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Street Scenes: Practices of Public and Private Space in Urban Vietnam

Lisa B. W. Drummond
Urban Stud 2000 37: 2377
DOI: 10.1080/00420980020002850

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Urban Studies, Vol. 37, No. 12, 2377 2391, 2000

Street Scenes: Practices of Public and

Private Space in Urban Vietnam

Lisa B. W. Drummond
[Paper rst received, October 1999; in nal form, July 2000]

Summary. This paper contributes an initial venture into thinking about the uses of the terms
public and private space in the context of Vietnamese urban life. It is argued that these terms,
while they are critiqued and debated in Western academia, still retain substantial descriptive
power at an everyday level. In non-Western societies, however, these terms may be more dif cult
to apply and the paper provides an empirical section which argues that the boundaries between
public and private spaces are uid and routinely transgressed, as in Western societies, but for
reasons and in ways which are distinctive to the Vietnamese situation. The paper concludes by
noting that Vietnam is experiencing both a divergence from the Anglo-American urban experi-
ence, in that Vietnam displays a resurgence rather than a death of streetlife and a convergence
with it in the construction of pseudo-public leisure spaces. Local speci cities must therefore be
acknowledged when using these otherwise useful Western terms in non-Western contexts.

Introduction
The notions of public and private are seen as vate is a socially constructed and gen-
profoundly important organising concepts dered division and, as such, it is important
in the social life of Western societies (Benn to examine the process by which it is formed
and Gaus, 1983, p. 25). Public and private at speci c moments and places. Here, then,
space, of course, are issues of profound im- this paper looks speci cally at the social
portance in human geography in particular construction of the division or otherwise be-
and have been subject to critical analysis tween public and private spaces in contem-
within the discipline and somewhat less criti- porary urban Vietnam.
cal but extensive use without. However, dis- There has been, as yet, almost no sustained
cussion of these concepts and practices tends scholarly attention paid to these concepts in
to centre on Western usages and norms. Vietnam; there is some work emerging on
Their application in Western societies has public space/public sphere issues, but it is
been critiqued and yet, public and private, piecemeal rather than systematic or allowing
no matter how complicated or ambiguous of a synthesising analysisa complaint
their academic application, still retain enor- symptomatic of the Vietnam studies litera-
mous descriptive power on an everyday ture in general which has suffered consider-
level. As McDowell (1999, p. 149) argues, ably from lack of attention and access over
the division between the public and pri- the past two to three decades). (Some excep-
Lisa B. W. Drummond is in the Centre for Advanced Studies, The National University of Singapore, Shaw Foundation Building, AS7,
5 Arts Link, Singapore 117570. Fax: 65 779 1428. E-mail: casdlbw@nus.edu.sg. An earlier version of this paper was presented at
the Institute of Australian Geographers Annual Conference in 1998 in Freemantle, Australia, and the Association of American
Geographers Annual Conference in 1999 in Honolulu, Hawaii.

0042-0980 Print/1360-063X On-line/00/122377-15 2000 The Editors of Urban Studies

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DOI: 10.1080/00420980020002850
2378 LISA B. W. DRUMMOND
tions include Kerkvliet, 1996; Logan, 1994;
Luong, 1994; Marr, 1997; Thomas and Heng,
forthcoming; Koh, 2000; Higgs, 1998.)
Consequently, it seems worthwhile to make
an initial foray into examining this broad and
rather basic issue of social life and practice.
Based upon an ethnographic methodology
which emphasises observation and partici-
pation in Vietnamese urban society over a
period of nine years, six of them spent living,
working and researching full-time in Viet-
nam (1991 97), this paper contributes an
in-depth engagement with the attempt to de-
scribe and explain non-Western social con-
texts and processes through considering the
explanatory power and applicability of West-
ern academic concepts.
Understanding how the Vietnamese prac-
tices of public and private space operate
helps to enrich the contextual picture of con-
temporary urban social life in Vietnam and to
contribute to an understanding of the pro-
cesses within which everyday life is experi-
enced. In analysing the tension between
public and private in the Vietnamese context,
it is argued that the distinction between pub-
lic and private space in Vietnamese cities is
transgressed or blurred both from the inside
out and the outside in. By these terms, I
mean that, from the inside-out, families and
individuals make use of so-called public
space for private activities to an extent and in
ways that render that public space notionally
private. And from the outside-in, the states
interventions in so-called private space,
particularly in the organisation of domestic
life, are so invasive and so wide-ranging as
to negate or seriously compromise a concep-
tualisation of private space. This discussion
will focus on this blurring of the distinction
between public and private spaces and will
argue that they have social and cultural
speci cities which are important in distin-
guishing their practice from Western prac-
tices, however much it might be helpful to
continue to use the terms public and private
in the Vietnamese context. In this way, this
discussion is structured and the examples and
illustrations offered, as a spatial metaphor
or in Lefebvres (1991) terms as a spatialisa-
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tionof social life as a negotiation between
state and society, where the states power
and activities are associated with the public
realm and societys activities with the pri-
vate. Howell (1993) further argues, in a
discussion of the historical geography of
modernity, that understanding the public
sphere as public spaces enables an under-
standing of the particularity, context and
locality of modernity (Howell, 1993,
p. 319). Here, I would expand this concern to
approaching the particularity of Vietnamese
modernity via the interactions and negotia-
tions between public and private spaces
which enrich the context of the experience of
everyday life.
