Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
22362
DOI: 10.1355/sj29-2a
2014 ISEAS
ISSN 0217-9520 print / ISSN 1793-2858 electronic
01 SOJOURN.indd 223
6/11/14 1:25:20 PM
224
Erik Harms
intense tropical downpour that had burst forth from the sky during
my trip across town. The lawyer was polite and non-judgmental
as I poured the water from my shoes into the decorative fishpond
surrounding the restaurant. But he was concerned: why had I come
by motorbike?
We spoke briefly about the danger of motorbikes, but it turned
out that the lawyer was less concerned with the question of safety
than with the idea that motorbikes were not a civilized mode
of transportation.1 I assumed at first that he was referring to the
discomforts and small indignities that one sometimes endures when
riding motorbikes in a tropical land. I was, after all, sitting there
with my shoes kicked off in one of the citys finer restaurants, my
soggy socks refusing to dry. But this was only part of the problem.
It soon became clear that his concern was really about a certain
symbolic meaning that he had come to associate with motorbikes
and their riders.
In the lawyers mind, motorbike riders represented a culture that
prioritized immediate personal desires over collective future-oriented
social goals.2 Zipping this way and that, travelling the wrong way
down one-way streets and making illegal turns, he explained, was
indicative of the way that motorbike riders generally rejected the rule
of law. This mindset, he continued, was riding rampant throughout
Vietnamese society, undermining Vietnamese legal culture, thwarting
the good intentions of urban planners and contributing to a social
(dis)order in which immediate self-interest always took precedence
over collective ambitions. The situation he described was not unlike
a Hobbesian state of warre, conceived as a state in which all
individuals struggle against other individuals. Motorbikes appeared
unruly and uncontrolled as they followed wiggly, unpredictable paths
through the city. Cars, he insisted, were more civilized. They travelled
in relatively straight lines, stayed in their lanes, signalled before they
turned and followed traffic laws. He was telling me that the way that
one moves about a city was not simply a question of practicality and
comfort. Rather, it represented a statement about social organization
more generally the way one got around said something about
the society in which one lived (Truitt 2008, p. 4).
01 SOJOURN.indd 224
6/11/14 1:25:20 PM
Civilitys Footprint
225
01 SOJOURN.indd 225
6/11/14 1:25:21 PM
226
Erik Harms
01 SOJOURN.indd 226
6/11/14 1:25:21 PM
Civilitys Footprint
227
01 SOJOURN.indd 227
6/11/14 1:25:21 PM
228
Erik Harms
01 SOJOURN.indd 228
6/11/14 1:25:21 PM
Civilitys Footprint
229
01 SOJOURN.indd 229
6/11/14 1:25:21 PM
230
Erik Harms
01 SOJOURN.indd 230
6/11/14 1:25:21 PM
Civilitys Footprint
231
If the way in which one moves through a city can acquire social
meaning, so too do the kinds of buildings that form a citys built
space. Over the course of the past several years, I have been
conducting an ethnographic study of Ph My Hng, a peri-urban
development located in District Seven of Ho Chi Minh City, about six
kilometres as the crow flies outside of District One, the citys central
business district. Built according to utopian visions of a modern and
orderly city, Ph My Hng is hailed in Vietnam as a model for a
type of development known as New Urban Zones (khu th mi)
master-planned, mixed-use residential and commercial districts
designed from the ground up by professional architects and built
by coalitions of local and foreign developers in cooperation with
city and provincial governments.11 They typically include a mix of
high-rise apartment housing, semi-detached row houses and standalone homes.12 The social vision promoted by New Urban Zones is
best summarized by Ph My Hngs official slogan: Civilisation
City, Human-Oriented Community.13
In todays Vietnam, like the integrated urban megaprojects Gavin
Shatkin (2011, p. 79) has described in Kolkata and Manila, New
Urban Zones are often presented as allegories as idealized
01 SOJOURN.indd 231
6/11/14 1:25:21 PM
232
Erik Harms
01 SOJOURN.indd 232
6/11/14 1:25:22 PM
Civilitys Footprint
233
01 SOJOURN.indd 233
6/11/14 1:25:22 PM
234
Erik Harms
their fair share of urban resources. This tension is not unlike the
one illustrated by the problem of motorbikes and cars. On the one
hand, residents describe the New Urban Zone as a utopian setting
in which the idea of collective commitment to building a civilized
community leads to self-discipline and consciousness of others.
