By 1982, over two decades of national development planning and economic transformation had reinforced the administrative, economic and symbolic dominance of the capital over the nation as never before. The Thai administrative title of the BMA capital region Krung Thep Mahanakhon recalled the old royal name of the city, but notwithstanding the state sponsored historical evocation of the Rattanakosin precinct in these years, the city's significance was rooted in its status as a capital of a modern nation state and the focus of economic accumulation and social advancement. The landscape of the city itself was a register of the major forces and contradictions marking the uneven development of previous decades The burgeoning slums belied the dreams of technocrats to forge a uniformly modern social and economic space. The governor of Bangkok's affirmative proclamation obscured the more complex realities of the metropolis and the ways it was experienced by ordinary people. At around the same time, the writer Wanich Jarunggidanan exposed a different image of the city in his short-story 'muang luang' (the capital). set in a nangkok bus in the middle of a traffic jam, the story evokes the indifference of the crowded city a place of alienation, grief and loss. The main character bemoans his fraught urban existence as an office clerk, dreaming of the simple and happy village life he forsook so long ago in search of advancement in the city. In the climax of the story, a labourer from Isan (the north east) spontaneously breaks into a traditional folk song about romance and loss, tears rolling down his face (Wanich 1985). The city is here defined as an oppressive, dehumanising force, a place to be endured, not lived. It the new urban dwellers the migrants to the city who now outnumbered the old-style Bangkokians who were born and bred in Krung Thep and its surrounds. Wanich was only one of numerous writers who depicted Bangkok as a place of alienation, commercialism and moral decadence at this time (see e.g. Lockard 1998: 178-83). In the decades after the Second World War Bangkok became an increasingly complex space, generated by the intersection of local transformations and transnational forces. Contrasting and varied images of the metropolis were a reflection of the ways Bangkok was experienced and encountered by its varied population.
..................This chapter incorporates within a narrative of change the key agents that have shaped the sociospatial complex of Thailand's contemporary metropolis since the Second World War. These agents can be broadly summarised as the state, capital (domestic and foreign) and ordinary people who have actively created the metropolis in their search for livelihood and status. Their dynamic interaction has developed in relation to forces of regional and global levels. Over the period of three change at national decades from the late 1950s Thailand underwent transformations of massive proportions, transformations in which the capital city functioned as the key fulcrum and beneficiary, and from a less sanguine perspective their victim. In economic terms the period saw a transition towards an export-orientated industrial economy and the commercialisation of the agricultural sector. It was fuelled by overseas development aid and technical assistance, facilitated by a development-orientated state and embraced enthusiastically by an overwhelmingly urban-based financial and entrepreneurial elite. In demographic and social terms, Bangkok expanded rapidly into a major metropolis by world standards, drawing waves of migrants from a over the country in search of profit, education, employment and survival. The nature and trajectory of Bangkok's physical, social and economic transformations were tied to historical legacies but intimately bound with the wider world economy. As used here, the term "Bangkok' refers to the whole metropolitan complex, not merely the territory delimited by the municipal administration of the BMA. But beyond this, we need to acknowledge that many "Bangkoks' emerged from the transformative processes i the post-war period, defined variously in terms of state representation and policy, urban functions, settlement patterns, ecologies and ways of life. Bangkok's existing functions as a centre of government and prestige were considerably enhanced, but new dimensions also emerged as economic change articulated with space and society Bangkok became simultaneously a key industrial city, a city of the poor, a city of the middle classes and a tourist city.