Highly Interactive Innovation District in Ho Chi Minh City

practice
Written By Justin Kollar

Location: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Client: City of Ho Chi Minh City

Status: Completed, Sasaki and EnCity

Awards:

  • Fast Company World Changing Ideas Awards, Finalist—Asia Pacific Category

  • Fast Company World Changing Ideas Awards, Honorable Mention—Spaces, Places, and Cities Category

Published Material:

In Eastern Ho Chi Minh City, the “Interactive Innovation District” reimagines Districts 2, 9, and Thu Duc (now Thu Duc City) as a connected landscape of laboratories, classrooms, factories, and neighborhoods rather than separate zones on a map. Anchored by universities, research institutes, and emerging tech hubs, the district is designed to help steer the city toward a knowledge-based economy in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. High-density clusters of research, development, and production are intentionally woven together with housing, public space, and social infrastructure so that collaboration is not an occasional event but an everyday condition. The aim is to generate high-value jobs, deepen economic resilience, and pair state-of-the-art infrastructure with supportive policy frameworks that allow new industries to take root while enhancing quality of life.

The site’s rivers and wetlands make it an ecological as well as economic frontier. This landscape is both an asset and a vulnerability, exposed to recurrent flooding and the long arc of climate change. Resilient design is therefore central to the project: sustainable water management, natural flood barriers, and green infrastructure are treated not as add-ons but as structuring elements of the district. Transit-oriented development, shaded public realms, and accessible green corridors are planned to make the district attractive to researchers, professionals, and long-term residents alike, building an innovation ecosystem that is as attentive to environmental limits as it is to technological ambition.

Regional Development Framework

Project Concept and Context

Illustrative Representation of the Urban Design

Flood Risk and Urban Expansion Context

Hydrological Context

Key Challenges

Climate Change and Resilience

Located outside Ho Chi Minh City’s flood infrastructure, the HIID boundary requires strategies to manage internal flooding as open spaces are developed. Key climate challenges—flash flooding, tidal flooding, urban heat, land subsidence, and saltwater intrusion—affect water quality, biodiversity, and resilience. To address these, robust standards, monitoring, and protection of green spaces are needed. Converting agricultural land to real estate reduces hydrological capacity and raises flood risk, highlighting the need to balance development with ecological resilience.

Tidal Flood Risk

Strategies for a Landscape Approach

To preserve HIID’s hydrological function, prevent pluvial flooding, and meet HCMC’s open space standards, planning must balance new development with ecological protection. Guidelines on open space typologies can support a diverse park system, while strategies should protect key ecological areas, improve blue-green networks, and integrate stormwater management from source to larger water bodies, including internal drainage and natural features. These strategies, grounded in ecosystem sensitivity and flood risk mapping, may be refined with further analysis to ensure resilient, sustainable development.

Rapid Landscape Classification

Justin Kollar
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