Bangkok is hot and highly inflammable. Each year, the city experiences 600 to 700 urban fires. Yet different people and neighborhoods in the city encounter heat, its causes, and effects differently. For the past decade, incidents of urban fire, which occurred mostly in low-income communities, densely populated and materially haywire areas, have demonstrated the fragility of city resilience.
“Short circuit” is one of the main causes of such catastrophic events. A short circuit allows unintended electrical current to flow with little or no resistance. This lets a lot of current flow through the circuit, heating its parts. Uninterrupted current can damage the power supply, wires, and other electrical equipment. If this continues, sparks could start an urban fire.
This study examines heat matters through the events of short circuit and urban fire: a combination of electric infrastructure failure, socioeconomic disparity, urban temperature, spatial and temporal shortages, population density, inadequate resources for maintenance, and anthropogenic influences on urban microclimate, particularly the heat island, dust, and flood. Employing multi-material ethnography of electric appliances and quotidian practices in urban homes and electricity infrastructures in the city, this study traces the socio-material processes of heat igniting into an urban fire through short circuits. Through the entangled and unanticipated circuits of electricity through its hazardous, thermal assemblage, it aims to elucidate how heat matters generated by short circuits have ignited politics of urban governance, rekindling the visibility of city’s impediments and the absence of effective resistance to risk.
Jakkrit Sangkhamanee: Bangkok Ignited: Urban Fire, Heated Circuit, and the Politics of City’s Impediment to Risks
@workshop HEATMATTERS
January 2023, Institute for European Ethnology, HU-Berlin
Transcript of Audio Summary
This community, it is called Bon Kai. It is a low-income community, it is overcrowded. It has been about more than 2000 people living in a small quarter of a small area.
So, the fire happened during the daytime in the mid-day. Most of the people are wage labourers, so they went out to work in a different part of the city.
The community is surrounded by big buildings with aircon. So, during the daytime, when the heat has been put out from the tall buildings surrounding, it creates a heat island in the area. And also because of the block of the building, it creates a very narrow wind channel. So, it creates a strong wind that flows into the community that also helps to expand the spread of the fire and also the infrastructure surrounding and within the community. And of course, one of the main reasons for this incident was to blame the electrical short circuit.
So, what is exactly a short circuit, and how does it happen? In a more technical term, a short circuit is an electrical circuit that allows a current to travel along the unintended path with no or very low electrical impedance. So, when the current flows into the circuit it is heating the part, normally the electrical wall already has the heat, but it has the impedance that controls where the electricity will go so it can control the heat as well. But when the electricity accumulated in the system or in the wall, the heat also accumulated. So, if you don’t cut the electrical path using the electrical breaker, the electricity will continue to supply into the system and become heat up and can start a fire.
This is a technical explanation of how the short circuit and the heat and the fire happened. Right. But for me, coming from an anthropological background, I look at the short circuit and urban fire as a pathological thermal matter that can set alight and make visible, you know, not only the infrastructural vulnerability but also the urban risk and the lack of multiple impedance beyond the techno-materiality of the electricity.
So, for me, when we look at the case of Bon Kai community, and other fire, a short circuit can be an assemblage of many things all at once coming together. Also, we talk about the dynamism of urban climate, mostly the heat island, wind blow, and, you know, and also spatial and temporal shortage. What actually happened is not just a small scale that happened at a particular site where the fire happened, but it also links to the wider network of, for example, like electrical wire or communication walls that link different kinds of electricity to the area as well. And of course, we talk about anthropogenic influence on microclimate heat island. But flood has something to do with urban fire as well, because when Bangkok get flooded, it actually brought a lot of muddy elements into the house and sometimes it flows into the socket and those soil or mud become conductive to the electricity and can create fires.
And you can see that people are also doing that manipulation of the electrical connection as well. So, when we talk about the definition of unintended circuit, whose intention, right? So, it is the engineering intention to design the electrical circuit there, but people might have different intentions of how to manipulate or make use of electrical circuits in different ways.
This brought me to some of the area in anthropological study, which is on the electricity. But I would like to distinguish between the study of electrical power and the materiality and the material agency of the electricity. When I talk about the short circuit and how it actually happened, that requires us to look into the inner workings and the materiality of the electricity itself, the current, how the current is actually working within the system.
Strange enough, in Thai terminology, the word electricity we call Fị, but and the term fire, we also call Fị. So, for these two things, we use the same word: electricity and fire. So, when you say turn on the fire, that means turn on the light, because you can light up the fire. But if you say light up the light or light up the fire, that means a fire fire, right? But then electricity also has another term for it, which is Fịf̂ā, which is a fire from the sky. So, the close connection between electricity and fire has been there in Thai context where you can’t find it the linkage here between electricity and fire in the English terminology.
My interest in this study is heat can be produced by electricity through electrical circuit and making it a socio-material thermal object that can be used to understand the urban fire caused by a variety of urban assemblages. But I also would like to look at how electricity is transformed into heat. It carries a certain kind of heat, but it doesn’t transform into the overheated materiality or excessive heat. And I look at the ignition as relation and as already mentioned, about the proximity of the material or the temporal, the movement of the people in our community.
So, ignition is very relational. Things happen, that in order to create a trigger, a fire, a short circuit, it has to be something that is present and it has to be something that is absent from the scene in that particular time and place.
I got this idea from one of the papers by John Law and Emory Moore called Situating Technoscience. This brought me to the idea of topology of fire. Topology of fire is the object that achieves constancy of form by enacting simultaneously absent and present of something else.
So, we talk about the continuity of shape. In this sense, we can apply to the urban fire, we can be talking about electricity as a continuing form. When we talk about continuing form, it doesn’t have to be there all the time, but it always continues to be there, you know? I mean, from that statistic we see that fire happened here and in urban area all the time, of course, in different form, in different outlook. But it continued to have that kind of relation with the urban area. So, it actually continues with the discontinuity of different things, you know, and also it has the oscillation or the flickering effect relation between something there and something not there. So, topology is different from topography in the sense that we don’t look at the two-dimensional space, but we look at the proximity in different dimension. And when we talk about proximity, it’s not like geometric proximity where we can actually measure, but as our dimension, it is relational in the sense that it depends on the context, it depends on the node, the material effect between different things together or even people.
And finally, it is quite relational in the sense that there is no clear demarcation between what is internality and externality. We’re talking about the short circuit, which is something very internal, but it is also linked with a lot of external externality that we cannot control.