Linda C. Samuels Professor and Chair, Urban Design Director of Sustainable Design and Environmental Justice
“Sink or swim” is a phrase often summoned in a moment of crisis where fast action is necessary to survive. In addition to immediacy, it also has a tinge of self-reliance: No one will save us – we must save ourselves or perish. There is perhaps no more appropriate sentiment for the world we find ourselves in today, a world of urgency and interdependence, where public budgets are strapped and too many government agents under-prioritize – or even disbelieve – the scale of impact to come. In the last few months alone, the U.S. has seen catastrophic flooding in unexpected places and conflagrations that dwarf coastal fires of previous generations. In both instances – and dozens of others – insurance providers have preemptively canceled policies, leaving residents stranded after decades of premium payments, and city agency responses have come up far short. Communities, non-profits, activists, designers, artists – these folks rise to the challenge and fill in the gaps where they can, how they can.
The Sam Fox School’s Global Urbanism Studio (the final semester of the Master of Urban Design degree) engages cities in the perpetual slow crises of long-term climate change, guided by our partners and local experts who live in these conditions and as part of the communities we visit and engage. For the past three years, we have had the great pleasure of collaborating with landscape architecture and urban design firm LandProcess,
based in Bangkok, Thailand. Founder and director Kotchakorn “Kotch” Voraakhom and design director Sajjapongs “Pom” Lekuthai are integral to the summer experience, sharing their spectacular green infrastructure and public space work with our students and facilitating connections with government agencies, academics, and people – shrimp farmers, water experts, residents, and others. Beyond the exposure to impressive and consequential work, designed, as their website says, “to shift cities to a carbon neutral future and confront…climate uncertainty,” the summer studio is defined by an experience of authenticity. This is the benefit of embedded travel abroad: not just to see a place as a tourist, but as Kotch says in the following pages, to be awake in a new place, to question deeply why it is the way it is.
No doubt, the topics the students tackle are daunting. Bangkok is sinking, sea level is rising, development is happening – all of which together add up to a seemingly intractable condition for 15 million people. Our students go deep into these complexities, investigating zoning policies, histories of tidal flow, the impacts of land cover and impermeability, the importance of infrastructure. The projects found in the pages that follow grapple with the role and responsibility designers have to mediate between this evolving terra viscus and the very real needs of people.
Unlike a formal book, which can be slow to form, this dispatch is intended as a report from the front lines, a combination of on-the-ground observations, interviews with partners, and student responses. This edition tracks not only the work in Bangkok, but the many places we visit in addition – Shanghai, Cambodia, Angkor Wat, and the Mississippi River – that serve as comparative
conditions. These are deltaic places, helping us to see where Bangkok has been and project where it could go next. At the same time, this patchwork of places reminds us of the globe’s interconnectivity, how systems of commerce, transportation, energy, and heat are interwoven and interdependent, and that the world’s common denominator is humanity. Regardless of the language, the food, the clothing, the religion, we all hope to save this planet and continue to occupy it together.
Note from the Coordinator
Jonathan Stitelman Senior Lecturer, Studio Lead and Editor Assistant Director, Beyond Boundaries
The Global Urbanism Studio set off on immersive, global travel, meeting amazing collaborators, experiencing varied, complex cities, and establishing strong comparisons in the regions we visited. In the summer of 2022, we centered studies on two river systems: the Chao Phraya and the Mississippi Rivers. The Chao Phraya runs through the center of Thailand, roughly from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. After several weeks in Bangkok our studio spent a week traveling up river on a 100-year-old train through the small-scale, waterbased urbanism of central Thailand, finally landing in the lush high ground near the border of Laos where we came to the Chiang Mai dam –a national-scale project intended to control the flood-pulse of the river. In a country with such a historical link to the natural fluctuations of the river, this modern alteration, along with upstream channelization, is significantly impacting daily life and blocking community relationships to the river, disrupting centuries of historical, social, and natural patterns.
Bangkok, a city of 15 million at the mouth of the Chao Phraya is pinned between upstream and downstream conditions. The city itself sits roughly at sea level on a deep bed of sediment. This is a city of water – originally built around a dense, extensive network of canals. In the past 70 years, many have been transformed into streets, a transformation that has coincided with the progressive paving-over of the city and overall reduction in open space. Years of development and aquifer depletion have led to widespread land subsidence. As the sea rises and the land sinks, and as the heavy monsoon rains pour down, the city is challenged by managing water. Increasingly public realm projects, adaptations to existing canals, and regulations for building-based water management are seen as some of the few tools for adaptation in an extremely dense city.
Our students experienced the contemporary city and the historic river-based towns such as Lat Chado, which has buildings constructed several meters above the ground to accommodate seasonal flooding. Kotchakorn Voraakhom, founder and director of design firm LandProcess and our partner in Bangkok, led us through public space adaptation projects – canals, parks, bridges and government centers which have been designed to increase capacity for managing water as well as inviting people to enjoy the city itself.
These changes are similar to what we see on the Mississippi River. After five weeks in Thailand, we traveled from New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico and then back upriver through Natchez, Vicksburg, Memphis, Old River Control, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineer Research Development Center (ERDC). Led by Professor Derek Hoeferlin, this trip gave us direct contact with the massive river control infrastructures that impact urbanism up and down the river as well as the designers, engineers, and researchers working to design nature-based systems for the future river. Along the way we met with designers David Waggonner and John Kleinschmidt at Waggonner and Ball, whose work deals with the tangle of ecological, social, and infrastructural systems in and around New Orleans. Aaron Chang, an urban designer, researcher, and educator, led us through neighborhoods still recovering from Hurricane
Sushimita Natarajan
Katrina – more than 20 years after the storm itself – and a handful of river-edge public spaces. At the ERDC, we saw how fluvial morphology, disaster scenario planning, and infrastructure performance are studied using enormous models in a campus of plane hangers. We visited many of those same ERDC-modeled landscapes as we traveled north, up the Mississippi River from Vicksburg. This trip revealed the industrial nature of the river, a vast openness peppered with infrastructure and manufacturing.
We built on these trips and collaborations in 2023 and 2024. We continued to focus on the porosity of urban development – its ability to absorb water – as well as resolving discontinuities in the canal network and designing adaptive building typologies which tackle land subsidence and high-density in the urban core of Bangkok. Most recently, we focused on a single district in Bangkok, Bang Khun Thian, a coastal area of the city with many shrimp farms, a few remaining mangrove forests, and increasing pressure for development as Bangkok sprawls toward the sea. Bang Khun Thian is one of the places where the tug of war of water-based urbanism and landbased urbanism are still legible. Multigenerational shrimp farms – already a fundamental transformation of the mangrove-dense landscape – are now prime speculative development sites. New development disregards the flood pulse and tidal cycles of the land-water landscape, degrading the natural ecosystems and their protective capacity.
These past two years also had comparative trips. In 2023 we visited Cambodia, traveling from
Phnom Penh across the country to Tonle Sap and Angkor Wat. In Phnom Penh we witnessed a city on the rebound and at a crossroads. The era of de-urbanization during the Khmer Rouge is over and as the city grows, regional influences and international development patterns, which disregard natural systems, are emerging along banks of the Sap River. We visited Tonle Sap, the largest freshwater lake in Asia, which gathers water from the Piandan and Cardamom Mountains. At this time of year, low-water season, the houses lining the lake hovered above the water line on 30-foot stilts, making visible the astonishing fluctuations of the landscape. We took a small boat out to the lake, where the horizon goes on seemingly forever, and saw families living on boats, hauling in piles of freshwater clams. Finally, we made it to Angkor Wat to see vast building complexes – temples that had changed hands between Hindu and Buddhist rulers over hundreds of years – which, because of their scale, are also able to manage, store, and distribute water in the region.
