An Thuong Tourist Streets is a neighbourhood on My Khe Beach in Da Nang. Despite the cringe name, this area is a model for how to build a walkable and vibrant beach neighbourhood. Other cities in Southeast Asia should take note.
An Thuong Tourist Streets
The An Thuong Tourist Streets (also referred to as An Thuong Street, An Thuong Quarter, and the Western Quarter) is in My Khe ward of Ngu Hanh Son district in Da Nang.
An Thuong is not an official administrative area, so there isn’t a precise boundary. The core of the An Thuong Tourist Streets is a gridded row of streets from An Thuong 1 to An Thuong 4.
These streets are marked as walking streets on the map, though they are not fully pedestrianised.
[An Thuong 2 Walking Street.]
There are numerous streets named An Thuong in the surrounding area within the roads of Vo Nguyen Giap, Phan Tu, Ngu Hanh Sơn, and Nguyen Van Thoai.
This article is about all of the An Thuong streets, so I will from here on refer to it as the An Thuong area.
[Map of An Thuong area in Da Nang.]
It is within this block that Da Nang inadvertently built a vibrant beach neighbourhood. I say inadvertently because the modus operandi for new urban areas in Vietnam is to give entire neighbourhoods to a single developer. An Thuong works because it has small blocks developed by individual owners.
[Typical Vietnamese residential tube houses on An Thuong 40.]
An Thuong is a new urban area in the literal sense. There was nothing here in the year 2000, which is remarkable when you consider that My Khe Beach often ranks on lists of best beaches in the world. This area was military land before it was redeveloped, thus this valuable beachfront land was not developed.
To get an idea of how undeveloped this area was, here is the Google Earth archive satellite view from 2003 (the oldest record on Google Earth).
[An Thuong area in April 2002.]
Here is the same area on Google Earth from February 2024.
[An Thuong area in February 2024.]
Here is a timelapse of the An Thuong area from 2002 to 2024 (Google Earth skips the years between 2003 to 2009).
Most of the blocks have been filled in by now, though there are still some big blocks near the beach that are waiting to be developed.
I have been a frequent visitor to this area over the last decade, so I have been watching it grow over the years. One thing that I often think about is that there was nothing here 20 years ago, yet it already feels lived in. Compare this with cookie-cutter housing estates that never shake off the feeling of being a single-developer project.
[There was nothing here 20 years ago, yet it already feels lived in (An Thuong 38).]
An Thuong Tourist Streets is a cringe name, even if those inner pedestrian streets are touristy. Many of the An Thuong streets though are residential, so it’s not accurate to taint all of An Thuong as touristy or an expat enclave.
[Leafy neighbourhood vibes on An Thuong 35.]
I have written about building better cities in Southeast Asia, and the An Thuong area gets a lot of things right. There are also problems which could have been avoided.
What makes An Thuong work
Preplanned streets
Looking at the archived satellite images, the streets were laid out on a blank sandy canvas before anything was built. This is an unusual site for a beach neighbourhood in Southeast Asia, which tend to grow without any planning.
[Progress of An Thuong streets development in June 2009.]
Compare that with Canggu in Bali, which is one of the worst planned beach neighbourhoods in Southeast Asia. And by worst planned I mean no plan. This map of Canggu shows main roads that go to the beach, with former rice field lanes on either side. No one in the government planning department has thought to reserve land to build roads that run parallel to the coast (I have longer article about Canggu coming soon).
[Map of Canggu beach area.]
Another bad example is Pattaya in Thailand. There are lanes that connect Beach Road and Pattaya Second Road, but there is no way to travel between the lanes without going out to one of the main roads.
[Map of Pattaya beach area.]
Individual blocks
One of the reasons that the An Thuong area works is because there are individual blocks that anyone can build on. The city looks like a normal city with a variety of buildings. This is how a normal city should function. I say this because Vietnam’s coastal cities are not being developed in a normal manor.
Compare this with the new urban areas in Vietnam that are built by single developers. Here is a row of shophouses in a new urban area near Quy Nhon that was being built by a single developer.
[Abandoned beachfront projects like this plague coastal Vietnam.]
In Da Nang, if one investor goes bust, then there is one shophouse that is left abandoned. If a single developer of a new urban area gets into financial difficulty, then an entire street or neighbourhood of shophouses is left abandoned.
