Bangkok's future hangs in the balance. Rising sea levels, unchecked development and rapid urban population growth have left millions helpless to natural disasters — scientists warn the city Bangkok may not survive the century.
But it does have a secret weapon in its battle to resist the impact of a hotter planet — LANDPROCESS, a Bangkok-based landscape architecture and urban design company founded in 2011 by the landscape architect Kotchakom Vbrkaakhom. She wants to shift the orientation from growth to the actions on environment and land and promotes mindful development instead of mindless construction.
She made her name by creating the internationally acknowledged Chulalongkorn University Centenary Park, an 11-acre space in central Bangkok, which tilts (倾斜) downward at a 3-degree angle, allowing rainwater to flow through the grass and wetlands. Water that's not absorbed by the plants runs down to a pond at the base of the park, where it can be stored for use during dry spells. In case of severe flooding, the park can hold up to a million gallons of water.
In 2018, she created Asia's largest rooftop farm, which imitates the region's famed rice terraces (梯田), preserving both water and soil. Uniquely, winding around the 22, 400m2 rooftop is a jogging path and a lawn.
Green space design of ecological cities emerged one after another, which not only expanded the design ideas of landscape industry, but also provided new strategies for people to deal with climate problems.
Later this year she will carry out plans to transform a vast, unused bridge crossing the Chao Phraya River into a park with bicycle lanes, bringing more green space. Kotchakom has even greater ambitions for her hometown — she wants to reuse the more than 1, 000 canals that snake through Bangkok that are currently used for waste water. "Canals have so much life, so much potential to be public green space and a skeleton (框架) of the whole city, " she explains.
LANDPROCESS has always listened to the needs of the society, and established a hannonious relationship between nature and human beings through design, so as to create a public landscape that can really give back to the society.