[sustran] Boardwalk in Thai low-income settlement

[Paul Barter]

Dear all, Most of us take pedestrian access to our homes for granted.  But
this is not so everywhere.  This item is from the electronic newsletter of
the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) which has its secretariat in
Bangkok.


6. Thailand: A BOARDWALK FOR TUNG PATTANA

Thailand's UCDO teamed up with Denmark's funding agency DANCED to start a
Community Environment Development Fund, which channels grant money to poor
settlements for small improvement projects - wells, drainage, community
centres, walkways. All decisions about how the fund will be used - what
projects, where and how much - are made by national and local community
networks.  Chiang Mai's community network, for example, requires projects to
cost less than Baht 200,000 (US$7,000), be built entirely with contributed
labour, and benefit everyone in the community.  77 projects, affecting
14,248 families, are underway around Thailand.  Here is how one community
used the fund:

Tung Pattana is a small squatter settlement in Chiang Mai.  Its 25 houses
are built of second-hand wood and salvage materials, on stilts, along a
municipal drainage canal.  Even though the possibility of eviction looms,
Tung Pattana is filled with evidence of the human impulse to make a home:
flower-filled balconies, songbirds in cages, and the merry confusion of
clothes hung out to dry.  The most potent expression of this impulse is the
boardwalk Tung Pattana's people have come together to build.  During the
rains, floodwaters fill the canal and houses can only be reached by rickety
bamboo poles, dangerous for old folks and children to navigate.  The
community asked for 100,000 Baht (US$3,500) from the Environment Fund, and,
with their own sweat and ingenuity, built a boardwalk which is a marvel.
For the legs, they used concrete fence-posts, and during the dry season,
when the water was low, they cemented the posts into the bottom of the
canal, in pairs, at two-metre intervals.  Then they bolted wooden
cross-members to the columns, nailed teakwood boards to these and trimmed
the edges.  The boardwalk is assembled in easily-liftable sections, so the
entire system can be taken apart and re-bolted at a higher level during
flooding.