This comparative trip gave us a new sense of time. Often when dealing with climate change it is hard to look past the urgency and immediacy of the challenge. Seeing these ancient cities and buildings introduced questions of how we can design for future generations – many, many future generations – as we increase the capacity of the contemporary city and consider the existential threats facing them today.
In the Summer of 2024, our comparative trip was to Shanghai, China, a coastal, deltaic megacity which has undergone a vast transformation over the past 50 years, driven in large part by the
Rachel Stagner
Dylan Sabisch
strong central government. This nation-building project has entailed the clearing of historic neighborhoods, construction of millions of square feet of new building, and the design and reuse of the expansive Shanghai Expo, which today stands as a park stretching for miles along the Huangpu river. Shanghai marks a far end of the spectrum of urbanism – orderly, dense, with a strong and present administrative state. Standing in Shanghai with Phnom Penh and Bangkok on the mind, one wonders how other cities in this region of the world will develop. Will they follow the models of Bangkok, Shanghai, Singapore, among others, or will they set their own path on their own terms?
In Bangkok, our collaborators opened a window on the complexity of the contemporary city. We met with planners from the Bangkok Municipal Agency who explained the strategic plan to preserve historic buildings while trying to control and focus contemporary development. Chat Architects joined us for a lecture on designing with local fishing communities and being open to the contingencies and unexpectedness of designing in the sea. We met with the Community Organization Development Institute, a national nonprofit working with informal settlements to design and establish land tenure. They brought us to several canal communities throughout Bangkok where new housing, infrastructure, and water management were being designed to increase social stability and health.
During our deep study of Bang Khun Thian, we had the chance to do a home stay on a shrimp farm, and spent the night on the Bangkok coast –an extraordinary experience. The crisp sea breeze and tranquility of the shrimp farm was a quiet counterpoint to the heat and commotion of central Bangkok. This is a landscape on the front line of climate change. The Gulf of Thailand is washing inland, and over the past 50 years has moved nearly a kilometer toward the city. Researchers and the city government have funded large-scale mitigation projects using a variety of materials to stabilize soil and counter the tidal fluctuations of the sea, including planting swaths of mangrove in vertical concrete pipes – all human-made projects to reconstitute vestiges of the natural landscape that was here just a century ago.
Our work as urban designers was to draw together all these complex places, varied drivers for making the city, and the intriguing challenge of letting the water in. We seek to design the city with water front of mind and to cultivate fluidity in urbanism. (A city closed and static will fail in the long run.) Bangkok offers worldclass vibrancy with a population that proved to be welcoming, aware of their natural landscape, and finding ways to live well, together in this hot, humid, lush place.
Design Processes
In 2022, we collaborated with students from Chulalongkorn University on a weeklong workshop to define a set of problem statements for Bangkok. Students worked in groups of eight to define the problem and represent how that problem would impact the city if left to develop unabated. The five statements were provocations to think about the city from a distinct perspective: power, land cover, upstream and downstream challenges, spiritual connections to the river, and the notion of the commons. Using problem statements and urban elements students developed adaptive design proposals, transforming known forms of the city to confront future conditions.
The following year, we continued our focus on the themes of spirit, commons, power, and landcover. We used them to read the city, and over several weeks determined the location where that challenge was in strongest relief. Students then designed a project that imagined new typologies, systems, or adaptations to the city to resolve a specific challenge. Student projects anticipated the receding coast and proposed a variety of design responses: a material reuse plan for structures and villages as the sea marched inward; new forms of water-mitigating, high-density development in the already dense urban core; landscape systems which releveraged local knowledge to manage water in the historic but densifying western side of the city; and a renetworking of canal and road systems to imagine a more fully integrated public transportation and public space system.
We turned our gaze on a single district, one that acts like a microcosm of Bangkok Bang Kuhn Thian. This long, narrow district stretches several kilometers from the coast of the Gulf of Thailand up to the Rama II highway. Within that stretch north, there are generally three distinct areas. At the top, bundled around the highway, is a dense, land-based city. Speculative buildings are popping up here as the city pushes toward the sea. The northern part of Bang Khun Thian is much like the eastern suburbs of Bangkok: buildings are between four and ten stories tall, roads span over old canals, and huge walled blocks of buildings contain either open mall complexes or tightly packed residences. In the central part of the district, there is a mix of low-rise buildings, functioning canals, and many sites of development – two to three story townhomes built at grade which cut off the tidal flow of water. There are a few historic areas built around a tangle of canals, where the tide floods some low-lying portions daily; the water rushes in and out freely to the sea. Finally, there is the southern-most district, where shrimp farms have largely replaced the naturally occurring mangrove forests. While the landscape
is vast, it is controlled by a handful of families – fewer than 50 – who rely on this land for farming. One woman told us “I was born in the sea, I will die in the sea.”
This district, where land and water meet in increasingly precarious ways, is the protective buffer of Bangkok. Fifteen million people living in the city rely on this area to absorb and block the water from the sea, to absorb overland flood water that has been diverted around the city, and to clean particulates from the air. This is the urban challenge – how do the rights of the farmers to continue to use their land compare with how this land might benefit the region in perhaps more significant ways than farming shrimp? Students in the 2024 studio sought to resolve these challenges by proposing new forms of land preservation, reintegrating water infrastructure and ecological stability, and anticipating the continued recession of the coastline toward the city. This balancing act at the edge is a hallmark of urban design and our students rose to the challenge.
The spectacular Shanghai skyline at night
Global Urbanism Studio Field Visits
In Conversation: Mississippi River Common Ground
Derek Hoeferlin, David Waggonner, and Jonathan Stitelman
Jonathan Stitelman sat down with Derek Hoeferlin, chair of landscape architecture at WashU, and David Waggonner, founding principal at Waggonner & Ball in New Orleans, to discuss urban design along the Mississippi River.
Jonathan Stitelman: Thank you, David and Derek, for taking the time to talk today for the Dispatch. You each work across a range of scales, from urban to rural to planetary. How do you see a future path for urban design negotiating these contexts and scales? And then, as a follow up question, how did your training inform this?
David Waggonner: Frank Zappa said, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
Derek Hoeferlin: One of the first urban design projects I worked on was with David in Bossier City, Louisiana. That was my first immersion into that scale, working with David and Mac Ball, from a more city-making standpoint less so than from an ecological and climate-based understanding of cities.
DW: At that time, we had worked on campus scale but not really town scale, and Bossier City had some money coming in. We were looking at redevelopment as the driver, which is a strange position compared to where I think we get ourselves today.
When I was at Yale, we didn’t have a lot of urban design training. But being in a place like New Haven, you confront urban design every day. I would walk from the school on Chapel Street in New Haven to George Street, by the Elm City diner and the Old Heidelberg, and see the street life there. The presence of urban design is so strong in an environment like that. It’s through experience that I learned urban design. Observation is fundamental.
DH: I had that similar feeling. Moving to a place like New Haven, after living in New Orleans for 11 years, was an urban shock, like “Whoa. There are other types of cities in America.”
At Yale, I was exposed to things that were outside the scale of architecture and really learned about urban morphology. But my teacher, Fred Koetter, was already almost dismissive of that, and would say “look, you have to study the invisible systems, you have to understand capital flows.” We were learning about suburbia and it was about development within challenges of capital flow.
Then I had Keller Easterling for studio, which is a very different way of understanding scale. That was maybe one of the first studios that had access to Google. We were finding all this new stuff, learning about Trash Island out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and how that stuff all connects or doesn’t connect.
DW: That gets us to the planetary question!
