BKKx

bkk.nonarkara.org is an open civic atlas of Bangkok: the Fine Arts Department register of 571 ancient monuments, nine authored heritage quarters, seven street-following walks, a sourced rowhouse atlas, bilingual English/Thai reading, and two Minecraft Java worlds generated at 1 block = 1 metre. The 3D map is the front door.

A sibling operational twin lives at atlas.nonarkara.org in a separate repository (Nonarkara/bkk-3d-atlas). Same city, different job. This repository does not deploy that site.

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1. What this is

BKKx is a civic atlas: a public, inspectable picture of Bangkok in layers — heritage, ordinary fabric, water, and the method used to assemble them. It is a studio instrument for reading the city, not a municipal product and not a live operations console.

What ships here, at bkk.nonarkara.org:

Surface	What you actually get
/	3D heritage front door — nine quarter jumps into the Historic Core map
/heritage	Fine Arts Department register, 571 Bangkok monuments, mapped honestly
/areas/:slug	Nine authored quarters with a licensed Commons photo each
/walks/:slug	Seven walks on real OSRM foot geometry, not straight-line guesses
/rowhouses	32 sourced ensembles: cultural corridors + an opt-in footprint review queue
/shophouses	Research companion: pressure map, gazetteer, comparative essay
/datasets	Open-data catalogue — every served file, sourced, licensed, checksummed
/warroom	Counted corpus plus live adapters that fail in public rather than invent a zero
/about	Why the project exists
/case-for-bangkok	Comparative dossier against Asian heritage cities — claims, gaps, not a slogan
/worlds, /atlas/:district	Minecraft walkthrough of two generated districts

The register. Not the dataset most people reach for first — vw_important_architecture (Ministry of Culture) covers 72 provinces and has zero Bangkok records. This uses the Fine Arts Department register instead: 8,341 monuments nationwide, 571 in Bangkok. 397 of those publish coordinates to two decimal places (~1.1 km) — in the Historic Core, 181 monuments collapse onto 12 points, 37 stacked on one. scripts/build-heritage-register.py resolves each row against the register, then OpenStreetMap by name, then leaves it unpinned rather than guessing. Every site records which method won.

Nine quarters, seven walks. Rattanakosin, Kudi Chin, Talad Noi, Song Wat, Yaowarat & Sampheng, Sam Phraeng, Nang Loeng, Charoen Krung, Bang Krachao — each an authored page, not a database dump. The walks carry OSRM foot-profile distances and times, and — for the 125 stops that fall inside a generated Minecraft world — the exact /tp command to stand on them.

The rowhouse atlas. Cultural corridors, not cadastral parcels. Each record carries its source, geometry method and confidence. Solid map lines follow high-confidence street axes or documented extents; dashed lines are interpretive. A second, opt-in candidate-footprint download screens current Overture building shapes for field review. It does not confirm rowhouses, age or heritage status. Method: docs/rowhouse-atlas-method.md.

Bilingual. Quarters, walks and the essay toggle English/Thai. The register's own raw government prose stays untranslated — that volume was out of scope, and the site says so rather than leaving a silent gap.

The Minecraft worlds. Where this started. Two districts generated block-by-block from OpenStreetMap, Overture Maps and land-cover data, playable in Minecraft Java Edition 1.21.4+.

World	Coverage	Size	Validated chunks
Ratchathewi / ราชเทวี	Victory Monument, Phaya Thai, Pratunam and Makkasan	4.96 × 2.95 km	61,440
Historic Core / เกาะรัตนโกสินทร์	Phra Nakhon, Chao Phraya and adjacent Thonburi	3.38 × 3.22 km	50,176

Both use a 1 block = 1 metre local projection and open in Creative mode.

The sibling system. Nonarkara/bkk-3d-atlas is Bangkok's operational digital twin — live traffic, air, heat, rain, flooding, CCTV, land price — on its own Worker and its own domain. edge-proxy/ in this repo binds bkk.nonarkara.org only. See context.md for the incident that made that rule load-bearing.

A focused snapshot of the culture site also lives at Nonarkara/BKKxCulture. This repo remains the live deploy source.

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2. Philosophy / invitation

Bangkok is a living city that never got the UNESCO plaque. That is not an oversight this project exists to correct. A civic atlas is the other kind of plaque: a public instrument that admits, layer by layer, what is known, what is hoped for, and what must not be claimed yet.

The layers in the banner — districts, water, survey, elevation, transit — are the idea of that instrument. The software in this repository is the slower, sourced version: every number has a generator, every gap has a sentence, every live feed is allowed to say it is down.

