Urban staycation attraction factors: a case study of Ho Chi Minh city

The attractiveness of a city is an issue that has received much attention from scholars, regulators and authorities. In terms of a built environment, many attempts have been made to build an attractive city with its own identity through pattern language and form language; however, these languages are developed based on the language of geometry and on how human beings interact with their surrounding environment. Meanwhile, multiple studies on the factors that create motivation to attract visitors to a certain place (e.g. motivation theory) also identified the factors that makes a city attractive, but such studies are still general, incomplete, and only focus on the perspective of tourists. This research builds a system of factors that contributes to urban attractiveness from the perspective of both visitors and residents, through qualitative research methods such as Group Focused Discussion, In-depth Interview and Capture Evaluation Method Survey. The research findings discovered many more factors that affect urban attractiveness and then built nine Conceptual categories of Urban staycation Attraction Factors with 141 factors. The nine main categories are (1) Architectural and Built Environment, (2) Natural, (3) Works of Art and Humanity, (4) Folklore, (5) Community Civilization, (6) Green & Blue Infrastructure, (7) Sense of Place, (8) Services, and (9) Other. Moreover, the research also determined 134 factors that contribute to the attractiveness of Ho Chi Minh City and proposed an additional six important groups of factors that need to be developed to improve urban quality. These findings play an important role in supporting regulators, authorities, urban planners, designers, and tourism and cultural managers to enhance quality of urban life, then create an attractive urban environment for both tourists and local residents.