A year after heavy machinery first tore into the banks of the Selbe River near Auto Zamchidiin Street in Sukhbaatar District, the flood protection wall promised to area residents now stands largely complete. The broader transformation that was supposed to accompany it, however, has yet to materialize. A few days ago, we visited the “Selbe Renewal” project site near the headquarters of Ulaanbaatar Buyan company at 11 a.m. The contrast with a year earlier was striking in its quietness. No workers were present, and no machinery stood idle or active anywhere along the site. Where the area was once a constant churn of activity, it is now simply still. That stillness marks a sharp turn from what residents endured 12 months ago. Heavy equipment ran continuously through the area, kicking up dust that settled over nearby streets and buildings. Road crews and construction teams cordoned off pedestrian routes, forcing residents to navigate around mounds of excavated dirt piled haphazardly across the site. The Selbe’s natural flow was narrowed to make way for the work, and large stones were dumped into its diversion channels and floodplain to redirect the water. Its banks, once lined with vegetation, were packed instead with wet earth, and the trees and bushes that had grown along the riverside for years were cleared away entirely.
The disruption extended well beyond the construction site itself. Pedestrians and drivers alike found themselves contending daily with blocked paths and rerouted traffic as the work dragged on. At the same time, a vocal segment of the public pushed back. Citizens opposed to the idea of running a concrete flood wall along the riverbank took to social media in considerable numbers, criticizing the project’s design and its impact on what had been one of the city’s few accessible stretches of natural waterway. That opposition was loud and sustained throughout the construction period. A year later, both the construction noise and the public criticism have fallen silent, even as the underlying questions about the project’s design remain largely unanswered.
The flood dam itself, in essence a concrete retaining wall, has been completed as planned along a 1.5 kilometer stretch of the river, running through the site where the former S’Outlet shopping center stood before its relocation. But the landscaping and public space improvements that were meant to accompany the wall remain only partially realized. Behind the Nature Bridge, the pedestrian overpass crossing Olympian Street, workers laid a walking path along the outer edge of the dam. Staircases descend from the path to the riverbank on both sides, and a small rest area built from natural stone offers what is, for now, one of the only finished public amenities along the entire corridor. That work does not extend to the section in front of the bridge. There, the earthworks left behind terrain so steep that the area is effectively impassable to pedestrians, undermining the basic purpose of the path before it has even been completed. Anyone attempting to walk the route in that stretch is confronted not with a riverside promenade but with an unfinished, unwalkable embankment.
The changes to the river itself may prove harder to reverse than the unfinished pathways. What was once a comparatively wide, free-flowing river has been narrowed along its entire length and reshaped with stone into a tightly winding, serpentine course, a significant departure from its original embankment and natural contours. The outer face of the new dam has been finished in cement, while the inner side facing the water has been faced with stone, giving the structure a hard, uniform edge that runs the length of the project. The cumulative effect is a river transformed in character as much as in shape. Hemmed in by concrete and stone, its course straightened and its banks stripped of the vegetation that once softened its edges, the Selbe now reads less as a living waterway running through the city and more as an engineered drainage channel.
Broken promise
When citizens first criticized and pushed back against plans to line the Selbe’s banks with concrete, capital city authorities responded with warnings rather than reassurance. “If we don’t build a flood protection dam, the city center will overflow,” officials said at the time, adding that “those who oppose and decide to stop this work will be held accountable later”. Alongside the warnings came promises meant to ease residents’ concerns. Authorities insisted the goal was a natural ecosystem, not a cement structure, and pledged to build the flood dam without disturbing the river’s flow and drainage. Once construction was finished, they said, the surrounding area would be landscaped, with recreational areas and green spaces created for public use.
A year on, those promises appear largely unmet. The pledge not to encroach on the river’s natural space has been broken, and the plan to deliver a comfortable, green public environment shows little sign of materializing. New Ulaanbaatar Mayor B.Purevdagva inspected the landscaping and construction work along the Selbe’s banks last week. Shortly afterward, social media posts declared that Selbe River improvement work has been intensified and that the area around the banks and dam is being improved. Circulating alongside the headlines were images, evidently AI-generated, depicting a lush, green riverside environment rendered convincingly enough to pass for a photograph.The discrepancy between those images and the actual site is striking. The trees, bushes and green landscaping shown in the renderings are nowhere to be found along the real banks of the Selbe. What grass remains has been trampled and stripped away by machinery, and no bushes or shrubs are visible anywhere along the corridor. The reeds, trees and other natural vegetation that once lined the riverbank have been cleared entirely and replaced with gravel, cement and tile.
Surveying the sections currently under what officials describe as improvement, there is little indication that any green space is actually being created. What is taking shape instead looks more like a hardscaped recreation and entertainment area than the natural riparian environment originally promised. This would not be the first time such an effort has fallen short. Ulaanbaatar has attempted to improve the Selbe’s banks and develop recreational space along the river several times in the past, and none of those efforts succeeded as intended. If anything, each successive initiative has eroded the river’s natural character a little further, leaving it more polluted and more degraded than before. The current “Selbe Renewal,” project appears set to mark not a turning point but an endpoint, the moment when what remained of the river’s ecosystem was finally built over for good.
Political ‘show’ outpaces progress
The “Selbe Renewal” project, encompassing construction of both the flood protection dam and an accompanying recreation area, broke ground in April of last year across territory spanning Bayanzurkh District’s 43rd khoroo and Sukhbaatar District’s first khoroo. According to the Ulaanbaatar Mayor’s Office Department of Urban Engineering Infrastructure, the flood protection dam was scheduled for completion by June 30, 2025, with landscaping of the surrounding area to follow by autumn of that year. That timeline has since slipped, and the project may now stretch into a second autumn before it is finished.
