On Monday, 2 March 2026, after sitting in on a transportation justice class in Cambridge, one that treats Rawls and Sen as more than decorative citations, we walked into Gund Hall and found a striking exhibition: Designers of Mountain and Water: Alternative Landscapes for a Changing Climate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

The show is ambitious and timely. But one Bangkok project, the Chulalongkorn University Centenary Park, presented as a global model of climate “resilience” made us uneasy. This is not because climate adaptation is wrong, but because the story that travels internationally often leaves out the lived experience of people on the ground: displacement, uneven benefits, and performance that deserves scrutiny rather than applause.

Poster for the exhibition at GSD Harvard “DESIGNERS OF MOUNTAIN AND WATER Alternative Landscapes for a Changing Climate”

A climate icon - 100 meters from a threatened shrine

The Chulalongkorn University Centenary Park, internationally praised as a flagship of climate adaptation in a densely populated Southeast Asian city, sits about 100 meters away sits the Chao Mae Thapthim (Mazu) Shrine, a sacred space and living community site still under pressure from redevelopment. 

The shrine is more than 150 years old. Today, it has become newly visible and widely visited, especially among young people in Bangkok. It is not a museum object. It is alive: a place of belief, care, memory, and everyday urban belonging.

We write from direct involvement. Netiwit is the producer of The Last Breath of Sam Yan, a documentary following students and residents struggling to preserve what remains of the Sam Yan neighborhood amid Chulalongkorn University’s long redevelopment arc. Phumiyot has organized civic programming as a student leader. Both of us have watched how “development” in this district has not only changed buildings, it has changed who gets to remain.

Sam Yan sits near Bangkok’s historic core and long-established migration and trade corridors. For generations, it has been a dense urban fabric of small shops, residences, informal economies, and relationships. Redevelopment did not arrive on empty land. It arrived on top of lives.

A photo taken by us portraying CU centenary park as a location in exhibition at GSD Harvard “DESIGNERS OF MOUNTAIN AND WATER Alternative Landscapes for a Changing Climate”

Resilience can’t be a slogan

The Centenary Park is often boldly described as a benchmark for flood management and stormwater resilience. These claims travel well. They are easy to celebrate in global design culture because they promise a hopeful solution: landscape as infrastructure.

But resilience is not a press release. It is what happens during actual storms.

We have repeatedly observed streams of water spilling out from the park area during heavy rain. This does not automatically “prove failure.” Storm intensity varies. Drainage networks constrain outcomes. Maintenance and operation determine performance. But it raises a basic, fair question that exhibitions rarely ask: Does the project hold runoff as effectively as its global narrative suggests, consistently, under real conditions, over time?

If a project is presented as a model, then it should also be discussable as a model, with room for evaluation, limits, and critique. We do not need to be engineers to ask common-sense questions: Is detention capacity smaller than people assume? Are inlets or outlets constrained? Does performance depend on pumps or operations that become fragile at peak moments? Some people in Bangkok also ask whether the substantial concrete structure beneath the park, such as the underground built volume, limits how much the ground can truly absorb. We do not present that as a confirmed diagnosis. We present it as exactly the kind of question that responsible climate storytelling should invite, not avoid.

There is also an operational sustainability question that does not require technical expertise to understand. In tropical cities, a project can look “green” while operating like a machine: constant irrigation, pumping, heavy maintenance, and large air-conditioned interior spaces used for events. If a landscape requires significant energy just to keep plants alive and spaces comfortable, how sustainable is it in practice?

Page 57 from Catalogue of the exhibition “DESIGNERS OF MOUNTAIN AND WATER Alternative landscapes for a Changing Climate

The exhibition catalogue’s “street reshaping” story—and the people it erased

The exhibition catalogue praises Centenary Park not only for stormwater but for urban improvements, including the claim that the design “reshapes adjacent streets by reducing traffic lanes and expanding pedestrian walkways and bike paths.” On paper, this sounds unequivocally good: walkability, cycling, people-first streets.

But in the neighborhood, that “pedestrian upgrade” has a hidden underside that glossy narratives rarely acknowledge.

During construction, dust and pollution were intense. Street closures cut off foot traffic. Small shops around the site, many renting from the university itself lost customers for long stretches. Some did not survive.

Netiwit still remembers this vividly from the period when he served as President of the Student Council and organized a public hearing for affected residents and shopkeepers. One elderly woman told us she had saved money her whole life to open a small shop there. Then the closures came; visitors disappeared; sales collapsed while rent obligations remained. Her savings were gone.

That is the behind story of the “walkability” celebrated in institutional language. What is framed as a design virtue can function, on the ground, as a redevelopment tool: it accelerates economic loss and displacement while producing a streetscape that looks progressive to outsiders.

