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Article contents
Abstract
Visitors to the city of Bangkok are often struck by the sight of exposed, dangling, and dangerous electrical wires and a multitude of inconveniently placed utility posts that impede pedestrian circulation. This article argues that the city's seemingly dysfunctional electric power infrastructure is not a failure of modernisation but the outcome, or ‘style’, of a socio-technological system built by and operated for a narrow set of interests. To demonstrate this, the article presents a history of the electric power system that shows how its initial development in the early twentieth century produced new forms of privilege and disenfranchisement that are now the basis of social division in the city. By approaching the study of Bangkok's electric power system in terms of equity, the article offers a framework for evaluating how infrastructure shapes cultural practice, social relations, and political authority.
- Type
- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © The National University of Singapore, 2022
Footnotes
The author would like to thank Lawrence Chua and Choon Hwee Koh for their comments on early drafts of this article. He would also like to thank Wiphop Huyakorn for his help obtaining documents from the National Archives of Thailand (henceforth NAT), Bangkok. This research was supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its AcRF Tier 2 programme (ref. no. T2MOE1716).
References
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