Ho Chi Minh City and Water-Based Spatial Morphological Transformation - Opportunities and Challenges

Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) is a city undergoing global transformations, influenced not only by local but also global economic, political and knowledge powers (Vu, 2010, 2013, 2021). The city's transformations, at different speeds and certain extents, applied to its different morphological layers (Bentley 2013). The sequences of changes are depending on their own life cycles, concurrent temporalities as years, decades, centuries, and millennia. Morphological analyses have helped understand how physical aspects of a city transformed by which mechanisms. This also enables the projections of foreseeable changes depending on certain scenarios. Urban spatial morphologies, as understood today, include three components or spatial dimensions: the physical (form), the activities (functions) and the meanings (intangible, meanings, memories, experiences). Using the urban morphological framework for analysis, the paper investigates the social, political, environmental and professional cultures of making spaces and places of Saigon HCMC: the opportunities and challenging contexts and morphological transformations in city's timeline of development, the analyses are supported by selections of some typical spatial examples. The paper concludes with some responses and recommendations for more contextual sustainable transformations of the city's distinctive morphological characteristics.