ABSTRACT
On 3 April 2010, in Bangkok, Thailand, the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), better known as the ‘Red Shirts’, consolidated the main camp of their mass street protest from the by now conventional symbolic locus of political protest of Ratchadamnoen Road, where they had been for more than a month, to the upscale or upmarket shopping and hotel district, Ratchaprasong. It is somewhat ironic that the Red Shirts were largely from the provincial rural poor in the north and northeast of the country, drawing resonance and support from the urban poor and other rural migrants to the city that fill the lower rungs of the urban service economies. The UDD’s protest was to force the existing government, a coalition led by the Democratic Party, to resign and call fresh elections, on the grounds that the government was not popularly elected but had come to power on a parliamentary vote, after the duly elected government was dissolved by an act of the Constitutional Court. This shift of protest venue from the location of historical political weight to the international
financial and consumption and entertainment centre of the city replicates similar development elsewhere in Southeast Asia: for example, in the case of the People Power movement in Manila, discussed later in the chapter. The shift in the symbolic loci of power is itself a reflection of the transformation of the city from one which is defined by an industrial production economy to one increasingly determined by global financial capital and the service industry economy, in which the city government plays an entrepreneurial role in making the city commercial edifices to cater to both this rising middle class and the globally mobile, not only tourists but also expatriate managers and their families. The urban economy of the capital city is thus transformed into one that is dominated by the economy of real estate of corporate megastructures and high-price condominiums and of consumption with its shopping and entertainment complexes. Illustrative of this transformation is obviously Singapore, followed by Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok and increasingly Jakarta. The shift of symbolic venue of political protest in Bangkok is symptomatic of this larger and deeper transformation of the urban economy of the capital cities of Southeast Asia. The concerns of this chapter are the social, cultural and political consequences of this economic transformation.