The paper starts with a very brief scene-
setting to contemporary Vietnamese urban
society. A third section offers an overview of
some of the theoretical arguments around the
use of public and private space as concepts in
the Western literature and a fourth section
gives the background to the concepts of pub-
lic and private as applied in Vietnam. Two
sections look empirically at how the contem-
porary boundaries between the practices of
public and private space in Vietnam are
blurred or transgressed using the inside-out
and outside-in directions noted above. And
a nal section, before concluding, considers
how the market economy is beginning to
introduce change in the practices of public
and private space, particularly in the realm of
leisure, creating commercialised spaces
which require more of a public private dis-
tinction, with an examination of some of these
initial manifestations and their implications.
Contemporary Vietnamese Urban Society
While Vietnamese history over the past cen-
tury has been in many ways characterised
more by change than by continuity, it is
important to note, when discussing contem-
porary urban Vietnam, the setting of the pol-
icy known as doi moi or economic
renovation in 1986. Although it was initially
implemented slowly, by the end of the 1980s
this policy had dismantled the rationing sys-
tem and had begun the introduction of a
 STREET SCENES
market economy or market socialism and its
concurrent open-door policy towards for-
eign direct investment and other engagements
with the world economy. (For more detailed
discussion of the doi moi policy, see Than and
Tan, 1993; Ronnas and Sjoberg, 1990; Fforde
and de Vylder, 1988; Forbes, 1991.)
Changes in a wide range of aspects of
socioeconomic life accelerated quickly
throughout the 1990s, from massive lay-offs
at state-owned enterprises and the opening-up
of opportunities to engage in informal-sector
activities to opportunities for overseas Viet-
namese to visit home and the circulation of
foreign lms and videos. The recent econ-
omic slow-down, partly the result of the
Asian nancial crisis, has meant that the
raised expectations of development and im-
provements in the quality of life for urbanites
(rising incomes, employment opportunities
with foreign rms, wider variety of products
available on the market) of the mid 1990s
may, at least temporarily, be unattainable.
With the seeming loosening of state control
over many aspects of socioeconomic life have
come a number of pressing social problems
for the government. These include ever-
increasing rural-to-urban migration (dis-
cussed below), rising divorce rates and the
changing structure of the family. Another is a
staggeringly young population (estimates of
over 60 per cent of the population under 30
years of age)meaning one with no memory
or experience of the nationalistic anti-US war
and little ideological attachment to the Com-
munist regime, as well as indicating a rapidly
expanding labour force needing employment.
Conceptualising Public and Private Space
The argument of this paper is not that Western
academic terms have no resonance in a non-
Western, in this case Vietnamese, context.
Rather, it is that these concepts offer import-
ant insights when examined according to lo-
cal speci cities of time and place. In this
instance, it is important to note that Western
is used here as an all-encompassing term; the
signi cant differences among and between
Western societies and academies must be
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2379
acknowledged, although they cannot be
explicitly addressed here.
Public and private, as noted in the opening
paragraph, are both fundamental concepts in
Western societies and also tend to be used in
ways which refer almost exclusively to West-
ern understandings and experiences. Al-
though interpretation of these concepts has
changed over time, public space since the
Greek republic has
occupie[d] an important ideological pos-
ition in democratic societies. [It] repre-
sents the material location where the social
interactions and political activities of all
members of the public occur (Mitchell,
1995, p. 116)
although it is also clear that exclusion was
often as much the norm as inclusion. Private
space was public spaces opposite, perhaps
its residual:
[while] man [sic] made himself in public,
he realized his nature in the private realm,
above all in his experiences within the
family (Sennett, quoted in Mitchell, 1995,
p. 116; emphasis in original).
Private space, in this conceptualisation, is the
domestic space where social reproduction oc-
curs more or less free from outright control
by outside forces such as the state. Public
space is the space out there which belongs
to the whole community, although regulated
by prevailing social and legal norms. The
two are distinguished also by the conceptual
separation between home and work, repro-
ductive and productive space. But this di-
chotomous and Western liberal distinction
between outside and inside has been cri-
tiqued from several angles and the concepts
and practices of public space have been sub-
ject to considerable analysis and criticism
(Lefebvre, 1991; Gregory, 1994; Harvey,
1989; Davis, 1990; among many others).
The concept of public space in particular has
been complicated by analyses which argue
that it does not always correspond to the
public sphere. The Western ideal of public
space is
2380 LISA B. W. DRUMMOND
unconstrained space within which political
movements can organize and expand into
wider arenas (Mitchell, 1995, p. 115).
It is a space where the marginalised can
challenge the status quo or dominant order
(Duncan, 1996, p. 130) and where
oppositional social movements can form
and operate (Mitchell, 1995, p. 110). In
practice, however, it is more often
a controlled and orderly retreat where a
properly behaved public might experience
the spectacle of the city (Mitchell, 1995,
p. 115).
The public sphere, in other words, is not
necessarily played out in public space:
Public spaces and public spheres often do
not map neatly onto one another (Duncan,
1996, p. 130).
