Thailand wants to build “smart” city

The Thai authorities want to build a “smart” city in the country near the capital city of Bangkok.

It is noted that the construction of the city will become part of the Eastern Economic Corridor – a program to modernize the coast of the Gulf of Thailand by attracting public and private investment. It is planned to allocate 37 billion dollars (2.16 trillion rubles) for the implementation of the project, Bloomberg writes.

According to project leader Kanit Sangsuban, the name of the new city has not yet been chosen, but it is known that there will be business centres of companies, headquarters, financial and medical centres, as well as a platform for international research in the field of exact sciences.

“The new city will be created for the life of a new generation of people. We created this project to offset Thailand’s financial losses during the pandemic,” Sangsuban explained. The authorities expect that the population of the new city will reach 350,000 people, while 200,000 will work directly in this settlement.

Since 2018, Thailand has been participating in the creation of a network of smart cities in the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The cooperation of the members of the organization is aimed at solving urgent environmental, demographic and social problems in order to create comfortable and modern living conditions for the population. So far, the network includes 26 cities.

Earlier it became known that the Russians began to be less interested in moving to Thailand – in May 2022, the demand of citizens for housing in the beach country fell by 19.8 per cent compared to April. The specialists noted that the decrease in demand is recorded for two months in a row – in April the number of requests fell by 57 per cent.