Understanding Ho Chi Minh City’s Urban Structures for Urban Land-Use Monitoring and Risk-Adapted Land-Use Planning

This chapter outlines an urban structure type approach used to portray, classify and understand the settlement patterns and urban structures of the current and emerging landscapes of Ho Chi Minh City. An important prerequisite for establishing much needed efficient and proactive, as well as rapid, adaptation planning strategies is the spatial and rational characterisation of the current urban fabric according to vulnerability relevant features. In our work an understanding of urban settlement patterns and urban structures allowed for the capturing of the highly dynamic spatiotemporal social and structural changes associated with rapid urbanisation processes. The aim was an integrated assessment of the underlying the inherent urban resilience based on coherent and credible indicator sets. The approach provides a common spatial framework at the resolution of the urban block for data integration various thematic and scientific disciplines at the same spatial scale. The scale provides a clear instrument to generate portfolios of block-specific core indicators, move across scales, run scenarios and aggregate to larger planning horizons, ultimately useful to determine hotspots for administrative interventions and to assist prioritising in spatial planning decision-making.