The flood protection retaining wall itself was built by Bilguun Mongol Construction, while landscaping of both the dam’s exterior and interior has been handled by Silla Group. According to the landscaping company, the delay stems from two main factors: the capital city’s failure to release necessary funding on schedule, and the discovery of extensive cable and heating lines running through the area along the riverbank, complicating the work.
What remains unexplained is why the city itself, as the project’s customer and primary funder, has held up financing and allowed the riverbank to sit in its current unfinished state for so long. Asked to account for the delay, Head of the Department of Urban Engineering Infrastructure at the Ulaanbaatar Mayor’s Office L.Altangerel and chief engineer of the Department of Geodesy and Water Construction and Facilities S.Batsaikhan were unable to offer a clear answer.
S.Batsaikhan’s response was noncommittal at best. “They say that they will finish the landscaping and construction before Naadam, or by July 9. Once it is completed, the paperwork to submit to the commission will begin. In any case, the financial year has been resolved,” he said. The vagueness of that explanation stands in contrast to the tone the mayor himself has struck publicly. Despite the funding delays being a matter squarely within the capital city’s own control, Mayor B.Purevdagva has ordered the contractor to complete the Selbe River landscaping on time and to a high standard, warning bluntly, “If you don’t do something right, I won’t accept it.”
‘It took 2 years to pave a small stretch of riverbank’
The prolonged delays in completing the Selbe riverbank improvements have not been merely an inconvenience for those who live alongside the project. For residents in the surrounding neighborhoods, the unfinished construction has translated into months of sustained environmental strain, with conditions that, by their own accounts, have only worsened over time rather than improved. When earthworks first broke ground, locals reported a sharp spike in both noise and airborne dust disrupting daily life along the riverbank. More than a year later, residents say that problem remains as present as ever, with no clear timeline for resolution in sight.
L.Selenge, a resident of Sukhbaatar District’s First khoroo who has watched the project unfold from her doorstep since its earliest stages, described a situation that has deteriorated with the seasons rather than improved. “The improvement work here started in April. The dust was manageable during the winter, when snow on the ground kept it from spreading, but it has gotten dramatically worse since spring set in. It seems to be concentrated in certain pockets of the area, and that’s because the natural vegetation that used to hold the soil along the riverbank has been stripped away entirely. There’s nothing left to keep the dust down anymore,” she said.
Her frustration extends beyond air quality to the basic usability of the space itself. “It’s taken two full years just to build a pedestrian path through what is, frankly, a fairly small stretch of riverbank. And even now, there are trees, stones and loose paving slabs scattered everywhere along the route. It’s genuinely difficult to walk through here, especially after dark. You could easily trip, fall and get hurt without anyone noticing. Before the city talks about landscaping or beautification, the most basic priority should be making this environment safe to walk through in the first place,” L.Selenge shared.
A young man working at a coffee shop near the construction site offered a similar assessment, though he framed the problem less in terms of dust and more around what he sees as a fundamental gap in public safety planning. Drawing a comparison to infrastructure standards he has observed abroad, he argued that the absence of basic protective measures reflects a broader failure of planning rather than a temporary oversight tied to the delays. “Looking at how construction projects like this are handled in other countries, it’s standard practice to put up isolation fencing and shade structures to protect the public from the risks that come with an active work site. There’s nothing like that here, none of it. Barriers and proper fencing are essential in an area like this, especially with how much foot traffic passes through. Young children run along the top of the embankment and fall regularly. There are two places where stairs have actually been completed leading down to the riverbank, and ramps have even been built alongside them for wheelchair users, which sounds promising on paper. But in practice, large stones have been piled up right at the base of those stairs and along the connecting path, blocking the very access they were supposed to provide. Looking at it, the setup seems genuinely hazardous, not just inconvenient, for people with disabilities and for small children alike,” he expressed.
Planning defies world standards
The shortcomings of the “Selbe Renewal” project become even more apparent when measured against current international thinking on urban water management. In an era increasingly defined by global sustainable development goals, concepts such as low-impact development and resilient infrastructure have gained significant traction worldwide. Central to this shift is the idea that cities and their infrastructure should coexist with natural ecosystems, rivers and forests among them, rather than disrupt or override them. Judged against that standard, the work carried out under the project appears to run directly counter to prevailing global norms and trends.
Altering the river’s natural course and reshaping it into a winding, serpentine form in order to slow its flow stands as clear evidence of substantial ecological damage rather than environmental stewardship. Equally questionable is the premise, implicit in the project’s framing, that a genuine ecological environment can somehow be cultivated inside what is, in essence, a cement flood barrier. The two concepts sit awkwardly together at best.
By contrast, the model of flood-resilient parks and green corridors has become well established in many countries. Under that approach, recreational areas, sports fields, and pedestrian and cycling paths built along riverbanks are deliberately designed to withstand periodic flooding rather than to wall it off entirely. Notably, a portion of the landscaping planned along the Selbe dam itself sits within a designated flood zone, meaning these spaces are expected, by design, to flood when conditions warrant it. That raises an obvious question. Those responsible for calculating the river’s 100-year flood threshold and for commissioning what was, by any measure, an expensive engineering structure presumably accounted for that risk when designing the landscaping around the dam. Whether that risk was genuinely planned for, or simply priced into a project now defined by missed deadlines, unmet promises, and a landscape stripped of the very ecosystem it was meant to protect, is a question city authorities have yet to answer.
