Da Nang
The airport that handled Agent Orange anchors Vietnam's first Free Trade Zone — ecological succession from contaminated warzone to tech hub, with path dependence built into every runway.
Da Nang Airport once handled nearly 11 million litres of Agent Orange and recorded roughly 67,000 aircraft movements — takeoffs and landings — per month. Dioxin contamination at the site peaked at 365 times the Vietnamese safety standard. In 2018, the United States and Vietnam completed a 116-million-dollar remediation that involved baking 160,000 tonnes of contaminated soil at temperatures exceeding 335 degrees Celsius. That same airport anchors Vietnam's first Free Trade Zone.
This is ecological succession at city scale — not loose metaphor but close parallel. A contaminated site was stripped to something resembling bare substrate, detoxified, and recolonised. The path dependence runs deep: runways built for American fighter jets became the commercial airport terminal, military logistics roads became trade corridors, and the city designated a 1,881-hectare free trade zone across seven sites to attract technology, logistics, and advanced manufacturing. Infrastructure built for war determined the geography of peace.
Lichens are the first organisms to colonise bare rock after volcanic eruption or glacial retreat — breaking down hostile surfaces into soil that later, more complex species can use. Da Nang's thermal remediation played the same role: resetting contaminated ground to something approaching bare substrate so that the economic ecosystem could take root.
The Vietnamese government then accelerated the succession through deliberate niche construction. Da Nang was designated the country's third focal economic zone, breaking the Hanoi–Ho Chi Minh City duopoly. The East-West Economic Corridor linking Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam was routed through the city. A deep-water port at Lien Chieu, with projected capacity of up to 13.7 million tonnes by 2030, will complete the logistics infrastructure. Since 2004, Project 922 has sent young professionals abroad on government-funded scholarships with mandatory return commitments — seeding the city with human capital the way fungal spores colonise a forest floor after fire, imperfectly, with many failing to take root, but enough to establish a foothold.
The results are visible but incomplete. Da Nang's urbanisation rate exceeds 87 per cent, the highest in Vietnam. But the city remains a work in progress — its 1.3 million people still generate a fraction of the output of Ho Chi Minh City, and the succession has far to run before the ecosystem reaches anything resembling climax.