An Evident Disconnect between City Planning and Education Policy Makers: A Case of Bangkok’s Troublesome Public School Infrastructure

Wimonsiri Saengkrod^**, Chen JingFu^*, Abdul Ghaffar Mastoi^**

1. *School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, Hubei, China
2. **College of Public Administration, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, Hubei, China

Published in The Fourth NZAAR International Event Series on Natural and Built Environment, Cities, Sustainability and Advanced Engineering, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 27 January 2018, pages 217 to 224. New Zealand Academy of Applied Research. ISSN 2463-5979 (online), 2463-5960 (print). Indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection, Conference Proceedings Citation Index (Clarivate).

Abstract

Public schools are important elements of public, social and physical infrastructure. The quality of cities depends on the quality of schools. Likewise, the quality of schools depends on the quality of cities. This paper analyzes a profound and detrimental disconnect between city planning and education policy makers in terms of provision of public education facilities in Bangkok. This is evident in the deficiency of public school infrastructure to provide enough capacity for an oddly and robustly increasing population of a metropolitan city of Bangkok. This study incorporated primary and secondary school density in each district of Bangkok (in terms of area and population) through secondary data (Ministry of Interior) to show how oddly distributed are the education facilities. City planning scholars need to increase their engagement with public schools and school facilities and think more critically about how development and redevelopment decisions ultimately impact our public schools.

Keywords: public schools; public infrastructure; city planning; education policy; Bangkok

Rights

Copyright © New Zealand Academy of Applied Research Ltd 2018. All rights reserved. Reproduced in the GDI Academy archive from the original proceedings without change to the authors’ text.