Considering the resources poured into the development of smart and sustainable cities, one might feel optimistic about emerging high-tech and ecologically sound modes for global urban development. However — as examined by researcher Michaela Büsse and filmmaker Solveig Qu Suess, in the borderlands between Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Laos — all that glitters is not green.
FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI/KOOZ Within the context of the Against Catastrophe platform, what prompted you to investigate the territories of the Mekong River and Forest City for Holding Rivers, becoming Mountains and Overcast?
MICHAELA BÜSSE When I first visited Malaysia’s Chinese-built Forest City in 2018, I was doing a research residency at NTU CCA in Singapore. During this period, I laid the groundwork for my doctoral project, which explored the material politics of sand and land reclamation as a speculative practice. Singapore has reclaimed about a quarter of its land area and continues to expand through ongoing reclamation projects. However, access to these sites was always restricted. In contrast, Forest City — located in the federal state of Johor, just across the border from Singapore — actively welcomed visitors to its sales gallery, one of the first completed structures on the artificial island, alongside a mall and a hotel. This visit offered me a rare opportunity to witness an artificial island in its formative stages.
At the time, I had no idea that Forest City would become a focal point of my research. Yet, as I monitored its developments from afar, a series of significant events unfolded. First, tensions arose between Malaysia and Singapore over the environmental impacts of land reclamation on the narrow strait separating the two countries. Malaysian activists and citizens raised concerns about the ecological damage caused by the project. Then came the blow: Chinese nationals — primary target market for Forest City — faced new restrictions on investing in overseas real estate. This marked the beginning of the project's downward spiral.
What began as this overly-ambitious and unrealistic venture promising cutting-edge “smart” sustainability began to unravel into something resembling a self-made ruin. Intrigued by this transformation, I felt compelled to return and observe how life in Forest City was evolving amidst its grand promises and stark realities.
SOLVEIG QU SUESSWith China’s Tibetan plateau as a source of the Mekong river, early on in my research I had read that downstream nation-states describe glaciers as “bank accounts of water”. This positions the Chinese state as building safe deposit boxes on the upper Mekong because they know the bank account is going to be depleted eventually and they want to keep it in reserve. I was drawn by this statement, and the underlying sentiments — the transnational scale of the river, the asymmetries of power distributed by the source and stream of water, and the inherent suggestion that China’s actions are calculated financially, in withholding the river’s resources. While I find this perspective problematic, I wanted to understand further questions brought forth by the compounded and amplified crises of climate, of resource distribution and governance — as well as water and its directional power while all its fluidity eludes any modern ambitions for containment and control.
As I couldn’t return to China during the pandemic, I began to spend a lot of time in Thailand and Laos. The more time I spent there, the less I came to view the river and the fundamental shifts in its territories as coming largely from China upstream, but rather how global processes and far-flung stakeholders act on the Mekong, situated far from the actual sites of the dams themselves… And how visual cultures — not only documentary films, but also surveys, photographic documentation, and promotional material — have long been complicit in the reorganisation of the world, enacted by large-scale infrastructure projects.
"What kinds of aesthetics do we need to create different relationships to the anthropocene, and to care about or relate to it differently?"
- Solveig Qu Suess
With the downstream politics of hydroelectric dam construction on the Mekong, the river becomes a device to research a series of infrastructural transformations between China and Southeast Asia. My documentary films and research have been particularly interested in the interplay between aesthetics and global orders, as well as the challenges of representing such complex figures of climate and politics. So with this film work, I really wanted to think with questions like, what kinds of aesthetics do we need to create different relationships to the anthropocene, and to care about or relate to it differently?
KOOZ‘Against Catastrophe’ aims to both interrogate the concept of catastrophe – how it is defined, analysed, and deployed – as well as engage in anti-catastrophic practices in an attempt to envision alternatives to our present. What is the potential of doing so, and how do your projects explore this tension?
