Rights to cope. A study of urban land tenure and flood adaptive capacity in Bangkok Metropolitan

Rights to Cope: A study of urban land tenure and flood coping capacity and Bangkok City Yanin Chivakidakarn Spatial Planning and Urban Development Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano, Italy International Disaster Risk Management literatures have asserted that land tenure security promotes adaptive capacity to natural disaster. Insecurity of land tenure is viewed as vulnerability, and largely inferring to the marginalized city dwellers whose livelihood hardly settled on owned land but leased or intruded. Therefore, land tenure improvement programs in urban areas are aiming to increase tenure security, which is incremental in spite of imminent natural disaster threats. However, very few land tenure scholars have made extensive studies mentioning natural disasters, especially flooding, and vise versa for DRM scholars about land tenure in urban context. Using Bangkok as the case of observation, the study is thus attempting to bridge the relationship between types of land tenure and flood adaptive capacity. Conceptual framework is constructed from applied economics, legal, and behavioral science theories related to decision-making upon investment in assets and the likes. Empirical evidence is derived from focused group interviews, questionnaires and community laboratory to assess (1) ‘livelihood asset,’ (2) flood compensation entitlement, (3) catastrophe insurance coverage, and (4) ‘perceived flood adaptive capacity’ as elements of total flood adaptive capacity among different levels of legitimate rights, different level of security in land tenure. The case of Bangkok has shown that the level of land tenure security through types of land tenure does not significantly affect livelihood assets of slum communities as the core adaptive capacity to flooding, yet greatly influence their access to financial aid for home recovery by means of the government’s flood compensation and catastrophe micro insurance coverage. As per perceived flood adaptive capacity, different types of land tenure also showed different level of perceived capacity in accordance with legitimate level of rights in the tenures. However, at community level, the assessment has yield no perceived capacity difference among communities of different land tenure security when it comes to implementing flood prevention measures. To explain the findings, the thesis discusses the significant role of ‘duality’ in land tenure, besides level of rights and tenure security theories, that community choose different set of tenure security existing in own community to perform flood adaptation. Finally, the thesis invites urban planners to pay attention to the change of pattern of land tenure as the change of characteristic of flood capacity, whist looking at spatial trend of urban settlement in the midst of future flood risk to the cities.