This dissertation addresses the critical environmental degradation resulting from coal mining activities in Jharia, India. This region represents the devastating legacy of extractive industries, characterised by land subsidence, extensive contamination of soils and aquifers, and the almost total loss of local ecosystems. The team focuses on the problem of abandoned coal mining terrains. From this, the team investigates the process of coal extraction. Each stage has been analysed sequentially, from the initial deforestation and removal of the overburden, through the actual extraction, to the final abandonment of the excavated sites, and from there explaining how each stage inflicts distinct and often irreversible damage. These operations have rendered large tracts of land unstable, uninhabitable and biologically sterile, creating complex environmental hazards. The project begins in a landscape where ground, ecology and habitation have fallen out of sync. Jharia's terrain, shaped by extraction and continual disturbance, becomes the site for rethinking how architecture might arise from processes of repair rather than imposition. Our research studies how stabilisation, ecological succession and spatial formation can be treated as a single evolving system instead of isolated interventions.

By reading the shifting environmental and biological gradients of the site, we construct a generative framework that allows built volume to develop only where long-term ecological performance can be sustained. Space is not predefined; it is negotiated by conditions of soil behaviour, microclimate, and the capacities of emerging vegetation. The resulting architecture doesn't arrive fully formed. It materialises gradually as the landscape begins to reorganise itself. The work proposes a model for post-mining territories where ground recovery and architectural emergence are intertwined, offering a future in which settlement grows from the logic of a healing ecology.