MB We are living in a moment when multiple catastrophes and crises are unfolding simultaneously. It feels almost impossible to think beyond these crises. Yet, against the backdrop of catastrophe, I see the importance of searching for traces of hope, resistance, and emergence — possibilities that might allow us to imagine different futures. This is not about ignoring extractive capitalism, racism, the colonization of thought, or systemic violence. Rather, it’s about exploring how we might persist, adapt, and create alternative worlds.
"This is not about ignoring extractive capitalism, racism, the colonization of thought, or systemic violence. Rather, it’s about exploring how we might persist, adapt, and create alternative worlds."
- Michaela Büsse
This perspective shaped my decision to move away from the most obvious narrative surrounding Forest City — its glaring failure — and instead focus on how people and animals live with and on the island, and, in some cases, even thrive. A quick glance at the press coverage of Forest City reveals countless articles about its status as a "ghost city" or one of the world’s most useless developments. While I don’t entirely disagree with these assessments, I was struck by how few people seemed to take the time to genuinely explore the island. Most appear to fixate on what they expected to find — if they visited at all — and rarely ventured beyond the mall. Yes, Forest City is an unsettling place, but there is also a distinct vibrancy there. With Overcast, I wanted to capture both: the discomfort and the life that persists, often in surprising ways.
SQS I had a conversation with Professor of Human Geography Philip Hirsch, who said very plainly that the Mekong river is not simply being destroyed by the dam. Rather, that “destruction” brings forth new ecologies; new forms of living with something reshaped, creating new materialities, relationships, conditions, and opportunities. He told me that sturgeon fish, which are an alien species to the Mekong, had escaped out from the Golden Triangle special economic zone into the river and are apparently thriving.
Instead of painting binaries between the catastrophic and anti-catastrophic, the real Mekong or virtual, or the Indigenous groups versus the technoscientific, what I found much more productive was thinking alongside the work of Antonia Hernandez , with whom I was paired with during the Against Catastrophe project or anthropologist Andrea Ballestero’s writings. For instance, in their work, water forms spaces for choreographies with subjects and substances that are not distinct but are constantly pushed and pulled into different directions. Within these pushes and pulls, new entities are brought into presence into a new ecology, rife with spaces for negotiation. But this does not negate the political urgency of constantly needing to question and negotiate with state-corporate plans.
"The Mekong river is not simply being destroyed by the dam. Rather, that “destruction” brings forth new ecologies; new forms of living with something reshaped, creating new materialities, relationships, conditions, and opportunities"
- Solveig Qu Suess
Another example of this tension for me was brought to light when speaking with a captain who has driven ships on stretches of the Mekong for the last 50 years. No one other than captains and their network of captains know how to navigate its waters best. He insisted that he would work for anyone that paid, but nonchalantly told us that he tipped off local environmentalists of corporate plans that only he would know, since he was the one who was hired to drive their boats. This spilling of information to local networks had eventually undermined plans made between Thailand and China to widen the river to make way for larger commercial ships. When they saw more Chinese ships, he recounted how they would drive their boats to chase them away. In late 2017, Thailand's foreign minister announced that China had decided to cancel the project. Regarding a changed time-space of the river, the captain knows ‘when’ the river is becoming a different sort of infrastructure. Even withinvolumetric time, financialised loopholes and agencies pull its futures into undetermined directions. Figures like him inform the construction of the documentary, and these figures recur across my encounters.
KOOZ Through the three-part film Holding Rivers, becoming Mountains, you explore how global processes and far-flung stakeholders act on the Mekong, portraying the river as a complex design project. How have the geographies along the Mekong been reconfigured in the pursuit of capital accumulation — and what are some of the implications?
SQS The geographies start in the Tibetan Plateau, where the Mekong runs from the sacred Himalayan mountainsthrough the Yunnan province of China into parts of Myanmar, outlining the top of Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, before exiting into the South China Sea through Vietnam.The flood pulse — which is what drives the river, essential to its overall biodiversity — has been shifted since the nineties. Many dam constructions have already been fulfilled, mostly south of China; now ongoing projects are mostly planned in Laos, which has been affecting the levels of the water downstream. Because of the current energy crisis and climate change pressures, various actors have been trying to figure out ways to manage the water supplies of the river; there's a lot of mobilisation under the green energy rhetoric through hydro-electricity. One large project is backed by the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructural Bank, for example, which vouches to support a regional homogenisation of interconnected energy grids, fed largely by these hydroelectric dams. Laos also wants to be the “battery” of Southeast Asia, an ambition that would allow places like China as well as Singapore to be running on "green energy" — which is actually anything but green when speaking about hydroelectricity.
