, conservative protestors from the People’s Democratic Reform Committee who had occupied parts of Bangkok for much of the year leading up to the military takeover. Thawng continued, “Is that fair? Is that just? How can that lead to happiness?” (nī khư̄ khwam yutthithām rư,̄ ja sāng khwām suk yāngai). Across the table, Boonma retied his pony tail behind his head, smiling wearily, “I’d be content to have happiness restored to my family.” The growing sense of authoritarian closure marked Thawng and Boonma’s questions about fairness, justice, and happiness as rhetorical. The evictions that began in 2016 suggest that happiness—let alone justice or even stability—remains beyond the horizon for many residents in Khon Kaen. Yet the period of intense democratic debate that preceded them reveals other possibilities, some taken, others abandoned. This book considers that period and its abrupt end. It does so by exploring how the spaces along the tracks became fertile sites for reimagining Thai citizenship and democracy and the ways residents’ democratic aspirations were extinguished after the military coup. As I describe in detail, residents and their counterparts in state agencies and nonstate activist groups sought not only to remake the homes of the poor and the city of Khon Kaen, but also to redesign democracy itself. In taking on the period’s democratic designs, I ask what it might mean to design a democratic city. How did local actors use the city to reimagine both citizenship and political life? What can the experiences of Boonma, his neighbors, and those they collaborated with tell us about the fate of democracy in a moment of mass urbanization and authoritarian retrenchment? What could their experiences reveal about the practice of politics in the twenty-first century?

1 Designing the Political

This book is about designing democratic citizens and democratic cities in twenty-first century Thailand. It takes up these themes during a period (2007–2019) in which the value of democracy and democratic forms of politics have been subject to intense disagreement. During this time, Thailand experienced both a flourishing of democratic aspirations and a resurgence of authoritarian rule. Thai cities have often been at the center of these undecided politics. They have seen mass demonstrations both for and against democratic expansion. They have been objects of contestation for the urban poor who have used claims to urban space to assert their political legitimacy. Urban space also has become an important mechanism used by powerful actors to silence these new political claims. Amid these tensions, Thai architects, urban planners, and activists have also reimagined the city as a space to accommodate the voices of the poor and, perhaps, manage their inclusion through an expansive experiment in participatory urbanism called the Baan Mankong (Secure Housing) project. By considering the convergence of these phenomena—democratic aspiration, participatory city-making, and authoritarian retrenchment—from within the rail-side squatter settlements in the growing provincial capital of Khon Kaen (figure 1.1), Citizen Designs argues that competing visions of democracy and the good life have been fundamental to animating Thailand’s contemporary political volatility. I make this argument by examining how residents along the tracks, the Thai state’s Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI), and 8

Figure 1.1  Map of Thailand with the railway system visible. The inset shows Khon Kaen City. Map courtesy of Michael Jeffe.

10

chapter 1

activists from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) engaged in contentious collaborations to remake the city’s poorest communities by mobilizing conflicting “citizen designs” that imagined different political roles for the poor and rendered distinct political orders for the nation. The term “citizen designs” refers to the entangled visions of citizenship, politics, and the good life these actors imagined, debated, built, and struggled over in the spaces along the tracks. Citizen designs were expressed in actual designs of houses and communities as well as in protests, local meetings, contentious arguments, and highly personal, future-oriented visions of the good life. These designs are like what Nicholas D’Avella calls “concrete dreams” in that they enable imagined forms of living and being to be enacted (2019, 6). Citizen designs, both built and imagined, tie together historical ideas of good citizenship and emergent ones still being formulated through ongoing political struggles over land and the proper order of politics itself. Like many visions of the future, most of the ones I describe in this book were never fully achieved. Instead, residents’ claims to equality and planners’ and activists’ efforts to improve and mobilize the poor have had uneven effects: As residents reconsidered who they were as political actors, they began rethinking Thailand’s entrenched inequalities, attempting to remake their homes and communities to better reflect these new visions of political belonging. For some residents in Khon Kaen, these struggles have enabled new, if tenuously held, rights to the city. These efforts fundamentally reshaped the way residents articulated their political visions as they tried to reconfigure their relationship with the state in both material and symbolic ways. Localized efforts to enact democracy in Khon Kaen thus paralleled, contributed to, and were influenced by the nation’s changing political terrain. The relationship between the national and the local is especially evident in the ways the pro-democracy group known as the Red Shirts not only found support along the tracks, but also offered key intellectual resources for residents to rearticulate their political capacities. Residents’ visions of citizenship were often at odds with their collaborators from CODI, the agency in charge of the Baan Mankong project, and the activist NGOs working along the tracks to organize residents into pro-poor social movements. Actors from these groups had their own citizen designs that did not always match up with residents’ aspirations.1 As I show, these differences were productive, generating new debates about what democracy looked and felt like. Yet the differences also led to complex and



Designing the Political 11

contentious relationships that resulted in exclusions along the tracks that in turn disrupted efforts to improve the railway settlements, exacerbated residents’ vulnerabilities, and later set the stage for evictions. This became especially clear after the 2014 military coup, which brought with it an urban formation that can be called “despotic urbanism.” Alongside new state and nonstate investments into Khon Kaen’s urban landscape, the logics of managed inclusion transformed into modes of participatory dispossession; urbanization offered the junta another way of silencing politics. Residents’ designs on democracy and the good life, though still potent, are now more precarious than ever. In one sense then, this book analyzes the conflicting citizen designs circulating along Khon Kaen’s railway tracks to reflect on contemporary struggles over citizenship, the value of democracy, and the form of the political in Thailand. In a much larger sense, it argues that the experiences of Khon Kaen’s residents, activists, and community architects reveal the complexity of making good on democracy’s promises of equality. The struggles in Khon Kaen reflect larger questions about the limits of democratic inclusion, the meaning of politics, the complex effects of mass urbanization on the political. Here, Khon Kaen has something to tell us about the contours of possibility, uncertainty, and violence that plague democracies elsewhere.2 DESIGN AND POLITICS Understanding Khon Kaen’s citizen designs requires an engagement with two interrelated but often opposed concepts: design and politics. Design is popularly associated with the technical practices of envisioning and producing innovations in space and material life. As Keith Murphy notes, “design is primarily an intentional structuring of some portion of the lived world in such a way as to transform how it is used, perceived, or understood” (2015, 31). Yet Murphy’s ethnography of Swedish designers reveals how design is also much more than this, highlighting that design is never individual, but instead always influenced by multiple actors, ideologies, cultural values, institutions, and histories (2015, 47). From this perspective, design practices link histories, economies, cultural values, and political formulations to material forms. Although design is imbued with promises of better things to come, it is deeply structured by the worlds from which it emerges (Murphy 2016, 434; see also Hartblay 2017). In calling for a critical anthropology of design,

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Lucy Suchman argues that ethnographic research aimed at making sense of design should “articulate the cultural imaginaries and the micro politics that delineate design’s promises and practices” (2011, 3). Arturo Escobar points out that this kind of attention to design is crucial for overcoming the contemporary political-economic and ecological conjuncture and using design’s possibilities to imagine futures beyond (2018, 18). Yet, as Fernando Domínguez Rubio and Uriel Fogué note, a critical study of design requires double attention to how designs “enfold” specific power arrangements while remaining open to the possibility that designs might “unfold” new political struggles (2015). This book is interested in design in this double sense. The Baan Mankong project never promised simply to transform houses, but rather to redesign urban space, community life, and, however ambiguously, Thai citizenship. In so doing, it held out the promise of remaking the country’s socio-political hierarchy.3 Yet this was never merely an emancipatory exercise, instead, by intervening in poverty through design, the project aimed to enhance the voice of the poor while moderating their desires and reorienting their social lives toward community (see Elinoff 2014a; Thorn 2016). At the same time, NGO housing activists have used urban improvement to organize the poor to push for both local rights and broader political change. In this way, these political organizers became entangled in “civic governmentality,” which, as Ananya Roy argues, organizes the poor but also aims to manage them through inclusive governance (2009a). Amid these efforts, residents engaged in their own designs, which, though less elaborate from a technical perspective, also used their homes, their communities, and the venues created by Baan Mankong as a means to assert their equality. Analysis of the contentious encounters between design professionals (architects and urban planners), residents of poor communities, and their activist collaborators reveals how CODI’s notion of community design (kānawkbāeb chumchon) entailed a broader practice of citizen design. Attending to Baan Mankong’s competing designs as citizen designs thus reveals where the project challenged political inequalities and where it extended them. To make sense of the political implications of the Baan Mankong project, it is helpful to focus on politics as a “critical practice of world making that proceeds through constellations of disagreement, difference, and conflict” (Postero and Elinoff 2019, 6). Doing so highlights both residents’ collective efforts to transform their worlds and the tensions the encountered and gener-



Designing the Political 13

ated in doing so. Such an approach highlights how internal tensions, inconsistencies, and frictions within Baan Mankong’s citizen designs mobilized individual and collective capacities to disagree in the aim of transforming the political order in ways that sometimes extended the projects aims and sometimes worked against them. Although some collaborations along the tracks sought to manage politics through design, other agonisms aimed to reshape, challenge, and disrupt state-centered visions of good citizenship by reconfiguring the place of politics in the life of Thai citizens altogether. As Chantal Mouffe notes, agonistic confrontation—legitimate forms adversarial relations—are the “very condition” of democratic life (2005, 30). Thus, where residents’ disagreements exceeded design’s capacities to enact politics, they often reflected residents’ desires to assert their equality more broadly.4 These contestations sat at the limits of design’s ability to produce democracy. Residents’ embrace of their political capacities has been aimed at exercising their likeness (khwāthaothīam) with other Thai citizens. These aspirations for equality ran counter to entrenched visions of the poor, the rural, the ethnically different as being developmentally backward, politically inferior beings, which have historically undergirded Thailand’s histories of participatory development that preceded the Baan Mankong project (Connors 2007; Reynolds 2009). The expansion of political aspirations in Khon Kaen thus articulated with broader shifts associated with the growth of democratic movements such the Red Shirts, whose urban occupation in 2010 called for an end to the endemic double standards that nullified the political voices of the poor in military and judicial coups. Residents often encountered local opposition that reflected the same antidemocratic discourses among national conservative and royalist groups in the Thai middle and elite classes who used the poor’s emerging claims to equality as a basis for challenging the value of democracy. Thailand’s 2014 military coup and the extended period of military governance that followed pivoted on the strength of those responses. Paradoxically, the coup, in its effort to silence politics, highlighted the depth of the challenge that such aspirations posed to the political order. By attending to politics and design together, I not only explore the ways that various actors along the tracks reimagined their homes, communities, and cities, but also consider how these citizen designs contributed to contestations over the remaking of the political. The ways local debates reflect the larger forces making and unmaking Thai democracy demonstrate that the political is always a contingent formulation, bound up in contested

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i­ maginings, subject not only to the machinations of design, but also to the “quickenings” (Guyer 2013) of disagreement, the contingencies of community, and the foreclosures of authoritarian violence. DEMOCRATIZATION AMID CAPITALIST RUPTURE The last thirty years in Thailand have been a dizzying, recursive spiral of economic boom and bust, democratic expansion and collapse (Aulino et al. 2014). The span between 2006 and 2019 saw two military coups, three judicial coups, and ten prime ministers. Vivid, color-coded social movements have dominated global news about the country. Images of red and yellowclad protestors, state violence, military incursion, infrastructural disruption, and urban occupation have been striking displays of this volatility, but defy easy explanation given that they reflect complex alignments that scramble the ideological coordinates of left and right. Thai politics in this first quarter of the twenty-first century has involved complex political constellations that converge in odd and seemingly contradictory ways. The poor, provincial elite, and aspiring working classes have come together to support a rising capitalist class (embodied in the Red Shirts support of the billionaire telecom magnate and former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra). At the same time, the former democratic vanguard of the middle class, including some former leftists and many NGO activists, have thrown their support behind retrograde antidemocratic reforms, military coups, and the royalist establishment (Kitirianglarp and Hewison 2006; Pye and Schaffer 2008; Ungpakorn 2011; Somchai 2014; Keyes 2014; Elinoff 2012, 2014c; Nishizaki 2014; Baker 2016; Sopranzetti 2018). The results of these entanglements were months of public demonstrations by movements that have often paralyzed the government, the capital city, or both. Public outrage in the streets has been accompanied by intrigue in the palace (McCargo 2005). In the wake of the death of the deified monarch, King Bhumipol Adulyadej, in 2017, the institution of the monarchy faces questions about its prestige and its relationship with other organs of the state, especially the military (Marshall 2015; Sopranzetti 2016; Mérieau 2016). At stake within this volatility is a yet-unsettled disagreement about the shape of the political and the meaning and distribution of legitimate politics in the wake of tremendous political and economic transformation (Elinoff 2014c, 2019).



Designing the Political 15

From the early 1980s to the middle of the 1990s, Thailand experienced massive economic growth, the fastest in the world for part of those decades (Bello, Cunningham, and Poh 1998; Pasuk and Baker 1998). The country was hailed as the Fifth Asian Tiger based on its booming export sector, novel usage of state-guided development with foreign investment, and extensive use of cheap international loan money (Bello, Cunningham, and Poh 1998). Its shifting political economies closely followed global economic trends in development thinking, moving from import substitution industrialization in the 1960s to export-oriented production in the 1980s (see Porphant 1999; Suehiro 1989). Thanks to a combination of military authoritarianism, Cold War aid and expertise from the United States, and foreign investment, Thailand transformed from a largely agrarian society into a rapidly urbanizing industrial one in a matter of decades (Glassman 2004; Porphant 2012). This rapid political economic transformation was profoundly spatially and socially uneven. Across the twentieth century, Bangkok was privileged as the spatial and political center of Thailand as it emerged as a nation-state (Pasuk and Baker 2004; Glassman 2010). Because of this, the countryside hollowed out as laborers shuttled between the rural areas and the sprawling capital (Mills 2001).5 Bangkok-centered expansion produced deep structural changes in the provinces. Geographers Jonathan Rigg and Sakaunee Nattapoolwat demonstrate that the nation’s economic shifts radically altered rural life. Migration became fundamental to filling the economic gaps left by land consolidation, falling rice prices, and increasing industrial wages (2001; see also Rigg and Salamanca 2011). Thailand’s growth over the last twenty years has been concentrated in industrial sectors and agricultural wages have remained relatively flat. Rural families have managed these shifts by adopting hybrid livelihood strategies that incorporate wage labor, both periodic and permanent migration, and new engagements with state policies (Walker 2012). The uneven distribution of both this growth and the burdens and possibilities that accompanied it are fundamental to the contemporary political upheaval (Walker 2012; Keyes 2014; Rigg 2019). Kevin Hewison points out that despite the economic growth of the last three decades, most Thai workers remain outside the formal welfare system, state investment is concentrated in urban areas, and taxation has been largely regressive (2015). At the same time, democratic political power has increasingly amassed in the provinces, where the preferences of most voters have been repeatedly nullified by military coups (Glassman 2010). Even as the country has managed to upgrade its

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status to middle income, the transition has heightened persistent inequalities that have always been simultaneously economic, ethnic, spatial, social, and political (Streckfuss 2012).6 Because the nature of its growth, Thailand is among the most unequal countries in the world.7 The northeastern region of Thailand—one of Thaksin’s strongholds, a focal point of pro-democracy Red Shirt activism, and where this book is situated—has been central to these debates.8 Isaan has long been marked as Other by its ethnic differences, its poverty, and its political subordination. David Streckfuss notes that these perceptions are tied to a deeper racialized logic of rule that was inheritance from colonial modes of governing adopted by Siam to restructure the Thai sense of self-identification and justify rule over the polity’s loosely held edges at the turn to the twentieth century (1993, 126). Because of its size (accounting for one-third of Thailand’s electorate), its ethnically distinct population (mainly Lao, but including a sizable contingent of Khmer and other ethnicities), its distance from Bangkok, its history of resistance, and its persistent (often deliberate) underdevelopment, Isaan—as it is known in Thailand—has long been seen as a dissident region.9 In addition to its ethnically and linguistically distinct population, Isaan is hotter and drier than the rest of the country. The region’s poor, saline soil and difficult climate produces only one rice crop per year. Its staple foods, sticky rice (khāo nīaw) and fermented fish (plā rā, pa dāek), are seen by central Thais as less refined and therefore morally inferior (Lefferts 2005). The region’s Lao culture—bawdier humor, distinct performance style, and less formal mode of speech—is understood by Bangkok Thais as similarly uncouth (see L. Smith 1996; McCargo and Hongladrom 2004; Pattana 2012; Platt 2013; Saowanee and McCargo 2014).10 For decades, Isaan people were subject to explicit and implicit discrimination via this national cultural hierarchy and direct repression via dispossession and militarized forms of development (Thak 2007). Indeed, these intersecting forms of inequality are reflected in the imbalances between central Thai prosperity and Isaan poverty and are fundamental to the composition of Isaan identity as a deeply political identity. They are also foundational to the ways in which Isaan political aspirations have been dismissed by central Thai institutions. In the last decade or so, the northeast has radically transformed (Keyes 2014; Rigg 2019). The region was a target of policy by Shinawatra and his successors, who built their political base there. As financial capital circulated from Isaan laborers working in Bangkok and abroad into their homes in the



Designing the Political 17

northeast, the region’s increasingly “cosmopolitan” residents (Keyes 2012, 2014) have gained a better sense of their capacities and have increasingly contested the visions of inferiority long associated with Isaan-ness (Mills 2001, 2012; Elinoff 2012; Sopranzetti 2012). Aspirations to belong to modernity, to participate in consumer capitalism, to enact their own political capacities, and to benefit from state policy grew in provincial cities, towns, and the rapidly transforming rural countryside. Throughout, Isaan has been not simply the geographic location of these transformations, but also one of the things being remade by these processes. Credit and consumption have been one answer among Isaan people to the question of how to assert their proper belonging.11 As Mary Beth Mills explains, Isaan migrants embraced their status through consumer purchases that reflected aspirations to be seen as modern and therefore equal with other Thais (2001, 2012). New consumer spending led to a booming housing and land markets in Khon Kaen as the regional capital transformed into important site of national growth and investment. Since 2011, land prices have tripled across the city (see also Macan-Markar 2016). New cars choke the city’s major roads, and old inner-city spaces are being bulldozed for massive projects like malls. Shimmering architectural renderings of housing developments and emerging infrastructure projects are sprinkled across the city.12 Although Khon Kaen remains a provincial capital, what Jennifer Robinson (2006) might call an “ordinary city,” that many Thais rarely visit, the city now bears all the signs of aspirations to world-class status (Ong 2011). The city is the center point on both the Asian Development Bank’s East-West Corridor highway, which will link deepwater ports in Myanmar and Vietnam, and along the long-planned Chinese-funded rail projects, which will link Kunming, Vientiane, Bangkok, and Singapore as part of the Belt Road Initiative. The promises of prosperity attached to these projects aimed at regional and global interconnections have transformed the city into a “landscape of accumulation” where speculation and property development drive accelerating urban transformations (Searle 2016; see also Shatkin 2017).13 Struggles over dispossession and political belonging are now woven into the fabric of everyday life in a place far beyond Thailand’s typical metropolitan imaginary. If migration, consumption, debt, and economic growth offered one answer to Isaan people’s efforts to assert their legitimacy, political mobilization has increasingly provided another. Throughout the last century,

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c­ oalitions of activists extended the region’s dissident political history in different ways (Keyes 1967, 1977, 2014; Ungpakorn 1997; Baker 2000; LoGerfo 2000; Missingham 2003; Somchai 2006; Streckfuss 2012). They often did so by mobilizing development as a “language of contention” (Roseberry 1996) to organize poor and rural communities to struggle against the pernicious features of the country’s social, economic, and environmental changes. These coalitions led to new slum rights networks, farmers unions, and anti-dam struggles (see Hewison 2000; Pye 2005; Somchai 2006; Missingham 2003).14 Although the movements often carried with them developmental models of citizenship that imagined the mobilization of the poor as a way of training them for democracy (Connors 2007), they also initiated transformations both at the local level, participants rethinking their relationships with one another, and at the national level, where they influenced policy shifts. For example, in the wake of these mobilizations policymakers under Thaksin sought to incorporate the voices of the poor by using community organizing as a basis for development policy (Walker 2012; Elinoff 2014c). In the streets, at the ballot box, and in governmental offices, people across Isaan began experimenting with modes of political being in a variety of sites. Within the Khon Kaen railway corridor, these distinct postures toward development and democracy were embedded within disagreements about the quality and meanings of citizenship. The railway’s land has been an important zone of urban settlement for the poor and aspiring classes in the regional capital since the mid-twentieth century. The structures organizing railway land were themselves deeply affected by changing political economies and have thus shaped how debates about democracy, citizenship, and the effects of capitalism have played out. These debates highlight the complex relationship between democracy and changing meanings of the good life under capitalism, a system that has brought with it expanding possibilities for material comfort and deepening precarity simultaneously. It was precisely these questions that animated the slum movements that emerged in the 1990s. These movements brought together middle-class activists affiliated with a growing body of NGOs in a coalition with residents that sought to organize the poor and challenge the State Railway of Thailand’s (SRT) efforts to evict residents in order to redevelop its land (see also Askew 2002; Ockey 2004; Bolotta 2017).15 Although the community organizers and NGO activists behind these movements often understood their work as part of a larger set of anticapitalist, antidevelopment, pro-poor mobilizations, resi-



Designing the Political 19

dents used the mobilizations to exercise their political voices, secure their homes, and protest against specific projects and their local effects regardless of whether they believed in the larger visions of change central to much activist discourse. Thaksin Shinawatra’s government (2001–2006) built its power on these tensions. The government’s agenda liberalized the market through loan schemes, adopted parts of the NGO platform by funding small-scale participatory projects, and recognized emergent claims to belonging in the provinces by offering a national health-care plan (Pasuk and Baker 2004; McCargo and Pathamanand 2005; Sopranzetti 2016). By engaging provincial aspirations, Thaksin extended the range of actors included in the political sphere and refashioned the relationship between the state and the market simultaneously. Thaksin’s policies targeted poor and provincial citizens’ desires for inclusion by creating credit schemes, housing programs, and (as noted) a national health-care plan (Pasuk and Baker 2004). He also incorporated numerous NGO activists and their small-scale development activities like savings groups, credit associations, and self-help housing and infrastructure schemes by supporting CODI and inaugurating the Baan Mankong housing project. This incorporation of NGO methodologies and personnel occurred as Thaksin rerouted funding from NGO work toward state agencies and assaulted the civil rights of more politically oriented organizers (Kengkij and Hewison 2009; Kuhonta and Simpeng 2014). Thaksin radically transformed existing activist networks by undermining their solidarities with the poor and silencing the activists themselves by assaults on their civil rights. At the same time, his policies validated the citizenship of millions of voters and opened the consumer markets to these same citizens as consumers via credit. Although the 2006 coup that resulted in Thaksin’s removal from office seemed to many—especially the rural and urban poor, the working classes, provincial citizens, and a host of other provincial elites and emerging business-based classes—to repudiate their belonging, the subsequent formation of the Red Shirt movement offered a space where those groups could come together to articulate claims of belonging in ways that were previously impossible to articulate (Chairat 2013). Emerging from the shadow of the coup, the Red Shirt movement gained momentum throughout the latter half of the first decade of the century, culminating in a six-week occupation of downtown Bangkok in April and May 2010. Structured by the same circular patterns of migration that shape the nation’s broader economy, families in

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the north and northeast sent relatives to occupy the protest encampment at the Ratchaprasong intersection in the heart of the capital’s hypercapitalist shopping district (Sopranzetti 2017; Tausig 2019). At the protest encampment along Ratchaprasong road, these desires for equality and inclusion were given public airing until mid-May, when then Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva ordered the military to violently evict the protestors. All told, nearly a hundred people died during the protests and thousands more were injured.16 These events reveal how democratization and capitalism radically altered Isaan people’s sense of who they are and what the meanings of their lives should be in relation to Thailand’s existing hierarchy. Experiences of capitalism, migration, and democracy transformed Isaan people’s expectations of the state, of their political capacities, and their relations with their fellow citizens. In this sense, the last several years have seen a redistribution of legitimate politics, which has thrown into question precisely who had the right to speak and be heard. Such shifts produced a tense uncertainty beyond the narrow sphere of institutional politics, opening new questions about the possibility of equality and its relationship to what constitutes a good and valuable life (Aulino 2014a, 2014b). As Thailand’s hierarchy was disrupted so was the value of hierarchy, resulting in pitched debates about the structures, aesthetics, and theories that define who a legitimate citizen is, how he or she ought to look and act, what he or she should aspire to become, and what role democratic politics would play in the making of the state’s future (Ferrara 2015; Herzfeld 2016; Jory 2002, 2016; Elinoff 2019). People like Boonma and his neighbors have increasingly embraced democratic politics as fundamental to securing their lives in Khon Kaen and enacting their visions of the good life. By asserting themselves as legitimate political actors, they see democratic politics as a way of actualizing long-deferred aspirations for equality even as Thailand has become increasingly prosperous. For the well born and the reform-minded middle classes, including many NGOs, whose livelihoods were organized around improving life in poor settlements, these transformations have also inspired uncertainty; many began questioning the value of democracy. For these groups, longings for a return to hierarchy are entangled with an emergent rural nostalgia.17 The same middle classes that aspire to urban lives lived in glass-enclosed Bangkok, also listen to country music, eat high-end versions of “rustic” Isaan food, and idealize images of collective rural lives embedded in values of cooperation and self-sufficient moderation, linked to a fixed notion of authenti-



Designing the Political 21

cally Thai values—especially those associated with King Bhumipol’s notion of the sufficiency economy (sēthakit pawpīang). By encouraging everyone to be content with what they already have, by knowing “enough” (khwām paw, khwām pawpīang), the sufficiency discourse resituated the problems of uneven development within the affective lives of individual consumer subjects by reifying a class-based moral hierarchy and pining the most subordinate, restless parts of that order—the poor and working poor—firmly back in its place (Elinoff 2014a).18 Even as these idealized visions of rural goodness have taken root in the city, Bangkok middle-class and elite animus targeted urban migrants by marking them as out of place, ignorant, crude hillbillies (khon bān nawk), even though many of the migrants were really long-term residents of the city and shared middle-class aspirations (Kate 2008).19 These feelings align with ideas of “Thai-style democracy” (Anek 1996) premised under the assumption that popular sovereignty has failed in Thailand because it upsets the country’s moral hierarchy by allowing rural and poor citizens political voices they are not capable of using responsibly (Ferrara 2015, 156). Signs calling urban migrants “buffaloes” were common parts of conservative protest rhetoric within the Yellow-Shirted People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD)—whose urban occupations in 2006 sparked the coup that ousted Thaksin and in 2008, when they closed the international airport ousted his successors—and its heir, the People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC)—whose urban occupation in 2014 led to the ouster of Yingluck’s government. This developmentalist rendering of the body politic was mobilized to curtail electoral democracy by restricting the domain of politics to “good people” (khon dī)— conservative, urban, male elites (Funahashi 2016).20 Among the middle class, the entangled effects of these capitalist and democratic expansions have been closely related to the emergence of a “postdemocratic” sensibility that variously views democracy as corrupt and politics as pointless (Crouch 2004).21 These feelings have fueled successive incursions against the electorate in the form of direct voter intimidation, judicial manipulation, and military coups. Organizing under the banners of the PAD and the PDRC, these groups sought to restore the national hierarchy by proposing a vaguely articulated vision of “new politics” (kānmư̄ang mai) mobilized through reform (kānbathirūp) processes that ultimately aimed to limit democratic governance by reducing the influence of the electorate in choosing the government. These “new politics” were a call to return

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to a model of moral hierarchy reflected in the harmonious beauty (khwām ngotnāgm) and smooth order (khwām rīaproi) of a polity ruled by “good men” (khon dī) according to the principles of “righteous kingship” (thammaraja) (see, for example, Gray 1986; Jackson 2004a, 2004b; Funahashi 2016). In this model, disagreements would be silenced and large swaths of the population returned back to their traditional, subordinate role without a political voice (Vandergeest 1993; Streckfuss 2012).22 These reformist movements recast development in an older model not as a right, but as a gift offered in exchange for docile compliance with the national hierarchy (Vandergeest 1991). This model offered a fundamental legal infrastructure for the country’s current constitution. What is at stake in contemporary Thailand is neither about democratic malaise, such as what Crouch describes in the United Kingdom or the United States, or a conflict between primordial communalism and insurgent individualism. In fact, despite repeated military incursions, attachments to democracy have expanded among many Thais even as communal values also remain salient across Thailand’s political spectrum (Aulino 2014b). Instead, these debates hinge on contestations over the way democracy transformed many Thai citizens’ understandings of their individual political capacities and their sense of the national moral-political hierarchy.23 Although rebellions and dissent have always existed in Thailand (and Isaan has long been a center for such dissent), democracy radically altered the form and content of people’s imaginaries of how social change might occur through rightful mobilization of their political selves. In turn, these movements generated visions of who might practice politics, how it might be practiced, and the kinds of lives it might enable. Thus, the tensions between the moral values of hierarchy and the political values of democracy have been essential not only in shaping Thai politics at a macro-level, but also in refashioning practice of government taking place at local levels. DESIGNING CITIZENS IN THE (POST) POLITICAL CITY The Community Organizations Development Institute and its Baan Mankong project, which began in 2003 as an ambitious experiment in urban policy, embody the tensions of democratic governance in this era. Thailand’s shifting socio-political landscape shaped CODI’s vision of urban governance in that it sought to incorporate the voices of the poor in the aim of improving the city



Designing the Political 23

and deepening their sense of citizenship. These projects accomplished this by emphasizing participation in a variety of venues, including urban design, architecture, community finance, and community construction. Baan Mankong is one of the largest participatory housing policies in the world. Hailed as both an innovation in policymaking and a revolutionary use of urban design (C. Smith 2011; Kimmelman 2011), the project was a significant deviation in the way Thai housing policy took place (Giles 2003; Endo 2014). By mobilizing the language of participation, policymakers sought to use the aspirations and labor of the poor to in address Thailand’s growing urban housing crisis. Here, the Thai case resonates strongly with a broader movement in so-called self-help housing (Yap 1992; Yap and De Wandler 1992), which repositioned the homeowner as central to housing policy and diminished the role of the state as a housing provider. By casting “housing as a verb” (Turner 1972), self-help housing leverages the labor, capital, design vision, and “personal investment” of homeowners as a basis for state-housing provision. Often, these policies cast participatory housing and urban planning as a way of democratic expansion (see also Friedmann 1992, 2000, 2011; Friedmann and Douglass 1998; Evans 2003; Darnier and Douglass 2009). Including new voices in governing has been essential to the simultaneous expansion of democracy and late capitalism (N. Rose 1999a, 1999b, 2000; Ong 2006; Trnka and Trundle 2017).24 Erik Swyngdouw argues that the turn toward inclusion has been contradictory, entailing the production of new modalities and techniques of power at the same time as these groups are brought into the scene of governing (2005; see also Paley 2001, 2002). Cooke and Kothari note that the ubiquity of participation within development schemes marks it as a form of tyranny for both practitioners and participants (2001). Occurring at a moment in which the state was actively pressured to shrink by structurally transforming its economy and ceding sovereignty to the market (Harvey 2005), participation arose in many places as a way to fill gaps produced by the narrowing of state services (Mehta 1997; Paley 2001; Dagnino 2003; Hale 2002, 2005a, 2005b; Postero 2007). Participatory strategies of development and governance are now the global governmental norm but paradoxically bound up in questions related to narrowing rather than expanding politics (Swyngedouw 2005, 2009, 2014, 2016). Claudio Sopranzetti argues that globally circulating models of neoliberalism do not map out clearly in the Thai case (2017). I echo this sentiment, noting the way Thaksin’s government simultaneously liberalized portions of Thailand’s economy but

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also expanded the realm of services offered to Thai citizens, sometimes mirroring market-based logics (as in Baan Mankong) and sometimes bucking them (as in the provision of universal health care). Despite these “mutations in sovereignty” (Ong 2006), it is useful to link the Thai case to this broader genealogy of late-capitalist governance because the underlying logics and tensions of neoliberal governmentality brought the Baan Mankong project together. Barbara Cruikshank notes that participatory policies often become a way of controlling the very people whose “problems they seek to redress” (1999, 2). She argues that governmental policies are fundamental to remaking forms of citizenship. From microfinance (Lazar 2004; Karim 2011; Roy 2011), conservation (Agrawal 2005; Li 2007), development (Ferguson 1994; Escobar 1995;), disaster governance (Vaughan 2014), to urban planning (Appadurai 2002; Holston and Caldeira 2005; Roy 2009a), the inclusion of citizen voices and bodies in processes of development is fundamental to contemporary practices of governmentality (Foucault 1991).25 Arjun Appadurai argues that these forms of participation can constitute a kind of “deep democracy” or “governmentality from below” in which the poor are empowered to mobilize their aspirations into urban projects of improvement which secure their space in the city (2002, 2004). Partha Chatterjee, on the other hand, points out that the emergence of civil society does not in fact create inclusive political space for the poor, but bifurcates the political by creating spaces of retreat for the bourgeoisie that relegate the poor to what he calls a “political society” left to enact politics by other means (2004).26 In this sense, inclusion has been a double-edged sword for poor citizens, entailing both possibilities to assert their voices, but also allowing powerful actors to shape development processes and to control the poor.27 Whether inclusive governance extends or limits democracy remains an open question for both scholars and citizens alike. Attention to participatory design practices in a city like Khon Kaen offers a way of reengaging these questions by considering whether design mediates or disrupts the tensions among capitalist expansion, emergent political aspiration, and post-­political inclusion (Roy 2009b). Here, many scholars have cautioned against the allure of design thinking. Lilly Irani notes that the promise of design, disruption, and innovation often work together in the contemporary moment as a repository of optimistic faith in the power of technocracy (2015). In doing so, this vision offers more than a glancing critique of democratic mobiliza-



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tions, setting itself against the messy, world-nearness of politics and, especially, care (Irani 2015, 19–20). Christo Sims extends this wariness, arguing that “romancing design” risks “obscuring some of its politics” (2017, 440). The romance of design has reached Thailand as well. Design books litter bookstore shelves across Bangkok. New design collaborations aim to remake whole quarters of the capital (Nirpaporn and Ellsmore 2019). In 2015, for example, Sansiri, a luxury real estate developer, papered ads for a new developments across Thailand, asked passersby, “How will you design your life?” In another, more ambitious example, the design of the new Thai parliament building aims to reconcile the theoretical tensions between democracy and righteous kingship (thammaraja) through the shape of the building itself (Lowe 2017). Such an endeavor reveals the way that imaginaries of architecture and design have been invested with considerable promise to transform life in Thailand in both small and large ways. Projects like Baan Mankong reflect, in some sense, this design optimism. Participatory design is often cast as a key part of a turn toward “progressive cities” (Douglass 2016) elaborated alongside strategies of participatory housing, participatory budgeting (Cabannes 2004; Baiocchi 2005; Pimental Walker 2015, 2016; Mitlin and Boonyabancha 2012), and “Design with the other 90%” (C. Smith 2011). Although Baan Mankong uses all three strategies, its emphasis on design has had a particularly redemptive sheen.28 By employing design as a site of participation, promotors of the project assert that communities and the city itself can be remade in the moral and political image of its poorest residents. In fact, the project also works the other way around, using the city and the house as a way to reimagine residents as different sorts of citizens. Baan Mankong was formulated by a coalition of architects, urban planners, and urban activists to improve the lives of poor urban residents by improving the physical quality of their neighborhoods through participatory savings, upgrade, and planning projects.29 CODI claims that the project improves the physical spaces the poor occupy by reorienting their values toward community, moderation, and harmony. As architect Somsook Boonyabancha, the project’s creator, puts it, change can only be possible if people change themselves. This is why upgrading is a powerful intervention to spark this kind of change, because it is so active and because it involves changing the status of these

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poor communities. It involves a lot of doing, a lot of management, a lot of pulling, a lot of communal decision-making, a lot of physical change being done right in front of your eyes. It’s not talk; it’s change. And so many experiences in Baan Mankong show that people can create something new and beautiful out of a very dilapidated settlement. They make change themselves. Upgrading is a powerful way to create space, so that poor people come back to believing in their power. (Somsook 2005, 44)

Strategies like these aim to use state institutions to reimagine the slum as a kind of urban commons whose preexisting modes of collective life can be transformed into a bulwark against the ravages of uneven development and rapid urbanization.30 As Donald Nonini’s engagement with squatters in Amsterdam reflects (2017), the institutionalization of the urban commons can be dangerous, eroding the very politics it seeks to support.31 Indeed, CODI’s efforts to use local forms of sociality as grounds for improvement evoke the ambiguous relationship between hierarchy and politics described earlier. On the one hand, the Baan Mankong use of participation sought to enable the poor to assert their “power” as actors driving what, in 2008, CODI called the “revolution of the slums.”32 On the other, CODI’s forms of inclusion ask the poor to engage in self-improvement in the aim of social harmony and national unity—themes fundamental to the kinds of political suppression common under the military government (Pavin 2010b). Citizen design in this sense may render the citizen apolitical. Thus, despite its progressive glow, Baan Mankong and projects like it are deeply bound up in the tensions of late-capitalist inclusion and Thailand’s broader debates over democracy. In Thailand, as elsewhere, the turn toward participation has taken place as the city and its spaces have increasingly become sites of capital production in their own right (Davis 2006; Harvey 2006, 2008). The progressive quality of participatory design cannot be taken for granted as distinct from managerial governance but rather must be understood as part of the broader assemblage of late-capitalist governance (Collier and Ong 2005; Caldeira and Holston 2005). As Domínguez Rubio and Fogué note, even though designs may “unfold” new critical politics, so too can designs “enfold” existing power arrangements (2015). Under these latter conditions, participatory design can quickly become a scene of what Jacques Rancière calls policing (1999).33 Analysis of Baan Mankong’s citizen designs offers a necessary corrective



Designing the Political 27

to the romance of design by highlighting the complex logics that shape its efforts to include the poor and govern them simultaneously. Design sits at the boundary between efforts to settle the political in one form and efforts to disrupt it by transforming it into something else. Thus, making sense of the political work of design requires exploration of techniques of government that seek to organize residents’ bodies, regulate their spaces, and manage their politics (Li 2007). Yet, as Birgit Müller argues, the capacity for politics is not contingent on particular frameworks of governance and instead begins with our abilities to act on our own time (2019). Building on this frame, Tania Li argues that the human capacity for critical politics is “permanent and broadly distributed” and, so, even the most sophisticated efforts to erase politics fail to do so entirely (2019, 47; see also 2008). As the Thai case reveals, even as the apparatus of political management may have grown in Thailand, so has the will to disagree. To understand the effects of this change, it is necessary to consider how the railway settlements were transformed into spaces where residents could, using the words of Jacques Rancière (1998, 41), “stage” their own equality in the name of remaking the political more broadly. POLITICS IN THE MAKING In considering Thailand’s experiment in participatory planning through the designs and disagreements that composed it, I aim to demonstrate how the diverse configurations and contentious collaborations entailed in the act of governing Khon Kaen’s railway settlements also became sites through which residents began enacting politics. As Jacques Rancière argues, the distinction between “policing” and “politics” is an important one for making sense of this dynamic. The former (policing) is an ordering that ascribes certain bodies to particular tasks, roles, and places within the configuration of the social that he calls the “distribution of the sensible.” The question of the social order is not simply about who is included and who is excluded, but rather where and how particular subjects are located within fixed arrangements of social life. Although laws and regulatory frameworks reflect these distributions of the sensible, the primary question of who the legitimate subject of politics is relates to who can be seen, how they are seen, and whose speech is heard as intelligible. These aesthetic qualities define the social terrain that particular police orders seek to stabilize. Thus, for Rancière, groups may be included in a social formation while remaining invisible and inaudible as

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speaking political beings. These groups, which are included in the political sphere but essentially invisible to it, are what Rancière calls the “part without a part” (1999, 29). The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. (29)

Although knowledge and power, in the Foucauldian sense, are inevitably deeply imbricated in the mediation of sensory experience, Rancière privileges the questions of how subjects are and are not visible, audible, or intelligible as speaking beings. Asher Ghertner describes how these framings overlap in a terrain of “aesthetic governmentality” in which beauty is explicitly mobilized in the name of improving the city and caring for the population (2010, 2015; see also Herzfeld 2006, 2016; Harms 2013, 2016b; Elinoff 2016). Following from this perspective, the aesthetic and the governmental necessarily converge in ways that are just as important as law in contemporary contestations over the political and especially in regard to questions of the rights of the poor to the city (Ghertner 2015, 186). However, beyond attending to the aesthetic as a mode of deploying power, Rancière’s notion of politics resensitizes us to the scenes in which policing—governmentality—reaches its breaking point. As he puts it, politics consists in blurring the boundaries. It is what happens whenever ‘domestic agents’—workers or women, for instance—reconfigure their quarrel as a quarrel concerning the common, that is concerning what place belongs or does not belong to it and who is able or unable to make enunciations or demonstrations about the common. (Rancière 2011, 4)

In this sense, politics is an act (Arendt 1958) that redefines the police order; it is transformative and world-making (Postero and Elinoff 2019). Here, the city serves as both site and object of contestation between capitalist spatial reordering, post-political urban management, and the emergence of aspirations for economic, social, and political equality (Harvey 2012;



Designing the Political 29

Holston 2019).34 Engagement with the urban as a political space does not merely open channels for understanding specific sites of contestation, but also offers a way of understanding how coalitions that aim to improve the lot of the urban poor are challenging the order of the political more generally (see also Fennell 2015; Anand 2011, 2017; Sopranzetti 2017; Chance 2015, 2017). Beyond merely expressing a “right to stay put” (Weinstein 2014), the contestations that erupted along the tracks around land, democracy, and governance, especially as they related to CODI and Baan Mankong, demonstrate how urban struggles can reach toward a broader rescripting of political life altogether. This book follows the constitutive power of disagreements as they composed coalitions, ruptured relationships, pushed government agencies to act, and transformed the look, feel, and smell of communities. Attending to the discursive, material, and aesthetic sides of these conflicts reveals how actors along the tracks actively recomposed politics with the materials available to them. I do not describe the development of a clear or coherent class consciousness or political programmatic, but instead engage with the kinds of heterogeneous, incomplete ideas that grew and transformed in and through the process of disagreement. Within these complex spaces, residents’ ideas surrounding how political order should look and feel begins to emerge in partial and not always consistent ways. In this way, my analysis focuses on a notion of politics that is distinct from either an exclusive emphasis on the exertion of power over people (Rancière 2010, 27)—whether coercive, consensual, or bio-political—or an analysis of politics as social stratagem, fundamental to earlier orders of political anthropology (Vincent 2000, 2–3). Instead, I frame politics within heterogeneous scenes of critical, collective engagement with the social order by a focus on the ongoing, partial, compromised, disappointed, rejected, failed, and short-circuited ways that disagreements nevertheless coalesced to challenge existing social orders and occasionally to produce new political worlds (Postero and Elinoff 2019).35 Discursive struggles and material politics shed light on the world-making capacities of politics. Things—infrastructures, technologies, urban plans, documents, files, nails, zinc, paint, concrete, tiles, and houses—are a way of reimagining and attempting to reorganize the political (Braun and Whatmore 2010). As others have shown, infrastructures such as roads (Harvey and Knox 2015), electricity and water meters (Von Schnitzler 2013, 2016; Anand 2011, 2017), and ramps (Hartblay 2017) generate possibilities for ­disagreement and

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critique that both redistribute access to services and redraw the boundaries of the political. These approaches recast infrastructures as, according to Abdou Maliq Simone, sites of “instigation” composed through complex histories of hybrid disputes, material things, agonistic coalitions, and ongoing disagreements (Venkatesan et al. 2018, 19–26). Even where power attempts to find closure through infrastructure projects, these studies show how the heterogeneous nature of social assemblage leaves space for disagreement to foment. Houses, as numerous ethnographies have shown, are fundamental sites where both citizens and the state struggle to enact visions of ideal citizenship (Holston 1991b; Fehérváry 2013; Elinoff 2016; Mack 2017; Archambault 2018).36 Attending to these disagreements directs our attention towards disputed visions of citizenship and the good life, recasting modes of suffering as means of struggle. Here, politics produces spaces that give rise to political subjectivities (Subramanian 2009). For example, many residents along the tracks often explained why they felt like they deserved rights to that land, which they freely admitted was not theirs, by saying, “rāo yāk pen thaothīam kap khon ư̄n” (we want to be like everyone else). The complex implications of this seemingly simple response encapsulate much of what is at stake in this book. The most interesting word in the sentence, thaothīam, is composed of two other words—thao (equal) and thīam (yoking or bringing together). In this sense, their aspirations reflect an imaginary of citizenship not rooted in pure equality per se as much as in equivalence or commensurability with other Thais, aiming to be “like” them in their fullest political selves.37 As Joseph Hankins and Rihan Yeh point out, “Commensuration begins . . . at the point where simple comparison gives way to the imperative to equalize, to make things measure up” (2016, 13). Material and aesthetic commensuration thus became as important for residents as legal and discursive equality. With the aim of reaching their goal of being like others, their homes and their voices both became a way for residents to assess whether and how they measured up to their fellow citizens. Politics emerges here as both a way of measuring one’s political status vis-à-vis that of others and as a modality of acting in the name of making different kinds of urban spaces and new kinds of people that measure up to new universal standards of political and social being. My informants’ simply phrased aspiration for likeness is, given the hierarchical context in which class, culture, and space intersect, a more radical claim for a different social landscape than it might first appear. Historically



Designing the Political 31

in Thailand, rights (sitthi), far from being inherent or equally distributed, were historically understood as privileges of powerful actors distributed by powerful actors (Thanet 1998; see also Loos 2006, 68–69).38 Thus, when the question of equality was posed by the Red Shirt protests of 2009 and 2010 it marked a kind of watershed political moment. Although most of my informants were rapt by these movements—listening to Red Shirt media, watching rallies on television, attending local and national protests, and debating the terms of the movement vigorously at home—this book does not directly attend to those protests. Instead, it describes engagements with politics that existed around, grew out of, helped deepen, and sometimes built on the promise of those movements without actually being functionally connected to them. Indeed, by attending to the scenes of politics influenced by, but not directly related to, either the Red or Yellow Shirt movements, the book grapples with the deeper implications of this contested political moment revealing how widely spread democratic sentiments are in Thailand and exploring their varied effects. It also indicates the ways in which the meanings of democracy remain open and deeply contested even among those groups most diehard members. AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF DISAGREEMENT It was not my intention to write a book about disagreements. Initially, I hoped, however naively, that studying the Baan Mankong initiative might offer a window into the way Thai policymakers had revolutionized development through design by creating a policy that promised to challenge poverty, remake the city, and expand democracy from the ground up, all at once; this was an enticing imaginary. Baan Mankong seemed a radical departure from Thailand’s history of imposed mega-projects and state-centered planning.39 However, as soon as I arrived in Khon Kaen in 2007 to conduct preliminary fieldwork, the tensions of this experiment were apparent. During that trip, residents described the city’s multiple conflicts between its two community networks, the NGOs that had been operating along the tracks since the middle of the 1990s, and the architects at CODI’s offices. The NGO activists were actively protesting CODI and its projects, seeing them as co-opting their own movements. If harmony was all over CODI’s marketing material, disagreement was visible in each of the spaces in which the agency was trying to work. Yet, despite the fact that planners bemoaned conflict, often to

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the point of pathologizing it, these disagreements seemed to move things. The ethically charged work of CODI’s architects, the politically charged work of the NGO activists, and the materially infused sensibilities of residents intertwined into a rich space of debate over the world as it is, as it might be, and over how it might become otherwise. This was not the kind of progress planners imagined. However, the disagreements themselves raised progress as an open, if charged, political question. Methodologically, the question these agonistic scenes asked was how I might attend to these contentious encounters by writing a world composed not of settled matters, but instead of disagreement. My answer has been to use these disagreements as a mode of stuttering ethnographic poetics. As shown throughout this book, disagreements have been fundamental to the sorts of outcomes that residents hold up as success even as such conflicts are elided from the ways CODI describes its work. Residents acknowledged that, without struggle, nothing would have happened along the tracks. For their part, many of CODI’s planners understand the difficulties facing residents and the place of struggle in their efforts to secure their lives. At the same time, they bemoaned local disputes as evidence of residents’ selfishness, unable to unite to remake the slums into spaces of communal harmony. Even the activists who supported residents as they made forceful claims against the state found themselves becoming targets of disputes raised against their interventions and the power relations on which those interventions were premised. Simultaneously, national-level disputes over the political itself have raised precisely the same questions. The boundaries of what, who, and how one might disagree over the unfolding world have been thrown into flux again and again by mass movements and coups. Responding to these conflicts, my research design traversed through and across struggles. “Following the conflict,” as George Marcus put its (1995, 110), pushed me to move alongside disputes through multiple sites—from the offices of CODI in Khon Kaen, to meetings of local community networks, to the homes of residents, to national slum networks such as the Four Regions Slum Network (FRSN), to the offices of the SRT and CODI in Bangkok. Along the way, disagreement became a key analytic and a necessary poetic for managing irreducibly conflicting visions of the world. As I participated in these debates and disputes alongside residents, architects, bureaucrats, academics, and NGO activists, I tried to make sense of incommensurate and occasionally incoherent interpretations of the same



Designing the Political 33

events. I followed architects as they worked on projects they were proud of and those they abandoned in frustration. I spent time with residents as they collaborated and when their relationships collapsed. Sometimes disagreements were public, such as those that occurred in the countless meetings I attended with various project participants—planning meetings, network meetings, CODI approval meetings, community meetings—as well as protests, planning sessions, seminars, and training sessions. Other times, these disagreements asked me to trace the ongoing discord of the present backward through ambiguous narratives of unsettled arguments. This effort at tracing backward never ended in a settled account, but typically inverted itself, popping up in another ongoing debate. Sometimes disputes would emerge in the process of working on upgrade projects, carting out rubble, digging holes, laying tile, and pouring concrete alongside residents as they explained why and how their communities were or were not moving forward on projects. I watched architects draw community plans that obscured debates they themselves had explained to me. I helped as CODI architects and small groups of residents surveyed and mapped their communities, including and excluding groups and individuals as they went. I watched community and network leaders successfully negotiate leases for some residents but exclude others. I helped residents dig through stacks of documents and watched them struggle to get projects approved. I watched and waited with residents as they debated with municipal authorities, with SRT officials, with uncooperative members of their network, with their own neighbors. I sat with them as they worried about whether they might be evicted. I listened as they argued over recent news about the changing state of Thailand’s democracy. I listened to how they referenced ongoing public protests by Yellow Shirts, Red Shirts, and PDRC organizers to comment on the way nationwide political shifts were shaping their lives and understandings of processes that had little to do with national-level disputes. At times, I also became an arguer, debating with residents, NGOs, and CODI the practices they were engaged in. My interlocutors shattered my simplistic sense of what struggles over housing, land, and rights might mean by explaining the complex terrains of contestation and exclusion that actual housing struggles advanced on and through. If I was concerned about everyone along the tracks securing their rights equally, residents, planners, and activists frequently disabused me of such naive sentiments with long discussions about how individual agency (evident in open protest, diffuse acts of

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refusal, and ongoing disputes, which were both personal and deeply political), bureaucratic recalcitrance, spatial scarcity, entrenched power relations, and long-standing local acrimony foreclosed the possibility of a mass local movement being successful and allowing everyone to stay where they were, as they were. More than that, few people I encountered wished for things to stay the same. Yet how things should be, what they could be, and precisely how residents might accomplish those changes were always issues just beyond settled articulation. So, rather than following certain plans toward certain outcomes or positing that such a thing might exist, this book considers these processes alongside residents from within the disputes they inspired. It takes up their processes of refining their sense of the problem and the solution as they went, neither ending at a point of clear reconciliation. At each stage, it highlights the convergence of visions and the contestations they provoked. In doing so, it demonstrates how the debates themselves reveal the contentious grounds on which these worlds were being composed of fragmented space, mismatched materials, fragile coalitions, and agonistic disputes. Although this book navigates a wide variety of settings, it primarily follows four parties: architects and planners from CODI; NGO activists from the Four Regions Slum Network; residents and community leaders involved in settlements that belonged to Khon Kaen’s United Communities Network (UCN) who worked closely with CODI; and leaders and residents in communities that belonged to the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network (KKSRN) who worked closely with the FRSN and more activist-oriented NGOs. My initial contact with the UCN occurred through CODI. Officials in CODI’s Isaan office (located in Khon Kaen) showed me around town, introduced me to CODI’s pilot project communities, fed me, patiently explained Baan Mankong’s practices, and generously shared their complex feelings about their work. CODI’s young staff of architects and urban planners were particularly generous in this regard. We talked about urban design together and debated about participation and rights. They showed me how they sought to instill particular values through spatial plans crafted on Google Sketchup and shared with me their doubts as local disputes seemed to deepen, undermining their technical work. They also brought me to planning and organizational meetings in Khon Kaen city, where I met Mae Hawm, the UCN’s loquacious and challenging leader, and the rest of the network’s leadership team. Mae Hawm not only allowed me to accompany the group on all its activities, but also offered com-



Designing the Political 35

plicated critiques of CODI and of Khon Kaen’s network’s histories including its contentious relationship with both local NGOs in Khon Kaen and national ones in Bangkok. She shared with me the roots of her decision to fracture the original UCN by breaking off alliances with her NGO counterparts and her neighbors and friends in that network to work more closely with CODI. She expressed the difficulties and limits of that choice. By attending the UCN’s planning meetings, protests, and other activities, I met residents in the network’s constituent communities and began spending time with their families and becoming more embedded in life along the tracks.40 So, although my initial contact with UCN was through CODI, I quickly began attending the group’s activities on my own and eventually the group’s members began to see my work as distinct from that of CODI. For the leaders of the UCN, my interaction with the activists and the residents from the city’s rival housing network, the KKSRN, and the national FRSN were far more problematic than my relationship with CODI. This difficulty arose from the fact that the two networks were originally one. As I detail throughout this book, the split in the network created incredible animosity between the city’s community leaders and spread conflict within across settlement boundaries. This conflict meant that when I spent time with a rival network, my loyalties were cast into doubt among both groups of residents. It also meant that neither group’s political position was allowed to dominate my thinking. My relationship with the KKSRN is rooted in my time as an undergraduate student when I studied the effects of globalization and alternative development in Isaan. During that time (2001), I met some of the KKSRN’s leaders and affiliated NGO activists. Building on those contacts, I returned to Khon Kaen in 2007 and reintroduced myself. I began attending the group’s meetings, protests, and workshops in 2008. I also attended special weekend retreats and trainings held by the network and its national affiliate, a housing rights group rooted in the NGO movements of the 1990s. The FRSN maintained an aesthetic of radical opposition tied even more deeply to Thailand’s student movements in the 1970s. Activist discourses and oppositional politics shaped their approach to community organizing, but also sat uneasily against residents’ desires for autonomous political voice and the activists’ role administrating the Baan Mankong project in their communities. Here, too, I spent a great deal of time in people’s homes and at their businesses, working on projects, eating, drinking, and arguing.

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Although my involvement with these opposing groups was occasionally a source of tension—residents frequently chided me for supporting one group or the other or they pressed me for information about each other and gossip from CODI—my insistence on moving across their boundaries was productive. My time with each of these groups broadened my perspective on their work and pushed me to deal with the irreconcilability of their disputes with one another. By constantly crossing the lines across networks, I was able to consider how such disagreements—in their knotty, heterogeneous, contradictory clusters—exemplified emerging political life along the tracks and reflected the key nodes of contention that organize the political in Thailand more broadly. The opinions of my informants were difficult to categorize. Rather than reading these positions as internally contradictory or incoherent, I allow them to remain in tension with themselves and each other as a way of taking seriously the uncertainties on which struggles for belonging, rights, and a better life proceed. It is precisely from within these tensions that it is possible to see the unstable, constitutive power of disagreement—the political refashioned ever so slightly with each debate. This approach to politics is both illuminating and frustrating. On the one hand, it opened up the way in which disagreement itself is visible as a fundamental part of making the world. On the other, my work has resisted a clear political program and seemed to offer little of technical interest to the people with whom I was working. Instead, it generated a fractured and illfitting ethnography of arguments that can appear to give way to nothing but a future of more disagreements. In some sense this is true, but in refusing narratives of closure, arrival, or consensus, this approach also makes way for insights into the actual work done by these kinds of contentious collaborations many of which persisted under the military regime and continue in the current moment. It also highlights the complex ways in which democracy might work at a fine-grained level by transforming people’s senses of themselves as political beings toward open-ended futures of debate. Although the 2014 military coup aimed to stamp out politics, the persistence of the struggles along the tracks, even in the face of ongoing evictions, marks these pockets of agonism as remarkable, necessary spaces for understanding the future of democracy. Indeed, attention to the way residents continue to argue and make life livable for themselves even amid political closure shows how ideas of democracy continue to live in a time of increasing repression. To both contextualize and explain the roots of the struggles in Khon Kaen,



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this book uses history and ethnography as ways of tracing out contemporary citizen designs and explicating the disagreements they produced. It is organized in three sections: the first, Prototypes, presents the history of the State Railway of Thailand to consider how that agency reshaped space, citizenship, and governmentality both nationally and locally in Khon Kaen. In narrating this history, I show how residents’ membership became enmeshed with the state-owned enterprise thus tying their prospects for belonging in the city to both shifting national politics and changing global economies. The second part, Assemblies, uses ethnographic analysis to describe the ways citizen designs brought people, things, and politics together along the tracks in the aim of improving life there and engaging in disagreement. I explore these contentious convergences through an analysis of the Baan Mankong project, considering the effects of the project’s efforts to transform community into a site of governance. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze the project’s planning practices and its bureaucratic forms. Chapter 6 describes how disagreements over visions of citizenship gave rise to new political communities along the tracks that led to more secure lives for some but increased precarity and exclusion for others. Chapter 7 considers how differing citizen designs inspired debates over the proper forms of the house and the community. Chapter 8 elaborates on how residents reevaluated their political capacities during this process, recasting their local political struggles in terms of larger debates over democracy in Thailand. The third and final part, Fragmentations, examines the countervailing forces that have remade both physical space in Khon Kaen and the national political landscape after the 2014 coup. Chapter 9 describes how urban space has been used to reshape Thai politics and to repress residents’ political aspirations in Khon Kaen. Chapter 10 considers how residents and their counterparts are responding to life amid expanding authoritarianism by reimagining their urban futures in a moment of apparent political foreclosure. It is sad that this homage to the power of disagreement found its form when such a thing has become increasingly outlawed in Thailand. Yet, by investigating Thailand’s political volatility through the disagreements that undergird it, this book demonstrates the essential character of such agonistic struggles, offering an alternative vision of how things were and how they might yet might be. Indeed, the richness of Thai democracy before the coup emphasizes the contingency of the contemporary political formation and suggests the inescapable necessity of a return to disagreement for both understanding and navigating political futures in Thailand and beyond.

