Conservation of Religious Facilities and Surroundings: Contrasts Between Buddhist, Islamic and Catholic Communities in Bangkok, Thailand

Abstract

In Asian countries, religious facilities are important urban cultural heritages, as we can recognize temples, mosques and churches as cities' landmarks. Bangkok is a city where visitors often perceive strong urban images from those appearances of religious facilities in downtown area. To protect these facilities, government takes a big role in conservation of religious buildings, especially if they are declared as monuments. Religious organizations themselves are also crucial authorities in term of managing and providing financial support to maintain facilities, even some differences between religions could be seen. And at last, communities always serve traditionally full support, since residents are believers and common users of those religious facilities. But in administrative conservation system, there is no standing point for communities. By the law, cultural heritages protection is claimed to be duty of Fine Arts Department and each owner of properties, which means religious organizations in case of religious places. This can be interpreted that people cannot protect their local cultural heritages themselves even if their religious places are threatened, nor they have rights to report any destructive actions to the police. It is quite curious that people are excluded away from the mechanism of current conservation system, even communities have been supporting religious facilities for very long time. Religious community is a traditional urban community formed together with religious place. We can find many of them in downtown Bangkok. Temple, mosque or church is the most important element for this kind of community, because it is taken as community's center. Even nowadays, lives of residents in these communities are still connected deeply with religious facilities, not only by the ritual but in everyday life. Systematically participation in conservation of these communities might be a good way to improve process of protection, and to prevent further heritages destruction; which sometimes found expanding as social conflict. This study will clarify the potential of each religious community in conservation term. Buddhist, Islamic and Catholic communities have different mechanism to manage and control their facilities. This study is based on interview information gathered from residents from several communities in the same neighborhood area of Thonburi and Bangkok-Yai district; the west side of Bangkok. Settlements in this area are well-known for traditional religious communities that still remain effective today. The analysis will be made with case studies on points of “How the religious facility is managed”, “How the properties (land, buildings etc) are controlled”, “How the religious community role has changed”, and then “How much the community can participate in conservation process”. The results of this analysis should be compared between cases of different religious communities to figure out some hints to complement administrative mechanism, which communities have not yet been considered to play any role in conservation of their heritages.