| GRADUATION PROJECT |
Flexibility and Resilience in Asian New Towns
Wouter D. F. van Faassen MSc Urbanism graduate elft 2014
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The case of Nam An Khanh
Imagine. Large areas of vacant land, a couple of old villages and a big highway. This outskirt of the city is ready for construction of the new, modern Hanoi. Designs for high-end housing in Californian and Spanish style. Investors already bought large portfolios of houses and offices. This will become the place for the future of Hanoi! ..... At least, this is how they imagined the future. A severe bubble in the housing market deflated, prices went down, and all development came to a halt. New town ‘Nam An Khanh’ became obsolete. No investers, no users, half finished buildings with no purpose.
Many new towns have proved to be the opposite of ‘Resilient Urbanism’, the broad concept for responsive urbanisation, including infrastructure, social equity and inclusiveness. Flexibility in urban planning and design can be coined as the capacity of the built environment to adapt to new conditions in society and economy, or as the capacity for ready physical or functional alteration and the adaptation of new uses. John Abbott (2005) showed that,flexibility is especially important in urban planning and design when circumstances are uncertain. The rapidly changing socio-economical and cultural environment in Hanoi creates huge uncertainty for its inhabitants, therefore giving ‘flexibility’ a different significance compared to developed countries. Flexibility in urban planning and design in new South
East Asian urban developments, obviously has an important function, but seems to be lacking in so many large urban projects and new towns. • Nam An Khanh new town
The case of Nam An Khanh is a typical example of a purely profit-driven New Town development, that illustrates the fragility of generic new town development, now rapidly becoming the standard of urban development in Vietnam. Like other Asian cities, Hanoi implemented a scheme of new town development in a ring around the city as a response to its growth. This scheme fostered the purely profit driven developers to build large blue-print extensions, that are mostly monotonous, mono-functional
and speculative in nature. The result is that the new urban expansions in Hanoi do not respond to the needs of real users. Overproduction of high end housing led to vacancy. Ghost towns have become a serious social, financial and ethical problem in the urban extensions of Hanoi. In order to gain greater resilience in new town planning and design, it is crucial to stretch the importance of a changed balance between the main stakeholders: government, investors, project developers, adjacent inhabitants and local entrepreneurs. This involves a strategy that fosters socio-spatial integration and local economic growth and enables real users to be active stakeholders in this process, engaging them more deeply in decision making and co-development of their city. It involves
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