Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Bangkok's Two Centers: Status, Space, and Consumption in a Millennial Southeast Asian City

Bangkok's Two Centers: Status, Space, and Consumption in a Millennial Southeast Asian City Despite Bangkok's current incarnation as a globalized city of shopping malls and skyscrapers, indigenous concepts of power and space emphasizing center and hierarchy continue to pervade status differentiation in everyday social life. This is evident in tensions in the spatial‐symbolic relations between Bangkok's politico‐religious “old city” in Rattanakosin and the newer downtown consumption hub which emerged around the locales of Siam and Ratchaprasong, and highlights how urban and social transformations engendered by neoliberal market forces and embodied in downtown Bangkok's modern, consumerist milieu have mapped onto and exacerbated cultural logics of hierarchy drawn from much older notions of urban power and privilege in Southeast Asia. This produced modes of inscribing socio‐economic inequality into space and a striking culture of status display uniquely shaped by the intersection of modern capitalism and Bangkok's distinctive culture and history of indigenous urbanism and suggests that understandings of space, power, and consumption in today's cities may benefit from a less Western‐centric and more regionally sensitive conceptual framework. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png City & Society Wiley

Bangkok's Two Centers: Status, Space, and Consumption in a Millennial Southeast Asian City

City & Society , Volume 23 – Sep 1, 2011

Loading next page...
 
/lp/wiley/bangkok-s-two-centers-status-space-and-consumption-in-a-millennial-Rcp1lkxxa6

References (23)

Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
© 2011 by the American Anthropological Association
ISSN
0893-0465
eISSN
1548-744X
DOI
10.1111/j.1548-744X.2011.01056.x
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Despite Bangkok's current incarnation as a globalized city of shopping malls and skyscrapers, indigenous concepts of power and space emphasizing center and hierarchy continue to pervade status differentiation in everyday social life. This is evident in tensions in the spatial‐symbolic relations between Bangkok's politico‐religious “old city” in Rattanakosin and the newer downtown consumption hub which emerged around the locales of Siam and Ratchaprasong, and highlights how urban and social transformations engendered by neoliberal market forces and embodied in downtown Bangkok's modern, consumerist milieu have mapped onto and exacerbated cultural logics of hierarchy drawn from much older notions of urban power and privilege in Southeast Asia. This produced modes of inscribing socio‐economic inequality into space and a striking culture of status display uniquely shaped by the intersection of modern capitalism and Bangkok's distinctive culture and history of indigenous urbanism and suggests that understandings of space, power, and consumption in today's cities may benefit from a less Western‐centric and more regionally sensitive conceptual framework.

Journal

City & SocietyWiley

Published: Sep 1, 2011

There are no references for this article.