How to Adapt to Climate Change
Lessons from Bangkok presented at the Harvard GSD
By Jonathan Shaw, Harvard Magazine
Climate change, long a divisive political issue, has united humanity in at least one respect: like it or not, everyone will have to adapt to higher temperatures, more powerful storms, and record-breaking rainfall. On January 31, globally acclaimed landscape architect Kotchakorn Voraakhom, M.L.A. ’06, spoke about her climate-resilient designs for urban parks, campuses, rooftops, and buildings in her native Thailand, where “living with water,” as professor of landscape architecture and associate dean of academic affairs Niall Kirkwood put it in his introduction, “is the vernacular.”
Residents of Bangkok, dubbed by Western explorers “the Venice of the East” as early as the 1540s, “originally had homes on stilts,” said Kirkwood, “and the floating food markets that fed the population persist today. Communities were used to living on water, and flooding and inundation meant defense from neighboring countries, and food—particularly an abundance of fresh fish, and productive rice fields. Sediment was part of seasonal change, flooding was transformational and vital.” The city lies in a river delta, and as Kirkwood emphasized, “The Chao Phraya river was, and is, the lifeblood of Bangkok.”
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