Much of the critique of these concepts of
public and private has been from a feminist
perspective of the experience of public and
private space (see, for example, Pateman,
1983; Duncan, 1996; Sharistanian, 1987;
McDowell, 1999; Wilson, 1991; Massey,
1994; Rendell, 1998). Feminist analyses are
particularly critical of the patriarchal charac-
ter of these concepts, where public is associ-
ated with men/masculinity and private with
women/femininity, especially as the private
sphere or domestic space is supposedly one
of freedom from outside impingements and
obligations when it is often experienced as
anything but a place of freedom from re-
sponsibility and work by women. Indeed,
private space is often a locus of oppression
for women (and children) when the rights of
the husband/father impinge upon the rights
of other household members (Duncan, 1996).
Womens engagement with public spaces is
also more complicated and historically cul-
turally speci c than the idealised public
private distinction would indicate, as studies
of 19th- and 20th-century department stores
(Domosh, 1996; and Dowling, 1993, for ex-
ample) and of the experience of fear and
danger in public spaces argue (Valentine,
1989, 1990; and Pain, 1991, for example).
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Recent scholarship on the street, as well
on the increasing movement of public life off
Western streets into pseudo-public spaces
(Mitchell, 1995) or privatised public spaces
(Zukin, 1991), has allowed for a more nu-
anced and subtle rendering of the street as a
space of mediation between public and pri-
vate, masculine and feminine and other so-
cial categories. Jacksons (1998) work on the
shopping mall as a domesticated public
space, for example, argues that even in these
regulated spaces accounts must be sensitive
to the socially differentiated nature of peo-
ples experience of these highly contested
spaces (Jackson, 1998, p. 188). On the street
itself, accounts such as that of Rendell
(1998), who traces the early 19th-century
urban male rambler,
[reveal] much about the gendering of ur-
ban space and his mobility suggests that
the relationships between gender and
space are more complex than established
ideas concerning the separate spheres of
the male public realm and the female
private realm (Fyfe, 1998, p. 6).
An especially valuable contribution to this
literature on the street, for this paper, is
Edensors (1998) comparison of Indian and
Western streets wherein he argues
speci cally that the social ordering or regu-
lation of Western streets is culturally speci c
and not easily transferable to non-Western
contexts.
Public and Private Space in Vietnam
As noted above, the ideals of the public
sphere and the realities of public space often
do not coincide in Western societies. In Viet-
nam, however, there is little evidence of a
tradition of a public sphere at allnor of
public spaces where such a sphere might be
manifest, whether pre-colonial, colonial or
post-colonial. Prior to colonialism, spaces
which were not under the direct control of
the emperor were under the control of the
village and its conventions and its Council of
Notables. These spaces would have included
 STREET SCENES
the village communal house (dinh), the tem-
ple (chua)both of which were restricted in
access according to gender and statusas
well as communal rice paddies (which were
not farmed communally, but were allocated
for set periods to various members of the
community deemed worthy/needy, or to fund
rituals for the communal house or temple).
The city of Hanoi (originally Thang Long)
was, until the colonial period, mainly com-
posed of the emperors citadel and a market/
residential area (now known as the Old
Quarter or Thirty-six Streets) which was or-
ganised and run by various occupational
guilds which built, regulated and gated their
own streets, with a surrounding swampy area
dotted with villages. 1 Very few public
spaces could be said to exist, with the ex-
ception of temples and ritual spaces which
were often segregated, as noted, by gender
(women using temples, but being barred
from the communal house).
The imposition of French colonial rule
(varying south to north from the mid to late
19th century to 1954) introduced the trans-
ference of Western urban planning norms to
this non-Western setting, particularly ideas
about the spatial separation of public and
private activities and the need to create dis-
tinct areas for distinct activities: reducing
what Edensor (1998, p. 209) calls the multi-
use spaces of non-Western streets to
single-use spaces (see also Wright, 1991
for an extended discussion of French urban
planning in colonial Vietnam). During the
colonial period, the colonial government
constructed and controlled as tightly as poss-
ible public spaceoften wiping out local
pre-colonial semi-public spaces, monuments
and places of meaning, reconstructing or
reinscribing them with new uses and/or
meanings appropriate to and reinforcing col-
onial rule (see Wright, 1991, for thorough
discussion of this process in both Hanoi and
Saigon). A centuries-old pagoda, for exam-
ple, on the shores of Hoan Kiem Lake in the
centre of Hanoi, was largely destroyed (a
small gate remains) in order to build the new
and imposing Post Of ce. The colonial au-
thorities allowed little of oppositional social
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2381
movements to surface in the public sphere
or in public spaces.
The post-colonial state up until the mid
1980s (1954 86 in the north; in the south,
1975 86) also engaged in reinscription of
spaces (especially public spaces) on a vast
scale, even more intensely and widely than
the colonial state achieved. Where the col-
onial state, for example, interfered with the
Council of Notables which oversaw village
matters, the post-colonial state banned the
council altogether and transformed dinh into
secular spaces used for rice warehouses or
other non-ritual purposes (Malarney, 1993,
1996), cutting far more deeply into village
organisation and its landscape of meaning.
