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Nothing beats construction of superstructure when it comes to disaster on urban fabric, especially in Bangkok, a city where daily transportation heavily relies on private vehicles and whose authorities believe that building expressway is the answer to traffic problem. Buildings are torn down to give way to the structure and machineries used during construction process. In most cases, they are destroyed only half way or less, just enough to proceed the rushing construction. Some of the leftover structures are kept and new facades are built to reuse the spaces. Some are abandoned to be 'ghost buildings'.
In general, when you want to construct something near this kind of massive infrastructure, a certain setback distance is required. How about the other way around? Is there any regulation on the setback of the new structure from existing buildings? In Bangkok, the insertion of superstructures into existing urban space is driven by necessity. In many cases, the existing space is just simply too tight to talk about noise pollution or aesthetic.
Elevated expressway is believed to be a solution to traffic problem as it gets you from one point to the other faster. But the solution has been proved failure. Cars from the city’s periphery can move toward the city center faster while the number of cars at the center, at a particular moment, doesn’t decrease. Moreover, the gigantic size of these superstructures has caused difference in scale comparing to the size of local buildings. As more and more of these structures are, and will be, built, a new uninhabited urban layer is created over existing neighborhoods.
Bangkok is well known for its traffic condition. Inhabitants are in favor of private transportation. The amount of new cars keeps increasing everyday. With the registration number of new vehicle at about 1,000 cars a day (It was recorded as 1,220 cars/day in 1996) and the density ratio of road in length per area at only 2.55 km./ sq.km, no doubt Bangkok is brought to the forefront on the chart of world’s cities with serious traffic problem.