In my film, all scenes were shot in Northern Thailand and Laos. One of the scenes includes a government-level publicity event that I attended as a journalist, hosted by the Mekong River Commission. The MRC is a non-governmental body, but it does try to act as mediator across different governments, to arrange for general agreements across the Mekong region. It was truly interesting to notice the personal dynamics of these spaces: with whom I was able to have conversations, what the purpose of this event was —not necessarily for the words being exchanged, rather it was very symbolic and it was where people connected socially and exchanged business cards. It was attended mostly by people from engineering companies from different countries who hope to have stakes in the transformation of the river and the region.
Afterwards, I revisited one of the first documentaries I could find of the Mekong River, produced in the 1960s by Shell Film Unit. Called "Mekong," the documentary showed a United Nations project to engineer the river for purposes of redistributing food production across the whole of Southeast Asia. The film unit had been established by the Shell Oil Conglomerate, which leveraged the oil company's scientific research into the natural world. Scenes of the film followed various international teams who contributed to the initial studies of the Mekong, celebrating the unity of 60 nations, including Australia, Canada, Holland, Israel, Japan and the U.S. through a common purpose. It was interesting to jump back and forth between this documentary and the ongoing performance of the MRC Summit, because nothing much has changed in terms of who is really in power, able to perform and continue the construction projects. The sensing, mapping and systematisation projects which supported efforts to turn Southeast Asia from a ‘battlefield to marketplace’ during the Cold War, drew not only representations of sedimentation, tributaries and landscapes; they actually underpin how the river continues to be financialised and contested between upstream and downstream nation-states. This was just what I observed in the recent summit held in 2023, even if these projects are now reinvented as sustainable and green. This being one of the facets of how the geographies along the Mekong have been reconfigured in pursuit of capital accumulation.
Still from “Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains”, documentary by Solveig Qu Suess.
The accumulation logic continues as with the imposition of the hydro-electric dam, new metronomes, formats and material patterns follow downstream— the river’s pulse are now mostly dictated by energy demands from far away cities, which inform when water might or might not be released, rather than from the seasonal flux. Irrigation networks have multiplied as the river’s water is redistributed through the dam, reshuffling swathes of landscapes for the expansion of plantations. And with the shifting rhythms of the river, many of those who lived for generations tacitly knowing the river and sensing its pulsations through their everyday practices, are of course, amongst the first to notice.
KOOZ Listening to your narrative, I particularly enjoyed how you refer to the scale of the global economy as being a sensorial experience for those working more intimately with the river. Could you expand upon this tension?
SQSIn a change from the weeks prior to our filming, the women who collect riverweed in the early mornings by the border of Laos told us that they’ve now been able to pick it for several days in a row. This is an anomaly since typically the river’s water levels are too erratic to traverse safely. Waters have been more stable during Chinese New Year; upstream, economic activities have lulled and the dam gates have not been opened. For these harvesters, the scale of the global economy is literally a sensorial experience. Gathering weeds out of the river, these women can literally feel the difference in economic activity upstream in China.
Around twenty years ago, people who lived by the river in northern Thailand’s Chiang Khong district noticed that the water level was not stable anymore. In the villages, people did not know what caused these changes, nor were they notified to expect them. Measuring the water has become a site of epistemic contestation and claim-making. Interregional organizations such as the Mekong River Commission mediate datasets taken over the course of the entire river, in order to facilitate their use in state-supported projects. At the same time, measurements of the Mekong’s depth are regularly being recorded by local environmentalists from the Chiang Khong Conservation Group, situated on the Thai-Lao border along the banks of the Mekong. The school organises itself across a network of villages which share concerns around the river’s increasingly erratic pulse; these groups form their own information networks and knowledge archives.