The communist state also reinscribed col-
onial spaces as well as pre-colonial spaces,
by appropriating government of ces and
other administrative structures of the colonial
state and occupying them with new purposes.
The Lycee Sarrault, for example, was turned
into the Communist Party headquarters, the
Indochina Governor-Generals residence into
the Presidential Palace (Logan, 1994).
The post-colonial state of this period also
maintained very tight control and surveil-
lance over public space and even tighter
control over the public spherethrough con-
trol over the organs of it (newspapers and
other media)to a degree unattained by the
colonial state, under which there were at
least several periods when independent so-
cial commentary emerged, if not ourished,
as in for example the development of re-
portage in the 1930s (Lockhart, 1996; see
also Marr, 1981). Visually, the most dramatic
transformation was the reinscription of the
symbolic spaces of the colonial state with the
symbolism of the nationalist and communist
regime and the creation of spatial icons of
the communist regime (Logan, 1994).
Private space, on the other hand, seems
until the socialist post-colonial period, to
have been subject to comparatively little in-
terference from the state. The Western con-
cept of private space is, in its ideal form,
precisely its freedom from state control and
interference. As discussed above, it is a jeal-
ously guarded domain of patriarchal auth-
2382 LISA B. W. DRUMMOND
ority. Vietnamese pre-colonial concepts and
practices of private space are not well-
studied, although in general the understand-
ing of the traditional household is one of a
Confucian patriarchy under the absolute
power of the senior male, with a Confucian
structure of authority relationships structured
as son father king and an emphasis on the
subjugation of the self in favour of sacri ce
for the family or emperor. The individual
was constructed as loyal subject (Marr,
1997). During the colonial period, French
authorities do not seem to have been particu-
larly interested in interfering in the house-
hold and its organisation except indirectly, as
in through informal attempts (rather than
state policy) to educate women (Marr, 1981).
The post-colonial socialist state, however,
has since its inceptionindeed since forma-
tion of the anti-colonial Communist Party
actively engaged in reordering social roles
and reorganising the household and family,
mainly through social mobilisation cam-
paigns; this process will be discussed in more
detail below as part of the discussion of the
states interference in domestic space and
life.
In brief, then, Vietnam has little history of
a public sphere or of public spaces, a social
vacuum which has always been lled by the
authority of the emperor/state with little
place for Western-style public discussion or
expression. Private space, however, has until
the socialist state (mid 20th century) been
experienced primarily as a space of indepen-
dent patriarchal authority in the same way as
it has been idealised in the Western concept
of private.
Inside-out: Practices of Private Public
Space in Contemporary Urban Vietnam
The contemporary (post-doi moi) state still
orders the use of public spaces, but residents
and other users infringe constantly on the
more mundane areas of public spaces, such
as the street. Use of the street for personal,
usually commercial, purposes is rampant in
the cities and, although periodic crackdowns
attempt to clear the pavements, the effect is
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usually temporary if not momentary. The
state no longer exercises the moral authority
which it held in the earlier period and is no
longer able to control rigidly the use of all
but the most symbolic of public spaces. Peo-
ple are coming to use public spaces for more
personal expressionfor example, spon-
taneous public mourning for non-political
public gures (see Thomas and Heng, forth-
coming); nihilistic and occasionally fatal
late-night motorcycle races which are widely
reported in the press, as are police attempts
to put a stop to them; and encroachment for
personal or commercial use (pavement stalls,
the spilling out of wares from cramped shops
and pay parking for motorcycles and bicy-
cles). The state previously controlled and
patrolled public spaces more effectively
Hanoi was renowned for its quiet streets in
the 1980s, a description which a contempor-
ary visitor would not be able to fathom
both through policing and through
neighbourhood systems of keeping a watch-
ful eye on local goings-on. Now perhaps
these methods either hold absolutely less
power over people or else the police are seen
to be easily bribed or are simply more pre-
occupied with other offences and issues to
put much effort into curbing everyday-level
encroachment into the street. It is clear that
the state is attempting to impose a notion of
appropriate and desirable use of public
space, but that this is being met with con-
siderable, continual, small-scale and individ-
ual infringements.
Private space, as discussed above, has
been conceptualised in Western academia
largely as the space of the home, the space to
which access can be denied by those within
(Benn and Gaus, 1983), the space where
social reproduction takes place, where the
necessary domestic tasks are performed to
replenish the worker and make possible his/
her next days, next years and next gener-
ations participation in the workforce. This
conceptualisation has also been critiqued,
however, and certainly for urban Vietnamese
little of this reproductive activity actually
takes place within domestic space.
It is important to note that street frontage
 STREET SCENES
is a valued commodity in Vietnamese prop-
erty considerations, as it offers the oppor-
tunity to spill out domestic and commercial
activities onto the pavement or street. Living
areas are generally cramped; the per person
living space gure for downtown Hanoi is
less than 5 square metres.2 Hence it is not
surprising that the most visible manifestations
of this inversion of domestic and public space
are some of the most basic, including outside
practices of eating, cooking and bathing: out-
side practices which were or are common in
other Asian countries (see Edensor, 1998;
Yasmeen, 1996). Meals are often taken out-
side the home, particularly breakfast which
may consist of either some sticky rice from a
mobile vendor, a bit of French baguette from
the bread-sellers or a bowl of noodles at a
stand along the road to work. Many people
also regularly eat dinner outside the home, at
the ubiquitous Common Peoples Rice
stands (com binh dan). Even when meals are
cooked within the home, children often eat in
the street, taking their bowls of rice outside to
eat while playing with friends (see Valentine,
1998, for a discussion of the lack of civility
traditionally associated with eating on West-
ern streets). Moreover, given the lack of room
in most Vietnamese homes, people often cook
outside, placing their coal stoves in other-
wise public corridors, streets or laneways.
