On 27th of March, the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of the Cambodian Mekong University is organizing a seminar about research in urbanism. Mr Phanin Cheam, urban design studio lecturer, has invited two guests from LATITUDE to show and discuss some of the results of the research Floating Urbanism.

The study started from the observation that the interest in building on water is increasing worldwide, especially because of climate change effects. Nevertheless research at the urban design level is very limited. For example, looking at The Netherlands, significant technical achievements can be acknowledged for floating housing solutions. However, the approach remains often oriented towards ‘living on water’ rather than ‘living with water’ and water is treated merely as a passive landscape component. Our study proposes to look at very different and far contexts where ‘living with water’ is the result of a long-time co-habitat such as the Amazon River Basin and the Lower Mekong River basin (Cambodia and Vietnam) to gain insight by comparing settlements that present complex and rich morphologies.

A consistent part of the research project focuses on settlements along the Amazon River. After the fieldwork, investigating districts on stilts, floating or regularly flooded, the transformation of the physical interface between river and built spaces became one of the core themes. But there are emergent issues that are becoming relevant due to the effects of climate change, such as the increased vulnerability towards flooding of low built areas, the high pressure on these lands for development due to urban expansion, migration and resettlement a large number of inhabitants.

LATITUDE is currently conducting a 3 weeks fieldwork in various water-based settlements of the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia. The floating villages and the ones on stilts are one of the most interesting case studies in the Lower Mekong River basin.

The aim of the seminar at the Cambodian Mekong University is to invite students and professionals in urban planning to touch upon the field of research without losing the field of design (‘research-by-design’).