Collective Imagining: Ha Noi 2030 Presentation Script


Hello everyone, thank you all for coming to this discussion hosted by Sum Suê and Ba-Bau AIR. It's nice to see a lot of people here. 

We have limited capacity, so well done for getting tickets quickly! We're hoping to have a really interesting discussion tonight.

We're going to talk for a minute now to explain why we put on this event, as well as the format of the evening, so please bear with us before the fun part.

This evening we're going to talk about our collective hopes and desires and map out a collective idea for Hanoi in 2030. For a lot of reasons, it's easy to feel disconnected from the future of the city that we all live in, but we hope after tonight that you'll feel empowered to get involved with some of the work people are doing to shape Hanoi for the better. We chose the year 2030 because this is one of the deadlines for the government city plan, as well as being an important year in the fight against climate change, when global emissions need to have decreased by 45% to prevent more than 1.5 degrees of warming. It's also not too far off for us to speculate on what our lives might be like: we're not talking about jetpacks and hover cars tonight, unless you're REALLY optimistic.

There are people here who have professional expertise in the realms of architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism, as well as produced research on these topics, and there are people here with no formal training. We just want everyone to know that their contributions are equally valued here and this is a space for everyone to discuss on equal terms.

We believe that the process of shaping the city needs to be open to everyone - this is something we can maybe discuss later, because I don't know if everyone agrees...

On the way in, everyone will have seen the map on the wall and will hopefully have been able to contribute to it. We've created a collaborative map here, an imagination of what our Hanoi is going to look like. We'll keep referring back to this to center our discussion. 

Before that, we're going to have a brief talk from us, Sum Suê, about the history of urban imaginings. We'll cover some of the different ways people have thought about the future of cities, both fantastical and mundane, to get everyone caught up with the context we're working in. We'll then hand over and have a few of minutes from some of our invited guests who are going to speak about urban projects they have been working on.

We'll have a group discussion following this. Please feel free to speak in English or Vietnamese and we'll keep everyone translated on the projection screen. It won't be perfect, but we do not have the funding to have live translators for everyone like the UN, we're doing our best.

At the end of our discussion, we'll wrap up and speak about where we might go next. After that, everyone please feel free to stick around and hang out and chat. We have some drinks and snacks and and we'd love for everyone to continue these discussions together or talk about other things if you want.