This practice has a rural counterpart and
perhaps antecedent: in rural homes, the
kitchen area is usually located outside the
living area of the house.
These are some of the ways in which
domestic activities are performed unbounded
by a notion of private space.3 But private
uses of public space in urban Vietnam are
even more often commercial. Appropriation
of public spaces for commercial activities is
visibly rampant in the cities and the pave-
ments are lined with small businesses operat-
ing on what is nominally public space:
cooked food stalls, hairdressers, bicycle- and
motorbike-minders, petty traders, mobile ven-
dors, vegetable-sellers, tea stands, almost ev-
ery imaginable small-scale service or product
(see Figure 1). In many instances, these are
also very gendered uses of the street, as it is
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2383
mainly women who run these small-scale
informal economic activities, who are the vast
majority of mobile vendors, vegetable-sellers
and food stall proprietorsmens informal
commercial use of the street is more often as
a gathering place for the citys various labour
markets for construction and other day-
workers.
The small services sector in the cities, in
fact, caters to many of the domestic activities
that a Western observer would expect to see
done inside the private home: neighbourhood
launderers, shampoo shops and hairdressers
and, as will be mentioned below, cafes which
cater to the need for space for sexual activi-
ties. The picture is reminiscent of Sjobergs
(1960) pre-industrial city with its communal
water and bathing facilities, thus reinforcing
that conceptions of public and private space
have changed, are historically speci c and
should be considered, as this paper is attempt-
ing to do, in context. Sjobergs model perhaps
needs only the addition of motorbikes and
karaoke bars to be a convincing stand-in for
urban Vietnam.
Even more intimate activities are carried
out in public space because of the lack of
space for privacy in urban homes. The parks
that are not gated and locked at night, as well
as shadowed wall spaces along the city streets
are packed with young couples making out on
parked motorcycles and with sex-workers.
This example also illustrates how uses of
space can also be de ned temporally: these
areas are used differently in the daytime (for
early morning sports or tai chi practice; as
shady spots for mobile fruit-vendors to put
their baskets out, if they are not chased away
by police; at noon, for xyclo (rickshaw) driv-
ers or mobile traders to take a siesta) and at
night.
Illustrations of the states often futile at-
tempts to assert its authority over public
space and impose its notions of acceptable
uses of public space are probably as numer-
ous as the number of city-dwellers. In a
monograph on the notions of public and pri-
vate property in the Philippines, Stone (1973,
p. 1) notes that Filipinos have a concept of
usage he describes as
2384 LISA B. W. DRUMMOND

Figure 1. Household business encroaching on the pavement, Thu Duc District, 1996: the owner has put
up an awning over the pavement and has moved the goods on display right out to the edge of the road.

private, transitory possession or use of
public property, [where] it is assumed
that public property, rather than being the
possession of all, belongs, in fact, to no
one.
The users of public spaces regard them as
being their own property during the time of
usage. This attitude may be present in Viet-
nam, but does not seem to be prevalent. I
would argue, instead, that Vietnamese urban-
ites understand very well that the pavement
they use for their own commercial purposes
is not within their own possession, even on a
transitory basisalthough their customary
use of the space may be defended against
potential usurpers. They understand that they
are not supposed to be there, but appear to
feel either that they need to use the space in
order to conduct commercial activities and
therefore are justi ed in doing so, as long as
they do not get caught or the penalties are not
too harsh, or they are simply not persuaded
that the state will be able to enforce the
consequences of their illicit occupation.
The state, in other words, is actively trying
to impose a concept of public space and
respect for public space on an urban popu-
lation which routinely transgresses that bor-
der. On the streets of the northern cities in
the 1960s and 1970s, the state had a more
effective reign and urban streets of those
decades were largely quiet and bereft of
commercial activity. This description is
hardly recognisable in the Hanoi streets of
the 1990s. Part of this contemporary effort to
control public space is the now-familiar
attempt of developing country regimes to
create a modern cityscape. In this effort, the
Vietnamese government is following a well-
trodden path in attempting to control and
eliminate informal-sector activities, particu-
larly those which are most visible and there-
fore most eloquently attest to the countrys

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 STREET SCENES
Figure 2. Vegetable-sellers on a street corner,
Hanoi, 1996.
