- Adaptation of the urban structure type approach for the vulnerability assessment of climate change risks in Ho Chi Minh City    1053 kb by    Moon, Kiduk | moonkidu@tu-cottbus.de    Short Outline The contribution is based on initial research experiences of the development of spatially explicit vulnerability indicators for the impacts of climate change on the high-dense urban area of Ho Chi Minh City using an Urban Structure Type approach. Abstract The contribution is based on initial research experiences in the development and application of GIS-based vulnerability indicators for the adaptation of a high-risk agglomeration area to the future impacts of Climate Change. The proposed concept based on the urban structure type approach, represents an interpretative method to integrate climate change risks with the information that can describe the exposure and sensitivity of high-dense built-up areas in Asian Megacities such as Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) in Vietnam. Different discipline-specific methodological approaches to assess the vulnerability of the ''urban environment'' to climate change risks require a commonly accepted spatial working basis, which ensures that the resulting heterogeneous investigations can be trans-disciplinarily integrated by using an adequate spatially explicit classification. Therefore an 'urban typology' concept was developed and will be used as a practicable method to organize the spatial order of the sensitivity of settlement areas in HCMC. The Housing-related 'urban typology' provides a uniform methodological and spatial framework for the different tasks within the interdisciplinary network of the research project. Climate change related urban adaptation decisions require a rational characterization of urban structural landscapes according to risk relevant features. The typology approach ensures that data integration of different sources with their original specific spatial/temporal resolutions and thematic contents can be operationally integrated in the GIS environment of the research-project. The concept of urban-typologies promises to deliver an integrated view of climate change specific problem areas to urban and environmental planners in a form that makes sense to them. Firstly it provides a unit of analysis that is attractive to each of them and further the urban typology creates clusters of residential areas with similar housing structures, service/infrastructure availability, socio-demographic components and climate change related risk and pressures which makes it possible to analyse commonalities and differences in urban adaptation strategies. Keywords Urban Structure Type, Adaptation, Climate Change Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2009: Low Carbon Cities   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper