Date: 2020 · Country: Thailand · Director: Nicolas Axelrod · Editor: Stephanie Chung / Bloomberg · Producer: Ryn Jirenuwat
Commissioned piece for Bloomberg on the work of Thai landscape architect - Kotchakorn Voraakhom.
After witnessing the 2011 floods in Thailand, Kotchakorn decided to dedicate her work to mitigating climate change and increase Bangkok's resilience to flooding. That same year she started LANDPROCESS, a landscape architecture and urban design firm created around the idea building carbon-sequestering landscapes.
She opened, in 2017, Bangkok's first park in 30 years - Chulalongkorn University Centenary Park, built as an example of what is possible when architecture, climate change, and visitors are all parts of the design. Built on an incline to drain water into underground cisterns, the park can hold some 3.8mill litres of water for later use. Bicycles are set up for visitors to help aerate the water and wetlands offer a habitat for nature in the city.
In 2019 Kotchakorn opened Asia's largest urban rooftop farm, 7,000sq meters of gardens built to mitigate flooding and off-set the impacts of climate change but importantly used as an area to grow food for Thammasat University's Rangsit campus.
Kotchakorn received her master's in landscape architecture from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, she has featured in TIME magazine's 2019 TIME 100 Next, she is a TED Fellow and Echoing Green Climate Fellow, and on the list of the BBC's 100 Women 2020. Her and her work have received numerous awards.