Streetview from Google Maps Portraiting Commerce life disrupted by road construction

When a “public” park is not a public commons

The Centenary Park is often described as public space, and today it hosts many events including commercial and state programming, bringing revenue and prestige to the institution. Yet “public space” is not just about open gates. It is about whether a place functions as a civic commons, a space where ordinary people, including students and nearby communities, can assemble, learn, and discuss the future of their neighborhood.

Phumiyot previously served as President of Community Development in Chulalongkorn University’s Student Government, responsible for organizing student public events. He proposed to screen our documentary, The Last Breath of Sam Yan, at the park and to hold a seminar about Sam Yan’s redevelopment and the shrine case. These were not private provocations; they were student civic programs tied directly to the place.

The proposal was rejected by Property Management of Chulalongkorn University (PMCU), the park’s operator, and the university’s student affairs apparatus. He was warned that if he proceeded, the project could be canceled. Even for other approved activities, organizers faced uncertainty: venue availability was confirmed only one day before an event, turning “public space” into a conditional privilege managed at the discretion of a powerful landholder.

We do not recount this to center free speech as an abstract principle. We recount it to make a practical point: when a park is celebrated globally as a civic climate asset, but ordinary civic education about the neighborhood is treated as unacceptable, the park is functioning less as a public commons and more as a controlled institutional asset.

Poster for the documentary “The last breath of Samyan”which portrait the story of Mazu Shrine and the subject of a heated debate between Phumiyot and PMCU about screening this documentary in CU Centenary Park

Green space as a redevelopment instrument

There is another uncomfortable possibility Harvard audiences should at least consider: that “green” is not only about ecology it can also be about development capacity.

Friends who interned within the university’s property apparatus recount hearing a blunt internal logic: parks and green amenities help the institution meet planning ratios and strengthen the case for building more high-rises around them. We present this as what students report hearing, not as a formally verified policy statement but the logic is widely recognizable in real estate development globally: green space can be used to justify intensified construction.

If that is even partially true here, then the park is not just a climate intervention. It is also part of an urban strategy that reshapes land value and who can afford to stay.

Walkability that accelerates gentrification

Today the pedestrian environment around the park may indeed be more walkable. But it is also clear that “walkability” can accelerate gentrification, especially when it arrives alongside displacement, new condominiums, and rising rents.

In the years that followed, many long-standing shops around Sam Yan disappeared. In their place came a new commercial order: chic cafés, lifestyle restaurants, and curated spaces designed for higher-income consumers and visitors. This raises questions that are both social and environmental:

If the result is a neighborhood that forces people to travel farther for daily life, pushes out low-income residents, and replaces local economies with higher-cost consumption is that truly sustainable? If “walkability” is paired with displacement and higher living costs, who is the pedestrian city actually built for?

The conflict is not hypothetical

The story is not only about one park. According to its own Facebook page and PMCU materials, the park's designer LANDPROCESS will be responsible for designing the garden planned part of the Block 33 project situated on the site of the Mazu Shrine and the Sam Yan community, where there is an ongoing court case still being contested.

This matters because it complicates the “neutral climate designer” narrative. The same practice celebrated internationally for “resilience” is also present across the redevelopment pipeline that is actively transforming—and in key places, threatening—the living heritage and community spaces of Sam Yan.

When Western institutions elevate “resilience icons” without disclosing these entanglements, the exhibition risks becoming part of the legitimizing machinery: it exports credibility while omitting the conflicts and costs that define the landscape on the ground.

What Harvard should do differently

This is not a call to remove projects from the exhibition. Universities should show ambitious design work including contested work. But serious institutions must also show the politics and costs of what they platform, especially when the work is entangled with unequal land power.

If Harvard’s climate exhibition wants to be ethically credible, it should take three straightforward steps:

1. Add curatorial context (a wall label and an online addendum) acknowledging that nature-based solutions can coincide with displacement, contested land outcomes, and uneven benefits, and that resilience claims should be assessed through real-world performance and maintenance, not narratives alone.
2. Provide disclosure for contested cases, especially when showcased work is linked, by the landholder’s own project materials, to live redevelopment conflicts involving sacred and community sites.
3. Host a public forum on “climate adaptation + displacement + who benefits?” inviting not only celebrated designers and scholars but also community-linked voices and critics, so the exhibition becomes education, not just celebration.

In the climate era, the key question is not whether resilience looks beautiful. It is whether resilience is real, and whether it is just.

Because a climate park celebrated globally, built within a redevelopment ecosystem that displaces communities, while a shrine with more than 150 years of history remains threatened just 100 meters away, is not simply a design success story.

It is a warning: green futures can be built on social erasure unless we demand better.