“The moment of transition is a moment when the past, present and future happen simultaneously.” // Albert Einstein
Climate change risks are increasingly drowning the Mekong Delta, visible through intensified flooding, salinity intrusion, land subsidence, and ecological degradation. Yet what unfolds in the delta cannot be understood as the consequence of the climate crisis alone. Beneath these visible impacts lies a long-standing extractive mindset that has reshaped the delta’s landscapes, waters, and livelihoods over decades.
This thesis argues that the Mekong Delta functions as an extractive operational landscape, a machine, where practices such as export-oriented agriculture, sand mining, and large-scale hydraulic infrastructure have intervened in natural deltaic processes. These interventions have accelerated territorial vulnerability of its landscape and liveliehoodss while integrating the delta into global resource and commodity networks, often at the expense of local ecological resilience and socio-cultural continuity.
Building on this diagnosis, this research aims to develop an adaptive framework that emancipates the deltaic territory and its local inhabitants, whose livelihoods and knowledge are inseparable from the landscape, together with its non-human ecologies, from global demands and post-colonial extractive paradigms.
The project challenges the assumption that progress must follow linear trajectories of growth, intensification, and infrastructural control. Instead, it repositions traditional and situated forms of knowledge as counter-logics to extractive planning, shaped through centuries of living with sediment, flood, and seasonal uncertainty. By engaging the delta as a palimpsest, the research revisits and reactivates suppressed landscape practices as a means to resist the erasure of ecological and cultural memory. ... Read more

Zeeland is a land of production of food, energy and resources. Its very nature is deeply rooted in the Dutch people‘s historical ability to reshape the landscape and harness its potential for economic benefit. Today, it faces slow demographic decline, is largely covered by agricultural land and sits at the heart of a thriving transnational port economy and embedded within the Delta region, an area defined by dynamism and uncertainty.

Complex processes driven by climate change - such as sea level rise, soil salinization and the depletion of soil quality - raise urgent questions about the future of many agricultural zones and the rural communities that depend on them. These are farming communities that have inhabited the region for centuries, now thrust into a structural condition of uncertainty, shaped by evolving ecological processes that are often hard to predict or fully understand.
At the same time, they are communities with clear socio-economic needs and aspirations, which sometimes clash with broader environmental pressures and global dynamics. Yet, they also hold significant potential: as landowners, they are well-positioned to convert or diversify their agricultural practices toward renewable energy production, carving out a vital role in the green economy of the future.
“What’s missing is a clear and stable vision for my future and my farm,” says Peter, a Zeeland farmer. That is exactly what Performative Landscape: A New Paradigm for Energy Transition Through Farmers’ Community Engagement and the Transformation of the Zeeland Delta Landscape seeks to offer.

Our team of designers and researchers developed a new long-term vision, ambitious yet grounded, that emerged from an intensive and focused process of research and designs. It aims to sustain regional productivity, reinforce the economic resilience of farming communities, address environmental challenges, and unlock the full potential of the land for renewable energy. It proposes a new model for productive landscapes, rooted in local consumption, circularity, economic autonomy and the integration of agriculture with clean energy generation. ... Read more