Urban Planning
Through planning work at VIUP and research on informal waste workers, I’m exploring how maps, policy, and technology connect to the people who live with their consequences.
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Journal & photo gallery
Unravelling the City
Photographs, memories, and the questions a map leaves open
Step inside-
Turning planning documents into working maps
At VIUP, I taught myself ArcGIS Pro and AutoCAD to digitize planning documents and spatial data. I created map layers ready for GIS analysis and editable CAD assets for planning work across departments.
I also examined spatial datasets to identify site constraints and planning considerations. Working between a document and a map made the task concrete: the information has to be clear enough for someone else to use.A map is a way of making a question visible.
What it includes—and what it leaves out—shapes
the conversation that follows.
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Looking at the trade-offs together
I brought together planning-policy documents and development studies for the Quang Ninh redevelopment project. I assessed the trade-offs between resource use, environmental concerns, infrastructure, and long-term spatial planning.
This is the part of urban planning that draws me in: several needs can be reasonable at the same time. Reading across the studies meant asking how a decision in one area might change the possibilities in another.Several needs can be reasonable at the same time.
Reading across them is how a decision starts to make sense.
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Asking what a smart city needs in practice
I contributed to research on smart cities and digital twins, evaluating technology proposals through deployment feasibility and community needs. My interest in computer science helped me approach the tools; urban planning gave me a different set of questions to ask of them.
What would it take to put an idea into use? Which needs would it serve? I’m interested in the point where a convincing technical proposal becomes a useful part of everyday life.The value of a technology becomes clearer
when we ask who can use it, and what it helps them do.
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Seeing the people inside a waste system
I supported a manuscript on inclusive waste governance and informal labour in Vietnam. Through literature review and data analysis, I examined how policy is implemented and how informal waste workers fit into the country’s changing environmental policy landscape.
The manuscript was being developed for intended submission to Urban Policy and Research. After the abstract was submitted, my supervising lecturer included me as a prospective co-author of the full manuscript.A city’s systems depend on work that can be easy to overlook.
I want the people doing that work to remain visible
in the plans made around them.
