Yossapon Boonsom
SHMA
Co-Founder and Director
Landscape Architect
Inclusive River
Bangkok originated as a water based city on the Chaopraya Riverbank but nowadays, people progressively separate themselves from the unrelated environment. It is partly due to the shifting of people’s attitude after the flood catastrophe which hit Bangkok, in 2012. From then Bangkok became a solid city and people lost ownership and sense of belonging with the river. Moreover, as the city has been changing, there are city problems and future challenges.
Inclusive River is the territory which uses human-centred approach to understand human behaviours, needs, insights throughout the design process to improve the lives of people living the ongoing and future city challenges. This creative and interactive approach requires not only a collaborative platform to pull all the resources and tools from different stakeholders, shareholders, organizations and multidisciplinary to implement the territory, but also, it broadens perspectives to identify the appropriate strategies.
There are six projects that we applied such as; Lankila Pat 1 and 2, Co-create District, Co-create River, Bann Poon community, and FOR – river platform. These projects have shown the possibility of transforming city to be the inclusive territory to change the perception of the city which not only focuses on physical space, to create new values out of the existing assets, but also , create ‘Resilience landscape’ more effectively.
Resilience landscape, Human-centered approach, City Revitalization
Yossapon Boonsom is a Thai landscape architect and the director of Shma Company Limited. He received a degree in Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from Chulalongkorn University and continued his studies at a postgraduate level in Master of Arts in Urban Management & Architectural Design at the University of Wales (Domus Academy, Milan).
After completing his studies, he worked as a Landscape Architect in Singapore for 5 years before established Shma Company Limited along with two partners.
Shma Company Limited is a Landscape Architectural design and research practice which aims to transform the territory through landscape design with projects across Thailand and Asia pacific. Shma’s projects has been awarded and shortlisted World Architecture Festival (WAF 2012 – 2017)and International Federation of Landscape Architects Congress. Shma’s work has been selected to be exhibited in international Architectural festivals such as the 2012,2018 Venice Biennale and the 2013 Aedes Architecture Forum in Berlin At a larger scale of the public agenda, Yossapon Boonsom is the co-founder of Friends of the River (FOR) which is established as a non-profit organization, aiming to be a creative force which stimulates social awareness and participation to creatively develop Chaophraya River with the principle that encourage sustainable relation between city, community and the river through public participation process.
