It’s A Jungle Out There

At about 1am on a Friday night, we stood on a nearly deserted sidewalk in front of the Siam Discovery Center Mall. At the time, this was the newest mall in Siam Square and it had the best movie theater around.

My friend Conlan and I came out of our movie and down the elevator that delivered us to the secret door that ejected out the side of the building. The street was shockingly quiet compared to how we last saw it. In the warm, balmy tropical night air, we looked around, deciding how we wanted to go home. My apartment was far away and the Skytrain was already closed.

Conlan – one of the most inquisitive and thoughtful people I know – looked around in some amazement, glancing up at the buildings, the Skytrain station and the city around us. He paused for a moment and then delivered his conclusion.

"This place is weird. It's like Bladerunner."

It was an apt summation. Bangkok is sort of a disorganized urban jungle with a bizarre mixture of ultramodern towers and decrepit, crumbling cement and wood structures. There's no downtown, no central business district, no cultural hub either. Aside from the very oldest section of the city where the palace and government buildings stand against the Chao Praya River, Bangkok grew in fits and bursts without much rhyme or reason. In this way, it's like Los Angeles.

Only unlike LA's spread out, down to the ground feel, Bangkok has soaring towers here, there and everywhere sitting next to old two story, wooden houses and four story crumbling cement apartment buildings. Looking out at the city from any place and at any angle, you see discordance and chaos. Bangkok is both the phoenix rising and the ashes.

With electric wires bundled together like an armful of snakes hanging loose from buildings and sometimes inexplicably from mid-air, it's not hard to remember that what appears a modern marvel in some spots is incredibly third-world in others.

Bangkok also uses some of the thickest cement and asphalt I've ever seen to create its giant streets and narrow sois (back alleys that form the heart of the city's neighborhoods). That's because the city has to keep down the jungle in order to survive.

One thing I learned from living in tropical and subtropical environments is that you can't keep the jungle down. The land in, under and around Bangkok is very much alive and in a country like this, life teems in every corner and crevice. Insects and plants look for cracks, holes, morsels of food, rays of light – any opportunity to come forth from the oppressive pavement.

This is why sidewalks regularly raise and buckle, plants (and who knows what else)emerge from storm drains and streets crack. Life is stirring. The real jungle will not be repressed.

Bangkok's architects and caretakers seem to understand this phenomenon and use a two-pronged approach to deal with it. The first is to obliterate any bits of nature or soil in the areas in which they build. The concrete jungle must be fully concrete to keep the natural one contained.

At the same time, it's impossible to truly contain it all – and Bangkok is left with odd helter-skelter patches of green and nature – plots of swampy, green lands in the middle of high urban areas that have no specific purpose. Of course, there are some parks and intentional green outdoor areas. But by and large, these random patches of undeveloped green seem almost like a sacrifice to the gods or maybe more of a bone tossed to the dog.

I'm not sure fido is satisfied.

All of this struck me back in 2001-2002 when I lived here. I thought that it must be a constant battle that a tropical city constantly fights.

Then I got to Singapore. I first visited in 2003 and lived there in 2005-2006 during which I found myself astonished by so many things – including the landscape. Singapore is a fully modern, first world city with not a crack or a rough spot to its name. Sidewalks and streets are perfect and unlike Bangkok, the city is beautifully and meticulously gardened. One degree north of the equator, Singapore stands as calm, cool and controlled as any western city – perhaps even more so.

I wondered about its secrets. Was it better design? Incredible architecture? Weird science? Or black magic performed in secret?

Over time, I came to conclude it's all of these things.

There's no doubt Singapore uses a higher standard of design, building and construction than Bangkok. There's just as little doubt that early in the mornings gardeners flood the city, manicuring each public planter, shrub and lawn while men with machines on their backs blow thick white fogs of insecticide into not only the plant life, but around every single building on the island.

You don't get mosquito bites or ant invasions in Singapore. A cockroach is cause for national alarm and action.

Singapore in its quintessentially clever way takes the nature it wants – trees, plants and flowers – while eliminating the nature it doesn't want – insects. And while it's sort of horrifying in one sense, it also makes me want to take my hat off to the masters of their own domain.

Bangkok, let alone Thailand doesn't have that capacity. Meticulously controlling the environment is well beyond Thailand's scope and interest. In fact, that's the thing about Bangkok – it's a wholly manufactured city filled with very uncontrolled, human chaos. Traffic flows (and halts) everywhere, people ride motorcycles opposite traffic, vendors sell food from baskets on the sidewalks, neighbors stand in the sois and chat, pedestrians narrowly avoid each other as they walk in every possible direction even on a narrow sidewalk. Bangkok is also teeming with human life in every corner and crevice.

In a strange sense, Bangkok is two jungles – both surprisingly organic: the natural one below trying to find it's way back despite the concrete and the urban one that thrives because of the concrete. It's one of the strange beauties of this esthetically lacking city.

After all, Bangkok will never inspire you with it's incredibly sculpted beauty like Paris; impress you with its orderly civility like Singapore; fill you with its incredible energy like New York or Hong Kong; or make you feel its long, rich history like Istanbul or Jerusalem. Bangkok is not a city that poets and novelists celebrate. It doesn't inspire songs other than a 1980s one hit-wonder about the temptation of prostitution and vice. Alicia Keyes isn't going to hold her lighter in the air for Bangkok.

The lesson the city offers – besides a strong case for urban planning – is that the raw heart of a city is its people and that even an urban jungle can be beautiful if you know what to look for. The vibrancy of life in Bangkok – from ugly to sublime – tells the whole story. Thais are a people who live texturally – within the beautiful jungles of their vast kingdom and the grit of the concrete jungle of their capitol. They add the beauty even where none inherently exists.

Sent from my iPad