Members of the Chiang Khong Conservation group, Mekong School, and others such as International Rivers, have consistently found ways to articulate the dam and its corresponding and distributed processes. Identifying spaces and vulnerabilities within the network of relations, they challenge the institutional foundations of hydropower, all the while supporting imaginative and epistemic projects that counter the conclusion that dams are inevitable.
KOOZ Overcast explores the complexities surrounding the project for the creation of the eco-smart Forest City, from utopian dream to dystopian reality. Even as we continue to seek a smart, green future — purportedly enabled by cutting-edge technology — what is the potential in reflecting on the futures we envision versus the unpredictable realities we create?
MB It is essential to understand the relationship between Forest City as a project and Forest City as a physical site. Forest City began as an ambitious joint venture between the Sultan of Johor and the Chinese developer Country Garden. Alongside numerous other projects along the Johor coastline, it was designed to stimulate economic growth in the border region with Singapore. Johor plays a crucial role as Singapore's industrial hinterland, supplying resources and accommodating a significant number of daily commuters who travel between the two regions. Real estate in Singapore is prohibitively expensive, and projects like Forest City aim to capitalise on this dynamic. The development seeks to benefit from Singapore’s prosperity by attracting expats and affluent investors who are drawn to its futuristic vision — a vision not unlike projects in Singapore itself, such as Sentosa Island, where a similar model of hyper-modern, planned living is enacted. However, Forest City’s ambitions are entangled in broader geopolitical complexities. The development has been linked to China's Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure strategy that secures access to resources and establishes critical trade routes across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, and Southern Europe. Its location in the Malacca Straits — a vital and contested waterway through which China transports much of its oil imports — underscores its strategic significance.
Despite all of these considerations, as Forest City’s target audience — foreign buyers and expats — dwindled, the project had to adapt to local realities. Nearby communities who were excluded from the development wanted to gain access and receive recognition. At times, for instance, the parking lot itself transforms into an impromptu drinking hall and dance floor, reflecting the ways in which the space is being reimagined and repurposed by its inhabitants and visitors. Beaches were opened to local visitors, native plants were introduced to replace imported ones, and local bird species, stray dogs, and even mangroves began to inhabit the island. The mangroves, in particular, were planted through the initiative of a local youth organisation (Kelab Alami) which has been monitoring environmental developments around the site since its inception.
Today, the island is inhabited, but not in the way it was originally envisioned. Instead, Forest City occupies a liminal space, balancing between maintaining the façade of its original promise and acknowledging the starkly different reality that has emerged. This mismatch has given rise to unanticipated forms of adaptation and coping. These practices often exist in the shadows elsewhere, but in Forest City, they have moved to center stage, confronting anyone who visits. This is not an organized resistance; the inhabitants are not collectively envisioning alternative futures or fighting systemic injustices. Rather, they are simply living, inhabiting the spaces that have become available to them in the cracks of the original grand design. Overcast aims to capture these new realities and to shed light on those whose voices have been silenced in the planning process. This is also what Solveig's and my work connects: to show how these big infrastructure projects, which are shaped by larger geopolitical considerations that are highly exploitative of the environment and of people, how they hit the ground, where they can be subverted, and how other ways of being constantly emerge and are enacted.
"By highlighting these "accidental" lifeworlds and landscapes, my aim is to challenge and ground the hegemonic, grand, and placeless vision of an eco-smart city."
Michaela Büsse
KOOZ Michaela, beyond the eco-smart dystopia, the camera focuses on the feral zone which, designated for future development, now hangs precariously in limbo. What is the potential of this biological diversity, amidst the towering empty high rises?
MB I would not want to romanticise the often precarious practices unfolding in Forest City. It remains a managed space that, due to its lack of economic success, appears to be tolerating these emergent activities rather than actively supporting them. By highlighting these "accidental" lifeworlds and landscapes, my aim is to challenge and ground the hegemonic, grand, and placeless vision of an eco-smart city.
Forest City is also a liminal space because it is in a constant state of flux, where change could occur at any moment. Rumours of an impending casino to revive the island’s struggling economy have already sparked significant upheaval. At the same time, Forest City has begun to leverage its newfound biodiversity to rebrand and promote itself. Yet, amidst this uncertainty, there is a faint hope that the processes taking place on the ground might eventually supplant the management’s original vision. If this were to happen, Forest City could indeed become an eco-smart city — but one of an entirely different kind.
"In many cases, "sustainability" is co-opted as a marketing strategy to justify high-end, resource-intensive projects, obscuring the environmental degradation and social inequalities they perpetuate."
Michaela Büsse
KOOZ Even as we speak, state leaders are meeting in Baku on occasion of COP29. How close do such conferences feel, in terms of having an impact on the territories that you frame?
MB Hm, very far and very close at the same time. Forest City is undoubtedly a lavish development, built on reclaimed land that required immense amounts of sand — a resource extracted at great environmental and social cost. In the process, the project has severely damaged vital seagrass populations that play a critical role in coastal ecosystems, supporting marine biodiversity and helping to mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration. Despite its branding as a "sustainable city," almost nothing about its construction aligns with principles of sustainability. From the materials used to the reliance on imported labor, every aspect of its creation has been extractive and resource-intensive. Even now, the island demands constant maintenance to stabilise the reclaimed land and sustain its artificial infrastructure.
But I also think that these contradictions highlight a broader issue: the superficial application of sustainability within the framework of green capitalism. In many cases, "sustainability" is co-opted as a marketing strategy to justify high-end, resource-intensive projects, obscuring the environmental degradation and social inequalities they perpetuate. Forest City is, perhaps, one of the boldest examples of this phenomenon. I guess we need to ask the question what "sustainability" really means in the context of these kinds of projects. Is it a genuine commitment to reducing harm and promoting regenerative practices, or merely a tool for maintaining business-as-usual under the guise of environmental stewardship?
SQS While these events are very symbolic, in how they signal a calibration of global actors on shared environmental concerns, and towards standards and climate goals on a scale that would otherwise be difficult to happen, I echo Michaela and her emphasis on the need to consistently question projects built under sustainability. Similar to the summit I attended earlier in the year, these events as a format feel very far away despite the concerns addressed being so close as lived realities. Only particular types of people, from certain positions can speak and participate. The Azerbaijani government was very swift to crack down on environmental activists and political opponents surrounding the event. Agreements made during these events on where flows of money go, what gets funded, how they are discussed on ground, who decides, what gets calculated and what is left out, all matter. This is why these events are also important as timings for making critical demands, such as through peaceful protests and environmental groups, be heard.
Michaela Büsse’s Overcast and Solveig Qu Suess’ Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains were commissioned by the Against Catastrophe project. The commissions will feature in the online exhibition Reclaiming Futures. Reclaiming Futures critically examines how design, architecture, and technology are imbricated in producing catastrophic eco-social realities but also present tools with which to imagine and build more equitable, democratic, and sustainable worlds. The online exhibition will be presented in three installments. Suess’ Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains will be presented in the first, which focuses on water sovereignties and will launch in early December 2024, while Büsse’s Overcast will be presented in the second, which takes up planetary urbanisms and will come online in January 2025. The exhibitions can be viewed on https://againstcatastrophe.net. The Against Catastrophe project is part of Governing Through Design, a collaborative research initiative supported by a Sinergia Grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Bios
Michaela Büsse is an interdisciplinary researcher and postdoc at TU Dresden. She researches environmental speculation and emerging material and territorial configurations amid planetary urbanization and the climate crisis.
Solveig Qu Suess works within the fields of documentary film and artistic research. She draws on feminist science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, and visual ethnography to investigate questions of the optics, time, and infrastructure. Through her documentary work, she has been developing filmmaking as an intimate practice within global processes.
Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2022 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Prior to dedicating her full attention to KoozArch, Federica collaborated with the architecture studio and non-profit agency for change UNA/UNLESS working on numerous cultural projects and the research of "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.
