Hybrid of Place-making and TOD a pattern for rail-based development in Ho Chi Minh City Vu Viet Anh 1 Abstract Ho Chi Minh City is on the pace of booming populations with over ten millions in Vietnam and it also have to face with urban sprawl development. Population increases, properties price rises, urbanization of suburban accelerates. It leads to spreading the distance of daily transportation and the mobility demand. The further distance, the more barrier to develop equally and comprehensively. Meanwhile, the urban rail transit has been “imported” to solve the city’s traffic jam and infrastructure overload. Therefore, most of the research on rail-transit at the moment in Ho Chi Minh City spent on the finance, technical aspect of the rail construction but less attention to the parallel development in terms of social and spatial dimension. Rail seems to become a simple addition to the existing urban space. Despite of all these barriers, the attraction of a symbolic transport indicated development of a city, rail-transit has had very large positive response from the real estate market though it is still in the first line construction period. A large number of properties has been developed since the last two years under the umbrella of transit-oriented development model (TOD). At the moment, in Vietnam, TOD is widely considered as a magic wand tools to ensure the quantity of rail transit users. But in reallity now, it just like a capitalization to the properties developers, because most of the new developments get advantages from higher F.A.R basing on TOD model to build only luxury high-rise condomium while take less attention to enhance public space and the whole human urban environment. The way we develop along the rail lines now like the fruits has been picked before ripping but the trees are lacked of the nutrition. Originally, the nature of transportation is to connect one starting point to another destination, in short is connecting places. The shortest distance to reach a destination via rail-transit is to make the station areas become "places". Hence it comes to a concept that the rail-based development actually is making places. The objective of a rail station area plan is to make it a place for diverse people. The objective of a urban rail line is to make it a linear of diverse places. The objective of a urban rail system is to make it a network of places. The conceptual pattern for rail-based development is built basing on the theme of making- place. All station areas have to integrate three types of place and each station have different structure of place type, but have one dominant type of place. From the pattern of place of each station area, we could define the quantity and quality of residents, jobs, and area of functional spaces, then come to more detail dimension of urban design like F.A.R, building height, building appearance, etc and also many other solutions of harmonious and sustainable process, maintenance, and finance. Keywords: TOD, place-making, rail-based development, Ho Chi Minh City 1. TOD – which approach for Ho Chi Minh City? Ho Chi Minh City is on the pace of booming populations with over ten millions in Vietnam. In the same situation with other megacities in developing countries, Ho Chi Minh City also have to face with urban sprawl development. Population increases, properties price rises, urbanization of suburban accelerates. It leads to spreading the distance of daily transportation and the mobility demand. The further distance, the more 1 Ho Chi Minh City Universiy of Architecture E-Mail: anh.vu@uah.edu.vn