Where do People Live in Bangkok?

Bangkok, the capitol of Thailand, is the center of everything that you can think of about one country. It is the location for the Grand Palace where the King lives, a large financial distinct in the center of Bangkok, several markets and shopping malls for everyone to buy something, and hundred of Buddhist temples scattering around Bangkok. The Siam Paragon (สยามพารากอน)—a massive shopping complex, movie theater and aquarium in Bangkok–often ranked the most-Instagrammed places for several years. And we also said that Bangkok is the first step to come to South-East Asia because of our enormous airport, Suvarnabhumi Airport.

But where do people actually live in Bangkok? We often saw an ordinary scene of bad traffic in the morning when people are rushing to go to work from different places, students are trying to get to school before 8 am and locals are opening up their stores for another day. Have you ever wondered where do they live? And how far they have to drive to come to work or study in the center of the city?

As a picture is worth a thousand words, I would say that a map is worth a thousand picture. But I could not find any online map showing the details of population of people who live in Bangkok, so I decided to make my own. Fortunately, it is not too difficult to find this data online. Specially, I found the data for the boundary of different khwaengs (แขวง)–an administrative subdivision used in the 50 distrincts of Bangkok and also population within each khwaeng from the Ministry of Transport of Thailand (MOT). In this map, I showed the population for different khwaengs in Bangkok. You could see where people tend to live in Bangkok. I also put in some public transportation like subway train and express ways to see whether there is a correlation between the number of available modes of transit and the population of people.

From here, we can see that people in Bangkok tend to live to the north and east of Bangkok from Don Mueang (ดอนเมือง), Bang Khen (บางแค), Lat Phrao (ลาดพร้าว), Bang Kapi (บางกะปิ), Suan Luang (สวนหลวง) and Bang Na (บางนา) (but still not all the way to the far East like Nong Chok (หนองจอก) and Lad Krabang (ลาดกระบัง)). They also live all the way to Southwest of Bangkok around Bang Bon (บางบอน).

However, we can see that there is no train line that are going all the way to where people actually live. BTS (sky train) and MRT (subway train) simply run only at the center of the city where people work but they do not run to where people live. And this might be one explanation for why the traffic is terrible in Bangkok.

Here is the zoom-in version for the first map with only at the Inner City region (เขตเมืองชั้นใน) of Bangkok. We can see that there are only few districts in the inner city of Bangkok that have high population which are Bang Sue (บางสูง), Din Daeng (ดินแดง), Khlong Toei (คลองเตย). But there is one notice that we should be cautious about which is that each district does not have the same area. For example, Nong Chok (หนองจอก), the largest district of Bangkok in terms of size, which is the Suburb (เขตชานเมือง) of Bangkok has the area 167.8 times larger than the smallest district in Bangkok, Samphanthawong (สัมพันธวงศ์) which is the inner city. Therefore, this visualization might lead to a wrong conclusion if we do not keep this simple fact in mind. Another way to display this information is to consider the population density for each Khweang instead of total population. So, in the next post, I will post the same map but with the population density instead of the total population.

Lastly, once you see how people are scattered around Bangkok, you will have a better understanding of the place that you live (in my case the place that I was born and raised) and you will never look at Bangkok the same again. Feel free to leave comments or concern about any of this topic in the comments before.

Khao San Road: A popular street for foreigners who come to Bangkok

PS: I also uploaded the text file for the population and the number of households in each Khwaeng in Bangkok that I created from the layer data. You should be able to connect this text file with the boundary of each Khwaeng from MOT website. This data is offered free, without restriction and not subject to domestic copyright protection.

Acknowledgement: Thank you for ArcGIS as a tool for me to work on a map and add on information about population. Also, I would not know how to do any of this if I did not take a class at the University of Chicago called "Intro to Geographic Information Systems" from the Geography Department where I learned everything about geography from how to make a good map (cartography) to different methods for geographer to collect map data.