Concurrently during the past few decades, newfound opportunities to accumulate wealth, infrastructure expansion, the massive wave of migrants to the BMR, and the lower cost of land contributed significantly to massive land use conversion. The built-up area of the BMR ballooned from 67 km2 in the 1950s to 683 km2 by 2007 (Marks 2015). A key part of this transformation was the private sector shaping urban spaces for “market-oriented economic growth and for elite consumption practices” (Brenner and Theodore 2002: 375). Bangkok’s development in both the inner and outer core copied global patterns of increased privatization of urban land, particularly large-scale housing estates and shopping mall developments (Boonchuen 2002).