jailcd2016043: Planning Residential Area in the Central High Land of Vietnam Facing withFlood and Preserving Local Traditional Architecture

Abstract

owadays, rapidly expanded urbanization is becoming an increasing trend in developing nations in South East Asia. Particularly in Vietnam, the fast expansion of urban areas has caused many grave dilemmas including social and environmental problems such as heavy pollution, narrowing agricultural land and gradually losing local culture. On the purpose of meeting the demand of urban area development, Vietnam’s government set up the planning project in all their developing cities. However, planning cities in a sustainable way always is the biggest paramount mission of urban planners in Vietnam. Vietnam is a crowded country with 54 groups of people living together with their own special culture, although urbanization is a natural trend of society but also a challenge for preserving the local culture in each region. Besides, Vietnam has a long shoreline with high density of rivers which always have to face with flood annually. Residents also have to face with flood not only in the coastal and estuarine area, but also in the mountainous areas and central high land of Vietnam. With a developing countries as Vietnam, affording to apply the high technologies or investing a huge amount of budget to solve those serious problems is nearly impossible. Thus, which is the efficient planning solution for each residential area is still a tough question for Vietnam. Kon Tum city is one of the developing cities of Vietnam which is very famous for its unique culture of Bahnar people. Although this city is a mountainous area but it is still seriously affected by flood annually. Furthermore, this city is also facing with many serious urban problems when its dimension expanding as pollution and gradually fading local culture. This paper, choosing the Daktorech residential zone of Kon Tum city as an example to analyzing it current planning status, land usage, natural conditions, culture characteristic, social background in order to finding a suitable environmental solution which can both against the annual flood and preserving the local culture especially local architecture to some extent. And finally, this paper aims to propose a potential solution for this residential zone as a case of environmental urban planning