2 Infrastructures, Nation and Citizen

On a preliminary research trip to Khon Kaen in 2007, P’Waen, a longtime nongovernmental organization (NGO) activist in the city, took me on a tour of the railway settlements. He introduced me to the upgrade projects I hoped to study and to the local leaders organizing those projects with their neighbors. We visited several communities participating in the city’s activist networks. By the day’s end, the deep divisions between these groups had become had become faintly legible to me. At the core of these debates were a set of rules dividing the of space along the tracks. The rules were part of the three-year renewable leases administered by the State Railway of Thailand (SRT) that had been offered to some settlements. They regulated not only how rent for the land was to be paid, but also how the communities were to be arranged spatially and which residents might be included and excluded. Sitting in the then half-finished community center in the new zone of T5, which I would come to learn was the most contentious piece of railway land in the city, Paw Nokhuk, a leader in the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network explained these rules to us: We live on the State Railway of Thailand’s land. They own it and we have to work as a community to follow their rules. Their land occupies the forty meters on either side of the tracks. They divided that land in half. We are permitted to live in the twenty meters furthest from the edge of the tracks, but not in the twenty meters closest to the tracks [figure 41

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2.1]. We cannot build houses in that area because of public safety. If we hope to sign a rental agreement with them, we have to remove all structures that cross that line. This is hard because in some communities there are many homes that are inside that line, so we have to work together. Once we sign the lease and comply with these regulations, we can begin to develop the land legally and become more secure because we will have rights.

Paw Nokhuk was in his late sixties then, small framed, but ropey; he had a deadly serious aura that softened toward me over time. His experience organizing his neighbors along the tracks had made him acutely aware of the difficulties of actually complying with the rules laid out by the SRT. Even though residents strived to legitimize their presence in the city by working with a variety of agencies including the Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI) and the Khon Kaen municipality, he knew that the SRT governed this land and that he and his neighbors had to follow their rules. This was first of many times I would hear these spatial regulations. Residents, community leaders, NGO activists, and railway bureaucrats recited

Figure 2.1  Sample map of a railway settlement. The dark gray area indicates the area in the twenty meters closest to the tracks. The light gray indicates the area in the back twenty meters. The map shows how various structures crossed these boundaries complicating residents efforts to reorganize themselves to spatially comply with the SRT’s lease requirements. Map created by Kitty Nongpon.



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them again and again. It was often the first thing residents described about life along the tracks regardless of whether they were explaining their predicament to me or in large public protests, city meetings, petitions, meetings with ministerial officials, or presentations for ongoing development projects to CODI. The rules were inscribed in the land via surveyor’s posts and evident in houses, where walls marked in orange noted what was to be demolished to comply with the conditions associated with communal leases. The rules produced new spatial practices, opening sites for gardens to be planted and walkways to be paved. The rules also produced cross-cutting zones of security and precarity within and across the railway settlements. For residents who lived in the “front twenty meters” (yīsip met rāek), the rules marked demolition and, potentially, eviction. In this sense, the interests of residents living closest to the rail line diverged sharply from their neighbors living just on the other side of that line in the “back twenty meters” (yīsip met lāng). Why was the railway involved in administering low-income housing policy in the first place? How did these lines come into being? What histories, designs, and contestations have given the railway settlements their shape and provided the SRT with such a powerful force in the everyday lives of Khon Kaen’s urban poor? In what ways do these histories reflect broader and more complex forces shaping the Thai state? How did these forces shape changing visions of citizenship among residents? The answers to these questions lie in the interwoven histories of the State Railway of Thailand, the city of Khon Kaen, the settlements built on the railway’s land, the lives of the settlers who built them, and activists who sought to improve them. This account, rather than provide a comprehensive history of the SRT, draws on secondary sources, development and planning documents, and the oral histories of residents and activists themselves, to explore the history of rail—first nationally and then locally, in Khon Kaen—to trace how that history shaped both the space along the tracks and broader thinking about the meaning and practice of citizenship. The railway served not only as a physical infrastructure for the nation but also as an infrastructure for ideas about citizenship, which were tied to deeper political economies of space, changing practices of dwelling, and emerging forms of land governance along the tracks. This perspective sheds light on how the railway became embroiled in administering the rights of the urban poor and foregrounds how the infrastructural transformations described later are similarly bound up in changing political economies, citizenship, governance, and politics. The chapter

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takes up Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) interest in the social production of space to consider how changing regimes of economic production and resulted in different modes of governing and claiming space. It also shows how these different regimes of production and different modes of governing allowed for distinct visions of national belonging, and therefore different horizons of political practice, to emerge. THE MODERNIZING MANDALA (1891–1941) In 1900, less than ten years after the first short stretch of rail opened in the Kingdom of Siam, King Chulalongkorn traveled by train 260 kilometers from Bangkok to the city of Khorat, a strategically important city and the gateway to the kingdom’s northeastern region. Given the Siamese rulers’ concerns over control of the territory (Anderson 1978; Streckfuss 1995), the trip had important political effects in a region whose sovereignty was loose and contested.1 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, conflicts between the French and Siamese over territorial sovereignty escalated, culminating in a series of direct confrontations in 1893. These violent engagements resulted in the demarcation of the national border along the Mekong—the French occupying the river’s left bank, and the Siamese dominating the right (Thongchai 1994, 109–112). At the same time, Isaan became the site of “millenarian revolts,” which sprang up across the Khorat Plateau in response to poverty and dissatisfaction emerging from the new Siamese administrative system, which regarded the northeast as a lawless outpost, populated by “ignorant” people who needed civilizing by the Siamese center in Bangkok (Keyes 1977; Thongchai 2000a, 2000b). Isaan’s distinct ethnic makeup and its geographic position between competing precolonial feudal states and later colonial powers marked it as a crucial site of anxiety for the Siamese rulers, whose hold on the territory was negotiated and fluctuating (Thongchai 1994, 146; see Keyes 1967; Thongchai 2000a; Streckfuss 2012; Baird 2013).2 Historians studying the history of rail in Thailand argue that, given this context, rail was an important technology that had critical effects both holding the kingdom together and shaping its politics and economy (Holm 1997; Kakizaki 2005). Rail offered the Siamese a technological way of tightening its control beyond Bangkok by shrinking the national territory, forestalling colonial incursions, routing the movement of goods and people through



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Bangkok, and, it was hoped, generating feelings of fraternal loyalty toward the Bangkok-based polity. According to Kakizaki Ichiro’s calculations, in 1900 it took eleven days to make the 449km trip from Khon Kaen to Bangkok, by 1932, when the rail line was completed, the same trip took only a day and a half (2005, 152).3 David Holm argues that this space-time compression effectively enabled Bangkok to bring outlying regions under political and economic control (1977, 113).4 Beyond the overt political effects of space-time compression, the rail system helped direct labor, goods, natural resources, and financial capital toward Bangkok, which had the effect of integrating the national economy and deemphasizing trade with other competing urban centers in the region (Kakizaki 2005, 214–249). State-centered rail was appealing precisely because of its reterritorializing effects, ensuring that the royal capital in Bangkok would serve as its center above other competing regional trade entrepôt (Kakizaki 2005, 97–99).5 By 1935, with the completion of the northern line to Chiang Mai, Bangkok dominated both the import and the export markets for all products moving into and out of northern Thailand. David Holm argues that roads were deliberately underdeveloped during this period to enable tight political control over national development. The rail network led to the rise of itinerant merchants and an increase in migratory labor to Bangkok as well (Pasuk and Baker 2002, 23). The rail system organized the national territory by structuring the flows of power, goods, and capital associated with the state’s emerging political economy to the capital. The rail system reorganized the territory in other ways as well. It pushed urban growth away from waterways and enabled cities such as Khon Kaen to grow. It also produced a template for the highway system which still parallels the rail line’s tree-shape structure. The rail lines produced a durable organization of power that became central to the modernizing bureaucratic polity’s (Riggs 1966) survival following the collapse of the absolute monarchy and the end of Japanese occupation. As Stanley Tambiah argues, the effect of these modernizing shifts was not simply a reassertion of the old galactic order with its loose, negotiated attachments, but instead the creation of a “radial polity” that replaced previous forms of negotiated hierarchy with a bureaucratic structure that distributed power from the center outward (1977).6 So, although rail infrastructure reflected a number of existing ideas about the spatialization of power, it also suggested the possibility of a ­modernized

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­mandala in which the gravity of the center was much stronger than in previous incarnations of the state.7 From its inauguration, the railway was also imagined as a mechanism for improving the population. In a speech before the opening of the line from Bangkok to Khorat on December 21, 1900, King Chulalongkorn remarked, I hope that this railway line . . . will have the same effect on the development of the activity and industry of my people as railways had in other countries. I also hope that more frequent intercourse between them will strengthen their love for each other and for their country and thus encourage their king to hasten the extension of railways to other parts of the Siam. (quoted in Holm 1977, 98–99)

The train was designed both to bring the rural hinterlands physically closer to the center and to socially reorient their political loyalty toward Siam and away from competing polities. It was also meant to effect change in the population, stirring them out of their perceived isolation and lassitude toward lives of “activity and industry.” The railway was both an infrastructural project and a mechanism of governmentality designed to transform the population by realigning its loyalties and values. In this sense, Siamese rail was very much an early technology of citizen design. The railway, thus, mirrors many of the other modernizing projects of the period with their explicit visions of good citizens to come. These projects included the thēsaphibān administrative reforms, which remade territorial administrative practices via the creation of villages (mūbān) as an administrative units designed to settle and govern rural areas (Tej 1977; Kemp 1988, 1991; Thongchai 1994). The census, which sought to transform the population from the multi-ethnic, multinational kingdom into the seemingly ethnically homogenous Thai nation-state (Streckfuss 2012). And, later, the rathaniyom cultural reforms, which aimed to regulate the behavior of citizens through their appearances, governing dress, architecture, family structure, and the uses of leisure time (Jackson 2004a, 2004b; Connors 2005; Chua 2012). Like those strategies of government, rail was premised on a developmental logic that characterized the kingdom’s more distant subjects as “not yet” Thai and in need of specific technologies—settlement, nationality, Thai language, and culture—to become appropriate, modern citizen-subjects. Yet,



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rather than simply operating at a political or cultural level, the railway generated, sustained, and deepened the uneven relationship between the nation’s core and its peripheries by etching developmentalism into the physical, economic, and political infrastructure of the country. The railway mirrored and enacted the spatial hierarchy of the country, centering Bangkok and asserting it as modern while organizing the provinces as temporally and socially backward elsewheres (Morris 2000). Dipesh Chakrabarty highlights how these ideas of political deferral are fundamental to developmentalism, which casts certain citizens as politically legitimate because they are located in the present, relegating others to both the past and a deferred political future via the production of notions of “not yet” (2000, 8; see Thongchai 2000a; Elinoff and Sopranzetti 2012; see also Wilder 1999). As Michael Connors notes, these developmental logics have had long-lasting effects on ideas of democracy in Thailand, which always appears incomplete and remains a deferred promise for poor and rural citizens (2007).8 Thus the rail project was never a neutral technology of modernization, but instead must be understood as a political infrastructure that both reflected and generated the political, economic, spatial, and temporal logics that have defined the developmentalist ideas fundamental to modern Thai citizenship. The effects of rail in Khon Kaen reveal the train’s spatial effects at a local scale. Before the rail network was built, Khon Kaen was essentially a collection of villages. As an administrative entity, Khon Kaen in fact moved geographic locations seven times after its founding in 1797 (Somrudee 1991, 171).9 In 1935, the city became an officially designated municipality (176). Then in its current location, the train transformed the small town into a center for rice milling (Pasuk and Baker 2002, 23). The city’s geographic centrality to the northeast (relative to Bangkok), its comparatively shallow history (and thus lack of entrenched rivalries), and its proximity to the contested border with French Indochina made it an attractive location from which to administer the region (Somrudee 1991, 172). The city remained the northeasternmost terminus of the network from 1933 until 1941, when the line was extended to Udon and then eventually the Lao border at Nong Khai (176). Yet, even by the early 1960s when the province was designated a regional development center, only 19,591 people lived in the municipality (175). Over the decades that followed, the city became a hub for regional governance, education, banking, and administration. Spatially, the city’s plan references the railway tracks. The main streets all

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reference the rail line, starting with the road closest to the line—Front Street (thannon nā mư̄ang)—and then Middle Street (thannon klāng mư̄ang) and Back Street (thannon lāng mư̄ang). The city’s government buildings, rice mills, courthouse, commercial banks, hotels and saw mills were built in close proximity to the tracks. As the city’s 1962 plan put it, In the town of Khon Kaen . . . the people’s livelihood is similar to that of a large village settlement. The majority of its inhabitants are farmers, whose fields are nearby the town. The railway, which passes by the town and has daily transport for both passengers and goods, brings to town a few transport-related economic activities. Hence, the livelihood of the people in town is higher than that of its surrounding villages. (Phang Jangwat Khon Kaen 2525 [1962], quoted in Somrudee 1991, 177)

Whereas previous town centers clustered around major river systems, urban centers like Khon Kaen grew along the rail line, which in turn organized the city’s streets and services. Yet, because the railway authority owned its own land, the area surrounding the tracks remained mostly free of commercial development. The railway authority even encouraged the migrants who worked for the agency as laborers to settle nearby (Patcharin, Thanajak, and Jaranya 1998, 9). Some settlers even received agricultural leases from the agency. Indeed, the land was ideal for new urban settlers. It was centrally located and close to labor possibilities and thus offered many newcomers a toehold in the city and a site from which to craft lives for themselves in a rapidly transforming political and economic context. The State Railway of Thailand inherited direct control over a vast landholding, which exceeds two hundred thousand rai (thirty-two thousand hectares, or seventy-nine thousand acres).10 The agency’s authority over its land enabled easy movement of equipment and labor for services, construction, and track maintenance. It also provided space for the construction of stations, junctions, and employee housing. Finally, it gave its bureaucracy power to dictate the development of the land, building and maintenance of the tracks, and use of local lumber resources. The railway’s dual status as a landholder and a state enterprise underscored the way railway space was constituted, not only through local practices but also through systems of spatial governance dictated in Bangkok, which were, in turn, organized (and reorganized) by shifting national and international political economies. The con-



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text of national modernization—which included threats from colonial and regional powers, internal dissent, and emerging notions of the ­modern—was fundamental to the rail project and the modes of governmentality it enacted during this period. Rail generated the conditions of possibility for urban growth in Khon Kaen, giving the city its earliest spatial form, and distributing its population in specific ways with respect to the tracks. ROUTES OF PROSPERITY, ROOTS OF SETTLEMENT (1945–1980) At the end of the Japanese occupation, the Thai government renewed its project of infrastructural expansion. Throughout the postwar period, the railway and its profits expanded alongside the nation’s Cold War–fed economic growth. By the early 1960s, under the guidance of the World Bank and the strongman Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, Thailand began crafting economic development plans that sought to prevent communism through modernization (Thak 2007). These plans, reflecting developmentalist consensus of the time, shifted Thailand’s infrastructural projects from railway development to road construction.11 Whereas the railway aimed to forge direct links between distant provinces to the center in Bangkok, enabling tighter control by the direct assertion of sovereignty aimed at channeling goods and people toward the capital, “roads were designed to provide access for government officials and workers in ‘insecure areas.’ When the government decided which regions would receive development funding, priority was given to areas that seemed to pose security problems” (Thak 2007, 155). In this sense, roads were a key tactic in the era’s “despotic paternalism,” which mobilized development to generate loyalty and quash dissidence. Between 1960 and 1965 alone, more than 2,300 kilometers of roads and highways were built. These “security roads” were, in fact, one of the United States Overseas Mission’s largest nonmilitary investments in Thailand (DiMoia 2018). The close relationship between state security and economic development was evident in the transport routes that targeted the northeast, which continued to be seen as a dissident region and was home to a large number of communist party supporters on fragile borders. The region also received special attention in that it became the launching point for US operations in Southeast Asia and was home to three US military bases, which had important effects for the growth and expansion of the Thai economy

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nationally as well as for the transformation of local spaces into urban centers (Glassman 2004, 36–37). Even with road construction becoming a priority, rail freight doubled— from 2,070,000 tons to 4,216,000 tons annually—between 1950 and 1964. Both freight and passenger traffic continued to grow by more than 70 percent during the 1960s (Ramaer 2009, 107). These Cold War investments spurred regional urbanization. According to the Ministry of the Interior, cities in the northeast had some of the highest population growth rates in the country outside of Bangkok during that period (Kermel-Torrès 2004, 50). Khon Kaen’s population grew from 19,591 in 1960 to 115,515 in 1983 (Somrudee 1991, 180). Although this growth pales in comparison with the hyper-expansion of Bangkok during the same period (Porphant 1998), the railway transformed what had been a provincial outpost into an important stopping point for urban migrants, a targeted zone of industrial investment, and a focal point of regional administration (see Glassman and Sneddon 2003). According to my informants, railway laborers built Khon Kaen’s oldest rail-side settlements during the post–World War II period. These workers were the railway’s human infrastructure (Simone 2004), carrying wood and forest products, hauling rice, and loading other goods onto trains as they ferried onward to the capital. They settled near the tracks without interference from the railway authorities and in some cases were even encouraged to do so. The first settlement in Khon Kaen was built in a decommissioned wye junction known as the thawng chāng (Elephant’s Stomach) because of its shape. Shortly after the settlement was founded, other migrants began making homes in other spaces along the tracks by making claims to land outright or buying rights from farmers who had pre-existing agricultural leases. Conversations with residents who knew this early history emphasized a kind of skillful strategizing when talking about their land claims, acquired through a practice they call jap jawng (grab and reserve).12 With some variation, particularly among residents who bought a “right” from a person with an agricultural lease, jap jawng stories follow a pattern of surreptitious appropriation, patchwork construction, and local negotiation with bureaucrats and officials. Boonma’s father, an early migrant who moved to Khon Kaen from Khorat in the late 1960s, described it this way: During the day, you’d gather whatever materials you needed—wood or vinyl signs, old zinc for your roof—to build a temporary house. Once



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it got dark and there would be no more officials from the SRT in the area, you’d build. In the morning, what could they do? Sometimes it took them weeks to know you were there, sometimes they’d know right away and they might try to evict you. You could also pay off an official or maybe one would come around periodically and collect “rent.” This was the case along most of the tracks. But once communities started to expand the officials couldn’t do anything.

Residents described living conditions as difficult in this earlier period. Because the settlements were on railway land, they lacked connections to the municipal infrastructure and drainage systems. Floods were common. Residents had to purchase water privately. Khem, a fifty-year-old resident of one of the communities, recalled jumping from “stone to stone like a frog” to navigate flooded terrain on his way to school during the rainy season. The regulatory lines that Paw Nokhuk described at the beginning of this chapter did not exist, so settlers built their homes in whatever available space they could negotiate without attending to the distance between their homes and the tracks. Although conditions were difficult, residents frequently described the city’s transition from semi-rural to urban with a hint of nostalgia, perhaps brought about by the memory of a time when the city was relatively small, land pressures weren’t quite so acute, and political struggle—both locally and nationally—wasn’t so acrimonious. They talked about how the city was surrounded by forests, how it used to be cooler and shadier, and how quiet it was at night. Many spoke about the cunning it took to find materials, days of hunting down leftover pieces of scrap tin, and the complexity of negotiating with or outsmarting the SRT’s bureaucrats. Through these jap jawng practices, they transformed the railway’s infrastructural corridor into an ecology of dwelling. In 1967, the settlements along some parts of the tracks, particularly those in the center of the city, had grown large enough that the SRT conducted a round of mass evictions (Patcharin, Thanajak, and Jaranya 1998, 9). This was a shift from the previous attitude of the agency toward the settlers who made up its labor force. Although informants reported that evictions were commonplace, most were piecemeal and did not involve the settlements as a whole. Residents described building and rebuilding their homes multiple times during this period. Their houses were dynamic objects, whose flexible

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materiality enabled them to shift about the city and eventually return to the rail corridor when eviction pressures subsided. These narratives reveal the ways residents’ lives were set in relation with the railway authority. These entanglements produced new possibilities and also new attachments to land amid precarious, difficult conditions. During the following decades, the houses changed from being temporary shacks toward becoming fixed houses with concrete walls and foundations. As families grew, residents subdivided their plots or sold rights to newcomers. Settlements spread out from the center of the city, migrants moving progressively further north and south along the rail line. In 1977, the railway changed its policy again, making tentative contracts with residents that allowed them to stay until the railway decided it needed to use the land again (Patcharin, Thanajak, and Jaranya 1998, 9). Residents explained that these contracts were deeply ambiguous. Some described them as ad hoc, comparing rent collection with bribing local railway officials who were kin mưā ng (eating the city/realm).13 Others said that they offered official assurance of security. In either case, these arrangements enabled residents to avoid eviction and allowed for continued settlement growth as more settlers made claims to the land and existing settlers sold parcels of their own property.14 While collecting rents, local authorities turned a blind eye to the growing number of houses that started to hug the railway line. Despite threats of eviction and the capricious system of rent, residents pointed out that the comparatively slow pace of urban growth and the plentiful land along the tracks made this earlier period feel more secure than today. The Fourth National Economic and Development Plan (1977–1981) designated Khon Kaen City as an urban growth pole with the aim of reducing the deeply uneven economic patterns that had emerged between Bangkok and the rest of the country (Glassman and Sneddon 2003). The transformation launched what Somrudee Nicrowattanayingyong argues is the most sustained and intentional effort at developing a regional city of anywhere in Thailand (1991, 18–19). Unlike in the previous era, which mobilized highly visible projects as efforts to “legitimize a particular ruler” and disrupt regional insurgency, the growth model in these plans aimed to create “an inviting climate for private investment” (Somrudee 1991, 196). Despite these efforts, the city was poorly positioned to absorb the former agricultural workers, who, amid the rapidly emerging industrial economy, had suddenly become “surplus labor” required to go to Bangkok for work (Glassman and



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Sneddon 2003). During this period, Khon Kaen became a regional feeder for migrants moving to Bangkok (Somrudee 1991, 253). As Khon Kaen grew, jap jawng settlements sprang up elsewhere in the city—near ponds, lakes, and wetlands where people had access to water. Given their weak claims to land, construction projects inevitably pushed these scattered settlements out, forcing residents to find new sites to build homes. The spaces surrounding the train tracks often served as a solution to this problem. Many residents relayed histories of mobility within the city, moving from one place to another, before finding something semi-stable on the railway’s land. Although the space lacked proper connections to urban services, it was reliably vacant and could be claimed via local relationships. This mode of dwelling reflected the limited housing policy in Thailand before the 1970s. Helen Chiu describes the way the Community Improvement Office, founded in 1960 as one of the first government offices dedicated to housing, was mainly in charge of slum clearance (1985, 32). Even after the establishment of the National Housing Authority in 1972 under the guidance of US Agency for International Development, public housing programs for low-income citizens were limited until the 1980s and virtually absent beyond Bangkok (1985, 37–41). Patterns of squatting and eviction were so common from the 1950s onward, Chiu argues, that they might as well be considered a form of de facto housing policy that solved the growing nation’s housing problems during a period of rapid growth. Khon Kaen seems to reflect this analysis quite well.15 By the later part of the 1970s and early 1980s, residents continued to make efforts to secure more meaningful rights. The Elephant’s Stomach community managed to gain a rental agreement with the local railway authority that lasted nearly twelve years. This was the first agreement of this kind, setting the standard for the battles over occupancy that were to come. Rental rights became the normative terms of negotiation between the SRT and the residents along the tracks, not land ownership. Residents in the Elephant’s Stomach explained that the community negotiated its lease locally and consistently paid rent thinking that the money was going to the central agency’s office. The payments, however, were apparently pocketed by a local official. When the central SRT office found out about this arrangement, it canceled the agreement. Volatile agreements like these demonstrate how kin mưā ng bureaucratic administration and jap jawng land occupation reflected particular modes

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of citizenship at the time. Local bureaucrats and urban settlers negotiated to create an ambiguous form of public housing on available lands that accommodated the needs of poor migrants, but also left them at the mercy of patron-client relations with bureaucrats. This de facto housing also mirrors something of the city’s emerging character—an educational, administrative, and banking center with few forms of large-scale industrial employment. The settlements accommodated the sorts of migration produced by these conditions as they enabled newcomers to the city to find employment as day laborers, vendors, and scavengers. Migrants’ labor and their housing filled the gaps in the city’s underdeveloped infrastructure. In this sense, the squatting, bribes, and patronage that made life livable along the tracks were not corruptions of the system, but instead reflections of normal orders of power and political belonging at the time. THE RAILWAY PROBLEM COMES TO THAILAND (1980–1994) The Thai state’s turn toward road construction in the 1960s reflected broader shifts in Cold War politics. The military-bureaucratic apparatus transformed the nation’s infrastructure system in ways that both expanded the economy and reconfigured power across the territory. As freight was diverted from rail to road, the railway’s prestige diminished alongside financial revenues (Ramaer 2009, 107). The SRT attempted to improve its financial standing by modernizing its service and improving its trains, but the efforts did not reinvigorate the state enterprise. Even as the nation’s gross domestic product grew on average 7.25 percent per year between the 1970s and 1990s (higher during the latter half of that period), the railway’s share of passengers and freight declined in comparison with steadily increasing road and air traffic (1993). By the beginning of the 1990s, the SRT was saddled with debt, sliding into what the World Bank dramatically called a “cycle of doom.” As the World Bank described it, this cycle consisted of service cuts followed by deferred maintenance, which led to worsening service, decrepit equipment, and ultimately, steadily decreasing revenue (SRT 1993, 3). Both the SRT’s master plan and the Seventh National Economic and Social Development Plan 1992–1996 (NESDB report) advocated for privatizing the enterprise in part or whole (NESDB 1992, 7, 14, 65–74). The railway master plan recommends some level of institutional privatization, though the document never clarifies just how much. The more gingerly worded NESDB report argues that state-owned



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enterprises should launch public-private partnerships (NESDB 1992, 7, 14, 65–74). The documents contain other signals of the pressure to liberalize as well, including references to decreasing tariffs, balancing books, marketbased pricing, and greater accountability. The degree to which these plans are peppered with these phrases demonstrates the ways in which discourses of centralized, state-driven development were being transformed by international development agencies and how that same language was being taken up in national development plan. However, neither the SRT master plan nor the NESDB report describe how the structural transformation of the SRT from a state enterprise into a private (or quasi-private) entity might take place. The plans do not enunciate what become of the massive bureaucracy behind the state enterprise system or suggest how management should deal with the powerful union of railway workers. So, even with increased pressure from international lenders and a truly dismal economic picture facing the enterprise, complete structural transformation of the agency seemed unlikely. The SRTs landholdings are briefly mentioned in the 1993 master plan. Although the bulk of the plan is devoted to finding a balance between privatization and the desire to maintain some amount of state control over rail service, the report argues that “the agency’s real estate should be dealt with completely separately from other services” (SRT 1993, 45). The implication seems to be that the consultants behind the document did not want the SRT to consider its landholdings to be an easy fix to its lingering financial difficulties. However, by failing to address the agency’s landholdings in any detail, the plan also erases the extensive settlement along the tracks. This is even more remarkable because in 1987 some of the railway settlements in Khon Kaen were legally designated as “communities” on municipal registers. This designation marked the emergence the railway settlements as official administrative jurisdictions; the designation of community (chumchon) status in urban areas was similar to that of village (mūbān) in rural zones, enabling residents to elect a headman and participate more fully in local programs. The designation allowed further material transformations along the tracks as houses were improved with more permanent materials like concrete foundations, bricks, and tin (Patcharin, Thanajak, and Jaranya 1998, 9). The status of official community had no effect on land tenure or governance, both of which remained controlled by the SRT in Bangkok. It is perhaps not coincidental that just as the master plan was published, the SRT began its efforts to rent its land to local business people in Khon

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Kaen. This led to the eviction of two settlements along the tracks. Approximately one hundred families were relocated and received no compensation. The families that attempted to remain in place demanded and subsequently received 10,000 baht for their losses (Patcharin, Thanajak, and Jaranya 1998, 15). According to interviews, the event revealed to residents what future contestations with the railway would look like. Dispossession in the name of real estate development was now an imminent threat along the tracks. At the same time, these evictions helped to encourage new forms of solidarity among residents (15). My point here is to highlight how these documents reflected changing ideas about the railway’s land during this period. Although by this time the land had become densely settled, residents paying both official and unofficial rents to the agency, the SRT’s planning documents do not mention these issues. Instead, they reclassified the land as a vacant asset, waiting to be capitalized. The evictions described were the first effect of this reclassification, and land emerged as an important, but obscure piece of the agency’s economic portfolio. This situation would become more acute when the economy collapsed four years later and the SRT turned its attention toward its land holdings to correct its increasingly dismal finances. CITIZENS OF THE STATE RAILWAY OF THAILAND This chapter describes the way the rail system functioned as a critical infrastructure of nation-building in Thailand, transforming both the national territory and its population. It demonstrates how rail enacted these changes in multiple ways: directing flows of goods and capital, initiating new forms of governance, connecting the territory, creating new forms of mobility, re­imag­ining the population, and reshaping Thailand’s topography of power. At the same time, it describes how the railway also produced effects beyond Bangkok by creating new urban spaces such as Khon Kaen. There, the railway oriented urban space, generated new opportunities for migrant labor, transformed the local economy, and created new sites of dwelling in the city. These opportunities brought poor urban migrants into a new relationship with the powerful state agency, which effectively governed not only its land, but also migrants’ rights and their possibilities for citizenship. As Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta point out, “Material infrastructures, including roads and water pipes, electricity lines and ports,



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oil pipelines and sewage systems, are dense social, material, aesthetic, and political formations that are critical both to differentiated experiences of everyday life and to expectations of the future” (2018, 2). Indeed, as described, the Thai railway has been deeply enmeshed with both local and national politics since its inception. However, the history of Khon Kaen’s railway settlements reveals the ways in which the SRT’s role continues to exceed that as a facilitator of goods, people, and capital, in that it also shaped the possibilities of rights and secure futures for the thousands of settlers in Khon Kaen and across the country that came to dwell on SRT land. The history of the railway is also the history of the people it came to govern in intimate ways. Finally, this chapter reveals how the meanings and contexts of infrastructural governance were enmeshed with broader political, economic, and technological shifts. If the early history of rail marked the system through ideas of modernity, speed, and mobility, later periods saw the system decline into an apparent symbol of the bloated state in need of structural transformation. Thus, the emergence of the idea of the SRT as a property manager reflects the ways in which the agency transformed, shifting alongside other ideas about development, modernity, and the structure of the economy. Residents were caught up in these changes as their dwelling spaces were shaped and reshaped by changing political economic models. In this way, changing political economies transformed the position of the SRT in relation to the Thai state, while profoundly shaping and reshaping the physical space along the tracks and so too the frameworks for dwelling in that space. If the middle of the twentieth century was structured by the expansion of rail and settlement along the tracks was marked by jap jawng–kin mư̄ang relations between bureaucrats and settlers, the end of the century was shaped by new logics of real estate, market liberalization, and practices of dispossession. These forces inspired new coalitions and practices of development, while also fomenting the struggles over citizenship and the right to the city that have been fundamental to Khon Kaen’s urban politics in the twenty-first century.

3 From Crisis to Community

Paw Thamrong is a longtime community leader in the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network (KKSRN), a former engineer, and a resident of Zone 3, a small settlement that formed when it split from Chumchon Phư̄anbān, one of the largest settlements in Khon Kaen. One of the founding members of the KKSRN, he was recruited by P’Ko, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) activist from Khon Kaen, to set up that network after Mae Hawm and the United Communities Network (UCN) splintered in the early 2000s. In late November of 2008, the three of us met to discuss the moment Paw Thamrong decided to begin organizing his community: P’Ko: Organizing groups in the community is extremely important. [As an organizer] If you analyze incorrectly you’ll have a big problem . . . When the government has money they use it and they give it to anybody and they spend it. But what happens if the money runs out? Paw Thamrong: Then the money doesn’t come again, so you need to look for quality. P’Ko: This is really important for the villagers. You need to analyze what is important to them. For example, maybe it is just a group that gives people a little extra money to help people go to school—maybe a couple hundred baht per year or a thousand baht per year. Some NGOs just give 58



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money to people. Some groups help the middle class only. NGOs need to think about what is right for the people they work with. Eli, have you ever heard the phrase ot brīao wai kin wān [If you can refrain from eating sour, you’ll eat sweet]?1 You need to be very calm [jai yen]. You need to work like this. You need to wait for people to be ready. We all want to push people but they aren’t ready. When they are ready they will rent. Paw Thamrong: I waited a long time. At first, I didn’t want to rent. I didn’t understand. I was just there as before and then I changed my heart. I was ready. P’Ko: I remember I would just come around and you weren’t interested but then, eventually, you were. It is like with a mango . . . it is ready to eat when it is ripe. If we eat it when it is sour it is not delicious, but if you wait. . . .  You need to wait for the villager to be ripe [tawng raw chāobān hai pen suk]. You need to wait for the villager to be ready. If we only had two years, if we only had a short budget, it would be six months left and then you’d have to start pushing. Paw Thamrong: I took five years. The first time he came by, I didn’t want to hear it. But eventually . . . [he smiles]. P’Ko and Paw Thamrong’s conversation about their early collaboration hints at the complex spatial, socio-political, and personal processes that began in the middle of the 1990s along the tracks when NGO activists began working with residents. Engagements between residents and these nonstate activists transformed not only the physical spaces along the tracks but also the residents. The NGOs brought with them knowledge, money, infrastructure plans, ideas about politics, and visions of individual and collective transformation. They also helped usher in new regimes of participatory urban governance that linked a host of global development trends—community planning, participatory architecture, new infrastructural initiatives, and community savings and credit projects—to existing histories of urban activism. These trends asserted competing roles for state and nonstate agencies, offered sites of intervention for activists, and became vehicles for debates over competing visions of citizenship and politics.

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Amid these shifts, the Thai economy collapsed. The economic crisis both expanded the State Railway of Thailand’s (SRT) efforts to capitalize on its landholdings and intensified settlement along the tracks. At the same time, NGO activists and development experts began deepening their engagements with residents both on specific development initiatives and on long-term political projects. Community, previously either an administrative technology or a loosely held social ideal, emerged as both a modality of development assistance and a vehicle of politics as residents and their activist counterparts organized collective protests to stave off eviction and dispossession and to assert the political agency of the poor. The convergence crisis and community radically transformed life along the tracks. Distinct genealogies of urban mobilization shaped the emerging logics of government, ideas of citizenship, and practices of politics circulating through Khon Kaen’s communities during this pivotal period.2 As new coalitions reimagined the slum in multiple ways—as a political assembly, as a site of infrastructural development, as a space of moral pedagogy, as a mode of government—they also opened up new disagreements about citizenship and the meaning of politics. These projects remade the space along the tracks as the more-or-less loosely organized settlements attempted to unify themselves as communities. Paradoxically, this process of unification proceeded through contentious fragmentation. These shifts not only transformed the settlements as spaces but, as Paw Thamrong describes, the lives of residents themselves. Through their alliances with NGOs and state agencies, residents began to reimagine their capacities and imagine new ways in which they might organize to assert themselves by making claims to the city and to their legitimacy as political actors more generally. MOBILIZING COMMUNITY (1994–2007) As the SRT transformed its land into a real estate asset to address its debt, NGO activists and residents began recognizing the increasing poverty along the tracks. According to P’Waen, an NGO advisor who worked in Khon Kaen’s communities during this early period, Khun Sompop Bunnag was one of the first NGO to begin working in Khon Kaen city’s poor communities. Before Khun Sompop, P’Waen noted, “NGOs only knew about the slums in Bangkok.” Khun Sompop had previously worked in rural areas but had begun to



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notice that many rural people had been moving to cities for work. On one trip to Khon Kaen, he recognized the settlements along the tracks, noting that urban poverty was a growing issue in the provincial city. Khun Sompop took P’Waen to visit the communities. Although an estimated fifty NGOs were working in the northeast during the 1990s, few focused on urban issues (Patcharin, Thanajak, and Jaranya 1998, 12). Having worked with a foundation for foster children, P’Waen had known about rural issues in Isaan but began working in urban communities when he saw how rapidly the railway communities were expanding. Initially, he and his collaborators conducted projects focusing on infrastructure, paving roads and improving drainage in many centrally located communities. They also began creating connections between government agencies and the residents. As P’Waen explained, “At first they [government bureaucrats] were very honest they said, ‘I thought the slums were low class that had no education.’ But afterwards many local officials began supporting us.” When activists such as Khun Sompop, P’Waen, and later P’Ko moved away from rural areas, they transferred some of the norms, expertise, discourses, and organizing practices to urban ones with people facing very different conditions.8 Here, the legacy of Thailand’s Community School combined with emerging modes of activism and networks of urban politics that had developed in the larger slums of Bangkok. Whereas the Community School emphasized small-scale development, communal savings, mutual care, and local autonomy (Chaitthip 1991, 1999), the slum movements advocated political mobilization rooted in immersion in the everyday life of settlements. At first, engagements between NGO activists and residents were tentative. “We’d go maybe once or twice a month, just to go and talk,” P’Waen said. We’d try to get people to sit and talk about their problems and to begin organizing themselves. We went to the municipality, but they said they couldn’t do anything because the SRT owned the land. Eventually though, they’d give a little money for a project or some equipment or construction materials, and the community would supply the labor.

These long, slow engagements, reflected common NGO-organizing practices at the time. In the mid-1990s, Khon Kaen’s NGOs partnered with the Danish government through its development agency DANCED to

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c­ oordinate local development projects targeting communal savings and the physical environment. According to P’Waen, these projects emphasized construction because the settlements lacked essential physical infrastructure. However, P’Waen and the other NGOs imagined infrastructure as a mode of organizing: Some communities got plumbing systems. We used a system of community builders. Residents would build it on their own within the community finding links to connect their projects to the larger municipal systems. The SRT didn’t let the city build plumbing on the its land, but if the villagers did it themselves then it was ok because they did it on their own. The Elephant’s Stomach community got all this done first. Electricity remained a problem as well. We had to think bigger with these projects: We didn’t just think about roads as roads, but because the slums were often flooded or had small wetlands, there were mosquitos and people would get sick really easily, a fever or whatever, the concrete helped with that. The other thing was that kids had a place to play and now it was much more convenient for cars and motorcycles or bikes to use.

Because the settlements lacked access to city services, early interactions with NGOs involved development initiatives that targeted basic infrastructural improvements. These projects became increasingly possible because, in 1992, housing advocates successfully transformed Thailand’s housing registration laws. Since the mid-1950s, the ability to receive services such as electricity depended on having a permanent house registration number (thabīan bān thāworn). Many poor communities were, for the same reason, excluded from both official infrastructures and local schools and hospitals. Under these conditions, residents had to purchase water from local merchants and electricity had to be arranged via illegal connections with other private citizens who charged high prices for usage.3 The passage of the Housing Registration Act of 1992 divided homes into permanent and temporary. A temporary house was defined as “a house built on public lands or encroaching on protected forests or a house constructed without complying with the Building Code of 1979” (cited in Kumar, Shrestha, and Salam 2012, 6). As municipalities across Thailand began issuing temporary housing registrations (thabīan bān chuakhrāw) residents gained access to a range of local services. Most important, their children were able to attend local schools and



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home owners could install temporary water and electric meters. Although these meters continue to charge higher prices than permanent ones, they brought official urban services to many settlements along the tracks for the first time. According to the city’s mayor at the time, Han Siripol, the inclusion of the settlements in the city’s official population tally ultimately benefited local politicians and municipal governments more than the residents of the settlements. The politicians could now count on residents as voters and the municipality could include residents in their official population numbers and thus access new funds, but residents still lived on land that was officially outside the municipality’s jurisdiction and, thus, had to continue to negotiate with the SRT for infrastructure and land rights (Patcharin, Thanajak, and Jaranya 1998, 9). Nevertheless, even if temporary permits did not solve all of the problems facing residents, they were a critical step toward legitimizing settlement residents’ rights to the city and their political status more generally. According to P’Waen, the mayor also began to pay increased attention to the railway settlements through beautification projects. Interviews with Siripol describe how the municipality offered additional aid to settlement residents in an effort to incorporate them in city development processes (Patcharin, Thanajak, and Jaranya 1998, 11). Although it remained impossible for the municipality to give residents permanent land rights, the temporary registrations made the communities legitimate targets for development funding, municipal public health programs, and educational centers. Still, any proposed construction projects had to be approved by the SRT first. Thus, the municipality remained limited in what it could do. In the wake of the 1993 evictions, NGO activists began setting up the United Communities Network. The UCN was initially composed of thirteen settlements along the tracks and another eleven low-income communities from elsewhere in the city. The UCN directed its work toward building relationships among residents within and across communities and helping them develop a core of local leaders. Residents working with these activists connected with each other and the growing coalition of housing rights groups in Bangkok. To understand the broader character of this work, it is necessary to situate Khon Kaen’s emerging network within the legacies, tensions, and disagreements that shaped much NGO activism in Thailand. As Somchai Pathanaranunth describes in his research on the history of the Isaan Small Scale Farmers Assembly, the political legacies of NGO activism in ­Thailand are complex, emerging from the student movements and communist i­ nsurgencies of the

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1970s (2006, 66; see also Kanokrat 2012). This history contains both radical and apolitical elements, which aimed to mobilize “the poor” (khon jon)— imagined here as a revolutionary figure—to transform the state and disrupt capitalism or to use development to help improve their lives, respectively (Somchai 2006, 61).4 These two elements worked together in an uneasy tension throughout the formative period of the NGO movement in the 1980s. In the early part of that decade, activists focused mainly on the distribution of aid through small-scale projects. Given increasing pressures from development projects and resource extraction, many NGOs turned to more radical political action (Somchai 2006, 61). The transition to democracy in 1992 opened up political possibilities nationally for NGO activists and the social movements they advised to take on a more overt political role.5 The ­activists—mainly middle class, socially conscious, educated, and usually from Bangkok—began expanding their influence, using development projects to gather groups of settlers in national forests, small-scale farmers, dam-affected people, and urban slum dwellers into broader pro-poor political networks. These movements became the basis of the nationwide coalition, the Assembly of the Poor (samachā khon jon) whose mobilization in the late 1990s was a peak for NGO organizing and pro-poor politics. Although the group’s gains were temporary, they demonstrated the possibilities of a mass mobilization of poor citizens (Missingham 2003). The slum and housing movements in Bangkok were fundamental to this coalition. Evictions were commonplace in Bangkok. Official efforts to relocate evicted communities resulted in the peripheralization of poverty to spaces that lacked access to employment opportunities and urban services (Somsook 2003, 2–3). In that context, anti-eviction struggles became a focal point for a new generation of urban-focused NGOs (Ockey 2001, 2004; Abhayuth 2002; Askew 2002; Boonlert 2003; Somsook 2003; Bolotta 2017, 2018; Shelby 2019). These movements were rooted in a genealogy of earlier eras of slum organizing in Bangkok that linked religious-based charities, the student movements of the 1970s, and the Communist Party of Thailand. NGOs such as the Human Settlements Foundation, Plan International, the People’s Organization for Development, the Building Together Association, the Duang Prateep Foundation, and the Human Development Centre transformed poor urban communities into sites of charitable aid, development work, and political organizing aimed at building a mass social movement to advocate for the rights of slum dwellers (Boonlert 2003; Somsook 2003, 3; Bolotta 2014, 2017).



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NGOs also acted as mediators between landholders in impending evictions (Askew 2002, 147–148). Such engagements inserted NGOs into deep disputes within community life, where they functioned both as political organizers, development agents, and moderators of complex and internal struggles within settlements. In these multiple roles, NGOs trained residents to become community leaders capable of working with state and city agents on their own as well as to manage their own disputes. These activists ushered many communities through numerous transitions in formal political structures. In particular, they facilitated shifts from the 1970s and 1980s, when slum politics were governed by patron-client relations (Akin 1999), to increasing democratization in the late 1980s and 1990s, when slum politics sought to highlight both the vulnerability and protagonism of the poor (Ockey 1996, 2004), and into the 2000s, when notions of participation, transparency, good governance, and local participation became the norms (Shelby 2019). Giuseppe Bolotta points out that although early slum organizations like the Duang Prateep Foundation began as humanitarian missions working for women and children, they transformed into forums for political organization, leading, in part, to the creation of groups like the Four Regions Slum Network (FRSN) (2014, 2017). Leaders like Suwit Watnoo, a former Communist Party of Thailand member, organized slum dwellers and helped link their concerns to national coalitions involved in the pro-democracy movements in 1992 and pro-poor protests of the latter part of the decade (Kanokrat 2012, 192). Hayden Shelby notes slum movements were also composed of a second strain of NGO activists, such as Abhayuth Chantrabha, whose methods built on ideas of community organizing with their roots in the methods of Saul Alinsky (2019, 60). However, unlike other forms of charitable aid, slum activism as Suwit and Abhayuth pursued it, was building residents’ organizing capacities to help them cultivate their political voice to influence policy and to enable them to support each other internally (Akin 1999, 46–60; Abhayuth 2009, 11). Despite their differences, these strains of social activism were essential to the ideas about citizenship and community circulating through the slum movements. By fusing development and aid with various forms of political organizing, NGOs began important conversations among residents about the causes and effects of structural inequality and about the abilities of the poor to mobilize as a political community to transform those structures.

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The emergence of community finance within the National Housing Authority offered yet another vision of the slum, transforming the idea of what a community was yet again. Launched in 1992 by a group of progressive community architects, the Urban Community Development Office (UCDO), was a result of the convergence of the slum movements and the growing community finance movement that saw community as a mode of social development and financial disbursement. Advocated for by key figures such as the well-known activist architect Somsook Boonyabancha and former head of the Government Savings Bank Paiboon Watthanasiritham, UCDO sought to expand community savings groups and rotating credit funds to improve community relations, thus building on their early forays into community organizing conducted through experiments with “land sharing” projects in Bangkok (Somsook 2003, 3). UCDO mobilized the idea of community as a way of distributing new kinds of development finance in the form of lowinterest mortgages and local credit unions. Inspired by models like the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and the Community Mortgage Program in the Philippines, the progressively minded architects at UCDO started the Urban Poor Development Fund with 1.25 billion baht (roughly $50 million in 1992), UCDO argued that local finance projects demonstrated that “the urban poor were capable of running their own savings groups and development activities, and taking care of the repayment process” (Somsook 2003, 4). These modes of government reimagined residents as agents of financial responsibility who, given the right technical and social assistance, might transform their lives and communities on their own. By demonstrating that they could save, cooperate, manage money transparently, and manage debt, UCDO argued that these projects revealed that the poor were capable of improving the city by themselves. The Urban Poor Development Fund initially sought to intervene within growing scenes of urban poverty caused by Thailand’s rapid economic grow by helping the poor improve their income so that they could move from informal settlements to land and houses they owned (Somsook 2003, 1). The fund model aimed to meet two perceived needs: On the one hand, there was a need for a financial system that was more flexible and more directed to the needs of low-income groups, as they developed enterprises or other income-earning opportunities. On the other, rising inequality, combined with a widespread recognition that the



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benefits of economic growth should be shared, enabled a strong social development direction to permeate the new institution. The Fund was a response to the large gap that had been created between the formal and informal systems of urban development, designed from the wealth of experiences and potential learned from various initiatives in the 1980s. (Somsook 2003, 6)

The fund’s institutions—such as savings groups, collective administration committees, and credit unions—aimed to transform community into an economic unit. Relying on a kind of commoning logic, UCDO sought to pool residents’ resources to enhance local capital while producing community as a site of financial security, social engagement, and mutual care (for more on the notion of commoning, see Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healey 2016, 195; also 2013). These practices extended the sense that community was a social good. They also raised new questions about what community might be good for: was community a mode of political action, a target of development funding, a site of mutual care, or a mode of government administration? Different answers to the question of what the goal of community organizing was or should be drove a wedge between the residents who sought to assert their social and political legitimacy, the activists who emphasized community as a means of political struggle aimed at securing rights, and the groups such as those working with UCDO that saw savings, credit, and community development as best path toward social improvement. As Craig Reynolds points out, these conflicting definitions of community have deep roots in Thailand: community has been taken up both by the left and right in Thailand as part of broader political projects (2009). Indeed, the discursive effects these multiple framings of community in Khon Kaen were both paradoxical and powerful. By mobilizing ideas of community to speak about the slum, NGO activists radically disrupted the sense that the poor were innately inferior and incapable of taking care of themselves. In doing so, they asserted that the poor not only had a right to their lives in the city but also that they deserved broader support from the state. At the same time, the emerging use of community as a mode of financial disbursement extended the complex spatio-temporal discourse about rural life, which characterized the poor as primordial villagers both naturally communal and innately collective as political actors. Even though these discourses extended the social value of community, they also mischaracterized most of residents’ livelihoods

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and their loose relations with each other (see also Mills 2002, 2012; Elinoff and Sopranzetti 2012). They also obscured the complex economies land in most Thai cities where residents did not think of their land as a collective asset. More than that, they asserted new practices of government that sought to situate the poor within fixed communities binding them to one another through new financial relations. Nevertheless, as a counterdiscourse that emerged in its context, these ideas also challenged the prevailing sense that poor people were immoral, lazy, and dangerous by asserting that, with enough training, they could be transformed into protagonists in urban improvement. ECONOMIC CRISIS AND COMMUNITY ORGANIZING CONVERGE After the onset of the 1997 the Asian financial crisis, the SRT’s long-standing financial problems became an increasingly urgent problem for settlers along the tracks. During the collapse, the Thai economy shrank by 11 percent (see Pasuk and Baker 1998). Thailand’s economic collapse and subsequent request for financial assistance from the Internal Monetary Fund (IMF) increased pressure on the SRT to address its financial situation by privatizing. As part of the IMF’s loan package, Thailand’s state-run enterprises came under greater scrutiny both by these international lending agencies and the government (see Bello, Cunningham, and Poh 1998). Although resolving the SRT’s long-standing financial problems was now a national and international priority, the SRT’s powerful bureaucracy and historical importance made complete privatization nearly unthinkable. Instead, the SRT expanded its discussion of transforming its landholdings into commercial real estate. The national economic collapse also intensified migration to Khon Kaen’s railway settlements. Both national and international labor migration was already a critical part of Isaan’s economy (Rigg and Salamanca 2011; Mills 2012), but the economic bust exacted a heavy toll on the debt-laden rural sector. Simultaneously, unemployment pushed migrants back to Isaan. According to migrants who settled along the tracks at the time, the railway corridor provided a space of relief and possibility to establish some kind of new, if precarious, life in the city. Migrants often used existing social relations to find a place to live along the tracks. In short, the city’s poorest communities began expanding rapidly just as the railway was seeking new ways to make money off their land by evicting the settlements.



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Amid the profound social dislocation of the crash, new resources became available for development advocates seeking to intervene in these growing spaces of urban poverty. In response to resistance and criticism following previous experiences of extreme social dislocation after structural adjustments in Latin America and Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, the World Bank provided Thailand with 4.4 billion baht worth of interest free loans in the form of the social investment funds (SIFs) to be used to soften the effects of the structural adjustments (Endo 2014, 66; see also Ammar and Srawooth 2002; World Bank 2006). This shift toward civil society within development also reflected the mass mobilizations (LoGerfo 1997, 2000; Ockey 2001) and violence (Klima 2002) of Thailand’s democratic transition at the beginning 1990s. As the crisis converged with the strongest period of NGO organizing in Thailand, the phrase “community rights” was written into the 1997 draft of the nation’s constitution and the Eighth National Economic and Social Development Plan (1997–2001) (NESDB 1997; see also Kline 1998; LoGerfo 1997, 2000; Kuhonta 2008). The movements that grew out of that era asserted that a strong civil society would deepen democracy and temper the authoritarian impulses of the state (Pasuk 1999). The emergence of the discourse of civil society as a seemingly singular actor also papered over key differences within these movements (Elinoff 2014c). The tension in these coalitions is evident in the ways in which new kinds of participatory housing funds articulated with global trends toward self-help housing and land titling projects. Despite a long-standing effort at the World Bank to encourage Thai housing policymakers to adopt self-help approaches to resolve the housing crisis, Helen Chiu (1985) and Ceinwen Giles (2003) argue that this push failed to gain traction. For much of the existence of the NHA, international funding sources and trends in housing had little effect on the delivery of public housing projects. Both authors argue that it was not until later—the late 1970s and early 1980s—that the NHA began to think about self-help (Chiu) or market-oriented (Giles) policies, which the World Bank had long prescribed as the solution to Thailand’s growing housing problem (see also Yap 1992; Yap and De Wandler 2010). Projects such as UCDO’s land-sharing efforts and its Urban Poor Development Fund articulated with Thailand’s expansive efforts at land titling (Larsson 2012), mirroring growing global logics that posited private property rights would benefit the poor by unlocking the capital found in the informal market (De Soto 2000). These ideas of private property and market liberalization often had little

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to do with the kinds of political mobilizations that NGOs were pursuing. Nevertheless, the SIF money and a second recovery fund from the Japanese government, the New Miyazawa Initiative, were partially dedicated to helping urban communities (Endo 2014, 66). This inrush of funding for new urban projects offered a way for the planners involved in UCDO to expand their work by linking efforts to move toward a self-help models of housing and with existing ideas of community finance. It also generated new kinds of tensions in the nascent housing movement. A final strand emerging from post-crash era was the emerging notion of sufficiency economy (sēthakit pawpīang). Sēthakit pawpīang translates literally as “economics enough only.” The theory emphasized that capitalism thrives on affective excess and that Thais might use Buddhist thinking to moderate their affective relationships with the market (Elinoff 2014a). Although it has deeper roots in the activist work of the so-called Development Monks of the 1960s and 1970s (Somboon 1988; Pinit 2006), sufficiency became ubiquitous after King Bhumipol’s annual birthday speech following the 1997 Asian markets crisis in which he promoted the idea of “enough” as a remedy for the excesses of the pre-crash Thai economy. Sufficiency did not seek to transform the structure of the state, but rather to train the poor (understood as villagers) for life in this moment of capitalist flux and democratic transition (Unger 2009).6 Drawing from Nikolas Rose (1999), Søren Ivarsson and Lotte Isager argue that sufficiency economy functions as “etho-politics,” which “seeks to align the prevailing cultural emphases on autonomy and self-realization with the demand that all citizens accept their duties, obligations and responsibilities to their communities” (2010, 236). Although sufficiency has become a normative discourse in Thai policy, the results of its implementation have been complex. Sufficiency has often been used to solidify class differences, offering a justification for each to live with enough within their means (Hewison 2000; Sopranzetti 2012; Elinoff 2012). It also misrepresented rural livelihoods by casting them out of place and time (Kemp 1988; Bowie 1992;Walker 2010). As a framework for governing, sufficiency disciplines and reorients apparent villagers toward their life in the village while justifying existing social inequalities (see also Walker 2006). The tensions between community as a mode of politics and community as a mode of governance became more apparent toward the end of the decade. In March of 1999, residents and their activist counterparts expanded their use of the community to contest the SRT and its effort to evict the settlements.



