The compactness of urban areas in Vietnam. Sustainable urban development and local mobility nodes.

1 ABSTRACT This paper presents significant results of an urban sustainability assessment research into housing policies at the urban planning level in Ho Chi Minh City (HCM City), Vietnam. The objective is to develop an integrated approach to the sustainable development of housing and settlement structures to balance urban growth and redevelopment in HCM City. The aim of this paper is to discuss the importance of densification and compactness as the most important efficiency indicator for urban land-use patterns, because they reduce sprawl. Further, the dense structure of the city provides the necessary economies of scale for an efficient infrastructure, and provisions for certain types of public urban services and an efficient use of mass transport systems. Yet, the innovations in global mobility nodes, information processing and telecommunications are accelerating the growth and dispersion of both business activities and population, moving towards the point where geography is irrelevant. In Europe, at the same time, urban planners advocate compact as an ideal urban form, contrasting the reality of spread-out metropolitan development. The urban planning debate of the last decade was focused on the question how the form of cities – e.g. their building forms, site and densities - can contribute to overall urban sustainability. Urban planning strategies based on the city model promise to reduce the urban environmental footprint of megacities. Yet in heavily under-serviced urban areas in emerging Asian countries, densification can be detrimental. In HCM City traditional settlement structures of the inner-city districts are examples of areas of extremely high density living, but inadequate levels of service and infrastructure provision creating serious health problems and increased environmental impacts in these urban districts. Higher density is therefore not the only indicator for sustainable urban structures. 2 COMPACTNESS AND SUSTAINABILITY: URBAN FORMS OF ASIAN CITIES