More green and water spaces should be added to the sketches of urban projects in Hanoi so as to make the city a good place to live, Vietnamese and Swiss architects and urban developers said at a workshop in Hanoi on Jan. 28.

The seminar was part of the project “Globalisation and urban forms in Hanoi ”, which runs from 2009-2010 with the funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation. The project is jointly conducted by Switzerland ’s University of Neuchatel , the Institute of Social Sciences , University of Construction , the Institute of Urban Planning and Architecture and the Construction Magazine of Vietnam.

Dr. Blaise Dupuis from University of Neuchatel said a recent survey shows that ordinary people in Hanoi find the city messy and polluted and the traditional values associated with the place need to be preserved. Hanoi should create distinguished characteristics and must enable the co-existence of old and new features.

Dupis said the survey that he and his associates had conducted on two groups of people – urbanisation and architecture experts and normal people - also found that poor regulation and underdevelopment of traffic systems make it hard for Hanoi to become a cosmopolitan city.

The situation is compounded as over the past 20 years, Hanoi has seen an upsurge in the number of migrants. The number of original Hanoians now accounts for less than five percent of the total population of six million.

Migrants donot have enough time to feel attached to the city as well as to understand and follow its standards, experts said. They added that despite impacts from the global integration process, Hanoi still manage to keep its lovely features alive./.