Expanding in the mountains: spatial patterns of urban form in a rapidly urbanising small city of Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Measuring urban form is particularly important in rapidly urbanising countries as it can help assess problems caused by inefficient planning. Despite this, there is a dearth of research on fine-scale measures of urban form in Asia and Vietnam. In this paper, we aim to identify spatial patterns of urban form measured at the intra-urban level in Lào Cai, a provincial capital city in northern Vietnam that has been transformed dramatically since its integration in the Greater Mekong Subregion. We compute 15 indicators of urban form divided into four groups: shapes of built areas, street connectivity, density of services and population, and accessibility. A spatial clustering of the indicators allows to identify five urban form types and their spatial patterns, showing that this small city is experiencing an extensive and fragmented urban growth. We question urbanisation policy underlying such urban form and suggest avenues for a more sustainable urban planning.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban form
• indicators
• intra-urban scale
• Vietnam
• small city

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A recent report of World Bank shows that Vietnam’s annual rate of urbanisation dropped to 2.1.% a year in the 2010–2017 period. Since the pace of urbanisation elsewhere in East Asia and the Pacific also felt, Vietnam’s rate is now similar to that of East Asian and the Pacific developing countries (World Bank 2020).

2. The Economic Corridors of this program can be found at: https://www.greatermekong.org/content/economic-corridors-in-the-greater-mekong-subregion

3. We identified 100 reference points of built areas during our fieldwork in 2015 and visual interpretation of the SPOT image. We then created a 5-metre buffer surrounding each point and overlaid the buffer zones with the classification of built areas to compute the accuracy rate of the classification.

4. In our case, the centroid of the largest patch is located in the norther sector, at 1 kilometer from Côc Lêu, the largest wholesale market of the city (Endres 2019).

5. Although this interpolation is not perfect, it allows us to capture demographic differences between wards and communes and complement the percentage of construction density (BuidDense). For example, a hexagon with 40% of construction density in the north is inhabited by more people than a hexagon with the same construction density in the south.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC), grant number 2016-NP-189771. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), grant number 435-2015-1187.

Notes on contributors

Thi-Thanh-Hiên Pham

Thi-Thanh-Hien Pham is an urban geographer and associate professor at the Department of Urban and Tourism Studies, Université du Québec à Montréal. Her research has three foci: 1) The production of small and mid-sized cities, including migration, imaginaries of urbanisation, urban form and everyday life; 2) Environmental equity, including the extent and socio-spatial patterns of urban forests and urban agriculture; and 3) Practices in public spaces, including usage and perception of access to parks. She uses GIS, quantiative and mixed methods.

Jérémy Gelb

Jérémy Gelb is a PhD candidate in urban studies at Institut national de la recherche scientifique. In his research, he mesures urban pollution and influences of the built environment as well as transportation modes on pollution exposure. He is interested in developing spatial analysis tools.

Isabelle Gagnon

Isabelle Gagnon is an urban planner and obtained her Master in urban studies in 2019. She is interested in mesuring urban form and understanding people’s perception of urban form.