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Living with Water: Coping and Adapting in Flood-prone Areas in Bangkok–Nonthaburi Communities Along Khlong Mahasawat

Published in Inclusive and Integrated Disaster Risk ReductionSpringer, 2025 · ISBN 978-3-031-81071-8

Bangkok's waterfront communities have long defined their way of life through the canals — yet rapid urbanization has steadily severed that relationship, leaving residents more exposed and less resilient with each passing flood season. This study examines housing adaptation strategies along a 5.47-kilometer stretch of Khlong Mahasawat, the canal forming the boundary between Bangkok and Nonthaburi, comparing private dwellings built before and after the catastrophic Great Flood of 2011. Field observations of 32 housing units across three typologies — Bangkok-side residences protected by the Mahasawat flood wall, Nonthaburi-side vernacular stilt houses, and planned housing estates — reveal fundamentally different relationships with water. Findings show that the two-story stilt house with concrete terraces demonstrates the highest adaptive capacity, allowing floodwater to pass beneath while maintaining habitable space above, without displacing risk onto neighboring areas. Housing estates, while internally efficient through land-raising and pump systems, effectively disconnect residents from water culture and transfer flood burden to surrounding communities. The study argues that local vernacular wisdom embedded in stilt-house typologies offers a viable and contextually sensitive model for flood coexistence — one that planners and policymakers should integrate into waterfront housing guidelines as Bangkok's peri-urban edge continues to expand under an increasingly volatile climate.

living with floods, flood-proof home, Bangkok waterfront living, traditional Thai house, Thai stilt house, urban resilience, climate-adaptive design, water culture Bangkok, canal community Thailand

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Assemblage Theory
The six key principles of Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic thought

Connection: every point can and must connect to every other.
Heterogeneity: connected elements need not be of the same nature or order
Multiplicity: the rhizome has no subject or object, only dimensions and directions.
Asignifying Rupture: the network can be broken at any point yet will continue to grow along its own or new lines.
Cartography: the rhizome spreads laterally and horizontally, always in the middle, with no fixed origin or end.
Decalcomania: the rhizome can be mapped, traced, and reproduced in multiple forms without returning to the same point.

(Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, 1980)

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