The Ideology and Policies of the State of Vietnam on Public Spaces

Abstract

The concept of “public space” occasionally appears in legal documents of the State of Vietnam, especially in laws. On the contrary, in ordinary newspaper articles, “public space” is often mentioned under various terms including “public place”, “public location”, “public buildings”, etc. At the same time, public space falls in the scope of various aspects of interest, particularly urban public spaces. Thus, it is needed that the State's ideology and legal policies on public spaces are defined. Such challenge “suggests” that we analyze the currently available documents of previous researchers, searching in various regulatory documents of the State, as well as statistical documents and conducting in-depth interviews with urban planning experts to present an understanding of the State's ideology and legal policies on public spaces in Vietnam.

Various documents and researches have shown that the current planning policies in Vietnam consider land planning as a “golden mold” because the priority of the State still lies in economic, commercial, security and defense goals. These are the decisive factors that dominate other residential services, which is different from the modern logic of integrated planning, that, in turn, is based on three main pillars: i) Population planning and changes in demand for “residential services” in the broadest sense of this phrase (housing services; transportation services; medical services; educational services; cultural services; media services; environment, security and defense activities,...); ii) Administrative land planning; and iii) Land planning for economic and commercial activities. As a result of the current, yet simple categorization of land used in annual statistical documents, in the future, public space will not only be difficult to expand but also be narrowed in correlation with the growing population density, especially in urban areas. Meanwhile, the planning of public spaces of the previous periods still leaves us with lessons of the integrated and complex model to meet people's needs. The comparison of two French logic of integrated planning and the “socio-economic” spatial planning logic, taking economic and commercial in Anglo-Saxon-style as the central element also contributes to unravel the “ideology and policies of the planning of public spaces” of the state of Vietnam, although scientifically, the boundary between these two planning logic has now almost been blurred.

Keywords:

Public space planning; legal documents on public space planning; traffic space; spiritual space; entertainment and entertainment space; integrated logic; People's needs.