Project entanglement in a heritage waterscape: conservation, infrastructure and resident resources in Ayutthaya, Thailand

In Ayutthaya, Thailand—a former royal capital in the Chao Phraya basin, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1991—the relation between city and water has been reshaped by successive projects pursuing unrelated aims: terrestrial modernization, heritage conservation, regional flood management and cultural tourism. Drawing on 181 interviews with residents and 12 with public agencies across four sites, together with architectural surveys and archival plans covering 1932–2023, this article distinguishes two ways in which such projects combine. On the historic island they converge: each layer extends the direction of the last, and water is progressively treated as a monument—visible, but no longer used. In the peripheries they interfere, and the article specifies the conditions under which this constitutes project entanglement: divergent rationalities among the intervening actors, and the alteration by one project of the conditions under which a later and unrelated project operates. Entanglement, however, does not determine what follows. Three peripheral cases yield three outcomes—commercial reinvention, organized relinquishment, and the incremental raising of dwellings—according to what residents hold: spatial capital, local governance capacity, or transmitted construction knowledge. The comparison yields a finding specific to heritage water cities: the areas placed under conservation are those where the water relation has ceased to be practiced, while the unprotected peripheries are where it continues to be renegotiated. The article's contribution is this three-term relation between entanglement, resident resources and forms of negotiation, offered as a comparative hypothesis rather than a general model.