While one might readily criticize Ph My Hng from the outside as
simply another privatopia (McKenzie 1996, p. 12) characterized
by the self-centred privatization of everything, people living there
more commonly described their lives in the New Urban Zone in
terms of their commitment to respecting one another. Instead of
selfish individualism, most residents considered their behaviour as
quite the opposite. They saw themselves developing a civilized
consciousness, which they described as an ability to understand
that there were other individuals in society whose rights one must
also respect. In other words, the inward turn of private communities
actually produced, in the understanding of residents, a consciousness
of others, of a collectivity. Residents in New Urban Zones constantly
invoked civility, and they almost universally supported notions of
environmental consciousness and sustainability. For example, every
single one of the more than a hundred residents whom I interviewed
spoke positively about the green aspects of Ph My Hng, most
commonly citing the fresh breezes and open space, but also referring
to the fact that the preservation of such green space depended on
notions of broader environmental consciousness among residents.
The zone is one of the few places in all of Saigon where one sees
people riding bicycles or jogging. It is also increasingly the preferred
site for organizing walkathons and events to raise consciousness of
the environment.
However, communities like Ph My Hng are founded on exclusion
and on a disproportionate consumption of land and resources.16 At the
same time that master-planned New Urban Zones in Vietnam propose
to offer increased greenery, they also introduce and in fact demand
ecologically unsustainable lifestyles, dependent on automobiles,
long commutes, airconditioned spaces, high energy consumption
and great per capita use of space. This model has, after all, a golf
01 SOJOURN.indd 234
6/11/14 1:25:22 PM
Civilitys Footprint
235
01 SOJOURN.indd 235
6/11/14 1:25:22 PM
Erik Harms
236
Few, if any of the residents living in New Urban Zones ever explain
their desire to live in them with reference to the notion that they
are private spaces. Instead, I was surprised in the course of my
research by how consistently informants would make reference to
the notion that these zones foster consciousness of a collective social
experiment to improve the urban landscape. For example, I became
increasingly good friends with a young, upwardly mobile engineer
in his late twenties who epitomized this sentiment. A former star
student and scholarship recipient from the hill town of Dalat who
had originally moved to Saigon to attend university, he had lived in
Korea for two years while attending business school. By the time
we met in 2010, he was slowly but surely finding his way in the
booming Vietnamese construction industry as a project manager
involved in the construction of New Urban Zones. His life history
itself was a veritable story of the will to improve: with hard work and
determination, he always linked his dreams for improving himself to
broader dreams to improve Ho Chi Minh City, and Vietnamese cities
01 SOJOURN.indd 236
6/11/14 1:25:22 PM
Civilitys Footprint
237
01 SOJOURN.indd 237
6/11/14 1:25:23 PM
238
Erik Harms
01 SOJOURN.indd 238
6/11/14 1:25:23 PM
Civilitys Footprint
239
without helmets on the back of their parents motorbikes that one saw
everywhere else. But then I countered that the wide-open landscape
was so wide-open that it depended on automobile travel and more
resource-intensive urban lifestyles, with large homes that required
excessive airconditioning and other technological solutions to give
the illusion of coolness. He was dreaming of a future founded on
top-down planning and urban design, and I claimed that Saigons
urban street life could itself offer a locally produced solution to
the problems of rapid urbanization. He longed for the Vietnam of
the future to be like Singapore, Seoul or Taipei, and I wanted to
convince him that that Vietnam of the future should take its lessons
from Vietnam itself.
Bottom-Up Perspectives from the World Bank and Top-Down
Perspectives from the People
01 SOJOURN.indd 239
6/11/14 1:25:23 PM
240
Erik Harms
01 SOJOURN.indd 240
6/11/14 1:25:23 PM
Civilitys Footprint
241
01 SOJOURN.indd 241
6/11/14 1:25:23 PM
Erik Harms
242
The first point on this list, noting the simple fact that motorbikes
have helped Vietnamese cities avoid gridlock, makes complete
sense. If cars replaced motorbikes, they simply wouldnt fit on
the streets.25 Furthermore, because motorbikes can navigate much
smaller roadways, they make dense, involuted urban spaces possible
and thus reduce sprawl, and in turn commuting distances. While it
is true that road infrastructure in Ho Chi Minh City has improved
over the past decade, most notably with the construction of the
East-West Highway and several strategic bridges, traffic congestion
has in many cases increased. These projects themselves encourage
travel in automobiles, which then contribute to congestion when they
reach parts of the city with less road capacity. The increased traffic
that accompanies the construction of such new roads exemplifies
the phenomenon that traffic engineers call induced travel, known
more colloquially as the notion that more roads lead to more
traffic (Vanderbilt 2008, pp. 15455). The second and third of the
above points, concerning mixed land-use, both highlight the fact
that vernacular forms of housing offer an efficient and economical
use of space quite appropriate to Vietnams high levels of urban
population density.