DH: Yeah, that got me to the planetary question of architecture. And part of the reason we’re all here together. Katrina hit not long after, and then that’s when the big shift happened, especially for David in his practice, but also my teaching and engagement with the river system.
JS: That leads to a second question also about time scale. The time scales of your projects and research are so significant and may well outlive us all. How do different timescales and cultures shape your work?
DH: I was just thinking about David’s recent work on the coastal resiliency projects that are not just about Louisiana, but also places like Charleston and Norfolk, set in a short time scale of urgency – in terms of sea level rise and climate change – but also other senses of urgency, of decision making and political will.
DW: I’ve learned that no project has a single path or direction. There are a lot of loops and reversals. Designers are pretty well able to deal with that. We’re used to setbacks. We don’t think of things as linear. For example, Louisiana had a Democratic governor for eight years. And now we’ve got a hard-right Republican governor. We thought we had to move in one way and others
haven’t agreed about that at all. As we think about these longer-term projects, they’re all subject to upset.
We’re doing work in Charleston. We had been working with John Tecklenburg, a Democratic mayor, who had two terms and was our client. But he got beat. And so now there’s a new mayor who’s a Republican. Now we’ve got to reset all conditions: Are designers capable? And where do we maintain our principles in all that? What we’re trying to do in these processes is establish a common language and find common ground.
DH: Someone who seems to come up in every conversation like this is Colin Wellenkamp, who runs the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative. His charge is to connect the mayors up and down the whole river system, much of which is agricultural. He says that to really be serious about a sustainable watershed you have to get all those mayors together to find whatever that common language is.
DW: America is lightly urbanized. The real struggle we have in America is between the rural and the urban. The Mississippi River has very little urbanization, considering what it really is. It’s a long way from New Orleans to Baton Rouge to Natchez to wherever and really didn’t get urbanized the same way. So we’re talking first, questions about urban design, and maybe there’s another more vital question to ask why about why designers prefer the city instead of the landscape?
DH: This drills right into the urban design program at WashU. When I was chair of the program, coming out of COVID, Jonathan and I were able to do the first reimmersion of students into international travel. We went to Bangkok and through Thailand with Kotchakorn Voraakhom and Chulalongkorn University. And then we came back to the U.S. and Jonathan and I, and Matt Bernstine from our Office for Socially Engaged Practice, led the studio on a weeklong trip from New Orleans, where we met you, to St. Louis. We made our way upriver to places like Vicksburg, Natchez, Old River Control,
Memphis. It was a hundred degrees in July. We drove all the way up there so that we could show the students that our future as urban designers needs to look at this infrastructure. We need to look at the hinterlands because they’re so connected to places like New Orleans and St. Louis or Bangkok and Chiang Mai. It let us question why we build projects like the hydroelectric dams in the Mekong watershed that export power to cities so they can call themselves sustainable for getting energy from other sources… but they’re causing issues thousands of miles away in the pursuit of sustainable urbanism. Those are deep questions that architects, landscape architects, and urbanists need to grapple with.
DW: It begs the question: Where is this work occurring in time? The rebellion in my generation was against the 1950s. It was boring. We thought because it was conventional and working that it was a bland time.
DH: But in those bland times, in places like St. Louis and New Orleans, other big forces were at play that the public wasn’t really aware of, like big industrialization which was being championed because it was the ’50s and post-war. Big agriculture, big industry, and what that did to the city of St. Louis along the whole riverfront, it almost happened overnight. Entire neighborhoods and blocks and parts of cities – whether along the river, through the central axis of the city, or in East St. Louis in Illinois – were turned over, the land use was completely changed to be able to export corn, soybean, grain, and petrochemicals all over the world.
DW: It’s hard because architects aren’t really very good at history. All these things occur in a historical continuum. Oil and gas, just from the 1930s and earlier, was consuming Louisiana in this landscape, just devastating the planet. You don’t get these things back easily. One of the things we don’t really teach is the need to stop harming. First thing you do is stop hurting yourself.
JS: There’s something interesting in the historical time frame you’re talking about here, that the 20th century saw cities change through industrialization. Looking back, it feels inevitable, but it wasn’t. I wonder if you see the imaginative capacities of design as a powerful form of resistance to that inevitability. What is the value of speculating and putting forward bombastic or optimistic views of what the future could be?
DH: That’s where David and I probably have different feet in this. I have the luxury of it because I’m in academia. I believe in speculative futures and trying to open and join transboundary conversations.
This semester with students, I’ve taken a different approach, looking at the Mississippi River and St. Louis from a very imaginative angle. The studio Imaginary Islands starts by looking this at a map from 1837, which shows an island in the middle of the Mississippi River, across from where the Arch is now, called Bloody Island. That’s where they used to have duels. Neither Missouri nor Illinois claimed the island, so it was a neutral place.
When you look closely at the map, you see it was surveyed by Robert E. Lee. He was dispatched there by an earlier version of the Army Corps of Engineers to figure out how to reverse engineer the island with wing dikes. It was the first set of wing dikes to make the river silt up and narrow the channel of the river so navigation
could happen. The river was going eastward into what is now the American bottom. St. Louis was panicking because they were losing their access to the river. It took 20 years to enact. So now, when you type in the word “Bloody Island” in Google Maps, it’s labeled right on the flood wall, just north of East St. Louis. It’s all just backfill. And it’s full of rail lines. It’s the beginning of East St. Louis, basically.
So, what does it mean for an architect or a landscape architect to engage the traces of that historical context? When you overlay the map of the river, you see that it aligns with the highway and the rail line. And you see that the wing dike that Robert E. Lee has on that map perfectly aligns with the flood wall that’s there now. So those things do track through history.
DW: The great thing about that method is you’re looking not only at the map, which I think is the common ground of the urban designer, you’re looking at a two-dimensional version of what
coastal condition. But it doesn’t mean that the interior should be given less love or attention. You really have to look at the whole thing. You can’t look at the ocean without thinking about the land; you have to think holistically.
DH: As architects we have the values but we also know our limitations. There are other disciplines that are really good at this work, like ecologists, biologists, or coastal scientists. Maybe even more importantly, they should be doing the work with us helping in other ways.
DW: That’s why we joined an engineering company that has a lot of ecologists and has a lot of scientists. We had a lecture in the office by a coastal scientist out of Mobile, Don Blancher, who said ecology just means “whole house.” And I think if architects understood that, they would have to say “what am I doing here if I’m designing a wall but I don’t know what the house is?” I’m working with a carpenter to improve my little house. We got to talking and one guy was saying
was or is or might become. Urban design by its nature wants to be broader and design is the best way to negotiate. But that begins within limits. Architecture school is a chance to let those go, that’s the great thing about it. But the question would be, in pedagogy, how the freedom should be enjoyed, appreciated, and then how to utilize that freedom when you get into the real world.
JS: This is a nice way of bringing us back to training and where we are as educators. Each of you has a strongly values-driven practice. How do you grapple with the challenges, privileges, and responsibilities of this kind of work?
DW: I feel like we’re in the midst of the big question. We work on these adaptation issues at the
something about minimalism because it uses the least material. It’s not some aesthetic approach. It’s actually to do it with the least effort. Leasteffort approaches come out of ecology, but they also come out of carpentry, and I think that the real privilege of the profession is it cuts across everything. I don’t think we’ve understood the responsibility or the opportunity. Our work has to be driven by our belief in something beyond our own selves.
Derek Hoeferlin leads students along the Mississippi River in New Orleans
Students at the floodwall in St. Anthony neighborhood of New Orleans
In Conversation: Southeast Asian Pasts and Futures
Jonathan Stitelman and Kotchakorn Voraakhom
Kotchakorn Voraakhom is the founder and principal of LandProcess, a Bangkok-based landscape architecture and urban design firm working on public open space design and urban climate adaptation. She is the co-instructor of the Global Urbanism Studio.
