From Eco to Technological City and Back - An Eco-Smart Urban Spatial Structure for Phan Rang-Thap Cham City, Ninh Thuan Province, Vietnam

The increasing urbanization since the Second Industrial Revolution has partly resulted in Climate Change (CC). The CC makes weather events more extreme. Extreme Drought and Flood Coexistence (DFC) are costly and lasting in Ninh Thuan, the coastal Province in the centre of Vietnam. Theoretically, the two emerging concepts relevant to the interrelationships between cities and CC are ‘Adaptive City’ and ‘Smart City’. The first applies ecological science to making a city ecologically adaptive; the second uses technological methods in making a city technologically adaptive, which have been called ‘smart city’. This study aims to bridge the two conceptual strengths to structure Phan Rang-Thap Cham City adaptive, so-called ‘Eco-Smart’. The methodology focuses on accessing raw data from Geological Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS), extracting the geospatial facts, figures and numbers of natural conditions and urban spatial transformations to examine their interrelationships over time. The key findings are that the transformations at the provincial level are ecologically adaptive to DFC, while the transformations at the city level of Phan Rang-Thap Cham must use technologies to be adaptive. An eco-smart solution for Phan Rang-Thap Cham’s urban space in Ninh Thuan Province, Vietnam, is structured based on the current state.