ARTICLE
REWILDING BANGKOK: Critical Zones and the Cosmoecology of Parks and Protests
Casper Bruun Jensen, Jakkrit Sangkhamanee,
Casper Bruun Jensen, Jakkrit Sangkhamanee,
A version of this article was presented as part of the ‘Ecologies of Experimentality’ workshop series, Kyoto University, 22 December 2022. We wish to thank Gergely Mohácsi for organizing the event and express our gratitude to the participants for stimulating discussions. We also wish to thank Marisol de la Cadena, Paul Manning and Atsuro Morita, as well as three anonymous IJURR reviewers, for their useful suggestions. The article was finalized with support from the Second Century Fund (C2F), Chulalongkorn University.
Abstract
Bangkok is a tropical metropolis subject to many human and nonhuman transformations. While Covid-19 raged, the city's mix of precarity and oppression gave rise to a youth protest movement that opposed the junta government and sought to intervene in Thai politics-as-usual. At the same time, a rewilding experiment aimed at undoing environmental damage quietly was unfolding in Benjakitti Urban Forest Park. We draw on science and technology studies (STS), anthropology and urban theory to elicit the events of both park and protests as ongoing experiments in rewilding Bangkok on more-than-human terrain. Both involve overlapping critical zones, where encounters between many beings and practices of worlding shape an uncommons and create problems of coexistence. Such problems call for cosmoecological diplomacy, understood as the art of giving collective shape to a more-than-human cosmos yet to arrive.
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