Fork the method, not the secrets.

The portable part is written down in docs/twin-data-sources.md and in site/app/data/twin-sources.ts:

1. A registry before a dashboard. Each candidate source names what it unlocks, its licence, whether a browser can reach it, and — written before integration — the caveat that will bite.
2. An envelope that never invents a reading. { ok, fetchedAt, source, data?, reason? }. An unreachable gauge and a city with no rain are opposite facts. A zero is not a polite failure.
3. Transport decides architecture, not preference. HTTPS plus CORS can reach the browser; everything else is proxied. Being able to fetch directly is not a reason to — Open-Meteo is keyless and CORS-open, and this project still proxies it so visitors do not hand their IP to a third party.
4. A key in a repository is a leak, including in a private one. Credentials, if an agency ever grants them, live in Worker environment variables at request time. They are not in git, not in this README, and not in error strings.

Take the pattern to another city. Swap the rows, keep the fields. Re-check licences for your deployment. Do not copy unpublished operational feeds, agency passwords, or anyone else's keys. The invitation is the method.

The fuller argument, in the first person, is at /about.

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3. Ethical use

BKKx is an independent civic project. It is not an official product of the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA), the Fine Arts Department, ONEP, or any other Thai government agency, unless a document committed in this repository expressly says so. Open data reused here remains those agencies' data; this studio's curation does not confer official status.

When you reuse this work:

• Attribute. Code is MIT (see §6). Geographic data, the register, photos and generated worlds keep their own licences — OpenStreetMap (ODbL), Overture, Fine Arts Department (CC BY), Wikimedia Commons per-file, Arnis (Apache-2.0). See NOTICE.md.
• Do not treat layers as law. Rowhouse corridors are cultural extents, not parcels, conservation boundaries or height-control lines. Candidate footprints are a review queue, not confirmed heritage. Generated Minecraft worlds are city-scale models, not survey-grade twins. Zoning sketches in the atlas are orientation only.
• Do not use this map for regulation, demolition, valuation, ownership or emergency dispatch.
• Do not invent feeds to make a demo look alive. A fabricated camera URL or a guessed rainfall zero is worse than an empty panel that explains itself.
• Do not commit secrets. Optional Worker bindings (FIRMS_MAP_KEY, LONGDO_API_KEY, CCTV_SOURCE_URL) are environment slots, not values. Some civic endpoints that used to answer without credentials no longer do; this project records that as unavailable rather than storing a password. Forks must obtain their own authorised access.

Photos are Wikimedia Commons only (PD / CC0 / CC-BY / CC-BY-SA), one per slot, with attribution on every page that uses one. See site/public/heritage/photos.json.

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4. How the system works

Public catalogues in, sourced files out, a Worker that may proxy live feeds but never ships their keys.

flowchart TB
    subgraph sources [Public sources — not secrets]
        FAD["Fine Arts Department register<br/>data.go.th / gis-finearts"]
        OSM["OpenStreetMap · Overture · OSRM"]
        COMMONS["Wikimedia Commons<br/>free licences only"]
        OPEN["Open catalogues<br/>data.go.th · data.bangkok.go.th"]
        METEO["Open-Meteo<br/>forecast + air, keyless"]
    end

    subgraph build [Build in this repo]
        REG["scripts/build-heritage-register.py"]
        PLACES["scripts/build-heritage-places.py"]
        PHOTOS["scripts/fetch-heritage-photos.py"]
        ROW["npm run data:rowhouses<br/>+ footprint review queue"]
        TWIN["twin-sources.ts registry<br/>caveat written first"]
    end

    subgraph ship [Shipped artefacts]
        JSON["site/public/**<br/>register, GeoJSON, photos"]
        CAT["/datasets catalogue<br/>checksummed manifest"]
        WORLD["GitHub Releases<br/>Minecraft world zips"]
    end

    subgraph serve [bkk.nonarkara.org]
        SITE["site/ — vinext / React<br/>Editorial register + Console map"]
        WORKER["Cloudflare Worker bkkx-site<br/>/api/live/* adapters"]
        PROXY["edge-proxy/<br/>bkk.nonarkara.org only"]
        ENV["Worker env — optional keys<br/>never in git"]
    end

    FAD --> REG --> JSON
    OSM --> PLACES --> JSON
    OSM --> ROW --> JSON
    COMMONS --> PHOTOS --> JSON
    OPEN --> TWIN
    METEO --> WORKER
    JSON --> CAT
    JSON --> SITE
    SITE --> WORKER --> PROXY
    TWIN --> WORKER
    ENV -.-> WORKER
    WORLD -.-> SITE

Editorial frames, Console focus. The heritage shell is paper, Sao Chingcha, one oxide accent (#8c2f23) meaning gazetted. The 3D map and war room are dark Console surfaces. The homepage iframes /atlas/historic-core?embed=1 on this origin — never atlas.nonarkara.org. Pointing that iframe at the sibling domain is what made the two sites collide; keep it relative.

