
Bangkok: The Drowning City
Bangkok sits on a river delta that is sinking roughly four centimeters a year while the Gulf of Thailand rises to meet it. This episode of the Extreme Cities series looks at how the Thai capital, home to millions built on soft clay and crisscrossed by canals, copes with deadly typhoons, heavier monsoon rainfall, and encroaching seawater. Engineers, urban planners, and residents describe the flood barriers, pumping stations, and drainage schemes the city has built to hold back water that keeps finding new ways in, and the film shows streets and neighborhoods where flooding is already routine rather than hypothetical. It sets Bangkok's struggle against the wider pattern of coastal megacities built on unstable ground, asking what happens when subsidence and sea-level rise arrive at the same address. The tone stays practical rather than alarmist, following the people whose job is to keep the city livable rather than dwelling on worst-case predictions, and closing on the open question of how long current defenses can keep pace with the water.