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Tasting thePeriphery:Bangkok’sAgri- andAquacultural Fringe

Brian McGrath and Danai Thaitakoo survey the ecosystem of Bangkok,‘an amphibious city’ situated on a silted tidal delta. Influenced byWestern planning ideas, the major roadways and infrastructureprojects constructed since the Second World War remain out ofkilter with local conditions. It is as if a consumer society, networked to global media and transport links, has been ‘superimposed on a wet rice-cultivating landscape’.

AboveInfrared ASTER satellite imageryreveals an urbanised areastretching like a giant starfishacross the richly vegetateddelta. Dark-red patches on thewest bank are fruit orchards,while the blue patches alongthe coast are prawn fields. The mixed-coloured mosaic on the eastern bank depicts the pattern of urbanising ricefields.

The human mouth is a minutely receptivelandscape consisting of folded bumpy surfacesof papillae tightly embedded with cellularaggregations called taste buds. Each bud opensa pore to the watery oral environment, and thesense of taste is the ability to recognise andrespond to various chemical molecules and ionsdissolved in this mix.1 Taste evolved to sustainlife by enticing nourishment and detectingpoisons or spoiled food. Yet enjoyable flavoursbecome ends in themselves, and our mouthscommunicate the pleasures of taste through thesocial act of language with its rich metaphorsand associations.

The word taste is employed in English as anoun for a high sensibility in art or culture, but in Thai, chim is used as a verb to allegoricallyexpress a zest for life – the impulse to try orexperience something new or novel. Reconsider,then, taste as a key metaphor in urban design,not as a sense of refinement or class, but as anexpression of élan vital, the will to encounterurban life as varied novel sensory experiences.Attention to taste measures material encountersbetween bodies and environments, and connectsour inner and outer worlds. Tasting the city,therefore, links individual sensation, perceptionand impulse with social relations andenvironmental awareness. This essay tastes theperiphery of Bangkok as a call for the urban tobe tasted rather than to define urbane taste.2

The Bight of BangkokBetween May and October, a slight shift in atmosphericcurrents brings monsoon rains northeast from theAndaman Sea to Thailand. Seasonal cycles ofprecipitation rather than extremes of winter andsummer bring rhythm to life just above the equator,putting into motion human cycles of planting,harvesting and migration harmonised with water flows.Siamese urbanity evolved from intimate association with climatic, topographic and hydrological conditions.Upland mountain rainforests release their sacredmixture through river tributaries converging on wetrice-cultivating capitals. From 1350, amphibiousAyutthaya rose to dominate the region from theconfluence of three rivers. An island garden city ofpalaces, monasteries, forests, orchards and paddies,the city retained six months of rain for the following six dry ones. The fluvial geography was overcoded by a feudal tributary power system as Ayutthaya waspositioned to receive political tribute from upstreamvassals and lesser kings. Auratic power reflected backto village hinterlands from the King of Siam, Lord of the Earth, Forests and Waters, invisible yet all powerful,within the Inner Court of the Grand Palace.3

In 1767, Ayutthaya was destroyed by the Burmese,and a new capital city was built first at Thonburi andthen moved across the river to Bangkok, downstreamon a sparsely populated plain near the mouth of theChao Phraya River. The meandering river formsnumerous oxbows and a network of minor waterways inthe flat delta, creating a distributory as well as tributary

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AboveThe surface Eastern Ring Roadwith its two parallel-frontageroad bridges above major trunkcanals creates covered newpublic spaces shaded by aconcrete ceiling that vibrateswith the constant flow of traffic.

water circulatory system. As a vast, flat waterreception and dispersion area, the Chao PhrayaDelta is ideally suited for the wet cultivation ofrice, yet was inhospitable to human habitation asrainy and dry cycles created either a vast,shallow lake or a parched desert landscape. Yet the lower delta was populated even in theAyutthaya era, as kings constructed shortcutcanals and an inter-river transportation anddefence network that became settlement sites.Scattered farming villages extended along waterytentacles, creating an urban/agricultural networkcentred on the royal city, contained within lushgardens on raised walled and moated islands.4

Amphibious Bangkok must be savouredslowly when approached from the river’s mouth.Before industrialised prawn-farming, mangroveforests shielded a vast biodiversity of shore birds,crab-eating monkeys, fishing cats, mudskipperfish, sea turtles, dolphins, manatees, otters anda host of fish, molluscs and crustaceans.5 Thecity sprawls further upstream amidst the flat,silted tidal delta, unfolding along themeandering course of the river with its countlesswandering inlets feeding irrigated orchards andpaddies shielded beyond the shady water edges.

