LAN3016Y F
Instructor(s): Ivan Valin & Natalia Echeverri
Meeting Section: L0101
Tuesday, 9:00am - 1:00pm, 2:00pm - 6:00pm; Friday, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

Overview:

Landscape Strategies for the Urbanizing Tropics will be the sixth in a series of studios that has taken students to work in Myanmar and Indonesia to explore the potential of landscape architecture and the role of natural systems in a region undergoing rapid development. In recent years, Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam’s largest metropolitan area, has released an ambitious new masterplan aimed at drawing a significant share of local and foreign capital into the region. The plan attempts to mold the expanding periphery into new urban cores pushing east and southward into the vast agricultural plains north of the Mekong delta. Large scale masterplans in Vietnam are mobilized through private developers and tend to be articulated in terms of a few megaprojects and the imaginaries of the globalized modern metropolis. Between the “Innovation Hubs” and beyond the investment corridors, most of HCMC’s peripheral zone is being shaped through small-scale, incremental land-change and development, forming a heterogeneous fabric of formal and informal settlements, industrial enclaves, and agriculture. These desakota landscapes are a characteristic feature of Southeast Asian urbanization and represent the lived experience of a majority of HCMC’s new urban residents. International planners and geographers warn that these regions will be casualties of the most immediate and extreme threats from climate change, but groups working on the ground document nuanced practices of resilience and adaptation that have the potential to recast our understanding of agency and expertise in this dynamic city.

Approach:

If we assume that current development trajectories are problematic, how might we frame an alternative way forward? Are there landscape planning approaches, design strategies, or material and technological interventions that might deliver an alternative narrative of development? Can landscape strategies and disciplinary approaches be useful tools to negotiate a changing and uncertain environment, and can they help structure more positive and more equitable outcomes for all human and non-human actors in the territory? This studio seeks to understand and document these practices of settlement, adaptation, and utilization within HCMCs periphery. Through a sequence of exercises including urban/territorial analysis, on-site ethnographic fieldwork, and scenario planning, students will ultimately develop a multi-scalar set of landscape responses for their chosen sites and development issues.

Travel:

A central part of this studio is a one-week site visit to Ho Chi Minh City, where we will meet Vietnamese students, work alongside professionals, speak with academics or government representatives, and interview residents of local communities. Tentative travel dates for the trip are to be confirmed, but are tentatively set for October 10th to 16th.