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Abstract:
In May 2010, anti-government demonstrators created a flaming inferno of Central- World Plaza – Thailand’s biggest, and Asia’s second largest shopping mall. It was the
climactic close to the latest major chapter of the Thai political conflict, during which thousands of protestors swarmed Ratchaprasong, the commercial centre of Bangkok,
in an ultimately failed attempt to oust Abhisit Vejjajiva’s regime from power. In this paper, I examine how downtown Bangkok and exclusive malls like Central-World represent physical and cultural spaces from which the marginalized working classes have been strikingly excluded. It is a configuration of space that maps onto
the contours of a heavily uneven distribution of power, and articulates a vernacular of prestige, wherein which class relations are inscribed in urban space. The significance of the red-shirted movement’s occupation of Ratchaprasong lies in the subversion
of this spatialisation of power and draws attention to the symbolic deployment of space in struggles for political supremacy.
