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Cracking the Concrete City with Green: Landscape Solutions for the Sinking City

Monday, May 13, 2019 at 5:00pm to 7:00pm

Lawrence Hall, Room 206
1190 Franklin Boulevard, Eugene, OR

2019 Fuller Lecture Presented by Kotchakorn Voraakhom:

With today’s constantly fluctuating climates cause rising sea levels, storm surges, and unexpected heavy rainfall,-low-lying cities across the globe are bracing for similar disasters: urban flooding. As sea levels rise and concrete infrastructure multiplies, Bangkok is sinking 2 centimeters every year.

But for the first time in 30 years of rapid urban development, an invaluable property at the heart of the city wasn’t turned into another block for commercial use, but instead, a public park for people. Opened in 2017, Chulalongkorn Centenary Park is the first critical piece of green infrastructure in Bangkok to mitigate detrimental ecological issues and disaster risk reduction. Unlike other public parks around the city, this one is the first in Thailand to demonstrate how a park can help reduce urban flood risks and help city confronts climate change, all while offering city dwellers a place to reconnect with nature. Designed with various ecological design components, the park reminds the city of ways to live with water, rather than fear it.

Kotchakorn Voraakhom is a landscape architect who works on building productive green public space that tackles climate change in sinking cities.

Kotchakorn never thought her childhood playtime favorites--boat paddling with friends in the floodwaters in front of her house--would later become a catastrophic disaster: a sinking city. On a mission to save her hometown from climate change, Voraakhom has founded landscape architecture design firm Landprocess and Porous City Network, a social enterprise working to solve urban environmental problems and increase urban resilience across Southeast Asia by aiding, engaging and educating climate-vulnerable communities about productive landscape design.

Building a park may sound easy, but not in Bangkok, where Voraakhom and her team has turned an invaluable commercial property in the heart of the city, into a flood-proof, water-retention public green space, the Chulalongkorn Centenary Park. Alongside, she is also a design consultant for a major redevelopment project for Bangkok’s 250th anniversary. Voraakhom is a TED Fellow, Echoing Green Fellow, Atlantic Fellow, and Asia Foundation Development Fellow. She received her master's in landscape architecture from Harvard University.