Elephants: Urban Jungle

While the Asian Economic Crisis in 1997 may have financially crippled many real estate developers in Bangkok, it also provided unexpected opportunities for some of Thailand’s poorest. After years of unsustainable and exponential growth in the construction industry during 1990s led to an economic meltdown, countless developers went bankrupt and were forced to abandon their projects. 10 years on, all that’s left of the burst bubble are eerie pockets of the abandoned foundations of skyscrapers and suburban homes to be. While the construction boom may have ended with these structures, the day-to-day lives of Thais seeking to make ends meet continued on and many of Thailand’s poorest soon found new homes in other people’s forgotten dreams. 

30km from Bangkok in the suburb of Bang Bua Thong is a half-built housing community occupied by over 1500 squatters. In the furthest reaches of the development live 5 Khmer-speaking families from a poor province in Thailand and their 10 domesticated elephants. To supplement the family income when the rice-growing season has ended, they relocate to the suburbs of the capital and truck the elephants into town daily to walk them through the streets of Bangkok in search of people willing to pay to feed them. As if out of a classical tale of days gone by, the elephants live side by side with their mahouts and use the concrete foundations of their surroundings as their own makeshift jungle gym.