At first, we thought we'd hire a contractor, but after some calculations, we figured that we could save three or four hundred thousand baht (US$ 7,000 – 10,000) if we did the work ourselves. So we divided ourselves into teams and set to work. Besides picking up construction skills, we learned a lot about each other’s lives and families in the two years it took to build our new community. The construction process also became our community building, our trust building. Nowadays, everybody knows everybody here, and we live like a big family. I can leave my children in the community when I go out, and feel safe knowing they'll be looked after. When the building work is finished, we have plans to plant trees and vegetables so our community will be green and clean.

Development intervention
This is just one small example of what can happen when a development intervention emphasizes people as the key to making change. People like Pa Chan and her neighbours have come a long way from their decades of isolation, illegality and powerlessness. With these new relationships and this new confidence, Klong Lumnoon has become a secure, healthy and vibrant place to live. Its residents now have the confidence to take full responsibility for managing any aspect of their community’s development – physical or social. And even a poor woman like Pa Chan has become a regular speaker and an important adviser to many other communities and institutions in Bangkok and other cities around Thailand.

Why can’t we make a similar shift in how larger city development processes work? People are the spirit of any city. They are the creators: they provide the energy, the labor and the life that make cities function. It is time to look at them as the focus of city development. It is time to find ways them to get involved in our growing cities, so that they feel a part of whatever has been (or is to be) developed in their local constituencies – communities, wards or districts, along their canals or around their markets. How can people and communities play a part in the planning, the decision – making, the doing and the managing of their cities? How can they grow and be healthy as their cities grow? How can we begin a process where, little by little, the city begins to belong to people – whether poor or not? This calls for a big leap – a change in the city development paradigm. How can the system make room for the force of people’s creativity to spring up and flourish so as to create this new urban development culture?

It is important to open up larger space for people to come together and to take up development activities in their localities – activities like house-building, community upgrading, canal-cleaning, and recycling or revitalizing community markets. When a housing project is to be developed, for example, the people affected should be able to determine how they want to live together, how the social system is to be developed, what form their new housing will take, and what kind of management system will be instituted. Rather than have architects, planners or developers just planning all this on paper for them.

Similarly, if some environmental feature of a city (like a canal, river, lake, mountain, historic site or shoreline) has become degraded, people who live within or around it can help develop it and, in the process, become its protectors and maintainers. This would give people a sense of sharing in the management of their city and it will build relationships between them and their improved surroundings.

Create space
If we see people as the subject of development, we have to create space for them to participate more actively and to have a stronger sense of ownership of what happens in their constituencies. Instead of the city being a vertical unit of control, these smaller units – people-based and local – can be a system of self-control for a more creative, more meaningful development.

When local development initiatives come from communities, people become the doers, and feel that the development of the larger environment is part of their communities, part of their lives, part of their achievement. Canal-cleaning activities in many communities have led to many others, such as cultural events celebrating the long history of living with Thailand¹s life-giving waterways. These activities are the urban people’s way of respecting nature, since canals bring water, life, wealth, fish, transport channels, income-earning opportunities – and a vivid reminder of our unignorable relationship with nature, in the centre of the city.

Development interventions should try to create space for people to be the doers, for them to be able to lead the development process with confidence. We just need to understand the techniques to unlock this people energy and to channel it into a creative new force for city development. This must be supported by adopting flexible financial management mechanisms to allow people the freedom – as a group – to undertake development activities they initiate or need.

Canal-cleaning activities in many communities have led to many others, such as cultural events celebrating the long history of living with Thailand’s life giving waterways

Individual people in Asian cities now have a clear bilateral relationship with the state, but often very few horizontal ones among themselves. How can a single politician – or a set of politicians or government officials – possibly manage all the needs and aspirations of a city’s five or ten million inhabitants even if given the power to do so? If we start building a lot of smaller constituencies within a city, where people start relating to each other – and sharing between constituencies – a lot of horizontal learning, linking, and creativity will start to happen.

A city is not a homogeneous unit. Cities are getting very, very big – many in Asia now number in the tens of millions – much too big to make sense monolithically. It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that only gigantic sized policy decisions and mega-projects can tame and streamline these teeming, out-of-control agglomerations of humanity. But this kind of thinking leads to many of the unsustainable development attitudes that we labor under today.

It is possible to turn this around. If, instead, we look at cities as collections of many small, diverse and overlapping constituencies and allow the people of each to take part in developing their lives, their areas and their ways of relating to each other – with proper coordination – then the human element and scale can reappear. Cities will begin to be manageable by their own citizens.