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In 2019, when the Thai government announced plans to turn an abandoned tobacco factory in the country’s smog capital into a park, Bangkok-based landscape architect Chachaning Son saw an opportunity to address another issue of the city’s chronic problem: floods.
For Bangkok, a city of 11 million people sitting in low-lying marsh, its water management has become an increasingly survival issue. As the capital faces more frequent and extreme rainfall and sea level rise due to climate change, experts warn that the entire city could be underwater in the next few decades.
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As the restrictions on traditional flood control systems like the LA River became apparent as they intensify drought and flooding, like Los Angeles, Chachanin felt that Bangkok’s own stormwater infrastructure had reached its turning point.
Aerial view shows the route through Benjakitti Park in Bangkok.
(Krit Phromsakla na sakolnakorn / Associated Press)
Decades of rapid urban development have enveloped the city with impermeable concrete surfaces that hinder natural water drainage. As a result, the network of cities in over 1,600 cities that were once used to transport goods and people but now primarily serve as stormwater channels, is regularly overwhelmed.
“The water in the canal is mixed with public sewage, so the water quality is really bad,” Chachanin said. “The park project was an opportunity to absorb and clean this water.”
To design the new space, a 102-acre expansion to the existing Benjakitti Park, Chachanin partnered with Beijing-based landscape architect Konjianyu, who has long advocated what is known as the “sponge city” model of urban water management.
The idea is, unlike “gray” infrastructures, which are designed to drain water as quickly as possible, cities like Bangkok can reduce the risk of flooding by simply absorbing more surfaces like sponges.
Their winning design, released to the public three years ago, takes place in just 18 months, reflecting the idea that such urban water management systems can also provide valuable aesthetic and recreational benefits to the community.
Today, former Brownfield is a popular bird watching spot. Alongside the badminton and pickleball courts are forested passages along a warehouse of recycled cigarettes, during which they catch and clean water.
People take a break at Benjakitti Park in Bangkok.
(Sakchai Lalit/Applications)
A long system of wetlands, including aquatic plant bushes fed to nearby canals, removes contaminants from the water as they wind around the park’s perimeter, releasing what is left of large ponds dotted with small islands.
It can capture 23 million gallons of rainwater in Bangkok’s wettest month, alongside the park’s porous landscape and additional retention ponds. Water entering the permeable Earth instead of being blocked by concrete helps replenish natural underground reservoirs that benefit humans and the environment.
“It was really raining last year,” Chachanin said. “The park was flooded, but in the end it was absorbed much faster.”
The long system of wetlands in the park contains aquatic plant bushes that remove contaminants from the water.
(Sakchai Lalit/Applications)
She was pointing to the pond. The pond, despite only a few steps away, no longer had the foul smell or oily luster of the canal. The dragon squealed overhead – she pointed out that the water was clean.
Chachanin admitted that even one park alone cannot fix the water problems in Bangkok. But its modest success may at least encourage cities to rethink their relationship with water.
“People want a fast answer,” Chachanin said. “But hiding the problem is not the solution. You can’t lift up your house or flush the water out on a stilt. In the end, everything will come back.”
The idea that the city needs to adapt, not flooding, was a lifelong indigenous native of Condianyu, and his work with the sponge city that earned the prestigious Overlander International Landscape Architecture Award for comparison with Frederick Lawolmstead, a designer at Central Park in New York.
Yu traces its beginnings to the near-death experience he had as a child, growing up in rural China.
At the time, just ten years old, Yu played on the banks of the village river. This was huge than usual due to the high amount of monsoon rain.
It was the re-burst of the river re-re and willows that saved him, which slowed the water and gave him the opportunity to pull himself out.
Kongjian Yu’s work earned a comparison with Frederick Law Olmsted, a designer from Central Park in New York.
(Jil Sabrier/Era)
“My experiences in these villages, my experiences in rivers and streams taught me how to live with nature,” he said.
YU then earned a degree in Landscape Ecology from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, spending two years in Los Angeles with the SWA group before returning to China in 1997.
Disappointed by the rapidly modernised country leading concrete dams and waterways into the city, Yu began writing to the local mayor, warning of the risks of this approach and instead advocated for “regeneration of natural water systems.”
“Sponge cities follow three principles: maintain, slow and accept water,” Yu said. “That means removing all unnecessary concrete and pavement.”
At first, his ideas found little sympathetic ears. Some have sent letters to the Communist Party, claiming he was “a spy from the US sent to destroy China’s infrastructure.”
However, things changed in 2012. A severe flood in Beijing destroyed thousands of homes and killed 79 people.
