WATERLINES: Can Saigon Grow Without Erasing Its Water Landscape?

What if Saigon could continue to grow without first erasing the landscape it is growing into?

SAIGON IS STILL GROWING. BUT INTO WHAT?

Ho Chi Minh City continues to expand beyond its consolidated urban core, increasingly encountering landscapes shaped by water, agriculture and low-density settlement.

South of the metropolis, this condition becomes particularly visible. Rivers, canals, cultivated land and dispersed communities form a territory whose apparent emptiness can easily be interpreted as land waiting for development.

But it is not empty.

It is already an environmental system. Water moves through it. Agriculture occupies it. Communities inhabit it. Vegetation, soil and seasonal hydrology continuously shape its ecological structure.

The question is therefore not simply how this territory can accommodate urban growth, but whether growth can occur without first erasing the landscape it is growing into.

THE LANDSCAPE IS NOT THE SPACE LEFT BEFORE THE CITY ARRIVES

Urban expansion often begins by simplifying the territory it encounters.

Water is channelled or filled. Agricultural land is subdivided. Existing ecological continuity is fragmented. Road infrastructure establishes a new geometry, and development parcels follow.

Nature may eventually return — as parks, landscaped streets, waterfront promenades or planted architecture — but only after the original environmental structure has largely been replaced.

Waterlines explores the opposite sequence.

Instead of asking how the landscape can be adapted to accommodate the city, it asks:

What if the city adapted itself to the landscape?

WATER AS THE FIRST INFRASTRUCTURE

Waterlines begins with what is already there.

Saigon South is crossed by an extensive network of rivers, canals and smaller waterways. Rather than treating this hydrological structure as an obstacle to development — something to fill, straighten or bypass — the project considers it the primary framework around which future urbanization could be organized.

Water is therefore not conceived as scenery.

It becomes ecological infrastructure, mobility infrastructure and spatial structure at the same time.

Existing waterways define where development should occur, where land should remain open, how ecological corridors can connect, and how alternative forms of movement can operate across the territory.

The city does not determine the water system.

The water system begins to determine the city.

FROM WATER NETWORK TO URBAN STRUCTURE

Once the existing water network is treated as infrastructure, a different logic of urbanization becomes possible.

Waterlines does not begin by drawing a new road grid and dividing the territory into development parcels. It begins by identifying the systems already operating across the landscape: waterways, agricultural land, vegetation, existing paths and dispersed settlements.

These elements form the framework within which new development can occur.

New settlements are therefore conceived as clusters within the landscape rather than a continuous urban fabric imposed over it. Existing waterways remain connected. Agricultural land can remain productive. Ecological corridors can extend across the territory, while new mobility follows and connects the existing structure.

The objective is not to prevent urbanization.

It is to change what urbanization follows.

SETTLEMENT WITHIN THE LANDSCAPE

Waterlines does not imagine a territory without development. It imagines development occupying a different position within the hierarchy of the landscape.

Instead of producing a continuous urban fabric, new settlements are concentrated into clusters located within the ecological and hydrological structure already established.

Waterways remain connected. Agricultural land continues to operate between settlements. River parks and ecological corridors penetrate the inhabited areas rather than surviving as isolated fragments around them.

Density therefore becomes a tool: building more compactly in selected locations can allow larger portions of the territory to remain open, productive and ecologically connected.

The result is neither countryside preserved outside the city nor nature inserted inside conventional urbanization.

It is an attempt to make settlement one component of a larger living system.

MOVING WITH THE LANDSCAPE

If water defines the structure of Waterlines, mobility should reinforce that structure rather than overwrite it.

Instead of relying on a dominant road network, the project proposes a lighter and more distributed system of movement: local streets, walking and cycling routes, bridges, and water-based transport operating together.

Canals become not only ecological corridors, but part of everyday movement. Paths follow waterways and green spaces. Connections between settlement clusters cross the landscape without requiring every journey to be organized around the car.

This changes more than transportation.

When mobility occupies less land, less ground needs to be paved, ecological continuity becomes easier to preserve, and the relationship between settlement, water and public space can become much more direct.

Mobility does not cut through the landscape.

It becomes part of it.

A PRODUCTIVE LANDSCAPE

Agriculture is not treated in Waterlines as land waiting for a more profitable urban use.

It is part of the existing territorial system — shaping the landscape, maintaining open ground and contributing to the relationship between settlement, water and ecology.

Rather than replacing productive land with continuous development, Waterlines explores how agriculture could remain embedded within an urbanizing territory: between settlement clusters, along waterways and as part of larger open-space networks.

This creates a different relationship between city and countryside. The two are no longer separated by a clear edge, nor does one simply replace the other as the metropolis expands.

Productive landscapes can coexist with new communities, while also maintaining permeability, reducing the amount of continuously urbanized ground and preserving part of the territory's existing identity.

Urban growth does not necessarily require the disappearance of productive land.

NATURE AS A CONNECTED SYSTEM

In Waterlines, nature is not conceived as a collection of parks inserted between development parcels.

The existing waterways provide the basis for a continuous landscape structure. Riverbanks, wetlands, vegetation and productive land can be connected into a network extending across the territory and through the new settlements.

This continuity matters because isolated green spaces and a connected ecological system are not the same thing.

River parks can simultaneously become ecological corridors and public landscapes, while waterways connect different environments across scales. Instead of separating urban development from nature, the project attempts to maintain a continuous relationship between settlement, water and living systems.

This also changes the role of public space. Open space is no longer simply what remains between buildings or a recreational layer added after development. It becomes part of the environmental structure that organizes the territory.

Nature is not inserted into the city.

The city is inserted into a living landscape.

FROM A VISION TO A METHOD

Waterlines was conceived as a speculative project for Saigon South. But the question behind it extends far beyond this particular territory.

The project began with a simple inversion: instead of designing urban form first and adding environmental systems afterwards, begin with the environmental systems and allow urban form to respond.

Looking back at Waterlines today, this principle has become even more important to my work.

In The Ecological City, I argue that urban ecology cannot be reduced to the presence of trees, parks or green buildings. It depends on the relationships between ground, water, vegetation, mobility, urban form, public space and the different scales at which these systems operate.

Waterlines anticipated part of this thinking.

It attempted to preserve hydrological continuity, connect landscapes, integrate productive land, reduce the dominance of road infrastructure and concentrate settlement rather than allowing development to continuously consume the territory.

It was not a complete ecological model. Nor was it intended as a blueprint to be reproduced elsewhere.

It was an experiment in changing the order in which we design the city.

Landscape first. Systems second. Urban form as a consequence.

CAN SAIGON GROW WITHOUT ERASING ITS WATER LANDSCAPE?

Waterlines does not provide a definitive answer.

Saigon will continue to grow. Its southern territories will continue to face enormous pressure for infrastructure, housing and development. The question is not whether these landscapes should remain frozen in time.

The question is what should survive transformation — and what should determine it.

Rivers, canals, wetlands, productive land and vegetation are often perceived as constraints on urbanization: irregularities to be corrected before the city can arrive.

Waterlines proposes another possibility.

What if these systems were understood as the starting structure of the future city?

Development could still occur. Density could increase. New communities, infrastructure and mobility could emerge. But they would be required to negotiate with a territory that already has a structure, rather than beginning from an imaginary blank slate.

Perhaps the ecological city does not begin by asking:

How much nature can we put into the city?

but:

How much of the living landscape can remain capable of structuring the city?

FROM WATERLINES TO THE ECOLOGICAL CITY

Waterlines explores one possible answer to a much larger question: how can cities grow as part of living systems rather than progressively replacing them?

That question became one of the foundations of my book, The Ecological City, where I move beyond a single speculative project to examine the relationships between water, soil, vegetation, mobility, urban form, public space and scale — and introduce the Ecological Diagnostic Framework (EDF) as a method for reading and designing cities through those relationships.

If Waterlines is the vision, The Ecological City is the framework behind the question.

Explore the complete framework →