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Accepted Paper:
Bubbles of the Earth: Place, Accident, and the Counter-Plan in Bangkok
Andrew Johnson
(Stockholm University)
Daena Funahashi
(University of California, Berkeley)
We examine sites of accident and haunting within Bangkok that emerge as a "counter-plan" to urban models that emphasize efficiency and production. Here, nonhuman forces demand recognition, calling into question models of space and place, planning and certainty.
Paper Abstract:
Urban planning builds on a rationalized distribution of space allocated by use and connected by highways and boulevards designed to increase efficiency of transport and production. But within the urban plan, the unforeseen emerges: a counter-discourse to the urban plan. Accidents take place, despite all attempts to plan. In Bangkok, Thailand, such accidents are often recognized as the insistence of entities that pre-exist all notions of plan, calculation, and urban design, calling to be recognized by a plan that ignores their existence.
Here, we argue that within the plan is a counterplan, one built on a counter-instrumental logic of the timeless sacred. Turning to roadside shrines of such chthonic beings, we explore how these sites are more than dedications to the lives claimed. Rather, they mark places that snag against the fabric of urban planning and rupture its smooth surface. These shrines thus mark the insistence of otherwisefactual realities that insist of co-existing with a plan devoid of chthonic, non-human presences. Via an ethnographic look at these shrines, we see how they offer potential to not only rethink space, but also to re-theorize what is to be taken into account in planning.