The Handicraft Sector in Chiang Mai: Its Role in Sustainable Urban Development

For centuries the city of Chiang Mai has been synonymous with traditional crafts worked from materials as varied as silk, cotton, silver, wood, and lacquer. This former capital of the Lanna Tai Kingdom has been populated with a wide range of craftspeople who could meet the whims and needs of a cultural and religious center backed by the wealth of a powerful kingdom. Now one of the country’s primary tourist destinations, it is populated with artisans using the same materials to serve the whims of the tourist market, both locally and globally. This chapter is an attempt in making a first cut at assessing the contribution of handicrafts towards a sustainable future for the urbanizing region of Chiang Mai. We operationalize our conception of sustainable development as it would be applied to an economic sector and its relationship with the urban area in which it operates. We then proceed to tell the story of the handicraft sector in Chiang Mai, first with a brief account of the historical evolution of the sector followed by a description of the sector as we observed it in 1998, with particular attention to operations and relations within the production-distribution/promotion-consumption network and their geographic arrangement. We then analyze Chiang Mai’s handicraft sector using our sustainable development framework and conclude with our recommendations for the sector based on our analyses.