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On March 2, 1999, 1,200 residents gathered at Khon Kaen’s railway station to protest the SRTs decision to open the land along the tracks for commercial development. These protests were coordinated nationally to coincide with those taking place in front of the railway office in Bangkok. As one of the early leaders of the local network put it, this protest, more than the previous two years of small-scale savings groups, helped “wake up” (tư̄n tua) residents to the possibility of eviction. It also expanded the influence of the United Communities Network in Khon Kaen. Paw Singto, Mae Hawm, Prathān Thi, Paw Thamrong, and several other community leaders began an intense period of collaboration and negotiation with one another, national and international agencies, and the SRT. Moreover, some of these leaders—Paw Singto, Mae Hawm, and Paw Thi in particular— participated in global networks of slum activists. Mae Hawm, the only female leader in the group, traveled to Denmark, Brazil, Kenya, and beyond to share her experiences as an organizer in Khon Kaen and as leader of the nationwide network. Through the growth of the network, the protests expanded the influence of local NGOs, which increasingly had adopted idioms of struggle (kāntawsū) to characterize their work with residents. Although they had been administering development focused grants from the Danish Development agency DANCED, by the end of the decade most NGOs in Khon Kaen saw their primary goal in organizing residents to prevent eviction as a matter of political struggle rather than economic development. In July 2000, the Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI) was established using money from UCDO and the World Bank SIF’s rural development fund. Building on the community savings programs started by UCDO, CODI sought to develop a more comprehensive housing strategy rooted in notions of participatory design and architecture. Cast in the language of the “Livable City” (NESDB 2002, 51), CODI continued to use savings as a basis for community upgrades, mainly in the form of housing and infrastructure improvement projects. Eventually, CODI expanded the project’s ambitions, moving from a select number of pilot projects toward a broader integration with municipal governments across the country in both rural and urban areas (Somsook 2005). Given the institutionalization of participation via the founding of CODI, the question of whether participation in community governance was emancipatory or disciplinary emerged. Indeed, this tension came to mark the core contradictions within both CODI’s and the NGO activists’ work, shading

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their differing conceptions of rights, community, and politics with ambiguity. The Thai concept of participation (kān mī sūan rūam), as Andrew Walker explains, denotes a collective orientation away from personal life (sūan tua) marking it as a “morally desirable common endeavor” (2012, 172).7 He argues, using the northern Thai transcription of sūan hūam, that participatory activities have the moral force of “altruism, and participation in sūan hūam activities is often spoken of as involving some level of sacrifice (sīasala). This definition carries close parallels with broader Buddhist emphasis on the moral value of ‘selfless giving of gifts’ ” (173). The Baan Mankong project frames participation similarly, emphasizing self-improvement, sacrifice, and altruism. In doing so, it extends the idea that loosely integrated poor settlements could be made into coherent communities where practices of social and financial commoning would produce shared resources the poor could turn to in times of need; participatory mechanisms such as savings groups were to be the central vehicles for this kind of commoning practice. These ideas of participation sat awkwardly next to more richly political efforts to expand participation, such as those in the larger slum movements (Boonlert 2016). Hayden Shelby argues that the tensions between these definitions of participation in the context of Baan Mankong raise the question of whether residents were engaging in commoning or, in fact “being commoned” (2019, 109; see also Arnstein 1969; Cooke and Kothari 2001). The policy mobilized participation in the aim of transforming the city into a more just space by including the poor in urban governance (Somsook 2003; Somsook and Mitlin 2012; Mitlin and Saitherwaite 2013) while mobilizing modes of participation to discipline them through collective practices (Boonlert 2016; see also Lazar 2004; Karim 2011).8 NETWORKS DIVIDE, COMMUNITIES MULTIPLY (2001–2007) At the same time that CODI was established, Khon Kaen’s UCN and the FRSN signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the SRT. The document listed sixty-one communities that would be eligible to sign communal leases on the railway’s land, including fifteen in Khon Kaen. The document explicitly used “community” as its central unit. The rental framework set lease prices based on the entire space occupied by a community to be paid in full by the community, not by individual renters. Individual rents would be determined based on surveys conducted by residents and the SRT. Leases



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were to be cosigned by the community, the SRT, and the FRSN. Residents that did not belong to a community or refused to participate in the FRSN were excluded from rental contracts because the SRT required the signature of these organizations to approve the contract (SRT 2000). Later, CODI was included in the MOU to act as surveyor, organizer, and guarantor of the contract alongside or instead of the FRSN. These stipulations required residents to participate in collective community governance projects. These stipulations translated ideas of community and the developmental logics of citizenship that accompanied them into a legal part of the lease agreement. The MOU laid out five basic components for rental: 1. Rental agreements apply only to land twenty meters or more from the railway tracks. Land within twenty meters of the rail line itself cannot be rented and must be cleared of all structures. If the railway changes its usage of the land, it must find a suitable place to relocate residents no more than five kilometers from their original home. 2. Land within forty meters of the tracks can only be rented on three-year renewable leases. Land forty meters or further from the rail line can be rented for up to thirty-year renewable leases. 3. Rental prices are set between seven and twenty baht per square meter per year (price determined on whether the land was further or closer to the city center). Rental prices are set on the basis of the entire community’s area, not individual lots. 4. The SRT and the FRSN jointly administer the lease agreements. 5. Land and houses cannot be sold or rented to new settlers. Only residents listed on the original MOU are to be included in the lease agreement.9

These conditions established a pathway to permanent housing registrations and enabled residents to make compensation claims against the SRT if it decided to nullify the leases and order evictions. The leases also had the effect of reordering the space along the tracks into the spatial zones described in chapter 2—the no-build zone in the twenty meters closest to the tracks, a three-year rental zone within twenty to forty meters from the tracks, and a zone for thirty-year leases for houses more than forty meters from the tracks. Finally, it established a baseline national list of railway communities. The MOU also established a new norm of community governance. Legal residence required surveying, mapping, and collective rental

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payments. In this way, the MOU effectively transformed the space along the tracks from an ecology of dwelling into an economy of property organized around for the “poor” as a subject whose rights would be distributed collectively. These stipulations in place, the SRT created different rental rates for different kinds of renters: congested communities (chumchon āeat), commercial businesses, and private rentals. Furthermore, the spatial conditions of the agreement—that the leases were communal, that they divided the land into spatial zones, and that all the leases had to be cosigned by the Four Regions Slum ­Network—set the terms for future disputes over the boundaries of community spatially and socially. These disputes also came to reflect the ongoing differences over definitions of legitimate politics and citizenship circulating on the ground. The MOU simultaneously made it possible to create communal leases as a way for residents to gain rights to the city by becoming rent-paying citizens, and inaugurated the possibility for the SRT to begin renting its land to commercial tenants. If the MOU also provided new avenues for politics, it also produced a new regime of policing: Settlements excluded from the list were excluded from renting. Residents’ rights claims did not find legal form in either individualized or permanent rights, but instead were framed as renewable communal leases measured and paid collectively. Residents would police these leases themselves. In this sense, the leases reflected both uncertain long-term trajectories of land prices and implicit developmentalist assumptions about the capacities of the poor as naturally communal. Even though these forms of communal property were essentially new to residents, existing discourses of villages and villagers made them appear to naturally align with resident preferences. Further, this alignment made it possible for residents to invoke the notion of community in one way, to politically leverage their moral claims against the SRT and the city. However, they also enabled the municipality and state agency to mobilize community as a mode of disciplining residents. Development assistance aid became contingent on cooperative participation and harmonious behavior among residents. Frictions and fractures were signs that communities were not ready for improvements funds. Despite the widely shared social value of community, the idea that land was a collective asset that tied one’s rights to remain in the city to one’s neighbor’s ability to pay his rent on time was essentially new. Yet, as Andrew Walker describes, making community “legible” in the legal sense has been fundamental for the poor to become “eligible” for government support across Thailand. By this, he



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means that without participating in practices of legibility—mapping, surveying, documenting, and registering—community in the moral sense remains ambiguous and lacks legal standing. Legibility and eligibility are, in this sense, markers of legitimacy (2012, 183). The urgency of becoming eligible for aid and the existing value of community thus muted these newer, more contentious aspects of community governance. Even though the meaning and uses of community were contested, it appeared to become a consensus on which future-oriented rights would be distributed. The spatial effects of the MOU were immediately felt across the tracks. Residents living in the twenty meters closest to the tracks now had little incentive to pay rent on land that their homes in their current forms could never occupy. In communities where a majority of residents lived in homes built further than twenty meters from the tracks, rental became a focus of action. In all of the settlements, lease negotiations required residents to figure out ways to bring all of the homes into compliance with the SRT’s spatial regulations. In theory, the spatial regulations allowed the SRT to maintain access to its tracks for maintenance and public safety. In practice, they sowed divisions between neighbors. Mae Hawm, Paw Singto, and their constituents in a settlement called Chumchon Phưā nbān—a large centrally located settlement in Khon Kaen— resisted the idea of leases and rental from the outset. They felt the rental rates negotiated by the activist network were too high for many residents and pushed the NGOs to reject the SRT’s contract unless it lowered the rates dramatically. Mae Hawm suggested the network shift its strategy from demanding rental rights toward demanding that residents’ be given rights without paying any rent at all. The NGOs disagreed arguing that this was an unreasonable approach. Alongside community leaders such as Paw Thamrong, Brathan Thi, and Paw Nokhuk, the NGOs felt that negotiation with the SRT required a commitment among residents to change. They argued that implementing these rules would show that residents were no longer trespassers (phubukruk) because they were willing to comply with the law (yūthuktawng tām kotmai). Moreover, they felt that to continue to push to live on the tracks without improving the land was not good citizenship, but rather “wanting something for nothing” (yāk dai tāe mai yāk thāmgnān). In the NGO telling of the split, Mae Hawm, Paw Singto, and the residents in Chumchon Phư̄anbān were not interested in improvement; they simply did not want to pay rent.

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For Paw Nokhuk, Paw Thamrong, and those that followed the NGO model later, such as Boonma and Nung, struggle with the SRT, with their neighbors, and with powerful actors in the city was necessary because it built the strength of the communities. Struggle was also important morally because by gaining rights residents could demonstrate their willingness to support the SRT through their collective compliance with the leases. Finally, it was important politically because learning to protest, negotiate, and resist would enable residents to negotiate with other agencies and expand their political voice. These debates exploded during the planning for the World Bank’s Social Investment Fund (SIF) grants. According to the SIF project design, the grant money was to be used to support local savings initiatives, a small portion being designated for administrative needs. However, as differences between these different factions of the UCN widened, questions emerged about whether it was appropriate for NGO activists to draw salaries for administering the projects or to use the grants to cover their administrative costs such as travel and food. These debates linked the distinct visions of citizenship outlined earlier to the growing dissatisfaction among residents about their relationships with the NGO organizers and the UCN leadership team more generally. Each side of the dispute leveled accusations of corruption at the other. These debates raised questions about the autonomy residents had to decide their own politics and the role NGO activists would play in shaping political life along the tracks. For Mae Hawm and her collaborators, the NGO administrative budget was evidence that NGOs “ate money” (kin ngōen) directed for the development of poor communities, inferring that they were making their living off the poor. Yet, as NGO activists pointed out, the savings groups that the proposed housing project sought to establish were not representative of entire communities or even the history of community organizing along the tracks. Instead, the grants were controlled by those groups that chose to work with CODI, which they saw as eating their own activism budgets and coopting their participants. They argued that the grants, rather than supporting existing networks, were being channeled toward the construction of CODI’s headquarters and the hiring of the agency’s new staff of architects, planners, and administrators. As P’Waen, the Khon Kaen-based NGO activist who was involved in the debates at the time, explained,



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What were they thinking would happen? Would creating two groups within the community help build solidarity [thā mī sawng klum nai nung chumchon ja sāng āekaphāp mai]? You have two groups: This one is charging two baht [interest] per month. That group is charging three baht [interest] per year. Which group is going to survive?

Based on these disputes, the largest and most influential community in the United Communities Network—Chumchon Phư̄anbān, led by Mae Hawm and Paw Singto—pulled out of the NGO network. When Mae Hawm and Paw Singto stopped working with the NGOs, they took with them most of the city’s established settlements and their supporters. Mae Hawm and Paw Singto did this by recruiting communities with a large number of residents living in the twenty meters closest to the tracks who felt they had no chance of renting under the MOU framework. The split in the network provided these residents an alternative framework to bide their time against eviction, allowing them to strategically wait to see the results of the insecure and contentious NGO-led activism. Prathān Thi, Paw Thamrong, and Paw Nokhuk were forced out of the UCN, which they had helped create. Although they maintained close ties with the nationwide Four Regions Slum Network and activists from Bangkok, their local constituency in Khon Kaen was almost entirely destroyed. They were even shunned within their communities. This was difficult because those with close ties to the NGOs were now isolated from their neighbors. After the split, this group reformed itself, founding the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network, but it had few members until 2005. The rise of the Thaksin administration and its efforts to curtail the influence of NGO activism amplified Mae Hawm and Paw Singto’s criticisms of the NGOs. Rather than channeling resources to the nongovernmental sector, Thaksin used state resources to create quasi-NGOs like CODI to limit the growing influence of the NGO sector (Pasuk and Baker 2004, 147). Many influential NGO activists like Suwit Watnoo were deeply critical of Thaksin’s policies because they paired market liberalization with what they felt were “populist” expansions of the state that coopted their constituents. One NGO put the critique this way: Thaksin came and it began to crumble [tuk salai long]. Because, first, Thaksin’s populist policies [naiobai prachāniyom]. In the past ­people

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had no alternative, no way out [mai mī thāng awk], so people got together and formed a movement. After Thaksin came, populist policies broke the poor from the most organized groups—the Assembly of the Poor, the Four Regions [Slum] Network—so they all crumbled and went to networks formed by local representatives [tuk salai hai pai tawngtin].

Thaksin’s government was seen as driving a wedge between the poor and the activists who worked with them throughout the mobilizations of the 1990s (Kengkij and Hewison 2009). The charges of corruption and self-­ interest that Mae Hawm leveled against her NGO counterparts broadly echoed Thaksin’s critiques of the NGO sector even if they had little to do with each other. At the same time, the activists understood that their constituents had alternatives to accessing the state and expressing their politics. In this way, many of the activists who challenged the authority of the state under Thaksin suddenly found themselves in a double bind. On the one hand, the emergence of agencies such as CODI institutionalized their rhetoric and practices while enrolling many of their collaborators as employees. On the other, Thaksin’s broader rhetoric targeted the activists legally and marginalized their political position. In this way, many activists found themselves in opposition with their former constituencies as the developmental logics of their NGO-driven projects were turned on their heads and poor citizens sought unmediated access to the state via agencies such as CODI. Central to these disagreements between the NGOs and their constituencies were growing divides over practices of politics, their visions of the good life and especially the open question about the capacities of the poor to act as autonomous subjects of politics. By 2007, Mae Hawm had reformulated the UCN (now in opposition to the KKSRN and the FRSN) and begun working closely with CODI on the Baan Mankong project. She acknowledged that the NGOs had shaped her approach to community organizing. She said that they trained her to speak in public, to listen to her neighbors’ problems, and to analyze local issues collectively. They also trained her to organize logistics around demonstrations and to set the agenda on collective projects. She also felt that they were adept at pressuring state agencies to agree to meet with poor communities. Yet she and her collaborators remained frustrated by the ways that NGOs “made their money” off the problems of the poor but refused to let them think or speak



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freely. Thus the UCN was her and her neighbors’ expression of their desire to work with the state on their own terms. In the post-Thaksin moment, they began to see NGO projects and their structures of organization as paternalistic or, worse, parasitic, even if they were effective. As she explained, The NGOs force the villagers to think like they do [khao hai rao khit bāeb khao]. They don’t let the villagers think on their own [khao mai hai chaobān mī ōkāt khit ēng]. If you refuse to use their methods, they won’t support you or help you [thā patiset withī khit khawng khao khao mai chūay mai sanapsanun]. They tell groups to split apart [khao hai klum tāekyāek]. They are like the second government [khao mư̄an rathabān chut thī sawng]. This isn’t every NGO; it’s just some people [nī maichai NGO thuk khon, khāe bāng khon].

From Mae Hawm’s perspective, the division of labor in NGO projects categorized residents as particular kinds of subjects—“villagers”—who were understood as incapable of thinking beyond their self-interest and thus required organization and training before they could be seen as autonomous political actors.10 She interpreted the meager budgets most NGOs apportioned for their administrative labor as a kind of theft. The claim rested on the inherent tensions within the economy of NGO work that required activists to continue to propose and manage projects that required residents to work while they [the NGO activists] lived off some small portion of the project budgets. Although these funding provisions were a normal part of the NGO work, Mae Hawm ambiguously characterized them corruption, raising the question of the necessity and political positioning of the NGOs in the process. Finally, her perspective highlighted an assumption within some NGO work, which also characterized the poor as collective political subjects rather than autonomous individual actors capable of articulating their political views. Many residents were tired of being organized and having their political voices mediated by activists. Later, as the Red Shirt movement gathered momentum, many along the tracks used the phrase “double standard” (sawng matrathān) to describe how their relations with NGOs mirrored the general ordering of Thai society rooted in developmental notions of citizenship; the NGO was the phīlīang (mentor/guardian) and the “villager” was the trainee, a not-yet citizen.11 At the same time, Mae Hawm’s frameworks of citizenship included and

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built on existing discourses of communality. Thus, even as residents increasingly embraced notions of individual politics, they maintained a sense of investment in the social good of community. As residents intensified their efforts to organize themselves and to improve their communities, these debates expanded, generating both schisms between neighbors and new conversations around collective relations and the proper form of politics. Because of these conflicts, the number of communities in the Khon Kaen municipality and the adjacent districts multiplied from the fifteen identified on the MOU in 2000 to more than twenty-six in 2008, depending on who was counting and how they defined the boundaries of a particular community. When I began my research that year, the NGO-affiliated KKSRN claimed to represent nine settlements, whereas Mae Hawm’s CODI-affiliated UCN claimed to represent twenty-two. These conflicting numbers reflect both the gaps in framework created by the MOU and, more important, the multiple contested claims to land between and within the settlements that made up the various networks. In this way, these disputes had etched themselves into the space along the tracks, dividing settlements in ways that made some into legitimate communities and marked others as targets for eviction (figure 3.1). INFRASTRUCTURES OF POLITICS Just as eras of centralization and state developmentalism enabled settlers’ opportunities to forge life along the tracks via surreptitious practices of dwelling and personal connections, liberalization and democratization remade the practice of citizenship in ways that produced new political subjectivities, new possibilities, and new risks. If previous eras were organized around personal connections, liberalization reshaped the railway corridor into a space governed by logics of private property. Yet, at the same time, democratization also opened up possibilities for politics rooted in the emerging idea that residents’ communities had a right to remain in the city and that the city had a moral obligation to the poor. Among residents, these shifts emerged as they began to see themselves as autonomous political actors capable of speaking on their own behalf in ways not possible in previous eras. Thus these debates around the moral obligations of the state agency transformed into political debates about political capacities of the poor and the limits of their rights. The legacies of this period of community politics and fracture are fundamental to making sense of Khon Kaen’s political terrain during the period



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Figure 3.1  Maps showing how Khon Kaen’s railway settlements had splintered by the mid-2000s.

of organizing that followed and to the Baan Mankong project itself as it was conducted in the city. The dispute that split the UCN and the KKSRN highlighted the differences between CODI and the NGO’s citizen designs. Where the former saw citizenship arising out of a developmental process that would lead to rights, the latter saw rights as their most important aim and mobilization as fundamental to creating new kinds of political actors. Indeed, the undecided tensions within these models of citizenship are essential to the citizen designs described in the chapters that follow. Yet, as important as the differences between the CODI vision and the NGO vision were, the new imperatives of community governance marked each group as having similar roles in terms of governing community and, increasingly, policing residents. Here, residents’ visions of citizenship and feelings of subordination often reflected greater similarities across networks than the acrimony between networks suggests. The legacies of these struggles are potent along the tracks. They not only shaped the divergent practices and experiments in urban governance associated with Baan Mankong, but also the way in which the different networks approached the task of securing their rights. In the process, they engendered new debates over politics and its relationship with the good life. These debates were the grounds in which the residents’ citizen designs took root and the soil from which new exclusions sprouted.

4 Citizen Designs

It is late November of 2008, I am visiting the United Development Community (Chumchon Sāmakhī Phatthanā) where residents are meeting to discuss their participation in the Baan Mankong project. The community committee (kāmmakān chumchon) had recently changed the settlement’s name show residents’ renewed commitments to these projects and toward each other. As a part of this commitment, residents reorganized their community committee and elected a new headman, Paw Saksri, who had already been working with Mae Hawm on preparations for Baan Mankong– funded infrastructure projects and housing upgrades. Name changes like this were common among Baan Mankong communities, both in Khon Kaen and elsewhere, reflecting residents’ desires to shed their settlements’ reputations as dangerous slums and to inaugurate new futures. They often emphasized themes of unity (sāmakhī), progress (charoen), and development (phatthanā). I meet Mae Hawm, the leader of the United Communities Network (UCN), outside United Development’s small sālā chumchon (community hall) just before dusk. She is dressed in tracksuit and a knit cap and greets me with a cup of three-in-one instant coffee. It’s the early part of the cold season, so the steaming coffee is welcome. The air is cool and the light is rich. Mae Hawm is as usual energetic. She was one of Khon Kaen’s original community leaders. Although she has a complicated past, many residents continue to respect her a great deal, in part for being a tireless worker and a 85

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clear forceful speaker. Even though the United Development Community has long had a rough reputation and the residents have tried to organize themselves numerous times across the last fifteen years, Mae Hawm is optimistic: “This time is different,” she tells me, “because the state, CODI [Community Organizations Development Institute], and our network support them.” This meeting will inform residents of what will be required of them if they decide to participate in the project. A dirt road, deep red from the iron rich soil that composes it, runs the length of the community. As the sun drops behind us, passing motorbikes spin clouds of glowing ferric dust into the air as residents, mainly young people, shuttle to-and-fro getting ready for an evening out. Mae Hawm tells me that paving this road will be the first thing the community does with its Baan Mankong infrastructure grants. Residents hope the concrete road will tamp down the dust and mitigate the effects of seasonal flooding that has been a serious problem in the community since it was founded.1 We move into the sālā adjacent to a makeshift recycling center that many residents use to sort and process items they collect during the day. These spaces were originally built with money from the Danish government during previous, short-circuited community organizing efforts. They will also be upgraded once residents receive money from CODI. Mae Hawm begins by announcing the terms of the lease agreement to a group of about fifteen older residents: “Yesterday, they asked us if one hundred percent of our members were ready to rent and we said yes! WE CAN RENT NOW!” Everyone knows that this overstates the consensus about the project along the tracks. In fact, none of the communities in the UCN are ready, at least not in the way that the State Railway of Thailand (SRT) means it. The group laughs at this little deception and applauds anyway. Mae Hawm smiles and continues speaking first in Isaan language, but quickly moving into central Thai. She explains the benefits of renting. Throughout she speaks in an inclusive first person (rao), which appears to include her in their community. This was common among CODI-trained leaders such as Mae Hawm. It offered a way of asserting solidarity where relations might be more fragile: We all want water, we want electricity, but the problem is that they [SRT] see us as trespassers [khao hen rao pen phubukruk]. So, they won’t approve the funds for these projects. The actual problem—whether



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it’s the water issue, the land issue, the flood issue—is that to fix these issues we need to rent. We sometimes think Baan Mankong will help us to develop and to get water, roads, electricity, and a drainage system. The money for these projects has already been approved. At this week’s meeting, we will figure out how to transfer the money into the communities. This infrastructure improvement money exists, but first we need to secure our rights. Second, the project will give us money to fix our houses. We have 20,000 baht grants for each house to fix [sawngsāem] and upgrade [prabprung]. We don’t have the money right now because you’ll have to report what you’ll be building. We will have to organize this process on our own. We have to build the roads and our houses ourselves. In order to do, this we need to create an organizational system to keep documents and learn to audit [truat sawb] each other. This means that no money can go missing. We also cannot fight over the money. If we waste this opportunity by fighting with each other or having disagreements, they may not help us do this again [thā rao tawsū, mi khwām tāekyāek, rao ja sīa ōkāt khao mai chūai īk]. We can all work together do to this, but you’ll need to meet with each other. You’ll need to meet with the community leaders and the community leaders will have to meet with the city and the architects [from CODI]. But you need to start to understand the [Baan Mankong] process and have a way to report and keep your documents. Khon Kaen is the only city that the SRT is allowing to rent. We’ve fought to rent for a long time and we’ve said that we can fight for rights at the same time that we develop the land. We don’t want this land to go to others. The Baan Mankong project is not just for us to have convenient roads for us to drive our motorcycles on or to have beautiful houses. It exists so we can develop our communities and ourselves [phatthanā tua ēng].

Mae Hawm continues, describing the reasons they are eligible for rental and the reasons they need to rent now. She tells them about the money that will become available to the community once they sign the agreement with the SRT. She says that any further disagreement or stalling among residents will threaten their chances for securing their rights. Before the meeting concludes, she begins addressing them in the second person:

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Before we start the rental process, you need to ask yourself if you are ready [tawng thāmwā phrawm mai]? You will need to decide what projects you want to do. You will need to decide how you want the roads built. You will need to work together as a group [ja tawng rūam pen klum]. The whole community needs to decide together. The railroad wants Khon Kaen to be the first city where these rental agreements are signed. We have two months to get ready, then we will have to sign. You need to get yourself ready [ja tawng sāng khwāmprawm]!

Across this meeting, Mae Hawm’s speech invoked most of the Baan Mankong policy’s discourses as she explained its strategies and regulations. For residents in the United Development Community, these techniques were not new—the community had long moved in and out of the networks and projects described in chapter 3—but CODI and its significant financial resources did indeed shift their thinking. Baan Mankong seemed to open up a horizon of possibility, promising direct access to substantial state support and, at last, the possibility of long-term rights to the land. As Mae Hawm spoke, the developmental temporalities of Thai citizenship seemed to reorient themselves. Although the project relied on deeply rooted discourses of the primordial communality of villagers, Mae Hawm’s introduction affirmed that finally at long last these “villagers” might yet become legitimate citizens, provided they became ready. Baan Mankong promised a way for residents not only to remake their homes, but also to remake themselves into citizens worthy of being seen and heard. But what did it mean to become ready? What kinds of developmental practices were proposed to transform residents’ communities and lives? What citizen designs were imagined and enacted through those procedures? What was the disposition toward politics contained in these designs? SAVING PEOPLE, MAKING COMMUNITIES Baan Mankong projects take four forms: land sharing, new community construction, re-blocking, and on-site upgrading. New community construction aims to create new communities where none previously existed by negotiating low-cost rental land purchases from both public and private landholders that will become relocation sites for displaced or insecure poor communities and for scattered groups of low-income urbanites. Land sharing, as Paul Rabe



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describes it, “consists of dividing up a site so that one portion of the land is vacated to make way for development, while the land occupants are resettled on the other (usually smaller) portion, and in the process obtain legal title to their new plots” (2009, 115). Re-blocking radically rearranges an existing settlement by tearing down and rebuilding houses to create whole new spatial arrangements. Upgrading projects such as those that took place along Khon Kaen’s railway tracks, improves an existing settlement in situ through targeted infrastructure projects and housing upgrades. Regardless of the project type, CODI’s methodology begins with two processes: the implementation of citywide surveys and the creation of savings groups. The city survey is designed to allow community architects to begin coordinating with the municipality to locate pockets of urban poverty to find groups of residents to work with and to gather information about local conditions that will inform the upgrade projects (see Apisak 2006). These processes have the effect of making poverty appear legible by making spaces of poverty known, documented, and subject to interventions.2 CODI encourages residents to make themselves legible in order to participate in the project, to access the project’s upgrade funds, and potentially to secure their rights. In turn, residents often seek to make themselves legible to demonstrate their legitimacy and gain access to development funds (Walker 2012, 183). Building on the legacies of the Urban Community Development Office era of community funds and rotating credit schemes described in chapter 3, the second step in the CODI process is the creation of community savings groups. These savings groups were organized to help residents amass emergency funds and save enough money to apply for low-interest mortgage schemes via CODI. Savings groups also offered a local source of rotating credit and debt as an alternative to the unofficial loan market residents often used. Yet, beyond these specific needs, CODI officials often cast the role of savings in much broader social terms: “We don’t just save money, we save people” (rao mai awm tāe ngōen, awm khon). In this context, savings took on moral overtones as the practice was imagined to transform residents’ affective lives by fostering both new dispositions toward money and things and as well as new relationships with neighbors and family members. CODI theorized that collective savings would lead to the cultivation of values such as communality, moderation, and mutual aid. In this sense, they were created with a figure of an imagined poor villager, displaced from rural life and now subject to both pressures to spend on consumer goods and desires to

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consume embodied in vices such as alcohol, drugs, and gambling. CODI thus conceived of savings groups not only as organizations that prepared residents to manage financial pressures associated with their housing projects, but also as sites to help the poor weather the affective volatility of life in late capitalism. As one senior CODI architect explained, Savings is a way for people to know each other. It doesn’t matter whether they save a lot or a little. The goal is that people will save and work together as a community. They will see each other every week and they will know who is saving and who isn’t. Then, they can ask if that person is having trouble or not. They can go check to see if they are having a problem at home or if they are drinking too much. . . . Through savings, people learn new skills; they learn discipline. They learn to order and schedule their time. They learn to check in with each other.

Through savings, planners theorized that relationships could be forged between neighbors where none existed. Although these relationships were premised on affinity, they also entailed discipline and could be used to foster an ethos of cooperation and unity among residents through light surveillance couched in concerned care. Such relationships, I was told, were critical to supporting new values among residents. The savings groups and community mapping were intended to help residents build other community organizations (awngkawn chumchon) to administer local projects. The most important of these organizations is the community committee (kāmmakān chumchon), which is in charge of managing project budgets, auditing collective bank accounts, holding meetings with residents, organizing construction, and attending CODI meetings. The community committee is also in charge of communicating changes in CODI policies to residents. Committee members had heavy responsibilities in terms of attending meetings, but also direct access to project funding. The new leadership roles associated with Baan Mankong gave residents the ability to organize, design, and manage their own projects (including their budgets). However, they also created power struggles within communities, produced sites of mistrust, and pushed time-pressured residents to take up the role of the bureaucrats as they improved basic infrastructure on their own. Moreover, the community committee created by the Baan Mankong project often conflicted with existing community governance structures like



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the kāmmakān chumchon registered at the municipal level. That committee is chosen via official elections, but, unlike the Baan Mankong committee, could include powerful actors from outside the community. At the same time, the municipal committee, though official, had no access to the Baan Mankong project funds apportioned by CODI. Thus, the project created dueling leadership structures within communities that exacerbated existing tensions by creating factions and deepening schisms between local groups. These disputes in turn linked access to resources not only to existing social ties but also to different conceptions of appropriate political action and distinct visions of proper political subjectivity. DRAWING LINES After communities establish their community committee, they begin redesigning their settlements by creating a spatial map. Community maps document the number of households within a community, income levels of residents, and the spatial and site constraints, which are especially important for on-site renovations like those in Khon Kaen. Through these mapping processes, planners begin forming core teams of community leaders and learn about specific issues going on within the settlements. These technical instruments thus sought to make problems of poverty and insecurity visible, quantifiable, and legible to the city and state officials, rendering them open to technical intervention (Ferguson 1994; Li 2007). They also offered an important site of spatial praxis for CODI architects and community leaders to foment collective action by using the mapping projects to engage residents in conversations around Baan Mankong and its broader political, social, and personal implications. After the initial meeting at the United Development Community (Chumchon Sāmakhī Phatthanā) with Mae Hawm, that community embarked on its community mapping project. CODI architects and local leaders started by creating a ledger of the residents, marking the railway’s spatial regulations throughout the settlement, and drawing up a physical plan of the houses. These documents formed the basis for community records with CODI and the SRT, officially beginning the settlement’s process of rental negotiation with the railway. Working with Paw Saksri, two CODI architects, Khit and Frank, and two other members of the community leadership committee, I spent a long afternoon in late November of 2008 walking the tracks ­taking

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measurements. As we walked, we pounded stakes in the ground making SRT’s regulations visible in the settlement for the first time. The stakes marked distances of ten and twenty meters from the edges of the rail ties, which demarcated the no-build zone subdividing it into two sections. The first ten meters was to be left entirely clear for public safety and track maintenance. The next ten marked an area where community infrastructure could be built—roads, gardens, or drainage systems—but not houses; beyond this zone, houses were permitted (figure 4.1). As we walked, Khit made a hand-drawn plan of the houses, noting where they crossed the lines. This would become the basis for a GIS computer map of the community he would create. The map would note those residents organized with the CODI project and mark those who refused to participate. It would also mark where residents were working with the UCN, where residents aligned with the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network (KKSRN), and where they refused to join any network. Frank, for his part, unfurled a large tape measure which indicated where another community leader would pound a stake into the ground marking the distance from the tracks. When the stake was in place, I sprayed it with bright orange paint. Any part of a structure that crossed the twenty-meter line would need to be demolished to bring it and the whole community into compliance.

Figure 4.1  Residents and CODI community architects work together to conduct community land surveys in Khon Kaen. Photo by the author.



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During our walk, Paw Saksri told me he hoped to improve the recycling center and community meeting room that residents had built during the previous decades. No longer trespassers, he told me, the community could claim this space and legally improve it by making the structures permanent. Yet, the lines also made it clear how unevenly distributed legitimacy would be. Many houses would need to be destroyed in part or in total because they crossed lines that existed only on paper until we measured and marked them.3 CODI and the SRT argued that residents had to cooperate to accommodate these changes by adjusting their homes to allow those living closer to the tracks to have space to rebuild. Planners said that unity and harmony would help residents make these difficult adjustments. Indeed, for residents wishing to gain occupancy rights, navigating these socio-spatial adjustments was necessary to actualize opportunities for legitimacy offered by CODI. For those who could not or would not participate, however, especially residents living within the twenty meters closest to the rail line, our maps increased uncertainty by introducing the prospect of demolition, relocation, or eviction. Given these differences, unity and harmony would necessarily be hard fought.4 I followed mapping exercises like these with the United Communities Network from the fall of 2008 through the beginning of 2009. Throughout, I accompanied residents, local community leaders, CODI staff architects, and occasionally network leaders like Mae Hawm, as they walked the railway tracks, uncovered difficult conflicts, drew up plans, and discussed projects with residents. Although most of our mapping sessions were uneventful, some turned contentious, resulting in on-the-spot disagreements that revealed fundamental tensions that animated life within each settlement. Often, conflicts between residents showed exactly how vague and undecided community boundaries were, revealing the limits of the Baan Mankong project and its discourses of community harmony. They also demonstrated how leaders working with CODI often did not represent the same leadership many residents had voted for in municipally supported community elections.5 Finally, the map-making projects revealed the heterogeneity of the settlements: some people had established homes with manicured lawns, some maintained businesses, and others had large plots of land that reflected nascent or even established middle-class lives. Other residents lived in dire circumstances in improvised houses built of a variety of found objects. After one of our mapping sessions, Frank, Khit, and I went to dinner at a popular restaurant that served a variety of Isaan salads along with grilled

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meat and beer. Over dinner, I put these questions to Frank and Khit asking why CODI’s representational techniques failed to capture all the differences within the community. Frank, one of CODI’s newest planners, told me that I seemed to have entirely misunderstood the point of the mapping exercise. The idea wasn’t to map out all of the facts accurately so as to intervene in each one, he said, but to use the mapping as a chance for residents to begin working together on a common goal. He compared this with the savings groups: “The point is not that they save a lot of money, just one or two baht per day. If they do [just] that CODI can help them. They will also get to know each other and be able to work together to improve their communities.” Khit nodded, still optimistic, but also a bit wary of some of these issues. “I think the villagers can do it. . . . But it takes a lot of work. Some of them have time and some don’t. Some will agree and some won’t. These differences are normal. We have to find the people that want to work together and help them.” Indeed, CODI’s staff, like the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that preceded them, were adept at locating key partners and fostering relationships with them. However, in the process of locating these partners, they often enhanced the very divisions they wished to manage. These differences both exacerbated existing tensions and produced new ones. Alongside the distinct alliances to the city’s dual slum networks and contrasting loyalties to the multiple leadership bodies within settlements there were different senses of what community meant, where its boundaries were, and who might appropriately represent it within most settlements. These differences left considerable gaps in processes that manifested themselves as new exclusions. They also troubled the kinds of homogeneous representations of life along the tracks that appeared on CODI’s bureaucratic plans and forms. DESIGNING (APPROPRIATE) COMMUNITY Following the community mapping, residents collaborate with CODI architects to begin the community design (kānawkbāeb chumchon) phase by creating a new community plan (phang chumchon). During this process, groups of residents work together to debate spatial plans, propose new housing layouts, and work out conflicts that arise during the process. The theory behind the phase is that through collective conversation residents and CODI architects will come up with a community plan that reflects residents’ visions of appropriate community that can be built in ways that are affordable, aesthetic, and



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consistent with the agency’s values. At the same time, the discussions enable architects to insert CODI’s theories of community into the design process to reinforce the project’s broader social intentions. Design, however, was not a singular act but instead involved a number of CODI-led approval committees. Once a community committee creates a community design for a project, it is required to present the plans and documentation to the local network leadership first for approval. This was rather pro forma because network leadership and community leadership often worked closely with one another to prepare documentation. As projects moved from local network approval meetings, they then passed through the city committee, into the zone (a subdivision of the regional approval board), regional, and national levels of project approval. At each level, designs received intense scrutiny from bureaucrats, academics, and community leaders in other CODI communities. Meetings looked at every detail of the plans to determine the readiness (khwāmphrawm) of residents, critiquing their design choices, rejecting spatial layouts, and often critiquing residents for the immoderation of their visions. CODI’s vision for these approval processes was a horizontal one in which residents would work in partnership with community representatives, CODI officials, city and state bureaucrats, academics, and NGOs to produce acceptable community designs. Despite the emphasis on participation and horizontality, residents felt the process reinforced a relatively common vertically oriented bureaucratic hierarchy. They told me that the approval process was cumbersome, requiring too many steps. They also said it was disempowering; the meetings seemed to rearticulate their subordination in the guise of participation. After being approved at the community network level, projects are presented to the city committee (kāmmakān mư̄ang), an important venue because municipal governments approve infrastructure changes, make sure they meet city standards, and distribute project money. In this sense, it is the one of Baan Mankong’s most interesting innovations because it appeared to involve the devolution of power to local authorities. More than that, it also promised a robust public forum for the poor to encounter municipal bureaucrats. Because of this, residents invested the meetings with tremendous hope that they could use them to persuade the municipal government to press their political claims to land with the SRT. In practice, the meetings rarely reflected this potential. Instead, they were difficult to arrange and highly constrained. Between September 2008 and

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November 2009, no more than four were held. At the meetings, residents had little power to set the agenda and could not override anything the municipality proposed. At each meeting I observed, residents arrived with a long list of questions related project implementation—insufficient financial delivery, requests to change approval processes, demands to have technical consultants, and updates on their negotiations with the SRT. They also prepared criticisms of the municipality and CODI that they felt needed addressing for projects to proceed. However, rather than addressing these concerns, the deputy mayor used the meetings to shore up support and occasionally shame communities working outside of project parameters. In fact, the Khon Kaen City Committee was so ineffectual that the communities represented by the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network refused to attend the meetings at all. Instead, they adopted a parallel approval process organized by the NGO activists and the Four Regions Slum Network. As the KKSRN pulled out of the city committee, the promise of the public forum collapsed. Instead of being a site of horizontal debate, the city committee became a space the municipality used to control residents and regulate the claims to space and voice being made along the tracks. This was doubly frustrating for residents because their land rights were not even administered by the city but by the SRT based in Bangkok. CODI’s regional approval board also exerted considerable pressure on residents to conform to the agency’s vision of appropriate development. It often rejected plans that did not have enough communal spaces, failed to accommodate nature in ways that were perceived to be “traditional,” or separated homes into private lots with fences. For example, in one case, a community plan was rejected because it included individual driveways for each house. In another, a plan was rejected because the homes were oriented outward, facades facing away from their neighbors. Planners favored community schematics that had one or two exits and positioned all of the homes toward one another to foster social engagement (figure 4.2). These approval boards also checked whether documents were filled out correctly, the number of people in a community actively saving, and whether physical plans reflected sufficiency principles. In this way, planning documents were also used to audit residents’ values and to note whether they were adopting the kinds of communal values the project sought to promote. Planners conceived of each step in the approval process as a “learning process” and a site of “personal development” that adjudicated whether residents were sufficiently “ready” to move on developmentally toward the next phase of



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Figure 4.2  A handmade community plan constructed of paper and cardboard shows the ways in which everyday materials were used by architects to facilitate planning meetings. The plan also shows CODI preferences for communities that had one entry way and exit, where houses faced each other, and where homes were integrated with natural features. Photo by the author.

the project. This emphasis on values transformed what were intended to be spaces of participation into ambiguously paternalistic spaces where residents had to perform their understandings of the project’s values in particular ways in order to receive money for critical projects. In this context, CODI officials and the approval boards saw residents’ claims of rights as particularly problematic, if not dangerous. Talking about rights was seen as destabilizing, placing disruptive assertions of self-interest above communal interest. CODI’s chief architect, Somsook Boonyabancha, describes it this way: “Conflicts exist in the theoretical realm. The concept of “rights” could get people to kill one another. We must transform the theoretical concept of “rights” into the empirical realm that is more tangible—having an actual plan and a detailed solution” (2018). Another CODI architect told me, “You can’t really talk about rights, because how do you negotiate them if everyone has the same rights? Like in the slums in Khon Kaen, everyone says they have the right to this or to that, but they all crash into each other.”

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Another CODI employee working in northern Thailand put it even more simply: “You have enough to eat and you have some land. What do you need rights for?” Debates over rights often elicited comparisons by CODI staff to the then-ongoing struggles between Red and Yellow Shirt factions. In meetings, CODI’s managers in Khon Kaen pointed out how intractable struggles over rights could be by saying things like “if you fight with one another, it will be like the Red and Yellow Shirts.” Such jokes elicited a little awkward laughter but also highlighted the potential dangers many saw within the notion of rights as a political ideal. Rights were often cast as antithetical to personal development. On the one hand, rights raised the specter of intractable social conflict rooted in constant assertions of self over community. At the same time, this framing of rights was used to create false equivalencies that problematized overt political expression in general. Behind the scenes, these references took on a different tone, some residents, particularly those active in Khon Kaen’s local Red Shirt organizations, saying that if they wanted to make changes, they should “stage a real protest like the Red Shirts” (rao tawng mī mawb thāe jing bāep khon sư̄a dāeng). Although suggestions like these were dismissed or even laughed off, they nevertheless revealed the way residents had, even early on in the Red Shirt movement, juxtaposed these “real” forms of political expression to the limited kinds of expression they experienced in CODI’s forums. In doing so, they highlighted how debates about rights were used by planners to moderate, manage, and redirect residents’ political claims to commensurate political status. In talking with some of CODI’s senior project advisors, mainly local academics trained abroad, they cited Jürgen Habermas’s (1991) notion of the public sphere as an important theoretical impetus for all of these approval meetings. Participation, as they conceived it, entailed the production of spaces in which people could meet and discuss things freely, allowing the poor a voice. As if to prove many of the critiques of the Habermasian public sphere, CODI’s meetings were highly structured both by internal power arrangements rooted in CODI’s hierarchical committee structures (approval boards, subcommittee boards, and so on), by class, and by gender (i.e., Fraser 1997). The meetings also sought to use community development to reconcile more open-ended political claims about inequality or justice (Arditi 2009). The conflict between the closed outcomes of the Habermasian perspective on the public sphere and the open-ended vision of politics that Benjamin



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Arditi articulates is salient here because, as Arditi notes, political processes are built on irreconcilable of disagreements about the uneven redistribution of political capacity in the present and the possibility of equality still to come (2009, 178). In this sense, CODI staff and others were reflecting a reluctance not simply about rights, but also about democratic politics and, especially, the ways that the poor have taken them up to assert their political commensurability through disagreements. The question of gender is particularly important here.6 CODI explicitly aimed to develop women’s capacities through the Baan Mankong project.7 The reason, I was told by senior CODI staff, was that women were seen as better than men at cooperating and participating harmoniously. This notion reflected their perception that women’s innate tendencies toward mutualinterest above self-interest diminished conflict within communities and narrowed the scope of local disagreements, channeling cooperation towards community improvement. This positioning of women refracted a deeper history of urban activism in which women and children were at the forefront of anti-eviction movements (Ockey 1996). As women assumed leadership roles in these movements, they repositioned local land claims on moral grounds (Bolotta 2017). In doing so, early female-led slum movements often mobilized domestic issues and gender as means of opening political debate rather than suturing it. Within Baan Mankong, women were often at the vanguard. The UCN’s core leadership, starting with Mae Hawm, was primarily female. This group often organized workshops around women’s livelihoods and helped communities establish savings groups for women specifically. However, gendered hierarchies played out at the approval meetings, which were usually run by male committee chairs and male municipal officials.8 During meetings women typically presented projects, detailing complex political issues in their communities, but were subject to the kinds of learning processes described previously. Yet, despite these uneven encounters, the women working at the UCN both extended these stereotypes and contested them by extending the agency’s discourses about women’s abilities and continuing to raise knotty questions in their efforts to be heard. Here Baan Mankong’s gender politics reflects other insights into the gendered implications of evictions, which frequently create new political opportunities and new burdens for women (Perry 2013; see also Lamb, Schoenberger, and Middleton 2017). These meetings leveraged women’s moral capital, but also constrained their

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efforts to speak politically. The Baan Mankong approval process not only rendered the appropriate form of community, but also generated notions of appropriate participation—harmonious, cooperative, consensus driven, and gendered female—in contrast with other forms of public, political disagreements that highlighted the irreconcilable tensions within Thai society and were gendered male. By gendering appropriate participation female, CODI did not unseat gendered power relations, nor did it deter women from pressing political assertions through the various mechanisms available to them, but it did leverage certain assumptions about women to shape the roles they played within their settlements and homes. By directing their voices toward appropriate politics aimed at creating the agency’s idea of appropriate communities, CODI composed the approval meeting as alternative public sphere that had very little to do with local implications of ongoing national debates, which residents of all genders cared deeply about. COUNTING EXERCISES Following the community mapping projects, the SRT’s director of property visited Khon Kaen to discuss the terms of rental with the Baan Mankong representatives from each community in the United Communities Network. During the meeting held in early February of 2009, the agency’s representative, Udorn, stressed that the SRT wanted to rent to everyone, but that the community members needed to sort out the issues in each community before they could sign leases. These issues ranged from residents who were listed on the SRT’s roster as active residents along the tracks but had sold their rights to someone else, to people using SRT land for businesses, to people holding multiple lots as space for private rentals. They also included contested land claims between the city’s competing networks, as in the Chumchon Phư̄anbān, where both networks had laid claim to various interwoven sections of the settlement. Udorn underscored that the official community rosters needed to reflect the residents living there. Those not on the official roster created in 2003 would be evicted. He told the UCN representatives that the network needed to collect the housing registration cards for each member so that the SRT could cross-check residents against the master list. The SRT demanded clear documentation to curtail further settlement along the tracks and to limit their engagement with the disagreements that had blossomed there.



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The SRT also aimed to document businesses operating along the tracks and charge them higher rent than the reduced rate for low-income residents even though residents owned many of these businesses and used their houses as both domestic and commercial spaces. The next round of surveying aimed to accomplish three things. First, it was meant to aid the SRT in its effort to transform the land into an asset by clarifying who was “truly poor” from those who were merely “trespassing.” Determing these rental rates helped transform the land from being a de facto form of public housing into a form of real estate divided into different asset classes that helped the railway bring its property into line with the emerging real estate calculus taking place across the country. Second, it aimed to stabilize occupancy numbers by preventing new people from settling there. Finally, it set out strict conditions that defined what a proper slum was and therefore defined what it meant to be an acceptable villager: poverty, communality, docility, and, cooperation.9 The SRT had been collecting lists along the tracks since the beginning of the UCN’s mobilizations in 1997, as described in chapter 3. The 2009 meeting with Udorn began from precisely this point: The reason I came here today was to speak with the different communities that have wanted to rent. Today, we have all the communities gathered that are in the original list that the Four Regions gathered. I came today to report that the policy of the SRT is to solve the problem of the communities built on the railway land quickly. We aren’t going to address whether you are in this network or that network. We are going to use the ledger that we surveyed in 2003. That ledger is going to be central because we have had it for a long time and we haven’t addressed it. Since that period, we’ve had people come from the outside and things have grown little by little, so we need to address that first.

By 2009, the documented number of communities differed significantly from the number on the memorandum of understanding (MOU). The original MOU included the names of sixty-one communities nationally. When CODI began conducting more comprehensive surveys, it documented more than 230 settlements along the tracks. To complicate this picture further, among the sixty-one original communities named in the MOU many had split and split again, forming new communities in the process. At the same

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time, CODI created its own community network, Saphāp Ongkawn Chumchon (SOC), which aimed to be like the Four Region’s Network, working as a state-sponsored social movement that residents could use to push for change upward and organize and negotiate with its internal member communities. SOC’s leadership in Bangkok hoped it might also act as cosignatory, like the FRSN, working alongside the SRT, CODI, and its member communities. Yet this new network was not included on the MOU and the SRT did not understand the network’s relationship to CODI, which was ambiguous. The emergence of SOC and the expanded count of the settlements underscored how although the MOU seemed official, it ignored the changing political, physical, and governmental contexts along the tracks. In particular, it ignored how increasing interactions between residents, deepening local political organization, and emerging forms of housing governance had transformed both the number of settlements and how they were counted. Matthew Hull observes the “bureaucratic irony” that “dependence on written artifacts to secure fixity can result in the opposite effect” (2008, 585). This was precisely the case in Khon Kaen. Accurate or not, the MOU list continued to have real effects. The NGOaffiliated Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network used the MOU to organize residents while also using it to exclude uncooperative settlements and settlers. Those who did not comply with the KKSRN were seen as obstructing not only the local organizing process but also the network’s efforts to work within the law. Indeed, Chumchon Phư̄anbān was entirely left off the MOU, a point that the leaders in the KKSRN pointed out in their conflicts with Mae Hawm and residents from that community (see chapter 5). Here the specific irony of the SRT’s MOU clarifies itself: although the document sought to limit settlement, it also enabled residents to begin struggling for leases qua communities. Residents could only do so via new negotiations, new disagreements, and new exclusions, which lead to increasing numbers of communities. Thus, once the MOU was created, the number of communities skyrocketed as residents began organizing and disagreeing with one another about who was included in which community. The MOU created the terms of rental, making the conditions for residents to ground their land claims, “making the illegal legal” (Holston 1991a, 721–723) and therefore setting the terms of inclusion and exclusion (Harms 2016a). Udorn emphasized the importance of counting and audits for residents hoping to sign leases:



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With the exception of inheritance [moraadok] to family members, you cannot transfer property [ōn sapsin mai dai]. Every contract that gets presented to the SRT will have to count the names on the list and make sure they are accurate. After we’ve approved your rental, the SRT will come down another time to check to see whether every individual is the person who has requested to rent is accurate. We’ll check their name to see if it is true. We’ll check to see if they have transferred their rights to someone else. Because the railway doesn’t have to let you use the land for whatever you want to use it for. This time we are giving you a special price for people with low incomes. You need to understand that in the case of “congested communities” [chumchon āeat] we do not allow the transference of ownership [rao mai anumat on sitthi].

These audits required residents to take up management of the railway’s real estate asset by auditing each other—ironically, by making sure they were not treating their own property as an asset. Because the rental agreements were limited to “congested communities,” they transformed poverty and vulnerability into prerequisites for rental agreements.10 Given the inherent heterogeneity along the tracks, contentious encounters between residents, the SRT, CODI, and the city’s dueling networks was inevitable. If the community maps sought to render the spatial edges of the settlements clear, then the counting exercises intended to regulate and stabilize residency. As described earlier, settlement of the tracks was fluid. They were home to both the upwardly and downwardly mobile. They were made up of permanent and temporary residents—owners, renters, family members from distant provinces, and recent urban migrants of varying incomes. Sometimes temporary residents became permanent, sometimes they moved on, selling rights to land that they did not possess. By making the space legible, the SRT imagined it would be able to distinguish between legitimate residents (the vulnerable poor) and illegitimate invaders (including very poor renters, the political poor, temporary renters, and the upwardly mobile working poor, and lower middle classes who used the land as an asset in their own right) making it possible to evict illegitimate land invaders while protecting vulnerable, poor occupants. In fact, the more fluid residents were inevitably the most vulnerable.11 A politics of harmony was essential to this process throughout. As Udorn put it:

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In my experience when I’ve seen communities encounter problems that prevent them from renting, it is due to problems within the communities. I’ve said this again and again. When it comes time to rent, the community splits into two factions, three factions, four factions until the rental process fails. Sometimes groups will present [their case for rental] and then we go down to check the documents in the community and we find out that the people that represented the community were not in the community. . . . When we organize the community we can only complete the process if there are no conflicts. If we decide to rent and there is conflict it is not possible to continue.

This final description of community obscured the way the meeting itself produced topographies of community with clear boundaries by eliminating the disagreements necessary to compose such a thing. The inside and outside of any particular community could only be produced through disagreements. Instead of emphasizing the complex politics inherent in ­community-making, Udorn highlighted the importance of documentation and harmony. The SRT cast its job as simply checking the 2003 lists against the actual settlements, leaving the question of how to deal with the exclusions, elisions, and contradictions in that list unanswered. COMMUNITY ARCHITECTS CODI’s community architects (sathābanik chumchon) also played a key role in producing community boundaries. Community architects were important not only because they produced designs that reflected residents’ desires during planning processes, but also because architecture and design figured as key nodes of community work by CODI. Architects worked as community organizers, meeting facilitators, site surveyors, and creators of plans and home designs. They mediated disputes and formed coalitions. They mapped, budgeted, and helped out with construction questions. In this sense, they were responsible not only for translating residents’ desires into construction plans, but for making community real both in a physical and a political sense. Sakkarin Sapu and Nattawut Usavagovitwong, architecture and planning scholars who both studied and worked on the Baan Mankong project, characterize community architecture as an effort to understand “disguised relationships” through interviews, observations, and experimentation (2009,



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3). This kind of ethnographic architectural praxis was important for CODI’s architects who inevitably found themselves in the middle of complex disputes. As architects led various projects, they had to negotiate within and across factions, seeking allies, and attempting to manage confrontations as they designed, organized, and compiled documents. The aim of this engaged quasi-ethnographic praxis, according to Sakkarin and Nattawut, is to build chumchon khemkhāeng—strong, resilient communities—that residents could rely on for mutual aid and that could be mobilized to protect their interests against those of more powerful actors in Thai society (2009; see also Herz­ feld 2016, 152). Here, their work mirrored many of the processes used by their NGO activist counterparts, including developing both professional and personal relationships with residents to cultivate leaders and solidarities within the settlements. Acting on this knowledge was more complex than many architects expected. Many said they understood the disputes between residents and their roots, but lacked the tools—time, money, and open-ended support from city and state agencies—to manage them.12 Some architects recognized that the problems facing residents exceeded their grasp, that residents’ inability to pressure state agencies to make changes in policy was tied to their invisibility as political actors. Architects also understood that poverty was structural and that cheap land was limited in many fast-growing cities, impinging on their abilities to collaboratively design settlements and residents’ abilities to build them. For example, in two relocation pilot projects launched by CODI in Khon Kaen, the poorest residents were the first to withdraw from their rosters. Residents who withdrew from these projects told me they found saving nearly impossible and had to quit the project before construction began. As one participant—a forty-five-year-old female renter I met at one of the projects—explained, “The project took too much time, was too expensive, and became dominated by the municipal government, so we left.” These structural limitations produced the seeds of conflicts within communities that the architects simply could not solve through design. Within two years of opening, few of the original low-income participants lived in either of the pilot communities. Another complaint that CODI architects raised was that there simply weren’t enough of them to do the complex technical work, auditing, and deep ethnographic praxis entailed in most projects. In 2009, ten community architects were working in Isaan in more than a hundred projects across the

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region. No matter how much trust the architects could build with residents, they carried too many cases with too many complex details for them to manage. Here, many architects recognized that project participants were unable to even effectively critique CODI, which they acknowledged exacerbated residents’ insecurity with its inadequate staff numbers, ever-changing policies, documentation requirements, and budgetary priorities. Many community architects felt pulled by the technical constraints of architecture itself. For example, in one special technical meeting in Bangkok, architects were shown images of half completed homes and some frightening examples of auto-construction gone bad—such as homes with structural posts that were not integrated into their cement foundations. Afterward, one younger CODI architect explained, This is not a design problem. They [senior architects] just talked about how we need to design this or that and we needed better quality designs. I think it is important for the villagers to be the leaders of the process. They need to be the ones who tell us what they want and we do that. They need to show us what they can do.

However, as the photos of half-built homes demonstrated, the homes residents constructed on their own stretched meager project budgets and their own limited technical expertise; such construction was not always structurally sound. Thus, the tasks of resident-led design and construction and the goals of the participants—to have affordable, secure, safe h ­ ousing— were sometimes at odds with each other and, frequently, ran counter to CODI staff ’s ground-level aims to empower and inspire residents to do things themselves. Moreover, the images highlighted an even deeper irony. Autoconstruction was not an innovation, but instead an endemic and pervasive practice in most poor communities (see Holston 1991b). In this way, Baan Mankong’s self-help construction practices were not new, even if the kinds of resources they apportioned to the practice were. Armed with technical skills but limited ability to analyze, let alone change, the political and economic contexts they found themselves working in, many architects described feeling powerless to do anything about the situation residents faced. For some of CODI’s youngest architects and community planners, often idealistic and just a few years out of school, these disjunctures were particularly troubling. The architects I got to know were



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roughly my age (late twenties at the time), college-educated, and often simultaneously pursuing graduate degrees in urban planning. Many were from rural areas of Isaan and saw their work in an ethical and sometimes political light. These architects adopted close relationships with residents, conducting meetings that moved in and out of the Isaan language easily. Residents responded positively to this, but also noted that the architects were spread too thinly to really understand the situation on the ground in each project site. These conditions highlighted the limitations CODI architects faced as they attempted to build the sorts of intimacies the NGOs were experts at creating. Aware that such intimacies were fundamental to creating trust between the agency and residents, but lacking a critical social science background, many architects dismissed residents’ concerns because they felt that their disputes were merely evidence of individual personality conflicts or selfishness (henkāetua) rather than emerging from the way various structural inequalities had shaped community histories and futures. Nevertheless, some of these architects actively sought to manage the constraints of the project by mobilizing their status as bureaucrats to work with the residents to help them understand and leverage the system in their favor. Here CODI’s bureaucratic work turned into a kind of minor key activism in its own right. In twisting their circumstances ever-so-slightly to accommodate residents demands, the community architects were able to enact, what Tania Li (2008) calls a “situated politics,” that reflected their own positions and possibilities but did not exceed them much less turn into broader organized movements.13 Although the architects (and CODI as an agency) were relatively powerless within the broader framework of the Thai state, they often resisted by pushing projects ahead where paperwork was imperfect and directing project money toward things they knew residents could use immediately. MANAGED PROTESTS Following the meeting with Udorn, UCN members had little time to begin the SRT’s prescribed counting exercise. Instead, they organized a protest in response to rumors that a local Khon Kaen businessperson was trying to rent the land now occupied by the Chumchon Phư̄anbān to transform the space into a parking lot and residences for employees at the then underconstruction Central Plaza shopping mall. Held on a scorching day in early

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April 2009 on the lawn in front of the city’s railway station, the protest drew about two hundred residents from Mae Hawm’s network. After a short set of speeches delivered from the top of a bus the network had rented that morning to publicize the demonstration to residents along the tracks, Mae Hawm and her leadership left the field to meet with CODI and the SRT behind closed doors. Following a half-hour of conversation, the SRT reaffirmed its commitment to rent to the UCN members, provided they comply with the process outlined in the MOU. They resolved the issue surrounding the parking lot, but did not resolve the ambiguity surrounding the MOU’s stipulation that the Four Regions Slum Network and not SOC had to sign off on all the leases. They also did not address the missing communities on the roster. Nevertheless, Mae Hawm emerged from the meeting with a small victory. After announcing the agreement with the SRT, residents emerged from the shade and danced to the crackling sound of mawlam music as it strained the bus’s public announcement system. Amid the celebration, then Deputy Mayor Teerasak Teekayupa affirmed the municipality’s support for the residents, provided they work together: The city wants to be your partner and help the rental process but you have to want to rent too. You have to work toward renting yourselves and to prepare your communities and yourselves to rent. In the past there have been many people who wanted to be in the communities as they always have. They don’t want to rent. This is not possible now. There are many people interested in this land so we have to rent now.

