Chapter 2
products on the circulation route. This standard does not facilitate the possible expansion of product display. The standard sizing of stall built by Bangkok Metropolitan Authority (BMA) is 2 x 2 meters with a minimum infrastructure of the market. Secondly, these infrastructures also act as a device of control which can be seen in the case studies both historically and contemporarily. The first archetypal market, Nang Loeng market, was built by the government of Siam in order to clear out trading activities from the street and usher in a new, modernised urban quality in the mid nineteenth century. Nowadays, the orderliness and cleanliness of the urban scene is still an issue. The municipality often consider the street vendors in downtown Bangkok to be an urban nuisance25, and advocate policies to relocate these vendors away from their usual location. Standardisation of the market hall takes a role to govern and control over certain activities which are not considered to be hygienic and orderly. The provision of ventilation, daylight and drainage is a system of hygienic control that supports the cleaning activities. It is also stated in the Bangkok Local Ordinance of Marketplace that the market hall needs to be cleaned every day26. In this regulation, the distance between the products and the floor is crucial, and prohibited at less than 60 centimetres. The design of the stall counter aims to govern the bodies of both vendors and buyers, by stipulating that people need to stand while they are buying and selling. This is opposed to the usual manner of street trading in which products lie on the floor. It is useful to note the resistance of some vendors in the Tewarach market who, when forced to comply with the use of a counter, use that counter as a floor: sitting on it to prepare their produce for the next working day. On the one hand, the generic plan, an evenly provided infrastructure in the market hall, allows the possibility of change by the users. On the other hand, the activities that take place inside the market, which include the daily routine of the vendors, consumer behaviour and logistic protocol, is far from generic. I would argue that, although the current market standard and regulation are designed to regulate and control the activities taking place inside, they ignore what is precisely happening in the space every day. The generic plan is an issue here, in that it does not take into consideration the requirement of each vendor. It ignores the discrepancy between different type of product: fresh products and dry products, morning vendors and evening vendors, raw food and cooked food, circulation of vehicle and pedestrian. This thesis takes into account these various critical moments and rethinks an alternative standard model that would empower the market users. Case Studies: Market Architecture and the Specificity of Product
Perceiving an architecture of the market hall as a machine that organises trading activities helps us understand its purpose, and what should be projected toward an alternative model as a counter argument of the present model. However, the case studies are not a nostalgic recall of market as opposed to current prevailing modern
Fig. 13
25 Bhowmik, Sharit K., Street Vendors in Asia: A Review, Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 40, No. 22/23, (2005), p. 256 26 Bangkok Local Ordinance of Marketplace, 2008 <http://web. krisdika.go.th/data/law/ law2/%A136/%A136-2b2551-a0001.htm>p.8 38
