Outsmarting the storm: How other cities tame the flood

Every monsoon season Metro Manila rehearses the same grim tableau: traffic crawls through brown water, families stack furniture on second storey landings and city engineers scramble to restart stalled pumps. Even with a quarter trillion peso flood control budget, the country still shoulders about US $625 million in average annual losses—a figure the World Bank warns will climb as storms intensify and land subsides.

- ANNA MAE YU LAMENTILLO

That stubborn reality should prod decision makers to look beyond higher levees and deeper culverts and study how other cities have reframed flooding from an engineering failure to a design challenge. Singapore, Berlin and the Netherlands are three contrasting examples. Their contexts differ—tropical island, temperate capital, low lying delta—but each has embraced the insight that water must be given space to move, soak and linger rather than be hustled out to sea at the first drop.

Singapore began rethinking its concrete drains in 2006, when the national water agency launched the Active, Beautiful, Clean (ABC) Waters Program. At Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park, a straight flood canal was replaced by a meandering, bio engineered river that can safely inundate park lawns during cloudbursts and slip back within natural banks when the rain stops. The makeover increased conveyance capacity, cut downstream flood peaks and proved popular enough to spur similar retrofits island wide.