In one sense, the protest was a demonstration of the UCN leaders’ will to disagree. In meetings before the event, the UCN leadership committee speculated that the protest would draw 2,500 people. Shorty, a fiery leader in T7 thought the protest might even attract the growing regional Red Shirt movement to the issue. Despite the fact that far fewer people attended, most residents felt energized from their show of strength. They celebrated the prospect of rental and perhaps a more secure future. Saman, a leader from T1, a dense settlement in the heart of the city, told me that the protest made him feel hopeful. “This is the first time that the villagers from T1 have gotten together to do something like this. I think everyone can see now that we need to rent. I think before no one wanted to rent and didn’t believe that they could be evicted. They just wanted to stay there as before. But today they



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feel like they can rent and that they know they have to.” The protest seemed evidence for Saman and others like him that their voices were being heard and their bodies were becoming visible for the first time ever. Like previous eras, protest opened up residents’ horizons of possibility by demonstrating the power of their collective voice. CODI planners echoed this sentiment, telling them that the event was useful, waking the residents up (tư̄n tua) to changes taking place around them. CODI’s architects were involved in the entire event. In advance of the protest, Khit, Frank, and several other CODI staff carefully vetted the group’s plans. They helped script Mae Hawm’s message, sent advisors from SOC in Bangkok to help the network plan the event, and, ultimately, arranged the meeting with the SRT. One CODI architect explained that CODI had helped strike an agreement with the SRT about the parking lot in a meeting held before the protest even began. If the public protest showed some of the UCN’s organizational capacity and its will to resist, it also revealed the complex role that CODI’s staff played in the shaping that voice by extending the agency’s role crafting residents demands and managing their voices. POLITICAL MANAGEMENT THROUGH DESIGN This chapter describes both the techniques and visions of citizen design that informed the Baan Mankong project. Proceeding through practices of surveying, spatial design, counting, and local organization, it argues that CODI design practices encompassed physical design but also expanded on that process to intervene in the values that residents used to envision transformation in their homes and communities. Later chapters describe how the house became a critical focus for both residents and planners hoping to express their visions of citizenship, but here I excavate the core values that give those visions of domestic space their shape. Moreover, those visions were not up for debate but instead tied to a series of complex vertically oriented hierarchies of project approval that ensured that residents projects reflected CODI’s visions in very specific ways. Critical studies of design note the ways in which design enfolds power arrangements but also enable new potential possibilities to unfold (Rubio and Fogué 2015). The complex interplay between those logics already contained within a particular design and those that unfold in unexpected ways, open up designs to becoming political. This chapter emphasizes the former,

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considering how CODI's logics worked themselves out in participatory planning processes. At the same time, it also hints at the latter, considering the complex ways different citizen designs shaped the Baan Mankong project. Although CODI’s designs often worked their way toward managing the political aspirations and visions of residents, residents used the project to enable the unfolding of their own visions. However, CODI’s visions were neither uniform nor uncomplicated in their enactment. The agency’s architects wrestled with the complexities of what it was to enact democracy on the ground and often shared residents’ desires to build a more robust democracy even as they worked to manage the kinds of political claims settlements made. Finally, residents themselves engaged with CODI’s design practices and citizen designs in order to assert their own visions, which extended many of the values that CODI’s project proposed and challenged them. The chapter that follows demonstrates how despite these variations in visions of citizenship and politics, values of moderation, unity, and harmony were also inscribed in the project’s bureaucratic forms, which imbued those versions of citizenship with a force that narrowed the project’s possible outcomes and even ignored the visions of belonging put forward by many of CODIs staff, its NGO collaborators, and the residents themselves.

5 Paper Communities

In early 2009, I drove down to the Khon Kaen municipal office with Prasert, an engineering consultant hired by Mae Hawm and the United Communities Network (UCN), and Lop, a resident of T3. As we rattled through the city’s midday traffic, the two men chain smoked in the front of the car, complaining to me about Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI), the Khon Kaen municipality, and, above all, the annoyances of Baan Mankong’s paperwork. Prasert was hired to help the United Communities conduct site surveys for the network’s first approved projects—an extension of three alleyways and expansion of a local drainage system in T3. This job violated CODI’s rule against communities using project money to pay outside contractors. CODI officials wanted residents to avoid spending money to work with professionals on their projects. Instead, they preferred that residents mobilize their own knowledge and skills in the name of communal improvement. Nevertheless, Lop and Mae Hawm hired Prasert to help with the complex construction of the drainage system so as to avoid problems with the municipality’s technical requirements and to make sure their infrastructure project actually had the desired effect, ending periodic flooding once and for all. During the process of construction, residents from T3 had run out of money and could not finish the soi projects. At the previous city committee meeting, Lop had filed paperwork to get the second installment of project funds released so their work could continue. Once that application received 111

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approval, Lop and Prasert then filed a second round of paperwork with CODI to confirm the municipality’s approval. CODI architects, however, on checking the documents, found that their submission did not include the signature of the deputy mayor who was supposed to have signed off on behalf of the city committee. Despite the fact that Prasert and Lop had already spent the morning at the municipal office locating other documents, they headed back to find and copy this form, taking me along with them. Without it, CODI would be unable to approve the money and the community’s project would remain unfinished. Prasert: They [CODI] don’t even tell us we need this set of documents or that set of documents. We’ve been looking for the right documents for the last week. Lop: If it continues like this I am going to back out [of the project]. I am done with this. Prasert: CODI’s process is always changing. The documents they require for the approval packet are not clear. It is not clear who needs to sign them and who is responsible for preparing them properly. Lop: We are just villagers, they are the experts [rao pen chaobān khao pen phūchīaochāng]. It should be CODI’s role [botbāt]. Prasert: It’s like this every time we try to do something. It gets stuck in the process. The villagers won’t continue to work this way if the project is like this and they don’t see some results. Their frustrations continued at the Khon Kaen municipal office. When we arrived, we spoke with a receptionist who tried and failed to locate the approval documents himself. At this, Lop sighed loudly and stormed out of the office. Prasert and I stayed behind, rummaging through the binders stacked in front of us. Eventually, I located the packet of forms from the November meeting. Paging through them, we soon discovered that the approval form with the signatures was gone. Indeed, it was unclear whether the form was signed in the first place. Eventually we also gave up and went downstairs. Outside the municipal office, we found Lop and Wi, another member of the United Communities Network. Wi was also having trouble getting the remaining funding for his project—a drainage system. He was waiting to speak with the deputy mayor. Between puffs on his cigarette, Wi looked at me:



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“We can’t work like this. They don’t give us salaries. If we continue to work like this we’ll die for sure.” They all laughed. On the way back to the CODI office, Lop told me that he hadn’t been able to make his hours as a security guard at the local hotel because he had been spending all of his time working on the upgrade project. He and his wife turned to making pork rinds at home, selling them to make supplemental income. Lop, Prasert, and Wi were not wrong. The paperwork associated with the Baan Mankong project was incredible. Some of it reflected ordinary bureaucratic hassles associated with any construction process in Thailand. Large and small construction firms resolve these problems with large administrative staffs and, often, bribes. But for residents who had to spend their own time preparing documents, lost, missing, and incorrect forms were an onerous form of arbitrary power. Other times, paperwork exerted specific kinds of force, requiring that residents demonstrate Baan Mankong’s values in documentary form to gain access to money. In either case, paperwork always enacted a kind of uncertain power over residents, redistributing their time, managing their values, and quieting their politics. As Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari observe, participation under certain conditions can feel like tyranny (2001). In Khon Kaen, the most oppressive forms of participation often involved paperwork. Such forms of bureaucracy not only generated feelings of disquiet among participants, but also enacted forms of direct power as CODI’s vision of personal and communal improvement found implementation in bureaucratic artifacts. This chapter’s analysis of bureaucracy is situated between classic studies of the regularizing functions of bureaucracy (Weber 1968; Riggs 1966; Keyes 1987, 1991; Scott 1998) and studies attentive to the curious inconsistencies within bureaucratic power (Abrams 1988; Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Herzfeld 1992, 2016; Coronil 2001). Numerous anthropologists have emphasized how numbers, documents, and other bureaucratic aesthetics offer key insights into the implementation of the arts of government (see, for example, Hull 2003, 2008, 2012; Riles 2006; Gordillo 2006; Coles 2004; Ghertner 2010). Matthew Hull points out that a range of graphic artifacts “mediate the actions of individuals and the agency of larger groups, including that of the organization as a whole” (2003, 300). Graphic artifacts are thus fundamental to ways in which the bureaucracies assert their authority. Akhil Gupta and Aradhana Sharma show that what they call “governmental idioms” are also something that both nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and sub-

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altern populations master for their own ends (2006). Bureaucratic idioms and artifacts have proliferated under late capitalism as new agents of government have been created alongside an “audit culture” (Strathern 2000) to ensure “good governance” and “transparency” rooted in quantification and documentary forms. Because residents had to prove they were not “staying as they were” (yū mưā n dōem), collective and personal transformation had to be translated into “graphic artifacts” (Hull 2012), such as plans, maps, ledgers, and accounts that enabled transformations to be audited and translated across domains of power and expertise. They showed residents had changed and what they had changed into. Documentation demonstrated their seriousness, unity, and dignity. Their efforts to be transparent in their use of state resources showed residents moral capacities. So, although they appear to be ancillary to CODI’s more overt theorizations of citizenship, these practices are critical to making sense of Baan Mankong’s citizen designs; paperwork gave moderation, communality, and unity force as community leaders, NGOs, and CODI architects endeavored to produce bureaucratic representations of coherent communities of homogenously docile poor villagers with uniform values. Documents also partitioned one community from another, creating topological boundaries where topographic boundaries were impossible to produce. As chapter 4 relates, residents could gain access to Baan Mankong funds only if they demonstrated a commitment to the values embodied in community. They therefore turned to documents to prove their efforts to transform their heterogeneous settlements with fractured edges into clear, united communities with delineated boundaries. Documentation offered residents an important way to prove their commitments to CODI’s vision while offering a way for planners to regulate and shape residents’ ideas and their projects. Although Baan Mankong’s planning processes were imagined using the language of horizontal participation, the emphasis on bureaucratic processes and forms often worked to the opposite effect, reinforcing existing socio-political hierarchies even where most people at the agency disagreed with such hierarchies. Without attending to the forms of mundane bureaucracy that made up much of the everyday work of the project, it is difficult to disentangle the project’s rhetoric from its more ambivalent effects on the ground. Bureaucratic requirements forced CODI’s staff, the activist NGOs from the Four Regions Network who initiated a parallel form of the project in their own communities, and many community



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leaders to balance between mobilizing and disciplining residents’ aspirations. In some ways then, this paperwork flipped typical process of urban activism: residents and NGO activists took up the role of bureaucrats producing paperwork and auditing each other; CODI bureaucrats took on the role of activists, subverting bureaucratic processes where nominal subversions afforded space to help. COMMUNITY INSIDE-OUT Instead of resulting in leases, the protest described in chapter 4 led to a twoday CODI workshop in which residents were retrained in the Baan Mankong upgrade process. Three weeks later, residents met in Chumpae, a small city about ninety kilometers east of the Khon Kaen city. Officially home to around twenty-two thousand people, Chumpae had completed eight Baan Mankong project neighborhoods and was in the process of embarking on its ninth at the time of the workshop. Its successes in using the project’s mechanisms to create communities marked it as a model city that CODI often used for similar training and global marketing. Chumpae is a much smaller than Khon Kaen and its government actively supported these projects. Also, unlike Khon Kaen, these communities comprised previously scattered groups of residents settled into newly built housing projects. Nevertheless, CODI and the Khon Kaen municipality believed that “exchanging experiences” (kānlāekplīen prasopkān) would the enable the “villagers” from Khon Kaen’s railway settlements to learn from the experience of the “villagers” from Chumpae. They felt the meeting would help the UCN better understand the Baan Mankong process, gain confidence in themselves, and begin working together toward development.1 On the first day of the workshop, we met at Cool Breeze Community, a CODI project of cheerful blue and white houses. As the bus owned by the Khon Kaen municipality arrived, I sat and chatted with CODI staff about an assassination attempt on the controversial People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) leader, Sondhi Limthongkul, that had occurred the previous day. More than fifty residents from the United Communities Network filed into the open-air learning center (sūnrīenrū). Mae Nong, a community leader in Chumpae and a frequent public speaker for CODI, speculated that the previous day’s event might be a bad omen signaling deepening political violence to come.

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The conversation shifted when everyone had arrived. Mae Nong explained to residents how they had organized themselves into savings groups, which became the foundation of their community. She described how the groups transformed into important community institutions. In the savings groups people made payments toward the communal land rental, managed their collective savings, and interacted about community issues. Halfway through her explanation, she was interrupted by a resident from the railway tracks, asking her what the groups did when “people didn’t understand the process and they refused to participate.” Mae Nong emphasized that differences like these were fine, but that “everyone needs to see each other as members of the same community. Everyone has some way they can help the community. We cannot see each other like the Red and Yellow Shirts!” Her response, which emphasized personal development, community values, and consensus, glossed over the questioner’s specific concerns, generated from the complex conditions embedded in the State Railway of Thailand (SRT) lease in Khon Kaen. It also downplayed the key political questions inherent in the leases by mobilizing the possibilities of intractable conflict embodied in the false equivalency of the recent Red Shirt urban occupation over the Songkran holiday in Bangkok and the assassination attempt on Limthongkul. Shortly after, members of the UCN stopped asking questions and instead listened quietly. After the session, I ate lunch with friends from Saman’s community, T1. One resident told me that he felt like a “businessman” attending the seminar, laughing as he showed me a worn briefcase he brought to carry his notes back to his neighbors. Another, P’Lu, was more pessimistic: “This project will never work in our community. Things are too different from that community [Cool Breeze]. It is just a totally different situation [sathānakān mai mư̄ankān lōey].” Before the afternoon session, CODI’s regional director paired the agency’s architects with key leaders from Chumphae. Although most teams were unfamiliar with the specific issues facing residents in Khon Kaen, the groups were charged with facilitating the afternoon planning meetings with each community. Each group of facilitators was to lead a discussion about the community’s experiences with the project, some of the problems they encountered, their visions for the future of their communities, and how they might handle problems as they arose. CODI’s regional director told the facilitators that they needed to get the villagers to see that there are more “internal factors” (patjai nai) affecting the success of the project than “external factors” (patjai nawk).



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Internal factors here meant the residents themselves; external factors referred to the railway, the city, CODI, and just about anything else beyond the residents and their internal relations with one another and, at an even deeper level, their affective relations with themselves. The discursive schematic of a community, with a clear interior and exterior, echoed the one mobilized by the railway director. It was thus not a misreading of the situation, but instead a deliberate topological intervention that sought to highlight the shared nature of residents’ problems in an effort to help them think communally and to look beyond (if not ignore) their differences, perceived and actual. Doing so, planners hoped, would produce a community that was composed of internally coherent values and externally legible boundaries. The groups spread out across a lawn and, working with their facilitators, detailed numerous problems, mostly tied to what CODI would call external factors—cumbersome documentation, infrequent city committee meetings, insufficient numbers of architects and engineers to consult on project planning, and the network’s ongoing disputes between community factions and rival networks. Many workshop participants discussed the fact that the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network, the rival network working with the Four Regions Slum Network, fostered disputes between residents who were unsure which group to join. The most important complaints residents voiced during the sessions were those about rental. In one community, for example, residents complained that the homeowners in the twenty meters closest to the tracks refused to save collectively because they knew they would be unable to rent. The facilitator in that group, Tum, an architect at CODI, was unaware of the spatial regulations associated with SRT leases. He needed to have the spatial regulations explained. Tum apologized for not knowing more about the case and continued leading the discussion in another direction. The following day began without any of the specific issues raised in these sessions being addressed. Instead, the regional director of the Baan Mankong project returned to the schematic of internal and external factors: Yesterday, we identified some strengths, your willingness to work, and willingness to help each other. But we also saw some weaknesses—­ villagers aren’t confident in the project. Villagers aren’t confident and they don’t know what is going on. There are other external factors, like the municipality and the other power structures facing them.

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A local professor of urban planning who frequently consulted CODI continued: Right now it is important that we see that the internal factors are larger than the external. For example, we always say, “We want to rent! We want to rent!” and now the railroad and CODI have all the documents ready. The railroad is saying, “OK, you can rent now,” and the communities are saying, “We don’t have the money.” These internal factors can be changed if you use the process [chai krabūankān].

He then drew up a list of the many of the issues facing the communities taken from the previous day’s discussions, dividing them between internal factors and external factors and linking them with a proposed solution. Before moving on, the speaker paused, summing up the process of problem-­ solving he had just taken the group through: “Now that we have recognized the problems, we need to understand that we can fix them before they arise. It is important to see that there are fewer external factors than there are internal factors and that by working through the internal factors, the external factors might be lessened.” The three most important factors for residents—the rental process, internal disputes, and the preparation documentation—went unaddressed. By insisting on an internal-external dichotomy, however, the speakers effectively proposed specific socio-political boundaries within which residents should focus their community-building work. During the last session, residents created a final document—a development timeline (phāenphatthanā).2 Once again gathered on the lawn, the teams began scheduling their community projects, visualizing their activities across the year. The documents themselves were a blank grid in which each box started with a month, then a project name, then an estimated budget, and then an estimated time to complete the project. As the residents filled out these grids, clear benchmarks replaced knotted entanglements. In this way, the documents erased community as residents had previously experienced it, rife with disagreements and divided in space, and replaced it with a homogeneously unified community moving together across the year toward shared development targets. In doing this, the timeline gave CODI’s discursive work a documentary form. Among some residents the planning exercise inspired hope. By the end of the session, some even believed that their community might be like Cool



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Breeze Community, where many had slept the night before as a part of the exchange. They said that before they felt the project was impossible, but now these new goals and new forms of community seemed within reach. Shorty, a leader in a community called T7, said that the plans had helped him understand how to organize his work and had shown them that the kinds of collective practices that the planners had been talking about might be possible if he and his neighbors broke the project down into steps. The timelines served multiple purposes. First, they were documentary evidence of the community’s desire to “develop.” With these plans in hand, residents could show the railway that they were committed to “not staying as they were before.” Second, CODI planners felt that the plans would help leaders prioritize their goals and give them a chance to brainstorm their visions of improvement so they could clearly share them with their neighbors. In this, the architects were correct. The simple grid became a powerful tool for residents to imagine a future path forward as a unified community, even as it obscured the complex politics entailed in moving ahead together.3 Finally, the plans enabled CODI staff opportunities to interact with the community leaders and helped them channel their projects in ways that CODI felt were appropriate. For example, two communities prioritized the construction of a sālā chumchon over basic infrastructure projects. The sālā is traditional, open-plan building common to rural villages and used for communal activities such as rituals, festivals, and meetings. Because a sālā was a common request in other projects, planners were accustomed to using it to redirect participants toward more appropriate (mawsom) goals. Somewhat paradoxically, planners felt that these sālā were unnecessary and even excessive, even though they were the only resolutely communal spaces that residents could think to build. For residents, the sālā was imagined as a way of building solidarity while creating a shared space that visibly demonstrated the legitimacy of the community. CODI planners pointed out that improvised meeting spaces were suitable for most community activities in that they demonstrated residents’ willingness to live within limits and their understanding of “enough” (khwāmpaw). Although the documents presented a tool for aspiring, they also made space for the planners to interject their ideas to correct these aspirations based on a discourse of sufficiency. More than that, they revealed the ways in which residents’ visions of political legitimacy both overlapped and were in tension with the values of community that CODI proposed.

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CULTIVATING HARMONY, STIFLING DISAGREEMENT After the Chumpae workshop, Mae Hawm and United Communities Network went back into the settlements to once again attempt to “build the villagers’ understanding” (tām khwām khaojai kap chaobān) about both the Baan Mankong project and the rental process. Working in teams with CODI officials, leaders from the UCN used the methods discussed in the workshop to explain the upgrade and rental processes and the requirements for participation. The meetings aimed to introduce residents, in most cases for a second or third time, to the CODI process of surveying and documentation and to explain again the projects’ core values of harmony and unity. Throughout May 2009, these teams held meetings at various locations in their communities up and down the tracks. Meetings were held in the middles of streets, at half-finished and fully finished sālā, on front porches, and in other improvised communal spaces. Some of these efforts were well attended. A few even went smoothly as in Saman’s community (T1), where a large turnout helped build momentum for their community upgrades and encouraged a new group of leaders to emerge. Most of the other meetings did not go as well. In T3, the community’s official headperson (as opposed to the Baan Mankong–United Communities representative, Lop) instructed residents to skip the meeting; most did. At a meeting in the adjacent community of T7, the official headperson stood up in the middle of Mae Hawm’s presentation and accused her and her collaborators of corruption. She told them that she did not believe in the Baan Mankong process and that she felt that Shorty, T7’s Baan Mankong representative, was embezzling money and distributing it to his friends. At another session, held at a more recently settled community located on the southern edge of Khon Kaen, known as Chumchon Lāklai, the meeting became deeply contentious when a resident named Khāeng explained that the approach taken by CODI was naïve and likely to fail. After Mae Hawm and her collaborator from CODI, Noi, explained the process to residents of Chumchon Lāklai, they fielded a series of increasingly aggressive questions, concluding with Khāeng:

Khāeng: You [Mae Hawm] have been coming down here for ten years talking about rental. They’ve surveyed our land dozens of times now. Why has only one community been able



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to rent? Nothing ever happens! We’ve been talking about this for ten years! What is CODI going to do to help us? Some people don’t have any money! Some people here have money ready right now. If you want us to rent, just ask us and we are ready to rent. Why do we have to save as a group? Savings is the big problem. People will just save and borrow, save and borrow, save and borrow. Some of us don’t want to rent. We know who to deal with, I’ve heard all this before and I am tired of it.

Mae Hawm [upset]: CODI doesn’t do it for you. You need to do it for yourself. CODI is here to help in the process . . .  Khāeng [interrupting]: How many places in Khon Kaen have been able to rent? How many? Mae Hawm: Chumchon Phư̄anbān. Everyone else that has rented is with the Four Regions group.

This rebuttal was deceptive. Mae Hawm was referring to the section of Chumchon Phư̄anbān that was actually associated with T5, the KKSRN, and the Four Regions Slum Network. The much larger section of Chumchon Phư̄anbān that was part of the UCN had yet to sign any lease.



Khāeng: Mae Hawm: Khāeng: Mae Hawm:

Why is that? The villagers don’t have enough money to rent. No, that is not true. They have enough money. It’s because people are corrupt [khī kōng]. They take advantage of other people [referring to the way that the Four Regions groups have split off from larger communities to sign leases]. Khāeng: No, they need to protest to get leases signed. Noi: You want to have a situation like the PAD? Khāeng: No! I want a true protest [mawb]. I want to really protest for what is right.

By raising the specter of the locally unpopular, antidemocratic PAD, Noi drew the ongoing struggles between the UCN, the SRT, the Khon Kaen Slum

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Revival Network (KKSRN), and CODI into broader debates about politics more generally. Khāeng emphasized that the Four Regions and KKSRN had secured lease agreements because they had mobilized politically. He was upset because Mae Hawm and her collaborators from CODI framed the process as hinging on proper documentation and reforming their values. Having already conducted numerous rounds of surveying and documentation, beleaguered residents strongly pushed back. This reflected both their fatigue with CODI’s emphasis on harmonious bureaucratic processes and that this settlement was itself home a wide variety of residents, some relatively wealthy and others quite poor. CODI’s idioms of harmonious unity among a uniformly poor community did not fit the specific conditions in the settlement, which was heterogeneous and divided. Instead, residents were motivated to directly confront the SRT and demand recognition on their own terms. Yet, by comparing Mr. Khāeng’s call to political action with the PAD’s demonstrations, Mae Hawm and her CODI collaborators problematized such approaches, marking any attempt to mobilize politically as divisive. In this sense, Khāeng’s argument clarified the binds these conflicting citizen designs put on residents. The only way anyone along the tracks had secured their rights was by making themselves visible as legitimate political actors, capable of mobilizing and disagreeing with the SRT. However, to participate in Baan Mankong, residents were increasingly pressured to be good citizens in ways that asked them to develop themselves, to cooperate, to downplay their claims to rights, and to create social harmony. UPGRADES AND AUDITS For residents to receive their upgrade money from CODI, the UCN representatives had to create a ledger of every resident living in the community and photocopy their housing registration and their national ID card (bat prachāchon). They also had to photograph every house applying for the grant, the owner standing in front of it. I was frequently the photographer in this process, taking pictures and printing copies for each resident and the network. Residents in both the front twenty meters and the back twenty meters in most communities readily allowed us to photograph their homes and supplied the necessary documentation without resistance. This was not the case when it came to the SRT documentation.



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These packets of documents took time to compile and were checked by CODI and sent back to the UCN several times. Whiteout became a “weapon of the weak” (Scott 1985) as Mae Hawm and other representatives adjusted numbers until CODI officials finally accepted them. In fact, we were surprised at the lack of public debate when the upgrades came up for approval in the regional meeting. At first, I assumed this was because the documents were all correct and the issue came up at the end of a long meeting’s agenda and was approved as a matter of perfunctory business. In fact, the upgrade documents moved forward outside the normal “learning process” of the approval meeting because CODI had itself received scrutiny for not being able to keep up with its spending targets for the year. When I asked about this, CODI architects told me that they deviated from the normal approval process because, if successfully completed, these small upgrades might help them improve community relations among residents and imbue the larger Baan Mankong project with hope, pushing residents forward in their negotiations with the SRT. In short, the upgrades were approved because some of the architects saw them as an appropriate way to help residents move forward even if it was in defiance of the SRT, which often prohibited construction in communities without leases. Working this way was a nominal but effective form of bureaucratic activism in that it found ways to effectively bend rules without breaking them. This was good news for residents in the UCN, who began implementing the first stage of the housing improvement grants by the end of that summer. Although the grants did not help residents secure their tenure, they did make life more livable for many.4 In some cases, the money was enough to complete residents’ projects as planned. There residents made necessary improvements to walls, roofs, and floors. To the agency, these houses appeared to have done things correctly. In other cases, residents took out black-market loans to finish projects they started. In many cases, the money provided by the upgrade grants was inadequate for even the most basic repairs. In these cases, residents simply could not finish projects that they started unless they took out new black-market loans. In one house, a resident replaced and raised a leaky roof, but ran out of money before finishing the project. The result was a gaping space between the roof and the walls. In cases like this, residents were left with half-completed structures, unsure about how to get their houses back to where they started. The grants also sowed some seeds of cooperation, but not always in the

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ways CODI imagined. In T1, the densest, poorest, and probably most spatially vulnerable community in the Khon Kaen municipality, where more than half of its residents lived in the twenty meters closest to the tracks, the upgrades created numerous types of heretofore unseen types of community engagement. For example, the Baan Mankong team worked together to rebuild a house that was on the verge of collapsing. Over the course of a few weeks, a group of volunteers demolished the structure, planted new poles, performed the proper house building rituals, and constructed a concrete block structure where a preciously tilting wooden structure had stood. However, residents did not simply donate their time as CODI imagined (and required). Instead, they donated their labor and the homeowner provided food, beer, water, and in some cases nominal compensation. In doing so, residents used CODI’s grants in ways that did not conform to the regulations that encouraged reciprocal labor exchanges rather cash payments. Nevertheless, during the project the community worked together. Yet, even as it did, the requirement that residents manage the grants on their own created tensions. Over the course of the upgrades, I accompanied T1’s leaders as they walked through the community and checked on different projects by photographing them and collecting receipts. Here, residents were transformed into bureaucrats, auditing their neighbors and ensuring that the money was being spent appropriately. The leadership team in T1 began to crack under the weight of all of the work and documentation associated with the audits. Saman, the leader from the Baan Mankong project team who was so inspired by the protests and the workshops, ended up running to become the community’s official headperson but lost to a wealthy patron who lived outside the community. After the election, Saman withdrew from these community activities. Another leader spent so much time on the projects that he lost his job and separated from his wife, leaving Khon Kaen entirely a few years later.5 Complete transparency, though desired by the leadership team, was elusive because residents were poorly trained in bookkeeping, project budgets were not clearly defined (and procedures for administering them often changed), and bookkeeping practices in government offices were frequently as poorly managed than those in the community. Even though residents spent hours “fixing numbers” (kāe tūalēk) with whiteout, calculating and tabulating balance sheets, and correcting mistakes, none of this mattered when procedures changed, grant numbers shifted, or government reports



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went missing. Moreover, residents were keen to use the funds for repairs that CODI approved for repairs and upgrades that they saw as necessary. They also used money to hire daily labor and to purchase food and alcohol to support communal labor exchanges. This kind of exchange has always been a part of local practices of cooperation but was forbidden by project regulations. Few residents really felt compelled to discipline each other for this because they understood the difficulty of the kind of work these home improvements entailed. At the same time, community leaders commented about misuse of funds behind the scenes, concerned about the effects of possible government audits. Although the KKSRN and the Four Regions Slum Network often defined themselves in contrast with CODI (creating a parallel structure for project approval in their communities, for example) they were also required to conduct audit procedures that mirrored CODI’s. This fundamentally transformed the roles of both activists and community leaders; the Four Regions Network transformed from housing activists into local bureaucrats. On one occasion in 2010 as the KKSRN completed its upgrade grants, I accompanied Boonma, Nung, and Prathān Thi to a community called City’s Edge, where the KKSRN had to help elect a new headman after it was discovered that some of their bank accounts had missing money. At the meeting, the community voted in a new leader and the KKSRN group emphasized the importance of maintaining transparency in their accounting. Prathān Thi instructed them, “You need to make sure that you do your accounting clearly and work transparently. This is the community’s money and it is all in the account. You need to make sure you keep track of every baht and every satang.” Later in the week, we returned to conduct a long audit of receipts and expenses, ultimately determining that about 1,500 baht of several hundred thousand was used to buy food and alcohol to compensate voluntary labor exchanges on one upgrade project.6 The next day, Boonma and I discussed what this kind of transparency meant. Boonma explained that the activists from the Four Regions Network had become concerned about the accounting in community upgrade projects. They had seen similar issues related to misapportioned funds in nearly every community they were working in. Although it was clear that the money was indeed being spent on upgrades, it wasn’t always clear that the upgrades were efficacious or that the money was being spent wisely. Site surveys revealed that some homes had fresh concrete posts but little else in

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the way of improvements. Other homes had raised their floors and purchased tiles. Regardless of the project, CODI scrutinized the material choices residents made for their moral-aesthetic quality as much as whether the owner was capable of determining his or her needs (see chapter 7). Boonma expressed the high burden of these audits in two ways. On the one hand, he pointed out how difficult and exhausting they were. He told me that his group of leaders was suffering under the burden of all the work and the contentious interventions into matters in other communities took a toll. He told me that they didn’t have a new crop of leaders to follow behind them. On a deeper level, he pointed out the unevenness of the whole task: “You can’t have money go missing. The head person needs to be responsible and to watch over the community’s money. It makes us all look bad. Poor people need to have dignity [khon jon tawg mī saksī].” This point about dignity is particularly potent in light of the move to community governance. These projects depended on a level of transparency and morality among the poor that is scarcely visible among more powerful actors in Thailand. As residents’ consumption choices were examined, organizing skills critiqued, and documentation audited, they were aware not only of their own flaws, but also of the wider consequences: their failings would narrow future funding or risk dividing their own communities. This contradiction was expressed differently by Paw Rasri, a community leader in the UCN, who, with hands still covered in whiteout from a day spent correcting numbers, put it this way: “The officials think we are corrupt. They believe that we are the ones who kin ngōen [eat money], but no one checks them. They have paychecks and we do not, but we are the ones who have to waste time on this.” BUREAUCRATIC ACTIVISTS, ACTIVIST BUREAUCRACIES This chapter considers the way the Baan Mankong project served as a site to design and implement visions of citizenship through bureaucratic practices. Documents cast community as a noble good—as a site for developing residents’ values and as a technology to manage their political claims by reconfiguring their affective relationships with each other and the world. Documents also narrowed residents’ abilities to express alternative, more political visions of community that accounted for the multiple interests inside the



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settlements. Instead of fomenting politics, documents became a focal point for residents’ disagreements. Andrew Mathews argues that attention to the production of bureaucratic knowledge and the “optics of state” demonstrates how both are the result of “fragile negotiations” (2008, 486) rather than uniform or coherent enactment of power. Baan Mankong’s citizen designs were not imposed whole cloth from above, but instead subject to constant debate, contestation, and revision from all sides, even as some visions—especially those that ended up on documents—were invested with more power than others. These scenes of documentary governmentality underscore how although the project’s conception of citizenship was composed of unsettled disagreements about what proper politics is, how it might be practiced, and who the appropriate subject of politics might be in the first place, paperwork diminished these lively debates and rearticulated them in forms that enforced and reinforced the project’s core values. For residents, these simultaneous effects highlighted where their visions of citizenship overlapped with their collaborators and where these visions pulled at each other. Baan Mankong brought questions relating to the quality of residents’ autonomous political capacities into sharp relief and inspired residents to reflect upon the differences in quality of their own voices versus that of their interlocutors at state agencies, in NGOs, and among their fellow citizens elsewhere in the city. Yet residents’ will to disagree—their will to act on their own time (Li 2019; Müller 2019)—often became visible in less organized ways. In roughedup sentiments about their neighbors and collaborators, in nagging irritations over project regulations, in domestic disputes that arose over how much time these projects required, in conversations about uneven distributions of funding, in debates about how to debate, in disruptions of meetings, and, especially, in individual and collective acts of refusal and resistance that often ran counter to some of their state and nonstate collaborators’ aims. In some cases, these disagreements advanced residents’ aims. Other times they short-circuited local organizing. Nevertheless, the disagreements related to documentation revealed other visions of citizenship, highlighting residents’ political capacities just as they were being erased from the project’s records.

6 Unity and Its Discontents

In early August of 2009, the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network (KKSRN) gathered at Khon Kaen’s central shrine (sānchāo lak mưā ng) to announce that three of its members had signed lease agreements with the State Railway of Thailand (SRT). With the leases, those communities joined three other settlements in the KKSRN to become among the first in the nation to secure land rights from the SRT. The three-year renewable contracts punctuated a long process of struggle. Network leaders such as Boonma, Nung, and Prathān Thi and their neighbors gathered to inaugurate their leases with a march through the city’s main thoroughfares, proudly demonstrating their rightful belonging in the city.1 In addition to representatives from all of the KKSRN’s member communities, leaders from the nearby City Shrine community also joined the march. Not yet members of the KKSRN, most residents of City Shrine were still affiliated with the city’s other competing activist group, the United Communities Network (UCN). Filling out the crowd were nongovernmental organization (NGO) activist representatives from the national Four Regions Slum Network (FRSN) who had helped residents organize and negotiate their leases, as well as the deputy mayor of the Khon Kaen municipality. Standing in this crowd, Prathān Thi, then leader of both the KKSRN and the FRSN, began with a speech: 128



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The communities in our network do our work with honesty. We work for our brothers and sisters to have stability in their homes. We are now secure in our rights because we are all renting from the SRT. We have done this for ourselves. We have shown that these [settlements] are not slums. These are our homes. We will make them beautiful by growing trees and flowers and will help to develop this city.

Halfway through his message of participation and cooperation, a dispute broke out behind the truck holding the public address system. Mae Dam, a community leader from a faction of the City Shrine community that was closely affiliated with Mae Hawm and the UCN, approached several of the activists from the FRSN, interrupting Prahthan Thi’s message of unity she shouted at them: “These people are not a network! They are the mafia! These people create division within communities! They are splitting my community! Why are you splitting us up? Why are you dividing us?” The interruption, which was directed at the NGO activists, was quickly contained, but it offered a glimpse of things to come. Two years after this demonstration, a large section of City Shrine joined the KKSRN and signed its own lease with the SRT. Those residents who were still affiliated with Mae Dam and the UCN were left to precariously occupy the land without the protection of the lease. Both Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI) and SRT officials touted the collective leases under the explicit premise that they would bring about harmonious unity. Disputes like this one, however, encapsulated the way these visions of collective belonging were at odds with the fractious life of community along the tracks. Community emerged as a political resource residents used to presssure the state to recognize them as legitimate residents of the city, and as a site of policing where residents, working on behalf of the SRT, had to determine who was included and who was excluded in various lease agreements and thus in the city itself. In this sense, these debates over community reflected larger, unsettled conversations about meanings of good citizenship, proper forms of politics, and the value and form of democracy. As discussed, planners, architects, and many community organizers interpreted disagreement as antithetical to good citizenship. They felt that the practice of community was not intended to foment disagreement, but instead to produce harmony, consensus, and development. Thus they interpreted disagreements between settlements and the state or residents t­ hemselves as signs

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of the inabilities of “villagers” to cooperate (rūammư̄) and unite (sāmakhī) rather than expressions of their aspirations to belong in a system that did not accommodate them as legitimate political actors.2 Such perceptions not only obscured the real roots of their disagreements—too little land and the uneven distributions of political capacity to speak on such matters—but also the importance of disagreement itself as a way of living together amid these constraints and binds. These disagreements were neither pathological nor simply utilitarian but instead expressions of residents’ citizen designs. Wishing to demonstrate their capacities as legitimate political subjects, residents took to disagreement to secure their homes, to assert their equality, and to enact their own versions of community governance. These efforts to speak were aimed at enacting their commensurate capacities, but the outcomes were uncertain. Jacques Rancière argues that disagreement is the heart of politics—it is the method by which the gaps that constitute the political community, both as imagined and lived, are made visible and the means through which a new political topography emerges (1999; see also Arditi 2009). In this context, what is significant to this book is not how the disagreements along the tracks raised the specter of irreconcilable conflict, but instead how unsettled politics became increasingly necessary because residents needed to manage the incoming pressures of dispossession associated with the railway. Indeed, it was only through disagreements that residents in the KKSRN began making their status visible and, eventually, legalizing their communities. Disagreement is important, but its effects are complex. Residents embraced politics but also critiqued the disruptions caused by disagreement and wondering about the value of democratic life more broadly. Beyond simply expressing such doubts at a theoretical level, residents’ concerns emerged from the material effects of conflict, including the production of exclusion. In this sense, neither residents nor their counterparts took up disagreement lightly. Instead, they recognized that even as it produced legitimacy for some along the tracks, it also propelled forms of policing that led both directly and indirectly to the eviction of many others. They understood that disagreement and politics were messy and unpleasant, though necessary in the face of dispossession. Thus residents embraced political possibilities while wondering about the effects of these conflicts, the forms of exclusion they produced, the extent that they exacerbated their own precarity, and the degree to which harmonious community might yet still be possible. It is



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within these complex, often ambivalent, experiences of struggling for rights to the city that many residents’ visions of democratic life have emerged. THE BINDS OF COMMUNITY The shift toward communal leases with the SRT proved to be a political inflection point in residents’ relationships with each other. Before leases were signed, disagreements were often discursively capacious, fostering discussions of broad pro-poor alliances like those that led to the creation of the FRSN, the CODI project, and Khon Kaen’s dual networks. After rental agreements were signed, residents became agents of policing even as they simultaneously sought to expand the terrain of rights by advocating for other communities in their network. Their efforts to manage their settlements required them to police each other by handling disputes with reluctant neighbors internally, monitoring each other’s savings, auditing local projects, and creating governing structures to manage money coming into communities from projects such as Baan Mankong. Because the KKSRN, the city’s most politically oriented slum network, was the only one that successfully signed SRT leases, they also became its chief agents of governing along the tracks. In this way, KKRSN members ended up working nationally to generate propoor politics, but locally to administer settlement on behalf of the SRT and CODI. In the process, they ended up determining who might be included in various communities and who needed to be excluded. Processes of inclusion and exclusion have repeated themselves several times over in Khon Kaen as the KKSRN’s communities have secured their rights by forging communities out of groups that have splintered off other larger settlements, enabling the process of leases with the SRT for some but not for others. These disagreements also reveal the essential imbalance in the logic of community itself. Instead of opening up broad discussions about pro-poor urban policy as hoped, local arguments have tended toward finding resolution in policies that intended to police community membership. Throughout, the notion of community itself has remained an important social value among residents, planners, activists, and city agents, but what community means has become increasingly uncertain. To live outside community was to be vulnerable to eviction and to be excluded from other benefits that flowed to and through community governance frameworks. In this way, residents’ decisions to participate in

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c­ ommunity governance projects raised, in rather precise ways, the question of the correct way to make oneself visible. On the one hand, presenting oneself as poor and vulnerable marshaled a moral argument against eviction. On the other, participating as a good rent-paying citizen that complied with and even enforced SRT regulations was another way to be seen as legitimate. This form of legitimacy entitled a person to make claims to space and to enact certain forms of exclusion against others. Accordingly, across the last two decades, communities have fractured into smaller and smaller units until agreements could be reached. This allowed the kinds of bureaucratic work described in chapter 5 to occur, but it also forestalled a larger political movement from coalescing around the slums and ended up producing more exclusions on the ground. Even then, disputes did not find resolution but could be managed through small discussions and accommodations. Among the six communities in the KKSRN that signed lease agreements during my fieldwork, each built their community out of a fundamental disagreement and schism with a larger territorially unified settlement before they negotiated their lease with the SRT. In this way, disagreement was an unavoidable process through which community was formed, generating forms of inclusion and exclusion simultaneously (Harms 2016a, 2016b). As disagreements became widespread both in Khon Kaen and nationally, so too did talk of harmony and unity, suppressing the population’s expanding will to disagree. Unity (sāmakhī) and cooperation (kānrūammư̄) were not just prescriptions for producing development locally, but also growing buzzwords in this moment of democratic dispute (Pavin 2010a). The same language used to manage residents at local planning meetings began to appear at nearly every major intersection throughout the northeast, where large billboards were erected in response to the growing unrest in Bangkok following the Red Shirt mobilizations. These signs entreated the population to “stop damaging Thailand” (yut thām rai prathētthai) and to “Protect the Institution [the monarchy]: [be] Tranquil, Close, and United” (pokpawng satāban, sangop sanit sāmakhī). Local disagreements on the tracks thus often reflected and refracted the larger political questions facing the country. Residents and their counterparts used the emerging practice of disagreement along the tracks to think about, advocate for, and critique democracy at both a local and a national scale.



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GOVERNING PRO-POOR POLITICS For the national FRSN and the local KKSRN, the Baan Mankong project was secondary to their negotiation with the SRT for land rights. Activists from the FRSN who felt that CODI had coopted their budget and their alliances in poor communities were deeply skeptical of the agency and its reliance on relocation and debt-financed community construction projects. They felt that these projects expanded logics of debt and facilitated land grabs by the wealthy, often pushing the poor out of the city. Moreover, they argued that CODI was too accommodating to powerful actors and that its architects failed to understand to how create the kinds of local solidarity with residents necessary to produce sustainable change. These sentiments were reflected in the FRSN’s approaches to the community organizing processes. Instead of privileging savings groups, NGOs spent long hours getting to know residents, eating with them, learning about disputes, and helping them think through complicated problems. In workshops, the activists explained that “being ready” required locating key leaders among residents, then training them to speak with their neighbors in order to discuss their concerns effectively, to plan ahead, and to organize with each other. NGOs also emphasized that network leaders become adept at managing the conflicts they encountered along the way without asserting their egos. Effective leadership, they argued, sometimes involved mediating conflicts and sometimes entailed continuing debates so as to enforce the principled conditions of participating in the network and the lease agreements. This training aimed to equip FRSN community leaders with the skills necessary to organize themselves when NGOs might not be there to assist. In Khon Kaen, the process was not only successful in terms of organizing small groups of residents for rental, but also in producing a core set of leaders prepared to manage and engage in necessary disputes on the ground. Paw Thamrong, Paw Nokhuk, and Paw Kan trained Phathan Thi, who then trained Nung, Nok, and Boonma, who in turn would train the next group of leaders when they were identified. By transferring knowledge in this way, the older sets of leaders became advisors to newer leaders, who would then bring new communities into the networks, train their leaders, and, subsequently, serve as advisors for settlements in other parts of the city facing potential evictions.

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As one of the KKSRN’s activist advisors from Human Settlements Foundation put it, We are an organization that fights for rights first. So, we had to set up rules that there would be no corruption, no adultery, and no lying. Other leaders are like this, so in two hundred years, if you come back here the communities will still be the same. We feel the need to have a goal of participation as our core goal. We need to be transparent, like “clear water,” so that people can trust us. We change our leaders every year so that no one demands too much power and they stay fresh. We need to have participation.

Despite their concerted efforts to distinguish their work from CODI’s— even protesting the against the agency on more than one occasion—in 2009 the FRSN drew well over half of its budget from that organization. On other occasions, the FRSN held demonstrations to preserve CODI’s budget when it was threatened. One CODI advisor characterized this relationship as a kind of “critical friendship” in which the NGOs and CODI worked together in tense, sometimes conflictive collaboration. However, these overlaps are as revealing as the distinctions that activists often emphasized, because even though FRSN activists and the KKSRN prioritized rights as a matter of principle, the overlaps reveal the way that the FRSN has also served as an agent of governmentality along the tracks, enacting many of the Baan Mankong project’s initiatives through audits and counting exercises and extending some of CODIs related discourses. These dual pressures highlighted the complex effects of the project in transforming pro-poor politics into the governance of poor communities. Despite the persistent assumption that KKSRN and FRSN activists were more contentious and more eager to assert the political voices of the poor, the FRSN and KKSRN were also far more effective at governing than the UCN. Indeed, the FRSN’s attention to community governance practices generated clear and, largely, successful procedures for securing lease agreements with the SRT where the UCN’s inability or unwillingness to police its communities resulted their failure to come to an agreement with the agency. Community leaders were adept at conducting site surveys, collecting documents, and checking their own documents. When leaders did not understand these procedures, the NGO activists offered them useful criti-



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cal feedback. When disputes arose, the NGOs helped residents coordinate protests, events, and community meetings. This coordination enabled small groups of residents to make themselves legible enough for the SRT board to approve lease agreements. The FRSN network was so successful at signing leases agreements that NGO activists, such as P’Ko and P’Rak, who worked in the settlements worried about getting residents to think beyond struggles over land rights. As they put it, once residents signed leases they needed to expand their visions to think about “cool situations” (sathānakān yen) instead of the “hot situations” (sathānakān rawn). Activists explained that rental rights were a hot situation—something easy to mobilize around—whereas issues like education, health, and quality of life were cool situations—around which communal mobilization was harder to sustain. These distinctions bring the binds facing residents participating in either network into clearer focus: even when they had secured rights to their land, residents still needed to continue to act communally, to cooperate, and to mobilize to keep them. Even, or especially, when working within the activist framework residents experienced pressure to remain collective and mobilized in ways that emphasized their continued status as “poor” rather than allowing them to enjoy equality with other nonpoor, noncommunal citizens.3 Residents often asked, for example, why it was necessary for them continue to mobilize collectively after they signed rental agreements. For the activists they worked with the answer was clear: if residents stopped organizing, their communities would collapse and the SRT would evict them. Moreover, continuous mobilization was a part of a larger vision of regional pro-poor politics that the activists supported through their international network. These connections created links between slum movements across Southeast Asia and allowed some residents to visit these locations to learn from other activist movements. But for most residents, these international coalitions were of limited interests. Many residents felt the continuing requirements to act collectively was a burden that highlighted their difference rather than equalizing it. These binds speak to the dilemmas related to activists’ “citizen designs.” To gain rental rights, residents needed to organize and make political demands collectively. Once these demands were successful, residents had to continue to work together on communal governance to administer their leases, gain access to upgrade money, and secure their rights in the future

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by helping the activists broaden their urban rights networks. So, despite the differences between CODI and the FRSN activists, the notions of communal mobilization and community itself were key idioms that forced the SRT to act and also served as a mechanism to govern the poor even after they secured their homes. The leases effectively transformed community from a mode of politics to a site of policing. NGO activists, accustomed to contesting a state that they felt did not provide services for their citizens, ultimately found themselves doing its work, auditing residents, approving their projects, and disciplining them when their documentation was not in order. COMMUNITIES DISSOLVE The dissolution of Chumchon Phư̄anbān is the clearest example of these processes in action. The past fifteen years in that community have been marked by intense disagreements and schisms. Although the same processes were also at work in other communities, Chumchon Phư̄anbān’s history of involvement in local organizing, from the earliest activism to the current Baan Mankong project, attests to the depth of these disagreements and to their contemporary importance in sparking shifts in Khon Kaen. As related in chapter 3, Chumchon Phư̄anbān was the most prominent settlement in Khon Kaen’s slum networks. Settled in response to evictions in other parts of Khon Kaen city, it became a site of both local and global slum activism during the 1990s. Its leaders—Mae Hawm, Paw Singto, and Paw Thamrong—became national activists, board members of the newly formed FRSN, and part of the growing group of urban activists from the global south. This prominence was remarkable given that “slum activism” in provincial Thailand was new relative to the activist networks in Bangkok. The work of Mae Hawm, Paw Singto, Paw Thamrong (in Chumchon Phưā nbān), and eventually Prathān Thi, P’Jin (from T5 and T9 respectively), and a host of other activists from throughout Khon Kaen brought the concerns of the provincial urban poor to the attention of Thailand’s housing policymakers and activists. According to Paw Thamrong, Chumchon Phưā nbān was initially known as an NGO community because of its close interaction with the emerging scene of urban NGOs in Bangkok. Paw Singto joined the board of the precursor to CODI and Mae Hawm served on the national board of the FRSN. These activist-residents applied for grant money for urban development



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projects, including infrastructure and housing projects, and helped organize savings groups among residents. They were the first to take up the pro-poor organizing strategies to prevent the SRT from renting its land to businesses. These activities launched the process of community organizing, which influenced the creation of the housing policy that would become the Baan Mankong project. The broad roots of the schism are outlined in chapter 3. Paw Thamrong, however, whose house is in Zone 3 (formerly part of Chumchon Phưā nbān), recalled the conflict in close detail: “At first it was just money [that caused the split]. The money from CODI, SIF, and the Miyazawa grant [Japanese Recovery Grant] was coming into the community but we didn’t know where it was going.” The flood of development money after the 1997 financial crash created a number of conflicts and claims of corruption on the part of both local leaders and the local NGOs. Ultimately, Paw Singto and Mae Hawm, who were aligned with the part of Chumchon Phưā nbān located on the west side of the tracks, divided the network. Thamrong (who lived on the east side of the tracks) and the other activists—including their NGO counterparts from Bangkok—became isolated from the then newly created CODI and began working toward rental with the help of the Four Regions network. Paw Thamrong explained: At first [after the split], I was working toward rental only [chao yang dīao], but no one really wanted to work with me. Even Paw Kan (the leader of the Zone 2) worked against us. So, I worked in other communities. We tried to avoid Chumchon Phư̄anbān, but they came and disrupted us [rao mai yung kap khao, khao mā yung kap rao]. This [Zone 3] was actually one of the first communities to sign a lease in 2000. I signed back then, but no one around me wanted to rent so the lease failed. I stopped working completely from 2001 to 2003. I didn’t work at all. Then I started helping others rent. Paw Kan (in Zone 2) began renting before us, as did the city’s peripheral communities, City Edge community in Zone 1 and Zone 2. When the SRT opened this area to rental by businesses, then they [his neighbors in Zone 3] woke up [tư̄n tuā].

Residents within Chumchon Phưā nbān decided to continue to work with Mae Hawm and Paw Singto based on three criteria. First, many residents felt

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that the pair had proven themselves as leaders. Despite the constant charges of corruption that swirled around them, many residents thought that their approach, which sought to remove NGOs from the process, offered unmediated access to state resources through CODI. Residents felt that without the influence of NGOs they would be able to effectively act on their own capacities. Second, some residents simply had close personal ties with the two. These personal loyalties structured a good deal of community life along the tracks. The cultivation of network constituencies required residents to have trust and confidence in leaders, especially given that many of them were in control of a sizable sum of money via collective savings projects. Finally, by siding with Mae Hawm and Paw Singto, some residents felt that they would be able to delay the rental process that would inevitably force them to either pay rent they simply did not have or to leave their land to find a new place to live. Because the rental agreements also carried the inevitability of having to demolish part or all of one’s house to comply with SRT regulations, residents seeking to protect their homes were mindful that protracting negotiations could be as effective as engaging in direct politics. As Michael Herzfeld points out, temporal stretching is a critical strategy for residents of communities facing eviction (2016, 150–151; see also Harms 2013). As the threat of dispossession became more proximal, this new calculus emerged. Siding with Mae Hawm and Paw Singto allowed some residents time and financial space to back out of negotiations and to return to a less contentious life, as required by NGO organizing methodologies, even if it in some sense capitulated to the inevitability of eviction. Stalling was a diffuse act of refusal that residents used to weave together the strategic deferral of the rental question with more principled disagreements over the role of NGOs in cultivating communal life. This was especially the case for residents living in the twenty meters closest to the tracks, who knew the rental framework limited their options. Because most stood to gain nothing from the leases, these residents often moved fluidly in and out of projects in order to access state money for upgrades, without committing to rental one way or another. Paw Thamrong and his allies in the KKSRN, on the other hand, took a more principled approach, criticizing the way that CODI tried to strip their network of its budget by moving support from existing NGO-based savings groups to the national program associated with Baan Mankong. Having recently become an independent agency, CODI created two paths to development: one that emphasized rights before development and another that



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emphasized development first and rights second. The activists in the KKSRN pursued the former; the UCN activists and CODI pursued the latter. From Paw Thamrong’s perspective, these disagreements were both material and personal. That is, he felt that because he could no longer trust his neighbors or their intentions to rent, he stopped working with them. Their inability to organize was both an affront to his efforts and a threat to his house. He also came to fundamentally disagree with processes that privileged development above rights. He continued organizing, working with like-minded activists in Khon Kaen and Bangkok to achieve rental. In the process, new subsections of larger communities came into his network. He helped each of these groups organize and begin negotiating with the SRT. In Zone 3, it wasn’t until these disagreements blossomed that a community could be forged with his own neighbors, who previously were not unified in anything other than their resolve not to rent and their desire not to be evicted. From Mae Hawm’s perspective, these disputes were not about whether to rent, but about the role of NGOs in the organizing process. She claimed that apportioning a specific percentage of the budget for the NGOs was tantamount to stealing from the villagers. That system of budgeting reflected the broader power relations between NGOs and the community leaders with whom they worked. It also reflected the bind that residents faced when seeking to gain resources from these projects because they could not access the project budges on their own, but only through the activists who created projects on their behalf. In this sense, the disputes among residents reflected the same structures through which the poor were called into the development process in the first place. As “villagers” needing guided improvement, the poor required organization by either CODI or the NGO network to act as phīlīang (mentors, guardians). Each disagreement therefore hinged on how the poor would be governed, how state and nonstate money would be distributed and monitored (and by whom), and what kind of citizens the villagers along the tracks might be or become through these processes; these disagreements also raised the deeper question of who would stay in their homes and who would be dispossessed. CONFLICT AND COOPERATION IN ZONE 3 The disputes that emerged when Zone 3 signed its lease reveal how leases produced new forms of exclusion. In November 2008, I accompanied Nung,

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Paw Thamrong, and some of the leaders from the KKSRN to CODI’s office in Bangkok to see Zone 3 sign its lease agreement. After an overnight trip, we arrived at CODI’s main office expecting to be greeted by officials ready to sign documents. Instead, we waited in the building’s open-air plaza for two hours with only limited contact from CODI’s staff, who only periodically came down to ask our group for more time.4 Eventually, Sud, the CODI architect from Bangkok in charge of handling all of the communities in the Four Regions network, explained that Mae Hawm had interjected herself into the meeting because she was concerned that when the lease was signed, five families living in Zone 3 but affiliated with her network and attached to Chumchon Phư̄anbān would be evicted because they were not included in the lease. The houses were all located in the twenty meters closest to the tracks so the residents felt little compulsion to join the KKSRN. Nevertheless, Sud said that Mae Hawm was concerned that when the lease was signed they would lose access to the frontage road, be excluded from community infrastructure improvements, and ultimately be left unprotected from eviction. Nung, a leader in from Zone 3, explained that these homeowners were loyal to Mae Hawm and understood themselves to be a part of Chumchon Phư̄anbān rather than Zone 3. Mae Hawm claimed that these residents did not trust the KKSRN and did not want to protest the government but did want to cooperate by participating in the Baan Mankong project. The argument here mirrored conflicting senses of how to be a good citizen circulating throughout the settlements; residents could either cooperate with the state through the CODI-affiliated UCN or engage in contentious politics through the KKSRN, but they could not remain unaffiliated. Using this argument, Mae Hawm emphasized a broad antipathy toward the confrontational politics of the KKSRN and repositioned her allies as good, cooperative citizens in the process. Yet, as Khem, a member of the KKSRN and resident of Zone 3, explained, the homeowners were using the split between the networks to their advantage. By leveraging the disagreement, he told me, they were avoiding paying rent and “remaining as before” (yū mưā n dōem). In short, they were refusing to develop themselves and so had, in his sense, become an obstacle to the community, the city, and the SRT each wishing to pursue their own version of improvement. By raising this point, the KKSRN also used notions of legality to position themselves as legitimate citizens and argue that these residents were recalcitrant trespassers impeding development.