Recuperating Civility
In effect, the recent World Bank report supports the position that
a vernacular Vietnamese city populated by motorbike riders may
indeed prove more sustainable than master-planned New Urban Zones
inhabited by automobile-driving families living in homes with large
floor plans. Yet the World Bank report itself slips between different
registers, which themselves highlight a productive conversation
emerging between demands for civilized living and sustainable
urban development. On the most explicit level, the report celebrates
the sustainable elements of bottom-up forms of habitation, echoing
01 SOJOURN.indd 242
6/11/14 1:25:24 PM
Civilitys Footprint
243
01 SOJOURN.indd 243
6/11/14 1:25:24 PM
244
Erik Harms
01 SOJOURN.indd 244
6/11/14 1:25:24 PM
Civilitys Footprint
245
01 SOJOURN.indd 245
6/11/14 1:25:24 PM
246
Erik Harms
FIGURE 4 Urban civility. The sign reads, Lets Preserve a Civilized [van minh],
Clean, and Beautiful City. Photo by the author.
01 SOJOURN.indd 246
6/11/14 1:25:24 PM
Civilitys Footprint
247
01 SOJOURN.indd 247
6/11/14 1:25:24 PM
248
Erik Harms
01 SOJOURN.indd 248
6/11/14 1:25:25 PM
Civilitys Footprint
249
01 SOJOURN.indd 249
6/11/14 1:25:25 PM
250
Erik Harms
The lawyer, with his discourse on cars and motorbikes, was speaking
allegorically about the way that certain forms of mobility signal
a commitment to a civilized order. The project manager, with
his commitment to master planning, was enthusiastic about New
Urban Zones for reasons strikingly similar to those that informed
the lawyers ideas about traffic. Like the lawyer, he emphasized
that the unplanned nature of the city posed a problem of order.
Both of them were worried about disorder, whether in the form
of motorbikes darting into traffic or of a city marred by zones of
spontaneous urbanization. The project manager took it further
than the lawyer, however. He linked informality with selfishness,
in the form of individuals who built houses only to satisfy their
individual needs, without a sense of the larger collective interest
of the city in which they lived.30 But his concerns extended to
motorbikes too, for spatial forms and modes of mobility always coproduce each other. When describing selfish elements of spontaneous
building in the vernacular city, for example, the project manager
told me that people would build right up to the edge of their
plot in an alleyway, leaving no space for their motorbikes. Then
they would park their motorbikes in front of their houses during
the day and thus block the way. Or they might build balconies
that illegally jutted out past the actual footprint of their homes,
blocking out sunlight in the alleyway (cf. Pham Thai Son 2010,
p. 242). Each household worried about its individual interests
and ignored the collective good. One could see this reality quite
clearly, he reminded me, by simply looking at the tangled balls
of electric wires that hung like knots of hair on telephone poles
throughout the city. Because of the haphazard, individualistic
nature of Vietnams urbanization and the lack of any conception
of the larger collective, the city had become tangled and trapped
01 SOJOURN.indd 250
6/11/14 1:25:25 PM
Civilitys Footprint
251
01 SOJOURN.indd 251
6/11/14 1:25:25 PM
252
Erik Harms
01 SOJOURN.indd 252
6/11/14 1:25:25 PM
Civilitys Footprint
253
01 SOJOURN.indd 253
6/11/14 1:25:25 PM
254
Erik Harms
Notes
01 SOJOURN.indd 254
6/11/14 1:25:26 PM
Civilitys Footprint
255
9. For vivid yet rather extreme parallels to these examples, see the discussions
of car culture in Jakarta in Van Leeuwen (2011, pp. 5760).
10. These points are not intended to engage in environmental moralizing about
specific lifestyles and urban spaces, but to demonstrate that the concept
of civility engages with an emerging conversation about sustainable urban
development in ways that are at times synergistic and at other times
contradictory. The Vietnamese discourse of civility is indeed sometimes
accommodating enough to incorporate concerns about environmental
sustainability, specifically among engineers and technical urbanists seeking
to develop new urban solutions that minimize rather than intensify resource
consumption. But at other times, livelihoods promoted as civilized are
clearly not environmentally sustainable. Meanwhile, very little research
has highlighted the ways in which the vernacular Vietnamese city might
be adapted in incremental ways that might make it both more sustainable
and more civilized.
11. For a critical analysis of Ph My Hng, see Mike Douglass and Liling
Huang (2007). For a description of a New Urban Zone in Hanoi, see
Danielle Labb (2011).
12. New Urban Zones sometimes include, but are not completely made up
by, even more exclusive subdivisions of elite luxury housing protected
by a gated security perimeter.
13. The phrase in Vietnamese reads, th van minh, cong ong nhn
van.
14. The way that residents compared New Urban Zones to unplanned housing
was similar to the way the lawyer compared cars to motorbikes. This
observation and the observations about language used to describe New
Urban Zones and other parts of the city discussed in this and the previous
paragraph are based on the preliminary analysis of over a hundred interviews
conducted between 2010 and 2013. (Authors field notes and interview
transcripts, Ho Chi Minh City, 201013.)
