From London to Tokyo, climate change is causing cities to sink – and our modern concrete infrastructure is making us even more vulnerable to severe flooding, says landscape architect and TED Fellow Kotchakorn Voraakhom. But what if we could design cities to help fight floods? In this inspiring talk, Voraakhom shows how she developed a massive park in Bangkok that can hold a million gallons of rainwater, calling for more climate change solutions that connect cities back to nature.
A TED Talk by Kotchakorn Voraakhom Founder and CEO of the Porous City Network, Thailand. Porous City is a Landscape architecture and urban design non-profit organisation that tackles climate change.
Porous City won the design competition for Chulalongkorn Centenary Park. This was the big, bold mission of the first university in Thailand for celebrating its hundredth anniversary by giving this piece of land as a public park to Bangkok. Having a park sounds very normal to many other cities, but not in Bangkok, which has one of the lowest public ratio of green spaces per capita among megacities in Asia. The Chulalongkorn Centenary Park project became the first new public park in almost 30 years. The 11-acre park – a big green crack at the heart of Bangkok – opened in 2017.