Contemporary life in a newly industrialisedcountry follows the less predictable fluctuationsof global capital. Thailand’s strategic Cold Waralliance with the US catapulted the kingdom’seconomy to a world stage, and as a result new

products, ideas and desires from abroad now mix freelywith ancient practices, myths and rites. When riceprices fall, and word of jobs in Bangkok reaches smallsubsistence agricultural settlements, economicmigrations trickle, and then flood, to factories radiatingfrom the capital city. Now, media flows upstream, andtelevision infiltrates nearly every village household inthe kingdom. Bangkok broadcasts images andmessages much more rapidly and viscerally to the TV

screens of the rural majorities than news and lawsreached them from the kings of the past, producingmore impulsive and less predictable responses.

Cutting through greater Bangkok’s densely cultivatedfringe are new, monumental multilane expresswaysspeeding human migrations and material distributions.Evident from satellite imagery, this emerging networkconstitutes an entirely new order: a networkedconsumer society superimposed on a wet-rice-cultivating landscape. Following neither the web ofwaterways, nor the radiating ribbons of older canalsand roads, these limited access routes representlimited access, hyper movement, just-in-timedistribution and high-velocity bypass. Linking these new superhighways is the nearly completed Outer Ring Road, a possible route from which to tasteBangkok’s agri- and aquacultural periphery.

Greater Bangkok’s new ring road is a circuitingelliptical panorama offering new urban stories andinterfaces between the Bight of Bangkok and theoutskirts of ancient Ayutthaya. Historically, southeastAsian cities have been oriented around great

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AboveThe limited-access elevatedSouthern Ring Road has yet tobridge the Chao Phraya River,and thus offers an extendedterrace from which to overlookBangkok’s changing land-coverpattern.

nonperspectival circumambulatory narrativearchitectural spaces. Bas-reliefs in theambulatory colonnades of Angkor Wat depictfigures churning the great mythological ‘sea of milk’ – the Siamese version of the IndicRamayana epic unfolds along cloistered muralsat Bangkok’s royal Temple of the EmeraldBuddha.

We conducted our circumambulatoryexcursion on the Outer Ring Road in August, atthe beginning of the monsoon rains that coincidewith the start of Buddhist Lent. Millions of Thaisperformed the ritual vientien, circuiting thesacred chedi at their local temples three timesunder the full moon while we circuited the ringtwice in our van. Our tour began near the site of the new Suwannabhumi Airport, named forthe golden age of southeast Asian civilisationbefore European colonisation. The airport willreterritorialise the region, reconnecting ancientcapitals divided by the Cold War – Pagan inMyanmar, Luang Prabang in Laos and SiemReap in Cambodia – resituating Bangkok’s agri- and aquacultural fringe within touristcircuits of southeast Asia.

Stops on the Ring RoadWhile Bangkok’s Outer Ring Road rationalisesregional truck and auto transportation, andprovides access to an array of peripheralfactories, shopping centres and housing estates,it also provides new perceptions and experiencesof the city as it passes marginalised canal-basedagri- and aquacultural landscapes. Bangkok’sring cobbles together three highway types: thenewly completed limited-access surface Eastern

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RightStops along the Outer RingRoad include fish farms, foundpublic space under the highwayalong west bank meanders, andeast bank trunk canals, ricefields, mixed orchards andprawn fields.

BelowThe Bung Tong Fishing Hutserves freshwater-pond fishimmediately adjacent to theOuter Ring Road, but is onlyaccessible via an elaboratedetour off the frontage road andthrough an industrial estate anda golf-course residentialdevelopment.

Ring; the already urbanised unlimited-accesssurface Western Ring; and the incompletelimited-access elevated Southern Ring. Thethree sections situate relationships of traffic toland differently, and present to the high-speedtraveller a varied patchwork of geomorphic andhydrological properties shaped by historicalhuman interventions.

