Eddie's whole essay

Topic: To what extent can the problems of urbanization be met by policies of sustainable development?
Subtitle: How did Ho Chi Minh City solve its urban problem?

Abstract

Along with the emergence of urbanisation, more and more metropolitans have encountered a lot of urban problems, such as pollution and water management. It is clear that the UN and governments have paid attention to these problems and tried to use sustainable development policies to solve them. Since Vietnam adopted the reform programme, a lot of foreign investments had been poured into in Ho Chi Minh City and more and more people moved into this city. However, lack of infrastructures and environmental consciousness resulted in water supply problem. Moreover, poor families did not have plenty money to buy houses, so they built the house by themselves and lived in precarious areas. Residents’ lives were threatened; therefore, precarious settlements were another critical urban problem. To solve the water supply problem, the government should establish more infrastructures and consider natural factors. In addition, the government had implemented community development projects to improve the poorest family lives. In fact, the government had to consider all concepts to solve the water supply problem and solve uneven wealth distribution to give poorest families better standard of living.

Introduction

At the present time, it is interesting that there are more and more people trying to move to urban areas which then expand extremely quickly. It can be seen that this migration trend has taken place all over the world and the level of world urbanisation and the number of big cities has reached the highest level ever (Cohen, 2006). Following this trend, academics have coined a new word – urbanisation, which is widely defined as a trend that people migrate from rural areas to urban areas.

It is an undeniable fact that people move to cities for a lot of factors, such as getting high salaries, better life conditions, and more opportunities. In addition, local governments welcome people moving to urban areas, since these additional labours can stimulate economic growth and local competitiveness. However, along with urbanisation development, not only have advantages, but also disadvantages been brought to cities simultaneously. For instance, urbanisation might result in more serious pollution, traffic congestion, increased crime rates, energy deficiency, soaring housing price, and fierce competition in job hunting. All of these result in the decline of city competitiveness.

Encountering these serious problems, the UN and governments have paid attention to this issue. They try to solve this problem and commence implementing a variety of programmes, schemes and policies. These agendas are becoming the most urgent ones to be implemented in many countries, especially Asian countries. Currently, most Asian countries are developing countries or undeveloped countries and suffer from serious urbanisation problems. In the recent twenty years, the UN and Asian governments have adopted sustainable development policies which are deemed as solution of urbanisation problems. Most governments have dedicated to using sustainability programmes or policies to reduce urbanisation problem and retain the original and potential benefits of urbanisation trend.

At the present time, there is still no specific definition of sustainable development. People with different backgrounds interpret this term in various ways (Van Pelt, 1994). On the other hand, sustainable development “has become widely used to stress the need for the simultaneous achievement of development and environment goals (Pugh, 1996, P 23).” Also, sustainable development is called eco-logical sustainability which can be divided into five parts: economic sustainability, community sustainability, cultural sustainability and social sustainability. As a matter of fact, sustainable development is a long-termed programme which can improve environment, reduce the volume of resource used, and reduce waste (Mega, 1996a).

Since the liberalisation process was implemented in Vietnam, Vietnam’s two main cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, went through urbanisation very fast. More and more people flowed to these cities and some urban problems were resulted in. Therefore, this essay will first describe Vietnam urbanisation and urban problems. Then it will focus on Ho Chi Minh City’s water management problem and solve this problem. After that, it will describe Ho Chi Minh City’s precarious settlements and solutions. Finally, it will examine Ho Chi Minh City’s sustainable development policy.

Main body

Vietnam has experienced fast growth in economy and urbanisation since late 1980s when the Soviet Union collapsed. The GDP grew at almost 9% annually between 1992 and 1995 and the growth was concentrated in the industrial and service sectors. The 1989 census shows that there have been nearly 13 million people, 19.8% of the population, gathered in urban areas. Among them, more than 3 million people, almost 25%, lived in Ho Chi Minh City, the capital of Vietnam. In addition, the official data suggests that the urban population grew by 1.4 million between 1989 and 1994. However, the urbanisation and economic growth is very uneven in Vietnam. Most of investment and migration are occurred in two major cities – Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. Actually, Vietnam “has one of the lowest levels of urbanisation in the world and one of the more highly concentrated (Drakakia-Smith and Dixon, 1997, p.24).”

