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Nationalism and urban design: the parliament houses of Canberra and Bangkok
Abstract
Both Canberra and Bangkok have in recent times invoked design competitions to initiate new Parliament buildings. The Canberra case was in a tradition of open international competition, that of Bangkok limited to Thai architects, with both bringing ‘the nation’ into deliberation. In each, the design needed to negotiate an established urban landscape: in Canberra an urban design of axial set-pieces, formal and geometric, of largely US derivation; in Bangkok, a less ordered urban landscape, organically evolved over centuries. The resulting urban design complexes raise questions of how the idea of the nation is to be represented in urban space.
... The mega-infrastructure developments discussed in this chapter reflect the concept of Capital and Capitol. Political elites use architectural forms, and by extension infrastructure, to establish and legitimise specific regimes (Vale, 1992;Sintusingha and King, 2021). As Vale (1992) points out, "government buildings … serve as symbols of the state." ...
Chapter 9 investigates the BRI and other mega-infrastructure projects in Indonesia through the framework of postcolonial modernisation and de- velopment associated with foreign and local governments’ agendas. In par- ticular, the chapter discusses Jakarta’s emergent rail mass-transit system, the BRI Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Rail (HSR) and the Garuda Seawall (see Figure 9.1) – a major flood-mitigation project. The megaprojects reflect the aspirations of the Indonesian government and politicians, in light of the rapid rise of the middle class – especially for Indonesia’s modernisation and inte- gration with the global economy and Jakarta as a modern metropolis that can compete with other South-East Asian urban hubs. They provide a sense of Jakarta’s and the country’s ‘infrastructure deficit’ and the context for the in- volvement of and investments from various foreign governments and consult- ants. This includes the Dutch, former colonial rulers, on the Garuda Seawall project and the Japanese, who provided a lot of planning and development expertise via Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), and the more recent and increasing influence of China in their wide-ranging infrastruc- ture projects across the archipelago. Significantly, the competition for the Jakarta-Bandung HSR between the Japanese and Chinese governments is consistent with geopolitical and economic contests elsewhere in the planning and implementation of the BRI. At a regional scale, the metropolitan Jakarta mass-transit project supports urban integration with West Java and its capital, Bandung – and is consistent with development ambitions manifest in the master plans and political visions. Finally, the chapter interrogates whether the Chinese BRI in Indonesia is comparable/has parallels to Japanese, past colonial Dutch and present Dutch government involvement in major infra- structure development in Indonesia that sustained the ‘colonial gaze’ upon the country.
Cities carry traces of their pasts; they also carry traces of imagined pasts, inscribed on them by authoritarian regimes to suppress other imaginings. Bangkok in the early 20th century displayed the signification of a Buddhist royalty and imagined origins, subsequently suppressed with the imposition of new emblems of democracy following a 1932 overthrow of monarchical absolutism. Democracy was to be signified as founded in the common people. In the 21st century, a military junta dressed in the clothes of a pseudo-democracy re-writes the emblems of democracy, now to signify that democracy is not based in the people but, rather, is the gift of a benevolent monarch. The subverting of democracy is to be read from the monuments of the city, which highlight the specific strategies that the authoritarian state invokes in re-writing the national history.
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
This 2006 collection examines the urban spaces of Berlin and Washington and provides a comparative cultural history of two eminent nation-states in the modern era. Each of the cities has assumed, at times, a mythical quality and they have been seen as collective symbols, with ambitions and contradictions that mirror the nation-states they represent. Such issues such stand in the centre of this volume. The authors ask what these two capitals have meant for the nation and explore the relations between architecture, political ideas, and social reality. Topics range from Thomas Jefferson's ideas about the new capital of the United States to the creation of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, from nineteenth-century visitors to small-town Washington to the protesters of the 1968 student movement in West Berlin. This lively collection of essays speaks to audiences as diverse as historians, urban sociologists, architects and readers interested in cultural studies. © German Historical Institute 2005 and Cambridge University Press, 2007.
This paper compares Maurice Halbwachs's theory of collective memory to the most typical articulation of group memory in France before the twentieth century, especially from the late sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. It argues that the twentieth-century notion of collective memory, largely based on Halbwachs's work, differs significantly from earlier articulations of this concept and that these two conceptions are modeled on two different types of personal memory. Finally, it suggests that, given these differences, we should question whether our modern concept of collective memory is a useful tool in analyzing early modern French texts.
Putrajaya, approximately midway between Malaysia's monarchic/parliamentary capital of Kuala Lumpur and the new national gateway of Kuala Lumpur International Airport, is being developed as the national administrative capital. At first glance it presents as a typical exercise in national celebration, with grand axis, monumental building arrangements, an ornamental lake and token ecological displays. However, a more in-depth examination reveals ambiguities and tensions: between legislature and bureaucracy, between national integrity and global ambition, between rival views of nature and, in its adopted imagery (‘styling’), between actual and wished-for origins, and between nostalgia for origins (albeit ambiguous) and a vision of a radically different future. With an even deeper reading, there emerge profound questions about national identity and trajectory.
The prominent Thai scholar, Chatthip Natsupha, has gone from being a Marxist intellectual in the 1970s to a cultural nationalist advocate of a genuine Thai essence which, he believes, is an antidote to the dominance of the Western neoliberal capitalism. His case is not an anomaly. The intellectual path from the Marxist left to the cultural nationalist right is well-trodden and reflects broader changes in nationalism in the country. The cultural nationalist Thai ex-left rejected what it called 'bad' nationalism and embraced a 'good' one. However, its ideas were significantly drawn from conservative nationalism. Such nationalism, which is widespread among the Thai intelligentsia, was an important factor in their support for the military coup which, in 2006, ousted an elected government on the dubious grounds that it was a proxy for global capitalism.
In the decades straddling the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, the kingdom of Siam (later known as Thailand) underwent
a phase of modernisation in the context of the colonialist penetration of the rest of Southeast Asia. Historians have paid
considerable attention to the administrative and institutional dimensions of this process, the so-called Chakri Reformation,
which entailed the centralisation of government, taxation and military draft, and the establishment of a western-styled ministerial
cabinet, bureaucracy, Buddhist clergy and educational system. Influenced by 1960s modernisation theory, historians of the
Chakri Reformation have argued that, by promoting such reforms, the ruling dynasty was able to guard off the imperialist threat
and at the same time lay the basis for nation building. Works by economic historians in the 1970s and cultural historians
more recently have challenged this view contending that, in many respects, the dynasty acted as a counterpart to the region's
colonial governments, `colonising' the kingdom from within administratively and economically while also avowedly pursuing
a `civilising mission'. In a new book, Lords of Things, I propose that through consumption practices informed by westernised tastes, which encompassed luxury goods as well as architecture
and public spectacles, the Siamese royalty achieved the re-validation of their symbolic capital by connecting to the sources
of `civilisation' which, as illustrated by the Thai neologism siwilai, were now perceived to be located no longer in the Indianised world of South and Southeast Asia or China, but in Europe.
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