District-level town, commonly known as town, a type of second tier subdivision of Vietnam is divided into 713 units along with urban district, district, and city have equal status. Also by virtue of Decree No. 42/2009/ND-CP, town are officially classified into Class-3 or Class-4. The towns may only be a capital of a province, but not of a municipality as the Second Tier unit. At the Third Tier, Town is divided into wards and communes.
District level
In Vietnam, there are other kinds of district-level urban subdivisiona: urban districts, districts and provincial cities. The urban districts is within urban and only consists of wards, but provincial cities and towns can consist of the wards and communes. Towns are similar with provincial cities, but towns are smaller than provincial cities in population density. Moreover, municipality can include town, even provincial cities. The type town is categorized as urban and its residents is classified as urban population, although there may still be a part of residents living in agriculture. Main economical activities in town included industry, services and business.
Upgrade and downgrade
Regularly, a commune-level town or township can be upgraded to a district-level town or town, and district-level towns can develop into provincial cities. But the district-level town can also be downgraded to a district capitals, especially when there is a merger of the provinces. That are the cases of the An Lộc, Sông Cầu ... Some district-level towns were downgraded into commune-level towns for some time and then be re-established, as Nghĩa Lộ, Bắc Cạn, Đồ Sơn, Phúc Yên, Hà Tiên, Vị Thanh, Gia Nghĩa. When a district-level town is downgraded, the urban become a commune-level town, and the suburban is merged into other districts or established rural communes. Some district-level towns have become commune-level towns and not re-established, so far as: Đô Lương, Tiên Yên, Ninh Giang, Cát Bà, Vĩnh An of Đồng Nai Province. There is a rare case: Phan Rang as district-level town is divided into two commune-level towns, Phan Rang and Tháp Chàm in 1977. Each commune-level town belonged to a county, and in 1981 the two commune-level towns was merged and re-established as county-level town named Phan Rang–Tháp Chàm. Kiến An, a former district-level town, located in a municipality in Hải Phòng from 1962 to 1980, later downgraded into a commune-level town and was recovered between from 1988 to 1994 and is now an urban district of Hải Phòng. Đồ Sơn ever was the only district-level town within a municipality, until September 12, 2007 it became the new urban district of Hải Phòng. Sơn Tây is a district-level town governed under Hanoi in the period 1978 to 1991, then merged into Hà Tây Province. August 2007 this district-level town was upgraded into provincial city. In 2008 Hà Tây Province was merged into Hanoi, Sơn Tây was moved back into district-level town.
