Ho Chi Minh City has green-lighted the construction of a 150-hectare park in District 12 in the northwest.
The multipurpose park, to be situated in Thanh Xuan and Thoi An wards, would increase the total area of parks in the city by a third from the current 491 hectares.
The district will draft detailed construction plans but has released no information yet about the timeline and cost.
There are only 102,000 trees in Vietnam's biggest city, which is home to 13 million people. That is a lot fewer than in Hanoi, which has over a million trees, or Singapore with two million.
The World Health Organization has recommended nine square meters of green area per person for a healthy urban life.
HCMC has lost its trees to rapid urbanization, uprooted or damaged to build roads and sidewalks and chopped down in large numbers to accommodate the metro lines.
Many of the city’s outlying districts, including District 12, currently have no public park.
Le Hoa Binh, director of the city Department of Construction, said at a conference in August that the city would need VND100-200 billion ($4.3-8.5 million) a year to develop 10-20 hectares of public parks.
