Across the globe, urban areas are rapidly expanding, and now the majority of the world’s population lives in cities. Peri-urbanization, a specific form of urbanization characterized by rapid and fragmented growth, is also increasing rapidly, especially in developing countries. By 2030, it is anticipated that peri-urban areas in East Asia will expand by 200 million people, or 40% of total projected urban population growth, making these areas one of the largest and most significant land cover changes in the region. Characterizing and understanding the peri-urbanization process is critical, as these transition zones have a wide range of impacts across multiple scales, including local effects on farmer livelihoods, regional impacts to economic development, fragmented governance, as well as detrimental environmental impacts such as increased air and groundwater pollution, loss of native vegetation, and decreases in biodiversity.

This study aims to document and analyze the rates, locations, and patterns of urbanization, peri-urbanization and cropland loss in and around Ho Chi Minh City in recent decades by answering three primary research questions:

1. What factors have driven urban expansion and peri-urbanization in Vietnam between 1990 and 2012?
2. How have patterns of urban expansion and population change shifted over the last two decades, and how much of new land development has occurred in peri-urban areas?
3. How do changes in urban land compare to changes in population distribution across the region at the commune level?

To investigate these research goals, this research combines commune-level Vietnamese census information, dense time stacks of Landsat satellite data (1990 – 2012), and several spatial measures to quantify urbanization and peri-urbanization in the greater Ho Chi Minh City metropolitan area from 1990 to 2012. The results indicate that 660.2 km2 of cropland was converted to urban uses (a near quintupling of urban land), while 3.5 million persons moved into the region, bringing the total population to nearly 12 million by 2012. The analysis also highlights the rapid, unplanned nature of peri-urban development: approximately one-third of new urban expansion occurs in areas >40 km from the core, with nearly 50% of population expansion occurring in communes classified as peri-urban. This pattern of growth is likely linked to policies meant to spur foreign investment, and we expect that these regions will continue to attract much, if not most, of the foreign direct investment (FDI) flowing to the region, since most large manufacturing enterprises now locate in peri-urban areas. Read more about the project

Figure 1. The greater Ho Chi Minh City area located in southern Vietnam (A). We define the study area as the 50-kilometer radius surrounding central Ho Chi Minh City, and classify urban expansion within this area from 1990 – 2012 (B). Examples of urban expansion in different commune types (based on prior commune classification by Saksena et al., 2014) are shown in (C).