Urban Green Areas – their functions under a changing lifestyle of ...

After that Hanoi citizens become more involved in the further planning process (see Table
1.3). The master plan and several detail plans are made available to the public in a public
exhibition. This step permits a degree of public participation. There are three groups of
participating people:
The people directly affected by the new plans: In general they usually restrict
themselves to complaining about the loss of their private property or other existing
benefits which might be taken away by the new plan.
any “normal citizens” can give their comments only very “unprofessionally” due to
their lack of experience with such planning processes (often it is difficult to understand
from their comments what they would like to change or to point out).
Currently there are only few people (scientists, planners, managers, and other well
educated people) who are able to discuss the draft of the plans well.
We observed comments by residents of Hanoi since 2000 and the typical complaints that
people make about property loss resulting from the government’s land use projects. The
most common complaint is that those projects take private land with inadequate
compensation. For example, in an urban public space management and development
conference in Hanoi, November 17 th , 2011, a participant from the authority of Tay Ho
district, where dykes and a concrete road by the West lakeshore were to be constructed,
reported that the households located by the lake do not want to move, refuse compensation
money and thus delay and the project. Their resistance was spurred by the fact that the
property value of other house-owners behind them was increased by the new road, while
the compensation offered to them was lower than the current value of their property on the
free market.
The management of the participation process is not transparent. The transparency index,
which shows the prevalence of corruption ranks countries into six levels (high, transparent,
semi, low and opaque) placed Vietnam in the low transparency group at rank 76 of 81
countries examined in 2010, (LASALLE 2010: 5). This indicates the need for considerable
improvement in the transparency of the planning process.
The guidelines for the planning process do not determine how the public feedback from the
public presentations is to be processed. There is no provision for public presentation of
revised plans which means that the public do not know whether or how their comments
have been considered. In fact since there is no requirement for a political decision of
people’s committee on a revised plan, the wide spread public view is that most comments
are ignored. This unsatisfying situation could be remedied by publishing revised plans that
show where changes have been made.
In the implementation phase, there are two forms of financing infrastructure for projects in
Vietnam, namely BT (Building-Transfer) and BOT (Building-Operate-Transfer). The BOT
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