Live adapters. /api/live/rain, /weather, /fires, /cctv, /longdo/* run on the Worker. Open-Meteo forecast and air quality are wired today. NASA FIRMS, Longdo and a camera registry are ready behind optional env vars. BMA drainage observation is catalogued as researched: the public gauge route now requires credentials, so the adapter reports that fact instead of drawing zero millimetres. The contract is in site/worker/live.ts.

A small D1 table records aggregate pageviews (path, referrer, country, language, timestamp). No IP addresses, no user-agents, no credentials.

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5. How to run / fork from what is actually in the repo

Repository map

site/         vinext app — everything at bkk.nonarkara.org
edge-proxy/   custom-domain binding for bkk.nonarkara.org ONLY
scripts/      register, places, photos, world installer, Anvil validator
worlds/       generation manifests + tiny level.dat headers (not the binaries)
docs/         method notes + this README's hero banner
public/       source assets for docs and the About essay
previews/     validated top-down world maps
releases/     archive checksums; world zips are GitHub Release assets
context.md    deploy history and the domain-collision guard

World binaries stay out of git and out of the website bundle.

Run the site

Requires Node.js >= 22.13.0.

cd site
npm install
npm run dev

Production checks (from site/):

npm run build
npx tsc --noEmit
npm run lint
node --test tests/rendered-html.test.mjs

The site deploys as Cloudflare Worker bkkx-site, fronted by edge-proxy/ on bkk.nonarkara.org. Forks will need their own Cloudflare account, D1 binding and domain — none of those credentials are in this repository.

Optional live layers, if you have your own authorised keys, are Worker secrets named in site/worker/index.ts. Leave them unset and the panels explain themselves.

Rebuild the heritage data

python3 scripts/build-heritage-register.py   # 571-monument register
python3 scripts/build-heritage-places.py      # 9 quarters + 7 walks + OSRM legs
python3 scripts/fetch-heritage-photos.py       # Commons, free licences, one photo per slot
cd site && npm run data:rowhouses             # public GeoJSON
cd site && npm run data:rowhouse-footprints   # Overture shapes, scored for human review

Source pulls cache in .cache/ (gitignored). --refresh / --reroute / --refetch re-fetch. Nothing here calls a private BMA operations API.

Download and enter the Minecraft worlds

macOS installer (uses a local generated world when present; otherwise the matching GitHub Release; never overwrites an existing save):

./scripts/install-macos.sh ratchathewi
./scripts/install-macos.sh historic-core

Generate another Bangkok district

Worlds are generated with Arnis from OpenStreetMap, Overture Maps and land-cover data. Record the bounding box, scale, generator version and validation results in a bkkx-manifest.json, then add the district to site/app/walkthrough-data.ts.

python3 scripts/validate_world.py /path/to/generated-world

These are procedurally generated city-scale models, not survey-grade engineering twins.

Fork the method into another city

1. Copy site/app/data/twin-sources.ts; replace the rows, keep caveat and integration.
2. Copy the live envelope and one adapter from site/worker/live.ts.
3. Point heritage ingest at your open register, not Bangkok's Fine Arts extract.
4. Re-read licences. NC terms (for example FABDEM) and agency camera terms do not travel just because the code does.
5. Do not paste another city's operational URLs, keys or passwords into the fork. Obtain access in the open, or leave the panel dark.

Contributions and district requests: GitHub Issues. Minimum handoff: CONTRIBUTING.md.

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6. License

Code: MIT License (see LICENSE). Copyright (c) 2026 Non Arkara.

Geographic data: © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0; supplemental building data may include Overture Maps. Register data: Fine Arts Department, Creative Commons Attribution. Photos: Wikimedia Commons, individually licensed and attributed per-page. Arnis is Apache-2.0. Generated world distributions retain their source-data attribution in each manifest and in NOTICE.md.

Minecraft is a trademark of Microsoft/Mojang. BKKx is an independent open-source project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft, Mojang, or the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration.