Modular Approach Creating Low-Maintenance Sponge City: Benjakitti Forest Park in Bangkok, Thailand

中国风景园林学会

AUTHOR: Kongjian YU, College of Architecture and Landscape, Peking University, China

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In the bustling heart of Bangkok, Thailand, the design team transformed a former tobacco factory into a vibrant new cultural landmark—Benjakitti Forest Park. The project faced a number of challenges including seasonal floods and droughts on the site, severe water pollution in the surroundings, poor accessibility, limited construction funds, and a compressed timeframe (only 18 months). The design has restored the site into an urban park with a resilient ecosystem that intercepts and reduces the destructive force of storm water, filters contaminated water, and provides much-needed wildlife habitat. Benjakitti Forest Park has not only become the largest public recreational venue for residents of downtown Bangkok and its environs, but also offers a low-maintenance, modular approach for worldwide urban public green space design practice.

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Despite having been built on an extremely compressed timeframe, the Benjakitti Forest Park project has proven its construction a great success with sound performance in delivering the expected regulation, provisioning, supporting, and cultural services. While much of Bangkok flooded in the summer of 2022, the park and its immediate vicinity did not; the water-quality remediating wetland is performing well and produces enough water to keep the wetland alive through the dry season. In addition, the park’s biodiversity has increased significantly: nearly 100 species of birds have been observed in the park since May 2022, and dozens of other wildlife species have taken up residence in the park. A symbiotic ecological interrelationship between fauna and flora is developing, and the “messiness” of the constructed wetland is creating a new, highly dynamic and diverse aesthetic that sharply contrasts with the surrounding urban landscape. The most striking achievement is that this naturally regenerative system is now the largest park in densely populated central Bangkok and attracts tens of thousands of visitors daily, who use it for a wide variety of activities, including jogging and cycling, family gatherings, school commencements, picnics, dates, art experiences, and wedding photographs. It has been celebrated extensively on social media as a new symbol of Thailand’s capital city. With an extremely low budget and very limited construction timeframe, this project creates a modular landscape that allows nature to do its work, restoring the self-succession of vegetation communities through the use of small-sized seedlings and seed sowing, providing a park that develops with the citizens’ public life of Bangkok. As an oversea project that practices “sponge city” theory and techniques, the construction of the park has innovatively explored a nature-based and nature-driven solution to provide ecosystem services at a lower cost, improving the quality of life to local residents. Its successful experience in low-cost improvement of hardened clay soil, reuse of construction waste, and revitalization of industrial heritage can offer a reference for sustainable park design and construction in Bangkok and other similar cases around the world.

About the Researcher

Kongjian YU, College of Architecture and Landscape, Peking University, China

About the Article

https://journal.hep.com.cn/laf/EN/article/downloadArticleFile.do?attachType=PDF&id=35021

About the Journal

https://journal.hep.com.cn/laf/EN/2096-336X/home.shtml