Bangkok’s “Clean-Up” Model: Can Order Conquer Urban Chaos on Sukhumvit?
Is the future of urban governance simply a Sisyphean cycle of control and chaos? Bangkok’s “Sukhumvit Model,” as reported by the Bangkok Post, is the latest act in a familiar, frustrating play: a concentrated, visible effort to sanitize a specific zone, driven by the relentless pressure of complaints, tourism revenue, and the Sisyphean task of maintaining order in a megacity that seems to reinvent disorder daily. Governor Chadchart Sittipunt’s highly publicized nighttime walkabouts are less a solution than an admission: cities are thermodynamic systems, constantly converting order into new, more complex forms of entropy.
The ambition is clear, even admirable. The BMA wants Sukhumvit Road, that throbbing artery pumping life through the city’s core, to become a “blueprint for the rest of Bangkok.” This blueprint promises to eradicate a catalog of urban anxieties: drug trafficking, homelessness, illegal vending, and the insistent buzz of unregulated tuk-tuks. Layer on crumbling sidewalks and a spaghetti of drooping power lines, and you have a vivid, visceral illustration of the sheer intractability of managing urban space in a city perpetually outgrowing its own skin.
“These are not isolated issues — they reflect on the city’s image and affect everyday life. If we can resolve them here, Sukhumvit can serve as a blueprint for the rest of Bangkok,”
But what happens when the “Sukhumvit Model” scales? What happens when the levers of control, perfectly calibrated for one neighborhood, are applied across the sprawling, contradictory expanse of Bangkok? Resources are, by definition, finite. Enforcement, always a blunt instrument, is quickly exhausted. Suppressing street vendors on Sukhumvit only displaces them to Lat Krabang. Crackdowns on illegal taxis merely create a vacuum for new informal transport networks to emerge. Are these true solutions, or merely elaborate exercises in pushing problems around a chessboard? It’s not a failure of will, but of imagination — a systemic myopia that mistakes symptoms for sources.
The ills Chadchart targets are not isolated outbreaks; they are symptoms of far deeper structural pathologies. Bangkok, like so many rapidly globalizing cities, is a crucible of inequality, haunted by the specter of insufficient social safety nets, and hobbled by decades of piecemeal, reactive urban planning. The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, far from being a distant memory, continues to cast a long shadow, widening the gap between the haves and have-nots and pushing countless individuals into the precarious embrace of informal economies. These informal economies, in turn, inevitably collide with the rigid formal regulatory structures the city attempts to impose, creating a friction that generates both economic dynamism and social tension.
Historically, Thailand has been locked in a complex dance between the forces of hyper-modernization and the deep gravity of traditional social hierarchies. The relentless pull of urbanization has drawn waves of rural communities into Bangkok’s ever-expanding orbit, placing immense strain on the city’s capacity to absorb and integrate them, creating what some call “urban villages” existing in a liminal space between tradition and modernity. As urban theorist Mike Davis might argue, this creates a volatile cocktail of rapid growth, social fragmentation, and persistent precarity.
The Sukhumvit Model, however well-intentioned, risks becoming a Potemkin village writ large — a visible display of responsiveness that obscures the deeper, more intractable challenges lurking beneath the surface. Success will hinge not merely on the ability to sweep Sukhumvit clean, but on a willingness to confront the underlying inequalities, to reimagine urban planning as a tool for social inclusion, and to build bridges between the formal and informal economies. Otherwise, Bangkok risks being forever condemned to play this never-ending game of whack-a-mole, expending vast resources chasing down symptoms while the underlying disease continues to metastasize.
