HISTORY

CITY-WIDE UPGRADING IN RANGSIT :
Rangsit is a municipality in the 300-year-old province of Pathum Thani, which together with Bangkok, Samut Prakan, Samut Sakhorn and Nonthaburi make up the greater Bangkok Metropolitan Region. Rangsit is a busy Bangkok suburb on the Bangkok-Ayutthaya transport artery, crowded with shopping malls, universities, posh housing enclaves. If you look at the aerial photos of Rangsit, you see an astonishing amount of empty land for an area so close to Bangkok, but most of it is being kept idle by speculators for future real estate deals and is way too expensive for the city's poor to access. And have many long canals.

Getting started in Pathum Thani Province:
The community upgrading process in Pathum Thani Province began in 2003 with a big forum (involving the Municipality, the enthusiastic mayor, represent tatives from all the communities and CODI), the launching of community savings groups and the setting up of a joint committee to develop plans for resolving the problems of housing in Rangsit and Pathum Thani Province.

Rangsit city facts :
• Urban population : 72,000 people
• Total number of poor and informal communities in the city : 17 settlements (2,746 households)

Canal settlements in Rangsit :
Thailand is a wet part of Asia, and many cities like Rangsit are built on lowlying swampland and are criss-crossed with klongs (canals). These canals not only help control all that water, but have traditionally provided vital conduits of commerce, transport and development. But since the car replaced the boat, roads and expressways have overlaid these older, wetter structures. The klongs, relegated to the status of open drains, have fallen into disrepair and are used for dumping sewage and garbage, or concreted over to make way for buildings.But as the cities keep growing, and the klongs keep deteriorating. Too often, the finger is pointed at the poor communities which line many of Thailand's klongs, to mask much deeper problems of urbanization and bad planning. Canal-side communities find themselves accused of spoiling the klongs and threatened with eviction. In most Thai cities now, beleaguered klong-side communities have used the problems they have in common to form networks, to work together to improve their klongs - and the environment around them. And in the process, they are consolidating their right to stay by demonstrating that they are the best keepers of these muchneeded water management systems.

Rangsit : Thailand's first planned agricultural development . . .
In the nineteenth century, the extremely fertile land in Rangsit inspired His Majesty the King to develop Thailand's first planned agricultural development. An extensive network of canals were planned and dug, the land was surveyed and dividedup into long fields of uniform length and width, which farmers could cultivate, for afee. Lively settlements, floating houses and markets, and a whole culture grew up around these canals. But as Bangkok expanded towards Rangsit in the 60s and 70s,the economic pressure to stop farming and start developing real-estate meant Rangsit's canal-side communities started being evicted.