The Historical Traces of Residual Rhythms in Maintaining the Identity, \nAuthenticity and Sense of Place in a Contemporary City: The Sino-Thai Urban \nLivelihoods in Thai Cities
Year: 2023
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Local public life activities have been part of Thai urbanism for a long time. People generally perceive those activities as the senses and identities of urban places. However, the importance and values of the public life activities of locals are overlooked in the perspectives of the Thai government and urban practitioners. For example, urban design and urban conservation studies and practices do not have analytical frameworks for public life activities. Moreover, the government issued urban policies to limit the performances and appearances of local life activities in public spaces. These gaps in perspectives resulted in the declining senses and identities of Thai urbanism. \nRegarding such gaps, this research aims to demonstrate the values and importance of traditional life activities for Thai urbanism in order to bring such activities into studies and practices of urban design and urban conservation in Thailand. As such an aim, this research sets a research question: ' How have traditional life activities sustained senses, identities and memories of Thai urban places over time? Theoretically, this research considers that traditional life activities are the ‘residual rhythms’: residues of the past that remain in contemporary urbanism and pass on social histories and meanings across people’s generations. \nThis research applied three methods to study residual rhythms' values and importance in two Sino-Thai neighbourhoods. First, the walking interview explores people's feelings and attitudes toward residual rhythms. Second, Place-Rhythmanalysis is used to investigate the temporal characteristics of the rhythms. Third, the photo-elicitation interview is adopted to collect people's memories with the rhythms. \nThrough the studies, this research concluded that residual rhythms are ‘mental images’ and repositories of memories of Thai urban places. The importance of these rhythms is about being parts of people’s everyday life, representing the ‘cultural process’ of place, and delivering a wide range of urban memories to people. The results of this research expand the perspectives and suggest a new framework of urban design and conservation in Thailand to focus more on the regular life rhythms of locals.
Author: Chaimanee, Anon
Institution: University College London
Language: English
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7019609450