From Train Station to Night Market: Bangkok’s Talad Rod Fai as Urban Liminoid Space

Abstract

Drawn from grounded perspectives of a Bangkok night market that is part of a franchise known as “Talad Rod Fai” (or “Train Station Market”), this article argues that the market’s popularity rested originally on its liminoid character, enabling the construction of an alternate public space that can be transgressive of the city’s highly urbanized landscape. Its long-term sustainability, however, appears to be at the cost of its original objectives, due to the onset of global tourism, which has increasingly converted and transformed its spaces into a site of commercialization and formalization. This has impacted the nature of the goods and products sold, and contributed to the growing precarity of many of its tenants, along with significant loss of local interest in the market. Such insights raise implications about the potentially contradictory nature of tourism on local street-level economies, and its impact on the construction and subsequent consumption of public spaces in urban settings.