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.
