Metabolic Abundance frames circularity as a living condition – the ongoing process through which life is sustained, exchanged, and returned across ecology, culture, infrastructure, and everyday practice.
The Mekong Delta is not a metaphor for this condition. It is this condition. Alluvial sediment, brackish water, floating rice, fermented fish paste, tidal rhythms, canal politics, salt damage, and Khmer rituals are all metabolic processes. They do not require circular design to be circular; they already are.
But this abundance is not stable or given. It is continuously produced through a tension between two orientations that run through every canal, every sluice gate, every hybrid rice variety: Thuận thiên – living in accordance with the flood, adapting as a form of intelligence – andkiểm soát – controlling, optimising, extracting. Most circular design discourse operates in the register of kiểm soát. The Mekong Delta is a site where Thuận has been practised for centuries, and where the conflict between these two orientations is currently visible, embodied, and at risk.
CDW 2026 asks what circular design can learn from this place – not only what it might bring to it.

Two Routes, Two Angles to Sense-Feel the Mekong Delta

The Mekong Delta sits at the southern tip of Vietnam, where the river breaks into nine tributaries before reaching the sea. It moves. Tides shift the riverbanks overnight. Sediment from somewhere upstream quietly rewrites the estuary floor. Rain decides what is farmland this season. Rivers here are not boundaries but connective tissue, linking farms to markets, craft traditions to ports, and the domestic to the industrial.
The Delta is also mid-transition. Climate change, salinity intrusion, land subsidence, and new infrastructure are reshuing how people live and work. Planning agendas now reach beyond rice production into aquaculture, logistics, fruit cultivation, and climate adaptation. Things circulate here without waiting for design frameworks.
For CDW 2026, the Delta maers not simply as a vulnerable landscape but as a living laboratory for the Asia-Pacific.
For CDW 2026, participants will explore this continuously transforming landscape through two distinct routes across the Mekong Delta. One route follows the upstream freshwater zones, where communities have learned to live with seasonal floods; the other traces the downstream brackish and saline areas, where people are adapting to increasing saltwater intrusion.

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  Route 1

  Thuận thiên

  Go with the flow of the heavens / Upstream · Freshwater zone

  Route 1 follows the upstream / freshwater axis where floods continue to be a gift, where floating rice and amphibious living are intact practices.

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  Route 2

  Con nước

  Reading the Water / Downstream · Brackish to saline zones

  Route 2 follows the downstream / brackish-to-salt axis where communities are actively renegotiating survival under salinity intrusion, where the transition between water states is a daily, material pressure.