Despite its potential flaws, the 2nd Asia-Pacific Water Summit is at least tackling head-on the flooding threat faced by cities like Bangkok. But even 350 billion baht worth of fixes won't change the fact that Bangkok will some day experience a repeat of 2011's disaster, and the city needs to be prepared.
Joining hands in times of crisis, officials and volunteers work together to fix a broken flood embankment in Bangkok’s Sam Sen area. CHANAT KATANYU
Not just with catchments, basins and seawalls, but with a citizenry that's empowered and equipped to react. Too many cities make the mistake of focusing only on costly infrastructural solutions. But a city's best resource is its people, and during times of crisis, the informal social networks among those people are among the best defences Bangkok has.
To Thais this may sound obvious, thanks to a culture that values cooperation and a populace that recognises the limits of the authority's capabilities. But I live in a city that's just beginning to learn this lesson. In New York, when Hurricane Sandy left entire neighbourhoods isolated, dark and underwater last year, the municipal government had big fish to fry and couldn't rescue each and every block. While the city was restoring power and transit service to half of Manhattan, many other communities were left on their own, forced to create solutions on the fly.
Some of these solutions were extraordinary. The hard-hit Brooklyn neighbourhood of Red Hook, a couple of kilometres from my home, was all but detached from city services during and after the storm. The community rallied, cobbling together a highly effective response built on informal social networks of neighbours and friends. Food and blanket distribution systems sprang up. Cell-phone charging stations appeared in buildings that still had electricity. In 2011, communities in and around Bangkok responded in similar fashion.
But these informal responses to disasters aren't sufficiently supported by city governments. In places like Bangkok, people feel they can't rely on the government for help during emergencies. In New York it's just the opposite _ the government often doesn't trust the people to help themselves. In both cases, this lack of trust and coordination is a problem. Both cities need a disaster-response plan that equips, empowers and supports residents' efforts during citywide crises.
That means not only giving communities the tools they need to rescue themselves, but also granting them the ability to plug in to the local authority's official efforts. Some cities are catching on to this. The emergency management office at the New Zealand capital of Wellington has "community resilience teams" that train residents in towns and villages how to survive during emergencies by managing resources such as food and fuel, setting up their own civil defence centres, and coordinating with the local government agencies that are responding to the crisis.
Likewise, San Francisco's Empowered Communities Programme teaches residents how to survive during catastrophes, and even has an online game called "Resilientville" that allows neighbourhoods to test and enhance their local response efforts. These governments understand that while people can work with their friends and neighbours when catastrophe strikes, local work must be paired with a supportive government response that accommodates it.
This kind of collaboration between government and citizens can enhance the disaster reaction capabilities of both, and it doesn't cost 350 billion baht to make it happen. It's a low-cost, low-tech fix that's only going to become more important as storms strengthen and sea levels rise.
Bangkok is a place where citizens are used to creating their own survival strategies _ a place where, when you call an ambulance, it may be your neighbour who shows up with the rest of the volunteer corps. The water summit in Chiang Mai is a good start to solving Bangkok's flooding issues, but the city needs to go further, and create a disaster plan that will support its community-led responses during the next flood.
Will Doig is the International Editor for NextCity.org, a partner in the Rockefeller Foundation's Informal City Dialogues, a year-long project to make cities more resilient. Website: Nextcity.org/informalcity