REWILDING BANGKOK: Critical Zones and the Cosmoecology of Parks and Protests

Abstract

Bangkok is a tropical metropolis subject to many human and nonhuman transformations. While Covid-19 raged, the city's mix of precarity and oppression gave rise to a youth protest movement that opposed the junta government and sought to intervene in Thai politics-as-usual. At the same time, a rewilding experiment aimed at undoing environmental damage quietly was unfolding in Benjakitti Urban Forest Park. We draw on science and technology studies (STS), anthropology and urban theory to elicit the events of both park and protests as ongoing experiments in rewilding Bangkok on more-than-human terrain. Both involve overlapping critical zones, where encounters between many beings and practices of worlding shape an uncommons and create problems of coexistence. Such problems call for cosmoecological diplomacy, understood as the art of giving collective shape to a more-than-human cosmos yet to arrive.