Citizen Designs : : City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand / / Eli Elinoff.

What does it mean to design democratic cities and democratic citizens in a time of mass urbanization and volatile political transformation? Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand addresses this question by exploring the ways that democratic urban planning projects inters...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Superior document:Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus PP Package 2021 Part 2
VerfasserIn:
Place / Publishing House:Honolulu : : University of Hawaii Press, , [2021]
©2021
Year of Publication:2021
Language:English
Online Access:
Physical Description:1 online resource (310 p.) :; 12 b&w illustrations
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Other title:Frontmatter --
Contents --
Acknowledgments --
Note on Transliteration and Naming --
Abbreviations --
Prologue Disagreement in a Time of Happiness --
1 Designing the Political --
Part I Prototypes --
2 Infrastructures, Nation and Citizen --
3 From Crisis to Community --
Part II Assemblies --
4 Citizen Designs --
5 Paper Communities --
6 Unity and Its Discontents --
7 Building Politics --
8 City of Disagreement --
Part III Fragmentations --
9 Political Life in the Despotic City --
10 Happiness Otherwise --
Epilogue Legacies of Politics --
Notes --
References --
Index
Summary:What does it mean to design democratic cities and democratic citizens in a time of mass urbanization and volatile political transformation? Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand addresses this question by exploring the ways that democratic urban planning projects intersect with emerging political aspirations among squatters living in the northeastern Thai city of Khon Kaen. Based on ethnographic and historical research conducted since 2007, Citizen Designs describes how residents of Khon Kaen’s railway squatter communities used Thailand’s experiment in participatory urban planning as a means of reimagining their citizenship, remaking their communities, and acting upon their aspirations for political equality and the good life. It also shows how the Thai state used participatory planning and design to manage both situated political claims and emerging politics. Through ethnographic analysis of contentious collaborations between residents, urban activists, state planners, participatory architects, and city officials, Eli Elinoff’s analysis reveals how the Khon Kaen’s railway settlements became sites of contestation over political inclusion and the meaning and value of democracy as a political form in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Elinoff examines how as residents embraced politics to enact their equality, they inspired new debates about what good citizenship might mean and how democracy might look and feel. The disagreements over citizenship, like those Elinoff describes in Khon Kaen, reflect the kinds of aspirations for political equality that have been fundamental to Thailand’s political transformation over the last two decades, which has seen new political actors asserting themselves at the ballot box and in the streets alongside the retrenchment of military authoritarianism. Citizen Designs offers new conceptual and empirical insights into the lived effects of Thailand’s political volatility and into the current moment of democratic ambivalence, mass urbanization, and authoritarian resurgence.
Format:Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
ISBN:9780824888152
9783110743357
9783110754001
9783110753776
9783110754186
9783110753967
9783110739688
DOI:10.1515/9780824888152?locatt=mode:legacy
Access:restricted access
Hierarchical level:Monograph
Statement of Responsibility: Eli Elinoff.