The Outer Ring passes freshwater fish pondsin the low-lying area above the dyked easternindustrial seaboard, the vast irrigated rice fields of Rangsit to the northeast, and polderedmixed-fruit orchards that cling to the westbank’s meandering river banks, and skirtsnorth of the western seaboard’s vast coastalprawn fields. From satellite imagery, the fish,

rice, fruit and prawn production areas are distinct andhomogeneous, but field examination on the groundreveals a surprisingly heterogeneous pattern with manylocal disturbances.

The East Bank: Fish Farms, Wet Rice Cultivation and Subdivisions Driving counterclockwise from the surface EasternRing, we initially cross the perennial wet zone directlyeast of central Bangkok. This low-lying inland areacomprises freshwater streams, swamps and fish-farming ponds, and the enormous construction site ofBangkok’s new airport. Surviving fish farms near thehighway have added restaurants and fishing pavilionsalong ponds to supplement their income. However, this section of the highway has limited access and is

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TopAsian open bills, migrating fromBangladesh, find sanctuary inthe rice fields. They assistfarmers by eating the invasivegolden snail, which feeds onrice seedlings.

RightAn old orchard along KanlapaPhruk Road – a new unlimited-access surface highway linkingthe Western Ring Road toRatchapruek Road – now has avariety of market vegetablesand herbs growing: lemongrass, ginger, spring onions,lettuce and other leafy greens.

barricaded behind a double embankment, largedrainage gulley and a fenced frontage road. Ahungry traveller or weekend fisherman can findaccess to these facilities only by taking elaboratedetours and U-turns through industrial estatesand golf-course communities.

To the north is Minburi, the site of LucienHanks’ landmark human-ecosystem study of the Ban Chan rice-growing community. Hankscarefully documented extended-familyhouseholds who responded to changing marketand technological conditions through an intricatefeedback system, moving from shifting, tobroadcasting and, finally, to transplanting riceduring Thailand’s first period of modernisation.Hanks’ study demonstrated how village-leveldecisions affected environmental change inconcert with shifting market trends.6 The present landscape is much more fragmentedand heterogeneous, with many methods ofcultivation and income-producing activitiescompeting, and various stages of planting,growth and harvesting coexisting. Historicalevolution and seasonal rhythms have collapsedinto a mixed-time image of lapsed land-usefragmentation and superposition.

The endless flat plane of Rangsit consists of 200,000 hectares with no large rivers ortopographic relief. In the 1890s, Dutchhydrologist Homan van der Heide, the firstdirector-general of Siam Land, Canals andIrrigation Co, rationally planned the diversion of water through 20 straight north–south canals,30 to 40 kilometres long and spaced at 2kilometres, with smaller numbered irrigationcanals repeated at 1-kilometre intervals. Largeareas were opened up for habitation as feedercanals assured a steady water supply for newlydeveloped paddy fields. In the early 20th century,the Bangkok periphery became the primary ricebowl for the region, and the kingdom’s primaryeconomic base. With global food shortagesfollowing the Second World War, World Bankloans allowed the completion of van der Heide’splan of a modern irrigation system, resulting in a human-controlled water system wheregrowing cycles could be in sync with marketsrather than seasonal precipitation.7

Now, however, the emerald-green carpet of

Rangsit’s fields extends in narrow rows chequered witha grey pattern of new housing and factory estates.Developers have planted these crowded single-familyhomes and factories in dense rows on the kingdom’smost fertile soil. Along Canal Road 3, fishing nets aresuspended over the waterway, and narrow woodenpedestrian bridges cross to rice-farming villages hiddenbehind jungle-like vegetation. A few kilometres down theroad, a giant helium balloon marks the entrance to a newhousing estate perpendicular to the canal. A securityguard stiffly salutes outside a gated estate raised above,and walled from, the surrounding paddies. Inside, a fauxNew-England-common green lawn is lined with concretecolonial homes with terracotta roofs in four varieties.crowded together within the former rice plot.

