Vietnam has experienced rapid urbanization in the past years. It has now over 760 urban areas, rapid increase of urban population with more than 27 million people living in inner cities. Urban areas accounts for 70% GDP of the whole country. The comparison of budget revenue indexes shows that economic growth in urban areas reaches 12-15% on
average, 1,5 - 2 times the country’s common level. That shows the role and importance of urban development in the industrialization and modernization of our country.
The local authorities in Vietnam, including urban authorities, are organised into 3 levels:
province, town and commune with 63 administrative units at provincial levels, 698 ones
at town level and 11.112 at commune level. Currently, there are around 30.000 cadres of
urban authorities from Central to local levels.
However, the very rapid development of cities has brought difficulties, challenges for
management and administration of local authorities.
The capacity of urban management and development does not keep up with real demands and requirements. While there is a huge demand for recourses for urban development, the socialization, mobilization is still limited, causing the situation that many new urban areas are built with construction planning, infrastructure
investment not keeping up with demand. That has led to unsystematic development of many cities, cultural characters, typical features of the regions, human ecology features in urban planning and architecture are not distinctively reflected.
In order to overcome inadequacies of urban development process, besides enhancing
institution of development management; perfecting legal system, policies on planning, land use; creating conditions for mobilizing and exploring resources for investment, reform, urban management and development, the core issue is to improve capacity of local authorities at all levels to ensure adequate human resources to deal with demand and challenges of the urbanization process in Vietnam.
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