ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the development of transportation and urbanization in the Bangkok Metropolitan Region, which in many ways illustrates the typical metropolitan growth in Southeast Asian cities. It reviews the organizational and institutional background of transportation and urban development organizations to provide readers with an understanding of the local context. The chapter introduces the pre-motorized period in the late nineteenth century and the motorized period leading up to Second World War. It discusses the rapid expansion of the city enabled by widespread availability of motorized modes of transportation during the post war period, analysis of how highways, expressways and urban railways shaped the urban form in the contemporary period in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The chapter concludes with challenges being faced by future transportation and urban planners who are tasked with integrating the interdependent systems that up have been operating in large part independently.
