Ground, in Motion

Abstract

“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.