The West Bank: Crossing the Meanders – Orchards,Gardens and Gated CommunitiesThe older, unlimited-access Western Ring Road isalready urbanised – an endless strip of malls, factoriesand shops. The newly constructed middle ring,Ratchapruek Road, is a better route from which toexamine the thickly vegetated orchards along the rivermeanders. This area is a poldered flood-controlreservoir, where excess water from the city centre isdischarged. A west bank orchard and vegetable gardenconsists of a corduroy pattern of rows of small dredgedcanals alternating with built-up mounds. The layeredtree canopy of a deltaic mixed orchard consists ofspindly betel nut and sugar palms at the highest level,blocking little sunlight from the next layer of coconutpalm, durian, mango, pomelo, jackfruit, rose apple, starfruit, mangosteen, guava, rambutan, rose apple, bananatrees and orange saplings. The lowest layer consists ofvegetables or herbs, benefiting from the filtering of the

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TopOverview of coastal prawnfields. Changing Western tastesand diets resulted in a hugespike in prawn consumption inthe 1980s and Thailand is now aleading exporter of prawns aswell as rice, resulting inmangrove deforestation of thewestern coastal zone.

BelowAlong the Southern Ring,abandoned mixed-fruit orchardsand coconut groves revert towild grasslands awaiting newhousing-estate development.

strong tropical sun. However, all over the westbank, this cool, aromatic and verdant mix, thegreen lung of greater Bangkok, is rapidly beingreplaced by upmarket gated housing estatestaking advantage of the attraction of a lushgreen area now minutes away from the centre ofthe city.

The Southern Ring: Orchards, Prawn Fields andFactoriesThe Southern Ring is a long viaduct raised abovethe perennial wet zone north of the coastalprawn fields on the west bank. There is noaccess to the farms below, but traffic is lightenough for truckers to pull off and have a snackfrom food vendors overlooking the fields.Coconut palms still line the major supply canals,but much land is uncultivated, and unpickedcoconuts clog the canals. Labour-intensive fruitproduction has declined and farmers widenirrigation ditches below in order to farm fishinside the orchard canals. The type of fish varies depending on market demands and waterquality, and provides a temporary source ofincome on land awaiting redevelopment.

The Chao Phraya has yet to be bridged by thering road to the south, and the easternconnection of the Southern Ring Road is still on the drawing board. Exploring the right of wayof the new highway, we listen to the stories of several residents. Most orchards have beenabandoned for decades, awaiting a highwayplanned almost 30 years ago. One farmer isgrowing orchids, not dependent on a clean watersupply. He has a large banner over the canal

telling neighbours not to accept the government’sminimal land-purchase offer. Although on this rainy-season day the canal water is flowing clean and freshfollowing a downpour, farmers assure us that thecanals often turn black when nearby factories discharge waste water directly into supply canals.

Conclusion: Slow Food on a Fast RoadDespite the verdant image from remote sensing, theperiphery of Bangkok leaves the oily and bitteraftertaste of environmental degradation and rampantland speculation amid the struggles of small farmers.How does a hastily growing city manage such a vast andsensitive territory? Bangkok’s periphery has benefitedlittle from 50 years of Western master-planning advice.The government recently built southeast Asia’s largestwater-treatment plant financed by large internationalloans, yet it remains unconnected to industrial andresidential developments. The Outer Ring Road isconceived at the scale and ambition of Abercrombie’s1948 Green Belt Plan for London, but Bangkok is not apostwar bombed-out capital city of a shrinking empire.8

A similar sprawl-containment strategy is not possible in this rapidly developing metropolis already marked by a vastly dispersed industrial and residential fringe,where orchard- and rice-farmers struggle behind car-manufacturing plants and chains of suppliers, or in the path of voracious housing development.

Instead, localised strategies must be deployed on the ground. The ecological theory of patch dynamicsreflects a paradigm shift in the understanding of socio-natural urban interrelationships, and better equips usto tackle the design challenges of greater Bangkok’sshifting mosaic of farm, factory and housingdevelopment strung together by new expressways.

