Atlas Narratives of Anthropogenic Transformations across the Vietnamese Mekong Delta's Urban-Rural Territories: Water Ecosystems as Subject for the Social Ecological Transition

Well beyond the impact of climate change, anthropogenic modifications of the Vietnam Mekong Delta's ecosystems have resulted in environmental degradation and subsequent loss in ecosystems. The environmental impacts include but are not limited to accelerated conditions in climate change, i.e., sea-level rise, flooding, and drought. Anthropogenic modifications in the Delta's landscape have shifted the ecosystem's abilities to self-regenerate due to increased land salination, land subsidence, decreasing sedimentation and ensuing systemic ecological fragmentation. The thesis proposes to reframe the many pressures posed by the Mekong Delta's flooding disasters by constructing atlases to shape the territorial understanding of how water ecosystems threats have evolved over the last 50 years. Chapter 1, Water as Subject; sets up the argument for reversing the gaze, through findings on scientific and policy-driven challenges faced by the Delta. The body of the chapter regards an Atlas analysis across four major bilateral planning collaborations between the Dutch and Vietnamese government to reflect how master plans have informed the transformation of the Mekong Delta's territories since the 1970s. Findings show that the misalignment between centralized planning processes and the implementation of hydraulic projects has led to the territory's increasingly anthropogenic state; leading to the research paradigm of reversing the gaze, whereby the narrative is based on the Water as Subject perspective. Chapter 2, Water as Infrastructure, regards the construction of mapping narratives across water infrastructure to build upon the Delta's territorial rationality. Palimpsest historical narratives were constructed in the Long Xuyen Quadrangle, shedding light to the territory's unending intensified rice production paradigm as the cause for the Delta's built hydraulic states, radically transforming the territory via engineered technology and planning policy. The discovered built states of the Anthropocene were deconstructed and defined through three distinct mapping patterns found in the territory, the Star, Grid, and Hybrid network models, characterized as territorial Social-Ecological configurations of the urban-rural fabric due to overlapping constructed interactions between global and local forces, creating complex dynamics across the Mekong Delta, which opened its potential for Social-Ecological resilience. Lastly, Chapter 3 responds to these findings by reframing the Social-Ecological Systems under systems thinking as a pivot toward an Ecological Transition for the Mekong Delta. By mapping ecosystem transformations across detailed case study areas in Can Tho, Long Xuyen and Rach Gia, further uncovering the kick-back effect at play. Therefore, a land mosaic study was conducted to confirm the dynamics between local farmers and policy mandates proving that the investments made on large irrigation projects have been challenged socially and environmentally, and the delta is found to be transforming in favor of more diversified land patterns conducive to environmental adaptation. A research-by-design approach proposes how the Vietnamese Mekong Delta could enter the Ecological Transition, by promoting the shift enforced by Social-Ecological processes through more intended project scenarios, proposing diffused processes as epitomized in the Horizontal Metropolis, whereby Weak Structures make up the new paradigm for the Mekong Delta's territorial resilience.