Urban Dynamism, a Contrasting Experience: - Faculty of Architecture

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
Kasama Polakit
Richard Bruch
ABSTRACT
T
1. INTRODUCTION
As major urban public spaces, streets play a
political, economic, social and cultural conditions.
state
.
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Sidh Sintusingha / Kasama Polakit / Richard Bruch
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2. URBAN DYNAMISM THROUGH
EVERYDAY STREET LIFE
control, simplicity, singularity, neatness and order.

Urban Dynamism, a Contrasting Experience:
Street Life in Unplanned Bangkok and Planned Melbourne
buildings can be seen as closed systems. We
encourages many social encounters, and stimulates
openings relate to open space and create two
outdoor areas across time and space.
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Sidh Sintusingha / Kasama Polakit / Richard Bruch
and unwritten rules.
portray urban street scenes and narrate stories
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Urban Dynamism, a Contrasting Experience:
Street Life in Unplanned Bangkok and Planned Melbourne
3. BANGKOK
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).
and contradictory layering concepts in urban
to
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Sidh Sintusingha / Kasama Polakit / Richard Bruch
to impose control 3
and department stores, supermarkets, transnational
and loc
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Figure 2:
Street life in the old commercial district of Pahurat (Bangkok’s ‘Indian Town’) adjacent to Sampeng witnesses the ‘place
3

Urban Dynamism, a Contrasting Experience:
Street Life in Unplanned Bangkok and Planned Melbourne
F
sois),
takraw
4. MELBOURNE
Figure 3:
informal. Note the congregation of youths to the left not participating in the introduced café/restaurant culture (Sintusingha
14/09/09).
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Sidh Sintusingha / Kasama Polakit / Richard Bruch
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geared towards pedestrians, cyclists and public
building stock towards residential accommodation.
“designed to reintroduce a residential population
international students attending city campuses was

Urban Dynamism, a Contrasting Experience:
Street Life in Unplanned Bangkok and Planned Melbourne
emerge
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
team argues that this exposes a behavioral mechanism, by which private interests seek to control public uses of city
space adjoining their own active frontages.
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Sidh Sintusingha / Kasama Polakit / Richard Bruch
increas
5. CONCLUSIONS
Table 1:
Ingredients of street life Bangkok Melbourne CBD
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1.Density
population)
in population in inner Bangkok
registered residences and actual
trend is projected increases

Urban Dynamism, a Contrasting Experience:
Street Life in Unplanned Bangkok and Planned Melbourne
Table 1:
2. Urban morphology
ability)
enclosed spatial system
soi) and
trok
streets.
malls
spatial system
3. Functionality, uses,
activities
day
Formal commercial and cultural
commercial and cultural
uses
4. Operation (spatial and
temporal dimension)
unwritten rules
unwritten rules and tacit
based on rules and
regulations
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Sidh Sintusingha / Kasama Polakit / Richard Bruch
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Bangkok’s conurbation.
demarcation and separation between pedestrian,

Urban Dynamism, a Contrasting Experience:
Street Life in Unplanned Bangkok and Planned Melbourne
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Sidh Sintusingha / Kasama Polakit / Richard Bruch
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