Trainer: Christine Larousse, urban planner
Trainees: 30 urban planners and architects from various national and provincial engineering institutes: Hanoi Architecture and Urban Planning Department, National Institute for Urban and Rural Planning (NIURP) of the Ministry of Construction, Hanoi Public Transport and Subway Development Authority, Hanoi Institute of Urban Planning.
Vietnamese professionals are keenly interested in urban landscape, given the low quality of the many development operations and real estate transactions taking place in suburban areas. They are faced with the question of determining at what point urban landscapes must be taken into consideration in the development of urban plans and how to get developers to apply the measures taken.
Ms. Larousse outlined the methodological considerations involved in handling urban landscapes and highlighted its multidisciplinary nature in France (making up teams of urban planners, architects and landscape engineers), which differs from the Anglo-Saxon urban design model. She emphasized the need to bring in the urban landscape issue at all levels of the city, doing so as far upstream as possible, in city master plans, in order to circumvent the need for later revamping of landscaping operations that lack internal coherence. These approaches were illustrated using concrete examples from Paris (Reuilly and Bercy quarters), Canada (Montreal urban area landscape plan) and Hanoi (integration of villages in the Tay Ho Tay project).
During the final two days, the trainees were divided into two workshop groups in order to do a diagnostic urban landscape analysis of the Old French Quarter in Hanoi and make recommendations for its preservation and showcasing. Their performance revealed that they had gotten a very good grasp of the skills transferred by the trainer. The training session also provided an opportunity for interchanges with the French landscape planner and her Vietnamese counterparts on the various concepts of Hanoi’s heritage and landscape in Western and Oriental cultures.