One of Asia's most park-starved cities is turning prime real estate into public park

After decades in which prime downtown land went to high-rises and housing, Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City is changing course, setting aside some of its most valuable plots for parks and public space.

Every afternoon, after collecting her grandchild from primary school, Nguyen Thi Lan likes to take the child for a walk to cut down on screen time. It is rarely easy. Lan lives on Nguyen Tat Thanh Street in Xom Chieu Ward, formerly part of District 4, where parks and play space are scarce and the streets are crowded, dusty and often jammed.

She has been attached to the nearby Nha Rong port since childhood and watched it change. When the port moved to Hiep Phuoc, leaving dozens of hectares of empty land along the Saigon River, Lan hoped the site might one day become a park. She never expected it. The location was too valuable, she assumed, destined for towers and malls like everything else downtown.

For years she was right. In 2016 the city approved a Nha Rong-Khanh Hoi complex of more than 3,100 apartments, a shopping mall and service buildings on the riverfront. Under the detailed plan approved in 2015, barely 4% of the site was set aside for public parkland. A few hundred meters from the Nguyen Hue walking street and Bach Dang Wharf, it was one of the most coveted land banks in the city.

Then the plan was scrapped. On April 29 the city broke ground on the first phase of a project that will instead turn the roughly 39.5-hectare site into a riverside cultural park and public space. The full development carries investment of more than VND20 trillion (US$760 million), built by Sun Group under a build-transfer contract that draws no money from the state budget. About 2.5 kilometers of Nguyen Tat Thanh Street will be widened to eight lanes, with a new Tan Thuan bridge tying the center to the southern districts. The wish Lan had given up on is being built.

Xom Chieu Ward packs nearly 58,000 residents around just 29,250 sq.m of public greenery, about 0.51 sq.m each. "Most of the green space is scattered through residential areas and doesn't meet community needs," said Tran Thi Thanh Thao, chairwoman of the ward People's Committee. Converting the Nha Rong-Khanh Hoi site, she said, suits a city center where land for parks is vanishing.

The shortfall runs across the whole city. Ho Chi Minh City offers only about 0.7 sq.m of public park space per person, and the inner districts fare worse than that average, against a benchmark of 8 to 10 sq.m the city itself treats as the baseline for a livable urban area.

By international measures the gap is stark. Bangkok, often called park-poor in its own right, provides around 3.3 sq.m per person, and Tokyo and Seoul each offer more than 5, according to comparative studies of urban green space. A 2025 study of HCMC's park system judged its public open space among the lowest of any major city in the world, leaving the city near the bottom in Asia even as it sits under a thick canopy of street trees.

The riverfront park is one move in a broader campaign. HCMC Party Secretary Tran Luu Quang first raised the idea of reclaiming the port for public use in October 2025. The commercial value was enormous and the investor wanted to proceed, he said, but the city chose otherwise.

"The need for parks, greenery and open space in the central area is very urgent," he said. Among some 20,000 public assets now being inventoried, he added, land for greenery ranks just behind health and education.

The 4.3-hectare land plot at 1 Ly Thai To, which lay vacant for many years, has become a park and a memorial to Covid-19 victims, pictured on the morning of June 2, 2026. Photo by VnExpress/Giang Anh

The results are already visible. A 4.3-hectare lot at 1 Ly Thai To, idle for years, opened in February as a park and a memorial to Covid-19 victims. Plots at 8 Vo Van Tan, 135 Nguyen Hue, 2-4-6 Hai Ba Trung and 8-12 Le Duan have had their fences removed for temporary public use.

The push has reached the wards. Around the airport, Tan Son Nhat Ward, home to about 71,000 residents and many more daytime workers and patients, plans to turn plots once zoned for high-rises into parks.

"Residents today lack parks more than they lack apartments," said Le Hoang Ha, the ward's Party chief. A building earns money now, he said, but a park serves a neighborhood for decades.

Not everyone wants a wholesale shift. Le Hoang Chau, chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Real Estate Association, said redirecting prime land to parks is necessary but argued for selectivity rather than an outright ban on tall buildings. Some central plots, he said, could still hold major projects that meet high standards.

"It is not about closing the door to investors, but about choosing projects worthy of the special location of the city center," he added.

The deeper fix, planners say, is geography. Architect Ngo Viet Nam Son said cities win back public space only by building new centers outside the core. He points to Singapore, which spread growth to hubs such as Tampines, Jurong and Punggol rather than crowding its downtown, and still kept large tracts for parks and waterfronts. Bangkok has turned old industrial and riverside land into parks to ease heat and flooding.

"The lesson is not how many parks you build, but treating public space as essential infrastructure, planned from the start," said Doan Hong Duc of Ho Chi Minh City University of Transport.

For Lan, the math is simpler. After years of assuming the riverfront would never be hers to walk through, she may soon be taking her grandchild there.