Socioeconomic and livelihood impacts within Bangkok’s expanding metropolitan region

Abstract

Recent national development plans in Thailand have incorporated concepts of sustainability, livelihood rights, and human dignity. Yet, development and urban expansion have unfolded in unexpected ways, complicating the socioeconomic and ecological integrity of peri-urban and rural spaces. This paper explores the ways in which urban expansion and state development within rural peripheries reshape political economies and, in so doing, the nature of vulnerability and precarity. Using ethnographic data collected among agrarian households in Samut Prakan province and among domestic migrant laborers in the Bangkok Metropolitan Region (BMR), the research considers the socioeconomic and ecological effects of peripheral areas’ tighter integration into expanding urban geographies. In effect, to what degree does urban development unfolding in the BMR improve people’s lives and, simultaneously, rework the dynamics of vulnerability and precarity experienced among those laboring in marginal spaces of the economy? A broad array of ethnographic and Landsat data demonstrates that families and individuals must renegotiate livelihood strategies to mitigate the sociopolitical, economic, and environmental outcomes of development. The findings demonstrate how agrarian families manage the structural and stochastic shocks and pressures of development in urbanizing landscapes and what this means for the future of smallholders situated within changing national economies. <em><strong>Policy relevance</strong></em> Bangkok’s urban expansion into peri-urban and rural areas is found to change the lives of existing residents. This outward movement of urbanization has negatively impacted smallholder agrarian families’ livelihoods and created new dynamics of vulnerability and precarity. Bangkok’s urban development into its peripheral greenfield areas has shifted political, economic, and environmental conditions that have led to a gradual but irreversible process of livelihood alteration. Agrarian families must pursue diversified livelihood portfolios in response to current policies that dispossess households of land and resources. To assist local people with this transformation, policymakers must address the fundamental transformations of agrarian economies within urbanizing landscapes. Positive actions could include the creation of productive high-paying jobs, training and education pathways into new labor markets, strengthening social safety nets, and considering alternative food production strategies.