Tami Banh: Shared Waters, Divided Landscapes  

The Mekong River, stretching 4,630 kilometers through six nations, is the lifeblood of diverse ecosystems and millions of people. For millennia, it carries water and sediment across vast floodplains, creating new land and shaping every aspect of life in the region. Along its shifting banks, cultures mingled, overlapped, borrowed, mixed, and brewed. These days, the river is governed by fragmented and divergent governance systems that intersect with ever-shifting cultural and ecological dynamics, creating a complex interplay of policies and local negotiation/adaptation. 

Shared Waters, Divided Landscapes follows the Mekong from its geological and cultural origins through the colonial period, Cold War conflicts, and contemporary systems of control.  Grounded in field work conducted across Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam over the past year, the presentation foregrounds the local practices and everyday acts of adaptation and negotiation at the margins: from the informal riverbank gardens that take root along newly constructed embankments, to temple grounds that sustain ethnic minority community livelihood and ensure cultural survival in the face of assimilation. These vignettes reveal how communities live with uncertainty, the impact of state infrastructure, and environmental precarity, and suggest where and how landscape architecture can engage within these contested and shared worlds. 

Tami Banh is a Vietnamese architect and landscape architect based in New York City. Her work explores ways of restructuring relationships between people and the environment through design, building, writing, and making. Focused on critical representation, climate resilience, and human / more-than-human cohabitation, her research and practice engage with landscapes at the intersection of ecology, infrastructure, and community resilience.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.