With regard to the Hanoi region master plan, a cooperation partnership agreement between IMV, the Hanoi People’s Committee and the Ministry of Construction designated the Île-de-France Region and IMV to carry out a second opinion appraisal of the plan. The ministry’s Urban Development Agency (UDA) turned the master plan over to an American-Korean consortium Posco-Perkins and Eastman-Jina (PPJ), associated with the Vietnam Institute of Architecture, Urban and Rural Planning (VIAP) and the Hanoi Urban Planning Institute (HUPI).
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Talk sessions with UDA
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The Île-de-France Region and IMV, on the one hand, and the Australian design office Worley Parsons, on the other hand, conducted two independent second opinion studies. The aim was to give policy makers independent views on the study’s quality and enable the formulation of recommendations to improve the plan’s final content. The Hanoi master plan was to have received the final stamp of approval by the prime minister of Vietnam in time for the Hanoi millennium celebrations in October 2010.
For the master plan review, IMV has the expert assistance of Île-de-France Region’s Sustainable Development Unit (Unité d’aménagement durable - UAD) and the Paris Region Urban Planning and Development Agency (IAU-îdf), which made available a team of five highly qualified specialists (J.-C. Gaillot, V. Mancret-Taylor, V. Fouchier, A. Rossi and N. Rolland), a team well grounded in the exercise of big city planning, given its assignment to draw up the Île-de-France Region master plan.
The tripartite partnership agreement between the Region, the Ministry of Construction and the Hanoi People’s Committee was signed on January 19, 2010 and followed up by three different missions.
The first mission enabled the members of the Île-de-France Region’s Sustainable Development Unit to make an initial appraisal of the draft master plan, to go on a number of on-site visits and to share in talk sessions with a number of officials from departments under the Hanoi People’s Committee and various ministerial agencies. The second mission involved J.-C. Gaillot, who made a chapter by chapter review of the report with the help of the IMV team. He submitted his evaluation findings at the second meeting of the National Evaluation Committee on February 26, 2010 in the presence of the minister of Construction, the chairman of the Hanoi People’s Committee, the deputy ministers of Defence, Planning and Investment, Transportation, Agriculture, Natural Resources and Finance, as well as a representative from the prime minister’s office. This second mission was also an opportunity for V. Fouchier to step in and look into issues of spatial organisation. The final mission was conducted by J.-C. Gaillot, with the support and local relay of the IMV team. The final assessment report from the Île-de-France Region consultants was submitted by L. Pandolfi at the third meeting of the National Evaluation Committee on September 7, 2010.
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The third meeting of the National
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This appraisal process enabled a promotion of the skills base in urban planning possessed by the Île-de-France Region professionals with our Vietnamese partners. The French experts used these interchange opportunities to highlight their expertise in fields such as the development of new cities and in determining priorities and structuring mechanisms for transport networks. The experience that the experts gained in Île-de-France coupled with their international perspective made it possible to provide enlightenment and constructive criticism regarding the phasing in of the upcoming urban planning operations, a key input being the genuine added value imparted to the chapters on urban transport, on architectural and urban heritage protection and enhancement, as well as on the development of specific regulations for implementing the master plan. The directions given and advice shared by the l’Île-de-France experts were taken on board in the planning document approved in July 2011 by the Prime Minister.