City Resilience in the Mekong Delta : SOC TRANG Resilience Assessment - Technical Study

Soc Trang city has been formed at the hybrid intersection of canals and roads and is incorporated with the coastal sand dune morphology surrounded by a constantly transformed productive landscape. The canal network geometry of the South Hau river presents a great number of lines, intersections and convergences, with even five and seven- junctures at some points. Roads were built parallel to the canals and rivers, beginning during the French colonial era. The main regional connecting roads to Soc Trang (National road No1A to Can Tho and No1 plus No60 along the eastern coast) took advantage of the already higher, safe ground land, built along the canal or through the dune settlements along the coast, accelerated the modernization and urbanization along. At the location of hybrid waterway and road concurrent geometries, the city has formed with particular shape with the combination of colonial setting and the dune’s settlements. The city has been shaped as an intersection of canals and roads, the combination of canal network geometry, colonial setting, coastal sand dune and road settlement morphology as well as the new logic of urban extension. The city form has been created through time by overlapping and interacting amongst multi-layers of social features, culture life styles, historical transformation, modernization and industrialization. Its combined characteristics can be found in different social layers, soft-hard water layers, road-street layers, traditional settlements and grid pattern layers, urbanization densification and extension layers. The infrastructure on the surrounding productive landscape with the 1st and 2nd ring roads has been built based on the master plan 2020 and largely shows fragmented development, rather than creating effective connectivity or conditions for economic achievement. In fact, different from the logic of the master plan, the linear development has extended to different directions, either urbanizing or connecting to existing settlements and new vast planned industrial and residential areas. The major potential for extensions of the city are the directions to connect with My Xuyen, An Nghiep, and the old airbase. The logic of development in Soc Trang rather shows an open system than the closed framework as the proposed ring roads of the existing master plan. The existing development and extension have still allowed productive landscape and water urbanism and rural, urban linkages, which should be taken as consideration in the revised master plan. Therefore, the urbanization with soft - hard infrastructure provisions for urban - rural linkages should be incorporated to support for the movement of the fresh economy into brackish economy of Soc Trang city and the province in the new context of climate change and SLR.