<< Continued from the Ghost Railway

The Privatization of the Common:
Bor Wa Settlement, Songkla

Taew is a small thin woman with a closely cropped curly hair. She is now in her 50s. She wears a perfectly ironed pink shirt; her face has that stern weathered look of a corporate executive. She is punctual and at 12:00 pm – when the tropical sun is exactly 90 degrees to the ground - we have arrived at Bor Wa settlement.

“This is the best time to visit the slums; it is noon time, you know…. the only time when the alleyways will be free of shades,” she says in a matter-of-fact voice.

To some people, she is a community leader. To others, she is the most tenacious agitator who has fought against eviction for over 15 years. She has been instrumental in organizing the community against eviction threats from the Port Authority – the landlord. Every child here knows her as ‘aunt Taew’. And over the past 15 years, she also visited the Port’s office so often that an entire generation of bureaucrats is now calling her ‘aunt Taew’ as well.

“Bor Wa is the oldest slum along Samrong Canal,” says Taew. The pioneers came here 40 years ago and worked as fishermen. “They were a rough bunch of men,” she says. The men knew each other well; they later brought their families here. There were only two large families at that time. They used to own about 20 fishing boats in total. Around the time of 1967, rows of canneries had sprung up near the waterfront; so there was a surge in the general population. Many people here have also worked in the canneries around the area. There are now over 480 households in this community.

We walked through an intricate network of alleyways until we come to a bridge. Over the bridge, we can see a long stretch of wooden porches – miles of them. They are decorated with beautiful plants and orchids. Some have canvas awnings over them; some are completely covered and converted into bays. All the porches are overlooking the canal.

“This is wonderful” I interject. “It almost feels like someone had designed a master plan for these long stretches of leisure spaces. They feel very intimate indeed.”

“Yes, those were planned. We actually have architects designing them, you know. But they were originally designed as a public boardwalk – not private bays and porches!” says Taew.

In 1995, the community of Bor Wa had finished building a long stretch of boardwalk along the edge of Samrong canal. It cost them 500,000 baht for the entire construction. The idea was to link the community together through this band of boardwalk; it would provide a long stretch of common public space for the entire settlement. The idea immediately received international attention and it was later supported by LIFE (UNDP) program. In addition to funding the construction of the public boardwalk, the UNDP also provided funding for community organizing activities such as public forums, and other community meetings. The budget for the entire improvement was managed by the community. “It was a participatory budgeting approach,” says Taew.

For most slums in Thailand, having a direct access from a public walkway to your house is considered a luxury. In most cases, the entry door to each individual house could be found in a rather dark and narrow alleyway. So having a well-lit boardwalk for public access sounded like a good idea to many people. Gradually, however, people started to put chairs and benches in front of their houses – and on the boardwalk itself. As time progressed, those chairs and benches became walls and bays completed with orchids and decorative plants. It is the privatization of the common.

“They would rather have minimal public spaces and maximum private spaces,” says Taew.

“That seems selfish!” I say.

“But when you have a whole generation of people in the community that no longer know each other well, they feel that the public space is actually dangerous,” she demurs.

“Why?” I ask “Couldn’t a playground or a basketball court help bring the community together?”

“They’d bring all the gang members together,” says Taew in a hush voice.

“You can’t bring people together simply by building new physical environments; you must first build a strong social fabric within the community.”

“I see”

Taew says that sometime the best way to build a strong social fabric within the community is to start a saving group. When you save collectively, you must discuss plans with one another on a regular basis. And when someone lacks money for medical expense, for example, he can get support from the saving group. The community saving group is the first test in accessing the strength of the community’s social fabric. *

“If you can’t do this in the first place, don’t even bother to talk to the architects,” she shakes her head.

It seems that when the social fabric is weak, it is better for the community to privatize the common. Collectivism tends to favor communities’ with strong social fabric. In the early days at Bor Wa, people knew each other quite well; they were a close-knit families of fishermen. There was a strong social fabric then. Today, the new generation works at various different places; some are office workers, some are accountants, and some are teachers. They hardly know one another. In the past 5-10 years, there were also many evictions in nearby slums. So the new generation of people here are migrants who managed to escape the flame and ashes of eviction. The social cohesion is just not there anymore.

Perhaps what we are witnessing now on a global scale - the privatization of state-owned enterprises, entertainment, markets, sports, and even the family - is the result of a general alienation among members of our society. The privatization of the boardwalk at Bor Wa is of no exception. They could all be done - with little resistance from the public - because the public common no longer holds anything in common.

A boatman appears with his wooden canoe. He is a large man with distinctively dark and unblinking eyes. “He’s the leader of Rim Klong community co-op,” says Taew. She has arranged with him earlier to take us on a boat tour of the Samrong Canal. So we wait at a makeshift dock (a large concrete culvert) as the man and his canoe slowly approach us.


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