I. The City and Vietnamese Market Socialism

A. Urbanization in Vietnam

1. Associated with modernity
2. Urban areas: mass consumption, highrises, malls, cars, motorbikes, fashionable people
3. Urban poverty, sex work, drugs
4. Extremes: wealth/poverty; civilized living/social evils

B. Market socialism, also as in China

1. Government run by Communist Party
2. Market-oriented policies (Doi moi): 1986-present

a. Land redistributed to families
b. Small businesses privatized
c. State-run companies and joint ventures

3. Special industrial zones
4. "Market economy with socialist orientation"

C. Effects

1. Rising standards of living
2. Poverty has declined
3. Class inequality growing
4. Concerns about Westernization, loss of culture, social evils

 

II. Master-Planned Urban Development

A. Harms, Erik. 2016. Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon. Berkeley: University of California Press.
B. "My primary aim is to show how large-scale urban infrastructure projects become entangled with the lives and aspirations of people living in a rapidly growing city, and to show the role these projects play in the complex political and economic dramas taking place in an urban world increasingly driven by the market logics of real estate development" (2).
C. Photos of Ho Chi Minh City
D. How do people experience urbanization: luxury and rubble

1. What does it mean to people to live in a new urban zone? What are the lives of residents there like?
2. What does creating a new urban zone mean for the people who used to live there, whose homes are turned into rubble?

E. Lifestyle and personhood: "In this situation, where neoliberal economics mingle with illiberal politics and free market expansion coexists with persistent political unfreedoms, master-planned urban development projects become important sites for imagining and contesting new ideas about urban life" (4).
F. Civility = property
G. Rights = property rights, "Because overtly contentious politics remain impossible, I argue that the agitation over land use rights and civility taking place in these two places operates as a surrogate for the kind of political life citizens in other countries normally enjoy" (4).
H. Some gain rights, others are pushed aside
I. Methods

1. Nine months of fieldwork between 2010 and 2014
2. Lived in Phu My Hung, visited Thu Thiem regularly
3. Participant observation in both areas
4. Ethnographic interviews with 335 informants

J. What this book is not: "Ho Chi Minh City is a Vietnamese city, and it is not my responsibility to tell Vietnamese how to build their cities. In my opinion, the hubris-filled history of foreign know-it-alls telling people in the developing world how to live has been neither pretty nor productive" (13).
K. Most people, both possessing and dispossessed, agreed with the goals of urban redevelopment

 

III. Culture and Civilization

A. Culture (van hoa): hierarchical, judgmental
B. Uneducated = lack culture (thieu van hoa)
C. Civilization (van minh): increasingly associated with urban areas
D. Urban civilization can also threaten urban culture: Dancing in the Park (Hanoi)

 

IV. Progress and Development

A. Popular support in Vietnam for concepts of progress and development
B. State promotes development and progress

1. Billboards of future cities
2. Development targets
3. Modern urban civilization

C. Criticisms of state, Vietnam lags behind
D. Nobody questions goal of moving forward in time to beauty, order, modernity, even in Thu Thiem.

 

V. Phu My Hung (Wealthy Beautiful Prosperous)

A. Luxury
B. Civic consciousness: "Rather, they felt that a heightened sense of private rights also fostered a heightened sense of obligation to others, which would form the foundation of a renewed ethic of civic engagement and social consciousness" (14).
C. Eighth grade students

1. From wasteland or swamp
2. Historical expansion of Vietnamese nation

D. Population of District 7

1. 91,000 (1997) --> 266,000 (2011)
2. Density: 21,000 persons per km2 in areas around Phu My Hung, 2,155 in Phu My Hung (2006, page 38)

E. "ostensible civilizers do not always see themselves as engaging first and foremost in acts of exclusion or willful domination of others, but more often see themselves as good-hearted, forward-thinking people" (63).
F. Civilized consciousness: "This community, they emphasized, was a model for building a new vision of society, a place where self-discipline and social consciousness were intimately connected" (102).
G. Consciousness reproduces privilege, makes it seem like personal character, like "quality" in China

 

VI. Thu Thiem

A. Over 14,600 households have been cleared
B. Residents' positions

1. Thu Thiem "wasteland" = seen without really being seen
2. Most residents accepted projects' goals, but wanted sacrifice to e honored
3. Mathematical calculations of value

C. Real estate speculation

1. 1997: Thu Thiem becomes urban district
2. "What might on the surface appear to have been nothing but a series of dry administrative decrees and shifting map boundaries in fact represented a fundamental restructuring of the approach to urban development in the city" (173).
3. Role of map: Benedict Anderson
4. Land reclassification --> insider trading
5. ICA (Investment and Construction Authority, est. 2001) needs to buy cheap and sell dear to finance project

D. Teacher Long

1. 60 years old, third generation in Thu Thiem
3. Material compensation is unjust
4. Two trees = "agricultural"
5. Residential = US$1,000 per square meter; agricultural = US$10 (201)

 

VII. Personhood and Property

A. Property rights are evenly distributed in theory, unevenly in practice
B. Phu My Hung requires dispossession
C. "'rights-bearing subject'" = "maximize land values in a superheated real estate market" (219)
D. "This is precisely what I have described taking place in contemporary Vietnam: the emergence of people whose very conception of self is tied to their sense of themselves as property-owning subjects, and whose understanding of 'rights' is entangled with ideas of private property" (220).