The fast economic growth, rapid urbanisation, and huge amount of in-migration break down local registration systems, which had an important role to play in providing basic needs and employments. They were unable to provide effective assistance to migrants and this led to some serious problems. The problems included traffic congestion, various pollutions, water supply, inadequate drainage, and power and communications. Besides, since the local registration systems were break down, it is estimated that the official figure listed above were seriously under estimated. Therefore, the problems would be more serious than what published by official organizations (Drakakia-Smith and Dixon, 1997). Here I will focus on water supply and precarious settlements problems in Ho Chi Minh City.

Water Management

Stable clean water supply was a big problem for people who lived in Ho Chi Minh City. The city is full of canals and rivers. These canals and rivers were the living areas of most poor families, traffic routes of waterway transport, and various market areas. However, people were used to throw wastes directly to rivers and canals. As the number of people moving to Ho Chi Minh City increased, the needs of clean water also increased, but the water pollution became more serious. In addition, new-built factories also threw industrial wastes to these waterways. This made the access of clean water more limited (Bolay, Cartoux, Cunha, Du, and Bassand, 1997).

To deal with this serious problem, the authority had to implement water management. This could be divided into two different aspects. The first aspect was water usage. The water usage in Ho Chi Minh City was subjected to several natural constraints: the effects of the tides and raining seasons. Both of them might cause floods and make it difficult to manage water distribution and storage. The ever highest level of population made it even harder to access to clean water in low price.

The other aspect was the emission of waste water. The increased number of residents and factories caused the amount of dirty water increase as well. However, some topographical and social challenges made it difficult to solve this problem. Firstly, most urban areas were located at a very low altitude and beside the canals or rivers and the volume of rainfall were so high and so concentrated in certain period. In addition, most people and factories took canals and rivers as sewages and just threw their wastes into these waterways. Besides, the sewer system was built in fragmentary manner. It was not well connected at the level of entire city territory.

To solve this problem, local government should build more infrastructures, such as new sewers, repairs of existing water networks, and the tear down of houses built on piles. In addition, new disposition system for both industrial and household wastes should be built and the canals and rivers should also be cleaned.

Indeed, the establishment of new and better infrastructures was urgent, but this policy should be carried out in overall concepts. In fact, there were two areas in Ho Chi Minh City so concentrated that the water problem was so serious. Because of more and more in-migrants, people were forced to raise the ground level in order to avoid the systematic floods. This made the way of canals and rivers more and more shallow and narrow. If the government did not think of water management in overall concept, the establishment of new infrastructures would result in new forms of floods (Bolay, Cartoux, Cunha, Du, and Bassand, 1997).

Precarious Settlement

Since the reform programme called Doi Moi, which was a renewal policy, a lot of foreign investments had been poured into in Ho Chi Ming City. There were a lot of people moving to Ho Chi Ming City. Therefore, precarious settlements were a big problem for people who lived in Ho Chi Ming City.

Due to the modernization of Ho Chi Ming City, the municipal government lacked of comprehensive design to balance the local historical culture and the city development. Therefore, it can be seen that living conditions had become a seriously problem. On the other hand, there are around four-fifths of people who lived in urban area lived in the Ho Chi Ming City, the inner-city area (Bolay, Cartoux, Cunha, Du, and Bassand, 1997). The above mentioned two phenomena could be found that both technical networks and housing quality were very poor. Also, more and more people lived in the precarious habitat in urban areas, in where many canals crossed and floods were easily to happen. In fact, poor families in particular always encountered this problem, because the majority of them lived in areas near canals or rivers.

Poor families did not have plenty of money to buy houses. They just built the house by themselves and lived in the small space. They usually used materials, such as woods, sheet metal, palm leaf, bamboo and recycled building, to build their houses. However, these materials were easily to have a bad influence on people’ health, because they always utilised the inferior quality materials. Furthermore, their residences were lack of infrastructures and technical services, such as sewer system and drainage system, so waste water directly flowed into the streams and rivers which then contaminated the environment (Wust, Bolay and Du, 2002). It can be seen that they lived in lives which have highly potential hygiene crisis; therefore, these inhabitants were easily to get cholera and dysentery.

The majority of the poorest families did not get any legal documents to authorise the use of land right. In fact, they just built their houses and lived here. However, the municipal government did not adopt the positive attitude to solve this problem. Conversely, it began to restrict investment in public infrastructures and development in their live place. It resulted in poor standards of living of these families.