Jonathan Stitelman: Over the past couple years, we’ve had a chance to travel to Angkor Wat, through Bangkok, to Shanghai, and beyond. From your perspective, what connects these places and what do you feel like we can learn from these examples?
Kotchakorn Voraakhom: I think it’s really important to be a flaneur. Do you know this term? It’s a French word – that you become a stranger to the place. And when you travel, you’re trying to understand, not at the level that makes it home, but just trying to see from a different perspective. I think it’s so important as a designer to have that lens of learning – to be awake in a different place and question deeply why the city, the landscape, the people, the food and many other things, why it is the way it is. I think it makes you grow in your own way with your own eyes, with your own lens.
JS: When we got back from Shanghai or Cambodia, was there anything that made you see Bangkok differently?
KV: Cambodia is our neighbor country. When I see Phnom Penh, I can feel that there was a period when Bangkok used to be just like it. We lost a sense of who we are. We wanted to grab more development. There’s greed in development.
In Phnom Penh, you put out-of-scale French architecture in the middle of nowhere on the waterfront. Or you put Chinese influence in, so it’s a collage city that is everywhere within us as a region. Bangkok used to want to be like the U.S. We wanted to have everything modern, to have a cultural displacement. I think that’s really what I have learned. Of course there is similarity in terms of landscape: we are a delta city, we have a river, we have so many similar ways of living with water. I think that’s how you see the similarity and difference. And I think that’s another way of learning about place. Shanghai, for example, is like a New York City of Asia, a fast-growing city with a long history. And I see that in one nation’s history, there’s always your history within that place. It brings an awareness to us as a society, each of us as a person. There’s always something that you learn if you really ground yourself as a human being.
JS: From a personal standpoint, I gained so much when I studied abroad as a student, seeing that people live in very different ways than I do. I learned how much bigger the world is and how much complexity you can encounter when you travel. What I love about cities is that everybody shows up every day and they make it fresh every day, in their image. Like the people we saw fishing out in the Gulf of Thailand, the people selling goods at the market. People just going about their days walking kids to school. I find that really energizing and it teaches me a lot. Sometimes we get stuck in 3D modeling software and think the city is all about the digital model, but really, the city is about accommodating all these ways of
living and being human and the dance between people and their natural and cultural environment. I really believe that when we take our students abroad, it makes them better designers and helps them understand that the world always has more questions for them.
KV: How do you feel about having Bangkok as the base to see other cities and to see St. Louis, fresh? What do you think about your experience of Bangkok through many years? Is it still relevant as the base city?
JS: Totally. I think Bangkok is a city that has more vibrancy than anywhere else I’ve ever been. It’s hot. It’s wet. People live their lives so publicly and the city feels alive everywhere. You get the sense that the city’s pulsating, like if you if you lay on the ground you could feel the city go “bum bump, bum bump,” like a heartbeat. It is so valuable to see a city so full of life and vitality. You don’t always see that; you can go to a city and it can sometimes shut you out. Bangkok is the kind of place that has a softness that draws you in. The blocks of Bangkok, because they’re built around the canals, work like a disappearing act. When you walk around a block and think “oh, I get it, it’s a street,” but then you turn into the block and you fall into a maze of spaces with all kinds of other shops and people and construction sites and cafes and little gardens and parks, and you realize that the city both shows itself directly, and also has a very tangible public realm that is full of surprises.
Every building form that has ever been thought of exists in Bangkok, every single tower shape and size. But the public realm is so porous and so open and there’s a lot of ambiguity between the street and the inside of a building. The buildings, shops, and cafes draw you in. It’s a multicultural city as well. With 15 million people, you can always find someone doing something that you’re interested in joining or learning from. I think it’s a really wonderful base because it always challenges you, but in a way that invites you to want to learn more. In that way it has an amazing richness that makes it a great touchpoint to understand other places historically, like how much is Phnom Penh the past of Bangkok, or how much is Bangkok the future of Phnom Penh, or how much is Shanghai the future of Phnom Penh. It’s a really surprising, intriguing place.
KV: Yeah, because every time you come, I think “will he get bored?” But you’re right, it’s complex enough, but it’s digestible. There must be some point that you like about the city, because if you dislike some place, it’s so hard to really, really understand.
JS: I want to ask one question about your practice. Your work is landscape architecture, but it’s also projects in the city that enliven the city – you collaborate with architects and urban designers. Is there a line that divides those things, or is it a mindset that divides those disciplines? How do you balance those?
KV: I think there’s always a line, even in the way we teach and we separate the younger generations. Some we call architects, some we call landscape architects, some we call urban designers. But in real life, it is such mix, like a hot pot boiling differently and melting everything together. But you still have a hat: you may be called an architect or landscape architect, but when you really see the purpose or strength of your expertise, I think you will do more.
We are very lucky to be a Bangkok-based practice because it’s such a challenging city. And in the sense of policy, no policy makes your practice easy. People don’t understand what we can do as landscape architects. Bangkok gives us an opportunity to be even more creative, more agile, and tougher. When you’re in a melting pot, it’s just like everyone who survives has a drive to come up with the best solution. We don’t have the privilege to have empty land. We can’t say “Yeah, let’s do a new park and let’s build a new city from scratch.” Everything is already occupied. Even just a strip from the street. We don’t even have a good width for pedestrians.
As landscape architects we have to straddle the boundary of practice. We use rules, we use architectural façades we use every surface in the city so that I can implement green solutions. I don’t have space and I need to clone buildings and use leftover infrastructure, whatever is unused we have to be very creative with. In real life, there’s no boundary. But there’s a boundary of the respect of professional expertise, and that’s always important to have as a team.
KV: What is your favorite food here? This would be a good ending question!
JS: Pomelo salad. It’s tart, it’s savory, it’s textural, it’s got some crunch. Some bursts of pomelo, some herbs, a little fish sauce. And like most Thai food, it’s just fresh ingredients brought together into one place. What I love about all Thai food is that it’s open, so you start with one dish but you end with a very different dish because you’re going to say “ooh, I want this curry bite on this rice, and oh, I’m going to take this tamarind and I’m going to put a little fish on my pomelo salad and I’m going to have some shrimp.” So in the end you might have one bite with six different dishes brought together in one place, and I love the openness of that. It’s just about flavor and enjoyment.
KV: Just come as you are. Even though I asked about food, you are describing how Bangkok is as a city!
Studio Field Work and Proposals
Bang Khun Thian: a Microcosm of Bangkok
Bang Khun Thian is the only part of Bangkok proper that touches the sea, and it is a microcosm of the challenges and potentials of the region. This is where you can see Bangkok’s history and its past. The district is a gradient, with rural shrimp farms on vast parcels linked by canals and narrow paths at the southern end and a major highway project – Rama II – foreshadowing high-density development to the north. In between, one finds small pockets of historic communities connected by canals that fill and drain by the tides. This is still a place of water, to a certain extent, but also a place that is slowly developing as the rest of Bangkok – car-based, impervious surface, canals blocked by speculative development.
Bang Khun Thian also reveals tensions between individual and collective interests. Bangkok, a city of 15 million people, lies in a vast deltaic floodplain. Bang Khun Thian has a relatively small population and is owned mostly by a few dozen families who have an intense connection to their land. Bang Khun Thian is a buffer between the city and the rising sea. This relationship puts the
interests and decisions of a relatively small group of people in control of a swath of land with great importance to the rest of the city region’s population. Bangkok and Bang Khun Thian are both vulnerable to the same things – rising sea levels, monsoon floods, land subsidence. The two must work together and coexist.
If Bang Khun Thian develops in the Bangkok business-as-usual model, we will see a district paved over just in time to be inundated by the sea. The three projects here reflect the realities of Bang Khun Thian’s ecological, infrastructural, and development conditions. Life here has a rural rhythm distinctive and foreign to central Bangkok. But it is a vulnerable place. One can travel by boat to see the original “pillar of the city,” a stone marker which, 100 years ago, had stood on solid ground in a mangrove forest. It now looms 10 feet above the surface of the water. From the pillar, one can look back and see the shore of the city, knowing that between these two points there had been land – a forest, villages, farms – now under water. Closer to central
Bangkok, the district has an industrial character, with small-scale production and repair activities unfolding from shophouses into the street.
In the free-flowing parts of the district, toward the center and south, the land floods twice each day as the tide rolls in and out, in and out. In Bang Khun Thian we see an urban form which has accommodated the fluctuations of water successfully for generations, a way of life that is being outpaced by speculative development and is increasingly vulnerable to climate change.
Our introduction to Bang Khun Thian was to join a community meeting where residents from the north, central, and southern areas of the district came together to share their own visions for the future of the district. The community’s desires were split between greater connection to the central city and the development that came with it, protection of their unique agrarian lifestyle, and preservation of the remaining ecological systems of the district.
Policy
Existing historic preservation policies are augmented to create a landscape preservation model. In central Bangkok’s Chinatown, building owners can sell off their air-rights to developers to use in other parts of the city. For example, the owner of a two-story building in an area that allows five stories can sell three stories of air-rights to be used in a part of the city designated for higher density construction. This policy preserves the historic fabric of the city and allows building owners to profit from the contemporary construction industry. The policy has been a powerful incentive for preservation in the dynamic and relatively unregulated Bangkok context. In what ways can these policies –and others like it – be adjusted to preserve, protect, and maintain vulnerable landscapes in the city?
Tidal Flow
Bangkok is a water city in every way. The river runs through the center of the region, monsoons drench the city, and sea tides push water in and out of rivers and canals twice per day. Historically, these tidal flows were accommodated by lifting buildings, providing open, floodable spaces within communities, and absorbing the volume of water in the extensive canal network. How can contemporary communities and development accommodate the influx of water? Can the development of new infrastructure coincide with adaptive and resilient water management practices?
Effects of Land Subsidence and Sea Level Rise (Current)
Islands
As the sea level rises, coastal communities will increasingly be cut off from the rest of the city. The urban form of Bangkok preferences impervious sprawl, with most buildings built on grade and protected by floodwalls. This form of development is problematic, as it displaces water elsewhere and does not account for water fluctuations. Could there be a model for densifying coastal communities without increasing the impermeable landcover? Can the development of new canals, road infrastructure, and mangrove habitats be intertwined to create areas of refuge and ecological preservation? The island model learns from the Bangkok region’s historic polder system to imagine a future wet/dry/ecological pattern for the city.
This project delves into the complex and often contentious relationship between urban expansion and the natural environment, particularly as it manifests in Bangkok. By focusing on the coastal district of Bang Khun Thian, the project seeks to unravel the intricate dynamics between modernization, traditional ways of life, and the challenges posed by rapid urbanization in a highly vulnerable deltaic landscape.
By offering a vision that harmonizes these seemingly opposing forces, the project aims to create a sustainable future for Bang Khun Thian, where the balance between wet and dry, modern and traditional, economic growth and ecological preservation, is thoughtfully maintained.
The design introduces an innovative ring and table system. The rings consolidate shrimp farming into centralized, managed ponds that integrate mangrove restoration. Within these rings, tables are constructed – elevated platforms, three meters off the ground, that house residential, commercial, and public spaces. This lifted design allows for natural water movement beneath the structures, enabling the landscape to adapt to flooding while sustaining human activity.
Junyi Yang
Toritcha Coulibaly
Chloe Kelly
Translating an existing building preservation policy to a landscape preservation proposal, this proposal balances the ecological health of Bang Khun Thian with its development potential. Kelly has identified a patchwork of individually owned parcels which will be preserved and connected with an ecological corridor and a new pattern of development, more attuned to the shrimp farm landscape than Central Bangkok.
CLIMATE VULNERABILITY
We are all climate vulnerable, but at what timescale? Over the course of our students’ careers, the project of climate adaptation will be one of the dominant challenges. It won’t be a singular project that resolves the issue –a wall or a factory to solve all problems in one fell swoop – but a persistent approach, expressed in each project over a very long time, which anticipates more extreme environmental conditions of the future.
At every scale, design must be in service of climate adaptation and mitigation. Individual buildings need to be designed for enhanced energy, water, and waste efficiency. The public realm needs to be designed as infrastructure with increased capacity for comfort, connectivity, resource management, and protection against harsh elements. And swaths of the city – districts, neighborhoods, parcels – need to be designed as integrated systems, working together with natural processes to find an equilibrium between new ways
forces of climate change compound. Some of these possible futures, such as keeping the average global temperature below a 1.5 degree increase, have been foreclosed. Without action, we are left with an increasingly challenging environment to adapt to and with fewer institutional and public realm measures available.
Photographs show an informal community in the center of Bangkok. This community has been working with the Community Organization Development Institute to rebuild houses along the canal which are lifted above the common flood level and provide safe housing to vulnerable populations in the city. The community faces the river, with open decks on the right and a shared walkway to the left. This is a typical condition in Bangkok, where the canal used to be the main street, central to the residential communities of the city. Vendors would have floated down the canal, selling food and goods. The building practices along the canals and rivers historically are marked by an openness and lightness, with surfaces that filter light and air, and can create a cool, shaded interior, seen in the image of the covered porch, akin to a sala or open seating space which is commonly found across Thailand. These spaces have two center-facing benches and are like a water-based stoop. Daily life unfolds here – parents and children catch a cool breeze, friends chat, and dogs scamper down to the water. They reveal a spatial logic centered on shade, breeze, fluidity, and ornament that characterizes architecture in Thailand. As the water level rises and as floods change the safe datum of construction, these light structures can be lifted out o f harm’s way. Contemporary development in Thailand often lacks the material qualities of these buildings.
In the image with the earthen trough and palm trees, one sees a speculative development parcel, where a developer has infilled the low land – sometimes displacing mangroves or areas of free-flowing water – and planted banana trees, a practice which allows the land to be taxed as agricultural
of living and the historic and specific cultures of a context. In this light, we have studied Thailand very closely to understand the vulnerabilities, potentials, and cultures which must be balanced for successful urban design, but it will take more than designers to head off predicted scenarios.
The centerfold of this publication represents Bangkok in two ways. The gray map with red figures overlays four generations of inhabitants with the anticipated sea level rise in Bangkok. Relative to the lifetimes of multiple generations, urban design must recognize that we serve not just the inhabitants of the contemporary city, but their children, grandchildren, and – should we be so proactive – their great-grandchildren. They rely on us to anticipate and respond to the demands of a changing world. The upper image shows where our urban design students over the past three years have seen fit to propose interventions which would leverage the infrastructure, public realm, and natural systems of Bangkok to increase the capacity of the city to meet the demands of the future. These projects do not hold fast to the river, but rather recognize the relative homogeneity of the delta: in such a challenging place, all spaces need to be marshaled toward the efforts of holding water, preserving ecological strength, and providing space for the vibrancy of Bangkok’s inhabitants to live their lives. These sites hold potential, as a constellation of interrelated projects, to bolster existing systems and open a view into how the landscape might change if many designers, developers, communities, and agencies could coordinate their efforts.
