Thai VI

“WHO wants a park?” This is meant as a rhetorical question, one that has been put to Jatuporn Tansirimas, a 39-year-old project manager in web design, and his friends quite a lot lately. He gets this response, he thinks, because he has been campaigning for something that would typically be left to Thailand’s kings to grant, rather than for any of its businessmen, politicians or ordinary citizens to bring about themselves. Or could it be that Thai people just don’t care about parks? Mr Tansirimas and his friends, anyway, believe that Bangkok, which has just been recognised as the world’s most-visited city, ought to have a new park. And not just any park: they want their country’s capital to find its own equivalent to New York’s Central Park.

It all started seven months ago when Tok, a friend of Mr Tansirimas, was driving along an elevated expressway. The road led him into a noodle-bowl of high-volume expressways that sucks cars in from all directions and spits them out into the centre of Bangkok. As he had many times before, Tok caught a glimpse of a vast patch of green, studded with trees and abandoned railway coaches, stretching along the highway in the city’s Makkasan area. For the first time, he looked it up on Google Earth, and then posted a picture of the plot on Facebook, asking people to imagine it as a park. Within 24 hours some 900 people had shared his link.

The idea amounts to turning Bangkok’s last remaining open space into a park. It has since grown into a movement of sorts. Ten people are now running an organisation they call Makkasan Hope. Its Facebook campaign (its motto, in Thai: “We Want Makkasan to be a Park and Museum”) has won more than 19,000 “likes”. A concert earlier this year attracted a few thousand listeners. So far none of this adds up to very much, Mr Tansirimas admits.

The number of clicks they have attracted is less impressive than it might be, for a city that boasts more Facebook users than any other in the world. In another context though, it is remarkable. In contemporary Thailand, effective calls for change tend to start in the countryside. The voice of the urban middle-class has been stunted by a combination of rising prosperity and a long period in which the army has held sway in politics and society.

Approximately the same number of Bangkok’s residents, some 22,000, have signed an online petition demanding that the state, specifically the State Railway of Thailand, turn the plot into a public-park-plus-museum. The land was donated to the railways by King Chulalongkorn (ie Rama V), more than 100 years ago.

If their hope becomes a reality, the Makkasan area would become the biggest park in the city centre, putting into second and third place respectively two famous royal gifts: Lumphini Park (built by Rama VI in the 1920s) and Benjasiri Park (built to honour the 60th birthday of Queen Sirikit in 1992).