Thai landscape architect Kotchakorn Voraakhom is building climate-resilient landscapes in Thailand by turning flood-prone urban spaces into living, water-managing ecosystems that serve entire communities.
Bangkok is in trouble. The city sinks about two centimeters every year while sea levels steadily rise around it. Floods already affect up to one million people in Thailand every year, and the economic toll is staggering. According to the World Bank, the 2011 floods were Thailand’s worst floods in over 50 years, and caused US$46.5 billion in damages, equal to 12.6% of the country’s gross domestic product. Annual flood losses across the country now average around US$2.6 billion, with urban areas like Bangkok bearing the heaviest burden. Every monsoon season arrives with higher stakes.
Into this crisis steps Kotchakorn Voraakhom, a landscape architect who has spent more than a decade proving that plants, soil, and smart design can do what concrete cannot. The cost of inaction is not abstract. For the average Bangkok household caught in a major flood, losses can equal roughly half of a year’s total spending. Climate-resilient landscapes in Thailand are not a luxury. They are an economic necessity.
Voraakhom founded Landprocess in 2012 with a clear goal: to use nature to solve urban climate problems. Her studio now employs 15 designers tackling some of the most difficult environmental challenges facing Southeast Asian cities. The work begins with a simple yet radical idea that living systems are infrastructure, not decoration.
Her first major test of that idea was Chulalongkorn Centenary Park, completed in 2017. Bangkok’s first green infrastructure project of its kind, the park sits on what was once an underused plot near one of Thailand’s most prominent universities. Today, it holds wetlands, water-absorbing lawns, and native plantings that together collect, filter, and reuse roughly one million gallons of rainwater. It also gives Bangkok residents a rare patch of accessible green space in a dense urban core.
Two years later, Voraakhom completed the Thammasat Urban Farm, a 22,000-square-meter terraced rooftop at Thammasat University. It is Asia’s largest organic rooftop farm. Designed to echo the look and logic of traditional Thai rice paddies, the sloped green roof uses cascading native plants and vegetables to slow stormwater runoff 20 times more effectively than a hard concrete surface. It also produces roughly 20 tons of organic food each year, making it both an environmental and food security asset.
What makes climate-resilient landscapes in Thailand significant is not just their scale. It is the way they reframe what a public space can do. A park is not just somewhere to walk. A rooftop is not just a surface to waterproof. In Voraakhom’s work, both become active participants in managing a city’s relationship with water, heat, and food. They are exactly the kind of climate-resilient landscapes that Thailand’s cities need to survive the decades ahead.
Her current project raises the ambition further. Landprocess is redesigning the Government Complex in Bangkok’s Lak Si district, a 178-acre site that serves around 40,000 workers each day. The redesign adds green corridors of native species, rooftop gardens, and plant-based cooling systems that naturally reduce building temperatures. The project also asks a harder question: can a government building be more than a symbol of authority? Can it model the kind of open, sustainable city that Bangkok needs to become?
Voraakhom does not work alone, and she is deliberate about that. In 2017, she launched the Porous City Network, a social enterprise that brings together landscape architects, urban planners, community groups, and youth organizations to advance plant-based climate solutions. The network converts concrete-heavy spaces into permeable green areas, including urban farms, rain gardens, green roofs, and canals filled with water-absorbing plants. Porous City also trains government teams across Southeast Asia in flood-resilient planting and water management techniques developed through Landprocess projects.
The network’s name reflects a key principle in her work. A “porous” city is one that lets water in rather than forcing it away. Permeable surfaces, planted areas, and restored waterways allow rain to be absorbed, filtered, and stored rather than rushing off into overloaded drainage systems. In a city like Bangkok, where flooding is not a possibility but a regular occurrence, this shift in how urban space is designed can mean the difference between manageable and catastrophic flooding.
Voraakhom has received recognition from the United Nations, BBC, and Bloomberg for this work. But the awards are not the measure she cares about most. The question she keeps returning to is whether Bangkok will still be livable in 50 years. The answer, she believes, depends on whether designers, policymakers, engineers, and communities can work together in ways they typically do not.
Climate-resilient landscapes in Thailand are not a distant aspiration. They exist now in working parks, rooftop farms, and canal restorations, already absorbing water, growing food, and cooling streets. With flood losses costing the country billions every year, the economic case for this kind of design is as strong as the environmental one. What Voraakhom is demonstrating, project by project, is that cities do not have to choose between beauty and function, or between growth and survival. The tools are available. The question is whether cities are willing to use them.
