Floating Village Cua Van: Promoting Climate-Adaptive Ecotourism with Principles of Living Spaces

Ha Long Bay—the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site on Vietnam’s northeastern seacoast—is often considered one of the world’s most beautiful bays. This bay is also famous for many floating fishing villages where the people live together on the sea as a community. However, due to rapid population growth in the floating villages, the present situation shows lacks in urban planning, waste management and development of infrastructure. Ha Long Bay had suffered the pressure of environmental pollution and resource degradation. Since 2014, in order to protect the UNESCO World Heritage Site, the local authority has planned a project to demolish the floating villages and move these communities to the mainland. In fact, the demolition project has caused the loss of cultural heritage and a tourist attraction in Ha Long Bay. The goal of this study is to propose a sustainable concept of living space organization for Cua Van, the largest floating village in Ha Long Bay, in order to preserve, revive, and promote floating communities as a unique heritage culture and tourist attraction. Therefore, a detailed analysis of environment and socio-cultural, economic, architectural characteristics of Cua Van is provided in this study. The analysis does not only accumulate precious traditional values that need to be preserved and developed in the proposed concept but also illustrate its weakness that need to be addressed to optimally design the future sustainable floating village. Based on these studies, as well as on general principles of a sustainable floating community and promoting ecotourism, the study proposes a living space concept for Cua Van, including solutions to both a sustainable floating community adapting to climate change and ecotourism development. The proposed concept would ensure stable and permanent living on the water for water dwellers and reduce human-induced impacts on the environment as well as an increasing livelihood income by tourism development.