Paradise Lost
Downtown Bangkok
This lesson follows the Evans family around downtown Bangkok. Student will explore with them the sights sounds and smells of the city.
Key questions:
- What's Downtown Bangkok like?
- How do you get around the city and what are the transport problems?
Key Concepts:
Place
Environmental interaction and sustainable development
Cultural Understanding and Diversity
What's Bangkok like?
Bangkok has a recorded population of about 6 million - the actual number is thought to be much higher. Bangkok is the 22nd most populous city in the world and is a major economic and financial center of Southeast Asia. Recently, Bangkok has experienced a large influx of foreign immigrants, long-term residents, and expatriates who have come to work in the city, the economic centre of Thailand. Development continues to flow in to Bangkok often neglecting the rest of the nation. Bangkok has one of the fastest rates in the world for construction of high rise buildings. The city has over 1,000 skyscrapers and ranks 17th as the ‘world's tallest city'. Bangkok's poorest districts are spread throughout the city. However, the most concentrated area is just north of the Port of Bangkok at the turn of the Chao Phraya River. For an area of ten km², the Khlong Toei district houses one of the poorest areas in the country with half-built houses and midrises for migrants and workers.
The city's wealth of cultural sites makes it one of the world's most popular tourist destinations.
How do you get around the city and what are the transport problems?
There is network of canals known as khlongs giving Bangkok the nickname "Venice of the East". Today, however, most of the canals have been filled in and converted into streets. Many khlongs do still exist however, with people living along them and markets, many are polluted.
Bangkok has been notorious for traffic jams and pollution as private vehicle usage continued to grow - 40 percent over the last ten years. But actual levels of the most dangerous types of pollution - small dust particles that trap themselves in the lungs - have nearly halved, since the government encouraged companies to produce cleaner cars that run on fuel known as gasohol, a mixture of petrol and biofuel made from sugar cane and other plants, and introduced higher taxes to lower the number of motorcycles on the street with two-stroke engines.
An elevated two-line ‘Skytrain' metro system was opened in 1999. This offered an alternative cheap, clean and quick way to travel along two routes through the city. In 2004, the subway (or underground train network) was added to the transport mix, making it more attractive to leave the car behind.
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