Bangkok is sinking — fast. As urban development continues unabated, this city of more than 10 million people is getting lower by 2cm a year, according to Greenpeace estimates. Meanwhile, the surface of the Gulf of Thailand is rising by 4mm a year — above the global average.
With the Thai capital currently approximately 1.5 meters above sea level, the specters of the 2011 floods that inundated the city and those of last year that killed 1,200 people in India, Nepal and Bangladesh loom large. Recent rainwater floods, plus a UN preparatory meeting on climate change hosted in Bangkok, pushed concerns to the surface once more.
“When I was young I liked floods,” says the architect Kotchakorn Voraakhom, who was born in the city. “I pushed my little boat out and the road became a canal, it was such fun. But after 2011 everyone was like, ‘Oh. What used to be childhood fun has become a disaster.’ And it’s getting worse.”
Photo: Reuters
WATER RETENTION
In 2011, Thailand suffered its worst flooding in 50 years. Climate scientist Seri Suptharathit predicts the city will be mostly underwater by the end of the century.
Voraakhom’s ingenious answer was the 4.5-hectare Centenary Park at Chulalongkorn University in the center of the city. Hidden beneath the trees and grass lies its most interesting feature: vast underground water containers that, along with a large pond, can hold a million gallons of water.
Under normal conditions, water that is not absorbed by plants flows into these receptacles, where it is stored for watering during dry periods.
When severe floods hit, the containers hold water and release it into the public sewage system after flooding has subsided. Voraakhom and her architecture firm Landprocess will open a 14.5-acre park with similar water retention functions at Bangkok’s Thammasat University next year.
Centenary Park is also a welcome glimpse of grass in a metropolis that, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Green City Index , has just 3.3 square meters of green space per resident. That compares with 27 square meters in London and 66 square meters in Singapore. Dr Seri Suptharathit, director of the Center on Climate Change and Disaster at Bangkok’s Rangsit University, says even more green has been turned gray since that survey took place in 2011. He says that in the past 20 years the amount of green space in Bangkok has dropped from 40 percent of total land to less than 10 percent — exacerbating flood risk.
‘MONKEY CHEEKS’
Walking around Centenary Park, which opened last year on a site on the Chao Phraya delta previously occupied by university residential buildings, Voraakhom points out trees, and an education center with a lawn roof and herb garden.
“One time last year we had six hours of heavy rainfall and all the roads around here were flooded,” says Voraakhom. “But the park still held the water.”
Her design ethos fits with the “monkey cheeks” water retention initiative pushed by Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej before he died in 2016. Just as monkeys stuff their cheeks with banana, saving the fruit mush for later, the monarch encouraged Thailand’s Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives to help prevent floods by utilizing land areas that could temporarily store water.
Suptharathit believes current flood prevention in Bangkok is too reliant on hard structures such as dams and canals. Voraakhom’s park helps, and Suptharathit proposes paying more farmers to use their land for water retention during the July-October rainy season.
“We don’t think about the use of nature enough,” he says. “Low-elevation rice fields, things like that. Before flowing to Bangkok much of the area [that floodwater travels through] is rural.”
For its part, the city government insists it is responding to increased concern about flooding. It recently announced 28 new flood prevention projects at a cost of 26 billion baht (US$10 million). Flood barriers and underground tunnels are being built, and canals are being dredged and expanded.
’GREEN ZONES’
Sakchai Boonma, director of the Department of City Planning for the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, says a “green zone” east of Bangkok is already used to retain water for the city. Since 2013, he says, flood concerns have been better addressed by building regulations.
“There must now be space for water to absorb into the ground [of new-builds],” he says. “Bangkok has been expanding in every direction but city planning authorities are prioritizing preventing and fixing flood situations.”
However, Suptharathit says the poor will still feel the brunt of severe flooding. They are likely to live in old buildings not well protected by new anti-flood measures, and are also at risk of being displaced by flood prevention redevelopment around canals.
“The strong can survive with these big structures, but what about the normal people?” he says. “The water will come to them.”
Long-term forecasts by Suptharathit’s research team suggest Bangkok is likely to be hit by serious flooding roughly once per decade, and he predicts that by 2100 the city will be mostly underwater. Tara Buakamsri, Greenpeace’s Thailand director, says: “We just don’t know when a ‘worst-case scenario’ — surge from the sea, rainfall and flooding from the north, all arriving at the same time — will happen.”
Voraakhom admits parks such as hers can only be a tiny part of the solution, but believes they help raise awareness and “show society what can be done in the next 100 years.”
She climbs onto an exercise bicycle fixed to the ground in Centenary Park. It serves the dual purpose of giving users a workout while also churning pondwater to prevent stagnation.
“Is it too late?” she says as she starts pedaling. “I’ve no idea, but we have to do as much as possible.”
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and