Manangkasila was an old, run-down community of fruit vendors and day laborers in the center of Bangkok.  After the land was leased to a private sector company to develop commercially, an eviction crisis brought everyone to the table.  Eventually, the community negotiated to turn over 60 percent of the land they used to occupy to the developer and lease the other 40 percent to rebuild their community, in a tight layout of rowhouses on small plots. Manangkasila was Bangkok’s second example of the “land sharing” strategy being used to avoid eviction and allow the people to stay and improve their housing.

Sengki was a very old land-rent community of market vendors and day laborers in the historic center of Bangkok.  After a fire burned down their wooden houses and invalidated their lease contracts, they formed a cooperative and negotiated to buy a portion of the land they had become squatters on, where they made a new plan and rebuilt their houses.  Sengki was Bangkok’s sixth example of the “land sharing” strategy being used to avoid eviction and allow the people to stay and improve their housing at the same time it allowed the land-owning agency to get some of its land back to develop commercially.

Thep Prathan was a thriving, well-developed and fully legal land-rental community in the heart of Bangkok, on the Rama IV Road.  After a series of suspicious fires burned down much of the community, an equally suspicious attempt to evict the people and grab their valuable inner-city land ensued. In the course of negotiating a way to stay in the same place, the people invented the land sharing strategy. This project became Thailand’s first successful land sharing project, even though it took so long to negotiate and build that several other projects that it inspired were planned and built in the mean time.  

The small, canal-side squatter settlement of Klong Lumnoon was far away from everything when the people settled on this swampy land in the 1980s.  But by the late 1990s, the area was developing fast and the people suddenly found themselves in a dramatic eviction struggle.  After a long and intense negotiation, which involved many helpers, the 49 poor families who had held on - the real fighters - were able to negotiate to collectively buy a small part of the private land they had been squatting on, where they rebuilt their houses and community, with finance support from CODI’s Baan Mankong Program.

This project is one of the ten pilot projects which launched the Baan Mankong Program in Thailand.  The Block 7-12 community was a sprawling squatter settlement of port-workers, laborers and street vendors who built their houses from scratch on the swampy land that had been expropriated for the new Bangkok Port in 1935.  When the Port Authority wanted the land to expand port facilities, the people resisted, and a 25-year long eviction struggle ensued.  Finally, a group of the toughest fighters remained and were able to negotiate a historic agreement to relocate to Port Authority land nearby.