backwardness, such as cyclos, peddlers,
beggars, street-side cooked-food outlets and
spontaneous fresh produce markets (see
Figure 2), 4 as well as to assert the ownership
of the citys spaces by the entrenched urban
residents, to keep out rural migrants, how-
ever circulatory, as much as possible and to
make the city inhospitable to them.5
Outside-in: State Interference in Private
Uses of Space
At the same time, however, as the urban
populace is appropriating public spaces, the
transgression of the border between public
and private is working in the opposite direc-
tion. The states involvement with domestic
or private spaces centres mainly around at-
tempts to organise household relations and
structure social roles within the family. The
state is extremely active in attempts to for-
mulate domestic identity: this is most evident
in the way the state discourse on the family
outlines the proper nature of womens roles
within the family, where women are cast as
nurturers, peace-makers, educators, as well
as budgeters and day-to-day decision-mak-
ers. The dissemination of this state discourse
is carried out through social mobilisation
campaigns which use both grassroots (face-
to-face meetings with mobilisation cadre)
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2385
and more generalised (media coverage and
billboards) techniques to spread their mes-
sages. The discourse on the nature of
womens roles as productive but more com-
monly as reproductive workers is primarily
addressed through the cultured family (Gia
Dinh Van Hoa) campaign, a national mobil-
isation effort in operation from the early
1960s; it forms part of the even broader and
older campaign started by Ho Chi Minh in
the 1940s, the new way of life (Nep Song
Moi), which sought and seeks to modernise
social life and behaviour in Vietnam.
The rhetoric of the social mobilisation
campaigns has changed dramatically over the
50 years or so that they have been operating
under the Communist Party. The most recent
change has been a new emphasis, taking over
slowly from the 1960s and accelerating rap-
idly from the late 1980s, on the family as the
central social unit of reproductive functions
and a focus on women as care-givers instead
of the state which had experimented with
providing these functions through day-cares
and canteens or communal kitchens. This is a
shift, in other words, from an earlier very
strong focus on breaking out the individual
from the family unit, creating a new social-
ist person, socialising the new person into
modern behaviourthat is, anti-traditional,
non-feudalto a new focus on placing the
individual back into the family unit, now
lauded as a Vietnamese traditional cultural
unit, which must provide for each members
reproductive needs (see Drummond, 1999,
for a more detailed account of the cultured
family mobilisation campaign and Malar-
ney, 1993, for a discussion of the new way
of life campaign). Of cially, the slogan re-
garding womens position in society is Be
skilled at productive work, [and] be skilled at
housework, but the focus has shifted decid-
edly towards womens role in the home
rather than out in society. Images of modern
women in popular culture reinforce this
message by focusing on their consumerist
functions and their care-giving functions,
constantly reiterating that Vietnamese
women are traditionally nurturing, hospit-
able, happy in the home doing housework
2386 LISA B. W. DRUMMOND
and houseproud, and that a womans dom-
estic duties are very important to her female-
ness, her feminine identity. Womens
productive work, where it features at all, is
almost always paired with her domestic abili-
ties.
The states ability to intervene in domestic
life is particularly striking in the realm of
reproductive activities. The state regulates
the birth strategies of urban families with
comparative effectivenessalthough not to
the dramatic extent that China (the most
obvious parallel) has imposed its birth strate-
gies on its urban populaceby limiting the
number of children and strongly advocating,
indeed making compulsory, family planning
through the use of contraceptives and/or birth
spacing. There are billboards seemingly at
every corner which advocate family planning
and small families, with slogans such as
Every happy family has only one or two
children, or Stop at one or two children
in order to bring them up properly (see
Figure 3). Although the state has had to
adjust its targets along the way, the measure
Figure 3. Family planning poster (right), HCMC
1998. The poster reads: Every family stops at one
or two children in order to bring them up properly,
to be well-off and happy, and for a prosperous
country. The poster on the left reads 300 years
Saigon and Ho Chi Minh City. Industrialisation and
Modernisation.
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of success of this intervention has been in the
successful lowering of the birth rate (Good-
kind, 1995).
This state involvement in the organisation
of private space through domestic life also
worked strongly through the 1980s at the
level of groups of household units as well as
through individual household units, through
the awarding of merit plaques. Although the
plaques themselves now undoubtedly carry
far less importance than they did through the
1980s (the novelist Duong Thu Huong, for
example, stresses the motivations provided
for regulation of domestic behaviour at an
individual and collective level by the be-
stowal or withdrawal of these merit plaques;
see Duong, 1996), they are still awarded as
part of the social mobilisation campaigns
which operate to disseminate the states/
Partys messages about how households and
social behaviour should be organised and in
some rural areas are af xed to the outside of
the award-winning homes so that they can be
easily seen. In urban areas, award-winning
families are encouraged by the local au-
thorities to display them prominently in the
front room.
Another way the states engagement in
domestic organisation is demonstrated is
through the household registration (ho khau)
system. This system, in which all persons are
registered as living in a particular household
at a particular location, once regulated the
food rationing system (stopped in the late
1980s) and thus severely limited mobility, as
rationed foodstuffs were only available in
ones place of residence. This registration
also regulated access to education and other
state-provided services and it was necessary
to have of cial permission to move ones
registration from one area to another, limit-
ing, in particular, rural-to-urban migration.
