How Do We Support Local Economies?
Creating Compelling Destinations
The creation of every compelling destination begins with a vision. As designers, it’s our job to ask the right questions to tease out the details of each project’s unique vision and understand how to translate the intangibles of experience into the built environment. By thinking holistically and asking tough questions, we deliver our clients’ visions, so nothing is lost in translation.
Asking the right questions is about asking the questions that uncover the experiences people crave. People always come first.
How do we support local economies?
The creation of sustainable developments requires long-term thinking and planning on multiple levels including environmental, social and economic factors. As strategists, planners and designers, we evaluate ourselves against all three tenets of sustainability. When it comes to economic resiliency, we consider immediate ROI as well as financial return over time for investors and the community at large. Specifically, we want to know if the development or project we’re working on allows for reasonable profitability for investors, growth in value and will offer a range of economic spin-offs as a result, such as jobs and opportunities for commerce, trade and revenue generation.
The Hamlet Waterfront Residential development is an approximately 200-hectare site located south of the Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) urban area on the east side of the Saigon River. Because of its remote location, the site will likely start as a villa development area. The long-term plan is to create an active urban subcentre, largely self-sufficient with mixed uses including retail, employment activities, community facilities and a mix of housing types and densities.
This community planning model is part of the vision for HCMC as it grows and matures. Rather than a concentric, central business district-oriented urban structure, HCMC is based on a planning framework of urban districts that are connected and integrated in terms of large infrastructure in the city, but also functions as independent communities with individual urban design characteristics within their respective community identities. The community is planned to function independently and to provide a full range of urban services, employment opportunities and residential types that will allow it to function as a self-sustaining development.
