Urban ecology in Bangkok, Thailand: community participation, urban agriculture and forestry.

Abstract

This paper describes a community-based urban environmental management project in Bangkok, Thailand. In this project, representatives from two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worked with two poor communities in Bangkok to establish citizen working groups to address local environmental problems. Once these working groups had identified problems, they established and enacted plans to address them. During this process, NGO staff also worked with local governments, building bridges between community groups and elected officials. In addition to improving the local environment, this project developed a framework that other communities could follow to establish their own urban green programmes. This framework was adopted and replicated in fifty communities by the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration. Using this process we demonstrate that both environmental goals and social development goals can be met at the same time.

Cet article decrit un projet de gestion collective de l'environnement urbain Bangkok, en Thailande, dans lequel des representants de deux organisations non gouvernementales (ONG) ont travaille avec deux communautes pauvres pour mettre sur pied des groupes de travail de citoyens cherchant resoudre des problemes environnementaux locaux. Une fois les problemes identifies, ils ont mis sur pied et realise un plan d'action. Au cours de ce processus, le personnel des ONG a aussi travaille avec les gouvernements locaux, estalissant ainsi des liens entre les groupes communautaires et les elus. En plus d'ameliorer l'environnement local, ce projet a cree un cadre de travail dont d'autres communautes peuvent se servir afin de mettre sur pied leurs propres programmes environnementaux urbains. Ce cadre a ete adopte par 50 communautes de Bangkok. Ce processus a permis de demontrer que des objectifs environnementaux et de developpement social peuvent etre realises simultanement.

Keywords

South East Asia, urban agriculture, urban forestry, community participation, international development.

Introduction

Moving in search of a better life, people across the globe have abandoned traditional socio-economic systems, broken ecological bonds with nature, and flocked to urban centres. While this process started in the 'northern' or "developed" world, less developed countries have quickly caught up. In late 1999, the United Nations declared that over 50% of humanity now lives in urban centres (Brook and Davila, 2000). To support densely packed urban populations, societies take resources from around the planet and concentrate them in cities. Moving natural resources in this way sustains modern society and results in significant environmental degradation. We extract resources from remote areas, causing deforestation and soil erosion, and we move resources to urban areas, causing problems with waste disposal and water and air pollution (Wackernagel and Rees,1995; Wackernagel,1994). This process of taking raw materials from around the globe and accumulating waste in cities has broken the self-regulating cycles of nutrien t flows that are characteristic of many undisturbed ecosystems. Climate change, ozone depletion, species loss, and habitat destruction are all consequences of modern, urban life (Douglas, 1983; White, 1994).

These problems are compounded in the developing world since economic constraints are much larger in countries like Thailand, than in North America or Europe: it is difficult to find money for environmental management when basic needs and poverty are an immediate concern. In Bangkok alone, one third of all homes do not have water and most sewage ends up untreated in the canals that crisscross the city (Sivaramkrishnan and Green, 1986). These concerns are exacerbated by the pace of change in the developing world, which is much more rapid than in Europe or North America. For example, Bangkok is similar to many cities in the developing world in that it had just one million people in 1950 while today it is home to close to 12 million. This pace is not expected to slow for decades (Platt et al. 1994).

In addition, the developing world is concentrated in the tropics, which covers 7% of the earth's land surface, and is home to an estimated 50% of the earth's species (Shiva, 1994). Not only are the tropics significant in terms of biodiversity, but they are also among the earth's most fragile ecosystems. The soil in these regions tends to be low in organic matter -- which buffers against changes in acidity and increases fertility -- because hot moist conditions make organic matter decompose quickly. The majority of biomass in tropical ecosystems is above the ground in living plant material. Because of this, Lamprecht argues that tropical soils are maintained by the vegetation that grows on them as opposed to temperate ecosystems where the soil maintains the plant life that grows on it (Lamprecht, 1989). Once the original vegetation is removed, soils are susceptible to erosion, quickly lose fertility, and stop supporting high biodiversity. As a result, urbanization threatens some of the planet's most important and fragile environmental areas. In Thailand, this leads Laird (2000) and Bello et al. (1998) to conclude that unfettered and unplanned economic expansion has led to serious environmental problems.

In light of these challenges, this paper describes a community-based environmental management project in Bangkok, Thailand that was designed to address these problems at the local level. Funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), and run through a partnership between the Canadian-based International Centre for Sustainable Cities (ICSC) and the Thailand Environment Institute (TEI), this project has worked with poor urban communities in Thailand to develop urban agriculture and forestry plans. While the goal was primarily environmental -- to use community participation to improve nutrient cycles in urban areas by promoting urban forestry/agriculture -- this project quickly evolved into a capacity building exercise to help communities address environmental problems.

Urban Greening in Bangkok

Bangkok, home to 12 million people, offers a huge potential for urban ecology. First, both the Thai government and the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) have established urban greening as a priority. Bangkok has one [m.sup.2] per capita of public green space, and the BMA wants to increase this to 10 [m.sup.2] per capita (Apichat, 1999). Second, while the downtown core is densely populated, approximately 39 % of the greater Bangkok area is vacant, undeveloped, low-lying and marshy, or abandoned (Pornchokchai, 1992). This was partly caused by Bangkok's extremely fast growth rate in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s that meant municipal authorities could not build an adequate road network to keep all of the city accessible by car. As a result, large areas, especially in the outer-lying regions, have been cut off from typical urban development and remain more or less empty. Seeing this potential, and the obvious need for a better urban environment, the Thailand Environment Institute (TEI) -- one of Thailand's leadi ng ENGOs -- approached Canada's International Centre for Sustainable Cities (ICSC) to work on a Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) funded partnership on urban greening in Bangkok. The tasks of this project were to:

1. Teach members of two pilot communities in Bangkok about the benefits of urban green space.

2. Form community working groups in these two areas and guide these groups to plan, implement and maintain urban green space in their community.

3. Develop and test a process or method of community involvement so the needs of the community and the larger-scale environmental benefits of urban greening can be met.

The challenge behind these goals was the development of a process that future communities could use to improve the environment while not overly influencing their priorities. To do this we needed to ensure that the opinions of women, minorities, or other marginalized groups were placed alongside environmental concerns so that neither was subordinate.

To create this framework, TEI and ICSC staff anticipated that activities would fall into three major steps: preliminary work, planning and implementation. Preliminary work involved finding a site where people would participate, where land was available, and where the local authorities were supportive of the project. Next, the communities needed to form working groups, who would receive education and training on urban green space. The planning phase consisted of drawing a map of the existing area, establishing goals, planning the new green space, and establishing a work plan. The key consideration for this phase was to ensure that all groups in the community -- including women, children, any minorities, and the elderly -- were involved in the process. The last phase was to implement the green plan. This included site preparation, planting, and ensuring that there was a regular maintenance schedule. To help communities through these stages, TEI and ICSC created a background educational booklet (in Thai), and dr ew up a checklist of relevant questions for each phase. The goal was to provide communities with enough structure that all relevant issues would be covered, while allowing sufficient flexibility so that communities would be able to articulate their own needs (for more information see Fraser, 2001).