Thailand: This massive new rooftop farm helps keep Bangkok from flooding

The 236,000-square-foot roof can store as much as 3 million gallons of water. It’s the largest rooftop farm in Asia.

By Adele Peters
Fast Company
Jan 13, 2020

Excerpt:

A massive new green roof is designed to help capture rainwater in one neighborhood, on the Bangkok campus of Thammasat University. Designed to mimic traditional rice terraces, one part of the roof serves as an urban farm, now the largest farm of its kind in Asia; the cascading terraces use rain to grow rice along with native plants, and then store as much as 3 million gallons of water in detention ponds to be used later for irrigation in a drought.

Another part of the 236,000-square-foot roof is covered in solar panels to help power the building below, and the roof will also be used as an outdoor classroom for students at the university. Like other green roofs, the design also helps the building below it stay cool in heatwaves and reduces the urban “heat island” effect, the way that concrete surfaces and typical roofs reflect sunlight to make cities even hotter on hot days.

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