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Space complicated the situation further. Although the majority of the houses in Zone 3 were spatially clustered, the homes of the residents refusing to rent were dotted across the middle of the community connected across odd plots of land. One cluster was wedged between the railway tracks, drainage canal, and some other residents’ homes. A second cluster was directly adjacent to the tracks behind houses of active members of Zone 3’s leadership committee. Lacking direct access to the road, these houses could only be reached by a small footpath running between other houses. This spatial dispersion and disconnection from community infrastructure posed important questions when it came to Zone 3’s infrastructure redevelopment plans and housing upgrade projects because each of the homes that refused to sign the lease would need to be relocated if the other residents in Zone 3 hoped to bring the community into compliance with SRT regulations. Eventually the leaders of Zone 3 agreed to leave an access alleyway for these residents. This required a new lease agreement to be created, dragging the day out further. No longer celebratory, the day had become contentious and the mood dour. This was particularly true for Khem,whose house shared a lot with one of the reluctant families. Khem is a machinist; 90 percent of his house is taken up by his busy metal shop-cum-vocational training center. Most days he works with a staff of a few experienced workers and several local young people from the settlements, whom he trains to do metal work. When he isn’t working, he is active in Zone 3’s administration and travels to Bangkok with other leaders in the KKSRN for public demonstrations with the Four Regions network. The small shack that sat behind the house was particularly vexing for him because its owners were preventing him from gaining secure rights to the land even as that house remained in violation of the SRT’s spatial regulations. Early that morning, he and I had been joking as we waited for the officials from CODI to meet with us to sign the final rental contract. By the time the final documents were signed several hours later, all of his energy was drained and he was withdrawn. “What am I supposed to do about them? We asked them whether they wanted to rent and they refused (patisēt). We are trying to work with the SRT. You have to go along with their policies. It is their [SRT] land and if they don’t want to rent, then they can’t live there.” The way he framed the debate cast residents’ choices into stark relief: rent or be evicted. Technically, the day before signing the lease, Khem and his family were

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also trespassing, living on the very same land without a lease. Yet, having signed an agreement, he was in the position of administering the SRT’s policy. Given that he and his family had decided to pay rent for the land, it now seemed unfair that the people living in the house behind him be allowed to live rent-free in a space that violated the SRT’s stated policy. Indeed, he referred to them as trespassers (phubukruk), a word that, prior to his own lease, he had used when describing his own feeling of illegitimacy as a resident of the city. In Khem’s framing, his neighbor’s refusal to join the community was a choice. They had been given the option to become good citizens but had rejected it. They were not only refusing to develop by remaining as trespassers as they were before, but they were also bad citizens. Here community as a mode of politics gave way to community governance as a mode policing. When he and his neighbors came together to sign a lease for Zone 3’s land, they gained the power to administer their own rights, to participate in the creation of a newly governed space, and to police and exclude those who refused to participate. At the same time, residents who refused were in a position to stall negotiations with the SRT or disrupt leases altogether. This tension gave Khem and his neighbors an urgent reason to exclude the abstainers. Not only were residents who did not sign the lease not paying rent, they threatened the lease itself, which was predicated on harmonious behavior, unified communal administration, and collective payment. In short, someone was going to be dispossessed and the leases redistributed the job of determining how that would take place. Prior to signing communal leases, residents organized broadly, gathering divergent groups from across the tracks with the aim of stopping commercial rental and pushing for expansions of housing rights. However, after residents began signing communal leases and creating demarcated communities, this kind of broad-based, pro-poor activism became more difficult. In the case of Zone 3, the group of residents who fell outside the lease were excluded not only from leases but also from upgrade funds and access to permanent electric and water meters. Further, they were no longer seen as potential allies but instead as trespassers, illegitimately stalling the development of their now-legitimate neighbors. SRT representatives often said that their interest was not in mediating land disputes but in collecting rent. These disputes thus threatened the long-term security of those leases. From the SRT’s perspective, CODI was to act as a mediator in such situa-



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tions. Yet CODI representatives were often unsure of how to handle these types of disputes precisely because the underlying disagreements emerged out of the fundamentally uneven arrangements that served to govern the tracks in the first place. The story of the dispute between residents in Zone 3 shows why these conflicts were both inevitable and also intractable: common solutions to the underlying disputes over land and access to lease agreements were difficult to achieve given the range of loyalties, strategies, and spatial politics at play. EVICTING AN AMBIGUOUS VILLAGER The eviction of Mr. Sapda, an elderly man living in a fenced-off junkyard behind one of the most contentious pieces of land along the tracks in Khon Kaen demonstrates the fundamentally ambiguous of effects of community governance: revealing the competing ways residents sought to make claims to the land by mobilizing a variety of subject positions in their struggles. Sapda’s house was set between the Mittrapap Highway, the emerging East-West Corridor, and the two densest communities in the city. This piece of land was part of larger lot the KKSRN secured with an agreement between the SRT and CODI to relocate residents living in the first twenty meters of a very dense community called T5. In 2005, Prathān Thi, the leader of T5, the chairman of both the KKSRN and the national board of the FRSN, along with his allies from the Four Regions, negotiated rights to the land with the SRT and CODI. When that agreement was signed, the residents of T5 began paying rent on the land immediately. In the three years since taking position of the parcel, only a community center, a two-story frame for a house, and another, small single-family house to the south had been completed. The resident of that small house, Mae Noi, joined T5 after a disagreement with her neighbors in Chumchon Phư̄anbān. Indeed, her defection made it possible for T5 to make a claim to the land. Sapda was a member of neither network but continued to live on the land behind the fence, which was occupied by an adjacent machine works. The land jutted into T5’s recently acquired plot and prevented the KKSRN from beginning the construction projects that would enable the residents from across the street to relocate their homes and bring T5 into compliance with SRT leases. Thus the land became in the focus of a long series of protests that required the KKSRN to become involved in the courts, to protest, to make

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repeated trips to the SRT office in Bangkok, and to call the local enforcement officers to finally clear the space for their construction. Every time I saw Sapda, he was wearing a loose-knit white shirt, long blue shorts, and sandals. His passive, deferential smile bespoke a kind of villager-ness that belied his apparent ownership of the auto-repair shop where his shack was located. Some people said he continued to own the building; others argued he lost everything when the economy collapsed in 1997. The truth of the matter never emerged. Instead, SRT officials visited Khon Kaen on several occasions to mediate the land dispute involving him, T5, Chumchon Phư̄anbān, the adjacent engine repair shop, and the associated networks of activists. At stake in the dispute was not just the land, but also the question of whether Sapda was a poor villager or a local patron or somewhere in between and how that status did or did not validate his claims to belonging on the tracks. In May 2009, the SRT came to Khon Kaen to enforce an eviction order the KKSRN had filed against Sapda. In response, Mae Hawm and the UCN set up a public address system directly in front T5’s community hall to demand they stop their efforts to evict Sapda. Residents from all over the tracks came to see the outcome. Throughout the morning, Sri, Chumchon Phư̄anbān’s leader, announced the UCN’s three demands: that CODI, the SRT, and the FRSN be held accountable for evicting villagers (lairư chaobān); that T5 lose its right to the plot of land for abusing this poor villager and that Chumchon Phư̄anbān should be given back the land that rightfully belonged to it; and that Chumchon Phư̄anbān and members of the UCN should be allowed to sign a lease with the SRT (figure 6.1). Sri’s speech simultaneously sought to delegitimize the work of the activists from the KKSRN while demonstrating that the residents of Chumchon Phư̄anbān were in fact the wronged group as they were the legitimate and compliant citizens who were ready to rent the land but were being prevented from doing so by the KKSRN. At the same time, his speech asserted a claim not just to the land that the T5 had been paying for in their own leases, but also for the entire original space designated within the municipality as Chumchon Phưā nbān—including the community across the tracks, Patthanā Sithī Zones 2 and Zone 3, which, by that point, had signed their own leases with the SRT. Although the groups stood apart from one another for most of the morning, occasionally a few women from T5 would yell at the representatives from Chumchon Phư̄anbān. Visibly angry, one resident of T5 leaned over



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Figure 6.1  Residents in the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network appeal to the media as they attempt to remove a wealthy encroacher from the land along the tracks. These kinds of events leveraged the KKSRN’s leases to make public appeals as legitimate residents of the city in their efforts to secure their land. Photo by the author.

and asked, “Is it right that we have paid rent for four years and haven’t been able to use this land?” For me, navigating this shared space proved a fraught exercise. My inability to settle on a side irritated all of my interlocutors. The morning was also personally dispiriting. I had hoped that this research would result in some space or site for advocacy. It had instead mostly resulted in my becoming embedded in complex and confusing disagreements between two networks each working in different ways toward something that seemed important and necessary, strengthening the rights of poor citizens to the city. Yet during my fieldwork, residents often asked which network was the correct one. Rather than answering, I told them that everyone along the tracks deserved a right to the land and that I hoped both advocacy networks would be able to sign leases. This situation highlighted the naïveté of that position. As residents knew but I was reluctant to admit, the terms of the leases meant that it would be extraordinarily difficult to include everyone equally. Given the rental framework, the kinds of spatial regulations they entailed, the limited space and funding for community reconstruction, it was highly unlikely that negotiations would accommodate everyone. Not only was space along the tracks inadequate, but also no consensus had been reached that the leases on

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offer from the SRT were the best path to legitimacy. It was clear that although the SRT would rent to communities, the agency would prefer not to do so. Its stated aim was to rent to higher paying commercial tenants. Given the emergence of the Baan Mankong policy and its provision that state agencies could rent their land to assist the poor, the SRT had to offer residents a path to rental. However, from the SRT’s perspective, communal leases were a way to transform its vast land holdings into an asset. In this sense, logics of dispossession were built into the leases from the beginning (Li 2014). As I considered the disagreement from this perspective, my flat position became difficult to maintain. Although residents might value the same things I did, the range of constraints—spatial, structural, material, regulatory—­ facing them created pragmatic reasons for pursuing more complex actions that resulted in the eviction of their neighbors. In this sense, my position was not unlike that of the CODI officials who sought to work on behalf of community but avoided delving into the messy details. Residents had few good options and these disagreements reflected the binds they encountered as they attempted to enact their political wills to secure their rights in a moment of increasing dispossession. The situation highlighted how KKSRN residents mobilized disagreements to assert their rights to the land and how the leases redistributed the job of policing to the newly legitimized communities. Hemmed in by existing discursive frames, residents could make their voices heard by asserting themselves as collective political subjects advocating for themselves as legitimate, law-abiding citizens or could present themselves as vulnerable but moral villagers. These conflicting positions emerged to undercut each other’s efforts to secure their homes and highlighted the general problems of the framework at the same time. To “deserve” rights, one had to be poor and communal, a position that ignored the insurgent sentiments that had successfully provoked leases. But to secure rights, a resident had both disagree and to pay, thus excluding both the most docile and the poorest residents. Paradoxically, disagreement deepened framework of community but highlighted its limits by bringing these intractable binds into view. Members of the KKSRN told me that Sapda was a rich businessman (nakturakit rūay), not a villager. He shouldn’t be allowed to occupy the land, they said. Paw Kan, a leader in the KKSRN, explained: Sapda is just a rich man that looked after [dūlāe] the leadership from Chumchon Phư̄anbān and Mae Hawm. He has plenty of space to live



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in the building he owns in front of the lot. These villagers from T5 have been paying rent for this land for the last four years and have not been able to use that land at all.

Paw Kan argued that Sapda was using Chumchon Phư̄anbān to protect his own interests. In doing so, he stood in the way of T5’s efforts to comply with SRT policy, impeding T5’s ability to work with authorities to solve the slum problem and their abilities to become legitimate citizens. Mae Hawm and Paw Sri, on the other hand, claimed that Sapda was a “poor villager.” Mae Hawm admitted that in the past, he had had money but that his business failed in the 1997 economic crisis and that he was now living behind the building at the good will of the owners up front. She argued that KKSRN activists were using confrontational methods to divide villagers from each other, as in Zone 3, which went against the philosophy of the Baan Mankong policy and its intentions to build unity. She complained that the FRSN and KKSRN leadership were just trying to “evict poor people” (lairư khon jon). She referred not only to the homeowners who refused to rent with them, but also to people like Sapda, who not only did not orient his life toward the tracks, but also seemed to only loosely represent the aims of the Baan Mankong project or the FRSN mobilizations. As to why the KKSRN refused to work with Mae Hawm and Chumchon Phư̄anbān to help them rent and why they did not allow Sapda to join their community, they argued that they tried to include him but he refused to rent. As Paw Nokhuk, from Patthanā Sithī Zone 2 pointed out, “He doesn’t want to rent. He is playing a game [len kāem] and he doesn’t want to participate with us [mai yāk rūam kap rao]. We gave him a chance [hai ōkāt], but you have to follow the SRT’s requirements if you want to gain rights.” These conflicts highlighted how models of development and good citizenship came to structure physical space. Because both groups believed that they were legitimate representatives of the poor, it made for an intractable disagreement and an irreparable split between residents. At the same time, Paw Nokhuk acknowledged that he was simply working within the existing set of practices to reach his goal. The binds that the KKSRN and UCN were up against were visible through the disagreement, but neither group addressed them directly. Instead, they disputed the validity of each other’s claims. The ambiguity of Sapda’s status became central: Was he poor? Was he a villager? Was he even a resident of Chumchon Phư̄anbān? These questions

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were really proxy questions that pointed to the larger gaps in the project of community governance. Neither the NGO approach nor CODI’s, emphasizing poverty as a prerequisite for rights, were adequate for addressing these questions. They relied on frameworks that excluded others from the possibility of renting by deepening the requirements that residents had to be uniformly poor and uniformly communal in order to rent. Given the spatial constraints along the tracks, the meager funds apportioned via Baan Mankong’s upgrade money, the limited ability of residents to take on lowcost mortgages to relocate, and the growing pressure of dispossession it was impossible to house the current number of residents living along the tracks and still comply with SRT regulations. Even when residents did highlight the problems related to implementing community, they had difficulty arguing with the concept itself. EXCLUSIONS AT THE EDGES OF COMMUNITY In July of 2009, Sapda’s house was finally demolished by the SRT. When compared with the previously contentious encounters, the eviction happened quietly. Whereas previous SRT visits entailed trips to the enforcement office, were covered by national news media, and sparked counterprotests leading to partial evictions, the only people to watch the final evictions were a few KKSRN members, several local SRT officers, and a handful of police officers. Paw Kan, Paw Nokhuk, a few women from T5, and I watched from a shady spot near the new community center. Mae Hawm and the residents from Chumchon Phư̄anbān were noticeably absent. When I arrived, I wandered over to Paw Kan who shook his head and said, This has taken nine months. We’ve been waiting since last November for this, but now it’s finally happening. Now we can take this drainage pipe (pointing to a pile of concrete pipe fittings) and extend it all the way to the road and have a proper drain for the first time. We’ll be able to begin filling the land in and start building houses. We’ll also build a large fence across the back so this can’t happen again.

A woman from T5, squatting nearby, pointed to the family whose business shared the yard with Sapda and said, “They look disappointed, huh? Look at



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them. They have several cars and a Kubota tractor. They are rich. We don’t even have one car. They’ve made us wait and look how much they have.” Sapda sat uneasily between these dualities. Indeed, his actual status was never clarified. He was a resident along the tracks but, unlike the people who owned all the junk in his yard, not unambiguously wealthy. At the same time, he did not have enough credentials as a “poor villager” to make a claim to the space. He might have been poor but he did not belong to a community. The fence that surrounded his house oriented his life toward the main highway, but the mobilizations by the UCN and Chumchon Phư̄anbān on his behalf highlighted his status as a resident of the tracks nonetheless. Spatially and economically, he did not fit a clear image of a villager in need of development, but here he was being evicted. Paw Kan asked about the UCN and the current status of their rental negotiations with the SRT. I explaibed that the network was still in the process of trying to negotiate rental and that the number of communities they were working with had slowed them down considerably. He scoffed: So basically, they are just where they were before [khao yū thī dōem]. They are trying to represent every community at once and you can’t do that. It just won’t happen. They have to do it in small blocks like we have. This is the way to get the community to work together. This is the only way the communities can get things ready on their own. They need to work at things a little at a time.

Paw Nokhuk joined us, adding, The UCN just want to present all the communities [to the railway’s board of directors] and finish like that—boop! But it is harder than that. If you look at each community, it will be just like this [He pointed to the eviction]. CODI has its own problems too. They have so many projects that the bureaucrats [jāonāthī] just approve and approve and give money to the villagers. But when the government inspects [truat sawb] the projects, they will see if CODI and the UCN have followed the correct procedure. The government will see that they haven’t. They will learn that the bureaucrats are just giving money to people and the projects are not done correctly.

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He pointed out that this kind of problem was recurrent in each settlement: As for CODI, they are supposed to fix the problem but this is really the way to fix it [again pointing to the eviction]? You need to fight, struggle [tawng sū]. You need to use the courts [tawng chai sān]. That is how you fix the problem. The other network is good at talking. Mae Hawm says the right things. She will stand up in a meeting and tell the villagers this or that but the villagers don’t understand that this is what the process is like. The villagers don’t have enough information and the leaders don’t give it to them and the villagers don’t listen. Nothing ever happens over there. It is just talk until something happens. Look at the first twenty meters of the railroad tracks, the SRT says you need a plan for these people, you need to give them somewhere to go. Do they have a plan?

This description was the most distilled version of the saga over the eviction I had heard—the SRT’s spatial regulations exerted pressure on the networks to organize themselves in a particular way. To gain access to the land, you needed a plan the SRT had approved. To create that plan, residents needed act as a community. This required reorganizing space and people, finding the social and spatial boundaries of community, determining who was included and who was excluded, and considering who would remain and who might be evicted. This required debating and disagreeing all the way. That entailed conflict, managing differences, and making a series of decisions with difficult consequences for those who chose not to participate. Paw Nokhuk argued that residents could not remain passive, but instead had to decide whether to remain vulnerable villagers making a moral claim on the state on the basis of their vulnerability or to make claims that leveraged the language of citizenship, exchanging rights and responsibilities. The first choice, preserved the possibility of unity. The second required that they assert their legitimate belonging and potentially engage in practices of policing on behalf of the SRT. Here, practices of disagreement and practices of policing abut in complex and uncertain ways. Initially, the spatial struggle along the tracks had been primarily between residents and the SRT. The post-rental phase, however, pushed residents into conflict with one another. The month after Sapda’s eviction, Mae Hawm organized ten buses to take the UCN to the SRT office in Bangkok to stage a sit-in on the agency’s lawn. At the meeting, they tried to present the entire list of more than two



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hundred communities along the tracks. Although the agency agreed to consider their request, ultimately the list was rejected, deepening the sense that UCN’s efforts to organize locally and CODI’s efforts nationally were failing. The SRT further deferred its decision about what it would do with the communities not listed in the original MOU. The case of Sapda reflected how each settlement had its ambiguities that fell outside the simplistic frameworks of villager and community. These ambiguities arose from the land along the tracks having been settled heterogeneously across time, often serving as housing for poor migrants, but also for an upwardly mobile working poor, the nascent and growing middle class, and, in some cases, opportunistic wealthier citizens. It also grew out of the broader transformation of the land into a real estate asset. The conflicts over land also reflected a growing sense among many residents that they needed to demand their rights politically, regardless of the consequences for their neighbors, lest they lose their homes in the face of the increasingly present threat of dispossession. EMBRACING POLITICS The ambivalent relationship between villager and citizen, and especially the different capacity for politics assigned to each, was at the center of these tensions between unity and disagreement. Residents were called into the rental process as villagers naturally inclined to work together. This occluded the spatial, social, and material differences between residents and the disputes entailed in actually creating community. Politics—not harmony—became the stuff through which communities were made. Although community as a technology of government was designed to quell disagreement, it also depended on it. As communities were created they needed to become harmonious. As Laura Nader’s description of what she calls “harmony ideologies” demonstrates, notions of harmony can police both from without and within (1990; see also L. Rose 1992). Residents used the same language to quash internal disagreements and to appear unified. Rather than build disagreement into the community process, planners were forced to ignore it, cover it up, or exclude it. The best way for residents to appear homogenously united was to portray those who refused to participate as choosing to remain outside the community.

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In the end, these disagreements emerged from the material spatial dilemmas facing residents trying to demonstrate their status as legitimate political subjects by following regulations and participating in state-sponsored projects. The irony of Khem’s calling his neighbors trespassers was that he was demonstrating his legitimacy but silencing the kinds of politics essential to his visibility. What for all intents and purposes looked like a dispute between neighbors was in fact a dilemma emerging from the tenuous frameworks that structured the terms of inclusion and exclusion associated with Baan Mankong and the SRT’s leases. These confusing debates reveal precisely how divided most settlements were and how complex it was to organize to make claims. In this sense, the uneven results of these conflicts closely reflect the structures through which disagreements took place. Community leases enforced unity above everything else. Where unity was impossible to achieve, exclusion began.

7 Building Politics

Nung places a tile in wet concrete. He lines the edge up at an odd angle to its mate and smiles; the head of one koi fish printed on the tile now chases its tail on another. When dry, the platform we are constructing will offer space for guests to leave their sandals before entering his newly remodeled kitchen, itself awash in color. Before the grant, Nung’s kitchen had bare concrete floors and unfinished cinderblock walls. After, mixed tiles in patterns of green, beige, blue, and pink, and more of the bright koi fish, covered the walls and floor. Although the Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI) explicitly forbade residents from using their Baan Mankong housing upgrade grants for tile or other materials considered primarily aesthetic, Nung ignored the regulation and bought them anyway. Having recently secured his home in Chumchon Patthanā Sithi Zone 3 with a renewable lease from the State Railway of Thailand (SRT), he saw the improvements as part of a larger project of making a life along the tracks; the tiles were, in this bigger sense, an effort to live his designs. Most of Nung’s money went toward demolishing and rebuilding a portion of his house to bring it into compliance with the railway’s spatial regulations as stipulated in the lease. He used the remainder of the grant, supplemented by the informal loan market, to complete a variety of home improvements, including paving a driveway, replacing the accordion gate that served as the façade of the house with concrete brick, tiling the kitchen, 153

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and building the landing. His neighbors did the same. They replaced rusted, pocked metal roofs with shiny aluminum. They poured fresh concrete over recently raised floors, painted walls, and planted kitchen gardens just meters from the tracks. They also put up signs that announced their settlements’ new names, their lease agreement numbers, and the names of their associations with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other state organizations. Officials from CODI told residents that upgrade grants should only be used for “necessary” home repairs and that residents should not get black market loans to “finish” projects with decorative materials. The tiles were seen as unnecessary, mere decoration. CODI architects, planners, and the project’s affiliated academics emphasized that residents should plan slowly and improve their homes little by little (thīlanit thīlanoi). The agency’s architects favored an aesthetic of sufficiency (khwāmpawpīang) that reflected residents’ embrace of moderation (khwāmpaw [enough]), based in the traditional knowledge (phūmpanyā) of vernacular design. CODI planners told residents that “a house is more than a house” (bān khư̄ mākwā bān) to remind residents that material improvements should not be their priority. These planners felt that residents should instead remember that houses were more than their material qualities: they were a method for developing themselves (phatthanā tua ēng), supporting communal well-being (kāndūlāe khwāmpen chumchon), and enabling wider social improvement by embracing the values associated with King Bhumipol Adulyadej’s “sufficiency economy.” The slum rights activists who worked with Nung in the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network (KKSRN) and the Four Regions Slum Network (FRSN) also saw the house as a powerful “tool” (khrư̄ang mư̄) to organize residents, to prompt them to reevaluate Thailand’s inequalities, and to mobilize them to struggle against injustice. These activists felt that improved housing was important, but fleeting, likely to disappear unless residents had secure land rights. Some activists feared that housing improvements, though necessary, might demobilize residents as they became more comfortable. As P’Rak, an NGO leader from the FRSN, put it, “The house is a core issue [for residents], but that is not the whole issue. We use the house as a tool. The broader issue is the rights of the people and the abilities of communities to think for themselves.” For these NGOs, the house was a mobilizing force, but not an end unto itself. In this respect, everyone working along the tracks saw the materiality of the house as inescapable, but also insufficient for enacting new socio-political possibilities. Yet they also understood the ways in which the



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house might be a modality of acting to transform their citizen designs into lived forms.1 Aesthetic practices—actions that envision, manipulate, produce, and transform terrains of sensibility—offered residents, planners, and activists a way to order and reorder the world.2 Residents’ efforts to aesthetically remake their homes responded to existing perceptions of their capacities and incapacities as citizens and reflected the kinds of future worlds they hoped to build, which they felt might better accommodate their visions of political belonging. This latter project linked residents and their collaborators in a tense moral-political project aimed at transforming the sensible terrain of the settlement into a legitimate community. Activists and planners also proposed aesthetic visions of houses and communities that suggested their own world-making imaginaries. These visions spoke both to their notions of the right political order and to their commitments to making life better for residents more generally. In this way, aesthetic practices became a “politics in the making” and the house a lived-in way for residents’ to act on their citizen designs: remaking the house was also about rebuilding the political itself.3 Yet the house was also more than a site of politics. It was always a space of dwelling. Although houses offered possibilities for development experts to improve, for bureaucrats to govern, for activists to organize, and for residents to make political claims, they were also, always and irreducibly, spaces where such claims were lived in and occassionally enjoyed. Thus this analysis is anchored within the context of shifting and often conflicting definitions of the good life, something that often had an ambiguous relationship with the practice of politics. The house afforded residents a possibility of attaining the good life through politics. It also provoked them to wonder whether such a thing might be possible beyond politics. 4 MORAL-POLITICAL STRUCTURES The rich scholarship on domestic architecture in Southeast Asia shows how the region’s houses link occupants to broader social, moral, and political universes through arrangements of space and materiality (Tambiah 1969; Fox 1993; Waterson 1997). Houses also reflect and structure social relations (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995). Vernacular Thai houses, for example, are connected to a moral cosmos through specific construction practices, symbolic posts, and rituals that prepare the house for occupancy (Tambiah 1969;

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Turton 1978; Morris 2000, 119).5 Although most of the houses along the tracks lack overt vernacular design elements, many, if not all, are grounded in some form of ritual practices. During home reconstruction projects, for example, owners might pay extra to make sure their “first post” (sao ēk) was sunk deeply into the earth after being consecrated through a series of cleansing brahmin, Buddhist, and anamist rituals and blessings that compelled previous spirits to leave the dwelling and offer good fortune to the new occupants. These rituals, whether conducted in part or in whole, aimed to help residents secure better lives and ward off bad luck. Yet, despite the long-standing interest in homebuilding practices, homes like those along the tracks often go unnoticed in scholarship on the region’s architecture. They lack the spectacular sensibilities of the region’s grand-citymaking projects (Ong 2011) or the specific culturalist flourishes considered “vernacular,” which is itself a politically laden category (Crinson 2015).6 Even when owners were able to conduct the proper house-building rituals, these houses appear either too ordinary to be remarked on or developmentally problematic. Within Khon Kaen, municipal authorities and better-off citizens regarded them as eyesores.7 Nevertheless, the houses along the tracks remain as intricately linked to broader systems of meaning as their predecessors, reflecting both their owners’ local and cosmological aspirations as well as the turbulent sociopolitical settings in which these hopes might take root. As scholars working in India (Ghertner 2010, 2015), Vietnam (Schwenkel 2012; Harms 2012), Brazil (Holston 1991b), and Thailand (Herzfeld 2006) point out, the unsightly quality and dubious legal status of the homes of the very poor, the working poor, and the aspiring lower classes often marks them as uncivilized, rendering occupants vulnerable to eviction. The commonplace practice of using aesthetics as pretense to evict the urban poor reflects Yuriko Saito’s insight that aesthetic judgments often carry moral weight (2007, 208–213; see also Hartblay 2017).8 Thus scholars investigating urban struggle argue that houses—especially the houses of poor and working-class urban settlers—are fundamental sites for claims of citizenship (E. Murphy 2004, 2015). Houses enable the poor and working classes to express their commensurability with more powerful actors and to claim a legitimate life in the city (Holston 1991a, 1991b, 2008). The dual functions of aesthetic work, to enforce power relations or potentially disrupt them, is fundamental here (Bourdieu 1984; Eagleton



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1988; Rancière 1999, 2004). Most scholars of Thailand focus on aesthetics in the former sense, as a way to maintain the existing hierarchy. Peter Jackson, for example, argues that the production and maintenance of appearances is critical to Thai hierarchies of power and order (2004a, 2004b). For Jackson, the “regime of images” that regulates public social life silences anything that disrupts the appearances “of ‘smooth calm’ (khwām sangop rīaproi) of social life” (2004a, 184). More simply, as Penny Van Esterik puts it, in Thailand, “Appearances matter. Beautiful appearances matter even more” (2000, 109; see also Morris 2000, 5). Power in Thailand is closely linked to the appearance of order and the order of appearances (Herzfeld 2017; Chua 2018; Janepicha 2020).9 Residents used material aesthetic practices as a part of their efforts to stave off eviction, demonstrate their dignity, and make themselves intelligible as legitimate political actors while producing spaces for better lives.10 Aesthetics have thus become fundamental to reconfiguring the substantive quality of their citizenship (Holston and Appadurai 1998, 190). 11 By bringing appearances in line with broader conceptions of the good life mobilized through aesthetic regimes of appropriateness, modernity, moderation, and development, residents claim commensurability with other members in the broader social order.12 As my informants put it, their efforts, both political and material, were aimed at showing that they were “like everyone else” (thawthīam kap khon ư̄n). Residents claimed to feel these transformations from within as occupants, as they transformed the house in ways visible to viewers from the outside. Aesthetic work itself might not be strictly moral (or immoral), but it offered them a mode of acting in the world in the aim of producing lived-in spaces that were recognized as both good and legitimate. Although the development experts from CODI and the more political slum activists I worked with often downplay aesthetics, they too engage in aesthetic practices that propose possible worlds for the squatters with whom they work. Like the residents, their expert collaborators’ designs also reflected value judgments about the proper ordering of the world. Thus, the different “aesthetic regimes” (Fehérváry 2013, 8) proposed by residents, CODI architects, and NGOs reflect not only taste preferences (Bourdieu 1984), but also conflicting and competing notions of citizenship and the good life. The projects described here reflect encounters between these visions and aspirations. Vernacular structures—wooden post-and-beam construction and cosmic posts—can index claims to authentic forms of Thai or local Isaan

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identity (Askew 2003; Formoso 1990). Concrete brick and smooth tile index capitalist modernity (Mills 2001; see also Archambault 2018). Mud, earth, and improvised spaces speak in the language of sufficiency, community, and development alternatives (see, for example, Reynolds 2009). By manipulating the sensible world, residents, planners, and activists sought to produce terrains for both living and for politics by blending existing visions of the good life with emergent claims to political and economic commensurability. THE HOUSE AS A DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY The tensions around the role of the aesthetic in producing political and social change are evident in the ways in which houses were cast by CODI officials as being “more than houses.” Such a framing ignored the critical importance of aesthetic improvement in two regards. On the one hand, residents’ lives along the tracks were shaped by the conditions of the leases, which brought with them an aesthetic imperative. As one railway official put it, “If you sign a lease, you can no longer live as before. You must develop and you must work together.” Indeed, one condition of signing the leases is that communities must participate in the CODI Baan Mankong housing upgrade scheme. As mentioned, the imperative to change was fundamental to bureaucratic documentation. However, for residents, this dictum was an incitement to beautify their homes and communities that they took to vigorously. For example, shortly after signing their residents in Chumchon Patthanā Sithi Zone 3 spent the day clearing the dense overgrowth along the tracks to, as Nung put it, “show the railway that we can care for their land.” For those without leases, beautification was also seen as a strategy to induce the railway to begin negotiations. As one resident explained, “we try to develop the land as a technique. In the past, the SRT said we are just slums. It is easy to clear a slum away. Now we are developing the land, building roads, and planting trees so they can see that this is not a slum and can’t be cleared away easily.” Visible transformations became vital for residents because they demonstrated their capacities to transform themselves. On the other hand, the Baan Mankong policy complicated the value of the aesthetic dimension of improvement. CODI planners repeatedly affirmed that social improvement and not home improvement was the purpose of the project. However, they too used aesthetics as a means of gauging improvement. CODI’s clearest evidence of its successes were photographs of dense,



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ramshackle slums transformed into orderly communities with houses and apartments laid out grid-style on manicured grounds. Despite the prevalence of before and after imagery, CODI staff entreated residents to use and reuse modest materials and plan carefully, and prioritize their needs over their desires. They discouraged residents from taking up projects that were primarily aesthetic, prohibiting them from using their money for tiles or other objects that seemed excessive. Mae Hawm often reiterated CODI’s mission to her network members using their words: “In Baan Mankong a house is more than a house. It is a way to develop ourselves [phatthanā tua ēng] and our community. We know how to solve our problems and we know how to unite to do this on our own.” The tension between these different perceptions of improvement made aesthetic practices ambiguous for many development experts and activists. For many residents, the SRTs imperative to “not live as before” articulated with their own sense that their houses and lives were out of place in the rapidly changing city. As Boonma once observed, “The city is changing fast. We need to keep up or we will be evicted.” Indeed, the heterogeneous nature of the housing, the material qualities of their construction, and the sensory qualities of the space still mark many of the settlements as slums to many Khon Kaen residents irrespective of residents’ legal rights. Residents understood this. They argued that their houses were vulnerable both because they lacked legal rights and because they were unattractive. Residents held that the sensory qualities of the domestic spaces along the tracks have been just as important as their lack of legal rights in marking them as trespassers in the city. This assertion collapsed legality into aesthetics in an evocative way. By definition, a trespasser appears in the wrong place at the wrong time. In this case, aesthetics added another layer: appearing wrongly, in the wrong space, at the wrong time. Thus, the house and its physical and material transformation took on a larger significance for residents seeking to improve their status along multiple trajectories. MATERIALIZING COMMENSURABILITY The Golf Community comprises twenty-two households arranged in a neat row at the far edge of the golf course owned by the SRT. Because the houses were located more than eighty meters from the tracks, residents in the Golf Community were able to sign an unusual thirty-year lease with the SRT. In

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doing so, the Golf Community became one of the first of the railway settlements in Khon Kaen to begin onsite Baan Mankong upgrades. As KKSRN members, their collaborators in the FRSN often used the community as an example to show other member communities what was possible if they organized and mobilized themselves to struggle for rights. In 2008, I was given a tour of that community as part of a workshop organized by the FRSN and the KKSRN. The organization’s NGO activists brought residents of other communities, students, and academics to tour the settlement and survey its projects. At the time, residents of the Golf Community were completing housing upgrades, road improvements, and an herb garden—all funded by Baan Mankong upgrade grants. Surprisingly, however, these projects were not our first stop. Instead, the community’s leaders took us to see an electric meter affixed to a concrete post. By beginning the tour here, the group demonstrated their awareness of how even the most utilitarian object could index the quality of citizenship: the meters and their concrete posts represented both the legitimized legal right to the city afforded by the lease and the electricity metered at cheaper rates because of their permanent house numbers. Houses without permanent numbers had temporary meters that charged higher rates and were affixed to temporary installations. Thus, residents’ excitement reflected their acute sensitivity to the ways their leases and their legitimacy manifested itself in material things, even as banal as an electric meter. Where improvements had not yet found material form, residents shared plans of improvements to come. For example, when I entered Mae Mu’s house she apologized: “I am so sorry. This place is not beautiful; it is not finished yet.” The front of the house was unpainted concrete. Unstained, wooden slats covered the sole window. These slats are called a ranāeng, a vernacular form of ventilation common on rural Thai homes. I told her the house, a recently finished structure built in another KKSRN community on the edge of the city, looked lovely, but she rebuffed me, sharing plans for coming improvements: “This wall will be painted blue. And I plan to tile the floor soon. That will make it nicer in here.” She took me to her garden and showed me papaya, chili, and lemongrass plants, none yet ready to eat. These sprouts reflected her goals, as she put it, “to practice the sufficiency economy.” Mae Mu’s use of sufficiency to describe these projects reflected her desire to be seen in a particular way and, perhaps more pointedly, to live a particular kind of life. Like other homeowners I met, Mae Mu was highly attentive to the differ-



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ences between finished (rīaproi) projects and unfinished ones (yāng mai set) because of what these projects helped to say about her as an occupant and about the life she was trying to build. This mode of thinking linked her life and the house on a longer intertwined trajectory toward a range of futureoriented possibilities. The house served as a stage for living out these better, more comfortable, more beautiful, more equal futures. Some residents invited me into their houses only after they had finished their projects. For example, I had known Mae Ni for more than a year and half before she showed me around her house. When she finally did, she started the tour in the bathroom—a space I rarely saw in homes whose owners I did not know well. The recently finished room was tiled with pink and buff sandstone on the walls and smooth black granite on the floor. The same tile also covered the house’s façade. “My son helped us negotiate for these tiles—sandstone and granite—fifty percent off!” She laughed, “It looks like a resort, doesn’t it?” For Mae Ni and Mae Mu, these upgrades were done with an eye toward materializing moral and political commensurability with other members of the city. Indeed, behind Mae Ni’s house, her neighbors had erected a huge sign announcing the community’s name, its lease number, and its association with various agencies (figure 7.1). When we spoke, she did not highlight the

Figure 7.1  Upgraded house showing some of the owner’s aesthetic choices, including tiles, bright fences, and a sign indicating affiliations with state agencies and activist networks. Photo by the author.

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specific political possibilities of the lease as much as the way the upgrades made the house more pleasant to occupy (nāyū). “This house is better than the old one. That one was hot. The air didn’t move. This one has a nice breeze right on the road. The old one never felt finished.” Homes like Mae Ni’s drew from an aesthetic repertoire that mirrored the sleek modern housing developments under construction throughout Khon Kaen city, but for others, commensurability took alternative forms. In the Golf Community, one homeowner covered his home’s entire façade with mismatched broken and recycled tiles he had found as he worked collecting recyclables around the city (figure 7.2). The house echoed the sufficiency discourse, serving as an alternative to the sort of ready-made modernity found in Mae Ni’s house. It reflected the owner’s idiosyncratic effort to build something beautiful through found objects put to careful reuse. This house was a favorite of planners, visiting academics, and NGO activists because its materiality seemed to represent an alternate set of lived possibilities that was more careful about the world and the things that composed it. For those skeptical of deleterious effects of consumption, the house offered a vision of a sustainable urbanism forged by finding value in what others had discarded. Yet, even as the house seemed to suggest these possibilities, it did so in a way that was not completely unlike Mae Ni’s houses; it was, after all, made pri-

Figure 7.2  House constructed of reused tiles in the Golf Community. Photo by the author.



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marily of tile and concrete. In this sense, it also suggested permanency and the sorts of recognition that was supposed to come with it. Both structures spoke to the desires of their owners to live and to be seen as living legitimate lives rendered in particular ways. Those desires were built directly into the materiality of the house. SUFFICIENCY AESTHETICS If residents were acutely aware of the power of appearances, the limitations of the aesthetic preoccupied the planners, architects, and NGO activists who worked along the tracks. Most planners and activists felt strongly that real change, though tied to material improvement, was something other than that. As former CODI director Somsook Boonyabancha explained, “Real upgrading goes beyond the physical aspects; it changes relationship[s] and allows urban poor communities space and freedom” (2005, 39). For CODI planners, the physicality of the house often obscured the meaning of “real upgrading,” which transformed people’s values and social commitments. As one architect affiliated with CODI put it, “This is the core concept that we need to build the strength of the community and work up until they can have the house. . . . the house is only an outcome of a strong community.” Yet in their professional practice, CODI’s planners and architects saw space, materiality, and aesthetics as critical tools for producing a lived terrain that would enable residents to enact new sets of values. To this end, CODI architects helped residents create community plans with houses oriented toward each other to help promote socialization, communality, mutual aid, and moderation. They drew street plans with only one or two entryways to force residents to see each other every day. Architects also actively used aesthetic tools such as community diagrams and computer renderings of projects to motivate residents to participate through visions of improved homes and communities. As mentioned in chapter 4, these tools “rendered technical” (Li 2007, 7) the problem of poverty, depoliticizing the key questions about land and recognition facing residents. However, as one CODI planner pointed out, they also helped residents visualize their goals to facilitate new personal and collective practices of improvement. In other words, they were not meant to solve those debates as much as stretch residents’ temporal horizons, imbuing their work with a hopefulness that might have otherwise been impossible (Gibson, forthcoming).

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Although planners and architects posited their own aesthetic renderings as mere tools (khrưā ng mư)̄ or mechanisms (konkai) rather than as ends in themselves, their aesthetic visions of improvement were revealing. The plans demonstrated the way planners and architects used aesthetic practices as a way of producing future moral-political worlds. Such worlds were often rooted in a kind of “sufficiency aesthetic” that sought to valorize the poor by highlighting their goodness and communal spirit while creating spaces that would moderate their capitalist desires, make development more sustainable, and diminish their political demands. Like bureaucratic practices of community, aesthetics were also seen as a way of managing the poor and their political aspirations. In this sense, aesthetics posed a complex problem for planners. Like the residents, architects and planners used appearances to generate different values within spaces for living. Sufficiency aesthetics transformed discourses of sustainability, communality, and moderation into lived space. This logic is clearly articulated in a handbook produced from a CODI “low-cost housing design competition”: We have a requirement that they need a housing design that is cheap and affordable. It should also be beautiful, strong, and reflect local identities and “Thai-ness” [khwāmpenthai]. The characteristics of most low-income houses are simple and thrifty. They need to be well ventilated because the house doesn’t have air conditioning. According to the Baan Mankong system, residents of a community need to develop close relationships and cannot have fences between their houses. Communities should have more walking paths than roads for vehicles. The design of houses should also promote togetherness as a community. (CODI 2007, 109)13

This passage neatly summarizes the formal aesthetic ideals of the Baan Mankong project, even if such ideals were rarely met. CODI architects subordinated certain values—mainly those associated with material comfort, modernity, democratic rights claims, and consumer belonging—to others such as tradition, communality, national or depoliticized forms of local identity, and sustainability. These values were encoded in materials—tin, used wood, concrete, brick, and paint. The results were home designs that recreated shacks as more beautifully designed architectural objects. As striking as the home designs were, they retained an ambiguous poli-



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tics. In one sense, designs like these often reindexed the shack, transforming it from a space of deprivation into a beautiful structure that reflected ideals of moral moderation. In another sense, the designs reproduced precisely the terms of exclusion that residents sought to undo. Beyond the fact that few residents wanted to continue to live in a tin shack—even a beautiful one—the designs didn’t accomplish the goals of residents to be seen as commensurable with other urbanites. Indeed, these visible contradictions became the stuff of public and private debate as the project progressed. Khit, a CODI architect I worked with, said that he had been reading extensively about earthen-home designs and was trying to convince residents that such structures were sturdy, cheap, hygienic, climate friendly, and easy to maintain. Born in Isaan and educated at Khon Kaen University, Khit understood residents’ desires and the limits they posed to this sort of project: You can’t just present them with an earthen home [bān din]. They don’t want that. They’ll say it doesn’t look nice. They want square windows and wooden doors and a nice pitched roof. When I presented this idea the villagers just sat there like this [crossing his arms and smiling serenely]. I’d like to build an earthen home project but they’d say it wasn’t modern and it didn’t look nice.

On another occasion, Khit and I visited suppliers of recycled wood to determine whether secondhand materials might be useful for residents in their home improvement projects; it turned out that they were too expensive. Some architects and planners said they felt residents rejected such projects because of the pernicious effects of capitalism and the desires of “villagers” to be modern. Khit’s explanation demonstrates his understanding that these structures were filled with possibility, but did little to address residents’ desires to politically, legally, and morally belong in the same ways as did other residents of the city. He did not dismiss such desires but understood how they were at odds with his visions of what might constitute a better, more just, and sustainable city. At other times, architects weren’t so evenhanded. I sat on the side of a larger public event at a recently rebuilt community in Bangkok with a group of planners, all of whom complained that the first thing residents did when they redesigned the community was to ask that the first floor of all the homes be enclosed in concrete blocks. One architect said that the designs would

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be too hot. Another suggested that their children had manipulated their parents into these designs: “They come back from working abroad and tell them they should make their homes more modern-looking.” Another told me that the houses were bricked in because the residents were concerned about theft. Whatever the answer, the issue of enclosing the ground floor was read as indexing a difference between a resident who understood the value of “traditional” uses of space, the value of vernacular design, and oneness with nature. Those who preferred the open floor plan typical of traditional designs were understood to be capable of seeing beyond the façade of modernity.14 Although many residents wanted to make their settlements understandable as legitimate communities, planners and NGOs imagined slums as spaces where alternatives to the individualizing effects of capitalism, modernity, and democracy might be enacted. This proved, however, to be where the aesthetic possibilities of what Ananya Roy calls “slumdog urbanism” found their limits (2011). If planners and activists saw the slum as social laboratory capable of generating new lived possibilities, residents often rejected this vision when it failed to change the fundamental terms of exclusion. The aesthetics of sustainability marked the precise boundaries of commensurability. Disagreements over innovative designs were not simply about aesthetics, then, but instead about the distinct and contested worlds to which these aesthetic visions consigned residents. Planners wanted to validate some existing logics and practices within communities. Many residents, however, wanted to be seen as of similar capacity and kind as other citizens, leaving “the slum” behind altogether. It was this struggle—the struggle between contested worlds imagined and built—that was at stake in these debates over beautified shacks and earthen homes. They were not just struggling over architecture, but instead about citizenship and the good life more broadly. MODELING CITIZENSHIP In July of 2009, activists from the Four Regions Slum Network held a leadership training seminar (kanfeuk oprom phūnām) at the local network’s office in Khon Kaen. This training gave activists and planners spaces to discuss the material desires of residents and open them up to critical inspection while teaching the basic skills associated with community organizing. Through various activities, the activists hoped it would allow residents to see development in broader terms than physical improvement; instead it raised political ques-



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tions about social justice and inequality. Seventeen community leaders from one of Khon Kaen’s slum networks participated. Throughout the workshop, P’Rak, an NGO organizer from Bangkok, reminded participants about the role of the house. “We use the house as a tool. The broader issue is the rights of the people and the abilities of communities to think for themselves,” he said. P’Rak’s vision recalled CODI’s mantra “a house is more than a house,” but twisted it, suggesting that that residents should participate in community activities for more than their material interests because materiality is morally subordinate to the “rights of people” and the abilities of “communities to think for themselves.” Indeed, P’Rak—having worked alongside evicted communities for decades—was skeptical of physical improvement because it was temporary and did not attack the roots of social exclusion. He had seen hundreds of homes that residents had devoted their lives to improving erased by conspiring pens, bulldozers, and money. During the session’s main activity, residents worked in three groups, building model houses using paper and tape. The activity was supposed to be a learning opportunity to teach residents that the resulting objects were less important than the process of working together. Although this was the implicit lesson, the model houses offer insights into the complex role that aesthetics play in the making of the world. The first group constructed a postand-beam house of rolled tubes of paper. According to one group member, “This house is designed to be with nature so that it won’t be too hot and won’t require air conditioning.” The traditional “posts” reflected vernacular “Thainess”; the ponds and gardens indexed sufficiency. More directly, the words “unity, development, harmony” (rūam jai, phatthanā, sāmakhī) were written across its lintel, offering direct discursive connections to the nationalist sufficiency discourse. The second group presented a simple one-floor house with a corrugated paper roof. Paw Kan, the group’s fiery leader, began with a claim to moral poverty through moderation: “We’re poor so we don’t have a car.” With a toothless grin, he claimed that the house cost thirty-eight thousand baht and did not yet have electricity or water. Paw Kan said, “We did not add these because we did not want to borrow money to do the upgrade.” Here he echoed the constant reminders made by activists and planners that upgrades should take place little by little, an ironic twist that emphasized the limits of what could be done with so little money. Another group member added, “We have a committee and they came to check the land and helped us survey the

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community first. We have a large area to raise animals and grow vegetables. If we have the chance to add more, we will.” Both presenters offered sly moral takes on the upgrade process, demonstrating their abilities to work slowly and think together on moderate solutions while highlighting the limits of such methods. The third house was modestly sized and, unlike the others, lacked either vernacular flourish or reference to sustainability. Instead, the group distinguished its model with a hand-drawn tile roof, a red satellite dish, and a driveway. This house looked like many of the better houses along the tracks reflecting the sorts of modest consumer comforts most homeowners aspired to own. When I asked about the driveway, one of the group members laughed and said, “That is where you can park your Vico!”—a recent model Toyota truck advertised on large billboards across the city. Boonma, the group’s leader, began: Outside, there is a place for members to meet and a place to hold seminars. We also have a satellite dish so that people can come here and get the news and so that the network will have information. We have a place for ‘sufficiency’ too so we can grow vegetables.

When the presentation was finished, all the residents joked that they wanted to move into this place. Boonma added, “We used good materials so that it will last a long time and we won’t have to fix them.” Although the activity attempted to create a neat division between the aesthetic of the house and development processes that would create strong communities, the models the participants built showed that real development also involved things, often better things, than those that many residents already had. Where residents focused their attention on the end product—the physical house—the NGO facilitators tried to refocus residents’ attention on the process, reminding them that things “can be taken at any moment” and that “the poor must work together to achieve security.” The discursive bifurcation between “real development” as process (here political process) and material development as appearance served not only to problematize residents’ desires for the stuff of better living, but also to reinforce, from the activists’ points of view, that the residents still did not understand the meaning of real development, marking them as still-notyet-capable citizens. Yet the choices of the residents reflected development’s



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materiality and its sensory qualities. Development entailed political mobilization, but it also entailed posts, fishponds, gardens, concrete blocks, tile roofs, satellite dishes, and Toyota trucks. Each model wove together a complex web of desires that reflected the discourses and dilemmas many of the residents faced living on the edges of a booming provincial city, highlighting the ways appearances sought to transform their status as trespassers. Their sarcasm exposed their understanding of the power dynamics of the system in which they lived. The models enabled them to knit together the morality of moderation and collective organization with the consumer comforts and freedoms associated with individual rights that they felt other, wealthier Thai already had. Residents ultimately refused to see these goals as contradictory, building their homes to simultaneously reflect multiple aesthetic regimes of good citizenship. ENVISIONING INDEPENDENCE In late 2009, I sat with Nung in his backyard enjoying the cooling night air of the earliest breaths of Khon Kaen’s so-called cold season. He had recently demolished the back five meters of his house. Doing so brought his house into full compliance with the railway’s twenty meter, no-build zone, certifying his and his community’s commitment to upholding the terms of their lease. Having completed the rear wall of his realigned house, we now sat on a table in the middle of a concrete slab that had previously been his kitchen, eating spicy soup and drinking beer. A few traces of the original structure were still evident, though. The palimpsest of the concrete slab and a halfdemolished post marked the structure’s maximum size before the lease. The house had shrunk but was now legal along with the homes of the rest of his neighbors in Chumchon Patthanā Sithi Zone 3. Nung’s occupation of the home and land had been legitimized by both the lease agreements and these physical transformations. Our discussion that evening touched on many topics, calling on a number of aesthetic forms during its course. Nung showed me his color-coded ledger books for all of the community’s collective accounts—savings, rent, finance, and community work. Each book with its neatly arranged columns of numbers testified to the bureaucratic aesthetics he had worked hard to cultivate as a leader. He hoped that these books would serve as an example and as a learning tool for other communities because other leaders needed to

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understand how to show that their community was transparent and working on the project appropriately through documents. Nung shared his plans to upgrade his home as well. He wanted to smooth out the concrete in the backyard and get rid of the ruins of the former house. He hoped to plant some trees to offer shade from the midday heat and privacy from the train that raced by the house every hour—this natural fence (rua thammāchāt) would replace the tangle of overgrown weeds that provided privacy before he and his neighbors uprooted them to show the railway their progress as a community and their commitment to “taking care of the land” (kāndūlāe thīdin). As the night wound down, he talked about all the things he had learned from the NGO activists he had worked with. He spoke of how he learned to organize people. After working with the activists, he explained, he felt like a leader and when he spoke now his neighbors listened. He was indebted to the activists like P’Rak and local leaders like Paw Thamrong, who taught him to believe in himself. He also confessed his desire to become autonomous from the network he had worked so actively in for the past three years. He was exhausted from all the struggle, the trips to Bangkok, and, most of all, the struggling with his neighbors, with Mae Hawm, and with other participants in the KKSRN who, he felt, didn’t work as hard as he did. His dream of becoming isara (independent) had a physical manifestation: I think I could be satisfied [mīkhwāmpawjai] with about five million baht. Just that much and I wouldn’t need any more. I would buy a piece of land, maybe six or seven rai outside of town, and I would make a little resort, I’d grow vegetables and fruit and then have a fishpond and raise chickens. I’d just like to have enough to take care of my wife and we could eat chicken or go catch fish whenever we needed food. I think that would be enough for me.

Despite the tiles he had placed and all the work he had done on his house along the tracks, this fantasy offered an escape from the disagreements with his neighbors, the city, and within his network. It offered a sense of relief from the debt he had taken on to improve his home. It offered something else to think toward beyond the drudgery of managing his small shop at the city bus station. This dream could be read as enhancing capitalist fantasies of personal wealth by wedding them with a vision of independence manifest



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in “sufficiency aesthetics.” It might also be read as an expression of a desire to escape from the intractable dilemmas posed by urban life, capitalism, and democracy. Although phrased in terms of income security, the amount, five million baht, is ultimately an imagined number.15 It doesn’t represent wealth, per se, but instead an imaginary number beyond which money itself might no longer be so important. It wasn’t about the specific things that money might buy, but rather, the possibility of being beyond the worries associated with money. The rural idyll was Nung’s escape route from debt, bureaucratic procedures, community negotiation, and the intense disagreements that shaped his and his family’s life along the tracks. It may have been just a dream, but it was one that felt good to think about, even as he persisted with the daily hard work of these other less agreeable tasks. GARDENS OF POLITICS To celebrate their lease, Boonma and his neighbors in the Rail’s Edge community used their CODI infrastructure grants to transform the space between their homes and the tracks into a garden. First, they tore out the overgrown weeds that had occupied the space. Next, they dug a long trench to install a drainage system to help with urban runoff that sometimes caused the neighborhood to flood. Then, they paved over the drainage pipes, creating a path that linked all the homes across their backyards. According to Boonma, who organized the project, the process of negotiating the paved path was a hassle because it required everyone to rethink their use of space; the new path cut into backyards that people used to hang clothes or to store belongings that didn’t fit in their homes. Nevertheless, the community’s leadership fought through the objections, arguing that the path would help residents could move more easily through the community by avoiding the busy alley that ran in front of the houses, which was frequently clogged by large trucks transporting gas from the local depot. Finally, after Boonma had persuaded his neighbors that the garden was a good use of space, he organized a group and planted a long skinny garden in the ten meters closest to the tracks. Aided by his wife Thawng and her capacious knowledge of traditional Thai herbs, Boonma and his neighbors planted papaya and banana trees, chilis, lemon grass, garlic, ginger, a range vegetables, and a variety of medicinal plants. Eventually, Boonma even built a small shelter like those seen in

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rice fields throughout the countryside, where farmers take their midday meal and nap to escape the oppressive heat. The garden used what was effectively surplus space to take up an ambiguous set of values, either rural sufficiency or anticapitalist collective production, depending on who you spoke with. It almost perfectly reconciled the tensions of what it means to be a “poor villager” in Thailand by linking both conservative and progressive aesthetic visions in one space. It also articulated the Rail’s Edge’s sense of what a post– slum community could look like. It is ironic, then, that almost immediately after the first seeds were planted, the SRT notified the Rail’s Edge community that the garden violated the community’s lease agreement and that the garden had to be torn up because it violated the designated ten meter no-build safety zone adjacent to the tracks. If the community did not uproot the garden, the SRT said it would nullify the agreement and they would lose their rights and face eviction. Rail’s Edge residents explained that the garden also demonstrated their commitment to beautifying the city and to enacting the principles of the sufficiency economy. The garden did so by reflecting specific values development, moderation, and unity in lived space. Instead of solidifying the community’s claim to the land, however, the garden ended up leading to another set of contentious meetings with the SRT culminating in a protest and meeting at the local railway office. Here, the garden’s references to sufficiency reveal another set of possibilities locked up in a discourse that was more frequently used to discipline residents. At a meeting held at the railway office in Khon Kaen, residents of Rail’s Edge and their allies in the KKSRN petitioned the government to allow the residents to maintain their lease and keep the garden. As they put it in their petition to the SRT, the garden represented the community’s desire to make the city beautiful, to develop and improve their quality of life, to enhance public safety (by building a fence along the tracks), and to enact their nascent rights over the land. In the petition, they juxtaposed their project with the sois (alleyways) built with CODI money in T3, a community working with Mae Hawm’s United Communities Network that, despite residents’ best efforts, still lacked a lease. Residents of Rail’s Edge argued that they were not building roads or wasting the state’s money on projects that would be torn down by the railway, but beautifying the city and acting on the promise of sufficiency ideals. In doing so, they presented their neighbors in T3 as illegitimate because they lacked leases and were simply wasting government



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money on projects that the SRT would ultimately tear up. Prathān Thi, the leader of the KKSRN, put the claim this way: The railroad wants us to develop. When the community signed the lease, they told the railway that they wouldn’t live as before and that they would develop the land. They [the community] want the land to be developed and they want to help the city be beautiful and livable [thām hai mưā ng sūaygnām lae nāyū]. The municipality wants the land to be developed and the community wants to develop it, but they [the SRT] won’t allow us. . . . We want to improve the city but the railway won’t approve it.