Household composition was also subject to
state regulation through the household regis-
tration system (and in principle this is still
true, although rarely if ever enforced).6 Only
persons listed in the household registration
booklet were allowed to sleep in the familys
home; visitors had to be reported to the local
police. The system, therefore, worked to
 STREET SCENES
keep would-be rural migrants out of the cities
by blocking their access to rice and other
food, employment, accommodation and edu-
cation, all of which were only possible in
ones of cial place of residence. Although
rationing was stopped in the late 1980s, and
many of the barriers to spontaneous mi-
gration were therefore lifted, lack of an urban
registration still blocks access to public edu-
cation, some formal-sector employment (in
state-owned enterprises or government de-
partments) and accommodation through
of cial channels. Rural-to-urban migration,
particularly of the spontaneous kind, is now
a major problem for the government and
local urban authorities, whose services and
infrastructure are already strained (see Li
Tana, 1996, and Truong Si Anh, 1995, for
discussions of rural-to-urban migration to
Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City respectively).
The state also tried to regulate ritual
spaces within domestic space by encourag-
ing the placement of pictures of Ho Chi
Minh on family ancestral altars and by dis-
couraging excessive expenditure on
sacri cial objectsi.e. the hang ma votive
paper objects that people burn as offerings to
their ancestors: paper money, paper houses,
even paper motorbikes, which the dead need
in the afterlife (Malarney, 1993, 1996). Al-
though as a formal effort this state interven-
tion in ritual practice was largely abandoned
in the 1970s, tirades against superstitious
beliefs and ritual excess continue to appear
frequently in newspapers and other media.
Urbanites, then, routinely appropriate so-
called public space to their own ends and
refute or ignore state attempts to reappropri-
ate and control those spaces, while at the
same time the state reaches into domestic
space to regulate and control behaviour and
the organisation of that space.
Beginning to Converge? Emerging
Pseudo-public Spaces
It is clear, however, that the nature of public
space is changing in Vietnam as the market
economy develops. This is occurring most
visibly in the area of leisure spaces. Once,
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2387
for urban Vietnamese, the only available
spaces for leisure activities were state-
produced and state-controlledthese would
include parks, museums, sports facilities (op-
erated by the various ministries to which they
belonged) and the squares such as the area
in front of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, in
addition to spaces such as pavements which
are used for recreational activities, particu-
larly sports, because other more appropriate
or more purpose-built spaces are not avail-
able.7 These spaces were free of charge,
although often requiring speci c
af liationsthe sports facilities, for exam-
ple, could only be used by employees of the
ministries or organisations which owned
them. These spaces were not necessarily in
any way adequate, but were the only rec-
reational spaces available until the late
1980s.
Doi moi, which has seen the gradual
introduction of a market economy, has, in
addition to its many other social effects,
made possible and encouraged the commer-
cialisation of leisure space and the com-
modi cation of leisure itself. Leisure now is
consumption, direct or indirect, where previ-
ously conspicuous or even moderate con-
sumption of leisure was frowned upon and
discouraged. The state is now allowing and
encouraging the creation of commercialised
leisure spaces where the primary activity
within these spaces and indeed their primary
purpose, is consumption. As in Western soci-
eties, public space is becoming consumption
space (Zukin, 1991).
An excellent example of this is Ho Chi
Minh Citys SuperBowl bowling alley inau-
gurated in 1996 with a lavish opening
ceremony. Bowling at SuperBowl is compar-
atively expensive in its own right, but more
than half of the space of the SuperBowl
complex is made up of a shopping mall
Vietnams rst, which includes the rst KFC
and Jollibee (a fast-food chain from the
Philippines) to open in Vietnam. The mall
has a video game arcade, a mini supermarket,
as well as shops selling clothes, cosmetics,
CDs and so on. Bowling is the least of the
activities in this leisure space: most of the
2388 LISA B. W. DRUMMOND
Vietnamese who go there go only to watch
the bowling, browse the shops and perhaps to
eat a KFC meal which, for 3 4 persons, costs
approximately the equivalent of one-third
of a government workers of cial monthly
salary.
The Sai Gon Water Park is another recent
example of commercial leisure space con-
struction. Not only is the entry fee itself
expensive, but the water park is located ap-
proximately 10 km from the city centre and
there is no public transport to the site.
Would-be patrons, therefore, must have pri-
vate means of transport. The advertisements
for the Water Park explain in some detail
what the water park is and how one should
behave there (do not bring your own food,
buy it at the parks food outlets) to a poten-
tial clientele without experience of this type
of space and who would not know the proper
etiquette.
Other types of leisure space are also expe-
riencing commercialisation. As noted above,
young couples use the parks and other public
areas at night for intimate activities because
of the lack of space for privacy in their
homes, but this is also changing. Those with
enough money can go to a bia om (literally,
a cuddle beer bar) for privacy. These are
privately run bars, deliberately dark and
murky, set up with potted trees and screens
between each table to give a semblance of
privacy. Some of these bars have small cubi-
cles in the back which can be rented. There
are also now short-stay guesthouses where
the owners do not ask questions and do not
request the marriage certi cate which cou-
ples are legally required to provide.
The point here is that all of these commer-
cialised spaces and leisure pursuits now op-
erate as private spaces, restricting access on
nancial criteria, not on Party or employment
af liation as some leisure spaces did before.
And these commercialised leisure spaces are
coming to dominate recreational options.
