Informing Urban Climate Change Adaptation Through a Comprehensive Understanding of Recent Settlement Patterns and Population Dynamics in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Coastal cities in Southeast Asia, particularly Ho Chi Minh City, are significantly vulnerable to natural hazards. This vulnerability, coupled with the city's formidable growth dynamics, places increasing pressure on policymakers and planners to adapt the city to current and future risks. The interaction of climate change, continued urbanization and peri-urbanization, and creeping environmental changes is expected to intensify these risks. This chapter explores how recent scattered and dispersive patterns of peri-urbanization have developed at the local scale in relation to the broader urban area, creating a hybrid structure with fragmented urban and rural characteristics. Through a block-level scale analysis of Ho Chi Minh City's urban development for the dynamic period 2010–2020, the structures, scales, processes, and changes in land-use of recent urbanization are identified. The results visually show the predominant growth challenges of planned urbanization into peri-urban areas and multiple risk generation. Finally, the paper provides a view of the loss of multifunctional adaptation space and the spatial planning constraints of managing future risks in such a dynamic context.