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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

I was there last month. It's truly surreal.

One thought that occurred to me as I watched the train pass was how many safety regulations and zoning laws such a market would violate in most Western cities.

Then I realized: laws and regulations can have the unintended side effect of "sanitizing" the more interesting parts of our culture, to the point where everything becomes standard and boring.

It's the reason Seattle's Pike Place Market is a tourist attraction even though open-air fish markets are incredibly common all around the world.

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There is a wide continuum of lawlessness; this fish market seems to be close to the benign side, where the setting is risky but people have good intentions.

As less and less people have a choice about their condition, you get to self-governing slums. Towards the far end of the scale, you find places like Kowloon Walled City, Saipan in the 1980s, and Mong La in Myanmar -- places which external law has failed to penetrate, and are rife with the exploitation of people.

There's a local market here (http://www.kensington-market.ca/) where a lot of the building code rules are ignored, street-level patios, extensions to stores, and other quirky architectural flourishes are loosely permitted.

It's got way more character than your typical neighbourhood and is a great place to spend time.

I wish there were more areas like this in cities with relaxed rules on construction and zoning.

This probably already is a huge violation of many safety regulations in Thailand.

True; many/most street food vendors are allowed to be present in Bangkok because of an unwritten understanding with authorities. Eventually when the government wants to claim the space for a clearer sidewalk or building development, they set a date by which the vendors in that area need to move on.

This just happened last month in one of the more famous areas in Thailand: http://www.khaosodenglish.com/life/2016/10/03/sukhumvit-stre...

I'm not sure if they are back to business as usual or still gone however.

Those drunken one legged beggars in india, who fell asleep on the tracks, beg to differ. But yes, if its so organized as in this case, it has some beauty to it.

If the train becomes such a part of the environment, why not install generator rolls below the train, and milk its movements for energy?

That generator would produce such a trifling amount of power, and it'd be stolen before you could recoup the cost.

It's awfully selfish of you to value interesting tourist sights over the health and safety of the people providing you with those sights.

Zoning laws making everything standard and boring and unlivable is a specifically American problem.

The biggest issue, IMO, with a lot of American zoning codes is that they require that retail spaces be specifically zoned to exist at all. This does a lot to prevent the organic growth of small retail spaces that exist in other countries.

Houston has no zoning and it's none the more interesting for it.

https://urbanedge.blogs.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youv...

Could that be because it's the same people and companies building things in the city, based broadly on what's done elsewhere in America? It's very, very hard to develop a culture completely independent of the rest of the country, especially when large amounts of money (and therefore the need to interact with national entities like banks) become involved.

That’s true indeed. Many other countries have a lot more relaxed zoning, or accumulative zoning (where, if you zone something as one type, it can be built with that type, or any more restrictive zone – you can always build housing in a commercial district, for example. See Japan).

Or places where zoning is only done for specific developments, and then very generally (only restricting height and noise for the development, for example, instead of building type, or restricting nothing at all. See: Germany).

You can take the quotation marks off of the word "sanitizing" in your comment :D

Some people value safe and boring.

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