To overcome these problems and increase the standard of living of inhabitants living in Ho Chi Minh City, the government started carrying on community development projects. These projects examined the standard of living from residents’ points of views and started dealing with problems they believe the most urgent. This method was aiming at two goals. Firstly, the government wanted to resolve the most urgent problems to increase the quality of life directly. In addition, by assessing the situation from people’s opinions, people could be involved in the project and also take necessary actions (bottom-up approach) (Wust, Bolay and Du, 2002).

The projects were very realistic and had been proved to be effective. However, this method also had its down side. In fact, this method needed to balance the opinion of people who is responsible for urban development and the population in more sensitive way. In addition, the government also need to teach the public about related issues (Wust, Bolay and Du, 2002).

The projects was first took place in two of the areas in Ho Chi Minh City, in where the situation was most serious. These areas were all situated in lowland by two canals. In addition, most people here were from poor families and had no sense of environmental protection issues.

The government followed some guidelines to carry on sustainable development here. Firstly, a participatory self-help model was used. This was the model that local people had been familiar with through loan rotation. This model helped people save money to built toilets and other facilities to improve their lives. Secondly, the governments hired some people to show residents how they could improve their stand of living in practice. This measure effectively educated people how to do the practical things by themselves. Finally, the government started with the projects in small-scale, instead of general areas. They divided these two areas into several small groups and focus on each group at one time (Wust, Bolay and Du, 2002).

Challenges

The ‘bottom-up’ approach is being carried on by the Vietnamese government has been approved to be successful. Compared to the past ‘top-down’ method, this approach make the government understand the opinions of residents, especially the ones from poor families. The government had tried to build new houses for these families to solve settlement problems, but people from poor families think these houses were so expensive that they could not afford. However, the ‘bottom-up’ approach totally changed the situation, since it finally took poor families’ opinions into accounts.

However, this policy still had its limits. For example, one of the most important guideline was the cooperation from local people. Of course, it was effective that local residents could start thinking about their living condition and making improvements. Yet, the approach often resulted in the fights between the professionals and residents, since people from poor families lacked of education, especially about environmental problems and sustainable developments. In this case, people might refuse to cooperate with the government anymore (Wust, Bolay and Du, 2002).

In addition, lack of financial resources made these poor families is unable to improve their lives. It is true that the economy in Vietnam has been progressed, but the distribution of wealth is very uneven. Poor families cannot afford clean water, better settlements, and public infrastructures. The Vietnamese government should not only try to carry sustainable developments to improve residents’ quality of living, but also think about how to solve this wealth distribution problem. In fact, this is the fundamental problem of all urban crises.

Conclusion

It was clear that Ho Chi Minh City encountered two big urban problems, water supply and precarious settlements, which constrained the development of Ho Chi Minh City. The municipal government coped with water supply problem by two separate aspects: water usage and the emission of waste water. Indeed, the local government established new and better infrastructures to solve water supply problem. This sustainability policy was useful, but the most important thing was that the government had to increased people’s environmental consciousness and considered in all concepts, otherwise all efforts would be in vain.

Furthermore, in terms of precarious settlement, the local government had implemented community development projects to improve the standard of living of poor families. It can be seen that this policy could be considered successful to solve this problem, even though it still faced some challenges. In fact, to solve this problem totally, the government must also consider the fundamental problem, uneven wealth distribution. Then, the abovementioned problems would be solved more easily than before in Ho Chi Minh City.
Bibliography

Bolay, J. Cartoux, S. Cunia, A. Du, T. and Bassand, M. (1997) ‘Sustainable Development and Urban Growth: Precarious Habitat and Water Management in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’, Habitat International, Volume21, Issue 2 , Pages185-197, 1997

Cohen, B. (2006) ‘Urbanization in developing countries: Current trends, future projections, and key challenges for sustainability’, Technology in Society, Volume28 Pages63-80, 2006

Drakakis-Smith, D. and Dixon, C. (1997) ‘Sustainable Urbanisation in Vietnam’, Elsevier Science Ltd, Volume28, No.1, Pages21-38, 1997

Mega, V. (1996a) ‘Our city, our future: Towards sustainable development in European cities’, Environment and Urbanization, 8 (1), p.p. 133-154

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Van Pelt, M. Kuyvenhoven, A. and Nijkamp, P. (1995) ‘Defining and measuring sustainability’, Institutional Journal of Pollution 5 (2/3), p.p.204-223

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