Events

PROGRAM

Moderator   Dr Rita Padawangi | National University of Singapore

ABSTRACTS

Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City by Assoc Prof Annette Miae Kim

For most, the term “public space” conjures up images of large, open areas: plazas, parks, and the ancient Greek agora. In many of the world’s major cities, however, these are not a part of the everyday lives of the public. Rather, business and social lives have always been conducted along main roads and sidewalks. And now with increasing urban growth and density, primarily from migration and immigration, rights to the sidewalk are being hotly contested among pedestrians, street vendors, property owners, tourists, and governments around the world. With Sidewalk City, Annette M. Kim provides a multidisciplinary study of sidewalks in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Based on fieldwork over 15 years, Kim developed methods of spatial ethnography to overcome habitual seeing, and recorded both the spatial patterns and the social relations of how the city’s vibrant sidewalk life is practiced. In Sidewalk City, she transforms this data into an array of maps, progressing through a primer of critical cartography, to unveil new insights about the importance and potential of this quotidien public space. Ho Chi Minh City’s sidewalks show us that it is possible to have an aesthetic sidewalk life that is inclusive of multiple publics’ aspirations and livelihoods, particularly those of migrant vendors.

“Dis-locating” Public Space from Ho Chi Minh City’s Alleyways (hẻm) by Dr Marie Gibert

Although lacking official recognition from the urban authorities, the urban network of alleyways still houses about 85% of city dwellers in Ho Chi Minh City. As such, it remains an important ingredient of the Vietnamese urban identity. The anthropological exploration of the daily functioning of ordinary alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City provides an invitation to acknowledge the social value of ephemeral public spaces, which are constantly renewed by residents’ uses and interchanges. These fluid and shifting spaces allow for a great reversibility in urban functions and illustrate the idea of the street as a ‘capital for experimentation’ and the fruit of a social agreement continuously renewed over time, which allows both for the permanence of a spatial form and the modification of its parallel uses. Beyond the antagonism of the public/private duo inherited from the Western conception of urban spaces, Vietnamese alleyways offer the richness of the buffer zone of its intermediate semi-public spaces, at the interface of the tube-house and the street. In Vietnam, the level of publicness of a space varies depending on the time of day, and day of year. This remark invites us to re-think the notion of public space from the perspective of Ho Chi Minh City alleyways, in order to fully integrate the urban practices and conceptualisations of the global South in the field of urban theory.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Annette Miae Kim is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California’s Price School of Public Policy. She also directs SLAB, the Spatial Analysis Laboratory, that advances the visualization of the social sciences for public service. Her research experiments with critical cartography and spatial ethnography to re-conceptualize contemporary urbanism and find more inclusive and humane ways to design and govern the 21st century city. Her books include Learning to be Capitalists: Entrepreneurs in Vietnam’s Transition Economy (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Sidewalk City: Re-Mapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Chicago Press, 2015). She received her Ph.D. in urban planning from UC Berkeley, Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University, and was a professor at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning for ten years.

Marie Gibert received her PhD in urban geography from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France, in June 2014. Her research deals with the dynamics of public and private spaces in the development of Asian cities today, as well as with vernacular architecture and the practices of city dwellers in postcolonial cities. Her PhD proposed a trandisciplinary and in-depth ethnographic study of the alleyways network (hẻm) in the urban districts of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Considering the figure of the alleyway both as an urban form and a vibrant public space, her work is at the crossroad between urban planning, architecture and social issues. She has been conducting fieldwork in Ho Chi Minh City for more than six years, during which time she regularly taught urban planning at the University of Architecture and Urban Planning. While at ARI, she pursues her research on place-making and expressions of the collective realm in Southeast Asian cities. She is concerned with the study and the understanding of places that enable to “create publics”.

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