The first-ever Da Nang Urban Development Forum took place in the city on Monday.  The event was jointly organised by the Da Nang People’s Committee, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), and Japan’s Yokohama City authorities.

The Director of the International Technical Cooperation Division, Policy Bureau in Yokohama City, Mr Tetsuya Nakajima, affirmed that his locality’s urban government system has been highly praised by the Japanese government.  He added that this had helped his city to promote cooperation with JICA and the Asia Development Bank.  He also pledged that the Yokohama authorities would give more technical assistance to Da Nang, as well as help it to attract more official development assistance (ODA), commercial loans and financial resources.

Da Nang - a modern and dynamic city

Meanwhile, JICA representatives noted that Da Nang is now seeing a fast rate of urbanisation, whilst the quality of the local urban services and natural disaster mitigation is still lower than expected.  They vowed that JICA would next year help the Da Nang authorities to make short and long-term plans through re-checking local urban development projects and incentive strategies, and the efficiency of use of local land resources.

Also at the event, the Director of the Da Nang Department of Investment and Planning, Mr Tran Van Son, stressed the urgency to promote better management of urban planning, improve traffic infrastructure systems, develop more urban utilities, and ensure sufficient financial resources for local urban development projects.  In addition, Mr Son suggested that the city’s authorities should accelerate urban restructuring and develop effective urban planning policies, as well as improve urban infrastructure and the performance of the local sea ports.  He also affirmed that Da Nang would boost bilateral comprehensive cooperation with Yokohama in the near future in order to reach the city’s future goals of ensuring sustainable socio-economic development and becoming an environmentally-friendly city.

Addressing the event, the Vice Chairman of the municipal People’s Committee, Mr Nguyen Ngoc Tuan, remarked that the forum provided the city authorities with an opportunity to learn about effective urban investment and management experience from Japan.  This will help the city to spur international cooperation, implement more public-private partnership (PPP) projects, and attract more ODA and foreign direct investment (FDI) flows into the city.

Vice Chairman Tuan also said he hoped that JICA and the authorities of the two localities will foster bilateral cooperative ties to boost integrated urban development, ensure effective financial management, and promote applications of the PPP investment model.  In addition, he said that he would like the Yokohama authorities to give more financial and technical assistance to Da Nang to ensure its sustainable development and to help it develop into a key urban area in Asia’s “smart” urban network in the future.