I was born in Bangkok. Somewhere there are four small photographs proving it — a baby in a stroller, squinting at whoever is holding the camera, family close by, the old neighbourhood painted flat and pastel behind us the way old photographs always render a place. I grew up in the old town. My parents went to university a short walk from where those photographs were taken, at Thammasat, and years later so did I — first as a student, later as the person standing at the front of the room instead of in it. I have spent more of my life walking these streets than anywhere else on earth, and it still catches me off guard how little that fact seems to count for anything when the subject turns to heritage.

Here is the thing I keep running into. I collect World Heritage cities the way other people collect anything — Penang, Kyoto, Vienna, Graz, Prague, Warsaw, Krakow, and, because my own taste in cities has never been entirely serious, Wigan. Every one of them has a plaque. Every one of them has a boundary somebody drew around the old quarter and a rule somebody wrote about what can and cannot happen inside it. I have stood in a lot of beautiful, correctly maintained places, admired them properly, and then gone back to the hotel feeling like I had visited a diorama rather than a city.

Bangkok has none of that. The old town where I grew up has never been UNESCO-listed, and for a long time I assumed that was an oversight somebody would eventually correct. I do not think that anymore. I think it might be the best thing about it.

A city that gets the plaque gets frozen at whatever moment looked best in the application. A city that does not keeps changing, which is a nuisance for photographers and a mercy for everyone who actually lives there. The temples in my old neighbourhood are not exhibits behind a rope; people still pray in them on an ordinary Tuesday for reasons that have nothing to do with tourism.

The shophouses are not preserved facades with a gift shop behind them. There is a foodstall open under one of them at eleven at night because someone's family has been running it long enough that closing early was never on the table.

People sit out on the street past midnight in a way I have not seen on the rest of my list, because they feel safe enough to, which is its own kind of heritage and nobody puts it on a plaque.

I do not want to overstate this into some kind of victory. The absence of a UNESCO badge is not Bangkok winning a competition it entered on purpose — it is just what happens when nobody applies. And that absence cuts both ways. A living city is also a city nobody is formally obligated to protect, and I have watched buildings in this old town disappear that I would have sworn, walking past them as a kid, would outlast me. Nothing froze them in place. Nothing had to.

That is the actual reason this project exists, underneath the maps and the Minecraft blocks and the walking routes. Thailand's Fine Arts Department does keep a register — 571 monuments in Bangkok alone, each one either formally gazetted or still waiting on a decision nobody has made yet. That register is the closest thing this city has to a plaque, and it is a more honest document than a plaque would be, because it admits, item by item, what is actually protected and what is only hoped for. A UNESCO listing tells you a place has already been decided on. This tells you the decision is still open — which is uncomfortable, and also true, and also exactly the kind of thing I would rather know before the building in question becomes a parking lot.

So this is the whole argument, and I would rather say it plainly than dress it up: the best heritage city I have found, out of every one with a plaque, is the one that never got one — and I think that is worth building something around, rather than something to apologise for.