Guidelines for community conservation and development: The Traditional Communities of Wat Ket, Chiang Mai Province

Abstract

Chiangmai, a province in the northern region of Thailand, worldly-known to be one of the best developing cities and a famous tourist attraction. The government has approved on random construction plans such as, roads and real estates to develop Chiangmai and its economy. Consequently, most of the communities aren't satisfied with these unpredictable plans so they stood up against the government, made assemblies in order to claim the rights they once had.Unfortunately, only one community that succeeded to defer the road expansion plan from the government that would completely destroy their beloving historical sites, engraved with memories from generation to generation.

WatKet Community, a community of cultural diversity, filled with people from many religions such as Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Chinese, Thai natives, Indians, Burmeses and other nations. Due to its history of being an old port city, it has made WatKet as one of the historical community sites in Chiangmai.Even though this diversity seems to be a problem in order to join the people of each culture together to enhance its strength to stand up against the state's interference that might cause tremendous effects to the community, WatKet Community has done a pretty great job in uniting themselves together as one and became a strong community that is capable of protecting their own architectural and cultural heritages. They changed the government's idea of modifying the area into a central business district but now, conserving it instead. Nowadays, the assembly formed by a small group of people to preserve their historical heritages for the latter generation is hardly to be found in the society due to the materialistic needs of the mass that are increasing each day. Most nations tend to be focusing only on the convenient basic needs without concerning about the cultural significances of each area. Many developing capitals such as Kuala Lumpur of Malaysia, Seoul of South Korea or Singapore which has developedrapidly, have to face multiple difficulties in order to revitalize its own architectures. We could say that these cities are just old cities without a soulsince it is too late to restore what has been destroyed. This dissertation contains researches and finalized studies about this unique strength and characteristics of WatKet Community that can be used as a study case for readers to understand the following issue so that they could be able to suggestguidelines for the community conservation and community development in the future.

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