ISTAR inaugurated
Vietnamese-Dutch Research and Training
A Vietnamese-Dutch collaboration programme on social-scientific training and research was formally inaugurated on 6 January 1998. Under this three-year programme that aims at capacity building at the National Centre for the Social Sciences and Humanities in Vietnam NCSSH, specific attention will be given to strengthening the training and research capacities of the Department of Urban and Community Studies at the Institute of Sociology, NCSSH.By Hans Schenk and Trinh Duy Luan
The programme, called Institutional Strengthening of Training and Research for the urban improvement of Hanoi and other cities in Vietnam (ISTAR), has been made possible and is financially supported by the Netherlands Government. It will be implemented with assistance of the Faculty of Environmental Sciences at the University of Amsterdam and other faculties at various Dutch universities.Major components of the programme include training and research. At the auxiliary level material support to upgrade library and computer facilities at the DUCS will be provided and a few fellowships for training abroad have been budgeted for. The training programme consists of four one-month courses of lectures each year, consisting on average ten three-hour lecture sessions each. The courses are basically composed of two major groups of subjects. First: staff members of several faculties at the University of Amsterdam will lecture on a variety of urban-sociological, urban-geographical and urban-planning issues, as these have developed in Europe and the United States over the past few decades. Second: other batches of Dutch university staff will pay attention to several aspects of South and Southeast Asia's urban developments, urban problems, and urban planning and management. Students are to be recruited from the Institute of Sociology and various relevant urban development-oriented departments.
The research programme capitalizes on earlier research on informal housing in Hanoi (known as 'popular' housing) by the DUCS and by graduate students of Delft Technical University and of the Faculty of Environmental Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. As about three-quarters of Hanoi's housing construction takes place on an individual basis along informal lines and without proper state permission and control, it is relevant to acquire a detailed knowledge of the varieties of conditions that govern housing and building, and that condition access to housing, including access to urban land and infrastructural facilities. The programme is designed to introduce a broad spectrum of research methodologies and techniques, and its results will among being put to others uses form the basis for one or more development-oriented project proposals. The hope is that teams of Dutch and Vietnamese graduate students will augment the research activities while preparing for their Master's theses.
The programme has a few distinguishing, noteworthy characteristics. It is highly demand driven, not only in the initial choices of the broad subjects of research and teaching, but also at the 'daily' level of requested training topics. Forewarned, Amsterdam staff members going to Hanoi are prepared for a much wider variety of 'teaching input' than the course titles may suggest. The initial impressions derived from the first course lead to the conclusion that the Dutch university staff finds it very refreshing and rewarding to be 'forced' to leave routine procedures of teaching at home and to take up the challenge of a different set of expectations from their audience. The programme co-ordinators have anticipated to the best of their ability this high degree of by preparing a highly flexible teaching programme.
It is hoped that the programme will also be sustainable as the teaching and research activities have not been situated in a newly created 'artificial' institutional set up. In fact, expectations are high that an existing department will be strengthened, and this department will continue to function even after the external support has drawn to a halt. One final important element is that the programme is explicitly 'low budget'. No multiple salaries have been claimed from the Netherlands Government. Indeed, to some extent staff members at the University of Amsterdam have even used accumulated holidays to spend teaching in Hanoi. Daily allowances have been calculated far below the generally applied standard level, by choosing to live in relatively modest accommodation and to follow the local lifestyle.
:Hans Schenk (University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Environmental Sciences) and Trinh Duy Luan (Institute of Sociology, NCSSH) are the ISTAR co-ordinators.