DISCONNECTIVE EDGES

Abstract

The slum, a region of the city where the typical rules of understanding the city do not apply; and edges, the linear elements in the city that bound and relate urban areas. These are the two concepts that this thesis is primarily preoccupied with in response to the growing threat of eviction in Khlong Toei slum of Bangkok. This situation, brought about by years of mounting economic pressure to develop the area as the adjacent Port of Bangkok gets increasingly outmoded due to geographical constraints, provides the grounds for an experimental approach towards protecting the slum from eviction. Typically, many programmes designed to improve slums are premised upon the idea that the problems related to slums are due to physical and social segregation from the formal city. Thus, by solving the physical problems of connection by building infrastructure, the social problems will improve. However, for this project, the contrarian viewpoint is taken where slum-dwellers in Khlong Toei have willingly accepted the conditions of the slum in exchange for the oft-unseen advantages of living in this location. Further building up connectivity will destroy the present equilibrium by increasing land pressures overwhelmingly. The conclusion is to veer in the other direction and disconnect it from the city and thereby the forces of the urban land economy. This thesis project is a proposal to disconnect the slum by creating new limits and barriers in the urban fabric using the elements in the city that disconnects: edges, as described in Kevin Lynch’s “The Image of the City”. The architecture of disconnection is explored in the space below an existing highway that bounds the slum: an assembly of Edges which combine to disconnect the slum along the entirety of this 2km long border. This thesis is a theoretical exploration of the question of informality of the slum as a space within the city that is incoherent with the formal logic of the spatial economy in the city.