Developing public parks in Ho Chi Minh City: An opportunity for increasing water absorption to mitigate flood risk = Phát triển công viên công cộng tại Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh: Cơ hội tăng khả năng hấp thụ nước của đô thị nhằm giảm thiểu rủi ro ngập

Abstract

Public parks in cities, with most of their area being green areas, play an important role not only in balancing the living environment, but also in contributing to the minimization of flood risks through absorption and the storing of water. This creates the motivation to restore, maintain and develop green areas in inner cities, especially in centralised areas, which have a high level of urbanisation potentially associated with a shortage of such green-lands. This can be seen as an opportunity for Ho Chi Minh City, which saw an increase in green-lands around 23% from 2012 to 2018 as an initial development. Although this has contributed to an increase in the average rate along with the goals in different plans for urban development, the urban area continues to face an imbalance in green space between the central inner city area and new development districts, which can be seen as a critical area for attention, and which is focused upon in this paper. In fact, the area of public parks in HCMC are mostly quite small (mostly under 10ha), and rarely have large-scale water areas inside, in comparison with other public parks in the world. This has triggered an encouragement of creating more area or spaces for water in public parks, particularly in the existing in the centre and new parks to be developed in the future.