Banana Island (Bãi giữa sông Hồng in Vietnamese) is an island located in the Red River adjacent to the city of Hanoi and is home to the city’s most marginalized community. Currently, 30 low-income households, mostly domestic migrants who lack identification papers or stable jobs, struggle to make a living. Adding to this community’s vulnerability is a lack of access to public services such as waste management, running water, electricity, and healthcare. 

To avoid land conflicts with the local government, residents build floating homes of scrap materials. The one floating community house that provided space for meetings, education, and emergency shelter has recently sunk into the river following a storm.

The proposed project will have a double mission in (1) providing residents with a new Community House where they will be able to gather, and  (2) building capacity for the community to improve their own floating houses and surrounding public spaces by opting for a community participatory design+construction model.

Rather than repairing each individual floating house, the team wishes to build a more long-term and resilient capacity of self-repair and house-upgrading from the residents by providing them with both a replicable model (the community house) and new skills and training in basic construction but also sanitation and waste management.

In the long term, the goal is to improve living conditions for the vulnerable floating community on Banana Island through more sustainable practices and cooperation that includes community participation. 

With sustainable practices in mind and clear construction processes, the new community house would also serve as a prototype model for floating houses. This would allow residents of the community to learn to improve their respective houses through a better use of materials, assembly, construction, and house organization (in relation to waste management notably, but also water treatment and hygiene).

A more immediate result would be to build communities' capacity to design and repair their floating houses and public spaces in a more resilient and sustainable way, while inspiring new practices to change living habits and contributing to improving quality of life in the long run. Using the construction of the community house as an opportunity to train residents in simple but effective construction methods to improve resiliency of their own home (slower degradation, better resilience to weather conditions, etc.)

We strongly believe that community participation also improves community cohesion around a shared project. The experiences and results of this project will be used as a model to share with other organisations, and urban residents to mobilise their participation and contribution to make Hanoi more livable for all.

Think Playgrounds  is a social enterprise working on providing safe public spaces through community participation. Think Playgrounds has facilitated changing perceptions of public space design, construction and space management as well as promoting The Right to Play in various communities across Hanoi, including the floating community of Bai Giua, where work has already been done since 2016 in setting up an adventure playground and working with poor and low-income communities with effective workshops around co-design with community participation and capacity building.

Keep Hanoi Clean (KHC) is a social enterprise which aims to solve environmental problems and improve Hanoi’s urban sustainability by leading and inspiring the community on critical environmental challenges, raising awareness, and collaborating with citizens, organizations, and the government. Programs now address air, land, and water pollution and include plastics and solid waste impacts mitigation, beautification (cleanups, revegetation, artwork), and broad public awareness raising.

ECUE is a social enterprise with expertise on research, communication, advocacy and campaign on topics of public spaces, air quality, and inclusive city. ECUE has been working with local government, universities, NGOs, creative spaces and marginalized groups such as female migrant workers, ethnic minorities, LGBTIs and people with disability to encourage them to take part in the city development.