Who is this for?
Anyone who cares about these cities — as a place they live, a city they left, a history they study, or a dataset they need.
People living in the city
You walk past these buildings every day. Find out who built them, who owned them, what was torn down to put them there — and watch the street you know change across a century.
Now: browse 39 georeferenced maps, overlay them on today, walk a GPS storyFamilies with roots here
Your grandparents' neighbourhood existed, and the street where they lived had a name before it was renamed. Finding that street on a colonial sheet works today. Attaching a photograph or a memory to it is designed but not built.
Now: find a street on a colonial sheet. Planned: attach a photo or a memory to a placeResearchers & historians
Georeferenced maps you can cite and embed, each linked to the institution that holds the scan. The structured, downloadable dataset behind them — land tenure, morphology, administrative records — is the goal, not yet the state.
Now: embed a georeferenced map, cite a sheet and its holder. Planned: open dataset downloadsOSM & GIS mappers
Same skills you already use — polygon tracing on a georeferenced base, open data values, community validation. Vietnam’s historical cities need the attention OpenStreetMap gives the modern ones, and right now they have almost none.
Now: trace footprints, check OCR labels. Planned: GeoJSON export once a sheet is reviewedEducators
Interactive maps you can walk through and GPS stories you can assign, usable today for teaching Vietnamese history, colonial urbanism, or heritage and memory. The sourced dataset to cite alongside them is still being built.
Now: embed a map in a lesson, assign a GPS walk. Planned: structured timeline dataArchives & institutions
Your digitised maps used and kept accessible rather than downloaded and forgotten, with your institution credited on every record. Sheets from BnF Gallica, Université Côte d’Azur, UT Austin and the Library of Congress are already in the archive; none of it is a formal partnership yet.
Now: your sheets georeferenced and credited to you on every recordWhat we're building
Six layers, each resting on the one below — from maps pinned to real coordinates up to a walkable city with family memories attached. Only the first has much in it; the upper four are research and design, not software. Click any layer to see what is genuinely done, what is moving, and what is still only a plan. The percentages are our own rough estimates, not measurements.
The roadmap, in three phases
Maps to Geometry
"Turn every building on colonial maps into a shape with an address"
- ○ M1.1 10 colonial Saigon maps placed and linked — spanning 1880 to 1930
- ● M1.2 Community tracing tools live: trace building outlines and check what the OCR read
- ○ M1.3 AI building detector improved on community-traced examples
- ○ M1.4 First open dataset: every building outline in 1900 Saigon
- ○ M1.5 Dataset covers 5 time periods from 1880 to 1930
Geometry to Knowledge
"Give every building a story, every street a history"
- ○ M2.1 History database live — find any building and see what we know about it
- ○ M2.2 100 buildings documented with sources: who built them, who owned them, what happened to them
- ○ M2.3 Uncertain dates handled honestly — every fact shows how confident we are
- ○ M2.4 Research library: 50+ primary sources (maps, surveys, land records) linked to specific buildings
- ○ M2.5 All data publicly downloadable — open for researchers, students, journalists
Knowledge to Dimension
"Lift the city off the page"
- ○ M3.1 3D reconstruction tool adapted to French colonial Saigon maps
- ○ M3.2 Color and symbol recognition validated across 3 different Saigon map editions
- ○ M3.3 3D city model for the 1900 Saigon core — every building as a block with a roof
- ○ M3.5 "Adopt a building" live — volunteers collect archival photos, earn permanent credit
- ○ M3.6 10 landmark buildings rebuilt in full detail from historical photos
- ○ M3.7 Timeline viewer: scrub through the city at 1890, 1910, and 1930
How this stays alive
Not a startup, not a closed archive, and not yet funded. The intent is public infrastructure for historical memory — open, honest about its own state, and designed to still be useful in 50 years.
Built the way OSM and Wikipedia are built
No central authority decides what's true: anyone can trace a building, correct a mistake or add a fact with a citation, and disputes are settled by evidence. That is the model we have chosen and built the tools for. It is not yet the model in practice — the contributor count is in single figures, and the review queues are nearly empty because almost nobody has filled them.
Decentralized, open, forkable
All data is openly licensed (CC-BY / ODbL). All code and methodology published. Any city with a map archive and a community can fork VMA and run the same pipeline locally — no permission required. Saigon is the testbed; the model is designed to replicate.
People and the model check each other
The design is a loop: contributors trace buildings, those traces sharpen the detector, and a sharper detector leaves less work for the next contributor. Both halves exist — a tracing tool and a fine-tuned SAM2 fork — but the loop has not closed yet, because it needs a volume of reviewed shapes we do not have.
Hoping to be grant-funded (Phase 1–2)
Nothing is funded today; the work so far is unpaid. Grants that look like a fit, none of them applied for and won yet: the French Institute, an EFEO partnership, the Wikimedia Foundation, the Asia Foundation, the NEH with a US university partner. One strong application at a time rather than a scattergun.
Get involved
VMA follows the OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia model — open data, community-verified, permanently attributed, controlled by no single organisation. The archive is small enough that one person's afternoon is a visible share of it, which is either the discouraging part or the appealing one.
Trace the city
Draw building outlines on historical maps — the same skills as OSM tracing. 46 shapes exist so far, all on one sheet. Yours would be visible in the total.
Start tracingWrite the history
Once buildings are in the archive each one gets a page, to be edited the way you would edit Wikipedia. That is not built yet, so this is an invitation to help shape it rather than to start writing.
Join the historian groupAdopt a building
Take a landmark from flat footprint to detailed 3D model — collect archival photographs, submit a mesh, keep permanent credit. Nobody has done one yet, so the first would be setting the pattern.
Get in touchFund the work
No pitch deck. Read the roadmap above, including the parts that say a layer has not started. If you still see a fit — university partnership, heritage grant, institutional collaboration — write to us.
Contact usMay 2026 — rebuilding the viewer around the layer stack
The most recent written update. Since then the work has been unglamorous: route and interface cleanup, an OCR pass across a few more sheets, and a review queue that needs people more than it needs code. The next update is overdue.
Read the update