Urban Dynamism, a Contrasting Experience:
Street Life in Unplanned Bangkok and Planned Melbourne
Urban Dynamism,
a Contrasting Experience:
Street Life in Unplanned Bangkok and
Planned Melbourne
Sidh Sintusingha
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Kasama Polakit
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Richard Bruch
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ABSTRACT
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1. INTRODUCTION
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As major urban public spaces, streets play a
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2. URBAN DYNAMISM THROUGH
EVERYDAY STREET LIFE
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Figure 1:
Street life in the old commercial district of Sampeng, Bangkok’s Chinatown is possibly an early area where the waterbased culture metamorphose on land. We hypothesize that Bangkok’s contemporary street life has formal origins/roots
in both its khlongs and the Chinese migrants commercial urban practices (Sintusingha 22/12/08).
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Street life in the old commercial district of Pahurat (Bangkok’s ‘Indian Town’) adjacent to Sampeng witnesses the ‘place
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Figure 4:
Through the 2008 action research project “Couch Sit”; Urban Village Melbourne Inc questioned whether formal physical
appropriation of public space was the only mechanism by which private interests excluded public uses of city space.
Seated on a red household couch from 11am on a weekday, the researchers occupied a section of a sidewalk on Collins
Street near to the intersection with Elizabeth Street. While the neighboring bank had no physical or legal claims to the
sidewalk, after two hours the bank manager confronted the research team (pictured), and after four hours the team was
asked to move on by the Victoria Police at the request of the bank manager. The Urban Village Melbourne Inc. research
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