A house is more than a house: aesthetic politics in a Northeastern Thai railway settlement Eli Elinoff Victoria University of Wellington This article examines debates over architectural aesthetics between residents of Thai railway communities, state urban planners, and NGO activists. It interrogates the designs, colours, objects, and materials these groups use as they attempt to upgrade these settlements as part of a participatory urban housing project. I argue that through aesthetic practices, residents, planners, and activists propose, debate, and enact distinct political and moral orders. Houses, real and imagined, reflect these actors’ provisional attempts to answer contentious questions about what constitutes a legitimate political actor and what it means to live a good life in contemporary Thailand. Aesthetic practices thus constitute a ‘politics in the making’ that offers a means for actors to debate lived configurations of the political while simultaneously intervening upon it. Nung 1 places a tile in wet concrete. He lines the edge up at an odd angle to its mate and smiles; the head of one koi fish printed on the tile now chases its tail on another. When the concrete is set, guests will leave their sandals on this platform before entering his newly remodelled kitchen. The Thai government’s Baan Mankong (Secure House) project, which offers grants and low-interest loans to help improve housing in poor communities, partially funded the housing upgrade. 2 Before the upgrade, Nung’s kitchen had bare concrete floors and grey block walls. After, mixed tiles – patterns of green, beige, blue, and pink, some printed with bright koi fish – cover the space. There are twenty-six designated settlements like Nung’s that line the railway tracks running through the growing Northeastern Thai city of Khon Kaen. 3 They vary in size, density, and condition. The approximately 8,000 residents settled along both sides of the tracks live in houses that range from brightly painted concrete structures to shacks built from ageing wood, rusting metal, and found objects, like vinyl signs. Irrespective of these differences, all the residents are in conflict with the State Railway of Thailand (SRT) over their rights to live on this land. Some, like Nung and his neighbours, worked with NGO activists and signed three-year, renewable land leases. Other settlements, like the one across the tracks from Nung’s, rejected alliances with their neighbours and the NGO activists to autonomously assert their political voice, but unsuccessfully negotiated with the SRT. Despite these divergences, residents in all settlements received Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 610-632 C  Royal Anthropological Institute 2016