15. These models are clearly based on Singaporean and other Inter-Asian
borrowings from Taiwan, China and other sources (Chua 2011, pp. 4245;
Hoffman 2011, pp. 6263; May 2011, p. 116).
16. On the exclusions typical of these kinds of development, see the discussion
on land conversion in Derek Hall, Philip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li
(2011, pp. 11844).
17. Hiep Phc powerplant also serves the Tn Thuan Export Processing
Zone, which was built in conjunction with Ph My Hng as part of the
larger Saigon South development strategy. For the history of the EPZ,
the Hiep Phc powerplant and their connection to Ph My Hng, see
Nguyen Van Kch et al. (2006, pp. 1125).
18. The original Vietnamese passage reads, Sc hap dan ay thuyet phuc
01 SOJOURN.indd 255
6/11/14 1:25:26 PM
256
Erik Harms
01 SOJOURN.indd 256
6/11/14 1:25:26 PM
Civilitys Footprint
257
01 SOJOURN.indd 257
6/11/14 1:25:26 PM
258
Erik Harms
Benjamin, Solomon. Touts Pirates, and Ghosts. Bare Acts: SARAI Reader,
no. 5 (2005): 24254.
Castells, Manuel. Urban Sustainability in the Information Age. City: Analysis
of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 4, no. 1 (2000):
11822.
Chua Beng Huat. Singapore as Model: Planning Innovations, Knowledge
Experts. In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being
Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong. Malden, Massachusetts:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Davidson, Mark. Sustainability as Ideological Praxis: The Acting out of
Plannings Master Signifier. City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture,
Theory, Policy, Action 14, no. 4 (2010): 390405.
01 SOJOURN.indd 258
6/11/14 1:25:26 PM
Civilitys Footprint
259
Douglass, Mike and Huang Liling. Globalizing the City in Southeast Asia:
Utopia on the Urban Edge The Case of Phu My Hung, Saigon.
International Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies 3, no. 2 (2007): 141.
Drummond, Lisa. Street Scenes: Practices of Public and Private Space in
Urban Vietnam. Urban Studies 37, no. 12 (2000): 237791.
Durkheim, mile. The Rules of Sociological Method. Translated by W.D. Halls.
New York: The Free Press, [1895] 1982.
Economica Vietnam. Socio-economic Development Strategy for the Period
of 20112020, 11 June 2012 <http://www.economica.vn/ChangePages.
aspx?IDKey=T68H36363539105330&c=0&f=1> (accessed 13 March
2014).
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell,
[1939] 1994.
Ghertner, D. Asher. Nuisance Talk: Middle-Class Discourses of a Slum-Free
Delhi. In Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and
Sustainability, edited by Anne Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013.
Government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Decree No. 42/2009/ND-CP
of May 7, 2009, on the Grading of Urban Centers. Hanoi: Government
of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, 2009.
Grimm, Nancy B., Charles L. Redman, Christopher G. Boone, Daniel L.
Childers, Sharon L. Harlan and B.L. Turner II. Viewing the Urban
Socio-Ecological System through a Sustainability Lens: Lessons and
Prospects from the Central ArizonaPhoenix Lter Programme. In Long
Term Socio-Ecological Research, Human-Environment Interactions, edited
by Simron Jit Singh, Helmut Haberl, Marian Chertow, Michael Mirtl
and Martin Schmid. Dordecht: Springer, 2013.
Hall, Derek, Philip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li. Powers of Exclusion: Land
Dilemmas in Southeast Asia. Singapore: NUS Press, 2011.
Harms, Erik. Vietnams Civilizing Process and the Retreat from the Street:
A Turtles Eye View from Ho Chi Minh City. City & Society 21, no.
2 (2009): 182206.
. Eviction Time in the New Saigon: Temporalities of Displacement in
the Rubble of Development. Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 2 (2013):
34468.
Ho Chi Minh City Statistics Office. Dn So V Mat o Dn So Nam 2010
Phn Theo Quan, Huyen [2010 Population and Population Density
According to District]. Ho Chi Minh City: Ho Chi Minh City Statistics
Office, 2011.
Hoffman, Lisa. Urban Modeling and Contemporary Technologies of CityBuilding in China: The Production of Regimes of Green Urbanisms.
01 SOJOURN.indd 259
6/11/14 1:25:27 PM
260
Erik Harms
01 SOJOURN.indd 260
6/11/14 1:25:27 PM
Civilitys Footprint
261
01 SOJOURN.indd 261
6/11/14 1:25:27 PM
262
Erik Harms
01 SOJOURN.indd 262
6/11/14 1:25:27 PM