The coastal cities in Southeast Asia, such as Ho Chi Minh City, have a significant vulnerability to natural hazards. With formidable growth dynamics, policymakers and planning increasingly face pressure to adapt the city to current and future risks. It is expected that risks for the city will intensify because of the
interaction of climate change, continued urbanization and peri-urbanization, and creeping environmental changes. Peri-urbanization is understood as the physical expansion process of built-up areas and socio-economic transformation beyond the existing urban area. This paper addresses the question of how recent scattered and dispersive patterns of peri-urbanisation have developed spatially at both the local scale
and in relation to the wider urban area, creating a hybrid structure of fragmented urban and rural characteristics. Through a block-level scale analysis of Ho Chi Minh City’s urban development for the dynamic period 2010–2020, the structures, scales, processes, and changes in land use of recent urbanization are identified. The results visually show the predominant growth challenges of planned urbanization into peri-urban areas and multiple risk generations. Finally, the paper provides a view of the loss of multifunctional adaptation space and the spatial planning constraints of managing future risks in such a dynamic context.