In the late 1950s Bangkok was still a relatively compact city. In 1947 the Bangkok and Thonburi municipalities(formed in 1936) housed well under a million people in an area of between 60 to 67 square kilometres (Donner 1978: 792). By 1960, under the impact of population and settlement growth, Bangkok's built-up area had increased to some 90 square kilometres. By that year the population of Bangkok-Thonburi had reached over 2 million(Donner 1978: 791). As was typical of Western observations of Bangkok and other cities of Southeast Asia, Litchfield's report emphasised the lack of clear zonal organisation, with minimal separation of industrial, commercial and residential uses. The most noticeable departure from this predominantly pre-war configuration was the cluster of industries that had located close to the newly excavated river-port of Khlong Toei and a predominantly middle-class suburban strip which had developed along Sukhumvit Road. The Greater Bangkok Plan 2533 produced by the Litchfield team in 1960 was never implemented. In 1963 Cyrus Nims, the UsoM(United States overseas Mission) city planning adviser to the Thai govemment, noted that effective implementation of the plan required adequate enforce- ment powers and effective planning authority for a capital district encompassing Bangkok, Thonburi and surrounding Above all, the task required coordination between numerous agencies in national government. Nim's evaluation was pessimistic coordination among
agencies was not evident, a new city planning office languished as a minor section of the Ministry of the Interior, and the national government was choosing to ignore plan's recommendations 1963: 104) was also prophetic, because the Litchfield Plan was never implemented. By 1971 an amended master plan was produced by the Department of Town and Country Planning, which acknowledged the dramatic level of population growth by revising the population estimate for 1990 upward to 6.5 million. Two years earlier, a Greater Bangkok Plan BE 2543(CE 2000) was produced by the City Planning Division of the Municipality of Bangkok, despite the fact that this office was not official authorised to develop general plans. Neither of these plans had statutory force for a decade they floated in a bureaucratic limbo and were then virtually forgotten (Sternstein 1982: 111; Kammeier 1984: 20). Their failure illustrates much about the various power holders in the city, the inability of state agencies to coordinate and cooperate, and the dominance of property interests in the rapidly growing city.