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The Politics of Flooding in Bangkok

The Asian Institute presents

The Politics of Flooding in Bangkok

This presentation challenges the dominant approach to examining flooding through a case study of the 2011 Bangkok, Thailand floods, the fourth-costliest disaster ever globally and which led to over 800 deaths. The alternative approach developed here views floods not only as outcomes of biophysical processes but also as products of political decisions, economic interests, and power relations. This approach illustrates how vulnerability to floods in Bangkok, which is a combination of exposure to floods and capacity to cope with them, and the extent to which floods are a disaster, are uneven at multiple scales across geographical and social landscapes. While the Chao Phraya River Basin received heavy rainfall in 2011, a number of human activities interacted with that rainfall to create the floods. This talk discusses how state actors together with unequal socioeconomic processes caused vulnerability to be unevenly distributed before, during, and after the event.

Danny Marks, UCRSEA Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Asian Institute, University of Toronto

The event is presented as part of the Urban Climate Resilience Partnership in Southeast Asia (UCRSEA) at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Lunch will be provided.

This event is free and open to all. Registration is required. For further information, please contact Rachel Ostep at 416-946-8996