Through the garden, the residents applied sufficiency principles to make a political and moral demonstration of their legitimacy as residents in the city by asserting their right to develop and improve the city. The protest did not cast residents as aggrieved or vulnerable poor people. Instead, it highlighted the KKSRN’s members as citizen-protagonists whose designs were critical to making the city more livable.16 By using the garden to make its claims, the residents asserted themselves as acting in the interest of the city and nation, arguing that it was, in fact, the SRT that was not operating in the interest of the nation’s development project. This was not merely a novel argument, but a potent mobilization of aesthetic practices to hold the railway authority to its word. In this sense, the garden revealed the way sufficiency could be marshaled directly in the name of politics, using its language, aesthetics, and affective dimensions to legitimize the Rail’s Edge community and their right to develop the land. BUILDING POLITICAL LIVES In Khon Kaen, domestic aesthetics allowed residents, planners, and activists to debate the making of the world, raising contested questions about good citizenship and moral progress. Although the housing projects never fully secured residents’ rights and, in fact, did almost nothing to disrupt the broader systems of economic production that led to the poverty along the tracks, houses became sites where visions of social, political, and moral transformation could be enacted. For residents, homes became lived-in claims to belonging that reflected the legitimacy of their being. Through aesthetic

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practices, they materialized commensurability with their fellow citizens as best they could and sought to embrace new, contested modes of living in the world. Their homes thus reflected and refracted competing notions of a good life, each tied to conflicting models of good citizenship. Houses balanced notions of the good national citizen with alternative ideas about sustainability, efforts to participate in capitalist modernity, and the pragmatic constraints of poverty. As anchors for these various desires to belong and to live a good life, the house became a site of politics that was itself not yet complete. At the same time, houses became potent space to govern. Planners, activists, and architects used houses and communities as tools to attempt to teach, moderate, and organize residents to become particular sorts of citizens. To them, the spaces of community and the structures of the houses were entry points to govern the moral and political lives of the residents. They often reminded residents that real development was not rooted in the materiality of the home but in social and political transformations: “A house is more than a house.” For the reformers and activists, it was critical that the poor recognize that their houses were not an end, but a means to living better lives by serving as a node of communal living, moral transformation, and political mobilization. Indeed, even the limitations of aesthetic practices may give rise to other articulations of politics. As Terry Eagleton argues, the aesthetic itself “can be the first primitive, incipient materialism, politically indispensable” (1988, 328). Material inequality and narrowed channels of aspiration were critical to fueling participation in the massive Red Shirt demonstrations between 2008 and 2014 (Sopranzetti 2012; Elinoff 2012). What made that movement so complex is how it resisted reduction to one ideology or the other. Instead, like the residents along the tracks, those protests wove together a number of disagreements about who counts as a citizen and what it means to live a good life in contemporary Thailand. Yet the aesthetic improvements of the houses were marked by the same pervasive uncertainty that plagues the appearances of development elsewhere in Thailand. These improvements are readily called into question: middleand upper-class reformers skeptical of the morals of the poor might point out that demands for better living through improved housing are the result of excessive desires. NGO activists argue that individual material progress wrought through consumer goods merely deepens capitalism. Other ethnographers might point out that material things—especially shoddily con-



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structed things—degrade and betraying their very claims to thing-ness in the process (see Lea and Pholeros 2010). They might also argue that beauty ultimately reproduces existing power arrangements, deepening inequality, and producing new forms of exclusion (see Harms 2012). Even residents are aware that aesthetic improvements have their limits. One resident turned this critique back on the Baan Mankong project: “They like things that look nice for a little while, but then fall apart.” Another perspective on the aesthetic, then, is that aesthetic improvements did manifest slow but real material and existential improvements in peoples’ lives, however precarious and uncertain. These changes have deeper effects than those that can be immediately seen, even if they remain on the surface, are impermanent, and never quite realize the transformations they promise. Aesthetic practices along the tracks emerged as important because they offered a variety of ways of articulating what more just city would look and feel like and how different sorts of citizens might live along the tracks; these structures embodied the practice of citizen design. Aesthetic work enabled action. It allowed residents, activists, and planners a way of manifesting answers to impossible, irreconcilable questions about democracy, development, and politics by building homes and communities. In attempting to answer such questions, these actors made use of the available materials, discourses, ideologies, and symbols already burdened by historically and culturally laden expectations. The results of these processes were that none of these larger questions were answered, but instead a series of contentious collaborations emerged, producing a patchwork that calls to mind different, available notions of good citizenship and the good life. Such visions of belonging did not reflect a coherent political programmatic— that is, a neatly organized vision of good citizenship with a clear ideological stance toward or against democracy, capitalism, communality, or sustainability. Often, as in the case of Boonma’s garden, they did the opposite, binding contradictory visions together in one space. In this sense, these citizen designs did not anticipate a utopian future without disagreement. Instead, they offered a sense of the political itself, always in the making, always under construction, built of ill-fitting and contradictory visions of the good life; a kind of force that moves toward but cannot reach its own promise.

8 City of Disagreement

In Boonma’s restaurant in late September of 2009, conversation turned to the relationship between national politics and his organizing on a local level: If you ask me, most of the people in the communities support the Red Shirts. Wherever they go, we go too. If you ask at the Four Regions office, they think differently. Most of them hate Thaksin for what he did to the NGOs [nongovernmental organizations]. He [Thaksin] said that the poor don’t need the NGOs. He said that the NGOs get in the way of fixing things. I don’t know if that is entirely true, but, I mean look at this government [the Abhisit-led government]. They have been in power and the only thing I’ve seen out of it is the five hundred baht they give to my parents [as a special payment to the elderly]. They have borrowed 80 billion baht and we haven’t seen any of that money. It is just going to help people in the other classes. What is there for me? When Thaksin was in power we finally got health care. I could go to any hospital. I had a problem with my heart and I went to the hospital. it cost me only 30bt. In the past, if I had to stay in the hospital they would ask me all these questions about my work and my income and my ability to pay. How many kids do you have? How much money do you make? What is your job? That type of thing and it was humiliating. 176



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It made me feel like I wasn’t equal to them and with the gold card now I can just go in and get all of that taken care of.

Even as his collaboration with activists in the nongovernmental organization (NGO) network deepened, Boonma’s attachments to the Red Shirt cause also strengthened. He often laughed about this, saying that even though he deeply respected and worked closely with his NGO counterparts, they did not talk about the larger political situation. Although Boonma’s engagements with the Red Shirts and his work along the tracks were largely separate, our conversation revealed the ways in which these two political projects came to reflect similar sentiments, each experience feeding back into the other. In this chapter, I take up those interrelated sentiments and consider how residents’ citizen designs intertwined Thailand’s national political volatility, local organizing, and their everyday experiences. I argue that residents’ aspirations for equality, far from reflecting simple ideological oppositions, caused them to mobilize their political capacities in multiple ways simultaneously. Although the majority of the residents I worked with in Khon Kaen expressed sympathies with the Red Shirt movement, more than a handful of others— especially those who worked closely with NGOs—had other leanings. Some favored groups such as the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) because of their associations with the monarchy and a cadre of important NGO activists involved in that group; others articulated a third position that was skeptical of politicians and organized politics. Even among those who asserted support for the Red Shirts, few were uniformly or simply pro-­Thaksin. Instead, they expressed not only complex feelings about his tenure, but also that they resented the ways their votes and voices had been ignored by military and judicial interventions. In this way, residents’ local work enhancing their rights to the city in Khon Kaen and their interest in asserting their legitimacy as political actors nationally were enmeshed. In short, regardless of where they worked, the sense that the poor should have an equal capacity to disagree became fundamental to their citizen designs. Residents began to make sense of their larger political predicament by triangulating between national and local politics. On the one hand, they were keen to use political action to assert their equal status. This, they said, took hard work and commitment to transforming their own lives and their own dispositions. On the other hand, this work was in tension with other things they valued like community. Beyond merely reflecting these ­sentiments

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­ iscursively, residents’ ideas and practices evolved over time, like their d houses, interweaving various visions of politics with ongoing struggles over democracy occurring at the national level. Even as residents saw politics as a necessary form for expressing their equality, they wrestled with the meanings of democracy and the multiple discursive and social forms of exclusion that shaped their lives. Their reflections on these forms of exclusion and the ways in which democratic politics might enable them to exert their legitimacy in the city and the nation were increasingly reflected in citizen designs that privileged their political equality sometimes in relationship to and sometimes beyond their embrace of unity, harmony, and moderation. In this sense, disagreement itself became both a path toward a more secure, better life and, occasionally, a good unto itself. POLITICS (UN)MANAGED In July of 2009, I accompanied key members of the United Communities Network (UCN) leadership team to a public meeting in Bangkok where then Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva turned a Baan Mankong housing project into a public relations event for his Strong Thailand (thai khemkhāeng) program for economic growth and social reconciliation. Formulated in the shadow of global financial constriction and deepening national political divisions, thai khemkhāeng was created to prop up the economy with infrastructure projects and bring stability through moderation by expanding ongoing social programs such as Baan Mankong. Indeed, the event was timed to coincide with the release of a documentary that positioned the Baan Mankong project as an alternative to the increasingly pitched demonstrations by the opposing Red and Yellow Shirt protestors.1 The event was held in a small public yard, adjacent to the inky, polluted Bang Bua canal. The prime minister, clad in a white windbreaker reading I Love Thailand and surrounded by uniformed police and bodyguards, sat on the ground on a plastic mat customary at village style meetings. Ill at ease in his “man of the people” role, the Oxford educated Abhisit was surrounded by an audience of Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI) officials and residents visiting from participating communities across the country. He was also accompanied by Apirak Kosayodhin, a former governor of Bangkok, who was much more skilled at this role (Herzfeld 2016, 138–139).



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Most of the discussion, though largely unorchestrated, was measured in its incorporation of residents’ questions. Selected residents asked questions and Abhisit directed the group’s attention to the government’s plan to use 1 billion baht ($140 million) to continue supporting the Baan Mankong project, which he claimed was a model for how social reconciliation and harmony could be realized through collective organizing and participation. Participation was cast as a mode of reconciliation that worked to fix the seemingly intractable political turmoil that had ousted Abhisit’s two predecessors, clearing the way for the judicial coup and parliamentary coalition that brought him into power. He did not mention that those debates were led by antidemocratic obstruction by the yellow shirted People’s Alliance for Democracy protestors, who were by and large supporters of his government. Toward the end of the event, the conversation became less scripted. One resident, a male leader from the Bang Bua community where the meeting was being held, stood up and took the microphone: “Right now, we have twelve committee members, but only three or four to do the work. Why do we need so many committee members? I think those committee members that do the work should get paid. Why don’t they get paid? Can you help us get paid for our work?” The crowd cheered wildly at this open critique of the policy and its simplistic rendering of community. The speaker had said something that was common in backstage conversation among residents, but rarely spoken aloud, at least not in such a high-profile forum. Bolstered by the cheers, an older woman stood up without the microphone, “You get paid, but many of us here don’t even have bathrooms.” The crowd cheered again, but the outburst was quickly quieted by CODI staff, who abruptly ended the meeting. What made this exchange potent was how it so quickly performed the contradictions at the heart of not only Baan Mankong’s notion of politics, but also the debates about democracy taking place across the country. By raising the question of the distributions of time and labor, the speaker demonstrated how the policy and, in some sense, the notion of developmental democracy itself depended on residents being cast as both protagonists in solving their own problems and as “poor villagers” in need of trainings and development to finally understand the values of unity and harmony (see also Nader 1990, 1997; L. Rose 1992). The questions appeared out of turn (and were described by CODI staff as incoherent) because they mobilized a vision of political equality at an inconvenient moment, raising both a specific critique of the project’s distribution of labor and a much deeper set of

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contradictions in the country’s political structure. In this sense, the questions were simultaneously too big and too small. The critiques were unanswerable because they brought the event’s backdrop—the political roots of Thailand’s inequality—into the foreground. Leaving the event, Mrs. Thip, a member of Mae Hawm’s network in Khon Kaen who was bused down to attend as an audience member, told me somewhat ruefully, “Everything the poor do, we must do together. We need lots of people because we cannot do it alone.” This remark was common, both a complaint and also a rallying cry, especially from NGO activists. On the one hand, she was repeating a phrase used to tell residents that to make the state act, the poor could not work alone because they would be ignored. On the other, she was demonstrating the binds of collectivity, making clear that poor people and their complaints were only audible when they were voiced together; these demands of collectivity were an indispensable burden of their subordinate political being. Her point clarified the way this unsettled tension was at the heart of what was possible politically for actors like those living along the tracks. Communal values and working together mattered, but increasingly so did equalizing the political voice of the poor. That meant confronting the way their subordination in the moral hierarchy consigned them to lives of collective negotiation or political inaudibility in various settings like CODI meetings or the NGO networks they belonged to. The moment is notable not because it was successful but because of the way the flickering disagreement brought the terms of the divided Thai polity and a whole other possible political order into view simultaneously. VILLAGERS’ FORUMS DISRUPTED As the national political situation became more polarized around Red and Yellow Shirt protests, local struggles in Khon Kaen became discursively entangled with national debates about democracy. Indeed, local discussions of harmony, unity, and consensus were portrayed in contrast to the increasingly pointed debates between Yellow and Red Shirt protestors. Both the UCN and the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network (KKSRN) sought to forge independent positions from those activities publicly. In our private conversations, however, residents often used the language of the Red Shirts to articulate the kinds of binds they faced in their local work. On other occasions, these situations merged. In October 2009, a CODI



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event was held in Chumpae, where Red Shirt protestors gathered to disrupt a visit from the Minister of Social Development and Human Security. CODI organized the minister’s visit at a local hotel for an event called the Villagers’ Forum (wāethī chaobān), a television show sponsored by the government to show how people in the country were solving their own problems without engaging in political conflict. That day, CODI planned to feature Mae Nong from Chumpae to show how Baan Mankong offered routes to social reconciliation through participatory planning. Mae Nong was the only villager featured on the show despite the mass audience of CODI participants—the sorts of subjects actually considered villagers—that had been bused to Chumpae from throughout the region. This irony was not lost on the members of the UCN in attendance that day. The morning of the forum, local Red Shirts gathered outside to protest the minister’s visit. Driving around town, they recruited local residents announcing the protest and playing the group’s theme song, khwāmjing wannī (The Truth Today). When the minister arrived, residents greeted him by throwing the local food staple, fermented fish (pā dāek), on his car. The aesthetic and symbolic significance of the gesture were obvious to all in attendance: covering his car in the pungent local specialty emphasized the protestors’ regional identities that in turn underscored the topography of the national dispute. It also reminded him in no uncertain terms that he was unwelcome in Isaan. Before the event, CODI held an untaped session at which residents could submit questions to CODI for vetting. Provided the questions were deemed appropriate, they would be able to ask the minister during the taping. Members of the UCN, many of whom told me they would have rather been outside with the Red Shirt protestors, asked the CODI official to raise questions about the railway. Shorty, a UCN representative from T7 with particularly strong loyalties to the local Red Shirts, began: We’ve been negotiating with the SRT [State Railway of Thailand] since 2539 [1996] and we are still unable to rent. We have so many problems on the railroad tracks in Khon Kaen. The SRT says they want to rent but they don’t let us rent. The SRT doesn’t allow us to negotiate. There are two networks in Khon Kaen and they don’t treat us equally. The people who are already renting are causing problems for those who aren’t. Throughout this year, 2552 [2009] we went around to every commu-

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nity, we prepared all the rental money, we gathered it from the villagers, and they still haven’t been able to rent. This has caused the villagers to not believe us or the project. They don’t believe in the leaders anymore or the process. The local authorities need to know what is happening there, the minister needs to know that we aren’t being treated equally.

As this was going on, Frank, one of CODI’s planners, stepped up to try to calm Shorty down as he became increasingly irate in his description, eventually cutting him off entirely. Mae Dam, from the City Shrine Community, continued his line of reasoning: I want to add something. I am also from the Khon Kaen UCN. The railroad is having problems with the law. The law is treating us differently. The law is forcing these evictions to happen because there are people who have rented and those who haven’t rented. The Four Regions network is causing pain for everyone. The minister needs to know that the current system isn’t equal.

Using the emerging language of inequality that was becoming central to Red Shirt rhetoric, these questions posed the differences between the UCN and KKSRN in stark terms. To gain rights to their land, residents had to be seen as harmonious citizens. Yet the only groups that had actually been able to gain rights did so through public politics and disagreeing with the SRT, CODI, and their neighbors in the process. In this sense, it was unclear what CODI was offering and how the UCN’s compliance with the agency would help them sign leases. The UCN’s engagement with CODI was premised on their negative feelings about the paternalism in the NGO movement, but by working with CODI they were now brought more closely into regimes of harmonious sufficiency governance central to the state agency’s understanding of participation. Neither alternative accommodated participants’ emerging claims to properly autonomous political subjectivity. They hoped that the forum might offer them an opportunity to express these sentiments. The Villagers’ Forum failed to address Shorty and Mae Dam’s questions. Instead, the minister talked about how the Baan Mankong offered a model of local cooperation and social reconciliation and how the Democrat Party, which was in power at the time, was the only party that supported CODI and the Baan Mankong project. During the forum, representatives from the



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Chumpae municipality denied that the Red Shirt protestors were from the city, claiming they, like the audience of villagers, were bused in from a nearby province. Mae Dam leaned over and told me this was a lie and that she knew that Red Shirts from Chumpae had organized the gathering. On the way home, we stopped at a restaurant on the side of the highway to eat koi, a local dish of raw beef, toasted rice powder, and bile, which adds an intensely bitter flavor to the dish which Isaan people regard as healing. Over dinner, we talked about various levels of unequal treatment the UCN had experienced. They complained that the KKSRN was able to rent and the UCN had been ignored. They argued that CODI officials get paid and are treated to stay in nice hotels when they travel, but that residents had to pay their own way to go to CODI events and they had to donate their time to the projects. They talked about how they had yet to receive the small portion of the project budget that was supposed to go to residents for their work administering these upgrades. Finally, they talked about how the Yellow Shirt occupation of the airport [at the end of 2008] had gone unpunished, whereas those involved in the Red Shirt mobilization in April had received a harsh sanction. At the heart of all of this concern over unequal treatment was the lingering question of what kind of political capacities the poor could mobilize: which kinds of politics were justified and which ones disrupted social harmony? Some residents pointed out that the KKSRN and the Four Regions were divisive like the Yellow Shirts. Mae Dam argued that some members of the Four Regions network, like many other NGOs, actually supported the ouster of Thaksin in 2006. Indeed, many in the NGO community had supported the coup and were active participants in the PAD. At the same time, most local members of the KKSRN did not support the PAD or any of the movements that followed.2 The day offered not only a clear vision of the ways in which the CODI project was increasingly being understood by residents as yet another way to manage not only their own political aspirations, but also those of the increasingly restless region. Their sentiments also showed how the housing movements and the national political conflict, though distinct from each other, had begun to merge, shaping the way in which residents made sense of their situation. LEGITIMATE COMMUNITY After signing their lease, adjusting their homes to comply with regulations, and clearing the excess underbrush from along the tracks, Chumchon

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Patthanā Sithi Zone 2 and Zone 3 called a meeting with a representative from the Khon Kaen municipality to file their status as an official community within the municipality. In doing so, they were attempting to finalize the split from Chumchon Phưā nbān, allowing them to become a node of distribution for new forms of state funding through small and medium enterprise grants and the Sufficiency Economy Fund. The latter fund was a state-sponsored rotating credit scheme that began during Thaksin’s government as the Village Fund, but had been rebranded by the then Democrat-led government to delink its legacies from Shinawatra and relocate them within the discourse of moderation associated with the monarchy. The meeting was held in the same community center where we watched Mr. Sapda’s home get demolished just a few months earlier. A representative from the municipal government explained the bureaucratic processes behind becoming an official community to an audience of residents packed into rows of plastic chairs, The representative emphasized that residents would need to organize an official petition with more than a hundred households registered as part of the new community, and then present that petition, a map of the community, and the list of the new community committee to the municipality to be approved. It was impossible for the residents of Zone 2 and 3 to become an official community on their own, given that together they made up fewer than fifty households. Nonetheless, residents had come up with a plan to connect their community with houses located off the railway’s land. In doing so, they would have not only split themselves from Chumchon Phưā nbān, but also effectively reoriented themselves away from the railway tracks entirely. This kind of break was precisely what some residents hoped for because they were tired of the constant urgency to organize, collectivize, and protest as prescribed by the activist networks that had helped them sign their leases. They wished to be free from the demands of being a mobilized poor and to express their politics autonomously. Thus the meeting was filled with the promise of legitimacy understood in multiple ways. For some, becoming legitimate meant registering themselves with the municipality and having access to loan money. For others, it was tied to a reorientation away from the tracks, the stigma of being a trespasser, and the labor of being organized. The meeting concluded with the group unanimously electing Paw Thamrong as the new community’s headman. Of course, the process was far from complete given that they still had to recruit the households from the adja-



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cent community to join their new community designation. Nevertheless, the meeting highlighted the tantalizing possibility of autonomy and equality that residents sought to enact with their own political work. After the meeting, everyone went back to Zone 3 for a celebration with curry and noodles and cold beer. I ended up talking to Paw Nokhuk, who shared his thoughts on the long process of struggle that led his community toward this achievement, I think it is good that the People’s Sector [phāk prachāchon] is finally coming together and the government is finally listening to us, providing more money for Baan Mankong and supporting our efforts for collective land titles [chanōt chumchon]. Everyone thinks we are just trespassers but that is not true. I’ll put it simply, when I was seventeen there were seventeen million people in Thailand, now I am sixty-one and there are sixty million people here but the land has stayed the same. Where were they going to go? The state had to do something.

I asked what direction he thought things were going to take in his community now that they were becoming officially registered: Look around. It looks good, doesn’t it? The city is going to come down and they are going to take care of the road and fix that. But what I think we need to work on is developing the quality of life, the quality of education, the quality of people. This is the most important thing. It is easy to talk about fighting for people’s rights to housing, but it is difficult to talk about developing people. If we can begin to develop people then I think this community will be great. I think it will help the whole country. That’s not easy, but you need to give everyone a chance. I don’t mean that we all have equal ability to learn, but we should all have equal opportunity. I think the problem is right now there are lots of groups fighting. I think that there are lots of people working the system and there are lots of leaders taking advantage of the people. We don’t do that. Don’t think we evicted anyone this year. That wasn’t us.

This was a strange statement in light of the evictions and exclusions the group had carried out in order to shore up their leases from recalcitrant and resistant residents. However, it clarified his understanding of that action. For Paw

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Nokhuk, the KKSRN did not evict Sapda; the state did. The KKSRN were merely supporting the existing legal framework and, in this, sense, demonstrating their own legitimacy. He concluded, referencing CODI’s rhetoric, but flipping it on its head: The problem is that you have to develop people. They have to know that no one does this [work] for outside compensation, for honor, or for power. We do this for the community and that is the hardest thing. You don’t just go out and rent and then stop. You need to keep working to develop people. Like in the past, Khem didn’t come out and participate. This year he’s started to work and to learn. Now he’s a leader and he’s started to teach his brother and he is starting to come to meetings. This is how you develop people. You don’t just work and stop, but you keep going. You keep finding new people to work with and to teach.

Other residents told me that they felt that organizing as a new community would offer the possibility of resting and not having to be mobilized constantly. Khem put it this way, “Now we are a real community and not a slum anymore. We don’t need that word. We can get [government] small and medium enterprise grants. I think that will really change this place.” For Khem, the meeting meant that the group no longer had to pursue politics as a slum but was entitled to form a new relationship with the state. Paw Nokhuk, who had taken up a vision of politics that mirrored many of the NGOs’ sense of constant mobilization, misunderstood Khem’s visions of the good life. These tensions were fundamental to the ongoing churn within NGOaffiliated communities as residents struggled with the demand for constant mobilization and wrestled with the differences between their political sensibilities and their collaborators. Despite their differing senses of whether the future required more or less mobilization, both Paw Nokhuk and his neighbors reflected on the way becoming a designated community was about transforming the order of the political through their own belonging. The network’s goals were not simply about division but also about enacting the possibility of equality, which meant different things to different people. At their core, however, was an agreement: By exercising their capacities to be seen and heard as legitimate political actors, residents sought to transform the state, create a more democratic city, and enact a more equal form of citizenship.



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DOUBLE STANDARDS In August 2010, I returned to Khon Kaen five months after the major Red Shirt demonstrations in Bangkok at Ratchaprasong road. If those demonstration visibly portrayed many of the aspirations to belonging many residents had expressed to me the previous year, the violent dispersal of the encampment on May 19 also reenacted, in heightened form, the kinds of inequalities and double standards they pointed out in their everyday lives. The military incursion into the protest camp led to civilian casualties and the widespread burning of shopping malls in Bangkok and provincial halls and government buildings across the country. The provincial hall in Khon Kaen was one of those. When I returned to the city, the building stood gutted, its charred interior gaping behind a high metal fence. Some of my friends in the communities told me about attending protests in Bangkok. Many reported protesting at local events in Khon Kaen. Of course, the unified support of the Red Shirt protests did not undo the old divisions between networks, but they did highlight a shared vision of political equality that was increasingly being used across the tracks to better articulate the binds of the citizen designs imagined by both NGO organizing and the CODI projects. These themes emerged over a dinner I shared with Nung and his wife, Tan. Sitting in Nung’s redone kitchen, Nung and I picked at the remains of a bowl of tomkai soup as Tan sat on the floor repackaging bulk snacks in smaller bags for sale at their small shop in the city bus station. The TV broadcast Red Shirt–related news in the background. While we were chatting, an advertisement for the MOSO (Moderation Society) initiative sponsored by the Abhisit government came on. I asked what they thought about it. Nung: I don’t think it is appropriate. Do you think it is appropriate to talk about enough [khwāmpaw] when the government has gone out of its way to take on more debt? They don’t have any money and they are telling the people that we need to know “enough.” Is that right? I don’t think so. They are taking on their debts and where does that money go? It doesn’t go to help people who need it. The government should be helping the poor first, those people that really need it. Eli: I couldn’t believe it when they gave the stipend out to the government workers last year during the economic crisis.

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Nung: Right, they gave people who already had a salary two thousand additional baht and the people who live out at the landfill are eating in the garbage. In my life I’ve never seen anything like what happened at Ratchaprasong—not Suchinda, not anything before.3 Never before have people come out—the elderly, farmers, poor people—never before have they gathered like that. Thaksin reached out to those people. His policies reached those people. Old people would go down there [to Bangkok] on the bus with just some rice to eat. Eli: Were people being paid to go down? Nung: No. Do you think they could pay all those people to be down there? There were people back home donating or maybe someone was helping with a little bit of money to help them cover their expenses but that is how it works here, like with CODI or Four Regions—they help us a little bit to cover our costs but it isn’t getting paid. Tan agreed. She got up and showed me her Facebook account, which she had created in order to follow along with Red Shirt news. “How could all these people be paid to protest?” Eli: Why do you support these protests? Nung: I think there are two reasons why I support the Red Shirts. First the “double standard” [using English]. Second, I think Thaksin knew how to run the government. He thought fast and he produced results fast. He knew how to organize the government and he didn’t take on too much debt. He also listened to the poor and created policies for them. Eli: What do you mean by double standard? Nung: I mean that the PAD went in to the airport and held up the airport and there were no arrests. They had weapons and they hurt the country and there were no arrests. But then the Red Shirts come in and there were ninety-one killed and two thousand injured and no one’s arrested for this. Why is this? This is the double standard [nī khư̄sawng mātrathān]. During the Samak government they killed seven protestors and the police were charged. This government has still not been charged after the Ratchaprasong incident. This is the double standard.



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As we spoke about double standards, Nung switched topics abruptly, asking me about Mae Hawm and my writing. He began confrontationally: ung: Do you think you know more about this stuff than me? N Eli: No, I don’t know more about what goes on locally than you, but maybe I have a different framework that I can compare to other places. Nung: So, what is your take on all of this? Eli: If you ask me which process is better than the other then I can’t answer. It is not so simple. I can say that there are some important differences between the way the Four Regions works and the way the UCN works. I think that the people in the UCN have been able to make some changes, but are those changes lasting? What will happen with these new projects [the recently proposed rail projects]? I don’t know. It isn’t clear yet. Dissatisfied with my mincing of words, Nung continued to press ahead: Nung: Let me ask you a different way: why has the Four Regions group been able to all of this accomplished and they [CODI/UCN] have not? Eli: One important difference is that they try to work with the whole community and the Four Regions group will work with those people that are ready to rent only. Nung: Right. Do you think it is strange that they have all of these official groups on their side and they haven’t been able to rent? They have the support of the city and the support of CODI and the Ministry of Social Development and they still can’t rent. It is because they don’t work with the villagers. CODI and the municipality just give them money. They give them money and the villagers aren’t ready. This causes divisions in the community. . . .  The villagers need to be ready. They don’t share information. The leaders of the UCN just want to build themselves and get all this money, but they don’t share any information with the villagers. They just give them money. Why has the Four Regions been able to rent? Because we see land rights as the most important thing and development as secondary. It can come after rights. They just want to develop and they still have no security. They just get all this money from the

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city. That is populism. The city gives them money for votes and support and then nothing happens. That’s populism. We are trying to get rights here and security. We argued for a while about whether the SRT was being honest in its attempts to let settlements sign leases. I pointed out that the SRT was leveraging the disagreements in its favor to clear out as much space along the tracks as they could to rent to commercial businesses. Nung argued that the fault lay with Mae Hawm, the UCN, and CODI for not offering residents a clear framework to help them negotiate with the SRT. Our disagreement, like the others, hinged on whether residents continued to have the right to occupy the land rent-free while others had taken on the burdens of communal leases. Eventually, Nung clarified his main point by returning to his telling of the split between his community and Chumchon Phư̄anbān: Nung: Look, those people [Mae Hawm/the UCN] don’t work on behalf of the villagers. They only care about themselves. Do you know how I got this community to begin organizing for rental? It started with that truck outside. I took on a lot of debt for that truck. I bought it around the same time the SRT opened the land up for bids [from private companies]. One day, over the loudspeaker, I hear, “Do you want to know who helped the SRT open the land up for commercial development? Go and look at who has the new truck. . . .” I came home that afternoon and I was shouted at from the entrance to the soi [alleyway] all the way to my house. I got insulted and cursed by everyone. I didn’t know what was going on. Eventually, Paw Thamrong called me over. He explained what was happening. I didn’t know. I hadn’t been there. I hadn’t been involved. I was just here minding my own business and suddenly I was involved. I went over to a meeting at their [Mae Hawm and Paw Singto’s] house and they didn’t talk about me at all. They just talked about Prathān Thi. I didn’t say anything. I just called everyone in the community over and I explained. I showed them the documents from my truck and I explained to them that I was going to go to the SRT and tell them that they couldn’t rent this land. I went around and I got everyone’s names and signatures and you know what? When I got



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down there to hand it in, Paw Singto [then a leader of the UCN] who was an important man in Chumchon Phưā nbān came down and put his own name on top of mine and acted like it was his doing. They didn’t do anything. This is how they work. Do you know what community this is? To this day it is considered part of Chumchon Phưā nbān. Even though we have leased it as Zone 3, we haven’t seen any money from the government’s small and medium enterprise grants or any money from the Sufficiency Fund policies because we are still listed as part of their community. Is that right? I tried to make this a separate community but you need one hundred households and we only had thirty-nine. So, we are stuck with them. Mae Hawm doesn’t care about villagers. She just cares about those people that work with her. Now they are trying to buy some sort of private land to move to after the Railroad evicts them and CODI is going to pay for all of that. Who will lose once all of this is over? Eli: What will you do if they want to work with you once the new double track project begins? Don’t you think you’ll have to work together?4 Nung: The Four Regions has already said no. Their time has come and gone. We have many new members—City Shrine, Phatthanā Sithi Zone 1, and another community outside the city and that is it. No more. The Four Regions has moved on from rental negotiations to working on quality of life issues. They’ve said that that issue is more important now. I think that’s fine. The other communities had their chance. They could have rented before but now that time is past; they have lost their chance. Eli: Shouldn’t the others be compensated for their land if they get evicted? Nung: It is not their land. It’s the state’s land. It’s the railway’s land. They haven’t paid for it. If they had paid rent or tried to rent, then they could be compensated. If they don’t pay for it, then why should they be compensated? Nung’s words reflected the binds shaping what it meant to be a legitimate citizen in Thailand at that moment.5 Across the course of the night, Nung explained in detail the way in which the KKSRN had attempted to work with Mae Hawm and the ways in which her work had violated his trust and, to his mind, manipulated his neighbors and the people that had come to rely on her. Of course, this sowed doubts for me about the veracity of her work. It also

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sowed doubts for me about the efficacy of the CODI project. The description reflected some tendencies I had observed, but also ran counter to the countless hours of work I had seen Mae Hawm undertake, organizing documents and entering into her own thankless disagreements with residents Nung had never met. This does not mean that I regarded her work without suspicion, but rather I came to understand that it reflected the same ambiguities that surrounded the unsettled quality of all of the political mobilization along the tracks. The disagreements along the tracks reflected in stark terms the sets of possibilities and binds that all residents had to navigate regardless of their roles as leaders in their efforts to mobilize their political voices and securing their land simultaneously. These were the limited conditions under which residents could act politically. Their actions did not merely reflect their visions of proper belonging in some abstract way but were deeply material; politics in whatever form it took could never be disconnected from their efforts to secure the terms of their lives. Nung’s abrupt transition from national to local issues also spoke to the ways he had begun to construct relationships between these issues. In this context, the Red Shirts claims of being “commoners” (phrai) suffering through countless double standards reflected not only the ways the different followers of the different movements had been treated or the will of the electorate had been ignored by military and judicial coups, but also how those national debates reverberated among residents along the tracks. Indeed, they began to feed into each other, reshaping residents visions of national democracy as well as their own lives along the tracks. In this context, to engage in politics was to do the hard and sometimes painful work of taking up disagreement without visible reconciliation or conclusion. SPACES OF POLITICS Nung often complained that taking up disagreement was thankless and often resulted in uneven outcomes. He frequently told me he wished he could withdraw from his community work and, as his reverie in chapter 7 makes clear, take up a simpler rural life elsewhere. At the same time, he recognized being political as a good unto itself and so he embraced it with all of its difficulties. This chapter considers how local disagreements and national politics intertwined. As they merged, residents became attuned to the ways that enacting their political selves at a local level reflected the same efforts they saw their



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fellow citizens engaging in more broadly. If mobilizing their capacity to disagree was essential for residents hoping to gain rights along the tracks, it also was essential for a broader and more substantive shift toward democracy at a national level. Indeed, as they attempted to engage in politics at a national level, they reflected on the binds and limits they faced as they attempted to be seen and heard as legitimate citizens in their own city. This recursive loop pushed them to rethink the order of politics more broadly. Chantal Mouffe (2005), and Jacques Rancière (2004) point to the intimate relation between democracy and disagreement. Rancière emphasizes that politics itself is defined by disagreement over the arrangement of the social order. He points out that the “scandal” that undergirds all politics is a miscount whereby parts are included in the political order without having any share to it. This “part without a part” is included, but remains invisible. Jacques Rancière argues, “Politics is the practice whereby the logic of the characteristic of equality takes the form of processing a wrong, in which politics becomes the argument of a basic wrong that ties in with some established dispute in the distribution of jobs, roles, and places” (1999, 35). The disputes taking place in Khon Kaen were neither subordinate to national political struggles like those of the Red Shirts nor metaphorical reflections of the terms on which that national movement emerged. Instead, the disagreements in Khon Kaen were the lived, material enactments of the political and part and parcel of that larger set of conflicts. The disputes along the tracks closely reflect the terms of the national disagreement both because the Red Shirts offered intellectual resources for residents to make sense of their own predicament and because residents’ experiences reflected the existing distribution of roles, times, and places within which they were allowed act politically. Observation of the unfolding life of those struggles on the ground not only adds to our understanding of the social life of democracy as people attempt to produce something that looks and feels farer in the everyday, but also highlights the ways that residents wrestled with the limitations of that way of living. The disagreements along the tracks were thus representative of the uneven ways residents made sense of democracy as a whole—its possibilities and its failures—even as they determined that such a thing was valuable and necessary.

9 Political Life in the Despotic City

By September 2010, the United Communities Network (UCN) started changing direction. Their negotiations with the State Railway of Thailand (SRT) had stalled. Most of the upgrade projects had come to a halt, only a third of the homes in some communities receiving funds. Gossip was also widespread that people within the UCN were taking money from savings groups for their own use. A few of the community leaders I had come to know during the previous year had left the city amid rumors of corruption. The completion of Khon Kaen Central Plaza, the new mall behind the UCN network office, signaled the arrival of Bangkok investment capital in the city. This was the well-known developer Central Group’s first major project in Isaan. For much of the previous year, UCN members watched out the office window as the building materialized. On breaks during meetings they speculated about what the building would look like and how much traffic it would cause. They worried about what its effect would be on their lives. They were aware that the size and scope of that project signaled a broader rescaling of the city. They recognized that more investment would follow and it would like be of a similar scale. Indeed, after the mall opened the city was suddenly dotted with new projects aimed at attracting investment from across Southeast Asia and China. In the wake of the Red Shirt protests and violent dispersal just four months earlier, talk also circulated about the government beginning work on double-track and high-speed rail projects. In this context, I met with UCN leaders in the network office as Mae 197

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Hawm announced that it was time for the network to begin thinking about alternatives to staying put. She explained that she no longer had much faith in the Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI) and had come up with her own plan, which involved using a combination of railway compensation and savings schemes to purchase a parcel of land that she had located out past the edge of the city. Once purchased, the group would begin construction under their own direction without CODI’s involvement. The details of the scheme were opaque and confusing, but her efforts to sell the project to members highlighted how CODI’s models of citizenship had lost their appeal. More and more, residents felt that the project relegated them to the same secondary sorts of citizenships they had tried to avoid by withdrawing from the nongovernmental organization (NGO) network a decade prior: If we do this [buy this land in the periphery] then we will be a village just like other villages. We will raise ourselves up to become individuals [yok radap pen tua bukhon]. We will have land rights and we will also have a rotating fund to support ourselves. We will need to make our own system. We need to get our lives back to the way they were before. We need to grow rice, raise chickens, and catch fish. We might be far from the city, but we’ll have a place to live and a place to get food. To do this we need to have rights, but we cannot sell our rights or transfer them to someone else. That will just put people back where they were before. . . . we are looking to the long view. If they understand this, then they will understand the policy and they will become stronger.

Mae Hawm’s use of the phrase yok radap pen tua bukon—raise ourselves up to become individuals—stood out both because it reflected the ongoing conversations around socio-political subordination that circulated throughout the Red Shirt movements and highlighted residents’ sense of their own incommensurability with other, more well-off citizens. At the same time, her vision for the community reflected the dreams of sufficiency and escape described earlier. In framing the project this way, Mae Hawm harnessed a range of aspirations and poured them into the new land project, marketing it as way for her core group of leaders to achieve those dreams and to get out from under CODI’s weight, both removing themselves from local disagreements and securing their lives against the increasing urban precariousness. Outside the window, the hulking rear façade of the recently completed Khon



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Kaen Central Plaza loomed over our conversation. Traffic clogged the road as cars came and went from the shopping mall. These physical changes in the city framed the conversation in direct and indirect ways. The following day, I arranged to meet with Chit, Pong, and a few others from the UCN to visit Mae Hawm’s land. Chit and I loaded ourselves in Pong’s sidecar and left the city, turning off the main highway and then veering abruptly into a nearly hidden laneway. Navigating the pockmarked slab of rural road past walled houses, we ended up in two large rice fields. These were flanked by a few large houses that appeared plucked from the designs of many of the city’s growing gated housing developments and dropped into the middle of rural Isaan. In the distance, a farmer lounged in the shade in a small field hut, taking a rest as a small pile of trash smoldered next to him. It had rained recently, so the ground was thick with sticky, red mud that had a fair amount of litter lodged in it. We all stretched our imaginations to see the place as Mae Hawm had described it in the meeting the previous day, as a place of autonomy that would elevate residents’ status. None of my companions seemed convinced. Chit felt it was too far from the city and the conditions were too rough. For Pong, the finances didn’t seem to add up. He wondered aloud how the group would be able to purchase the land needed for the price Mae Hawm had shared the day before. The others in our group wondered about missing infrastructure, water, and electricity. One person complained that Shorty and Mae Hawm were not being transparent about where the money for the project had come from. Rumors were persistent that Shorty had stolen money from T7’s community funds to pay for the land. On our way back to the city, we passed a small jap jawng settlement that had recently been built between a factory and the highway. Chit told me that it had been built by residents of T9 and T3, the communities adjacent to where she lived in T7. Residents there had also decided that it was time to leave the railway’s land. A few days later, Chit and I drove back out to that settlement to have a look around. We were greeted by a few residents she knew, some of whom I recognized from protests they had attended as part of the UCN the previous year. Most of the families, they said, were from the railway tracks and had moved there because the impending projects had made them feel insecure. They no longer felt that the Baan Mankong project or organizing with Mae Hawm in the UCN were viable ways to gain rights to their land. Moving to the periphery, they told us, opened up possibilities in ways that continuing to

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stay and fight along the tracks would not. “We are working to get some additional land out here,” Mae Jan, who used to live in T9, explained. “If we can secure this land, we might have enough for each person to farm a little bit.” I asked her whether she felt this was possible. “It is just an idea now, maybe just a dream.” Like our visit to Mae Hawm’s land, the question of whether the periphery was a space of possibility or an affordance for precarity remained in the air.1 The new project highlighted a series of existential questions raised by the new moment: Did hope remain in the CODI project? Should residents stay and continue to fight for their land or capitulate and move out to the periphery? Was Mae Hawm’s land purchase viable or even legal? Would moving to the dusty edges of the city allow them to reestablish their lives in more secure ways, to assert their legitimacy as many hoped, or would it simply reinscribe their status as inappropriate villagers, trespassers in the polity, unfit and unready to participate in its political life? This chapter and the next consider these questions by tracing the trajectories of residents’ life projects and political capacities as Khon Kaen’s slum movements fragmented. Local organizing changed alongside physical transformations taking place in Khon Kaen especially after the 2014 military coup. In tying these themes together, I demonstrate how the citizen designs circulating along the tracks prior to the coup, transformed alongside and through an emergent formulation that I call despotic urbanism. This phrase describes the convergence between the military’s crackdown on political organizing and the urbanization of capital that began before the coup, but intensified after. As Isaan’s urban spaces have increasingly become scenes of investment, dispossession has grown. In this context, the meaning of participation shifted. CODI’s practices of participatory planning increasingly look like participatory dispossession, which mobilized participation as a means of clearing space for new development and infrastructure projects. The subtle tensions between design as policing or design as politics become more apparent in this setting. Moreover, these changes have created new questions about the visions of citizenship circulating throughout Khon Kaen. TOWARD THE DESPOTIC CITY The urban transformation of Khon Kaen was already under way when I began my fieldwork in 2008. Phorphant Ouyyanont notes that the Asian



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Development Bank’s (ADB) East-West Economic Corridor (EWEC) entailed new regional trade arrangements and the construction of more than 1,500 kilometers of highways that link six countries (2017, 372). These arrangements had critical effects on Isaan’s cities by ramping up crossborder trade and investment. In 2008 when I arrived for fieldwork, these changes were beginning to be apparent in Khon Kaen’s urban fabric. The large field behind Chumchon Phưā nbān had been transformed into massive muddy construction site where Khon Kaen Central Plaza would be built. During meetings in the United Communities Network office, the constant groan of heavy equipment and showers of sparks framed conversations surrounding the fate of UCN communities. Occasionally, the project itself became the subject of protests, as described in chapter 4, when residents mobilized against a local developer aiming to use the land where Chumchon Phư̄anbān is located as employee parking and housing. Residents’ anxieties were related not only to the shopping mall, but also to the scale of the project and the ways in which it offered a glimpse into the city’s future. Although Central Plaza was not the first shopping mall in town, it was the first constructed wholly by a Bangkok-based developer, Central Pattana Incorporated, a subsidiary of the larger Central Group. Despite the source of the project’s financing, the mall was designed with flourishes of Isaan culture, including a woven façade designed to reflect the region’s sticky rice baskets and restroom signs that showed men and women clad in traditional plaid sōrong and phāsin. These nods to local culture aside, the project signaled the arrival of a flood of capital from real estate developers keen to capitalize on the region’s emerging political and financial influence under the Yingluck government and its relative security.2 This became especially apparent as investors sought safer contexts for their money after the political volatility of 2010 and the environmental upheaval of the 2011 Bangkok floods. The mall’s scale telegraphed wider urban transformations to come, dwarfing nearly every other building around it and altering broader flows of traffic, clogging the city’s main intersection. From 2011 onward, reports note that property values across the city increased by up to 300 percent in some places (Macan-Markar 2016). The Bangkok-based developer Sansiri began construction on the first of what would eventually be four condo towers of thirty stories or more. These transformed the city skyline, dwarfing what was previously the tallest building in the city, the skeletal frame of the Kosa Tower, an unfinished husk of a building

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abandoned during the 1997 economic implosion (figure 6.1). When people discussed the Kosa “ghost tower” (which was rare), they did so in terms that echo Andrew Johnson’s analysis of unfinished developments elsewhere in Thailand (2013, 2014). As he argues, these projects often served as spectral reminders of the loosened connections between the intertwined discourses of capitalist growth (kānphatthanā) and ideas of moral progress (khwām charoen) that animated much of Thailand’s rapid economic transformation during the twentieth century. For nearly two decades after the crash, that building marked the high and low point of Khon Kaen’s stunted transformation. However, by 2013, major Bangkok developers such as Sansiri, Land and Houses, and CP Land had embarked on major housing projects in the city, building approximately 6,000 new housing units in the process. As Sylvia Nam notes in her writing about Phnom Penh’s “vertical turn,” high-rise condos are the result of specific economic conditions that result in the kinds of transformations in regimes of value that enable developers to build vertically (2017). Included in these shifts are not only materials costs and land values, but also the emergence of specific financial regimes and political conditions that propel vertical construction. Writing about similar questions in the outskirts of Mumbai, George Jose notes, for example, how tradable airspace rights enabled developers to begin building higher in those cities (2017). Gavin Shatkin emphasizes that the convergence between real estate and political power is not endemic to Thailand, but fundamental to the contemporary moment across Asian cities as booming property markets and massive construction projects have become essential to the region’s political economy (2017; see also Elinoff, Sur, and Yeoh 2017). Although I do not explore the exact kinds of financial, technical, and legal shifts that enabled these changes to take place in Khon Kaen’s skyline, the rush of Bangkok development capital reflects one of the key forces behind urban growth in the provincial capital (Macan-Markar 2016). City residents and policymakers mentioned three other contributing factors in describing the city’s rapid transformation. First, the 2011 floods sent property investors fleeing from Bangkok and looking for safer spaces to park their money. Second, Khon Kaen had increasingly positioned itself as a regional administrative and infrastructural center located at the midway point on both the ADB’s East-West Economic Corridor and the emerging imaginary of a high-speed rail link to Kunming. These regional projects and China’s Belt Road Initiative have attracted migrants as the city attempted to



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reconfigure itself as a center for investment, administration, infrastructure, health care, and logistics (Porphant 2017). In 2015, the Chinese Consulate General opened an office in Khon Kaen for precisely this reason. The Bangkok-based real estate capital flooding into Khon Kaen thus accompanied expansive infrastructure funding for projects across Isaan including the double-track rail line, the planned high-speed rail project, the expansion of the EWEC highway, new airports, and Special Economic Zones in other parts of the region that are premised on Isaan’s wider integration into economies across East and Southeast Asia. The city’s central geographical position within several imagined regional transport corridors sparked new visions of regional growth that are now reshaping its physical terrain (Macan-Markar 2016). Much as the city’s founding was rooted in infrastructure, so too are these future-oriented imaginaries of an Isaan metropole to come. The final reason behind the city’s growth reflects the movement of capital from within Isaan. Growing agribusiness combined with extensive subsidies from the Yingluck government for crops like rice, tapioca, and rubber to provide an influx of money in the region. Local capital has, in fact, sought to remake Khon Kaen into Thailand’s first Smart City, organizing a pool of local investors as the Khon Kaen Think Tank (KKTT) seeking to amass enough private capital to build the country’s first regional light rail project. Led by Mayor Thirasak Teekayuphan (the city's former deputy mayor) the group offers a unique convergence of city government with economic elites. As Pechaladda Pechpakdee describes it, the KKTT comprises “a group of Khon Kaen’s 20 leading ‘new gen’ businessmen. The group counts among its ranks Suradech Taweesaengsakultha, an automobile tycoon, and real-estate magnate Channarong Buristrakul. Each member contributed 10 million baht to establish the KKTT and pool capital for building up the city’s infrastructure” (2018). The group has tied these locally funded infrastructure projects to several other digital initiatives that fall into the global smart cities discourse. In doing so, they have positioned themselves in opposition to the central government, arguing in terms that reflect the kind of self-sufficiency discourses common in the Baan Mankong initiative, that they aimed to improve the city “on their own.” Accompanying these plans are the kinds of gleaming architectural renderings of gleaming towers and sleek infrastructure projects that have become the norm in global city planning conversations (see Marotta and Cummings 2019). The convergence of these factors has translated into capital investments in urban projects like infrastructure, shopping malls,

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markets, and real estate (Carsten and Temphairojana 2013). In sum, cities across Isaan, including Khon Kaen, saw tremendous construction beginning before the coup but persisting and accelerating afterward.3 Whether this construction reflects actual or imagined growth in these cities remains to be seen. At night, the windows in the city’s new high-rise condos remain darkened, leaving locals to wonder whether anyone other than property speculators have bought into the sold-out projects. What is more clear is the way that these projects demonstrate how urban growth and infrastructure projects were taken up both by the national military government and the local government to transform political life. Although the much-vaunted double-track rail expansion had been discussed since the Abhisit government in 2010, it wasn’t until the military government came to power in 2014 that the project became a reality. The key difference, as described shortly, was the way in which these projects could operate and the limited means that citizens could disagree with them. As scholars point out, the Thai regimes of the 1950s and 1960s were the best guide post for how to think about the National Council of Peace and Order (NCPO) and its approach to ruling after the 2014 coup (Haberkorn 2015; Prajak 2018). Historian Thak Chaloemtiarana characterizes that period through the mobilization of what he calls “despotic paternalism” in which “policies and programs were aimed at maintaining the boundaries between hierarchical sectors while the process of phatthanā was applied. . . . Development and modernization were to be extensions of regime paternalism, and great care was to be taken to see that the change did not undermine the integrity of traditional boundaries that ordered the political system” (2007, 9). The key difference between the current moment and previous iterations is the way private capital related to real estate, construction, and development were wedded to the constriction on politics during under the military government. As Prajak Kongkirati and Veerayooth Kanchoochat demonstrate, the Prayuth regime has embedded relationships with major Thai business figures inside the military government’s agenda (2018). The result, they point out, has “enabled the tycoons, many of them from oligopolistic and monopolistic markets, to take part in resource allocation at the local level without a tangible long-term objective, needless to say a transparent monitoring system” (301). The situation in Khon Kaen reveals the close relationship between the socio-spatial and political dimensions of Thailand’s reconfiguration under the military. The NCPO’s model of happiness and order does



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not necessarily carry with it a clear discourse of modernization or even the deferred developmental promise of democracy. Instead, it mobilizes existing regimes of private, state, and transnational capital toward specific projects that generate profit, promise regional interconnections, and can be applied to eliminate politics simultaneously.4 The NCPO’s projects were backed up by the explicit power of Section 44, which granted junta head Prayuth Chan-ocha absolute power to override laws and regulations in order to carry out work the junta deemed necessary.5 Section 44 combined with ongoing practices of detention and “attitude adjustment” offered critical mechanisms to tamp down political debate and intimidate groups bent on disagreeing. Indeed, they offered an essential legal backbone for ideologies of spatial and political order, which have become increasingly enmeshed and acted upon in the name of urban renovation and silencing politics. Despotic urbanism thus links the military government and its legal mechanisms of intimidation to a variety of urban policies and projects remaking Khon Kaen and cities across Thailand.6 This turn has transformed the citizen designs described earlier. Eviction, demolition, and construction have been used to decimate the growing attachment to political action among the poor, working poor, and aspirational classes in Isaan and elsewhere by transforming the city and the region. Because the city has been weaponized against the poor, the junta has undone many of the improvements along the tracks that residents made in previous eras. With the arrival of the double-track project, their land claims became foreshortened and their political voices circumscribed; residents have had to demolish their homes, pull up their gardens, and remake their communities once again. Yet the effects of these changes on the lives of residents were not uniform. Instead, they have followed varied trajectories emerging from within the localized disagreements described earlier. Those diverging trajectories reveal the complex legacies of the previous political moment and the ways such legacies are now remaking other parts of the city. They also show places where residents and their counterparts continue to work toward alternatives by nourishing their political life in the ways that remain available to them. CODI TRANSFORMED According to residents, their interactions with CODI between 2010 and 2014 were characterized by an extension of the dynamics described e­ arlier, except

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that interactions were taking place much less frequently. Ongoing disagreements between Khon Kaen’s networks and internal struggles within the United Communities Network continued, and, according to friends working for CODI, the agency had found it increasingly difficult to intervene. As the UCN’s base eroded, CODI also lost its points of entry into communities and thus architects rarely visited the railway settlements. The municipality, instead, played a bigger role in distributing funds. These conflicts included more community schisms as well: Chumchon Lāklai and the City Shrine Community both left the UCN to join the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network.7 Changes internal to CODI were also central to these shifts. Although CODI continued to operate its regional base in Khon Kaen, it began focusing on community mapping, community titling, and supporting housing cooperatives in smaller provincial towns and cities. Apart from independently organized upgrade projects it continued to fund in communities associated with the Four Regions Slum Network, CODI no longer regularly worked along the tracks at all. The agency reconfigured the role of the municipality in the project, using it as the central node for the distribution of project funding. This meant that residents had to negotiate with the city government for any of the grants previously allocated. Even fewer projects, they told me, were getting funded than before. As one informant explained, after the municipality took on a larger role in the project, residents stopped attending city committee meetings altogether: The idea of Baan Mankong was good. We want to use our experience and to think for ourselves and do things ourselves, but it was never like that. It was lots of meetings and it was lots of paperwork and lots of trainings. They always say “think for yourself, do for yourself ” [khit ēng thām ēng] but to me it was always “thinking for us, doing for us” [khit tāen, thām tāen]. As with the BMK Kaennakhorn project [one of CODI’s relocation projects in Khon Kaen], we started working on that project. There were more than three hundred families from the railroad tracks on the roster. We all left. The municipality took the project over from Paw Sabiang [the former leader and original member of the UCN in the 1990s] and that was it. When we actually started to do things on our own the railway didn’t let us. The same with this city committee. In the past it was



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just eighteen communities, only the poor communities, from around Khon Kaen. Now it includes all legally designated communities. When we bring up the problems on the railroad tracks, they just say that we are trespassers, that we are preventing development by stopping the new railway tracks. We try to explain [the issues] to them but they don’t want to hear about our problems. The problem at CODI is that they have this huge budget that is supposed to go to poor people but it mostly goes to help the workers. The workers get salaries and we don’t. They get money to go to meetings. They get stipends to pay for their personal expenses. We have to go everywhere on our own and no one pays us back.

