Urban immigrant worker housing research and design for Da Nang, Viet Nam

• Current responses to housing millions of urban immigrants in Vietnam are inadequate.
• Worker housing in Vietnam typically does not meet minimum standards.
• Design criteria identified: affordability, sustainability, resilience, social needs.
• A prototype design tested inclusion of design criteria in existing planning context.
• The research and design indicates strategies for improved worker housing in Vietnam.

This paper outlines research and design for housing rural-to-urban migrants in Viet Nam. Foreign capital infusion has produced internal migration in developing nations given the transition from agricultural to industrial and service economies. Around 7 million Vietnamese are expected to relocate to urban areas by 2019 to seek entry-level employment in the industrial or service sectors, and will be challenged to afford housing meeting minimum standards. Finding a solution to housing urban immigrants is critical to stabilize the economy and help manage the movement, health, and welfare of people. In response, the Vietnamese government has implemented a low interest loans program to encourage apartment ownership for qualifying individuals.The authors led a team of students and lecturers in summer 2014 under the auspices of a Fulbright Specialist Grant in Urban Planning at Da Nang University of Science and Technology that researched and documented Vietnamese urban infrastructure, planning, housing, and construction. From these findings, housing design criteria were formulated, including affordability, sustainability, resilience, and social needs. A prototype housing block was designed to address the design criteria. The design shows a promising first step to find more optimal solutions to the current and ongoing Vietnamese workforce housing problem.