4.2 Urban Planning Adjustments in China
While Vietnam is launching various reform policies
since Doi Moi in 1986, China has developed the
socialist-oriented market economy since Reform and
Opening started in 1978. China with its growing socialist
market economy is similar to Vietnam not only in its social system, but also in its urban planning regime.
As shown in Table 1, the Chinese national and
urban planning systems have similar composition to
Vietnamese ones. In China, regional socio-economic
development plans are drafted on the basis of the plan for
national economic and social development, and regional
spatial plans are drawn up according to the regional
socio-economic development plans. Together with this
sort of centralized plan for socio-economic development,
it is found also in Vietnam that the national spatial plan
and the overall land use plan are formulated out of the
context of rural or urban planning. In this connection,
the fact that the overall land use plan of China is covered
by a division different from urban planning authorities
makes it difficult to coordinate spatial plans (Ye, 2008).
This difficulty is true for Vietnam.
As for Vietnam, the zoning plan newly introduced
by the Law on Urban Planning requires details at almost
the same level as the previous detailed plans of 1:500.
China also has two layers of planning system: general
planning and detailed planning. In both Vietnam and
China, the control of urban development is taken mainly
by the use of the detailed planning.
The detailed plan of China consists of two types:
project-oriented plan and control plan. The former refers
to detailed plans which an investor or developer prepares for its own specific plot and building(s). The latter
refers to detailed plans that relevant authorities or local
governments prepare to regulate land use and buildings
in a district (Shen & Ishimaru, 1999; Li & Sakamoto,
2003).
As a comparison with the Vietnamese planning
system, China’s project-oriented detailed plan and
control detailed plan have functions very similar to
Vietnam’s 1:500-scale detailed plan and the zoning plan,
respectively. Since its statutory establishment in 1991,
the control detailed plan in China has, through a series of
regulations to improve such plans, been able to control
urban development according to the changing social
situation.
Like the urban planning regime in Vietnam,
however, the actual management of urban development
in China shows that the control detailed plan has
institutional or operational issues such as the following:
(1) Statutory formulation or modification does not keep
up with the rapid pace of urbanization; (2) Too detailed
regulations restrict urban development; (3) Development
with continuity and rationality is not fully assured; and
(4) Urban design and other functions are not developed
enough to lead urbanization (Lu & Shi, 2009).
Then, to make a comparison with the application of
urban planning regime in HCMC, practices of the urban