I grew tired of Bangkok’s tourists, relentless consumerism and Hello Kitty, and made a Logan’s Run out along one of the city’s major waterways. I expected to find those oft-described gleaming spires of Bladerunner-like urban futurism. Instead, I wandered through a crumbling Heath Robinson environment, finding only low-fi make-do-and-mend survivalism.
For some time, I’d been feeling like a home-caged dog scratching at a door. I needed some space, and that is surprisingly hard to find in Bangkok. It lacks footpaths, having been built for car and motorcycle. The city has plenty of parks, but walking in circles speaks to the self-defeating routine I was trying to escape. Aimless wandering is for malls. I’ve seen enough sci-fi to know to follow the water. I aimed for the canal. Free of commercial pressure, the first person I met threw a bottle of water at me. Guess he had strong views on tourists keeping to designated areas.
It always seems oddly hyperbolic to describe Asian cities in similes derived from dystopian fiction. Bangkok isn’t Metropolis. If anything, it has more in common with the domed city in Logan’s Run. The city’s famed luxury malls are generally a Glenn A. Larson fever dream reminiscent of yesterday’s tomorrow. Outside, Bangkok is a strained mass transit system serving heavily populated civic centres and concrete brutalism. Primary coloured jumpsuits are thankfully absent, but many now shop in their pyjamas. If your brain is anything like mine, it can’t process even a tiny fraction of all that data. You start unconsciously filling the gaps with pop culture shorthand.
Of course, Bangkok doesn’t have a direct analogue of Logan’s Run’s Carousel either. The Thais haven’t yet taken to a public spectacle of executing anyone turning thirty. However, they do worship youth, and all the malls have floors devoted to cosmetic surgery. It wouldn’t surprise me if half of the beautiful people around me were living out a surgically augmented lifespan. In the movie the crowds chant ‘renew, renew’ as people are vapourised – the only renewal evident here concerns last year’s iPhone. Soma? Yes, there’s plenty of that in evidence – Nose Tea, FUKU Matcha and any other number of comically exotic brands. Generic Thai Tea isn’t quite the blue milk of pop culture legend: it’s orange and tastes foul. The Thai palette lands in its own unique register.
If you wanted an escape from the mall-heavy heart of the city, you’d do worse than following Logan 5’s example. Exit not along the highways but on foot through the industrial bowels. I followed the water out along the Khlong Saen Saep canal.
The advantage of living long term in a tourist destination is you eventually stray from the beaten path. In this subaltern subterranean world, I found drunks, ducts and decay running beneath structures of steel and glass. From down there, you can see many wonders – Bangkok’s copy of the Shard, the 80+ storey Baiyoke Sky Hotel, or the Mormon church at Makkasan, which looks more like it landed than was built. The slums are neatly tucked in behind.
Central Bangkok reeks of software-developer parametric architecture. With a little knowledge, you could easily predict which program the designers used. All copies without an original. I started to sense I was taking an archaeological trip through the back catalogue of industrial architecture. The further I travelled, the more towering HVAC cooling towers I encountered.
Armies of labourers are busy rebuilding the canal-side walkways. The new footpaths encourage runners and cyclists. I spent a lot of time dodging the motorcycle taxi drivers who use the footpaths as shortcuts and de facto speedways. Then it struck me – a walk such as this couldn’t have happened until recently. Yes, gentrification has penetrated even here.
Several decades out from the centre, the high-rise luxury gives way to functional low rent and shanty. Brave attempts at tarting up brutalist blocks in cosmetic slap are everywhere. Aging buildings wear too much makeup too. I pass condos with childishly silly names, Muay Thai training schools, and the occasional brothel. The further you get from the centre, the more the buildings drip and depress rather than delight and sparkle.
This bizarre collage of aged concrete, crass and creativity eventually gives way to uneven walkway slabs on stilts. The density of the shanty thins too. Factories and workshops dominate. You’ve passed the zone of comfortable habitability.
The temporary structures standing in the fields will leave no trace in the urban fossil record, nor will they go out of fashion – these shelters stand a Platonic ideal drawn from survivalist functionalism. In many ways the shack is a stronger evolutionary step than the condo – one’s a sharpened stick, the other a plastic fork. There’s no renewal here either. The ratio of structures abandoned due to markets and tastes shifting is significantly lower.
The harsh reality out in the fields croaked at me from the semi-darkness. It is more scorched earth than cursed. The Thais are honest when they talk about civilisation and its boundary. They’ll happily tell you exactly where the one ends and the other begins. They see in city-state terms. It’s become a fashionable trope in the West to see walls as confining. We’ve forgotten they’re a squeeze chute that calms and pacifies.
I’ve always suspected there was something wrong with dystopian fantasy. City states evolved for reasons – safety in numbers and protection from predators. The likes of Logan 5 are corruptors of youth and public morals. You’d have to have a very twisted sense of reality to imagine all those subsistence farmers and labourers wouldn’t want to change places with you. In the mall, hands grasp at new goods. On the periphery, they grasp at living until tomorrow. Dystopian authors always fail to imagine there’s something worse waiting out beyond the city limits. The adventures of Paul Rosolie or John Allen Chau confirm life is nasty, brutish and short out there. It’s not just a failure of imagination; it’s a failure of worldly experience. The dome – real or metaphorical – is a barrier against merciless entropy and hardship. The resulting infantilisation is a consequence of living in a safety net.
Turning back to look at Bangkok’s urban sprawl, the lights were coming on, and the futurist illusion was starting to emerge. LEDs and neon hide the grim functional reality. I missed the aircon. A night outside promised a sweat rash and torment by mosquito bite. I really needed a hot shower and a good meal. The error made in Logan’s world – and mine – was looking for an additional sanctuary beyond the secure one we’ve built. That’s basic greed. Logan 5, his creators and anyone else walking in their non-conforming footsteps are guilty of the ultimate urban crime – novelty-induced ennui. We call such people reckless thrill-seekers for a reason.
Lee Russell Wilkes 