From Blueprint to Block: The Ministry of National Development Reads Ho Chi Minh City’s Living Playbook

Singapore’s Ministry of National Development shapes how one of the world’s most admired cities is planned, built and lived in. When it sends its future leaders abroad to learn, the destination has to earn it. So how do you teach a rising generation of planners what a fast-growing Southeast Asian city actually feels like at street level?

We don’t; we show them. Saigon Social designed a curated study walk through District 1, where Ho Chi Minh City writes its own development playbook block by block, and its next generation of leaders read it firsthand.

The client’s brief

The Ministry of National Development arrived with a demanding remit: not a sightseeing tour, but a working study of how a fast-changing city actually gets made.

• Show how a city reinvents its own building stock: Give future planners a first-hand read on mixed-use development and adaptive reuse, and on the tension every growing city faces between preserving old fabric and building for what comes next.
• Prove that placemaking is more than public space: Demonstrate how public space, community life and F&B combine to make a district somewhere people genuinely want to be, the part of city-making that rarely survives a PowerPoint slide.
• Decode how commerce and the metro reshape movement: Unpack how commercial districts, street-level retail, consumer behaviour and metro development are redrawing where a city’s people gather, spend and move, in real time and at real scale.
• Turn a study visit into genuine two-way exchange: Secure a candid, senior-level dialogue between Singapore and Vietnam on large-scale urban development, sustainable planning and the future of urban centres, not a scripted briefing.

What we did

Instead of a briefing room and a slide deck about Southeast Asian urbanisation, we put the city itself on the itinerary and let it do the teaching.

Walking the blocks where old buildings get a second life

We led the group through District 1’s mixed-use fabric and into adaptive-reuse buildings, where ageing apartment blocks now hold independent cafés and bars stacked floor by floor. This gave them exactly what the brief asked: a first-hand read on how a fast-moving market reinvents its own building stock, preserving old structures while building for what comes next.

Showing how public space, F&B and community make a place worth staying  

We walked the public spaces and street life that hold the district together, showing how F&B, pedestrian corners and everyday community rhythms turn raw square metres into a place with pull. This was the placemaking the brief wanted made visible, the part that rarely survives a slide, felt on foot rather than described in a deck.

Tracing how retail, the crowd and the metro rewrite the map 

We traced how commercial districts, street-level retail and consumer behaviour shape the way the city grows, and how metro development is redrawing where people gather, spend and move. The group decoded it in real time and at real scale, on the streets where it’s happening rather than in a case study about it.

An audience with the people building the next city

The finale delivered the two-way exchange at the heart of the brief: an exclusive session with Leo Nishimura, Executive Director of BECAMEX TOKYU, on a live building site. He took the group through large-scale urban development, sustainable city planning and the making of future urban centres. Singapore and Vietnam traded notes candidly, senior to senior, on the ground where a new city is rising.

Planning a delegation that needs to come home with more than photos and a folder of slides? Saigon Social builds study tours you can only take on foot, through the adaptive-reuse blocks, hidden F&B corners and street-level life of District 1, guided by experts who know which door to knock on and which street tells the real story. Let’s design a study tour your leaders will still be talking about.

Image: BLOOMBERG