The line at the center of the image – a timeline of rising average global temperatures – is by now well known. Emanating from that line are the established global temperature change scenario projections; four possible paths forward for climate change. Our window for action is closing. Climate mitigation and adaptation projects which are anticipatory rather than just reactive have the greatest impact if they are enacted soon, before the many
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rather than commercial. These parcels block precious flows of the city, and when they are developed, they tend not to recognize their precarious siting. The ground here is soft and sinking. The softness of the land can be seen in the image with the narrow white building settling unevelnly into the ground, leaning to the right over a narrow alley. The settling ground also affects the floodwalls at the center of the city, as can be seen in the image with sandbags shoring up sheets of metal to hold back the river.
Climate change will also bring excessive heat. One student, Junyi Yang, walked through Bangkok and Shanghai with an infrared thermometer, documenting the differences in temperature caused by material, orientation, and shade. As we traveled from the dense core of the city to the coast, we found a surprisingly cool breeze, and a temperature difference of several degrees. In the coastal areas of the city, where some remaining mangrove forests shade the soft ground, heat is dissipated. Not so for the center of the city, where asphalt and concrete hold the heat through the day and night, creating a heat island effect that holds the typical daily low temperature at 27 degrees Celcius, a 10 degree increase over the past 20 years.
1.0°C–2.0°C global greenhouse gases contributed warming
1.59°C global increase over land (2011–2020 than 1850–1900)
30d ays a year above 100°F
3.8°C projected increase in Thailand by 2080
1.09°C
higher in 2011–2020 than 1850–1900 globally
0.88°C global increase over the ocean (2011–2020 than 1850–1900)
Citation: 1. Calvin, K., Dasgupta, D., Krinner, G., Mukherji, A., Thorne, P. W., Trisos, C., Romero, J., Aldunce, P., Barrett, K., Blanco, G., Cheung, W. W., Connors, S., Denton, F., Diongue-Niang, A., Dodman, D., Garschagen, M., Geden, O., Hayward, B., Jones, C., . . . Ha, M. (2023). IPCC, 2023: Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team, H. Lee and J. Romero (eds.)]. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.59327/ipcc/ ar6-9789291691647
2. Climate Risk Country Profile: Thailand (2021): The World Bank Group and the Asian Development Bank.
$6.9 billion projected annual urban damage in Thailand for a 1-in-25-year event in 2030
3.7mm yr-1 global average rate of sea level rise (2006-2018)
500,000 projected population in Thailand affected by a 1-in-25-year event in 2030
2.5 million people in Thailand are potentially exposed to flooding from sea-level rise by 2070–2100
Citation: 1. Calvin, K., Dasgupta, D., Krinner, G., Mukherji, A., Thorne, P. W., Trisos, C., Romero, J., Aldunce, P., Barrett, K., Blanco, G., Cheung, W. W., Connors, S., Denton, F., Diongue-Niang, A., Dodman, D., Garschagen, M., Geden, O., Hayward, B., Jones, C., . . . Ha, M. (2023). IPCC, 2023: Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team, H. Lee and J. Romero (eds.)]. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.59327/ipcc/ ar6-9789291691647
2. Climate Risk Country Profile: Thailand (2021): The World Bank Group and the Asian Development Bank.
LEARNING FROM CONTEXT
One of the lessons from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report (2023) is the need to fold local, or indigenous, knowledge into climate adaptation strategies. Our students immersed themselves in the historic fabric of Bangkok to find possible alignments with past ways of living with water and future development practices. Designing in Bangkok requires one to understand the logic of terrain and its historic culture of this district and the ways it managed water.
The surface of Bangkok has been carved up every which way by canals and by the channel of the Chao Phraya River. While the surface of the city sits on average 1.5 meters above sea level, there are some areas which are significantly lower, and some which are higher. The river builds up a natural
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stand in stark contrast to the entangled lifted and floating structures of historic Bangkok.
The fluctuations of this landscape necessitate a constant tending, regular rebuilding, and a certain degree of openness that would make a modernist blush. But that’s Bangkok for you. The city is found more in how it treats its land than what is seen on the horizon, a skyline of countless towers and forms. The ground is where it all happens, and not idly. There is great danger in waiting, speculating, and emulating development practices from elsewhere. Bangkok is a powerful model for how to live with water and the dangers of looking the other way; it is a sectional city, where a designer can learn about the delicate dance between water and structures.
Where can progress happen? That is the realm of urban design and landscape architects. Our task is to find the latent potential in the city, to define the ethos of a fluid future Bangkok. Learning from the past does not mean copying it directly without question, but taking the techniques and practices of past generations and folding them into contemporary modes of development. How can we study land stewardship practices from the past and adapt them as the starting point for a future preservation strategy? What policies are the Bangkok Municipal Authority developing to manage the seemingly unabating march toward an impermeable megacity in a floodplain? How can those strategies be broadened to support the many forms of development that the city needs – not just speculative condo development, but landscape preservation, mangrove ecosystem protection, cultures of fishing, boating, and farming that are bound to seasonal cycles? Bangkok as a city is an extension of all these ways of life and more. A deep culture of ornament, prayer, ritual, and celebration is expressed in every community we encountered. Responding to climate change will not be a drab affair in Bangkok –and if it is, it’s failed the richness of this fine place.
bank, elevated above the land on either side. A canal, on the other hand carves across the ground, terminating in the river by breaking through the bank. The web that this winding river and nearly 2,000 canals makes does not all drain equally to the center. The river is the high ground, the canals which extend perpendicular from the river sag as the ground subsides. Over time this sagging action slows the flow of water – up to the river channel –until it ceases to drain. Bangkok Noi is a district held between the natural course of the river to the west and the artificial canal, built in the 1600s, and which has been subsumed into the dominant course of the Chao Phraya. Bangkok Noi slopes down, from north to south, but also has a portion which is slightly more elevated along the right bank of the river. To learn from local knowledge here is to understand that designing in Bangkok is a game of inches, that the tidal flow of the river is a power to be harnessed and respected, and that the canals need to be linked, dredged, and cleared to allow for water to move freely through the district. Letting the water in is part of how this area is able to manage the extreme fluctuations; it’s the release valve of this powerful river. But this release valve has only so much capacity. As the whole nation’s river system becomes increasingly channelized, the natural buffering of the landscape is diminished.
Bangkok sits at the mouth of the river and inherits all upstream decisions. Districts like Bangkok Noi and Bang Khun Thian – as described elsewhere in this publication – are both places to learn from and places to protect for how they reveal a way of living with water that the entire city can benefit from. They reflect a different Bangkok, one which is in tune with the timing of the monsoon rains, the daily tides, and the seasonal floods.
In our travels, we have seen so many places that have not learned these lessons. One small town on the river has built up huge concrete embankments in the past decade, recently wracked and crumbled, undermined by the surging river. The rigidity and fragility of concrete structures on the river
Landcover
How can the transition of landcover from pervious to impervious be mitigated?
Bangkok sits in a young delta, built up over two million years by sediment deposition. The geomorphology of the delta is formed by the river, which deposits a high bank on either side and in turn results in low basins contained by the river banks. Over the past 400 years, canals have been constructed to shorten the length of the river, cutting off oxbows and stretching thin water channels across the basins, creating an extensive network of canals overlaid with the river. This site, Bangkok Noi, is one of the most historic parts of the city and is encircled by the original course of the river and a man-made canal.
Huang’s project uses Bangkok Noi as a polder, speculating that the existing suspended sediment in the river could be diverted across the district and be redeposited to rebuild the land as the water is diverted back out to the Chao Phraya. Slowing and diverting water is supported by the proposed building typologies which lift, turn, and prefigure future landforms to be welcome public spaces. Water- and landbased mobility are interwoven in this system.