[An individual shophouse in An Thuong left to its own devices.]
A classic example of what not to do is Cocobay Da Nang. This new urban area sits midway between Da Nang and Hoi An, but not near any established urban area. The project featured big hotels surrounding an artificial shopping area. The project collapsed and it’s now boarded up, and investors are wondering if or when they will get their money back.
[Abandoned pedestrian plaza at Cocobay, Da Nang.]
There are of course building projects that have failed in the An Thuong area. The most high-profile project failure is the Holiday Beach Hotel. This project has stopped and started over the years, and it now appears to have partially opened. If this was anywhere else in Vietnam, the developer would have taken the entire seafront to build several towers. There is only one tower here, so one failure hasn’t completely blighted the entire area.
[Holiday Beach Hotel at the front of the An Thuong Tourist Area.]
Beach access
The great thing about the city beach of Da Nang is that there are no hotels on the beach side of the road. The beach in front of the An Thuong area is accessible to everyone. There is no walking down a narrow alley between resorts to access the beach.
Problems
While the An Thuong area is flourishing, it’s not without its problems.
Half-assed street grid and street naming
The beach area in Da Nang is now at the point where it is being compared with Miami Beach.
Miami Beach (and South Beach in particular) is a good model for how to build a walkable city by the sea. The South Beach area is gridded out, and the East-West streets are numbered in order.
[Map of South Beach Miami.]
The An Thuong area has streets that go up to An Thuong 42, but they are not laid out in a logical order. This is all the more maddening because it was a blank slate when they laid the streets out. They should have made a Miami-style grid with a logical sequence of street numbers.
Lack of parks
Considering that this is a new preplanned area, it is surprising that there are few parks and green spaces here. It’s as if the planners just assumed that the beach was enough for open space. Lack of consideration for urban parks is a problem across Vietnam.
Parks make for a better urban living, and they are also important for flood defence. If you look at the satellite image from 2003, this area of Da Nang is basically a big sand bar where rain water is easily soaked up. Now there is so much concrete and roads that there is nowhere for water to run off. The last few years have seen some intense flooding, coupled with more intense rains during the wet season.
Da Nang experienced its worst flooding ever in October 2022, with rapid urbanization blamed for high flood waters.
“More concrete buildings going up means more impervious surface area, resulting in excessive runoffs, as there is not enough soil left to absorb the water.”
The only park in this area is An Thuong Community Park at An Thuong 34.
There is a small park at An Thuong 41 next to the Community Park, but it has yet to be landscaped into a place to hang out at.
Sidewalks
Sidewalks that are hard to walk on are a nation-wide problem, not just in Da Nang. It’s one thing to retroactively fix the sidewalks of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, but if you are building a new city then it should be done right the first time.
The problem with the sidewalks here are the same everywhere in Vietnam. They have gutters that are sloped to easily allow motorbikes on, even if motorbikes shouldn’t be there. They should have made dedicated parking spaces, or make a law like Tokyo where you have to prove you have off-street parking for your bike/car.
There should have also been nature strips built into the sidewalks to act as water sponges (as referred to in lack of parks). Every extra square metre of concrete is one less square metre where water can be absorbed.
A Model for beach neighbourhoods in Southeast Asia
The An Thuong area isn’t perfect, but it’s miles ahead of other new urban areas in coastal Vietnam. For example, Phu Quoc has ruined itself by building replica European towns with shophouses that remain empty.
Instead of building hundreds of identical shophouses, Phu Quoc should have just gridded out an area next to Long Beach and let individuals build on it. Long Beach could have been as popular as My Khe Beach in Da Nang if they had of adopted a sensible development plan.
[Da Nang dodged a bullet by not building like this (Phu Quoc 2021).]
This small street grid approach should be adopted in other coastal cities across Southeast Asia. The more coastal cities I visit in Southeast Asia, the more I wonder why there aren’t compact and walkable neighbourhoods.
Other places in Southeast Asia would do well to emulate the An Thuong model in Da Nang.
[Leafy gridded street at An Thuong 36.]
An Thuong news
Over VND 100 billion poured into An Thuong Tourist Quarter expansion – [14/05/25]
“Following the approval of the Da Nang People’s Committee, more than VND 100 billion will be spent on implementing the second stage of the An Thuong Tourist Quarter Project.”
Well said, now you point it out I realise your observations are very accurate. I love this area.