XMAHAKAM

Abstract

This thesis investigates how landscape architecture can operate within territories shaped by long-term extraction, where hydrological systems, ecological processes, and patterns of inhabitation have become spatially fragmented and environmentally unstable. Developed through the case of Samarinda and the Lower Mahakam Basin in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, the project examines how more than 520 mine lakes and the extensive territorial infrastructures of coal extraction might be reinterpreted not as isolated remnants requiring technical reclamation alone, but as active components of a socio-ecological watershed system.
Through fieldwork, territorial mapping, and research-by-design methodologies, the study shows that the apparently chaotic mosaic of degraded forests, mining pits, agricultural plots, and unstable ridge systems is in fact structurally organized by the geological distribution of coal deposits and consequently the operational logics of extraction. This discovery becomes the foundation of the design proposal. Rather than erasing the territorial mechanisms of extraction, the project partially reappropriates them: excavation, terracing, hydrological manipulation, sediment redistribution, and infrastructural corridors are redirected toward regeneration instead of depletion.
The proposal reorganizes the regional watershed through a system of “hydro-edaphic gradients”, where ridge systems operate as distributed hydrological “sponges” capable of retaining water, sediments, nutrients, and organic matter before gradually redistributing them across the landscape. Through selective terracing, agroforestry retention systems, wetlands, and staged mine-lake remediation, the project establishes interconnected ecological corridors that support reforestation, aquaculture, wet agriculture, biodiversity recovery, and new forms of inhabitation. Mine lakes gradually evolve through distinct stages of chemical containment and stabilization that function as forms of post-extractive ecological succession, progressively becoming one with the surrounding territorial systems.
Beyond ecological recovery alone, the project positions regeneration as a territorial and social process. Agroforestry landscapes are simultaneously productive ecologies and mechanisms of continuous occupation, stewardship, and tenurial reclamation across vulnerable concession landscapes. Extraction off-road routes are reappropriated to draw settlement toward mine and new fishing lakes, productive forests, and remediated lake systems, transforming the logistical infrastructures of extraction into connective frameworks for public life and ecological care.
Rather than proposing a singular technical solution, the thesis frames remediation as a long-term, multi-scalar, and adaptive territorial process. It links upstream hydrological regulation to downstream urban resilience, agricultural productivity, and public occupation, and proposes an alternative model for post-extractive landscapes - one in which ecological recovery, infrastructural reuse, and collective inhabitation become mutually reinforcing components of territorial regeneration.