Incendiary Central: The Spatial Politics of the May 2010 Street Demonstrations in Bangkok

In May 2010, anti-government demonstrators made a flaming inferno of the CentralWorld Plaza - Thailand's biggest, and Asia's second largest, shopping mall. It was the climax of the latest major chapter of the Thai political conflict, during which thousands of protestors swarmed Ratchaprasong, the commercial centre of Bangkok, in an ultimately failed attempt to oust Abhisit Vejjajiva's regime from power. In this article, I examine how downtown Bangkok and exclusive malls like CentralWorld represent physical and cultural spaces from which the marginalized working classes have been strikingly excluded. It is a configuration of space that maps the contours of a heavily uneven distribution of power and articulates a vernacular of prestige wherein class relations are inscribed in urban space. The significance of the Red-Shirted movement's occupation of Ratchaprasong lies in the subversion of this spatialisation of power and draws attention to the symbolic deployment of space in the struggle for political supremacy.