Having moved away from working along the tracks, CODI was involved in only three projects in Khon Kaen city, two of which were large community relocations. The first was a housing project built in 2005 as part of the city’s Baan Mankong pilot projects. The community was completed in 2007, but had largely become housing for the city’s middle class. Although residents continued to interact with CODI on certain issues, the project failed to retain the original low-income residents and was subsequently deprioritized by CODI staff. The second project, Baan Mankong Kaennakhorn—which I had observed in its germinal stages between 2008 and 2009 when it was led by a well-respected local organizer, Paw Sabiang—began as an effort to provide housing to the city’s scattered poor, including both residents from the railway tracks and other working poor people who rented flats throughout the city. Midway through 2009, the project was taken over by the municipal government. Paw Sabiang was replaced as project leader and many of the original participants in that project left. A few residents from the railway settlements continued to participate, but most withdrew because they could not keep up with the savings requirements associated with the low-interest loan agreements CODI used to fund the project. I heard similar stories about other communities who had taken up the agency’s new housing cooperative model, but have not investigated them closely. By 2014, the UCN, as I had come to know it during my previous rounds of fieldwork, had largely become defunct. When I met with Mae Hawm in August 2015, she had devoted herself to the piece of land on the city’s periphery. The network office where the UCN used to meet had been rebranded as a learning center for what she called the Five Regions Land Project. Working alongside a host of other agencies, many of which I hadn’t heard of, she

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said the Five Regions Network aimed to support a “new” method of organizing housing assistance. The new project’s method, even after she explained it to me, was hard to follow. Some of the details involved CODI and others involved other agencies but she didn’t clarify the roles those agencies might play. Many of the mechanisms for distributing money—savings groups, credit schemes—did not seem differ significantly from methods CODI used. Mae Hawm told me they were designed to circumvent the municipality by distributing CODI money directly to the local savings groups. The project was having trouble gaining traction among residents. Indeed, most residents said they no longer trusted Mae Hawm, referring to the land she bought on Khon Kaen’s periphery. Whether her shift toward that project was related to the changes at CODI or a result of her reduced credibility after a scandal related to her use of savings group money was unclear. As she said after relaying her version of the story, “Accusing someone of corruption is a good way to kill them.” Indeed, on subsequent visits, residents who had previously worked with Mae Hawm said she was living elsewhere in the city. They hadn’t seen or worked with her since 2015. An atmosphere of suspicion now permeated most of the UCN’s members’ remaining relationships. The changes in CODI’s practices underscored these local conflicts. The move toward community relocations and construction—and away from working in complex spaces like those along the tracks and helping them conduct in situ upgrades—meant that the agency had taken on a smaller role in the kinds of intensive negotiation and advocacy for land rights that had been part of earlier iterations of the proejct. Despite these shifts, CODI did not disappear, but its priorities shifted in ways that reflected the potential of design to act as a keen mode of policing. Most of CODI’s architects in Isaan were moved to Bangkok as the NCPO embarked on a major project to regularize the city’s canals to fortify them against floods. Numerous community architects from CODI’s Isaan office commuted from their homes across the northeast to the capital on a weekly basis to conduct these reorganizations in mapping sessions and community meetings. Despite the fact that these projects aimed to prevent disasters like the 2011 floods, the projects only seemed vaguely connected to flood management. Instead, they sought to relocate long-established communities built on land owned by the irrigation department. These projects involved not only the remapping and reorganization of these communities, but also the negotia-



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tion of evictions of up to twenty thousand residents. Participatory upgrading has, in cases like these, become participatory dispossession. In 2016, I attended a titling ceremony at a canal-side community in Bangkok. The day before the event, military personnel moved about the community clearing debris where residents’ homes had already been demolished and setting up a tent for visitors from the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security. The minister was set to arrive the subsequent day to hand out the community’s new title deed. CODI officials coordinated these visits as well, making sure that residents had all the necessary preparations in order, that food would be provided for volunteers, and that the area was clean when the minister arrived. The event was staged as a success for the community; however, I heard from more than one source that only half of the community had agreed to the relocation plan and that those who didn’t agree were invited to speak with military officials prior to being evicted. The tone of the event the following day reflected the same conditions. When the minister finally arrived, short speeches led up to the granting of the title, which was followed by residents’ delivering flowers to the minister. Although previous versions of Baan Mankong also paid attention to carefully staging political encounters between politicians and citizens, this event was even more scripted than usual. The tone was tightly controlled and residents had only a brief time to speak. The event was not organized as an exchange. No one sat in a circle on woven mats as they had during Abhisit’s visit to Bang Bua in 2009. Instead, residents sat as audience members only invited on the main stage of the event after the title was granted, lining up and offering the minister flowers and bowing in deep and respectful wai. The kind of exchange here was reminiscent of Peter Vandergeest’s description of what he calls “the gift” of development (1991), which, in contrast to rights-based models, presents development as something granted from above at the largesse of the giver to enlighten the poor and lead them out of their poverty. Read in this light, the moment of exchange—the title given in exchange for the flowers—reflected the shifting political context, demonstrating how the coup rewrote the kind of work CODI was doing on the ground and recasting their citizen designs in the process. My friends inside CODI expressed their hope that the project still mattered in the current context, often telling me that having CODI was better than not having it all. The idea that these narrowed exchanges were better than nothing at all was hard to argue with, especially when across Thailand evictions had

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i­ntensified with little or no recompense for residents. Behind the scenes, however, some expressed deeper cynicism around these participatory dispossessions, recognizing the effect the military had had on the project. Some friends left the agency to join local governments or open coffee shops. Others continued to work with the the agency, seeking to make good on their ethical and political commitments to the poor in whatever capacity their work afforded to them. Given the long history of participation in Thailand, that it has remained a key discourse under the military government is no surprise. As the practice has been brought into alignment with the military’s explicit and implicit power to intimidate, evict, demolish, and build, it also reveals the ways Thailand’s citizen designers changed in the process. URBAN COALITIONS UNDER NEW CONDITIONS On August 6, 2015, the effects of Khon Kaen’s urban growth and political constriction came into clearer focus. That morning, I found myself at what was, given the constraints on political speech, a large protest against the proposed moving of Khon Kaen’s bus station. In the afternoon, I attended a planning meeting for the railway’s double-track and high-speed projects. Although the two events were seemingly unrelated, their near simultaneous occurrence reflected how the militarization of urban growth was being applied to the city’s poorest residents. Reading both events in the same frame helps demonstrate the varied but intertwined aspects of despotic urbanization, showing in precise ways how the remaking of the city’s physical landscape was also a means of remaking its politics. As a part of the city’s rescaling, the NCPO-appointed provincial government in Khon Kaen ordered that the city’s bus traffic be redirected out of town. Previously, bus service was divided between two locations—one station housed the large low-cost government buses and a second was dedicated to private, long-distance bus services. The new policy shifted both services to a single government bus terminal built roughly ten kilometers south from the old location in the city center. The original government bus station, Baw Khaw Saw 1 (BKS1), was a key employment site for many residents along the tracks who ran stores or operated as small-time vendors, selling water, gum, loose cigarettes, or lottery tickets. By moving the bus station, the provincial government aimed to reduce the constant congestion that plagued the area surrounding the BKS1 as the buses and smaller sawngthāew—converted



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pick-up trucks with two rows of benches in the back that served as the city’s main form of public transportation—converged. By clearing the land, they opened up a massive piece of prime real estate in the center of the city, close to the intersection between the Mittrapap Highway (running from Bangkok to Vientiane) and the ADB’s planned EWEC highway. Rumors swirled that the BKS1 lot was cleared so that it could be combined with the large lot across the street, previously the site of a popular city market, so that a Bangkokbased developer, The Mall Group, could build another mega shopping mall in the heart of the city.8 Given the key role the bus station played in economic life along the tracks, the move had added to residents’ growing insecurity about life in the city. One store owner told me that the relocation caused him significant health problems. At the same time, I was surprised to see the way in which the project had galvanized a new group called Rak Phatthanā Baw Khaw Saw 1 (Love and Develop the Bus Station). The group brought together poor vendors, many coming from the railway settlements, and more middle-class urbanites who either ran businesses related to the bus station or used the station’s services and were concerned that the relocation would add expense and inconvenience to their lives. Where previous decades of urban activism in the city had been largely class based and mainly restricted to housing issues, the railway settlements being central to these struggles, the bus station protest was different in that it took on a problem that operated beyond the scale of individual homes and communities, raising questions of the urban commons more generally. The August protest brought together a group of roughly six hundred protestors in front of Khon Kaen’s provincial hall to publicly challenge the bus station closure. The protest was even more surprising given the general ban on such gatherings under the military and that the residents along the tracks had reported difficulties organizing public demonstrations. Despite these obstacles, the cross-class group of protestors showed up, clad in orange shirts—to signify the fact that the issues at stake were neither Red Shirt nor Yellow Shirt and therefore not “political”—to challenge the bus station relocation project. They offered a number of arguments against moving the bus station, including the effect on local vendors, the inconvenience of the relocated station, and the lack of consultation behind the project. Among these protestors were a number of residents from the railway settlements and some of their NGO collaborators. Some of the community

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leaders were involved as organizers, providing meeting space, organizing the day’s message, and ensuring that the logistics for the protest were well addressed. They also made sure that the provincial governor, toward whom they directed the protest, received a clear message that articulated their position that the movement of the bus station out of town was harmful not only to the city’s poorest residents who relied upon the bus station and its adjacent markets to make a living, but also to the twenty thousand or so passengers who arrived daily to the city to go to school or to conduct business. The residents’ experience organizing protests as part of the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network (KKSRN) helped direct the relatively inexperienced group of middle-class protestors and concerned citizens by giving the day a structure that it otherwise might not have had. Although the protest appeared to offer a counterpoint to the commonsense wisdom circulating through post-coup Thailand that political expression was dead, their rhetoric avoided national politics and the day was also heavily policed. Military officers were visible throughout the event, taking photos of protestors and observing the crowd as it sat at the provincial hall cheering on a series of speakers. According to some participants, the military subsequently called them in as part of its campaign of “attitude adjustment” (phrapthasanakhati), warning them against further actions. The event ended in irresolution. Even amid subsequent campaigns (none of which was as large as the protest on August 6), the station’s move out of town was final. Nevertheless, for a brief moment, the history of organizing along the tracks had expanded to include a different set of actors, informing a protest that seemed to knit together broader concerns about the changes taking place across the city. It would be in error to overstate the long-term implications of the protest, but the event nevertheless stood as a kind of beacon of possibility, demarcating the ways in which the arts of politics learned along the tracks during previous decades came to inform actions that brought to together this emergent cross-class coalition of citizens to think about the urban commons differently. The afternoon meeting to discuss the railway’s double-track plans and the relocations of residents tempered whatever optimism the morning protest inspired. After the protest, I joined residents from communities across Khon Kaen’s railway tracks for a meeting with representatives from the SRT hosted by the municipality. We gathered on the top floor of the city’s new municipal office. The room was decorated with a number of posters that highlighted



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recent municipally sponsored activities. Across the side wall was a giant rendering of a speculative aerial tramway. Although I never actually saw plans for this project, the poster telegraphed the ambitions in the emerging Smart City discourse before that discourse had coalesced into the larger idea of the so-called Khon Kaen model.9 Residents were seated in front of flat screen computer monitors projecting the SRTs design concepts showing both the proposed double-track project and the high-speed rail line, even though the terms for the construction of the latter project (let alone its funding sources) were still very much undecided. That the rail projects were taken up so quickly by the military after the coup is somewhat ironic. Toward the end of the Yingluck Shinawatra’s government, the new rail projects had been defeated in the constitutional court as apparent “evidence” of her government’s corruption (Associated Press 2014). Spanning the Democrat Abhisit-led government and the Pheu Thai government led by Yingluck, high-speed rail and the construction of a double track links with China’s One Belt One Road rail initiatives aimed at revitalizing the flagging rail network by capitalizing on Chinese economic growth. Yet, in March 2014, just before the coup, a constitutional court judge issued a defeat for the high-speed rail project. In a move reminiscent of the uses of sufficiency I had become accustomed to in CODI’s approval meetings, where sufficiency was used as a disciplinary technique (see chapter 3; see also Elinoff 2014a), judges blocked the rail projects, arguing that they were an example of state excess and went “against the King’s Sufficiency Economy.” Although the judges felt the double track was a reasonable project, one justice argued that the high-speed project was a waste of money and a foolish reason to go into debt until “most of the country’s unpaved roads had been paved” (Yapparat 2014). These were a novel uses of sufficiency arguments given that I had become used to hearing it used to precisely the opposite effect when poor residents asked for paved or concrete roads and were told to make due with unpaved laterite. The decision added to a list of defeats the courts handed Yingluck’s government but did little to pave anything other than the way for her removal from office. Despite these pre-coup political machinations, the rail projects—both double-track and high-speed—were immediately revived by the NCPO after the coup. “Sufficiency,” as usual, was used as a cloak for something else. Unlike the previous eras of marked by negotiation, protest, and political maneuver, residents, regardless of their local loyalties, found themselves

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in a set of binds that reflected how the political quality of their citizenship had changed. During previous eras of negotiation, residents used all of their available alliances to wage long, often slow battles with the SRT, stalling or defeating projects altogether. Under the military government, such tactics were no longer effective. According to residents I spoke with, the pre-construction phase of the double track project proceeded through ambiguous and sketchy, if not bad, information. They described the way a variety of railway officials came to visit them over a course of several months offering a range of shifting information about the areas surrounding the tracks that would be affected and what the potential processes for compensation and relocation might be. The narrowness of the forty-meter strip of land and its specific divisions—front twenty meters, back twenty meters—came into play as residents attempted to determine which side of the tracks would be affected. Shifting schematics and design plans made it difficult for residents to determine which sections of their communities would need to relocate. Residents also described conflicting reports of how much compensation they would be given for their houses, ranging from 8,000 baht (approximately $250) to 15,000 baht (approximately $500). For a comparison, the lowest-cost CODI house designs that I saw during my research cost a few hundred thousand baht. The August 2015 meeting reflected this confusion. Although the meeting began with a detailed discussion about the designs, it was ultimately interrupted by the city’s new mayor, Thirasak Thikhayuphan, who pointed out that the technical details of the designs weren’t as important as allowing residents time to hear the various relocation options being proposed. The first was a plan put forth by the municipality to negotiate use of the city’s plan to enroll residents in Stage Three of their Baan Mankong relocation scheme. A second was a plan to use National Housing Authority (NHA) money to try to build relocation housing on land currently designated as housing for SRT employees. The third possibility was presented by the KKSRN and its leader Prathān Thi, who said that the group was going to demand that the SRT modify its project design to accommodate those currently paying leases and living in the back twenty meters. For those not covered by leases, Prathān Thi asked that the SRT and the municipality to find land and construct a public housing development that residents could move to without taking on any debt (as in the municipality’s CODI-endorsed plan). When it was put to the group, the NHA plan, which depended on getting the railway to approve the



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piece of land in question, was the plan residents seemed to prefer, indicated by a very quick, public vote conducted by a show of hands. The stakes of these debates were ultimately clarified when the SRT employees took the microphone back from the mayor: Look, it doesn’t really matter which twenty meters you live in. Eventually you will be moved off the land. I am just trying to speak clearly and be straightforward. It doesn’t matter if it’s high-speed tracks or doubled tracks or, eventually, commercial projects. You will have to move soon. So, the question is do you want to continue to struggle or can we work together to find a solution now.

With that, the political effects of the military junta were clear. Although residents might continue to negotiate with each other, the city, and CODI, the railway settlements and their critical place in the city’s political history would either disappear or be irrevocably changed. This much was certain. What was interesting about the meeting was not that it was radically different from previous meetings I had attended with the municipality or the railway. Many of the harmony ideologies used to foster consensus or to quell debates that were visible at this meeting were very much like those I had seen in previous encounters with the SRT, the municipality, and CODI. In this way, the meeting continued to reflect the ongoing forms of anxietycum-antipathy toward democratic participation analyzed throughout this book. The difference was that residents had even less grounding to voice their opinions than before and limited options for external dissent. Like the titling ceremony, residents’ options for disagreement were narrowed because the political quality of their citizenship had been completely circumscribed by the coup. The SRT’s plans were now backed up with significant military coercion. Even the KKSRN’s efforts to mobilize were softened. Previous protests I had been to with that group had phrased its demands as contentious action points that called on powerful actors to respond. Prathān Thi’s claims now came as a request that was merely one of many options presented at a meeting. The way the plan was quickly dismissed suggested that the possibilities for successful mobilization were slim indeed. Although residents maintained their vision of their political capacities, the assemblies that had formed to enact those designs were fragmenting.

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DESIGN AGAINST POLITICS The convergence of the bus station protests and the municipal meeting offer contrasting images of the ways the political-economic contours of Khon Kaen’s urbanization rested on post-coup political reforms to reshape the physical terrain of Khon Kaen. The gathering of protestors against the relocation of the bus station reflected, on the one hand, the persistence of forms of disagreement and the lasting legacies of political transformation taking place in the city. The origins of the protest among coalitions that included residents from the railway settlements and their activist allies, the techniques of mobilization, and the structure of the protests themselves emphasized the lasting effects of citizens’ democratic aspirations. At the same time, the relocation and the meeting about the rail project also reflected the ways in which new forms of urban capital, urban re-­ spatialization, participatory dispossession, and the military’s constraints on politics had intertwined to curtail those aspirations. These scenes are perhaps subtler than the aggressive hostility and harassment that anti-junta political activists had been subject to after the coup, but they nevertheless demonstrated the breadth of the military’s efforts to manage the politics that emerged from places like those along the tracks. Moreover, they demonstrate the ways in which the junta had not only erased the practice of politics but also offered a distinct vision of mute citizenship alongside it, mobilizing design as mechanism to produce order, implementing political repression through construction, infrastructure projects, and real estate development. The language of beauty and order were nearly constant companions in these scenes as well. Just before concluding the municipal meeting, Mayor Thirasak reminded residents of the ordering possibilities of development: “We want our city to be beautiful. We want our city to be nice and to develop. We don’t want to stand in the way of progress, so let’s all work together to help the city improve.” This use of the inclusive rao (we) form here was common when Thirasak presided over the city committee meetings I had attended when he was deputy mayor. It enacted a consensus and shared perspective where none was possible. In this setting, the meeting revealed the way that through the ideals of beauty and order the city had become weaponized against the poor. Emerging logics of smart cities, regional interconnection, real estate capital, and the revival of large-scale infrastructural planning mobilized new despotic designs against the city’s most essential spaces of democratic politics.

10 Happiness Otherwise

In July 2016, I received a Facebook message from a friend from the community T3 in Khon Kaen. He had been an occasional participant in Mae Hawm’s network during my fieldwork, but I hadn’t heard from him in a few years. Construction on the double-track project had begun, he said, as had evictions. Across the next few weeks, friends sent images of homes being demolished and heavy equipment being put into place as construction on the project commenced. By the end of this first round of evictions, more than two hundred families, most in the twenty meters closest to the tracks, had been dispossessed of their homes and forced to move. Although these images would be familiar to many working in similar contexts elsewhere in the global south, it was still jarring to see them in Khon Kaen. In the fifteen years since I first visited the settlements in 2001, these were the first mass evictions along the tracks I had seen. Despite residents’ efforts to stall, organize, protest, develop, argue, and compromise, their homes were dismantled and their lives scattered across the city. The evictions can be read in two ways. On the one hand, they confirmed the years of strategic waiting that residents living in the front twenty meters had taken up, making their decisions to avoid leases and their skepticism about local organizing appear justified. On the other hand, those communities from the Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network (KKSRN) that had leases were spared eviction, confirming their sense that confrontation had effectively prevented eviction for the time being. Those in the middle, the vast 217

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majority of residents who had worked largely with the United Communities Network (UCN), remained uncertain about what their future would hold. As Erik Harms notes, evictions play out across extended temporalities, “eviction time” twists possibilities in ways that require those being evicted to think of their lives across many trajectories (2013). In some sense, the evictions of the early 1990s inaugurated residents’ new citizen designs, sparking new collaborations with activists and encouraging them to express their aspirations for legitimacy. This chapter examines the ways in which residents citizen designs once again transformed in Khon Kaen. These evictions caused residents to rethink their visions of belonging taking up new life projects often oriented away from the tracks. Of interest are the ways existing practices enfolded into new designs, some of which reflected the previous eras of community politics whereas others sought to remake life on different terms. Despite the increasing constraints on political organizing under the military government, residents’ visions of lives of political equality never disappeared. Even as evictions took place, residents tried to reevaluate where their organizing went wrong and what kinds of other possibilities for resistance might have been more productive. Residents’ visions of the good life did not stop at these political machinations. Like previous eras of settlement, residents’ practices adjusted to find new ways to make lives in the city. For some this has meant resettling elsewhere, for others waiting in place, and for others continued low-level negotiations. Although residents increasingly saw politics as necessary for achieving the good life, the good life could never be completely reduced to political life. Instead, lingering around the edges of the scenes of political debate central to this book’s analysis were possibilities of other ways of living and being in relation to the earth and to their neighbors that suggested a different affective world. These alternatives suggest that very often happiness is contingent on politics, but, even if deeply and intimately related, the two can never be collapsed as one and the same. RETURNING TO THE PERIPHERY By 2017, when I returned to Khon Kaen for a short visit, areas along the tracks that had previously been dense with homes had been cleared away and replaced by heavy construction equipment and muscular concrete posts (figure 10.1). Like the schematic I had seen at the municipal office in 2015, the double-track ran through the central part of the city on an elevated overpass



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Figure 10.1  The double-track project takes shape in T7 where residents’ homes once stood.

allowing it to bypass traffic. Where its construction was well under way, the elevated track gave the small houses an almost subterranean feel. The scale of the project ran counter to the scale of the city as it was previously. The posts dwarfed not only the settlements, but also the shop-houses and other mid-century, midrise construction that makes up most of Khon Kaen’s central business district. Four new thirty-plus-story condo towers also jutted awkwardly into the sky. The city’s skyline appeared like an adolescent in the midst of a growth spurt, gangly and uneven. My friends in the settlements complained about construction noise and the dust as well as about the evictions. They anticipated that the project would lead to months of periodic flooding when the rains came. Indeed, later in the year, some would post images on Facebook of their homes filled with muddy, ankle-high water that had drained off the construction site during a heavy storm. Their efforts to raise their floors to prevent flooding—a common project undertaken by homeowners using Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI) funds—were inadequate under these new conditions. It was in this context that Chit and I revisited the land Mae Hawm had purchased on the edge of the city. Chit, like her neighbors in T7 and many of her former collaborators in the UCN, was completely uncertain about what

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her future held. The group had disbanded and no longer met with CODI. Most of her time was spent simply working, scavenging for recyclables in the city or taking care of her nieces and granddaughter at home. Our trip offered her an opportunity to make sense of her options on the urban periphery. We met at her house in T7, where she took me on a walk up and down the length of the community looking at the spaces where concrete posts had replaced houses. She pointed to where her neighbors’ homes had been destroyed. She pointed to Shorty’s old tin house on the east side of the tracks, explaining that the community’s former Baan Mankong representative was now in charge of Mae Hawm’s piece of land. She said he invited some of the evicted residents in T7 to join him. Most residents declined, going elsewhere because they didn’t trust the way he was running the new settlement built on the muddy patch of land we had visited in 2010. Although Chit and her family had also reserved a plot of land in Shorty’s community, they also hadn’t decided whether they would move; they too were unsure of Shorty’s intentions. Some of her neighbors attempted to work with the KKSRN, but ultimately failed to gain enough support within the community to join that network. They had attended meetings with the State Railway of Thailand (SRT) to try to organize leases but fell short of actually signing them. Chit thought about joining the group but didn’t trust that the nongovernmental organization (NGO) process would make a difference. After our walk, we got on our motorbikes and headed out of the city to meet Shorty. The turn off to the community was still hard to spot. Chit blew right by it on our first pass and, following her closely, I did as well. Circling back, we turned onto the laneway that led to the rice fields where the community was located. Winding along, we had to hug our bikes close to the wall to dodge a truck speeding the other way, kicking up dust up as it went. It was after 2 p.m. when we arrived at Shorty’s house, an open structure of concrete block surrounded by similar-looking half-built structures, each lined up along a dirt path in various stages of completion. Gathered outside, families sat in the shade surrounded by construction materials, buckets, shovels, piles of dirt, and bricks. Some sorted through recyclables they had collected in the city, but, by that point in the day it was getting too hot to work. Chit waved and called to some friends as we parked next to Shorty’s house. He, his wife Kulap, and their daughter Noi greeted us warmly, offering rice whiskey and orange Fanta. Noi was covered in white paint from the wall they were working on behind us.



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Sitting on the floor of the structure, which had been finished recently with tiles covered with printed images of smooth river stones, we began catching up. Shorty refused to describe the actual processes of making the land purchase, only noted that Mae Hawm had made a deal with the landowner. He didn’t say exactly where the money came from, only that it came from their savings. I asked where Mae Hawm had gone. He wasn’t sure. He heard she had left the city but didn’t elaborate. Whatever the reasons, Shorty had emerged as an unlikely but nevertheless powerful headman in this new community. After sharing a bit of food and drink, Shorty showed us around. He explained that nearly forty families had been sending him money to reserve space for themselves, but at the time only ten families had relocated. He described the kinds of collective administration and group savings he intended to set up as the community solidified to support unity and cooperation. At the back of the settlement was a half-dry pond, a viscous looking green. He wanted to remediate the pond, he said, and plant the area around it as a garden. All of this sounded very much like the community designs CODI planners had created nearly a decade earlier. Indeed, it is ironic that all the work members of the UCN and their CODI counterparts put into developing community during that initiative resulted in this community. Although unable to organize their own communities, the UCN leadership team itself became the basis for this settlement. Community was being created out here, but not the way anyone intended, expected, or hoped. Read from this dusty edge of the city, the Baan Mankong project did not fortify the communities along the tracks, but in a led to a new community, created entirely through the manipulation of CODI’s finances, discourses, and practices. Once residents had saved enough with him, Shorty said, he would transfer ownership of their land directly to them, enabling them to finally have secure rights. This seemed a distant future possibility. On the drive back to Chit’s house, we passed Lop, a former member of the UCN whose name was also on the title to the peripheral plot of land despite the fact that he had rejected the purchase and was disgusted by the entire project. He was still living along the tracks in T3. His wife recognized Chit and called us inside to say hello. Lop, for his part, sat in the dark cutting flaps of pig skin into long strips to be sold at the market for frying as pork cracklings. Behind him, a fading banner advertising Thaksin’s 30-baht health-care scheme blocked the afternoon sun. In our short conversation, Lop reflected on the Baan Mankong project

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and CODI. He thought the project was a good opportunity and a good idea, but that the people implementing it were bad. He felt that corruption had prevented any of the money from making it down into the communities. Instead, he told me, it was being used for salaries for the CODI staff and for the benefit of the municipality. He felt CODI still owed them money for the expenses he and the other leaders had amassed administering project nearly a decade prior. He talked about Mae Hawm and Shorty and how he thought they used money from the network and how terrible it all was. He put it simply: “Shorty is a cheat” (khi kōng). He then turned to talking about the Khon Kaen Think Tank (KKTT) and all of the new construction in the city. The KKTT, he explained, was an interlocking agreement between the mayor, the provincial governor, the local representatives, and the city’s business people. This group was driving everything behind the rail projects—yāe māk (everything is terrible). As he put it, this clique (wōng) had begun reorganizing the city around “smart” projects that ignored the needs of the city’s poorest and most precarious residents. Before we left, he remarked sadly, “There is no place for poor people in this city anymore.” Back at her house, Chit and I sat in the shade and chatted amid the noise made by the heavy construction equipment working on the double-track: “That was my first time out there since you went with us back then [in 2010]. Life looks difficult out there. Hot. I’d rather not go.” She said that if she lost her place in the city to the railway expansion, she’d move, but that she also didn’t trust Shorty to transfer the land when they had finished paying. In fact, her family offered to pay the entire amount up front and he said he wouldn’t do it. She sighed heavily. “I just don’t trust Shorty. You should have asked him to see the deed. Then I could have seen it myself.” Chit’s father joined us, glancing back at the line of concrete pillars that now ran the length of the community: We don’t trust him but we don’t have anywhere to go. When the railway workers—two guys about your age—came down to talk to us, they didn’t answer our questions. They said they’d give us money to leave, that it would be noisy and dusty and cause problems and flooding and that you should leave.

He then pointed out how uneven and inconsistent compensation schemes were. “They’ll give you seven thousand, eight thousand, ten thou-



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sand, like this.” He then explained why they wouldn’t move to one of CODI’s relocation projects. There are too many rules there. You can’t have animals, you can’t have cats, you can’t have dogs. We collect recyclables in the city. Where would we put our things? There are too many steps. The process doesn’t work for us. It doesn’t work for poor people. We have tried to get them to change their way of thinking, but when we talk they don’t listen. The railway doesn’t listen either. We ask, can you help us? Why are you helping rich people? Why are you going to give this land to businesses? Can’t you just rent it to us? We are Thai people and we have lived here for many years but now you just want us to leave to make it better for businesses. They can’t hear us. We need to protest. We need to work like the Red Shirts.

The memory of the mass democratic social movements that swept Thailand during 2009 and 2010 served as his model for the kinds of on-theground struggles over space that needed to be enacted, rather than the conciliatory, cooperative stance he saw when he worked with the UCN and CODI. He continued, “If we had a hundred people, maybe they would listen to us. The Red Shirts weren’t afraid.” Of course, at times their network mobilized well over a hundred people; nevertheless, his point underscored how those movements allowed him to reread the constricted forms of political expression that the network had previously adopted and to understand the kinds of constraints that had become increasingly characteristic of political life under the junta. By contrasting the UCN’s participatory actions with the Red Shirts, Chit’s father emphasized that their growing insecurity in the city was not merely a result of poverty, but also rested on the much larger forms of subordination that the Bangkok protests had targeted in 2010. Under the military, the possibility of using politics to secure a better life had disappeared and the answer to the question of what kinds of actions they might take up to make a better future for themselves were increasingly murky. HAPPINESS ELSEWHERE The dilemma Chit and her father faced, though specific in some regards, reflects those that many residents along the tracks in Khon Kaen faced in the wake of the evictions that began in late 2016. Caught in a city whose growth

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had accelerated significantly since the military coup, residents have charted various paths forward, in some cases taking on considerable risk by organizing politically (such as the bus station protests described in chapter 9), in others, like Shorty, twisting old forms of governance to produce new possible lives. Yet for those caught between frames, the prospect of leaving the tracks for a life on the city’s periphery was fraught; they had few good options. Shorty’s community is interesting in this regard. It was, on the one hand, one unanticipated result of the sort of organizing that has been taking place in Khon Kaen since 2007. The land purchase was cobbled together out of funds saved mainly by residents who did not end up being involved in the land purchase, with the aim of participating in CODI’s project. The money became available for abuse through emergent ideas of community administration that pooled residents’ savings under collective administration. His imagined administrative structure mirrored CODI’s communities, with savings groups and a community committee. Even the roster of people renting from Shorty reflected some of the participants in that original set of CODI networks. In this sense, the history of that nascent settlement is deeply tied to the history of organizing and disagreement along the tracks. Mae Hawm’s insistence that her work, occluded as it may have been, was done with the aim of securing and producing opportunities for her neighbors reflects one way of interpreting that settlement against the atmosphere of corruption that swirled around the settlement. On the dusty edge of the city, a few residents had begun to make community on their own terms through their own means. This is not a romantic prospect. The community subverted the logics of care, participation, cooperation, and mutual aid promoted not only by CODI but valued by nearly all of the residents who devoted their labor and savings to the community building projects of the previous decade. That is to say, although the settlement might produce possibilities for some, few residents found the actions that led to its founding as morally justified. Indeed, most people found them reprehensible. Shorty’s ascension as leader of that dusty settlement was a matter not of good faith, but of persistence, opportunism, and manipulation. He had left mistrust in his wake. Nevertheless, Shorty took pathways and secured some space for himself, his family, and a select group of his neighbors outside the orders prescribed to him by the kinds of governance that had begun to dominate the city. The settlement he made didn’t feel democratic, participatory, or even particularly designed, but the air of communal activity and cooperation wasn’t altogether unlike the Baan



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Mankong project’s ideals seen through a broken looking glass. Here, Shorty took the mantra of doing it on his own and transformed it into something for himself and his family. Again, this doesn’t mean the community was just, but it does reveal the ways in which ideals of autonomy and political commensuration live on in varied, if fractured forms. Tracing the lives of other residents and their political sensibilities under the military government has required a turn elsewhere as a whole host of residents have sought to create life projects away from the tracks in the face of rising precarity. One community leader purchased a home for himself in one of the vacant structures built as part of the National Housing Authority’s massive Baan Ua Athorn (We Care Housing Project) community on the south edge of the city. That project, passed under Thaksin at the same time the Baan Mankong was passed, was designed as a rent-to-own scheme under which low-income citizens could apply to join the project and move into a ready-built home (see Endo 2014). The four Baan Ua Athorn sites in Khon Kaen each comprise row after row of nearly identical houses, none particularly notable in architectural form, but increasingly filled by the city’s working classes. In some of the developments, the houses are still unfinished, just raw concrete structures, overgrown by grass and weeds. In others, the houses are painted in vibrant colors, some customized, many built out to the very edges of their lots. The project was derided by critics as a mechanism for graft from the Thaksin era. They pointed to the unfinished homes and undersubscribed project as a boon for the contractors paid to build the houses. It was also contrasted with the moral qualities that animated Baan Mankong. Officials at CODI used Ua Athorn and its ready-made style to emphasize the contrast with the handmade aesthetic and morally rooted qualities of Baan Mankong. However, watching my friend and his brother fuss over floor tiles and debate paint colors, the way those projects seemed to open possibilities where life was constricting along the tracks was clear. “With Ua Athorn, you don’t need to work with your neighbors. There is no savings component and no participation. There are no complicated steps to follow. You can just pay for the house and move right in.” Echoing Robert Werlin’s critique of the participatory housing movement (1999), this resident highlighted how participatory projects shift the burden of care from the state toward the poor themselves in ways that can exacerbate rather than mitigate housing insecurity. For someone who had spent years trying to organize

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his neighbors, fighting with them, and often debating with participants in the housing network he belonged to, Ua Athorn’s private ownership—just moving right in—was a great relief. For other residents, unclaimed lots and dusty patches of open land have become grounds for making what were often just fantasies of a life otherwise. Repeating pasts of surreptitious land occupation, the practice of jap jawng, survives into the current era. Another former leader in the UCN left his house in Chumchon Lāklai when he found a suitable piece of land wedged behind a housing development and the city’s airport. After negotiations with the SRT stalled and acrimony within his community between factions working with the UCN and factions working with the KKSRN became too tense, he decided to leave his home and set up anew on this small piece of land. He built a small wooden shack, dug a fish pond, and planted banana trees. When I visited him, he showed me around as planes took off just overhead. I do not know whether he will be able to hold onto that land. Nevertheless, the last time I saw him he seemed relieved by the horizons that small patch had created. He seemed optimistic about the potential of life beyond the disagreements he associated with community. Like everything else in Khon Kaen, the airport is also expanding. Perhaps this will have an effect on his new life. In this sense, maybe his pursuit of autonomous jap jawng happiness was itself an illusion that appeared for a short time; his sense that he could afford to not be political might have been similarly illusory. Another resident created a space like this for himself in a different part of the city. Although he remained active continuing to struggle with his neighbors along the tracks, he found an affordable piece of land far outside the city and started planting chilis, vegetables, and papaya. He also maintained his home along the railway line and told me that if he managed to avoid eviction he hoped to be able to give it to his children but that he started directing attention out to this small piece of land with the aim of cultivating a way of living outside of contention with the SRT and his neighbors. The simple concrete block structure he started building there is not yet finished. When I last saw him, he said that the land had become overgrown as his life in town and his work along the tracks had taken up too much time. Like my friend with the house in the Ua Athorn project and the resident who is now squatting near the airport, these fantasies of escaping politics were paired with complex ongoing work to compose a good, secure life that asserted their commensurate claim to such a thing in physical space and present time.



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POLITICS OTHERWISE In the middle of all of this, the KKSRN has remained active in the face of evictions even if their tactics are more muted than before. Those who have stayed put continue to assert their claims to the land, negotiating with the SRT and the city, debating relocation projects, and arguing for compensation. Residents still involved in that network continue to hope that they will be able to stay in their houses, but they also have begun working with CODI to design a land-sharing scheme with the SRT that will accommodate residents if or when the high-speed rail project begins. In this sense, they also play out multiple disagreements across the varying construction timelines and schematics. Staying true to their commitments to argumentation and dispute, they have brought in new sections of a few communities and argued against potential evictions in their existing settlements. In 2017, Nung and I sat in front of his house, which, since the relocation of the bus station, has become a convenience shop. The shop sells the same sorts of items that they previously had sold at the bus station to many more customers. Now just a few neighbors stop by to buy beer, chips, or to top up cell phone minutes. The house, dwarfed under the towering posts of the double-track project, had also shrunk. In the back, the brightly tiled kitchen that he had so proudly built in 2009 was demolished to better comply with SRT’s regulations. That day, I accompanied him as he visited KKSRN communities, trying to clarify some local disputes that prevented some residents from paying their rent. He described how exhausted he felt by the organizing work these days, but that it had been important to try to sort out these disputes so they didn’t give the railway any further ability to expand evictions. “It’s easy to do work like you do, just sitting around listening to people,” he said, referring to me. “I have to go and solve these problems.” Despite these difficulties, leaders like Nung have allowed the KKSRN’s work to make claims against the SRT when the double-track project intensified seasonal flooding in the remaining communities. The KKSRN continues to work as mediators in disputed compensation projects as the high-speed rail line begins its design phase. They continue to negotiate on behalf of their members to preserve the leases that are already in place. They have pushed the government to conduct environmental impact assessments as well. They have also started to work with CODI to see whether a land-sharing project can be organized for their members in the event that the high-speed rail projects

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results in more evictions. Nung and Boonma continue to make trips to Bangkok to negotiate with the railway. Some of this work continues to reflect the role that the network has taken in governing its own communities. Yet the network continues to resist projects to relocate residents. At the same time, many residents fear that time is drawing near and the entirety of the urban landscape is conspiring to push their homes off their foundations. The nodes of engagement that the KKSRN members now work in have limited space for disagreements. Instead, struggles and debates often play out behind the scenes, in improvised community rooms and meeting spaces where residents struggle with one another about the hard choices facing them as they seek to preserve the forms of legitimacy that they had produced for themselves across the last decade. As one resident of Shorty’s community put it, “The city is growing so fast. Progress is coming with so much dust and noise. So, we knew we had to leave.” Although the most pessimistic commentators on Thai politics seem to think the moment of mass politics has passed, attention to the narrowed and foreshortened political struggles in Khon Kaen suggests something else. In 2017, Boonma and I discussed the prospects of a future of democracy in Thailand. We sat in his restaurant watching the raised double tracks be constructed. The garden he and his neighbors had planted in 2010 had gone fallow once, but they had recently replanted it. He felt that the National Council of Peace and Order had hoped to erase the memory of democracy from the country. I asked whether this was possible. In response, he sighed: “I am not so sure. It will take thirty years for us to forget what happened, maybe longer than that.” These small actions, accommodations to the current moment of infrastructural violence and despotic urbanization reflect precisely what it means to continue to live a political life under Thailand’s military government. Gardens can be torn up, but also replanted. From one perspective, the coup reflects how a moment of mass politics can be unwound through the application of violence, coercion, law, and capital; deep repression in the name of apolitical happiness. Yet, from another perspective, these ongoing actions reveal how residents continue to nourish their political wills at their most rudimentary, acting on their own time with their own energies often in the face of grave consequences. HAPPINESS IN THE DESPOTIC CITY The complex and fragmented trajectories that have shaped residents’ sociopolitical lives since the military coup did not erase the will to politics that



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formed along the tracks, but instead shaped it in new ways, gutting previously contentious scenes of disagreement and narrowing the kinds of political expression that had been fundamental. Muted negotiations and complex temporal strategizing have taken the place of agonism. These changing practices suggest the shifting temporal frames that Erik Harms calls “eviction time” (2013). This, Harms tells us in reference to conditions produced by mass evictions undertaken in the making of Saigon’s new urban zone, is an active but often nebulous time: Eviction time refers to the complex assortment of temporalities that arise when people are displaced from their land and homes. While eviction is of course primarily a conflict over land and money, people at all positions in the project experience the process most profoundly as a set of visceral engagements with time. (346)

Evictions yield possibilities for control by states but also for action, situated in phatic relations, chatting, hanging out, and hustling. It is in these extended relations that politics in more and less organized forms also continues. Since the coup and especially since construction began on the doubletrack project, time does seem to have changed along the tracks. The perspectives of residents, NGOs, and CODI planners concerning what participation means and what kinds of politics remain possible have also changed. Chit, Shorty, Boonma, and Nung have seen the measures of fixity from previous periods wane. Initial tokens of security, such as housing numbers, permanent and temporary, and the potential for rental rights eroded alongside the deployment of the military government’s power. The result has been evictions and relocation for some and continued struggle for others. For residents such as Boonma, Nung, Prathān Thi, and the others in the KKSRN, it has meant reevaluating their political practices and considering what might be possible in light of these changed circumstances. It has meant watching the political scene for openings and acting when possible. Eviction time compresses as often as it stretches; it both drags and pulls. Mae Hawm’s effort to withdraw from Baan Mankong and to buck NGOled projects by purchasing her own land sought to end the temporality of eviction time. By purchasing the land on the edge of Khon Kaen, she tried to enable her supporters to inaugurate lives in the fixity of the periphery. She took the various structural possibilities at hand—state support, ­international

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aid, occluded funding buried in community savings groups, and murky ­relationships—and attempted to transform them into a piece of land for some settlers, albeit a limited group, to move to and begin more stable futures. These weren’t the methods that the state had supported for creating community, but nevertheless, those structures provided resources to act upon and through. At the same time, the project, now controlled by Shorty, shattered the local network. Although a few residents became secure, most now suffer through drawn-out processes of eviction considering possible futures that follow multiple heterogeneous trajectories. The aims of the others who took up plots of land on various peripheries— purchased, squatted, rented, or otherwise—are also efforts to try to make some stability for themselves in the fast-moving context of Khon Kaen’s urban growth. Although residents’ visions of happiness were often cast as an effort to remove themselves from the daily politics of life along the tracks, they are never full extracted from the political. Their life projects do not make up a coherent politics in the way organization prior to the coup did. Nevertheless, they reflect the persistence of people’s will to both make do and make better given the resources at hand and their abilities to act on their own times. I was taken by the number of times residents reflected on the ways in which their participation in local and national political projects enabled the persistence of their senses of their political capacities—their wills to disagree—casting them as an inheritance that will survive the military intervention and outlast these evictions. Even if the future of democracy in Thailand remains undecided, these scenes of political thought matter, informing both actual political futures for the country and other possible ones. The current political moment has not yet resulted in mass mobilizations in Khon Kaen; from the perspective of the present, the path toward the renewal of these politics is unclear. Yet the actions of residents along the tracks reveal that they are not lone heroic figures struggling against Thailand’s history of military rule. Instead, their work reflects the uncertainty inherent in everyday efforts to act on one’s own political capacities and the ways in which democracy always remains an unreconcilable political project. Their short-circuited politics were targeted at expanding democracy even though no one could quite agree what such a thing would look or feel like. Those efforts were always deeply embedded in historical forms of spatial and material inequality, as well as in existing citizen designs that defined what good citizenship is, how it might be enacted, and how it might be transformed. In



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this, the visions of political life that continue to circulate through Khon Kaen provide the best answers to the question of what democracy is or might still be because they are incomplete. In being unfinished, these visions of democratic politics to come up hold the promise that equality might yet still be acted upon, during and hopefully beyond these times of authoritarian rule.

Epilogue Legacies of Politics

This book has explored the way democratic ideals shaped both the city of Khon Kaen and the lives of the people living along they city’s railway tracks. It positions a range of citizen designs—future oriented visions of political and social belonging—at the heart of an investigation of what it means to be political and to pursue a decent life in twenty-first-century Thailand. It demonstrates how new aspirations among the poor to assert their equal political capacities recomposed the spaces along the tracks, transforming them into a landscape of thoughts, designs, coalitions, debates, dreams, practices, and disagreements over what democracy is and what it might yet be. In this sense, it also presents an argument about democracy in general—how it is made, how it feels, and where it often finds its limits rubbing up against existing histories of inequality, exclusion, and subordination. The ethnographic material presented here spans periods of electoral democracy, mass mobilization, state violence, and military repression. It demonstrates the ways in which various kinds of citizens have attempted to enact democracy in Khon Kaen at the level of the nation, the city, the community, the house, and the body. In attending to the lived effects of democracy and the attempts by citizens, activists, and state planners to design such a thing anew across these scales, it considers how political ideals of equality are bound awkwardly with efforts to manage democratic politics, showing how the city, the house, and the self were also spaces of intense governmental intervention aimed at controlling the growing political aspirations of

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the poor and their emerging wills to debate and to assert their equality. The exploration of these themes demonstrates the complexities entailed in building democratic cities and making good on democracy’s promises of equality. On the one hand, these complexities reflect some things that are specific to Thai history. Citizens both like those living along the tracks in Khon Kaen and like those who mobilized en masse in 2010 at Ratchaprasong in Bangkok—the poor, the provincial, the non-Thai, the rural, the working classes, and the aspirational lower middle classes—have often been confined by overlapping socio-cultural renderings of hierarchy and histories of developmentalist exclusion to the realm of those “not yet” ready for citizenship (Elinoff and Sopranzetti 2012). Such renderings reflect long-standing forms of political inequality that characterize the poor as villagers and the related forms of structural economic inequality that have kept these groups from becoming equal in other regards. This political deferral—not yet—­ relegated these actors to being seen as unfit for participation and unready for inclusion in the proper domain of democratic politics. This formation has not only produced widespread discrimination, but also propelled successive incursions into electoral democracy that justified military rule and political violence against those dissenters. Although legally citizens, these internally subordinate groups have been understood as corrupt or ignorant or both. They are seen as bought-off, manipulatable, and prone to supporting populists. In this logic of purification, David Streckfuss (2011) tells us, coups are seen as justified by the middle classes and the well born because they are understood as efforts to save the polity from the poor and the poor from their own worst instincts. The pervasive political, economic, and social double standards that structure Thailand’s internal exclusions have given shape to a local articulations of the problem of democracy (Anek 1996) and produced various ideas about how to solve it through managed forms of participation, inclusive urban design, and military coups. They also produced new anxieties about the claims to commensuration that people like those living along the tracks have attempted to make. On the other hand, these kinds of internal exclusions and the fears of democratic aspirations are endemic to democracy itself (Rancière 2006; Arditi 2007). For example, Don Herzog’s exploration of English responses to the French and American Revolutions reveals how anti-democratic conservativism emerged from fears about the poor and the aspiring lower classes taking up democracy and, in so doing, acting out of place and speaking out

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of turn (1998). As Herzog describes, barbershops, pubs, and coffee shops were among the places where the poor fomented their democratic aspirations and made new claims on the emerging British state. The “lower orders,” their aspirations for equality, and the spaces within which those dreams were debated, were thus the objects of upper-class derision. According to Herzog, the moment of revolutionary democracy appeared to British elites to have turned the appropriate social order upside down; as one commentator Herzog quotes puts it, the feet had begun acting like the head (1998, 35). Indeed, crowds of Red Shirts reclaiming their status as phrai (commoners), wearing shirts that referenced the French Revolution, and waving foot-shaped clappers demonstrate precisely these kinds of inversions as the Thai “social body” (Aulino 2014a) turned itself inside out; so do the endless debates about equality and order along the tracks. This is not to suggest that Regency England explains twenty-first-century Thailand, but the parallels between the two reveal some of the fundamental tensions animating democracy itself. In twenty-first-century Thailand, community meetings, participatory planning workshops, DIY projects, as well as backyards, front porches, gardens, dusty lots, restaurants, and the gaps on the side of the railway tracks became potent sites where people could think through and debate the implications and meanings of democracy and its redistribution of politics. They became sites to question the meaning of citizenship and to argue about the value of politics. They were also spaces to imagine and act on other distributions of political capacity and other political orders. These scenes in the context of residents’ struggles to secure their place in the city make clear how deep and complex conversations about democracy have been occurring in places many Thais assume to lack the capacity for such discussions. Such debates about democracy have not only occurred in these spaces, but also led to transformative practices both momentary and sustained that opened up far more complex questions about politics, citizenship, the city, and the meaning of equality. Attention to these scenes reveals a diverse range of opinions about what it means to make a democracy from the inside. It also reveals what it means when citizens like those living along the tracks attempt to enact their own political wills to take up politics like everyone else. The results have been complex and partial, and remain unfinished. New forms of governance, however, have emerged to manage the poor and their politics through inclusion. These policies often challenged the democratic sensibilities of residents, but they also sought to extend democ-

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racy in new ways to new places. At the same time, they enrolled new actors— young, educated provincial architects and seasoned NGO organizers—to act as visionaries of democratic design and sometimes as agents of political management. Although CODI’s “community architects” understood the political possibilities of participatory design, they also became aware of its limitations. Similarly, the NGO activists working along the tracks engaged deeply in efforts to build pro-poor social movements, but also found themselves at odds with their own constituencies administering modes of communal governance. Nevertheless, they too worked on these projects with the aim of acting on democratic governance while learning its pitfalls. Yet, design without politics is not democratic at all, but instead another mode of policing. The political limitations of Baan Mankong had dire effects for many in Khon Kaen, which became visible as new rail projects entailed a renewal of mass evictions and the amplification of uncertainties up and down the tracks. New rail projects and a rush of urban growth in the city pushed residents along the tracks out to the city’s margins: wetlands, open tracts of land, and purloined plots have once again served as the grounding for the poor as they continue to attempt to stake their legitimacy as residents of the city and citizens in the nation. Design in this sense was not a magic technique for revisioning the world, but instead a historically laden practice, bound up in the structures of urban capitalism, and composed of existing power structures and contentious debates about the appropriate forms of democracy, politics, and the good life. Design provided a way of acting toward these contested futures in ways that renewed old hierarchies just as it sometimes provided new grounds on which to contest them. For their part, residents also understood the possibilities and limitations of projects such as Baan Mankong to support and extend their democratic voices. A variety of examples make it clear how residents engaged with, critiqued, and challenged that project and the ways it sought to manage their political claims, even as they conformed to its expectations and designs in order to access new money in the hopes of legitimizing their presence in the city. They challenged ideas of community, yet still longed for such a thing to be possible. Through their work, the policy became a site within which to experiment with democratic being, and also a space in which they discovered the structural limits of their political capacities. This book has sought to complicate the often-schematic picture of Thai democracy that presents hardened groups struggling against each other to

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advance either democratic or undemocratic modes of governing and being, instead opting for a mode of narration rooted in unresolved, perhaps unresolvable disagreements. It has also directly challenged ideas that the poor are incapable of thinking or acting politically. As I have shown, their politics advanced through unfinished contestations taken up in multiple complex acts of disagreement, both public and private: those very disagreements compose the political. Casting the political as a contingent formulation that emerges out of histories of unfinished disagreements—such as struggles like those along the tracks in Khon Kaen—gives more space for the complexity of people’s unfolding relations with democracy. It also opens up possibilities for actors to reformulate themselves, their ideas, and their relationships with each other. It also makes space to understand where emergent groups emerge to drive holes in even the most calcified systems of power or where power returns to prop up old orders in times of crisis. The promise of equality remains unrealized in Thailand, as elsewhere, but it remains real nevertheless and so too the possibility for politics. It is my hope that attention to practices of disagreement along Khon Kaen’s railway tracks offers a way toward thinking ourselves closer to realizing that promise. Although my friends and collaborators along the tracks, at the Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI), and within Thailand’s nongovernmental organization (NGO) networks continue to be at odds over what democracy is, their work reflects the uncertainty that always comes along with politics. The desires of residents, activists, and CODI architects to redesign the city as space for democracy were real, even if they were at odds, limited, and often contradictory. Their visions were rooted in their unfolding senses of democratic ideals and broad visions of the good life forged through encounters in the world and with each other. This book attempts to put none of these questions to rest. Instead, by taking on the political in Thailand from within its gnarled twists and uncertain trajectories, it presents democracy as a doggedly open possibility even when it has seemed most foreclosed. Describing the political in this way allows Thailand’s period of rich democratic ferment to sit in murky relation with the period of the authoritarian constriction that has followed; both periods remain unfinished, their political outcomes undecided, always unreconciled. The legacies of small insurgencies, false starts, and dead ends matter because they reframe essential debates in ways that shape future openings (Haberkorn 2011). The period of organizing that preceded the ongoing erasure of the settlements along the tracks

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in Khon Kaen is important to our understanding of politics not because it succeeded but because it reveals how residents transformed the city as both a physical and political space expressing their legitimacy and challenging, however briefly, the national hierarchy in specific and important ways. Anthropology is well attuned to thinking about politics emergent and interrupted (Li 2019). As Tyrell Haberkorn demonstrates, histories of politics reverberate and create political possibilities long after their moments have passed (2011). Although the last several years have witnessed a wholesale dismantling of some communities along the tracks, the acts of politics taken up in that space continue to resonate, forming the present conditions for future struggles. It is worth returning to these sites at times when the horizon of politics seems to be so foreshortened because they reveal how new possibilities might open up through the hard work of disagreement. The history of political action along the tracks has been circuitous and short circuited. Its successes have been partial and always complex. Nevertheless, the work that residents and their collaborators have done has made a difference in recrafting both the political terrain of Khon Kaen and Thailand. This work is often lost to analyses that defer real politics to revolution. Instead, politics emerges here as a flicker, something limited, latent, confounded, or half-formed, sparking changes both durable and brief through disagreement and in so doing revealing a vision of what might be possible. The possibilities of change opened up along the tracks did not materialize in the form of uniformly secure land rights, a just city, uniform equality, or more stable democracy in Thailand. Yet sustained attention to politics reveals both what Thai democracy is made of and how citizens, those living along the tracks and others like them elsewhere, have continued to act on their visions of themselves as political actors commensurate with their fellow citizens. To attend to politics at this level is to analyze the composition of democracy in situ. It is to observe the making of politics, built of uneven, mismatched, broken things, things that never fit together, things themselves composed of unsettled matters. Yet it is that ill-fitting-ness and incompletion, the composition of something from disagreement itself, that makes way for future politics. This conception of politics points toward the necessity of ethnographic methodologies for understanding how social changes get made and unmade and how political struggles leave residues behind in the lives and thoughts of those who participate in them that structure future transformations. Politics occurs in the vast terrains of action situated between the suffering slot and

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the good life (Robbins 2013; Ortner 2016), between governmentality and resistance; between violence and consensus, between hierarchy and emancipation. It is, as Max Weber reminds us, “a slow, powerful drilling through hard boards” (2004, 93). That work is conducted as disagreements big and small coalesce and pull-apart, producing new coalitions and new rounds of struggle. These practices resonate with lived efforts to be seen and to be understood as worthy of living a good life and capable of speaking on behalf of the life one seeks to live. The direction of such practices is itself not known and cannot be fully articulated from its outset; instead, it is something that emerges inside longer processes of making one’s way in the world in contentious relation with others. In this sense, the struggles along the tracks not only speak to localized transformations in political being, but also echo within the deeper stakes of a conjuncture in which we all struggle to make sense of political life unfolding after developmentalism, after capitalism, after liberalism, after democracy, and, perhaps, after authoritarianism.

Notes

PROLOGUE: DISAGREEMENT IN A TIME OF HAPPINESS 1.  Throughout the book, I use pseudonyms for my interlocutors and their communities. 2.  Since 1932, Thailand has had nineteen attempted coups, twelve of them successful. This number accounts only for military coups and excludes other nonmilitary interventions into electoral democracy, such as those by the courts. Yingluck’s brother, the wildly popular, wildly controversial Thaksin Shinawatra, was ousted in 2006 in the previous military coup. CHAPTER 1: DESIGNS ON THE POLITICAL 1.  This language of aspiration builds, in part, from Arjun Appadurai’s conceptualization of this unevenly distributed future-oriented capacity (2004), but also from work done by Tim Bunnell considering the way changing visions of the future have animated much urban transformation across Asia (2019; see also Bunnell, Gillen, and Ho 2018). 2.  Like Turkey, Bolivia, Brazil, Hong Kong, and the United States (to name a few), Thailand’s recent political history reflects the ways in which the mass mobilization of democratic aspirations can inspire unforeseen outcomes, including the violent (re)emergence of authoritarian values. In those and other contexts, attention to varied histories and sites of citizen design and the struggles they inspire may tell us a great deal about existing and possible configurations of the political (see also Postero 2007, 2018; E. Murphy 2015; Fennell 2015; Holston 2008, 2019; Caldeira and Holston 2005; Anand 2017; Chance 2017). 3.  These processes can be usefully compared with the much more top-down effort to redesign Thai democracy in the form of the new parliament building (Lowe 2017). 4.  Such an approach reflects Lucy Suchman’s notion of a “critical anthropology of design” (2011, 16), but builds more directly on existing work within ­anthropologies 239

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of development and citizenship that have explored how political struggles transform efforts to govern into “witches brew of processes, practices and struggles that exceed their scope” (Li 2007, 28; see also Ferguson 1994; Holston 1989, 2008; Postero 2007, 2017). 5.  Demographers such as Gavin Jones (1997) argue that Thailand is a prime example of what he calls “thoroughgoing urbanization” in which the appearance of rural spaces belies the ways in which nearly all other parts of life are deeply imbricated by urban phenomenon. 6.  Kevin Hewison points out that since the 1980s Thailand’s Gini coefficient has grown from 0.45 to 0.53 in 2015 (2015). 7.  As of 2018, 1 percent of Thailand’s population owned 67 percent of its wealth, making the country’s inequality gap among the widest in the world. Thai economist Banyong Pongpanich labels this a result of “vicious capitalism” (2018). 8.  Concern about the “Northeastern Problem” (Keyes 1967) is a long-standing feature of Thai politics. 9.  In Isaan, 85 to 90 percent of people speak Tai languages, a broader category of language that includes but is not limited to the central Thai (national) dialect. The majority of the region’s population speaks a phāsā Isaan (the Isaan language), which is related to lowland Lao. Numbers of Khmer speakers (roughly 9 percent), Thai Khorat speakers, Phu Thai speakers, and others are also significant. Nevertheless, phāsā Isaan is one of the defining features of Isaan as an ethno-regional identity, though that identity is extended to all the residents of the region regardless of linguistic background (Keyes 2014, 16–17). Despite the prevalence of Isaan language in everyday life, my language competencies privileged Central Thai throughout my research. I cannot claim to speak phāsā Isaan very well, but my ability to comprehend it has improved over time. At the same time, my friends and interlocutors have accommodated me as I have learned on the ground. Nevertheless, engagement with the Isaan language is an acknowledged limitation of this study. 10.  As Platt’s study of Isaan authors shows, tropes of country and city are fundamental to the binds that shape Isaan identity (2013, 229; but see Williams 1973). 11.  This point was neatly summarized in an advertisement for a Kasikorn Bank credit card that was hung around Khon Kaen in 2009: “This card is all you need and you’ll have rights” (khāe mī bat kaw mī sithi). Although the ad was meant to highlight the card’s specific privileges, the double language is striking. 12.  Household debt has skyrocketed across Thailand, growing from 2.85 trillion baht in June 2004 to 10.03 trillion baht in 2014 (Suttinee 2014). According to the Bank of Thailand (2018), household debt was measured to be highest in Bangkok. This study accounted only for debt extended by financial institutions and fails to account for the informal credit market which is common throughout Thailand but particularly important in poor communities.