The man uses a sign to signal a driver passing through a flooded street after heavy rains in Beijing. The floods have prompted China’s leader Xi Jinping to adopt Yu’s “sponge city” philosophy as a national agenda.
(AP News)
“When all sorts of paradigms change, there needs to be a crisis,” Yu said. “People are dying on the streets, and that was the key point.”
The floods prompted Chinese leader Xi Jinping in 2015 to adopt Yu’s Sponge City philosophy as a national agenda. Since then, the government has pledged more than $28 billion to fund more than 33,000 Sponge City projects in 90 cities, aiming to capture and reuse at least 70% of the rainwater by 2030.
By 2020, over 40,000 Sponge City projects have been completed nationwide, with roughly 3.8 trillion gallons of rainwater being recycled that year, according to the Ministry of Housing, Urban and Rural Development. The ministry said the amount equals about a fifth of China’s annual urban water supply.
Like Bangkok’s Benjakitti Park, many are wetlands designed to deal with urban floods. Others act as natural buffers against saltwater invasion and coastal erosion from seawater regions, like mangrove forests built on the banks of rivers in a tropical southern city on Hainan Island.
“The idea is not to get too close to the water to create a buffer zone,” Yu said. “Instead of building a wall, we’ll allow you to fill it with water.”
The woman stops near ponds and water plants in the “Fish Tail” Sponge Park, built at the former coal dump site in Nanchan, southwestern Jiangxi province in northern China.
(Ng Han Guan/AP)
According to Yu, this approach has made the Sponge City project complex, low cost and can be deployed almost anywhere compared to traditional solutions.
For example, Benjakitti Park was built by the Thai army, which cost $20 million and had little experience in environmental landscaping. Yu scrawled designs on napkins during his flight to Bangkok to meet Chachanin, keeping it simple enough to be at least theoretically achieved with one excavator.
Still, the program is not without its challenges.
Wetlands are often breeding grounds for mosquitoes. And much needed investments from the private sector are slower to realise, as local governments are expected to foot up to 80% of the project’s costs. Meanwhile, critics point out that some of China’s most touted sponge cities, like Zhengzhou in Henan Province, are still experiencing catastrophic floods.
“If the city can’t handle the flood, that means it’s not spongy enough,” Yu said.
“In the end, it’s not about removing all the concrete, it’s about combining grey and green. It’s upgrading the current model.”
Since 2006, Singapore has transformed its own waterways and reservoirs into a public park. It absorbs storm water, an initiative known as the Active, Beautiful, Clean Waters (ABC Waters) program.
In the Netherlands, a flood-prone country known for maintaining water-protecting techniques with land regeneration and other technologies, the government has experimented with a soft approach that strategically allows rivers in certain areas to spare other areas.
There is also growing awareness in LA that the area’s city’s impermeable flood control systems are lagging behind due to change, throwing out billions of gallons of stormwater that could otherwise be stored and reused.
According to a report from the Pacific Institute last year, the LA region ranks number one in the West for potential west runoff, as it allows for rainwater to be acquired in areas including Long Beach and Anaheim, including Lone Beach and Anaheim.
Pedestrians use the Los Angeles River Bikeway.
(Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times)
Among the efforts to make cities into sponge and therefore not rely on imported water is the safe clean water programme approved by LA County voters in 2018 as a Voting Measurement W.
The program collects property taxes on impermeable surfaces and provides approximately $300 million a year in grants for municipal stormwater acquisition projects.
The purpose of this program is to win 98 billion gallons a year. Experts say such projects can simultaneously prevent flood prevention in the Upper LA basin.
However, authorities estimate that it will take decades to achieve this goal, and progress is slowing.
Just 30 acres of green space have been added to the county over the first three years, according to a report from the Los Angeles Waterkeeper, a local watchdog.
And the program has recently been allocated around $1 billion to 130 projects, with Bruce Reznik, executive director of the group and member of the Measurement W Scoring Committee, noting that there are many challenges that do not exist in China’s intensive model.
Among them are slow, costly bureaucratic processes involved in the program, including lack of federal support and cleaning contaminated project sites and obtaining permits. He estimated that the project the county would cost around $50 billion.
“In terms of cost, that’s a question that many of us are asking. Why are these projects so expensive?” Reznik said. “I think there’s inflation, but the project I thought was going to be $10 million is $25 million. I think we’ll have to find a way to streamline something like this.”
Special correspondents Chalida Ekvitthayavechnukul and Xin-Yun Wu contributed to reporting from Bangkok and Taipei, respectively.
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