How to transform sinking cities into landscapes that fight floods

Urban development across the world is rising, and so are sea levels. The case studies in this manual present basic, yet essential, principles on how cities can manage water through drainage. However, reading this as a landscape architect in Southeast Asia, it was interesting for me to see how our different geographies can influence our approaches to water management. With the practical water solutions outlined in this manual, I have been able to innovate landscape designs for application more specific to delta regions around Southeast Asia.

One of the most important lessons I've learned from my landscape architecture mentor Danai Thaitakoo, the author of this paper, is that we can learn much from our past. The same ethos goes for our water management. Back in the day, our great grandparents lived harmoniously with water in an amphibious culture; today, it seems we've gotten into a big fight. I grew up with this Thai idiom: "There is fish in the water, and rice in the paddy field." We used to depend on water to feed our stomachs and fertilize our lands, but now, we declare it our biggest enemy. This paper shows how, to sustain our future urban lifestyle, we will need to preserve our past ingenuity and interdependent relationship with water.

Starting in elementary school, textbooks tell us why we built our ancient civilizations close to water. Water keeps us alive and keeps our cities running; we've developed our cities upon this waterscape. Yet today, we've forgotten how much we rely on it. This paper reminds us how crucial it is for us to maintain a "waterscape urbanism," instead of our present land-based urbanism. Our future cities will forever need to coexist with nature's hydrological processes, so it's time to rethink our cities' relationship with water.

By presenting Thailand's Chao Phraya Delta as an example, this paper highlights the importance of science in understanding the nature of water and its significance for our delta cities. I found this article's concepts about gravitational motion to be relatively complex and grand to my own scale of perception and understanding — but after reading more into this brilliant paper, it turns out that the big picture of our region's water mechanism can provide an elaborate explanation of the site-specific water systems in each of our cities.

If you grew up in Bangkok like I have, it wouldn't be hard to notice the increasing frequency of floods. It would be easy to blame the city's inefficiency in handling water and climate change with its urban growth, but the problem lies in the way we adopt water management systems from across the globe. "This solution works over there," we say, "so why not here?" This paper shows us how, by bringing in strategies from an entirely different environment, Bangkok and several other delta cities in the region now approach industrial development and water management with infrastructure that is completely incompatible with our geography.