Urban development trends

Ho Chi Minh City now has 7.43 million motorbikes, putting serious pressure on its transport infrastructure, local media reported, citing the Department of Transport.    Compared to 2011, the number of new bikes registered in the city has increased by around 2 million, according to a Tuoi Tre ...

When Vu Thi Linh moved her family from their spacious rural home to a tiny rented room in Hanoi, she hoped her children would be able to get the education she never had.   The Linhs are among hundreds of thousands of people moving to Vietnam’s bulging ...

Ho Chi Minh City is seeking the prime minister’s approval to spend VND9.85 trillion, or more than US$443 million, on a massive anti-flooding project that will include a seven-kilometer riverside embankment.  Keep reading ...

More roads in Vientiane and the provinces are being built or upgraded using concrete rather than asphalt as the authorities recognise its durability against the ravages of wet weather and heavy trucks. An official from the Vientiane Public Works and Transport Department, who asked not to ...

Phnom Penh’s lack of a clear master plan for development has hurt its communities and allowed private developers to collude with authorities to push out poorer residents, speakers at a land rights conference said on 4 November. Ee Sarom, executive director of STT said that as ...

Desperate residents along Khlong Prawet Burirom have threatened to take their grievance over a severely polluted canal to the highest levels of government. Suchin Kummanee, head of the Sangkharacha community in Lat Krabang district along Khlong Prawet Burirom said almost 20,000 residents in 20 communities ...

Supplying water to the estimated 100,000 residents of a new housing development in Yangon could put supplies to the rest of the city at risk, the Myanmar government has warned. Next year, the first 6000 of the 19,600 apartments now being built in the Ayeyarwun and Yadanar ...

Phnom Penh authorities on 27 October offered an economic argument for ministries, motorists and citizens to respect traffic laws, claiming that congestion-related costs in the capital were setting the country back about $6 million per month. Speaking at a national seminar, Effects of Traffic Congestion on Environment ...

Only 60 percent of Yangon’s water needs are being met, officials say. The Yangon City Development Committee is hunting for fresh sources, even as work proceeds to fix leaky pipes that lose half the water they are supposed to carry. The search for water security is part ...

Yangon will need around 75,000 new apartments to be built each year to accommodate the city’s growing population, but contractors are struggling to come anywhere close to this target. More than 330,000 people migrate to Yangon each year from elsewhere in the country, but formidable challenges ...