What does this mean for urban society and
Vietnamese society in general? The com-
modi cation of public space in Western soci-
eties through its replacement with
pseudo-public spaces serves to depoliticise
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those spaces: they serve corporate interests,
not democratic ones (whether Western,
socialist or other) (Mitchell, 1995; pp. 119
121; see also Goss, 1996). Thus the predomi-
nance of pseudo-public spaces makes truly
political spaces of unmediated access un-
available. In Vietnam, where such potentially
politicised spaces hardly existed, this
phenomenon may not be remarkable or prob-
lematic. Indeed, the state is complicit in this
developmentbut to what extent the pro-
vision of spaces of consumption as entertain-
ment, with all the advertising, glossy
magazines and lifestyle input that these en-
tail, will be suf cient to stave off any poten-
tial demands for deeper reform, remains an
open question, particularly now when it
seems that economic growth will be slowed
if not halted in the near future. Consideration
of these issues actually raises more questions
than it answers, but is important as a rst
foray into thinking about some of these is-
sues in the Vietnamese context.
Conclusion
This paper has examined the practices of
public and private spaces in contemporary
urban Vietnam, where the use of the street
has operated, to a limited extent, as a me-
dium for the mediation between state and
society over these spaces and practices. The
use of the street in the inside-out direction is
unlike the modern Western usage, both be-
cause of law enforcement and because of the
rise of the motor car and shopping mall in the
West which is yet to happen in Vietnam, but
contemporary Vietnamese city streets would
appear very much like the streetscapes of
other Asian cities. From an outside-in direc-
tion, there is very strong interference in pri-
vate space in contemporary Vietnam, unlike
the Western experience, because of the
states strength in its ability to impose and
perhaps because of the lack of a tradition of
a public realm of discussion in which resist-
ance to these impositions could be negotiated
or mediated. Ironically, where studies of
public space in Western cities decry the
death of streetlife, Vietnam has experienced
 STREET SCENES
in the 1990s a sudden resurgence of streetlife
and street-use by pedestrians, shoppers and
2.
residents, as users become increasingly em-
boldened in their occupation of this space
as an extension of domestic space, an
annexation of commercial space and a space 3.
for personal expression. To some extent,
slowed temporarily perhaps by the recent
economic down-turn, a convergence with the 4.
Western urban phenomenon of pseudo-pub-
lic spaces has begun in Vietnam with the
construction of private leisure facilities as
described above. These are limited, however 5.
and still few and the most commonly used
leisure space is still the street and its pave-
ments. Although it is clear from the preced-
ing discussion that these terms public and
private space have as complicated an ex-
pression in Vietnam as is now accepted in
critical application of these terms in Western
society studies, it is also clear that the rea-
sons for this being so are culturally, locally,
speci c and therefore need to be acknowl-
edged in their usage.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the
helpful comments of two anonymous review-
ers on an earlier draft of this paper. The
author would also like to thank Timothy
Bunnell for his insightful and generous com-
ments on another draft of this paper. At 6.
various times, the authors research in Viet-
nam which has contributed to this paper has
been supported generously by the Social Sci-
ences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, a Canadian Universities Consor-
tium Asian Institute of Technology
eldwork grant, a Northwest Regional Con-
sortium for Southeast Asian Studies travel
grant and a eldwork grant from the Depart-
ment of Human Geography, RSPAS, the
Australian National University.
Notes
1. See Papin (1997) for a detailed discussion 7.
of the development of Hanoi and outlying
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2389
villages from the early 19th to mid 20th
century.
The gure for inner-city dwellings was 4.87
square metres per person in 1996 (Hoan
Kiem District, Hanoi) (Ministry of Construc-
tion, 1996).
And, for the seemingly growing numbers of
homeless persons (no estimates currently
available), the street obviously functions as
their entire domestic environment.
Spontaneous is a word which appears fre-
quently in of cial or press descriptions of
migrants and urban mobile vendors. It is read
as unregulated and therefore has decidedly
negative overtones.
A newspaper article deploring urban behav-
iour, entitled The phenomenon of rudeness
is increasingwhy?, pointed to rural mi-
grants as a problem in the cities:
Not everyone who lives in the city can be
called an urbanite. Those who have not yet
forgotten their old habits make things go
awry. When they dont have the point of
view of an urbanite, they cannot under-
stand how to adjust appropriately to the
common practices (Nguyen Dau Van,
1994).
The article goes on to say that it is these
narrow-minded migrants who are prepared
to destroy the urban structure and its
stable institutions in order to get short
term bene ts. These phenomena include
breaking down walls in order to extend
their houses and using the area for trading,
even of a school or hospital [and this]
leads to rudeness (Nguyen Dau Van,
1994).
Whether urban or rural, families are still
reluctant to disclose the permanent resi-
dence of non-registered members in their
households, seeming to demonstrate that
while restrictions had been eased, the house-
holds registration book was still considered
a powerful tool to be wielded by the state
when the state cares to use it. That is, local
authorities may be well aware of irregular
situations and choose not to take action, for
one reason or another, but people still evi-
dently feel bound, at some level, to the repre-
sentation of their household in the
registration book, that this representation is
more accurate, legal or proper. (Observa-
tion noted during an inspection tour of inter-
viewers for a national household survey,
1998.)
In 1991, soccer playing on the pavements
had been made illegal because the balls and
2390 LISA B. W. DRUMMOND
those chasing them into the street caused so
many accidents.
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