Living with risk is an exploration of the precarious lives of Bangkok's urban poor. Tamaki Endo argues that the urban poor are not only defined by their income levels, but perhaps more importantly, also by the nature of their lives and the texture of their livelihoods. So the issue is not just a quantitative one determined and demarcated by a money-centric view of poverty, but also a qualitative one where we need to ask questions and collect evidence regarding the quality of working conditions and living arrangements among Bangkok's marginal and marginalised ‘poor’.
The book is impressively rich in empirical terms and the discussion is supported by a host of footnotes, tables and figures, scores of photographs, nine appendices, three bibliographies …. This is a fact- and evidence-rich exploration of Bangkok's poor. To pursue her argument, Endo embraces three entry points for her discussion. She is interested, to begin with, in the spatial configurations of low income communities, as distinct and discrete slices of Bangkok's urban space. Second, she is interested in the social containers that are to be found within these spaces and, in particular, households/families and ‘communities’, and how individuals sit within these social units. And third, Endo is interested in the social dynamics of change, in particular through the analysis and interpretation of life course and inter-generational relations. A final organisational theme in Endo's book is an interest in two types of risk: fire risk and employment risk. It is these twin risks which provide the author with the scope to embed her discussion within debates over ‘precarity’.
For someone wishing to find out more about the living conditions of Bangkok's poor this is a wonderful place to start; Living with risk can be mined for a host of material. But I thought that the density of the discussion and material presented sometimes meant that the argument Endo develops became a little lost from sight. There is simply so much going on, and so many different perspectives, that it is hard to see the wood for the trees. That is a shame because the underlying argument is an important one and worth hearing. As Endo puts it, ‘This book attempts to understand the contemporary urban lower class and their community [in Bangkok], the state of its employment and living conditions, and its stratification, from the perspectives of individuals who live in the community’ (p. 6). It is, in other words, an inductive study that links to research dating back over a decade to 2003 when the author began her doctoral research in Bangkok.
The evidence and data collected permit Endo to develop her core argument and contention that ‘members of [Bangkok's] urban lower class face precarious housing and work situations… [their] employment is unstable, and they constantly face the threat of eviction or fire’ (p. 1). The book, therefore, is about the precarity of life in an era of late capitalism.
‘Precarity’ and the ‘precariat’ have become terms of the moment, ones popularised by Guy Standing in his (2011) book The precariat: The new dangerous class. While Standing's work is not referenced by Endo, the notion of precarity threads its way through the discussion as Endo explores how the nature of employment makes lives unstable and the possibility of falling into poverty, let alone being displaced by fire, an ever real one. As she notes, Thailand (and Bangkok) is not only modernising; it is also informalising. This informalisation is mainly occurring through the informalisation of formal sector work, as people are increasingly employed on casual contracts. Even when they escape one type of informality, they often find themselves working in another.
What is unusual is the way that Endo links precarity to risk in the guise of the risk of fire. This would seem to have emerged as a particular theme because, in April 2004, a fire caused the complete or partial destruction of 713 out of 814 residences in one of the inner city slum communities that the author was studying at the time. Thus the book's argument hangs on two rather different risks: the risk of fire on the one hand, and the risk of being laid-off on the other. It would be tempting to see the former as idiosyncratic or stochastic and the latter as structural, and therefore rather different in their origin. Endo, however, shows how both shocks can be seen to be structural and stratified, linked to the highly unequal nature of Thailand's modernisation process.
The value of Living with risk lies in its attention to detail, its longitudinal perspective, and its rich empirical base. Scholars of Thailand and of urban transformations more widely will find much of interest and value here.
