Bangkok turns to urban forests to beat worsening floods
- Bangkok is launching city forests to help beat flooding by soaking up excess rainwater runoff.
- A new park slated to open in December will feature 4,500 trees, a floodplain and a weir to slow the flow of water; another newly opened $20 million city forest acts as a sponge during the monsoon season.
- Bangkok is sinking, and fast: according to the World Bank, 40% of the Thai capital could be flooded by 2030.
- The key to solving the city’s flooding problem is to learn to live with water, not to rid the city of water, says one landscape architect helping to launch the urban forests.
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Now Bangkok is turning to nature to help fight the floods. Voraakhom is among a group of landscape architects helping to launch urban forests throughout the city, which not only create more inviting spaces for its inhabitants but are filled with innovations to help tackle floods.
A city forest larger than New York City’s Central Park is slated to open in the capital as early as this December. The site of a former racetrack, it will become named His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej the Great Memorial Park. The new park will be filled with 4,500 trees and a floodplain where rainwater will be purified with vegetation. This joins Benjakitti Forest Park, where a former tobacco factory has been turned into a new $20 million city forest. The park, which was fully opened in June 2024 after a soft launch in 2022, acts as a sponge during the monsoon season, and another urban forest in Bangkok has been tilted by 3 degrees so when the monsoons hit it fills like a pond.
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Throughout the city, blue-green architecture is now showing how nature can help fight floods. The grounds of a former tobacco factory are now the 41-hectare (102-acre) Benjakitti Forest Park. This urban wetland has been designed not only to regulate stormwater, but clean contaminated water and provide habitat for wildlife. Native vegetation such as the rain tree (Samanea saman), bo tree (Ficus religiosa) and khee lek (senna siamen) were planted within the grounds that are designed to retain 87 million liters (23 million gallons) of water.
Award-winning landscape architect Kongjian Yu, founder of Beijing-based firm Turenscape, has turned an impermeable concrete ground into a porous landscape by creating giant ponds dotted with islets. Polluted water from a neighboring canal is pumped into the park and run through the filtration system of native plants before flowing out into the wetland. Bioswales, in the form of flower beds, have been carved into the center of former haulage roads to help make them more permeable.
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