Over the past 35 years, Mongolia has undergone two major structural shifts: the political transition from socialism in 1990 and the mass urban migration of formerly pastoral nomadic communities. Driven by accelerating environmental crises such as the dzud and post-socialist economic aspirations, this unique sedentarization process in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar has unfolded in an organic manner that contrasts sharply with historically forced colonial urbanisms. However, the current state of these expanding settlements, known as the Ger districts, is trapped in an economy of instant survival, generating a cascading series of environmental and socio-political consequences that demand the attention of local and international authorities. Frequently mischaracterized as informal settlements by the international community, a definition firmly refuted by both residents and the state apparatus, these districts embody the hybrid realities of post-socialist Mongolia where political, ecological, and economic uncertainties converge.

This thesis examines the Ger district not as an urban failure but as a complex spatial assemblage shaped by its material-discursive entanglements. Employing a critical posthuman and post-structuralist lens, the research critiques inherited planning paradigms that attempt to erase vernacular urbanisms in favor of standardized, international neoliberal models. The thesis structures this inquiry as a processual descent across three distinct spatial registers. The first section, Soil, establishes the theoretical baseline and deconstructs the researcher’s own gaze, exposing the Western biases and colonial histories embedded in traditional spatial documentation. The second section, Horizon, utilizes a narrative and experiential register to map the traces of nomadic mobility and regional migration through the bodily displacement of a high-endurance expedition across the territory. The final section, Atmospheric Threshold, operates as the terminal zone of synthesis where these narrative and analytical vectors collide within the dense, toxic reality of the capital.

Within this framework, the text introduces a taxonomy of deterritorialization to diagnose the site as a zone of interference where absolute negative environmental collapse and relative positive vernacular survival occur simultaneously. Rather than proposing a fixed, commercial building application, the thesis deploys a conceptual case study as a theoretical proof of concept, demonstrating how fixed infrastructure can actively facilitate a state of fluid becoming rather than enforcing a static, sedentary being. Ultimately, the work advances the worlding assemblage model as a speculative yet grounded alternative to rigid spatial governance, proposing the right to occupy-own as a dual political instrument bridging state responsibility with local agency. In a geopolitically delicate context, spatial empowerment is redefined through ethical negotiation, friction, and hybridization, offering a critical rethinking of urban futures that broadens the horizon of current international standards.

Keywords: Nomadology, Posthumanism, Assemblage Theory, Deterritorialization, Ger districts, Mongolia, Sedentarization, Spatial empowerment, Post-socialist urbanism, Urban informality ... Read more