Exploring urban verticality during the 2011 flood in Bangkok, Thailand

Abstract

Geographers have a long-established research interest in the ways infrastructures shape urban flood vulnerability and how urbanites cope with urban flooding. In this paper, I contribute to this literature by exploring the three-dimensional city during an urban flooding situation. Within a case study (based on interviews and ethnographic observations), I attend to ad hoc coping practices of a diverse city population during the 2011 flood in Bangkok. I foreground the vertical direction of these strategies and the affordances of the urban built environment and urban infrastructures that enabled such coping. The paper thus stages a conversation between established literature on urban flood vulnerability and coping with an emerging interest in vertical urbanism literature. Through this conversation between the two literatures, research on urban verticality is probed to consider verticality as a crucial dimension of urbanism during times of flood disasters.