You can see the historic pattern of polders adjacent to the newly formed berms and islands created by the sedimentation. The reconnected river network will also increase the volume of water detention during flood events, taking pressure off the strained stormwater system (combined stormwater and waste) and protecting downstream communities.
Weicong Huang
Designing in Bangkok requires careful consideration of the topography and the perviousness of the landscape. In such a densely built-up city, there is very little available space for adaptive projects to increase the stormwater detention capacity. This project takes these three considerations – topography, perviousness, and water retention – to design adaptive typologies to meet the future density needs of an already densely developed and populated district.
Hui’s project questions the contemporary city – already exceptionally dense with buildings and people – and how it might be designed to offer spacious density, a strategy which might increase resilience in a very constrained environment.
To the left we can see a deep section of the Chao Phraya delta. The land is formed through deposits of sediment over millions of years. There are naturally occurring aquifers distributed through the strata of the city. As the city has grown, the aquifers have been drained and the soil compressed. The imperviousness of the contemporary city’s landcover prevents aquifer recharge, creating a vicious cycle of building, draining, and sinking in the dense urban core. This proposal is structured around a permeable boulevard which links a set of proposed typological adaptations which fold water retention and porosity through the upper levels, public spaces, and public realm of the property.
This project is structured around two aspects of the city: ground porosity and land ownership. Akhtar has developed a careful method for reading the city and understanding the collective power of multiple building parcels to be bundled into porous districts. Her analytical method leads to a set of tactics for exposing water, reducing ecological barriers, and capturing storm water. These three objectives inform the design of a progressive, parceled, collective resilient infrastructure.
In her proposal, Akhtar speculates on how this practice would be played out in the Bang Krachao district. Also known as the Green Lung, this land is primarily covered by agricultural land – long held by families – which has become increasingly fragmented as it is divided and bequeathed to younger generations. There is significant development pressure in this district. It lies across the Chao Phraya from the Bangkok Port which has led to the development of a patch of impermeable land at the northern edge of Bang Krachao. The road that leads into the district from the southwest is also a conduit for growth and development of commercial areas. These developments, if they continue unabated, risk clearing the ecological power of Bang Krachao and its role as an air, water, and land purifier.
Bangkok is one of the most climate vulnerable cities on the planet. Its low, flat deltaic landscape has a high risk of flooding at the same time that the land is sinking into a rising sea. Shi speculates on possible adaptations to informal areas along the canals of the city by introducing a delicate megastructure to lift and enclose informal dwellings out of the floodplain. The structure also holds public spaces and areas for aquaculture – common features along the more historic stretches of canal – to support community connections in the design of the public realm of informal settlements.
The metrics of her project imply that while the land subsides and the incidence of flooding increases, informal areas may continue to be lifted out of danger. These practices can be commonly found in smaller towns and villages in the Bangkok region such as Lat Chado, a 100-year-old town with a small port and shaded shops and homes lifted above a floodable public space.
“Pixelized” development master plan and land use plan
Urban Feature Balance Diagram
Urban Feature interaction diagram
Phased Typologies
Shameen Akhtar
Jingyang Shi
Spirit
The river has historically been the site for significant cultural and spiritual practices, often related to natural cycles of wet and dry. How can future designs recognize the cultural significance and centrality of living with water? What does that look like in a time of extreme global climate change?
Margaux Elliott
Urban design leverages infrastructure and the public realm to increase resilience in cities. Elliott’s project looks at a historic district of the city, Bangkok Noi, and carefully untangles its web of canals in hopes of re-orchestrating a mobility and stormwater retention network. This area falls outside the primary flood protection walls of the city and is much more vulnerable than the central cultural area of the city, Phra Nakhon.
Elliot carefully considers the elevation changes within Bangkok Noi and the orientations of existing canals to identify possible through-routes and reconnections of the fragmented network. By gravity loading the Bangkok Noi canal system, she uses natural systems to manage stormwater, holding it through the district and then returning it slowly into the Chao Phraya. These are indigenous practices of water management which have been disrupted by 20th-century engineering mindsets. This is a test case for what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's sixth assessment report considers integral to a broad-based, localized climate resilience: leveraging local knowledge to manage environmental risks. This provides an intriguing basis for an urban design practice that looks closely at indigenous landscape management practices and future projections for climate and environmental challenges.
Ian McNeal
Traveling up the Chao Phraya River from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, the studio observed the historic relationships between cities, towns, and villages to the river. There has been a recent trend toward channelizing the river, building tall floodwalls which prevent the continuation of river-based culture, reflecting a defensive mindset of river management. These walls disrupt historic aquaculture practices and are generally not effective for flood management in the high ground parts of Thailand.
McNeal carefully studied the edge conditions of the river, developing a series of section drawings of the defensive, open, and occupiable river edge types. These became the basis for his design proposal, which conveys an attitude of coexistence with water and embracing the historic river fluctuations as part of the public realm, specifically the public walkway. For McNeal, walkways became an invitation to the river and the armature to support infrastructural development. This project suggests that contemporary development practices, public realm design, and the natural cycles of the landscape can be accommodated in a singular design.
McNeal’s project relates to the concepts of the Spirit group who considered the historic cultural and spiritual practices centered on the river and seasonal cycles. These ideas are part of a research practice dedicated to the integration of local knowledge in climate adaptation practices, as can be seen in Levy’s concept diagrams to the right.
Teddy Levy: Spirit Concept Diagram
Teddy Levy: Spirit Concept Diagram
Power and Authority
What alternatives are there to local and national power being expressed through hard infrastructure such as dams that attempt to control naturally fluid rivers?
Tim Buescher
The coastal landscapes of the Chao Phraya and Mississippi Rivers are exceptionally vulnerable to climate change. Each also holds significant potential in the capture and retention of carbon, with the possibility of supporting local economic development.
Buescher’s approach imagines the transformation over time of the shrimp farms into mangrove forests. These trees have enormous carbon sequestration potential, and at the same time are able to shore up the alluvial plane. By cultivating these landscapes with restorative ecological impact, there is the potential to foster the development of local economies, from harvesting to landscape management to markets.
In the Chao Phraya project, mangrove forests are restored, elevated walkways increase the possibility to safely navigate, and shrimp ponds are retrofitted to become ecosystem regrowth points. New civic buildings, adapted to local vernaculars, are hubs for gathering and organizing community-based restoration efforts. This active restoration will take time, and the renderings depict the evolving ecological condition over several decades of care.
Phasing Section
Elliott Boyle
Boyle’s project looks at Sena, a small town in the coastal area of Bangkok surrounded by expansive shrimp farms. In the next few decades, this area will be inundated by the sea. Their project imagines reusing existing buildings as platforms for future recreational and employment areas of the city centered on the marshy quality of the land. The image to the left shows the feeling of being in Lat Chado – delicate, overlapping buildings on stilts above the soft, porous landscape. This was the historic form of building in the Chao Phraya river delta prior to the 20th century.
Boyle worked within the power group to consider how top-down power could be directed toward projects of softness, retreat, and adaptation rather than a continuation of hardscape systems of river and coastal control which, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's sixth assessment report, are considered to be reactive and potentially maladaptive.
Boyle’s project is anticipatory – recognizing the threats faced by the district and speculating on how to move with the force of nature rather than counter it.
Yixin Jiang
Bangkok, situated a few kilometers from the mouth of the Chao Phraya river, is challenged on all sides. The sea tide pushes toward the city, filling and emptying canals, washing away land as it rises. Salt water intrudes the ground, especially where there are shrimp farms. Upstream of Bangkok, dams hold back sediment and seasonal flood pulses are disrupted. The intensity and frequency of flooding has become unpredictable, making it difficult to fully prepare the city’s infrastructure.
