Picture caption: Rice terraces in Thailand

In 2011, Bangkok experienced Thailand’s worst flooding in decades, triggering landscape architects to start working on traditional solutions to the ongoing flood risks. From parks to rooftops, 5,000-year-old rice terraces have become the inspiration for increasing flood resilience.

One landscape architect pushing for change, to protect vulnerable communities, is Kotchakorn Voraakhom, who saw flooding as a child in the 1980s, and more recently in 2011, when her and her family – and millions of other people – were displaced and made homeless by catastrophic flooding.

Across the region in Thailand, China and other Asian countries, communities are at risk. These risks will only increase, as climate change exposes these places to rising heat, flooding and – conversely – drought. By creating parks, roofs and riverbanks that mimic rice terraces, the risks of flooding can be mitigated.

Three such projects designed by Voraakhom’s firm, Landprocess, are a hospital roof with a healing garden, a rooftop garden featuring tiers of small paddy fields, and a tilted urban park on a university campus that collects and filters rainwater.

The helipad on the roof of Ramathibodi Hospital was removed and replaced with a garden that is good for patient health and also more porous, absorbing rainwater. The Siam Green Sky Urban Farm, on a rooftop in Bangkok, has turned concrete roof space into a stepped terrace, and includes a herb garden, vegetable garden and paddy fields.

And the Chulalongkorn University Centenary Park tackles not just water management, but the urban heat island effect – bringing much needed green space to a grey, urban area. Bangkok is flat, and the park sits at a three-degree incline, so that rainwater and runoff are pulled down through the park’s water circulation system. Not only does this clean and filter the water, but the park can hold up to a million gallons of water, easing the pressure on the city during heavy rainfall.

In her TED talk, Voraakhom expressed, “This isn’t just an urban park design. This is the first stepping stone to show the possibility of green public space as… ecological infrastructure.”

She shared that she is talking to students in Bangkok, and other cities in the region, about best practices in design for climate resilience. The bottom line as she sees it is this: “We might not survive if we don’t rethink our cities and adapt quickly enough.”

While things are not quite so critical here in the UK, we are seeing a lot more flooding, so it could make sense for us to look at similar solutions in areas that are hardest hit when the heavens open.

We all have to use our creativity as well as our practical knowledge and experience in this work, and inspiration can come from all avenues. This is a great reminder to look beyond the obvious and see if the solutions we need already exist in another form. After all, humans have been managing their immediate environment for thousands of years, so why not look to the past to inform our work today?

Meanwhile, if you need any assistance with the structural elements of an upcoming project, please do get in touch.