Bangkok, Thailand
and the Chao Phraya Basin
Bangkok is sinking. Located in the Chao Phraya delta, the city must confront both annual river flooding and sea level rise.
Across Thailand, gray infrastructure approaches were implemented during the second half of the twentieth century, but many of these have proven inadequate. However, Thailand, like the Netherlands, has a long history of water management and adaptation to its environment. Despite the car-clogged streets of current-day Bangkok, the city once boasted an extensive network of canals, a system that has largely been forgotten.
As urban development continued, many of these canals were filled in to accommodate roads, further exacerbating the challenges of contemporary urban water management.
Canal (blue) and road (gray) infrastructure, between 1935 (left) and 2020 (right).
Sternstein, 1982; Esri 2020
Bangkok began as a customs outpost during the Ayutthaya Kingdom. Surrounding farmland produced goods like fruit as exports for trade with the Europeans and Chinese. Today these canals, if not paved over, are more or less open sewers. The few that do remain are heavily controlled by a system of levees and gates that shut off the natural flow of sediment and marine life from the river and the Gulf of Thailand.
In 2011 the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration responded to devastating floods by constructing a massive flood wall at the northern end of the city. Despite the heavy engineering, it was a response that still fails to address the increasingly dire reality the city must soon confront. Higher walls can be built, but displacing water as flood mitigation is simply insufficient.
Ultimately the sea poses the greatest threat. Climate change will bring upwards of 2.5 meters in sea level rise along the lower Chao Phraya by the end of this century, inundating the mostly flat plain on which the city is built. It is possible that, akin to other coastal cities such as Jakata, the country's leadership may move their capital further inland only to see Bangkok become a ghost town. This evasive tactic is symptomatic to an extractive mode of urbanization that fails to reconcile climate adaptation with social justice, further marginalizing those most vulnerable to fend for themselves.
Flood gates near the Thewarat Market Pier in central Bangkok serve as part of the city's gray infrastructure network
This overreliance on gray infrastructure as the sole flood control infrastructure undermines Bangkok's resilience to the devastating forces of the next superstorm and reveals the difficulty in a paradigm shift in the society to embrace a hybrid approach of adapting blue-green infrastructure.
Thaitakoo and McGrath (2010) use the term ‘waterscape urbanism’ which aims to transform our current understanding of how we inhabit the city and how our infrastructure functions within it. They don’t suggest that all of Bangkok will be underwater, but rather large areas will be devoted to the natural fluctuations of the river and tides, developing a web or network of resilient and strategic systems that enhance and enable the city's continued livelihoods without the inevitable destruction of current land-based solutions.