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Notes1 Tim Jacob, ‘The Physiology ofTaste’. See www.cf.ac.uk/biosi/staff/jacob/teaching/sensory/taste.html.2 Personal conversation withJean Gardner, Parsons Schoolof Design.3 Thongchai Winichakul, SiamMapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, University ofHawaii Press (Honolulu), 1997.4 Yoshikazu Takaya, AgriculturalDevelopment of a TropicalDelta: A Study of the ChaoPhraya Delta, University ofHawaii Press (Honolulu), 1987.5 TED Case Studies, ‘ThaiShrimp Farming’. Seewww.american.edu/TED/THAISHMP.HTM.

RightBan Rai Café franchises sit onthe edge of the modern highwayand petrol station landfill,overlooking rice paddies.Seducing with a sip of coffee,Ban Rai captures and engagesits customers within thistransitional ecology betweentwo cultures and two eras,whilst straddling twolandscapes: one a shady wetvegetated oasis, the other aheat-radiating dry highway.

BelowWhere the flyover ofRatchapruek Road soars acrossthe old course of the ChaoPhraya River, a new publicbeach has formed over KhlongBangkok Noi.

For ecologist Steward Pickett, ecosystem patchdynamics can provide meaning, models andmetaphors for architects and planners.According to patch dynamic theory, ecologies areopen, heterogeneous, indeterminate systemswhere disturbance and outside forces can alterresources and environmental regulators.Conventional notions of nature consisting ofclosed systems in ecological balance orequilibrium are erroneous.9 A patch dynamicapproach to design would direct human-ecosystem monitoring, management and designof air, water and waste flows locally, on site, with information flowing up to governmentofficials and policy makers.11

The daily acts of eating, breathing anddrinking bring awareness to the sensory aspects of existence and give insight towardscomprehending the city as an ecosystem. Tasteand sensual pleasure are design tools that takeinto account the biophysical and socioculturallife-support conditions of a site. The 19th-century industrial city’s aqueducts and parkswere not just engineering infrastructures, butpowerful symbols of hope for a healthy andhygienic metropolis. As a detour from master-planning, this essay’s excursion along Bangkok’snew Outer Ring Road contemplates how a patch

dynamic approach would culturally revalue pockets of the city’s agri- and aquacultural fringe in order to provide breathing space, temperature moderation,water-quality maintenance and new perspectivesamong peripheral expressways, shopping malls, andindustrial and housing estates.

Like in ancient Siam, watersheds structure a patchdynamic ecosystem approach, but unlike the feudalkingship, suggest the possibilities of a bottom-upapproach for emerging democracies. In recognisingpatchy rather than centralised urban development,localised air-, water- and food-quality managementcould be strung among the underutilised open spacesconcentrated on the orchard meanders and the long,ancient irrigation canals, made visible and publiclyaccessible from the ring road. Physical connectionsprovide feedback loops between farmers, consumersand policy-makers. Bangkok’s Outer Ring Road couldbecome an attentive circuit,10 connecting modern travelpatterns with environmental monitoring. This is not justan engineering solution towards sustainability, but therecognition of a patchy new symbolic realm as well as a sensual and seductive new cultural space. Here,the urban populace might taste the city periphery as an ecosystem along highway detours and rest stops:slow food on a fast road would engage people inbioregional knowledge as part of daily life.11

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6 Lucien Hanks, Rice and Man,Aldine Publishing Co (Chicago),1972.7 Takaya, op cit.8 Personal conversation withGrahame Shane, ColumbiaUniversity.9 Steward Pickett, lecture atColumbia University, GraduateSchool of Architecture,Planning and Preservation, 11 October 2004.10 Paul Ryan of NewschoolUniversity has developed videowork based on a similar notionof a ‘relational circuit’.11 The acquisition of ASTER datawas supported by a researchproject, ‘Investigation of RapidUrbanization Processes UsingASTER, MODIS, and Landsat Data’,by Dr Philip Christensen,Principal Investigator, NASA

Grant number: EOS/03-0000-0502. The ASTER data aredistributed by the LandProcesses Distributed ActiveArchive Center (LP DAAC) locatedat the US Geological Survey'sEROS Data Center(http://LPDAAC.usgs.gov).

AcknowledgementThe authors would like to thankthe Thailand Research Fund,International START Secretariat,and the research project‘Investigation of RapidUrbanization Processes UsingASTER, MODIS, and Landsat Data’for their partial support for thisarticle.