ABSTRACT
The Pom Mahakan community in Bangkok is one of thousands of urban communities around the world under threat of eviction as a result of a number of development pressures common to city life. What makes their story much less common is the range of issues their fight brought forward. This was not just about tenure or lack of compensation for relocation. Those issues were certainly among the first raised over the many years this fight went on. Other fundamental conflicts surfaced about planning, about culture, history and rights. These differing understandings gave rise to conflicts about the methods and intentions of planning, about the arbiters of culture and history and how both affected the rights of this and other communities in the area. For many years, the people of Pom Mahakan have had an intimate relationship with the material history of the area. However, their fate rests with the planners and politicians who, with very few exceptions, refuse to recognize the community perspective of their part in the history of Rattanakosin. They are just poor. And the poor should be, in every sense, on the margins of the city and the society. They should be invisible.