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13.  Llerena Searle’s deft ethnography of the emergence of real estate markets in India reveals in close detail how development, real estate, and the production of urban space became central modalities of capitalist accumulation there (2016). These insights resonate across Asia (Ong 2011; Ghertner 2015; Harms 2016; Elinoff, Sur, and Yeoh 2017; Nguyen 2017; Nam 2017; Padawangi 2019). 14.  As Tyrell Haberkorn points out, these movements built on a still deeper legacy of rural organizing in the 1970s, which embraced law as a site of political possibility (2011). 15.  In the Thai context, NGO does not necessarily refer to a particular organization, but more frequently an “independent development expert” (nak phatthanā isara) who worked on behalf of an international organization on a larger grant. NGO refers to both independent organizations and the activists or agents that work in their name. 16.  Estimates for civilian deaths and military deaths from April 2010 to May 2010 range from ninety-one to ninety-eight people. The most comprehensive report conducted by the People’s Information Center, “Truth for Justice: Fact Finding Report on the April-May 2010 Crackdowns in Thailand,” states the total is ninety-four. Of these deaths, the report says that 47 percent of those killed came from the northeast and 5 percent from the north. Other 15 percent were from districts in Bangkok known as migration centers for Isaan migrants. It is also possible, that, given the complex ways in which residence is recorded in Thailand, among the other 26 percent, who were listed as domiciled in Bangkok, more might have also been from the northeast. Another 16 percent were listed as unregistered. The numbers reveal the degree to which the imbalances between Isaan and the rest of the country played out during the crackdown (People’s Information Center 2010). 17.  Michael Herzfeld (2002) and Andrew Johnson (2014) have explored the roots of these culturalist longings amid urban growth in Thailand. Similar ruralurban dynamics are taking place elsewhere in Southeast Asia (Bunnell 2002; Thompson 2004; Karis 2013; Gillen 2016). 18.  Allen Tran and others note the way people’s inner lives of and subjectivities transform alongside the rise of new capitalist and consumer economies across Asia (2015; Wilson 2004; Rofel 2007; Zhang 2009). 19.  This reading of echoes the relationship between the social and territorial body noted by historian Thongchai Winichakul (1994), whose work demonstrates the way in which the Thai “geo-body” came into being through the expansion of cartographic practices at the turn to the twentieth century. As Thongchai argues, geo-body itself is understood in a hierarchical way as having a center in Bangkok that is more civilized and modern and a periphery that is coarse, rural, and uncivilized (see also Thongchai 2000a). 20.  The word khwai refers to the water buffalo, both a symbol of rural life and widely regarded as stupid and stubborn. The message “Hillbillies go home!” (pūak

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bānnawk awk pai) appeared at anti-Red Shirt counterprotests that sprang up around Bangkok during the Red Shirt occupation in 2010. Both underscored that no matter how long Isaan migrants have lived in the city they were perceived as uncivilized outsiders. 21.  In Thailand, post-democracy speaks to the desires of Thai conservatives to undermine the demos writ large and circumscribe its role in the practice of governing so as to return the country to its rightful cosmic order (e.g. Herzfeld 2016, 151). 22.  Christine Gray offers a complex and detailed argument based on Stanley Tambiah’s reading of renunciation that enables her to demonstrate the ways the monarchy harmonized kingship, capitalism, and Buddhism (1986, 60–63). This is a valuable argument in its own right but I do not have the space to detail it here. 23.  Naomi Haynes and Jason Hickel highlight how the neoliberal politicaleconomic conjuncture foregrounds tensions between liberal values of freedom and local values of hierarchy globally. They suggest that exploring these tensions anthropologically requires attention to the ways that hierarchy produces social value for actors on the ground (2016, 7–8; see also Hickel 2015). 24.  Julia Paley articulates these contours as giving the anthropology of democracy its shape, vacillating between understandings of democracy as a regime of control or as a mode of politics (2002, 2004). 25.  Sherry Arnstein’s influential observations about the ladder of citizen participation offers an early deconstruction participation, noting that the practice exists on a continuum from “manipulation” to “citizen control” (1968). I argue that, without a clear sense of the political and how political capacities are unevenly distributed, such distinctions may not be as clear cut as the ladder presupposes. Andrew Turton (1987) and Jonathan Rigg (2019) consider similar questions in the Thai context. 26.  Critical theorists have characterized the turn toward inclusion as “postpolitical” to draw attention to the ways contemporary policy aims to solve problems by transforming political questions about equality into technical questions about service delivery (Žižek 1999, 2006; Rancière 1999, 2004, 2006; Agamben 2005, 2007; Arditi 2007; Crouch 2004; Swyngedouw 2005; Brown 2015). 27.  Numerous studies have taken up this dichotomy (see Werlin 1999; Appadurai 2002, 2004; Caldeira and Holston 2005, 2014; Pimmental-Walker 2016; Rabe 2009; Weinstein 2014). 28.  Despite the very different design practices at work across these eras, urban design and political management have been enmeshed from the colonial era (Mitchell 1988; Wright 1991) through periods of modernist planning (Holston 1989; Caldeira and Holston 2005). Indeed, as Lawrence Chua describes, architecture in Thailand also reflected norms of aesthetic citizenship (2018; see also ChevaIsarakul 2020). 29.  Given the range of interventions, approaches, and sites taken up by CODI,



Notes to Pages 26–29

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it is a mistake to consider this book to be the final word on the Baan Mankong project. Other scholars have considered the policy through a direct focus on community architects (Supitcha 2010; Boano and Kelling 2013), via focused set of surveys and interviews in project communities in Bangkok (Archer 2009, 2012; Endo 2014) and by considering communities beyond Thailand where these methodologies are used (Archer, Chabwababd, and Supawut 2012). Nevertheless, this ethnography is written in the spirit of disagreement and where it produces friction over Baan Mankong’s ideas and methodologies, I hope it is welcomed. 30.  Julia Elyachar’s ethnography of the marketization of poverty in Cairo reflects similar insights (2002, 498). 31.  As J. K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Steven Healey note, commoning is the “process” of reimagining the boundaries of property (2016). On one level, the contested notion of community at the heart of Baan Mankong reflects an effort to transform the space of the slum into a kind of commons and a site of commoning. Yet I am mindful of Lauren Berlant’s critique of utopic renderings of the commons (2016). She notes the ragged, broken, and contradictory edges of commoning projects. I argue that it is necessary to look beyond the romance of the commons to consider it as always uneven and always the subject of disagreement. This is especially necessary when commoning projects intersect with larger political forces that render the political voices emerging from within them as unintelligible and illegitimate by mainstream actors. 32.  The Revolution of the Slums was CODI’s chosen theme for their celebration of World Habitat Day in 2008. 33.  Christo Sims (2017) notes that whether design has any political content depends on its context and effects. 34.  Tim Bunnell, Jamie Gillen, and Elaine Ho highlight how engaging with urban aspirations in all of their conflicted forms reveals the future as a contested terrain (2018). Such analytical engagements are critical to making sense of the unfolding of a range of distinct future-oriented trajectories practices driving contemporary Asian urbanism. 35.  The history of anthropologies attending to the disjunctures at the heart of social life is a long one (see, for example, Gluckman 1940; Bailey 1969; Wolf 1982; Abu-Lughod 1991; Holston 1991a, 2008; Kaplan and Kelly 1994; Ortner 1995; Crehan 2002; Tsing 2005). Nancy Postero and I offer a longer genealogy of ideas of contestation in political anthropology (2019, 10–14). 36.  As numerous scholars attending to material politics have pointed out, things play a critical role in both the deployment of government and the practice of politics (Braun and Whatmore 2008; Bennett 2010; Hull 2012; Von Schnitzler 2015; Fehérváry 2013). Following these scholars, I do not partition the material and discursive but rather describe them in relation to one another to explore the ways in which

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the two interpenetrate, enabling or disarming modes of governance, expanding or limiting the practice of politics and remaking political worlds. 37.  James Holston argues that struggles over citizenship are often struggles about establishing “common ground” and “equal measure” among members of the state (2008, 266). 38.  The Red Shirt embrace of the symbolism and language of the French revolution reflects the depth of these claims and the breadth of their reach (Tausig 2019, 36). 39.  My first trip to Thailand was in the fall of 2001 as a study abroad student. I was immersed in the landscape of development activism that had swept northeastern Thailand following the economic crisis. We studied organic agriculture movements, slum activism, sex work activism, and especially the anti-dam movements centered at the Pak Mun Dam. This program continues to send students to learn from the railway settlements where the research was conducted. 40.  This research was conducted across multiple trips to Khon Kaen from 2007 to 2017, the longest sustained stretch of fieldwork occurring from September of 2008 to the end of 2009. CHAPTER 2: INFRASTRUCTURES, NATION AND CITIZEN 1.  The degree to which this period was guided by a willful strategy on the part of the Siamese monarchs looking to secure their power over a well-defined kingdom is debated. Two primary questions are at stake in this debate. First is the degree to which the monarchs ceded control over their territory to colonial influences (Harrison 2010; Herzfeld 2005; Strate 2015). Second is whether Siam’s actions outside the Chao Phraya river were aimed at shoring up their existing hegemony over the regions (Tej 1977) or whether they sought to extend their power via process of internal colonization (Thongchai 1994). The railway’s history reveals, in part, why these questions cannot be answered in a straightforward way. On the one hand, the construction of the railway system was unquestionably a strategic effort to shape the orientation of political and economic power within territories that had a range of competing allegiances. On the other, the rail system itself was both a reflection of global colonial modes of governmentality (see, for example, Bear 2007; Aguiar 2011) and, more pointedly, a result of actual entanglements with a range of European powers (Holm 1977, 63–90). 2.  Ian Baird (2013) argues that these millenarian revolts were not simply “antistate,” but emerged out of competing struggles for power over the region among existing powers including, as he documents, the Champassak royal house. 3.  The trip from Khon Kaen to Bangkok now takes between eight and ten hours by rail, around five by bus, and forty-five minutes by air. 4.  Scholars of railways from Marx onward have noted how rail compressed time



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and space in ways that are fundamental to the very idea of modernity. This compression was key to rail’s power to materially reshape political economies and its broader ability to enchant (see Buck-Morss 1991, 92; Schivelbusch 1986). In the Thai case, it also reveals the way as distances became compressed, differences became rearticulated via spatio-temporal narratives of development. 5.  In 1904, the Siamese census replaced the ethnicized administrative names for regions with compass point designations, calling Isaan the northeast. Bangkok was the center of the central region (Streckfuss 2012, 309). The rail system’s treeshaped structure, centered in Bangkok not only mirrored this territorial imaginary, but provided the infrastructure to enact it. 6.  Tej Bunnag’s history of the thēsaphibān administrative reforms describes how provincial administrative units were created during this period drawing distant regions under closer control from the center (1977). 7.  Read in light of the railway project, Christine Gray’s study of the monarchical revival from the 1950s onward reveals the way in which infrastructures such as rail enabled the transition from absolutism toward military rule, even as the power of the institution of the monarchy fluctuated (1986). At the same time, King Bhumipol used rail as a backdrop during his reign (Handley 2006, 66). The infrastructure became an important way of regenerating relationships across the country, which Gray documents, and served as a crucial stage for the production of notions of the “Development King” and the rearticulation of the monarchy. 8.  Anthropologist Gary Wilder describes “permanent deferral” this way: “Colonial humanism thus produced native subjects defined by a double bind: destined to become rights-bearing individuals, but always too immature to exercise these rights” (1999, 47). 9.  It is historically unclear why the city moved so many times, though Somrudee speculates that it is related to movements of the jao mư̄ang (lord of the city) relocating to more populous villages (1991, 171). 10.  Recent consultancy reports note that the railway controls close to 260,000 rai of land (Asian Development Bank 2013, 28). 11.  Roads and rail connections have reemerged as critical factors in development planning (World Bank 2008). 12.  Jap jawng homesteading was common in both rural and urbanizing parts of the northeast during much of the first part of the twentieth century. Local officials even encouraged this practice because permitted forms of homesteading deepened the state’s reach in the territory’s tenuously held hinterlands (Lohmann 1993, 181; Kamala 1997; Pasuk and Baker 2002, 84). Jap jawng practices were threatened but did not end when new logics of property and exclusion emerged to organize and regulate settlement during and especially after the closure of the land frontier in Thailand (Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011).

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13. Although mư̄ang often refers to the city, as Michael Herzfeld describes it, mư̄ang’s other usages refer to the polity that ties together local senses of shared community with higher more formal orders of hierarchy. This “nested image” is contrasted, he argues, with the notion of phrathēt, which refers more clearly to the modern ideal of the bounded nation state (2016, 45–46). 14.  Notions of kin mưā ng link bureaucratic practices of rent collection to the historic benefits given to local lords who, during the feudal period, were often afforded the privilege of extracting payments and labor from vassals (see Keyes 1979, 216). 15.  Walden Bello, Shea Cunningham, and Li Poh describe a similar dynamic in Bangkok, evictions in the center of the city leading to the peripheralization of poverty and the development of new settlements with limited access to urban services (1998, 109). This form of urban growth is common across much of the Global South (Caldeira 2000; Murphy 2004; Holston 2008). CHAPTER 3: FROM CRISIS TO COMMUNITY 1.  An approximate meaning is “good things come to those who wait,” but in the phrase also reflects the reward one receives after persistence through hardship. 2.  Hayden Shelby offers a detailed description of the history of slum politics in Thailand (2019, 58–68; see also Abhayuth 2002, 2009; Boonlert 2003; Bolotta 2017). 3.  Marc Askew notes that the Bangkok Municipal Authority began creating official administrative communities in the early 1980s, organizing local elections and community committees at that time (2002, 146). The notion of chumchon closely reflects earlier ideas of village administration. 4.  The village had been imagined as a mode of political intervention since its creation (Vandergeest 1996; Thongchai 2000b; Rigg 2010). In the 1960s, US Cold War aid repositioned village development as a way of intervening in communist insurgency (Thak 2007, 167–168; Connors 2007, 70). Aid workers involved in these early forays into community development produced remarkably diagnostic discourses to explain why “villagers” were uncooperative in their efforts to communalize them (Suvitya 1965, 98). The category of “the poor” (khon jon) merges and pulls at the category of the villager in complex ways. As Samchaiy Sresunt argues, “the poor” have been constructed as a complex social category in Thailand (2011). This classification signifies both moral standing and immoral standing simultaneously and has been mobilized across sectors including development, NGO activism, and politics differently. For NGOs, the category is often mobilized to refer to a collective, revolutionary subject, whereas development experts use it to refer to the morally pure but underdeveloped rural and urban underclasses. Khon jon are often collapsed into the category of the villager (chaobān). The language of community is often used to describe slums and other poor settlements to the exclusion of other sort of citizens (Endo 2014; see also



Notes to Pages 64–89

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Shelby 2019). Philip Hirsch (2002) characterizes the village as a terrain of struggle between the Thai state and its citizens; community can be understood similarly. 5.  Somchai describes a friction between the Bangkok-based pro-democracy NGO networks and Isaan networks, dedicated to more radical class politics (2006, 77). 6.  Michael Feener and Philip Fountain note the strong resonances between religion and development elsewhere in Asia, as well as globally (2018). 7.  As Andrew Turton noted in an earlier study of participation in rural Thailand, participation can mean a variety of different things including decentralization, creating a sense of inclusion, consultation, and resource distribution (1987, 12). 8.  Observations about participation in urban policy elsewhere highlight how participatory urban governance can also enable powerful actors to assert themselves (Caldera and Holston 2014; Pimental Walker 2015), propel evictions and relocations (Rabe 2009), or substitute participation in place of a more robust conceptualization of politics (see also D’Avella 2016). 9.  These conditions were recounted orally across a number of conversations. The original MOU, 17/2543, issued by the State Railway of Thailand on September 13, 2000, emphasizes the spatial conditions relating to the issuing of thirty-year leases for residents living outside the forty meter zone; three-year renewable leases for residents living inside the forty meter zone, including the compensation stipulation in the event that those communities are asked to relocate; compensation for residents living within the twenty meters closest to the tracks; and a stipulation that representatives from the Four Regions Slum Network act as partners in the administering of SRT leases. 10.  Building on James Ferguson’s (1994) classic work on development, numerous scholars have all noted the way empowerment-based development projects enroll the poor as vulnerable recipients in need of care and governance, limiting the efficacy of their political voices (Sangtin Writers 2006; Sharma 2006; Li 2007; Lazar 2004; Karim 2011). 11.  The pervasive use of the double standard to articulate a wide variety of grievances demonstrates how the Red Shirts tapped into what might be thought of a “structure of feeling” in the terms deployed by Raymond Williams (1977), which enabled the group to shift from being primarily focused on Thaksin Shinatwatra to articulating a much wider set of demands around democracy. CHAPTER 4: CITIZEN DESIGNS 1.  I stayed in this community as an undergraduate exchange student in 2001 and residents discussed flooding as a major problem then as well. 2.  I draw this notion of legibility from James Scott, who argues that “seeing” in the form of surveys, maps, and plans is essential to the deployment of state power

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(1998). Both Tania Li (2007) and Nikolas Rose (1999a) build on Michel Foucault (1991) to argue that such surveys are also tied to the practice of governmentality, which mobilize citizen bodies in the aim of the “conduct of conduct.” 3.  It is perhaps unsurprising that, given anthropology’s long entanglement with development expertise, that my main contribution to residents’ upgrade efforts was to participate in these processes of documentation. 4.  These dynamics reflect the tensions of what Nancy Peluso (1995) calls “counter-mapping,” whereby local groups take up mapping techniques as a means of pressing against state agendas. Following her, I argue that the kinds of inclusive countermapping CODI initiated reflects the broader tensions of inclusion explored throughout this book. 5.  Officially registered municipal community committees often differed from the CODI-organized Baan Mankong community committees. Whereas the former was elected and could contain people from outside the community, the latter was often organized by CODI staff. The former could access municipal funds; the latter organized the Baan Mankong apportioned funds and savings. Sometimes the official municipal leadership and the Baan Mankong leadership overlapped, but often these dual committees reflected competing loyalties within a settlement, leading to further conflicts. 6.  Giuseppe Bolotta offers a more detailed analysis of the relationship between gender and politics in the Thai slums (2017). Tamaki Endo also considers how gender distributes risk unevenly across Thailand’s urban poor (2014). 7.  Baan Mankong’s discourse around gender was rendered in binary terms, ignoring kathoey and other LGBTQI+ groups even though some community leaders identified that way. 8.  This analysis echoes both Sian Lazar’s (2004, 314) and Lamia Karim’s (2011,197–198) observations about the ways that the gendered rationalities of microcredit in Bolivia and Bangladesh, respectively, place burdens on poor women to participate based on their innate qualities (see also Sangtin Writers 2006). 9.  This point about “acceptable vulnerability” reflects Edward Murphy’s conceptualization of legalized slums as “sustainable peripheries” in Guatemala City (2004). 10.  As Marilyn Strathern notes, “audit culture” has proliferated under late-capitalism as discourses of good governance and transparency demand documentation, quantification and evidence to ensure that projects are corruption free (2000). As I show here, CODI’s audit culture had the effect of displacing responsibility downward as enchained audits sought to find the roots of corruption among residents’ documentary failures. 11.  These residents were also harder to reach during my research because they participated in local projects less and were more reluctant to talk with me. The few meetings I had with them were inevitably brief because they felt they had little to say in response to my interests because they were not actively participating.



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12.  This observation echoes Robert Werlin’s (1999) critique of slum upgrading, which observed how self-help strategies seek to minimize the role of the state, but often ignore the critical importance state agencies inevitably play in the process of managing projects and distributing funds. 13.  It seems that more attention should be paid to insurgent bureaucratic practices as sites of situated politics. Of course, such practices do not undo the kinds of formulations of governmental power that produce bureaucracies but they can contribute to the transformations of such institutions from the inside, or at least aid in forms of nominal resistance. As anyone who has spent time in a bureaucratic context (such as a university) knows, the best bureaucrats know the rules well enough to break them with tremendous efficacy. Bending the rules highlights points of contradiction and failure in apparently rational systems and offers opportunities for alternative practices to take shape within large organizations. CHAPTER 5: PAPER COMMUNITIES 1.  The Chumphae municipality facilitated the lease agreements with the Crown Property Bureau (CPB), the agency responsible for managing royal property and has used these communities to generate publicity for the small provincial town. All of the city’s projects were new construction projects and were created through processes different from those implemented in the railway settlements. As Serhat Ünaldi explains, the CPB is fundamental to generating and maintaining royal charisma (2016). Projects like those in Chumpae fit this model well (see also Porphant 2008, 2015). 2.  These timelines are also commonly used in the construction industry in Thailand. They are used to map out proposed project milestones against the actual progress of a project. In doing so, investors, contractors, and construction companies can adjust timelines and expenses vis-à-vis costs. Here, a task typically aimed at calculating profit and loss across the uncertain time span of a project was used to give shape to residents’ aspirations. 3.  Forms like these suggest the convergence of what Arjun Appadurai calls the “capacity to aspire” (2004) and projects of “governmentality from below” (2002). Here, I note the utility and unevenness of such emerging forms of governance. 4.  Planning scholar Diane Archer makes similar observations about Baan Mankong projects, demonstrating that in the cases she surveyed in Bangkok, residents often appreciated how the project’s upgrades improved their living environments, but also noting that such cosmetic improvements did little to secure their long-term tenure (2012). 5.  This was actually a surprisingly common story. Although not all domestic disputes arising over participation ended in divorce, a good number of residents

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along the tracks reported fighting with partners over how much time they spent on community work. Tamaki Endo also notes the complex ways community-based planning distributes labor and time (2014, 187). 6.  At the time of this study, 1,500 baht was roughly equivalent to $50. CHAPTER 6: UNITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 1.  During the swine flu (H5N1) epidemic of 2009, the network leaders wore masks and also made public health announcements throughout their march. 2.  Such assumptions have deep precedents in Thai development history. Community development handbooks from the 1960s often report that villagers failed to understand development initiatives because they had limited capacities for cooperation and often disagreed with one another (Suvitya 1965, 101). 3.  This bifurcation between the communal poor and the individualized middle classes, reflects Partha Chaterjee’s insight that the emergence of democracy and the rise “civil society” often results in a partition that allows the middle classes to escape politics while relegating the poor to a form of life that is deeply and inescapably political (2004; see also Marx 1967). Teresa Caldeira explores the ways new forms of urban segregation mirror and exacerbate these bifurcations (2000). 4.  According to the architects that designed CODIs headquarters, the building’s design was meant to reflect the organization’s “core culture” of communication, horizontality, and cooperation, with aesthetic flourishes like fake wood grained panels, an open communal plaza, and “top-hung” windows that reflected “the characteristics of urban housing” (Nithi 2010, 142). CHAPTER 7: BUILDING POLITICS 1.  Nicholas D’Avella notes the ways that the built environment is often a space for “concrete dreams” to manifest, linking the aspirations of builders with new lived possibilities (2019, 6). 2.  In addition to architecture, fashion is another example of the power of aesthetic practices to transform the social position of actors in the world (see Ferguson 2006; Keane 2005; Jones 2013). 3.  Jacques Rancière reminds us that the political itself is a “distribution of the sensible,” or the “a prioi forms determining what presents itself to sense experience” (2004, 13). Thus I attend to these home upgrades as more than home improvements but efforts to recraft the political itself. 4.  I take this ambiguity as a provocation to think beyond the dichotomies between what Sherry Ortner calls “Dark” and “Light” anthropologies (2016). Attention to the making of politics reframes questions related to both anthropologies of



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late-capitalism and anthropologies of the good (Robbins 2013). In the case of the former, one might ask, as many have , how do contested notions of the goods animate political economic projects like neoliberalism (see N. Rose 1999a, 1999b; Sopranzetti 2017; Trnka and Trundle 2017)? In the case of the later, how are disagreements over distinct visions of the good life fundamental to the irreducibly agonistic character of the political? My informants often hoped that a good life beyond politics existed, but this case suggests otherwise. Whether the idea of the good life beyond politics is possible or an elusive fiction that results from liberal modes of class bifurcation (Marx 1967; Chaterjee 2004) is an open question. 5.  Vernacular architecture in northeastern Thailand differs from central Thai architecture in some key respects. As Ruethai Chaichongrak and his colleagues point out, housing in the northeast reflected the “family’s life cycle, with its oscillations between stem and nuclear family” (2002, 165). Traditional housing in the northeast resembles a compound with a large house (huen yai, huen yai mī khong), where parents, children, and one son in-law all reside, until the daughter and sonin-law split and form their own nuclear family. The compound allows members of the new family time to gather material for the eventual construction of their own home. These compounds often have a number of other buildings, typically built in a more temporary style—often with woven walls and a central post sunk into the ground to support the roof. These temporary structures are used for relaxing, dining, and sometimes as the homes of new families before they begin construction on their own house. In this way, lifecycles are essential to the domestic aesthetic in the northeast. Shifts in the family’s structure become reflected in changing construction materials and spatial arrangement of structures (Formoso 1990; Askew 2003). Despite these regional specificities, the homes along the tracks rarely fully reflected the region’s endemic architectural styles. 6.  Architectural historian Mark Crinson notes that the root word of “vernacular” is verna, an Etruscan word that refers to a “domestic born slave” (2015). As I demonstrate throughout this chapter, this position of the internally excluded resonates strongly with the political critiques articulated by residents along the tracks and, even more forcefully, by the Red Shirts. It also reveals a kind of internal subordination latent in much discourse surrounding vernacular housing in Thailand. 7.  Anthropologists have recently begun to consider the aesthetic resonances of the concrete, aluminium, tile, and wood structures being built in Southeast Asia’s rapidly growing cities (Elinoff 2017; Schwenkle 2012; Harms 2012, 2016a, 2016b). 8.  Suntarī, suntarīya, suntarīyasāt are the Thai words that most closely approximate aesthetics as a special category of thought (Chua 2012, 30). Homeowners used words like nā suay (beautiful), nā yū (nice to occupy or livable), dū dī (good looking), suay ngām (beautiful), or mawsom (appropriate) to assess the quality of things and spaces.

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9.  In Thailand, failed construction projects have often decoupled local connection between ideas of development projects and moral progress (Johnson 2013, 2014). 10.  James Holston argues that democratization requires the poor to establish themselves on “common ground” with other better-off citizens. Such “commensurability depends on their sense that their status as citizen has an absolute, unconditional, equal worth in rights” (2008, 266). The question of citizenship is one not only of law but also of value, which is both absolute and relative to others. Following my interlocutors, I use this attention to likeness to consider the ways that they pursued commensuration through acts of politics and through the materiality of their houses. 11.  Holston and Arjun Appadurai distinguish formal citizenship—membership in the national community—from substantive citizenship—the qualities of citizenship experienced by different members (1998). 12.  Drawing on Charles Peirce’s notion of qualisigns, Webb Keane and others argue that qualities of sensation inhere themselves onto materials, embedding histories, ideologies, and meanings into materiality itself (Keane 2003, 2005; Fehérváry 2012, 2013; Jones 2010). The houses along the tracks—their bricks, tiles, tin, and wood—are thus “bundles” (Keane 2005, 188) of semiotic meanings and embodied sensations linking them to historically and culturally constructed moral and political hierarchies. 13.  Author’s translation. 14.  Khit’s experience echoes James Ferguson’s discussion of the relationship between home shapes and modernity in Lesotho (2006, 18). 15.  At the time of writing, 5 million baht was roughly $150,000. 16.  Prathān Thi’s claim seems to echo what Abdin Kusno has called “green governmentality,” which requires that urbanites begin to live “green” in order to gain social legitimacy (Kusno 2011; see also Agrawal 2005). However, here, residents used “greening” to make a political claim to proper belonging in the city. CHAPTER 8: CITY OF DISAGREEMENT 1.  In addition to the assassination attempt on Sondhi Limthongkul, April 2009 also saw large public demonstrations by Red Shirt protestors, who blocked off key roadways in Bangkok protesting the Abhisit government’s claims to power. 2.  I describe the complicated relationship between the NGO movement and the Yellow Shirts elsewhere (Elinoff 2014c; see also Ungpakorn 2009; Kenkij and Hewison 2009). Although the NGO movement’s position has also shifted over time, few NGOs support Thaksin. At the same time, they express disdain for the military and, more often than not, for politicians, political parties, and mainstream politics



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in general. Many in the NGO network signed letters in opposition to the 2014 coup have since maintained staunch opposition to the military government. 3.  Nung is referencing the 1992 Black May protests, which led to the ouster of Suchinda Kraprayoon and ushered in the longest period of democracy in Thai history until the ouster of Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006. 4.  I explain the new double-track project in chapter 9. 5.  As Tania Li explains, the question of politics raises both possibilities for disruption of power and for new kinds of formations of power (2019; see also Postero and Elinoff 2019). CHAPTER 9: POLITICAL LIFE IN THE DESPOTIC CITY 1.  As Harms (2011) notes, the periphery is always a site of productive a­ mbiguity— the uncertainty of urban edges is precisely what marks them as critical sites in fastgrowing urban contexts. 2.  By 2013, the media had noted that infrastructural investment, political influence, and environmental stability had shifted Isaan’s economic fortunes, bringing rising wages and new investment to the region (Carsten and Temphairojana 2013). 3.  Wolfram Schaffar (2018) and Kevin Hewison (2018) point out that Thailand’s pivot towards China was a result of a turn away from the United States after the 2014 coup. The overlap between China’s infrastructural projects and the Thai military’s political ambitions has made infrastructure building a key site of contemporary struggle in Thailand. 4.  Peera Songkünatham’s analysis of this convergence shows how local politics and national politics have converged through infrastructure (2019). 5.  The Thai legal NGO iLaw notes that Section 44 was deployed numerous times in relation to a wide variety of issues (“Report on the Exercise of Power under Section 44 of the Interim Constitution of Thailand,” November 18, 2015, https://​ ilaw.or.th/node/3938). 6.  These tactics were also potently deployed elsewhere, especially in Bangkok with new bans on street vending, the eviction of communities for infrastructure projects, the demolition of parts of Chinatown, and the destruction of the well-known Pom Mahakan community. 7.  Parts of these disagreements are described in chapters 5 and 6. 8.  Years after the lot across the street was cleared of the market that previously occupied it, signs were posted around the still-vacant space announcing the coming of “The Mall” to Khon Kaen. 9.  Peera Songkünnatham describes how the smart city discourse took up the name the Khon Kaen model, a name commonly associated with a widely reported incident in which weapons were seized from local Red Shirt activists who had

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a­ llegedly been planning to use them in an anti-government insurrection. The idea of the Khon Kaen model has even earlier roots, coined in 2010, to describe an action in which Khon Kaen–based Red Shirts stopped a train carrying troops from moving to Bangkok (Aljazeera 2010). Nevertheless, Peera’s analysis exposes the important political life of the smart city discourse.

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Index

Abhayuth Chantrabha, 65 Abhisit Vejjajiva, 20, 178, 213 aesthetics: of bureaucracy, 169–170; of citizenship, 30, 126, 156–157, 166, 173–175, 242n28; of fashion, 250n2 (chap. 7); of sound, 251n7; of sufficiency, 154, 156, 162–166; Thai words for, 251n8. See also vernacular architecture and design agency, 78–81, 141–142. See also collective mobilization; participatory political strategies; political belonging Anand, Nikhil, 56 anthropology of democracy, 242nn23–24, 250n4 (chap. 7) anthropology of design, 239n4 Apirak Kosayodhin, 178 Appadurai, Arjun, 24, 239n1 (chap. 1), 249n3, 252n11 Appel, Hannah, 56 Archer, Diane, 249n4 Arditi, Benjamin, 98–99 Arnstein, Sherry, 242n25 Asian Development Bank (ADB), 17, 200– 201, 202, 211 Askew, Marc, 246n3 aspiration, language of, 10, 239n1 (chap. 1) Assembly of the Poor, 64, 78. See also collective mobilization; slum movements auditing, 100–104, 122–126 awngkawn chumchon, 90 Baan Mankong Kāennakhorn project, 206, 207

Baan Mankong (Secure Housing) project, 4, 8; auditing for, 101–104, 122–126; Chumchon Sāmakhī Phatthanā, 85–88; Chumpae workshop on, 115–119; CODI’s management of, 10; community architects in, 104–107; community design process of, 94–100; design and participatory strategies of, 23, 25–27, 72, 206; disagreements on, overview, 31–37; intentions of, 12; mapping exercises of, 91–94; sufficiency aesthetics in, 154, 156, 162–166; thai khemkhāeng and, 178–180; types of, 88–89. See also CODI (Community Organizations Development Institute); railway settlements Baan Ua Athorn community, 225–226 bān din, 165 bān khư̄ mākwā bān, 154 Banyong Pongpanich, 240n7 bat prachāchon, 122 Baw Khaw Saw 1 (BKS1) bus station project, 210–212, 216, 227 Bello, Walden, 246n15 belonging. See political belonging Belt Road Initiative (China), 17, 202–203, 213 Bhumipol Adulyadej, King, 14, 21, 70, 154, 245n7 BKS1 bus station project, 210–212, 216, 227 Black May protests (1992), 253n3 (chap. 8) Bolotta, Giuseppe, 65 Boonma, 3, 125; on development, 159, 168;

283

284 index father’s jap jawng strategy, 50–51; gardens by, 2, 171–173, 175, 228; on government programs, 176–177; on happiness, 7; participation in FRSN, 4; struggle with SRT and, 76; training of, 133 Boonma’s Restaurant, 2–3, 6, 176 Brathan Thi, 71, 75, 252n16 Brazil, 71, 156, 239n2 bribery, 51, 52, 54, 113 Buddhism, 70, 72, 156, 242n22 Building Together Association, 64 Bunnell, Tim, 239n1 (chap. 1) bureaucracy: aesthetics of, 169–170; criticisms of, 111–115 bus station relocation project, 210–212, 216, 227 Cambodia, 202 canal projects, 208–209 capitalism, 17–18, 20, 202. See also consumerism; development; modernization Central Group (development company), 197, 201 Central Pattana Incorporated, 201 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 47 Channarong Buristrakul, 203 chaobān, as category, 58–59, 62, 67, 70, 74, 79, 88, 246n4 Chatterjee, Partha, 24, 250n3 (chap. 6) China, 1, 17, 197, 202–203, 213, 253n3 (chap. 9) Chit, 199, 219–222, 223, 229 Chiu, Helen, 53, 69 Chua, Lawrence, 242n28 Chulalongkorn, King, 44, 46, 244n1 chumchon, 55, 246n3 chumchon ēat, 74, 103 chumchon khemkhāeng, 105 Chumchon Lāklai, 120, 206, 226 Chumchon Patthanā Sithī Zone 2, 137, 147, 184 Chumchon Patthanā Sithī Zone 3, 58, 137, 139–143, 158, 169

Chumchon Phư̄anbān, 58, 75, 77, 100, 136, 144, 184 Chumchon Sāmakhī Phatthanā, 85–88, 91 Chumpae, 115–119, 181, 183, 249n1 citizen designs, as term, 10, 135, 155 citizenship: aesthetics of, 30, 126, 156–157, 166, 173–175, 242n28; FRSN on, 4–5; modeling of, 166–169; rights of, 30–31, 240n11; types of, 252nn10–11. See also political belonging City’s Edge community, 125 City Shrine community, 128–129, 182, 191, 206 CODI (Community Organizations Development Institute), 8; 2010–2014 shift of, 205–210; auditing for, 101–104, 122–126; Chumpae workshop by, 115–119; community architects of, 104–107; community design process by, 94–100; contentious relationship with other groups, 31–34, 133–134, 205–206; criticisms of, 76–77, 112–115, 133, 138, 149–150, 206– 207; establishment of, 71; headquarters of, 76, 250n4 (chap. 6); on kānawkbāeb chumchon, 12–13; mapping exercises by, 91–94; MOU agreement with SRT, 72–73; process description of, 89–90; protest events by, 180–181; as research focus, 34–36; on Revolution of the Slums, 26, 243n32; on upgrading, 153, 154, 158– 159, 163. See also Baan Mankong (Secure Housing) project; UCN (United Communities Network) collective mobilization, 60–68; changing conditions of, 210–215; cool vs. hot situations in, 135; of Isaan people, 17–18; slum movements, 18–19, 65–66, 72, 99, 135, 200; unforeseen outcomes of global, 239n2. See also agency; names of specific organizations; political belonging; protests; unity, as concept commoning and commons, as process, 243n31



index 285

Communist Party of Thailand, 49, 64, 65 community architects, 104–107 community committee, 90 community design, 12–13, 94–100 community governance, 131–132 community hall, 85, 86, 119, 120 Community Improvement Office, 53 community organizations, 90 Community Organizations Development Institute. See CODI Community School, 61 compressed time, 45, 229, 244n4 congested communities, as concept, 74, 103 Connors, Michael, 47 consumerism, 17, 240n12. See also debt contestations, 28–29, 33, 34, 43, 236, 243n35. See also Baan Mankong (Secure Housing) project; disagreements among Baan Mankong project, overview Cooke, Bill, 113 Cool Breeze Community, 115–119 cooperation, as concept, 90, 99, 132 counting exercises, 100–104 coups, 3, 5–7, 239n2 (prologue). See also military government and development projects CP Land, 202 Crinson, Mark, 251n6 Crown Property Bureau (CPB), 249n1 Cruikshank, Barbara, 24 Cunningham, Shea, 246n15 DANCED, 61–62, 71 D’Avella, Nicholas, 10 debt, 133, 170, 240n12. See also consumerism; money management democratic engagement in Khon Kaen, overview, 1–7 democratization, overview, 14–22, 252n10 Democrat Party, 182, 213 Denmark, 61–62, 71, 86 design and politics, overview, 11–14, 24–27, 109–110, 216, 243n33

despotic paternalism, 204 development: as concept, 85, 167, 204; economic forms of, 15, 17, 49–50, 67, 71, 178; methodology of, 153, 154, 158–159; military government and, 26, 204–205, 209– 215, 225, 228, 229; unfinished, 112, 161, 201–202, 225, 231; urban projects, 50–53, 61–62, 166, 197–205, 246n15; Vandergeest on, 209. See also kānphatthanā upgrading projects; vernacular architecture and design develop oneself, as concept, 87, 154, 159 disagreements among Baan Mankong project, overview, 31–37, 129–131. See also Baan Mankong (Secure Housing) project; harmony, cultivation of disease epidemic, 250n1 (chap. 6) dispossession, 51–52, 56, 88, 143–148, 199– 200, 253n1. See also evictions; names of specific communities and projects Domínguez Rubio, Fernando, 12 double standards, 6–7, 79, 187–188, 247n11 double-track rail project, 1, 3, 6, 191, 197, 203, 204, 212–213, 214, 217–220. See also railway system Duang Prateep Foundation, 64, 65 Eagleton, Terry, 174 earthen home, 165 East-West Economic Corridor (EWEC), 200–201, 202 economic collapse, 56, 60, 68–71, 144, 201– 202. See also money management economic development, 15, 17, 49–50, 67, 71, 178. See also money management Eighth National Economic and Social Development Plan (1997–2001), 69 electricity, 29, 56, 62, 86–87, 160, 167, 199. See also infrastructure Elephant’s Stomach community, 50, 53, 62 Endo, Tamaki, 250n5 Escobar, Arturo, 12 evictions, 51–52, 56, 143–148, 185, 217–218,

286 index 229. See also dispossession; names of specific communities exclusion, 102, 130–132, 139, 148–151, 165– 167, 185. See also evictions; periphery; political belonging fashion, 250n2 (chap. 7) Five Regions Land Project, 207–208 flooding: capital investment and, 201, 202, 208; prevention of, 4, 86, 111, 171, 219, 227, 247n1; settlement infrastructure and, 51, 62, 87, 219, 222, 227, 247n1 Fogué, Uriel, 12 Four Regions Slum Network. See FRSN Fourth National Economic Development Plan, 52 Frank (architect), 91–94, 109, 182 French colonial conflicts, 44 FRSN (Four Regions Slum Network): auditing by, 125; bureaucracy and, 114–115; CODI and, 134; community design phase and, 96; criticisms of, 188–191; disagreements with, 32; establishment of, 3, 65; leadership training by, 133– 136, 166–169; MOU agreement with SRT, 72–73; Rail’s Edge community in, 4; as research focus, 34–36. See also slum movements

Haberkorn, Tyrell, 241n14 Habermas, Jürgen, 98 Hankins, Joseph, 30 happiness, 6–7, 204, 218, 226, 228, 230 harmony, cultivation of, 5, 120–122, 129, 151. See also disagreements among Baan Mankong project, overview; unity, as concept Harms, Erik, 218, 229, 253n1 Herzfeld, Michael, 138, 241n17, 246n13 Hewison, Kevin, 15, 240n6, 253n3 (chap. 9) hierarchy, 22, 242nn22–23. See also monarchical rule high-speed rail project, 1, 3, 197, 202–213, 210, 213, 227. See also railway system Holm, David, 45 Holston, James, 252nn10–11 “a house is more than a house,” 154 housing and land market: in Bangkok, 202; in Khon Kaen, 17 housing improvements. See upgrading projects housing registration, 4, 62, 73, 100, 122 HSF (Human Settlements Foundation), 64 Hull, Matthew, 113 Human Development Centre, 64 Human Settlements Foundation (HSF), 64, 134

gardens: in Rail’s Edge Community, 2, 171– 173, 175, 228; SRT spatial regulations on, 43, 92; as upgrading project, 154, 160, 167, 169 gender and political participation, 6, 99–100, 248n8 geo-body, 241n19 Ghertner, Asher, 28 Giles, Ceinwen, 69 Golf Community, 159–162 grab and reserve land claim strategy, 50–51 See also jap jawng green governmentality, 252n16 Gupta, Akhil, 56–57, 113

iLaw (organization), 253n5 (chap. 9) independence, as concept, 169–171 independent development expert, as term, 241n15 India, 156, 202, 241n13 inequality, 15–16, 240n7 infrastructure: electricity, 29, 56, 62, 86–87, 160, 167, 199; local and national politics on, 192–193, 253n4 (chap. 9); roads, 45, 49; water, 29, 56, 63, 86–87, 199. See also under railway International Monetary Fund (IMF), 68 Irani, Lilly, 24 Isaan: economic and political overview of,



index 287

16–20, 44, 241n16, 241n20, 253n2; population overview of, 16, 240nn9–10. See also Khon Kaen region isara, 169–171 Jackson, Peter, 157 jāonāthī, 149. See also bureaucracy Japanese occupation, 45, 49 Japanese Recovery Grant, 70, 137 jap jawng settlements, 50–54, 57, 199, 226, 245n12 Johnson, Andrew, 202, 241n17 Jones, Gavin, 240n5 Jose, George, 202 Kakizaki, Ichiro, 45 kāmmakān chumchon, 85, 90–91 kānawkbāeb chumchon, 12–13, 94–100 kān mī sūan rūam, 72 kānphatthanā, 18, 202. See also development kānrūammư̄, 90, 99, 132 Kasikorn Bank, 240n11 Khāeng, 120–122 Khem, 51, 141–142, 186 Khit (architect), 91–94, 109, 165, 252n14 Khon dī, 21–22 khon jon, as category, 64, 70, 246n4 Khon Kaen Central Plaza, 197, 198–199, 201 Khon Kaen region: history of modernization in, 47–48, 50, 245n9; railway settlements in, 50–52, 81. See also Isaan; names of specific locations Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network. See KKSRN Khon Kaen Think Tank (KKTT), 203 Khun Sompop Bunnag, 60–61 khwai, 241n20 khwāmpawpīang. See sufficiency aesthetics khwāmthaotīam, 13, 30, 252n10 kin mư̄ang, 53–54, 57, 246nn13–14 kin ngōen, 76, 126 KKSRN (Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network), 3; auditing by, 125; CODI and, 134; com-

munity design phase and, 96; criticisms of, 180–183; history of, 35; leases with SRT by, 128, 144; MOU agreement with SRT and, 102; policing by, 131; political representation by, 80, 227–228; Rail’s Edge community in, 4; as research focus, 34, 35–36; upgrading by, 125; Zone 3 conflict and, 139–145 Kosa Tower, 201–202 Kothari, Uma, 113 Kusno, Abdin, 252n16 labor migration, 20–21, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56–57, 68 Land and Houses (company), 202 land sharing project type, 88–89 languages, 240n9 Lao culture and population, 16 Lefebvre, Henri, 44 Li, Tania, 27, 107, 253n5 (chap. 8) likeness, 13, 30, 252n10 Lop, 111–113, 120, 221–222 Mae Dam, 129, 182, 183 Mae Hawm: on development as methodology, 159, 229–230; as FRSN board member, 136; Khāeng and, 120–122; on NGOs, 76, 77, 78–79; Nung’s criticisms of, 188–192; on political agency and citizenship, 79–80, 197–200; research support by, 34–35; on Sapda, 147; splinter with UCN, 58; as UCN leader, 71, 85–88, 120, 137–138; on Zone 3 leases, 140. See also UCN (United Communities Network) Mae Jan, 200 Mae Mu, 160–161 Mae Ni, 161–162 Mae Noi, 143 Mae Nong, 115–116, 181 mall development, 197, 198–199, 201 Mall Group, 211 Marcus, George, 32

288 index materiality, 52, 155, 162–163, 167–169, 252n12 Mathews, Andrew, 127 migrant labor, 20–21, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56–57, 68. See also railway settlements military coups, 3, 5–7, 239n2 (prologue), 253n2 (chap. 8) military government and development projects, 26, 204–205, 209–215, 225, 228, 229. See also development millenarian revolts, 44, 244n2 Mills, Mary Beth, 17 Moderation Society (MOSO), 187–188 modernization, 44–49. See also capitalism; development monarchical rule, 14, 25, 44–46, 242n22, 244n1, 245n7 money management: accusations of corruption in, 7, 78, 120–121, 126, 137, 138, 197, 199, 208, 222; debt, 133, 170, 240n12; economic development, 15, 17, 49–50, 67, 71, 178; transparency in, 66, 114, 124–126, 169–170, 204, 248n10. See also economic collapse; economic development; savings groups MOSO (Moderation Society), 187–188 Mouffe, Chantal, 13, 193 mư̄ang, as term, 246n13. See also kin mư̄ang mūbān, 46, 55, 246n4 Müller, Birgit, 27 municipal utilities. See infrastructure Murphy, Kevin, 11 Nader, Laura, 151 nak phatthanā issara, 241n15 Nam, Sylvia, 202 National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), 5, 204–205, 208, 213 National Housing Authority (NHA), 53, 66, 69, 214, 225 national ID card, 122 Nattapoolwat, Sakaunee, 15 Nattawut Usavagovitwong, 104, 105

NCPO (National Council for Peace and Order), 5, 204–205, 208, 213 NESDB report, 54–56 new community construction project type, 88, 89 NGOs (nongovernmental organizations): criticisms of, 76–79, 187–192; Paw Tham­r ong on, 58–59; slum movements and, 18–19, 63–65; as term or group, 241n15. See also names of specific organizations NHA. See National Housing Authority (NHA) Nonini, Donald, 26 Nung: at celebration, 128; community work by, 125, 227; criticisms on community organizations, 187–192; home upgrades of, 153–154, 158, 169–170; struggle with SRT and, 76; training of, 133 Ortner, Sherry, 250n4 (chap. 7) ot brīao wai kin wān, 59, 246n1 PAD (People’s Alliance for Democracy), 21, 115, 121, 177, 179, 183, 188 parliament building design, 25, 239n3 participatory political strategies, 23–27, 71–72, 179, 247n8. See also agency; Baan Mankong (Secure Housing) project; collective mobilization Paw Kan, 133, 146–147, 148, 149, 167 Paw Nokhuk: on CODI and UCN, 149–150; as political leader, 41, 77, 133; on regulatory lines, 41–42, 51; on strategies of protest, 75, 76, 147, 148, 149, 150, 185–186 Paw Rasri, 126 Paw Sabiang, 207 Paw Saksri, 85, 91, 93 Paw Singto, 71, 75, 77, 136–138, 190–191 Paw Sri, 147 Paw Thamrong: on Chumchon Phư̄anbān, 136–139; as community leader, 184–185, 190; as community trainer, 133, 170; on



index 289

resident lives, 58–59, 60; splinter from UCN of, 77; SRT negotiations with, 71, 75, 76, 140. See also KKSRN (Khon Kaen Slum Revival Network) PDRC (People’s Democratic Reform Committee), 21, 33 Pechaladda Pechpakdee, 203 Peera Songkünatham, 253n4 (chap. 9), 253n9 People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), 21, 115, 121, 177, 179, 183, 188 People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), 21, 33 People’s Organization for Development, 64 periphery, 199–200, 218–223, 229–230, 253n1. See also exclusion permanent housing registration, 4 phāenphatthanā, 118–119, 227, 249n2 phang chumchon, 94 phāsā Isaan, 240n9 Phathan Thi, 133 phatthanā, as concept, 85, 167, 204. See also development phatthanā tua ēng, 87, 154, 159 Pheu Thai Party, 5, 213. See also Yingluck Shinawatra Phorphant Ouyyanont, 200 P’Jin, 136 P’Ko, 58–59, 61, 135 Plan International, 64 P’Lu, 116 Poh, Li, 246n15 policing, 27, 131, 188 political belonging, 8–11, 27–31, 151–152; consumerism and, 17; development of a, 173–176, 252n16; of Isaan people, 17–18; Kasikorn Bank on, 240n11; local and national, 192–193, 253n4 (chap. 9); Red Shirt movement on, 6, 10, 13, 19, 176– 177; through design, 109–110. See also agency; citizenship; collective mobilization; exclusion Pom Mahakan community, 253n6 Pong (UCN member), 199

poor people, as category, 64, 70, 246n4, 247n10, 250n3 poor politics, supporting governance for, 133–136, 180 prabprung. See upgrading projects Prajak Kongkirati, 204 P’Rak, 135, 154, 167, 170 Prasert, 111–113 Prathan Thi, 77, 125, 128–129, 136, 143, 173, 190, 229 Prayuth Chan-ocha, 5, 6, 204, 205 private home ownership project, 225–226 protests: (1992) Black May, 253n3 (chap. 8); (2009) Red Shirt movement, 180–181, 252n1; (2010) Red Shirt movement, 6, 19–20, 187, 188, 233, 241n16, 241n20; (2015) bus station relocation, 210–212, 216, 227; Khāeng on effectiveness of, 120– 122; by UCN, 107–109, 150–151. See also agency; collective mobilization; political belonging public sphere, 98–99 P’Waen, 41, 60–63, 76–77 Rabe, Paul, 88–89 radial polity, 45–46 Rail’s Edge Community, 3; gardens of, 2, 171– 173, 175, 228; lease with SRT, 4. See also Baan Mankong (Secure Housing) project railway settlements, 1–4, 42, 50–53, 81. See also Baan Mankong (Secure Housing) project; names of specific communities railway system, 9, 17; double-track project, 1, 3, 6, 191, 197, 203, 204, 212–213, 214, 217–220; establishment of, 44–49, 244n1; high-speed project, 1, 3, 197, 202–203, 210, 213, 227; monarchical rule and, 245n7; space-time compression due to, 45, 229, 244n4. See also SRT (State Railway of Thailand) Rak Phatthanā Baw Khaw Saw 1 (Love and Develop the Bus Station) group, 211 ranāeng, 160

290 index Rancière, Jacques, 26, 27–28, 130, 193, 250n3 (chap. 7) Ratchaprasong incident (2010), 6, 19–20, 187, 188, 233, 241n16, 241n20 rathaniyom cultural reforms, 46 re-blocking, 88–89 recycling center, 86, 93 Red Shirt movement: 2009 protests by, 180– 183, 252n1; 2010 protests and deaths, 6, 19–20, 187, 188, 233, 241n16, 241n20; Boonma on, 176–177; on double standards, 6–7, 188, 247n11; on equality, 31; on political belonging, 10, 13, 19; reputation of, 98; targeting of, 7. See also Thaksin Shinawatra religion, 64, 247n6 renunciation, 242n22 Revolution of the Slums (CODI), 26, 243n32 Reynolds, Craig, 67 Rigg, Jonathan, 15 rights, 30–31, 240n11. See also citizenship rituals in building projects, 156. See also vernacular architecture and design road development, 45, 49. See also railway system Robinson, Jennifer, 17 Rose, Nikolas, 70 Roy, Ananya, 12, 166 rūam jai, phatthanā, samākhī, 167 Rubio, Domínguez, 26 Ruethai Chaichongrak, 251n5 Saito, Yuriko, 156 Sakkarin Sapu, 104, 105 sālā chumchon, 85, 86, 119, 120 samachā khon jon. See Assembly of the Poor sāmakhī, 5, 85, 129, 132, 150–152. See also harmony, cultivation of Samchaiy Sresunt, 246n4 Sansiri, 201–202 Sapda, 143–151, 184, 186 Saphāp Ongkawn Chumchon (SOC), 102 Sarit Thanarat, 49

sathābanik chumchon, 104–107 see also Community Architects savings groups, 19; in Chumpae, 116; CODI and, 89, 90, 138, 208, 224; of UCDO, 66, 67; UCN theft from, 197. See also money management sawng matrathān, 6–7, 79, 187–188, 247n11 Schaffar, Wolfram, 253n3 (chap. 9) Searle, Llerena, 241n13 Secure Housing project. See Baan Mankong (Secure Housing) project sēthakit pawpīang, 21, 70, 154, 160, 213 Seventh National Economic and Social Development Plan 1992–1996 (NESDB report), 54–55 Sharma, Aradhana, 113 Shatkin, Gavin, 202 Shelby, Hayden, 65, 72 Shorty, 108, 119, 120, 181–182, 199, 220–225, 229, 230 SIF. See social investment funds (SIFs) Simone, Abdou Maliq, 30 Sims, Christo, 25 Siripol, Han, 63 sitthi. See rights situated politics, 107 slum movements, 18–19, 61, 63–66, 72, 99, 135, 200. See also FRSN (Four Regions Slum Network) Small Scale Farmers Assembly, 63 Smart City discourse, 203, 213, 253n9 social investment funds (SIFs), 69–70, 76 Somchai Pathanaranunth, 63–64, 247n5 Somrudee Nicrowattanayingyong, 52 Somsook Boonyabancha, 25–26, 66, 97, 163 Sondhi Limthongkul, 115, 116, 252n1 Sopranzetti, Claudio, 23 space-time compression, 45, 229, 244n4 spatial mapping, 34, 41, 73–75, 91–94, 103 spatial regulations, 41–43, 76, 247n9 SRT (State Railway of Thailand): 1999 protests against, 71; citizens of, 56–57; debt of, 54; dispossession by, 1, 51–52, 56, 144; eco-



index 291

nomic collapse and, 60, 68; garden regulations by, 43, 92; history of railway system, 44–49; leases and rental agreements with, 4, 41, 72–73, 86–87, 100–104, 128, 141– 148, 159; NESDB report on, 54–56; spatial regulations of, 41–43, 153, 247n9. See also railway settlements; railway system State Railway of Thailand. See SRT Streckfuss, David, 16 Strong Thailand (thai khemkhāeng) program, 178–180 suan huam, 72. See also participatory political strategies Suchinda Kraprayoon, 253n3 (chap. 8) Suchman, Lucy, 12, 239n4 sufficiency aesthetics, 154, 156, 162–166. See also vernacular architecture and design sufficiency economy, 21, 70, 154, 160, 213 Sufficiency Economy Fund, 184 Suradech Taweesaengsakultha, 203 Suwit Watnoo, 3, 65, 77 swine flu epidemic, 250n1 (chap. 6) Swyngdouw, Erik, 23 T1 zone, 108, 116, 120, 124 T3 zone, 111, 120, 172, 199, 217, 221 T5 zone, 41, 121, 143–144, 147, 148 T7 zone, 108, 119, 120, 181, 199, 219, 220 T9 zone, 136, 199, 200 Tai language group, 240n9 Tambiah, Stanley, 45 taxation, 15 thabīan bān thāworn, 4, 62, 100, 122 thai khemkhāeng program, 178–180 “Thai-style democracy.” See democratization, overview Thak Chaloemtiarana, 204 Thaksin Shinawatra: coup against, 19, 239n2 (prologue); Isaan region and, 16–17; policies of, 19, 23–24; supporters of, 5, 176. See also Red Shirt movement thammaraja, 25

thaothīam, 30 Thawng, 2, 3, 6, 7, 171 thēsaphibān administration, 46, 245n6 Thirasak Teekayuphan, 203, 214, 216 Thongchai Winichakul, 241n19 thawng chāng community, 50, 53, 62 “thoroughgoing urbanization,” 240n5 timelines, construction, 118–119, 227, 249n2 Tran, Allen, 241n18 transparency in community money management, 66, 114, 124–126, 169–170, 199, 204, 248n10 Ua Athorn housing project, 225–226 UCDO (Urban Communities Development Office), 66, 67, 69–70, 71 UCN (United Communities Network): criticisms of, 149, 180–183, 188–191, 197– 200; history of, 35, 58, 63; mapping exercises of, 93; MOU agreement with SRT, 72–73; political representation by, 80; protests organized by, 107–109, 150–151; as research focus, 34–36. See also CODI (Community Organizations Development Institute); Mae Hawm Udorn, 100–104 unfinished development projects, 112, 161, 201–202, 225, 231. See also development; upgrading projects United Communities Network. See UCN United Development Community, 85–88, 91 United States, 15, 22, 49, 239n2 (chap. 1), 246n4, 253n3 (chap. 9) unity, as concept, 5, 85, 129, 132, 150–152. See also collective mobilization; harmony, cultivation of “unity, development, harmony,” 167 upgrading projects: Archer on, 249n4; arguments for, 25–26; CODI on, 153, 154, 158–159; documentation on, 122–126, 169–170; in Golf Community, 159–162; of Nung, 153–154; types of, 88–89; unfinished, 112, 161, 201–202, 225, 231; Werlin

292 index on, 225, 249n12. See also Baan Mankong (Secure Housing) project; development Urban Communities Development Office (UCDO), 66, 67, 69–70, 71, 89 urban development projects, 50–53, 61–62, 166, 197–205, 227–228, 246n15. See also development; railway system Urban Poor Development Fund, 66–67, 69 US Agency for International Development, 53 utilities. See infrastructure Van Esterik, Penny, 157 Veerayooth Kanchoochat, 204 vernacular architecture and design, 154, 155– 158, 160, 166–168, 251nn5–6 Vietnam, 229 village, as category, 46, 55, 246n4 Village Fund, 184 villagers, as category, 58–59, 62, 67, 70, 74, 79, 88, 246n4 Villagers’ Forum (2009), 180–183

wāethī chaobān, 180–183 Walker, Andrew, 72, 74–75 water utilities, 29, 56, 63, 86–87, 199. See also infrastructure wealth gap, 15–16, 240n7 Werlin, Robert, 225, 249n12 Wi (UCN member), 112–113 Wilder, Gary, 245n8 women’s political participation, 6, 99–100, 248n8 World Bank: SIFs by, 69–70, 76; on SRT debt, 54 yāng mai set. See unfinished development projects Yeh, Rihan, 30 Yellow Shirt movement. See PAD (People’s Alliance for Democracy) Yingluck Shinawatra, 3, 21, 201, 213. See also Pheu Thai Party

About the Author

Eli Elinoff is senior lecturer of cultural anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. He received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 2013. Before moving to New Zealand, he was jointly appointed as a postdoctoral fellow in Asian Urbanisms at the Asia Research Institute and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on the intersection between political and environmental change in Southeast Asian cities. Elinoff has been published in a variety of academic journals, including South East Asia Research, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Contemporary Southeast Asia, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, City, Anthropological Theory, and Acme. He has also written for online venues like the New Mandala, Cultural Anthropology, and Teach 3.11. He is a founding member of the editorial collective behind Commoning Ethnography.