Parks, roofs and riverbanks mimicking the long-used agricultural form are helping Asian cities absorb, hold and purify rainwater.
One of Kotchakorn Voraakhom’s most memorable moments growing up in Bangkok in the 1980s was playing in floodwaters in a small boat built by her father in front of her home.
“I was so happy that I didn’t need to go to school because we didn’t know how to get to it,” recalls Voraakhom, a landscape architect based in the Thai capital.
But nearly 30 years later, flooding turned from a fun childhood recollection to a devastating experience. In 2011, Voraakhom and her family – along with millions of others in Bangkok – found themselves “displaced and homeless” when floods ploughed through swathes of Thailand and poured into the metropolis.
They were the country’s worst floods in decades, a nationwide disaster which lasted more than three months and killed more than 800 people. Scientists later linked the flooding to increased rainfall triggered by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
The disaster deeply shook Voraakhom, who believed it was time to use her expertise to do something for her hometown. She founded her own landscape architecture firm, Landprocess, which over the past decade has designed parks, rooftop gardens and public spaces in and around the low-lying city to help its people increase their resilience to flooding.
Perhaps her most intriguing design so far has been an enormous nature-laden university roof inspired by rice terraces, a traditional form of agriculture that has been practised in Asia for some 5,000 years.
Thailand, China and other Asian countries are vulnerable to climate impacts. China has this year been hit by its highest number of significant floods since records began, while Thai farmers are exposed to rising heat, drought and flooding due to climate change
The university roof designed by Voraakhom is part of a wider trend in Asia that is seeing architects seek inspiration from the region’s rice terraces and other agricultural heritages to help urban communities reduce waterlogging and flooding. Examples range from adapted wetland parks in Chinese cities to homes in Vietnam with rice paddy-inspired rooftops.
At Thammasat University, north of Bangkok, tiers of small paddy fields cascade down from the top of the building along Voraakhom’s green roof, allowing the campus to collect rainwater and grow food.
There are four ponds around the building to catch and hold the water flowing down. On dry days, this water is pumped back up using the clean energy generated by the solar panels on the roof and used to irrigate the rooftop paddy fields.
When the roof was built in 2019, it became Asia’s largest urban rooftop farm, with 7,000 sq m (75,000 sq ft) of its total 22,000 sq m (237,000 sq ft) dedicated to organic farming.
Source: www.bbc.com
