Re-imagining the slum of Khlong Toei

Abstract

An architectural research project explores how resilient water structures such as housing can provide long-term habitation for the slums threatened by flooding and rising sea levels. The test case for this project is Khlong Toei slum, Bangkok.

RESEARCH QUESTION How can architecture support an alternative sustainable community development in response to flooding and related sanitation issues in the slums of Bangkok?

ABSTRACT Urban flooding has been an unwarranted issue that the world is currently facing in different cities across the globe, such as Mumbai and Jakarta. Today, it is massively affecting how people occupy urban areas in the affected cities. Bangkok is a well-known vast metropolis in Southeast Asia, Thailand, experiencing annual monsoon floods, threatening the capital’s future existence. Research suggests that the city will be completely underwater within the next decade. Bangkok is the habitat of over 10 million people, meaning it will have to address and solve the severe annual flooding concerns soon before it gets worse, damaging the lives of the Thais.

The floods create penurious living environments for millions of urban citizens in Bangkok. However, it is not the upper or middle-class citizens that are mostly affected; it is the lower-class Thais, the people living at the bottom, those living in poverty and low-income communities. These people live near bodies of water, marshy fields, and low-lying regions that are infected with diseases and are unsafe and vulnerable to floods. In addition, the result of the annual floods in Bangkok desolates the mainland and potentially diminishes jobs, especially for the Thais in poverty, who are trying to make a living day by day and already earning little to no income.

Hence, through the analysis of low-income housing, flood resilient and Thai traditional architecture, Thai culture and traditions, and their powerful beliefs in animism and guardian spirits; Re-imagining the Slum of Khlong Toei aspires to redevelop and design a sustainable and vernacular community of houses and other essential amenities that are slum dwellerfocused and resilient to seasonal flooding in the slum of Khlong Toei, Bangkok.

NOTE: Cited supervisors vary. On title page "David Chaplin, Magdalena Garbarczyk, and Lucia Melchiors". On declaration form "Lucia Melchiors and Graeme McConchie". Links are for the latter.