the Problems

While addressing the notion of community and individuality, the project TEN also originated from the current housing problems in Bangkok. The paradox of the Bangkok housing lies in the fact that while most real estate developers cater their products for the high-income inhabitants, it is not the low-income urbanites who suffer from the lack of housing.

Deprived of all types of privileges, the low-incomes are now compensated with governmental aids, resulting in various housing projects across the city. This leaves us with people that occupy the economic demography between the high and the low incomes. Paradoxically, this has become a group with the most pressing housing problem. While the overpriced housings are out of reach, the people of medium income are also ineligible for the governmental housing aids.
They are forced to enter the deadend route of Bangkok housing, with neither opportunity nor alternative.

With the total provision of upper class housing done by private sector, and the governmental aids to that of the lower class; Bangkok’s broad spectrum of middle classes are left with the absence of alternate visions. A number of questions arose.


What constitutes adequacy in housing – is there a bottom line that is not monetary? Does the provision of housing subjects itself, as many other things are, to the flexible and capricious accumulation of capital that characterizes the global economy? What constitute a house these days? Is housing a matter of economy or is it a cultural artifact? If housing is both an economic product that depends on the market economy, and a cultural product that involve the particular ways of live of the people who dwell in it, how can we bridge the gap between the two aspects? What could be the approach?