| Summary: | In the last half-century urbanisation in Thailand has dramatically accelerated as its economy has globalised. The rapid growth of Bangkok since the 1970s initiated a transformation of its urban fabric from a relatively compact area to an unplanned sprawl. Whilst some areas of Bangkok have been demolished and filled in by new compound buildings others have undergone a transformation associated with craft consumption tastes, international mainstream culture and other qualities characteristic of ‘gentrification’. This thesis approaches the transformation of Bangkok's built environment in the half-decade 2008 to 2014 in the context of a critical examination of these gentrification processes. It explores gentrification from a 'bottom-up' perspective addressing changes in land-use and building stock at the scale of the building plot, street, neighbourhood and city. This approach enables it to be precise about what 'gentrification' means in a Thai context. Employing integrated space syntax and GIS analysis of contemporary and historical datasets derived from a combination of official sources and extensive original fieldwork, this thesis reflects on the issue of gentrification as a global phenomenon experienced locally. Yet if global processes are largely responsible for the gentrification of the urban landscape in terms of consumption practice, in Bangkok it is the local sociospatial processes that are responsible for how these processes are negotiated and realized in concrete terms. This thesis therefore, seeks to articulate a crucial link between the flows of economic capital associated with globalisation, the cultural capital of elite consumption patterns and what Marcus (2010) calls the 'spatial capital' of urban public space. It is proposed that the particular qualities of Bangkok's urban space are key indicators of 'being global', implicated in formulating the ‘sense of distinction’ that characterises the local sub-cultures of its transnational and local elites in which crystallises the sense of place and the land-use pattern of the neighbourhoods in gentrfying areas. It also suggests that complex metric distance scales performance is a critical syntactic concept of urban space that appropriates gentrification process in Bangkok.
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