Making Cities More Absorbent: The Porous City Network September 6th, 2023
Via Bloomberg, a look at efforts to make cities more absorbent:
Kotchakorn Voraakhom is the founder and CEO of Landprocess, a landscape architecture company in Bangkok whose designs incorporate nature-inspired parks and gardens that absorb and direct rain. As flood-prone coastal nations such as her native Thailand peer into a much wetter future, Voraakhom says softer, more porous materials are needed in addition to concrete dams and channels.
One of your signature projects is Chulalongkorn University Centenary Park in Bangkok, a project completed in 2017. The garden is tilted 3 degrees, sending water into a retention pond where visitors can aerate the water riding stationary bicycles. Where did the idea come from?
It’s a concept, known as the monkey’s cheek, from the previous king, Bhumibol Adulyadej. Monkeys store their food within their cheeks. We can mimic nature to store the water as the monkey stores food, finding pockets of water to hold and release when it’s needed. In such a swampy, wetland city like Bangkok, you let the water be part of the design.
Every development should think about runoff on its own. Bangkok is so dense. We’re a city of 11 million people, and it’s such a small city. We have to find innovation and collaboration in building with the urban fabric. How can the buildings and the development become more able to incorporate water, like a rainwater tank, retention pond or even a garden on a public street?
What is the Porous City Network?
When I was a student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in the early 2000s, I was questioning what I could do as a landscape architect: Do I have to serve only clients who have money to pay a designer? In the majority of the world, people don’t use architects—they just build themselves. When I came back home to Thailand, I saw how people in coastal areas were moving their houses already.
We created the Porous City Network in 2017 to work with those communities, to compromise with governments so they’re not displaced, or at least get displaced with integrity. In Hat Lek, a fishing community built on stilts in the ocean that was having conflicts with the government, we came up with a solution to create a mangrove barrier so they could stay in their homes. It wasn’t about innovative design. It was about creating the right direction for bigger-picture developments.
Is landscape architecture as a profession shifting to respond to climate change?
I think I’m shifting it, and I want to shift the narrative about the developing world and about delta cities. Climate change should be a leverage point that we use to create change. What are we going to do with a city that’s been built and a density that’s still increasing? There is so much work on urban infrastructure that we did wrong. We need to work with land and shift it so we can survive—and make everything beautiful. —Interview by Laura Bliss. Edited for clarity and length
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 6th, 2023 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Green Design, Resilient Infrastructure, River Flooding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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