Building a wall around the city to fully protect it from the upriver and coastal challenges is impractical – it would be monumental and would have the effect of holding in the monsoon rains that wash over the city. Jiang proposes a series of spatial typologies and land management practices to confront these upstream and downstream challenges. This project integrates landscape features, formal gestures (lift, flex, shape, dig), and scale changes to develop a more fluid relationship with water and its periodic dangers.
Her proposal uses the commercial backdrop of Bangkok as a distributed infrastructure for water management, integrating rainfall reservoirs, water treatment plants, and permeable public spaces. In the open landscapes of the wetland, marsh mounds are built up to slow water and increase sediment deposition, creating a foothold for biodiversity. Housing is elevated and integrated into a network of localized berms and floodwalls. The voluminous commercial spaces typical of Bangkok are used as temporary shelters and community centers in the event of environmental disaster. The adaptive typologies suggest the many ways that water –clean, dirty, potable; rain, flood, ground – could be the starting point for a constellation of adaptive typologies.
Watercolor Sketch: Building over soft ground
Sea Level Rise Projection
Sushimita Natarajan
Both the Chao Phraya and Mississippi Rivers have inland deltas: Yazoo on the Mississippi and Bang Ban on the Chao Phraya. From a geomorphological standpoint, these deltas are significant natural release plains – spillways – that could possibly take pressure off of downstream settlements and cities. These sprawling landscapes have the capacity to absorb huge quantities of water because of their generally flat, highly innervated terrain. They can swell and drain.
In this project, Natarajan explores the integration of rotational farming, water retention infrastructure, employment and residential centers, and rejuvenated forest ecologies in the deltaic plain.
The aspiration of this project is to manage flood and drought by balancing the water needs and aquifer recharge potential of various ecological systems.
Tiffany Dockins
Dockins’ project leverages the landscape around the river as a carefully controlled spillway system. By identifying areas on either side of the river that were undeveloped or being used as speculative property, she identifies a pattern for the expansion of the river in the event of a flood event.
Projects like these are a counterpoint to the progressive channelization of the river, a common practice in contemporary river engineering. Her work looks for opportunities to use the existing landscape and its topography and ownership patterns as a water detention system. This is a proposal for the common landscape to increase security and resilience in the city region.
The formal components of the project would be retention basins and water channels. These would become the new pattern for continued city development in the area.
Diversion, pumps, floodways, and dredging would continue to be part of the river management process.
U.S. Site Map
Aerial Diagram
Thailand Site Map
Diagram of Canal Network Section between Canal and River
Diagram Proposed Typologies
Commons
The river connects countless communities. However, over the 20th century, many communities have turned their backs to the river. How can 21st-century design treat the river as a common asset?
Boya Wang
Studying abroad is a chance to experience and reflect on the rich, unique material cultures of diverse locations. In the case of Bangkok, there is a deep history of highly articulated architecture, infrastructure, and landscapes. The city presents such a unique backdrop, and such extreme challenges related to climate change that at every turn one must ask – how will this endure, how does this reflect the past? Wang’s documentation of the city captures the variety of scales, spaces, and textures that enliven the experience of this dynamic city.
Dylan Sabisch
The next 50 years will be consequential for Bangkok. In the face of significant threats from sea level rise, more powerful storms, and irregular flood cycles, the contemporary projects in the city need to anticipate a challenging and dynamic context. Sabisch’s work explores the potential of active form-based development which anticipates the approach of the sea and subsequent ecological changes, and proposes an extreme tightening of the perimeter of the city. His proposal seeks to reclaim local economies of reuse and support while allowing a vast expanse of the Chao Phraya river delta to enter a new state as a salt marsh.
Landscape and Development Diagram Coastal erosion plan and timeline
Travel Sketches
Bangkok has two primary spatial patterns: canals and roads. The era of canal building and expansion should be thought of as occurring between the reigns of Kings Rama I and Rama V, or approximately 1780s-1910s. The road-building era of urban development began with Rama VI in the 1910s and continues today. This has created competing orientations throughout the city. In many places, the canal was in the front of a building or settlement, but today the road is in the front. The effects of this can be seen on the large blocks throughout the city. The opposition between front and back fragments the city.
Shen’s project looks to these misalignments and fractures as an opening to mend the dual mobility systems of the city. Through the design of typical sections along the canal and the integration of water management – cleaning, detention, reuse – and selective building removal she tries to connect the commercial and cultural spaces of the city into an integrated public realm.
Bowen Chai
Physical access to the Chao Phraya river is constrained by the construction of flood walls. The period of wall construction began in the 1970s and is developed by individuals, institutions, and the government. Long stretches of the river edge are inaccessible to locals, disrupting a longstanding reliance on the river for cultural activities, food, and recreation.
Chai proposes to lift new development above the wall and to straddle it. This would create pockets of space on either side of the wall which could be folded into the everyday practices of the wet and dry city. The prototypical structures are organized by a grid which alternates between building density and open space. The flexibility of the system is suited for the dynamic context of Bangkok.
Diagram and Plan
Proposed
Map of the regional canal network
River Edge Typology
Sections of canal transformation
Sue Shen
Future Plans
Linda C. Samuels
Professor and Chair, Urban Design Director of Sustainable Design and Environmental Justice
I began participating in the Global Urbanism Studio when I was appointed chair in 2024, joining the group for a week each in Shanghai and Bangkok. The contrast between the two cities is notable, particularly from a sensory perspective, where the former has limited the use of old fossil fuel vehicles in the city center making for a relatively clean and quiet street scene (as far as cars are concerned), and the latter is a web of weaving motorcycles and ancient diesel trucks looking precariously over-burdened. Shanghai is orderly and tidy; Bangkok is messy and magical – two cities on the water with very different pasts and futures. I would not have noticed the buzz of Bangkok quite as radically without the sterility of Shanghai. In the Global Urbanism Studio, the second city is a foil to the first, orienting our eyes and minds to the possibilities of what a future might be if….
Acknowledgments
The projects contained in this version of Dispatch are from the summers of 2022, 2023, and 2024, all grounded in Bangkok as our primary city of study and questions of its urgent climate challenges. In the past, the third semester of the Master of Urban Design program has moved around the globe on a roughly five-year cycle. Prior to Bangkok was Johannesburg, South Africa (with a secondary study in Kampala, Uganda) and before that Shanghai, Tokyo, and others. Social and environmental sustainability challenges have always factored in, but the palpable rise in urgency along with the dedicated work of our LandProcess partners, has sparked a deeper and more focused dive into design for environmental justice.
The wrap of these three years brings bittersweet news. Senior lecturer, Jonathan Stitelman, who has in one form or another been a leader of the Global Urbanism Studio for over a decade, will take on new responsibilities at WashU starting in 2025 that pull him away from full-time teaching in the Sam Fox School. The joy and generosity he shared with our partners, students, and coteachers over his time as support faculty and then coordinator cannot be over-estimated. The next chapter – currently in the works! – will stand
The Global Urbanism Studio relies on a network of experts, friends, colleagues, staff, students, alumni, and faculty. The course wouldn’t be possible without their effort and commitment to this project.
on his capable shoulders. We express sincere gratitude for his dedication to the value of deep cultural observations and strong partnerships this embedded study abroad has brought.
We invite those who are interested in helping to create a more just, sustainable, humane, and beautiful world to be in touch with us at the Sam Fox School. The Global Urbanism Studio showcases the values we prize – strong partnerships, local engagement (at a global scale), deep learning, interdisciplinary thinking, conscientious making, and wide awareness. The studio launches our urban design graduates solidly into the world as eyes-wide-open environmental stewards and citizen designers, the kind we need on this rollicking globe.
For More Information
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