He
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 upwards
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 officially 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.