This event is co-organised with the Department of Geography and Environment.
This seminar focuses on a set of three pioneering joint-venture infrastructure projects which were put in place in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in the 1990s. These projects transformed a swamp with some low-yielding agriculture land into a green, vibrant, sustainable urban centre that now serves 250,000+ people with many newly created jobs and newly established educational institutions. The infrastructure projects include Tan Thuan Export Processing Zone, Vietnam’s first export-oriented industrial zone; Hiep Phuoc Power Plant, Vietnam’s first foreign invested Build-Operate-Own electric power generation plant; and Phu My Hung Saigon South Urban Development, Ho Chi Minh City’s southward urban expansion plan.
With first-hand experience over the past 35 years, Albert K. Ting, Visiting Professor in Practice in the LSE’s Department of Geography and the Environment, will discuss the history of these projects and their impacts and implications for sustainable urban development in Vietnam and beyond. His lecture will discuss how the Phu My Hung Saigon South Urban Development Project in Vietnam offers a possible solution to the challenges of accommodating new flows of migrants from the country to urban centres, striking the right balance between nature and humanity, and generating a virtuous cycle of sustainable growth in Vietnam and other countries across Southeast Asia and the Global South.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Albert K. Ting is a Visiting Professor in Practise at London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a highly accomplished practitioner of sustainable urban development in Asia, more specifically in Vietnam and in Taiwan. He is one of the principal shareholders of Phu My Hung (PMH) Development Corporation whose large scale, multi-decade urban development project in Vietnam has been chosen as one of the leading sustainable urban development projects in the world by Harvard Business School. He is a graduate of Harvard, MIT, and Federal Executive Institute of the United States Government.
Prof John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).
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