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SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia Vol. 29, No.
2 (2014), pp. 22362 DOI:10.1355/sj29-2a2014ISEAS
ISSN0217-9520print/ISSN1793-2858electronic
Civilitys Footprint: Ethnographic Conversations about Urban
Civility and Sustainability in
Ho Chi Minh City
Erik Harms
Vietnamese discourses and practices of civility (van minh) both
intersect and come into conflict with conceptions of urban
sustainability. On one level, as ideas, both sustainability and
civility are born of the same will to discipline the present-day
actions of individuals in order to achieve long-term,
future-oriented goals for social collectives. On the level of lived
practice, however, the actual lifestyles that accompany
contemporary Vietnamese concepts of civility present challenges to
sustainable cities. Conversely, many ecologically sustainable urban
lifestyles, when viewed through the lens of civility, appear to be
socially unsustainable. Ongoing tensions between the concepts of
civility and sustainability in Ho Chi Minh City suggest that a
nuanced understanding of civility and sustainability in
contemporary Vietnamese cities might most productively emerge if
one considers the two concepts in dialogue with each other.
Keywords: civility (van minh), sustainability, urban planning,
New Urban Zones, Ph My Hng, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
The Lawyer: Wet Feet, Motorbikes, Cars and Urban
Civilization
One evening in the summer of 2012, I arrived for a dinner
appointment at an upscale Saigon restaurant with very wet feet. One
of my dinner companions was a successful Vietnamese lawyer, active
in the development and reinvigoration of the Vietnamese legal
system. He did not have wet feet because, unlike me, he had come to
dinner by car. I had come by motorbike, and, as sometimes happens
during the rainy season, I had been forced to make my way through
an
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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).
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Civilitys Footprint 225
The lawyers concern with motorbikes led to a broader discussion
about the concept of urban civility, what is known in Vietnamese as
van minh th. The concept of van minh (civility, civilization) is
ubiquitous in Vietnam, and is commonly associated with state
pronouncements and Communist Party slogans (e.g., Everything for
the target of a Rich People, and a Strong, Democratic, Equal and
Civilized Country).3 However, the concept cannot be completely
dismissed as empty state propaganda. For it also appears in a wide
range of contexts not directly controlled by the state, ranging
from slogans on ATM machines (Withdraw money in a civilized way),4
to movie theatre announcements asking filmgoers to silence their
cell phones (Please respect others; watch the film in a civilized
manner),5 and to everyday exclamations that people make about the
relative lack of civility displayed by their fellow urban
residents. Most of the academic research on the topic, my own
included (Harms 2009), has tended to highlight the way that the
concept of van minh is deployed to legitimize and reinforce
hierarchical status distinction. In contrast, conversations with
people like the lawyer indicate that the discourse has more
purchase on everyday thinking and carries a wider range of meanings
for a wider range of people than previously thought. Even people
who in some contexts might dismiss or ignore the states use of its
civilizing discourse will find themselves in other contexts using
the language of civility in order to express their own critiques of
Vietnamese social life. The lawyer, for example, is quite critical
of and is not likely to be duped by state dogma. He sees himself as
part of a brave legal movement standing up to the state by pushing
for a more socially just legal system. But, despite his general
cynicism towards state propaganda, the concept of van minh still
offers him a wide-open linguistic vessel into which he might pour
his ideals about the best way in which to live in the modern world.
For him, defending the rule of law requires pushing back at the
state as well as encouraging what he sees as civilized, law-abiding
behaviour among everyday people.
When discussing the concept of van minh, then, it helps to
recognize the complexity and semantic fluidity of the term, because
the people who use it do so in dynamic ways and with a range of
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226 Erik Harms
intentions. In many cases van minh is an undeniably top-down
dogma useful to a one-party state seeking to control a potentially
unruly population. In other cases it can be mobilized in less
authoritarian ways by non-state actors who wish to articulate a
kind of social contract that actually demands accountability from
their government, or simply to express the expectations that they
have of their fellow citizens. In all cases, however, whether
expressed from the top down as an instrument of government control
or from the bottom up as a critique of a social order gone awry,
the concept of van minh expresses the will to impose order on human
beings living in social groups. The ends to which this order can be
applied, and the beneficiaries of that order, are not foreordained.
Thus, rather than dismiss the concept of van minh as dogma, it is
productive to think of it as a concept that opens up a space for
conversation and debate, and to recognize that the term only means
anything concrete when realized in actual social practice. When the
concept of civility is reconceived in this way, it reveals itself
as a mutating set of ideas entangled with lived social practices
rather than a fixed ideology. This set of ideas makes it entirely
possible for Vietnamese to describe van minh as something worth
striving for in one context, and then, in another context and
without contradicting themselves, to share the critical and
sometimes cynical perspective commonly offered by the foreign
scholars who tend to dismiss it as a matter of empty
propaganda.
When Civility Meets Sustainability
One of the most useful approaches to understanding the language
and practice of civility in contemporary Vietnam is not to dismiss
it offhand as dogma alone, but rather to engage with it on its own
terms, and to subject it to its own logic to treat it, in other
words, as a theory of society. As with so many other theories about
the coming together of individuals into social groups, the
intellectual construct of civility is not without its own internal
contradictions. The lawyers discussion of motorbikes illustrates
this point. He used the concept of van minh in order to articulate
a sincere concern with
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Civilitys Footprint 227
protecting and preserving the collective good of society as a
whole. In insisting that his fellow citizens abide by restrictive
forms of rule-bound behaviour, he was not explicitly trying to
elevate himself above them or to gain any sort of political power
in an instrumental or self-aggrandizing manner. Instead, the lawyer
saw van minh as a kind of moral discipline, which when adhered to
might encourage his fellow citizens to consider the effects that
their behaviours might have on fellow citizens. His use of
civility, then, proffered a hope for social improvement. He hoped
that a greater number of people might become better off if more
people could learn to curb their individualistic desires. In his
mind, his making such demands of his fellow citizens was no
different from his making similar demands of the government and of
the Vietnamese legal system as a whole.
But the lawyers proposal that driving cars would promote the
collective good becomes complicated when it engages the discourse
of urban sustainability, a discourse which both reinforces and
undermines the concept of civility. On one level, civility is
itself a discourse of social sustainability. When the lawyer
insisted that civilized people (ngi van minh) should drive
automobiles, he implied that an uncivil mode of urban transport was
socially unsustainable. With no rule of law, he could not imagine
that problems of urban disorder could ever be solved, and
Vietnamese cities simply could not sustain such disorder. In this
sense, his understanding of civility was not wholly at odds with
the concept of urban sustainability, which also insists that
individual self-control and discipline have the potential to
benefit the social collective. Nevertheless, the lawyers desire to
increase civility in Vietnamese urban behaviour demanded that his
fellow citizens engage in modes of living driving cars, for example
that threaten the ecological sustainability of the city.
Sustainability is in many ways a civilized discourse. Like
civility, it insists on a consciousness of how ones actions will
affect other members of the society in which one lives. But
civility and sustainability also come into conflict, because the
lifestyles associated with civility are often unsustainable. This
conundrum, which is the principle focus of this article, may be
stated simply thus: Civility and urban sustainability are at once
synergistic concepts and concepts
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228 Erik Harms
inclined to work at cross-purposes. They embrace and also
strangle each other, simultaneously depending on and undermining
each other. On the one hand, civility and sustainability are
synergistic because they are both founded on the same logical
structure: both concepts promote self-discipline, delayed
gratification, consciousness of others and future-oriented
intergenerational solidarity (Castells 2000, p. 118). They are
both, to borrow from Tania Murray Li (2007), ideas founded on the
will to improve. On the other hand, they are at odds with each
other, because so many of the practices deemed civil or civilized
in the modern world are in fact founded on highly
resource-intensive and generally unsustainable modes of urban
living. In the Vietnamese case, lifestyles commonly coded as
civilized generally depend on modes of circulation, of habitation
and of technologically enhanced labour that consume greater per
capita quantities of fossil fuel and occupy larger expanses of
space than other modes of production and habitation. To put the
conundrum differently, urban sustainability, as a concept, is a
very civilized way of conceiving of the world and of human beings
duties within it. But the most civilized of urban worlds are in
many fundamental ways far less sustainable than the worlds most
uncivil of urban spaces.6
In Vietnam today, architects, planners, developers, government
officials and, in my experience, most citizens agree that
Vietnamese cities are out of control (Drummond 2000, pp. 238283;
Thomas 2002, p. 1612). It is thus perhaps no surprise that people
commonly look to ideas of civility for solutions to the problems of
the city. The very idea of civility, at least according to its own
logic, encourages people to develop a sense of consciousness ( thc)
of the collective good. Civility encourages individuals to
discipline their actions, comport their bodies, and live their
lives in ways that do not unduly impinge on collective interests.7
Like the swirling motorbikes cutting unpredictably across the
streets of Ho Chi Minh City, the urbanization process in Vietnam is
itself also commonly derided as uncivilized, especially for the
prevalence of unplanned auto-urbanization ( th ha t pht). Residents
lament that there is no visionary future-orientation reflecting the
interest of the social whole. Instead they
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Civilitys Footprint 229
describe the process as being guided by the immediate demands of
millions of residents thinking of their immediate, individual
needs. Urban Vietnamese of all walks of life commonly decry this
situation, complaining that the Me (ci ti) increasingly trumps the
We (chng ta). Within this context, the lawyers concern with
motorbikes and civility spoke to a generalized concern coursing
through Vietnamese cities from Hanoi to Saigon. Like many cities
around the world, people in those cities talk consistently about
the need to tame the disorderly city by promoting a notion of urban
civility and order that prioritizes a forward-thinking and broadly
inclusive consciousness of the collective good over myopic
self-interest (Murray 2008, pp. 414 passim).
The concept of urban sustainability, like civility, also arises
in response to the problems of the disorderly city. While
sustainability is a famously slippery concept, at root most
versions of the concept seek to develop a consciousness of social
collectives and to encourage people to think about the impact of
their actions on others, both now and in the future.8 In this way,
both sustainability and civility are similar logical constructs,
similarly founded on ideas of future-orientation, self-control,
delayed gratification and awareness of the effects of ones actions
on a larger world, one extending beyond the immediate self. For
example, the most famous definition of sustainability, as
articulated in the so-called Brundtland Report issued by the World
Commission on Environment and Development in 1987, encourages
development that meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, p. 8,
cited in Kates et al. 2005, pp. 910).
Applying the concept of sustainability specifically to cities,
Manuel Castells defines urban sustainability as both present- and
future-oriented: A city or ecosystem, or complex structure of any
kind, is sustainable if its conditions of production do not destroy
over time the conditions of its reproduction (Castells 2000, p.
118). Civility and sustainability are both forms of comportment
that demand the subordination of immediate self-interest to
future-oriented visions visions anticipating larger, transcendent
rewards that will come
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230 Erik Harms
through delayed gratification. A similar future-orientation
framed the lawyers concern about motorbikes. In breaking the law, a
rider might reach his own destination more quickly. But in doing
so, that same rider actually undermines Vietnams ability as a
country to reach a more distant and transcendent destination, a
place governed by something called the rule of law. Civilized forms
of mobility sacrifice immediate expedience and law-breaking in
order to strive towards the greater goal of rule-oriented traffic.
Like sustainability, civilized self-discipline must occur in the
present, but gratification is delayed to the future.
But on the level of lived practice many of the solutions devised
to bring about this urban civility, while born of an ideological
commitment to collective civic consciousness, are founded on
lifestyles that themselves demand increased consumption of
resources. Discourses of civility celebrate collective goals and
self-discipline, but the civilizing process itself, as social
scientists have recognized since at least the pioneering work of
Norbert Elias ([1939] 1994), is riven with power and hierarchy, and
commonly leads to unequal distribution of resources. The discussion
of the motorbike and the car captures this conundrum well, and it
raises a question to which there are no easy answers. Motorbikes
occupy less space, consume fewer resources, and make possible a
more compact urban fabric with smaller ecological footprints,
especially when an uncivil family of four crowds on a bike and
breaks the two-passenger-per-bike law. But they also promote, at
least according to understandings such as the lawyers, uncivil and
disorderly urban forms of conduct. Cars, on the other hand, promote
civil, rule-oriented urban comportment. But they also guzzle gas
and demand resource-intensive urban forms, characterized by
everything from wider streets, expressways, and parking lots to
larger homes and sprawling cities. In hot and crowded Vietnamese
cities one must add to these considerations the fact that
chauffeurs typically pre-cool cars before picking up their
passengers, or, for lack of parking spaces, simply drive around the
city until their passengers are ready to be picked up.9
In addition to concerns about transport, there are many further
dimensions to urban sustainability. These relate to the ways in
which
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Civilitys Footprint 231
patterns of consumption, lifestyle, land use and urban design
will play out in the housing and urban energy sectors, and to how
these outcomes will either mitigate or intensify the effects of
climate change. In the case of Ho Chi Minh City, for example, the
problem of rising sea levels, when combined with the infilling of
peri-urban watersheds to accommodate new, civilized housing
developments, is intensifying the historic problem of urban
flooding. It is thus adding a new set of concerns to the long list
of concerns already associated with urban sprawl. The uncivil city
of vernacular housing, while often described as dirty and
disorderly, can also be understood from some perspectives as
maximizing scarce resources in ways that promote sustainable
consumption. Civility, by contrast, has a very big footprint.10
New Urban Zones and Civilized Living
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
stand-alone 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
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232 Erik Harms
visions intended to illustrate a possible urban future. The idea
of a Civilisation City, Human-Oriented Community, while linking the
development to larger social ambitions, is not, however, purely
empty rhetoric imposed on hapless residents by a developers clever
marketing department. My nine months of participant observation,
and more than a hundred interviews with Ph My Hng residents, showed
that people living in Ph My Hng valued it as safe (an ninh),
orderly (trat t), marked by consciousness ( thc), polite or
mannered (lch s), civilized (van minh), modern (hien ai), beautiful
(ep), rich (giu), elegant (sang), spacious (rong), green (xanh),
well ventilated and cool (thong mt), quiet (yn tnh), clean (sach
se), hygienic (ve sinh) and happy (vui). They associated all of
these notions with civility, and they saw them all as very
desirable traits for an urban zone.
Residents commonly juxtaposed these elements of life in Ph My
Hng against dirty (ban; khng sach se), polluted ( nhiem) and
FIGURE 1 Ph My Hng, Civilisation City, Human Oriented Community.
District 7, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Photo by the author.
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Civilitys Footprint 233
unplanned (khng c ke hoach; t pht, lit. spontaneous) urban
developments throughout the rest of the city, which they viewed as
haphazard (lung tung), unruly (mat trat t), uncivilized (thieu van
minh) and socially and environmentally unsustainable (khng ben
vng).14 Both residents of Ph My Hng and its planners often asserted
that unplanned urban zones typically lacked adequate
infrastructure, thus presenting problems of waste treatment and
service provision. They derided unplanned zones for lacking any
coherent vision that enabled the planned integration of social
services, parkland and other forms of public space. By contrast,
developers, city planners and government officials, and many city
residents presented Vietnams master-planned New Urban Zones as
civilized (van minh) and green (xanh). For they offered modern
infrastructure, adequate services, as well as a unified, long-term
vision that integrates open spaces into the urban plan. The
following statement, from the website of the Ph My Hng New Urban
Zone, is typical of the way that developers describe these
zones:15
A modern city developed within an environmental framework is the
unique identity and attractiveness of this New City Center. The
existing greenery will be re-created for parks, reserves, golf
course, entertainment amenities. It is the citys great interest to
protect its environment features while providing for growth and
development. The existing waterways will form a system of green
fingers between the development sites. (Phu My Hung Development
Corporation n.d.)
While it is possible to be cynical about such representations,
and tempting to consider them simply as auto-legitimization,
greenwashing, or the stories that privileged people tell themselves
and others in order to mask the hidden truth about their lives,
ethnographic research made clear that residents showed great
sincerity in their commitment to the collective ideals embedded in
the notion of a green civilization city.
The middle- and upper-class Vietnamese who live in Ph My Hng
navigate a tense relationship between a commitment to a communal
sense of civility and the sense that they enjoy more than
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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
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Civilitys Footprint 235
course as one of its most important components of greenery.
Furthermore, the resource demands of this urban development are so
great that developers had to build a new powerplant at Hiep Phc.
The existing electrical grid in the city could not support the new
developments anticipated electricity demands and those of the
export processing zone built along with it.17 New Urban Zones, like
automobiles, are described using the language of civility. Yet they
have very large ecological footprints. And the link between these
zones and automobiles is not an accident. Ph My Hng is largely
inhabited by professionals not unlike the lawyer mentioned in the
opening section of this article, most of whom commute to work
downtown by car, by Ph My Hngs own private shuttle bus service, or
by vans provided by their downtown employers. Only a select few
residents ever commute by motorbike.
While residents of the development understand it as a pleasant
place to live, both they and the planners alike see something more
than luxury housing in the New Urban Zones. Instead of seeing it
only as a collection of buildings and open spaces, they commonly
described Ph My Hng as a consciousness-changing urban community
that engendered a sense of commitment to shared urban space and
urban environmental sustainability. Descriptions of its
infrastructure are often embroidered with moralizing descriptions.
For example, a three-volume history of the Ph My Hng development
written by one of the Ho Chi Minh City officials involved in its
early development always follows accounts of the development of its
infrastructure with celebrations of its civilized consciousness.
The following passage, written with deep sincerity, comes
immediately after a long discussion of the important role played by
the Hiep Phc powerplant.
The completely persuasive attractive force of Ph My Hng is
precisely its humanistic thinking; it is for people, it serves
people, and it gives people the perception and the sentiment that
Ph My Hng is the urban area of peacefulness, of a cultured and
civilized life. No matter their station or their level, people who
become residents of Ph My Hng will always respect each
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236 Erik Harms
other, and will be civilized and cultured in their treatment of
each other, their interactions, and the way they deal with civil
matters in the residential area; they will be very self-disciplined
in implementing the standards of behavior and culture. (Nguyen Van
Kch et al., p. 263)18
A passage like this, in spite or perhaps because of its
moralizing tone, conceals a tension between civility and
sustainability. On the level of ideas, civilized New Urban Zones
promote a sense of collective social consciousness and a deep
desire to improve the country, but as actual material places they
promote this consciousness from within developments that are
decidedly exclusionary, privatized and dependent on high levels of
resource consumption. Ph My Hng was built in accordance with design
principles appropriate to the resource-intensive lifestyles of
global cities, but it is never described as a place of
undisciplined overconsumption. It is instead celebrated as a space
in which residents will develop an unprecedented consciousness for
others, founded on a renewed sense of self-discipline.
The Project Planner
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
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Civilitys Footprint 237
in general. For example, as we talked about his work, he told me
that he hoped to become a property developer, not because he hoped
to become wealthy but because its my duty to support my country. He
saw investment in real estate and urban development as a way to
bring new forms of living and urban consciousness to Vietnam. Along
the way, he added, real estate development would stimulate the
economy and thus would be good for all Vietnamese.19
The project manager and I became close friends above all because
we liked to argue about the role that New Urban Zones might play in
the development of Vietnams cities. Our arguments generally
proceeded in the form of point-and-counterpoint intellectual
sparring matches. He said New Urban Zones were bringing order and
efficiency to Vietnamese cities, and that they were making cities
more sustainable by increasing floor-to-area ratios thanks to their
use of multistorey apartment blocks. I said that they were often
exclusionary and wasteful, and that they were in fact unsustainable
because they did not actually increase urban density but rather
produced areas with large ecological footprints, in the form of
thinly populated megaprojects inhabited by people using
airconditioning to cool large living spaces. He saw them as
civilized (van minh), because they replaced an outdated style of
unplanned, cramped, crowded, hot and unsanitary Vietnamese urban
development. To counter this point, I claimed that one could
understand the vernacular Vietnamese city as ecologically much more
sustainable than the New Urban Zones.
In our conversations, we compared Google Earth images of Ph My
Hng to images of neighbouring unplanned districts (see Figures 2
and 3). Pointing to the dense fabric of alleyways in the
neighbouring districts, I asserted that it was clear that the land
there was used much more intensively, and that an individual
residents footprint was much smaller. But the project planner
countered, Could you imagine a child doing homework in those
conditions? That is what is holding back Vietnams education
system.20 In the New Urban Zones, by contrast, he noted that there
was more open space space for leisure and community, for children
to play. He mentioned children riding their bicycles through broad
tree-lined streets free from dangerous traffic, and he compared
this to the children riding
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238 Erik Harms
FIGURE 2 Google Earth screenshot of Ho Chi Minh Citys District
4.Image 2012 GeoEye.
FIGURE 3 Google Earth screenshot of Ph My Hng, taken from the
same elevation as Figure 2. Image 2012 DigitalGlobe.
01 SOJOURN.indd 238 6/11/14 1:25:23 PM
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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
One might construe my debates with the project manager as a
classic confrontation between the bottom-up anthropological
perspective and a standard top-down planners perspective. The
critical, messy, vernacular challenge that I posed to his modernist
simplifications might appear an attempt to temper the planners
utopian vision with James Scotts critique of Seeing like a State,
or Jane Jacobss insistence on taking a street-level view from below
and celebrating urban messiness (Scott 1998, p. 142; Jacobs [1961]
1993, p. 72). But this interpretation would ignore the fact that
the project managers perspective was in many ways very much a
bottom-up perspective. The project manager did not in fact yet own
property in Ph My Hng, because he had not yet saved enough money to
purchase a home there. And he did not yet have a real estate
development company of his own. These seemingly top-down visions
were instead the bottom-up aspirations of a man trying to succeed
through hard work and determination after coming to Saigon from a
working-class family in a provincial city. Furthermore, my views
about the importance of vernacular forms of urban development,
while posed in the register of a bottom up anthropological
perspective, have
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240 Erik Harms
found a champion in an organization no less top-down than the
World Bank. As it turns out, the native informant was seeing like a
state while disagreeing with the anthropologist, who was all of a
sudden siding with the bottom-up view of the World Bank.
The World Banks bottom-up view requires some explanation. The
Vietnam Urbanization Review published by the World Banks Vietnam
office in 2011, raised important points about how unplanned urban
spaces actually exhibit many sustainable characteristics (World
Bank 2011, pp. 11536). Resonating in surprising ways with
anthropological perspectives, the report describes the rationality
of everyday practices and essentially argues that there are lessons
to be learned from the popular, vernacular, spontaneous housing
forms found in Vietnamese urban spaces never formally planned by
urban planners or experts.21 Most importantly, the report notes at
one point that Vietnam has a very low incidence of slums for a
country at this stage of development, and attributes this state of
affairs correctly, in my view to what it calls the pluralistic
supply of housing in Vietnamese cities (World Bank 2011, p. 115).
Few slums exist because different kinds and levels of housing are
available to different sectors of the population from modest
self-built construction deep in urban alleyways, accessible only on
foot or by motorbike, to luxury villas in gated communities. Even
the weak enforcement of building codes has had a positive effect:
it makes possible organic urban development that responds to the
needs of the urban population by providing housing to people at
almost all income levels.
This report represents a dramatically different approach to city
planning from that typically offered by Vietnamese urban experts.
Vietnamese urban planners generally exhibit strong antagonism
towards the kind of bottom-up spontaneous urbanization that the
report recognizes as a part of the solution to the problems of
urban Vietnam. In Vietnam, the term for spontaneous urbanization (
th ha t pht) is almost always used negatively at times it comes
across as an epithet. But the World Bank report acknowledges what
anthropologists and radical planners have long argued that
bottom-up solutions could often provide organic solutions to the
problems of
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Civilitys Footprint 241
urban life.22 Instead of denouncing disorderly street life or
haphazard traffic, the report highlights the correlation between
these forms of urban life and the very efficient use of space.
Residents in such areas of the city unconsciously avoid urban
sprawl by building dense and compact neighbourhoods. These urban
forms make the city more accessible to all. They enable people of
all classes to find housing of some sort. I had made these same
arguments to the project planner in our feisty debates. In my many
years working in and visiting Ho Chi Minh City, I have seen a fair
number of small and indeed rudimentary living quarters, but I have
never seen a homeless person of the sort one sees throughout North
America. In terms of square footage, Vietnamese often have
literally less home than North Americans, but they are almost never
homeless. The seeming chaos of dense urban quarters organized
around meandering alleyways with houses of many sizes and qualities
can accommodate people of a wide range of social classes within a
complex and extraordinarily diverse housing stock. It also provides
spontaneously produced mixed-use neighbourhoods in which different
forms of housing and social activity are available for residents of
all sorts.23 And, in dense mixed-use settlements like these, one
does not need to travel very far for basic goods or services. They
thus serve to help limit both the horizontal growth of cities
across the landscape and per capita fuel consumption.
Vietnams cities, the World Bank report further noted, still
enjoy relatively good urban mobility (World Bank 2011, p. 127).
While this observation might seem surprising to those who have seen
Ho Chi Minh City traffic, actual commute times are not very long by
global standards.24 The report attributes relatively short commutes
in the context of high urban density to three features of
Vietnamese urban life:
1) The nearly universal use of the motorcycles [sic] as the
primary means of transportation;
2) The characteristic mixed land use neighbourhoods of
Vietnamese cities (which result in the close proximity of many of
the day-to-day trips individuals typically make).
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242 Erik Harms
3) The prevalence of shop-houses, where many people live in the
space above or behind their stores.
(World Bank 2011, p. xix)
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
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Civilitys Footprint 243
recent academic understandings of social nature.26 But in doing
so, it inadvertently isolates sustainability by linking it to
organic forms of spontaneous housing and discursively separating it
from the larger social context in which civility is important to
Vietnamese notions of liveability. The lawyer and the project
manager were, arguably, interested in a different kind of
sustainability the sustainability of civilized urban living (van
minh th). And by their standards the World Bank reports focus on
vernacular housing wilfully ignores the problems that people face
when living together as individual human beings, crowded into a
sprawling city with millions of other human beings. The lawyer and
project manager were more concerned with the ways in which people
interact with one another, with how they might get along, and what
they could expect from each other. The World Bank, so often
anthropologys favourite villain, was making a powerful, vaguely
anthropological bottom-up claim that solutions to the problems of
transport and housing lay in encouraging people to do what they
were already doing: ride motorbikes and live in cities they
themselves have built. But the irony is that in this social turn,
the reports main vision of sustainability does not overtly address
the importance of civility, a concept central to the social life of
most urban Vietnamese.
On a different register, however, civility does slip into the
report. Careful consideration of some of the assumptions in the
report, which was prepared by a team of both Vietnamese and foreign
consultants, shows that the language of urban civility cannot be
ignored. It creeps subtly into the report in many places. Attending
to the different voices in the report replaces the seemingly
uniform, monolithic World Bank voice with the murmurs of ongoing
discussion and debate among the many contributors to the report.
For example, its text begins by citing the Vietnamese governments
most recent Socioeconomic Development Strategy for the period of
20112020. It favourably notes that this policy document includes a
focus on sustainable development and that the focus is on
bolstering industrialization and urbanization in parallel, while
consolidating social inclusiveness (Economica Vietnam 2012; World
Bank 2011, p. 6).
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244 Erik Harms
But what, exactly, is meant by the urban in this concept of
urbanization? Scholars familiar with Vietnamese New Urban Zones,
for example, will recognize that the Vietnamese government
envisions master-planned developments as a central pillar of urban
development. In 2008, for example, Ph My Hng itself was recognized
as the New Urban Model by the Ministry of Construction (Phu My Hung
Development Corporation, n.d.). And the Ph My Hng model is
currently driving a massive project in Ho Chi Minh Citys District
2, with support from all levels of the city and national
governments (Harms 2013, p. 344). With this official vision in
mind, the World Bank reports bottom-up celebration of organic
housing and warnings about cars are quickly tempered by another
voice reminding readers that, among other things, An urban center
has model urban quarters, civilized urban streets and public areas
for its inhabitants spiritual life (World Bank 2011, p. 13).27 This
almost offhand mention of model urban quarters and civilized urban
streets reveals the parameters of a conversation taking place
between the driving ideal of sustainability and ideals of the
civilized city. By evoking the concept of model urban quarters, the
report evokes the kinds of developments that my friend the project
manager was building and that he loved so dearly. And in Vietnam,
civilized urban streets increasingly refers to streets designed for
people like my friend the lawyer, riding not on motorbikes but in
cars.
Put differently, the default understanding of model urban
quarters and civilized urban streets contradicts the reports
primary recommendations, namely that cars be restricted and that
mixed use, organic forms of housing must be recognized for their
vital role in housing urban Vietnamese. The report inadvertently
slips back into a mode in which sustainable urban development blurs
into greenwashing, where anything new, modern, or civilized is
coded as a commitment to sustainable urban development.
The World Bank report thus speaks in two registers. In one
register, the report critiques New Urban Zones and encourages more
attention to the vernacular Vietnamese city. In a different
register,
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Civilitys Footprint 245
however, the report celebrates modern, civilized urban
development, which any Vietnamese reader would quickly understand
as master-planned quarters like Ph My Hng. Why the slippage?
Towards a Civil Discourse about Civilitys Footprint
It would be easy to dismiss the inconsistencies in the World
Banks 2011 Vietnam Urbanization Review as evidence of slippery
double talk. I suggest, however, that it is more productive to see
them as reflections of an unresolved debate over the central
challenges facing Vietnamese urbanization. The debate mirrors the
conversations taking place both among Vietnamese themselves and
between Vietnamese and foreign consultants about how to reconcile
civility and sustainability. In all of my many conversations with
Ho Chi Minh City residents over the years, including but not
limited to those with the lawyer and the project manager described
in this article, I have been witness to similar debates, exploring
precisely the same tension lurking between the lines of the report.
Viewing the conflict between civility and sustainability in urban
development as a manifestation of this tension and as a source of
debate rather than as a wilful act of deceit more fairly
illustrates the way that thoughtful Vietnamese today waver between
what seem to be deeply contradictory understandings of civility and
sustainability.
Conversations about this tension lie precisely at the core of my
argument in this article. On the level of ideas, civility and
sustainability can be understood as essentially synergistic, even
if, as practices, they tend to contradict each other. These ideas
not only share the same logical structure, but they also speak to
each other: civilized societies should be concerned about
sustainability, and civility is essential to any concept of
sustainability (Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan 2013, pp. 1824). On
the level of lived practice, however, urban civility in
contemporary Vietnam has in many ways been constructed as an
essentially unsustainable, resource-intensive, land-hungry mode of
existence. The tension between civility and sustainability thus
arises in the move from ideas to
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246 Erik Harms
practices, from imagining how people should live to the ways in
which they actually live.
To understand the connection between civility and
sustainability, then, it can be useful to temporarily suspend the
many critiques of civility and civilizing processes that are so
common in social theory, and attempt to take peoples engagement
with civility at face value.28 This approach allows us to consider
how, in its ideal form, the term van minh in contemporary Vietnam
is not always intentionally conceived as an attempt to exclude
others. It is more commonly construed as an attempt to guide,
harness and direct the collective possibilities of human will and
agency towards the resolution of intractable social problems. Taken
at face value, the civilizing imperative of van minh encourages
individuals to contribute to the civilized city, which is
understood as a collective good: van minh appears on garbage cans
(see Figure 4), is associated with controlling traffic and even
appears in the motto of the post office (Nhanh chng Chnh xc An ton
Tien li Van minh [Fast
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
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Civilitys Footprint 247
Accurate Safe Convenient Civilized]). The term might also be
used in everyday conversation to implore someone to sit up
straight, to turn down loud music or to stop picking her or his
nose in public. A young person who does not give up a seat to an
elderly person on a bus might be accused of lacking civility (thieu
van minh). She or he would level the same accusation at a person
who threw trash on the ground.
One finds parallels here with the nuisance talk that Asher
Ghertner (2013, pp. 25354) has described among middle-class Delhi
residents who denounce the selfishness of slum dwellers. That
people so commonly do such uncivilized things as failing to give up
their seats or throwing trash on the ground in plain view of others
is precisely the evidence that Vietnamese often mobilize when they
decry their countrys low level of civilization. It justifies their
argument for working hard to develop a civilized consciousness
among others. In short, van minh is all about the way that a person
should comport her- or himself as a member of a society. It serves
to direct one to be aware of the ways in which ones own comportment
affects and is perceived by others. Van minh embodies an assertion
of the need for human beings to discipline themselves, and through
this discipline to achieve a larger social goal.
In parks throughout Ph My Hng, for example, large signs make
clear the rules for proper comportment, in English and Vietnamese
(see Figure 5). A selection from the twelve directives printed on
one of these signs follows:
1. Visitors are required to behave a cultural and civilized
lifestyle at public places:
Proper wear. All activities at the parks should be healthy,
ensure public order and in line with morality, social and
traditional practices
2. Do not bring weapon, murder weapon, noxious matter, forbidden
goods in the park
Do not sell goods in the park5. Do not write, draw, climb up the
walls, trees and statues
in the park: do not trample on meadow (grass) not pluck
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248 Erik Harms
flowers, fruit, break off branches (twigs) do not chop down or
deteriorate trees in the park in any form, do not hunt birds, fish
in the park
6. Do not take a bath, wash, hang the washing, do not lie on
benches, grass in the park
Do not light fire, cook, fly a kite, shoot bird, fishing, play
football, skiing in the park
7. All guests must leave your motorbikes at the right place: do
not take pets into the park, do not drop litter, must put garbage,
go to stool and urinate at the right place29
The connection between civility and the emphasis on disciplining
the bodies and behaviour of people entering this park is clear. In
some ways this sign exudes a deep anxiety about the need to educate
certain people about how to use the park. But at root the anxiety
in
FIGURE 5 Park regulations in Ph My Hng. Photo by the author.
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Civilitys Footprint 249
this sign is founded on a perfectly reasonable desire to
preserve the park. It does not forbid practices simply for the sake
of forbidding them. Rather, it seeks to preserve the park and make
it available and pleasant to all who might use it. In this sense,
the anxiety evident in the text of this sign about civilized
comportment differs little from the anxiety expressed in any
discourse about clean cities or sustainability in many other places
in the world. Like environmental discourses in other societies,
this call for civility is, for better or for worse, also a
disciplinary project that seeks to preserve something through the
restrictions that it imposes. The sign instructs people to be
civilized, specifically so that the park can be sustained. All of
the listed activities require prohibition because they risk
undermining the possibility that future users of the park will be
able to enjoy the park in the same way that todays users can. The
sign, while at times clearly excessive and even humorous forbidding
skiing in a Vietnamese park! reflects an unmistakable seriousness
about the will to preserve. Civility is, in this context, not only
about exclusion, but also about preservation and
sustainability.
It is productive, then, to understand some of the compulsion
behind the discourse of van minh in much the same way that we might
understand standard discourses on sustainable cities, which also
compel human beings to restrict behaviour of some sort or another
for the sake of a larger, shared objective. It is not all that
different, say, from the way that a North American college student
might chastise her mother for not recycling a soda can, or how
students in a college dormitory might urge one another to take
shorter showers (or to shower together, as they often joke) in
order to conserve water and energy. In short, the civilizing
imperative is, like sustainability, founded on future-oriented
action that demands self-control and discipline in the present.
Both the civilizing imperative and sustainability focus on the
eventual achievement of a larger social goal. The urban civility
for which my Vietnamese friends in Ph My Hng argued is, at root, an
attempt to encourage the same goal. But their objectives were not
only ecological but also social. They sought to create what they
considered to be a liveable city
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250 Erik Harms
within a larger society, a society of which they could be proud.
What they wish to sustain and to pass on to the next generation, in
other words, is civility itself.
Motorbikes, Megaprojects and the Footprint of Civilized
Living
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 co-produce 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
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Civilitys Footprint 251
by its own development just like those clumps of wire. The
project manager continued by citing further examples: he noted that
people dumped their waste into public spaces, like canals; they
funnelled their sewage into fields surrounding their houses; and
they encroached on alleyways. He added that the individualistic
approach to unplanned urban development also explained the lack of
green space in Ho Chi Minh City. Spontaneous urbanization spares no
free space because people jockey with each other to build anywhere
that they can, with no incentive to preserve unused space. If one
person does not encroach upon unbuilt space, someone else will. So
everyone does.
For the project manager, the solution to this disorderly state
was clear: the city needed more extensive master planning. He
explained that the architects and planners who designed New Urban
Zones could think of the needs of the collective, without being
distracted by the individualistic needs of discrete households.
Only planners were able to envision entire projects, because they
could subordinate their own individual needs to those of the
project. The New Urban Zones demonstrate his logic in action. Their
luxury housing may be designed to satisfy the demands of
self-interested elite beneficiaries of Vietnams post-socialist
privatization, but their proponents rarely frame the ideas of
civility embedded in such projects in idioms of self-interest. In
fact, they praise these developments using language commonly
formulated as a response to images of rampant individualism that
undermine collective goals. The civilized living promised by these
New Urban Zones embodies a notion of discipline and restraint.
Residents receive instructions on everything from how to hang their
clothing out to dry to how to use parking spaces in a civilized
manner. The idea that limiting actions in the short term will in
the long term preserve and produce something better and longer
lasting for all members of the community (including, of course,
oneself) justifies these instructions. And that logic, for better
or for worse, is no different from the logic driving discourses of
sustainability.
Critics commonly argue that the idea of sustainable development
is subject to manipulation to fit any ideological agenda
(Sneddon
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252 Erik Harms
et al. 2006, p. 259). Indeed, when middle-class Vietnamese
structure their own language of civility in such a way that it
resembles discourses of sustainability, such language obscures but
does not actually mitigate the effects of ecologically and socially
unsustainable lifestyle practices. People like the lawyer and the
project manager call for Ho Chi Minh City to develop in ways that
will give the city a larger ecological footprint and are likely to
exacerbate an already unequal distribution of resources.
Nevertheless, the lawyer and project manager also agree that
sustainable urbanization and development require stewardship of
some sort, and that individual urban livelihood practices need to
be situated within a larger social context. Thus, even though their
lifestyle choices pose a threat to sustainable urban development,
they espouse a civilizing logic grounded in the same core
observation that drives the language of sustainability. In a sense,
they are saying, We cant go on living like this. We need to work
together and think of the future.
Once we have understood what civility claims to do, we can
evaluate it in its own terms. If we begin by taking civility at
face value, attempting to understand that those who speak in the
language of civility see it as a language of improvement, we can
also understand precisely what turns it into a language of class
exclusion. When people use civilizing logics to pass judgment on
one another, it becomes much easier to brand as uncivilized (or
unsustainable) those practices that remain visible at the level of
everyday urban experience. Who can miss the experience of being cut
off by a wild, swerving motorbike driver, and who can ignore the
cumulative effects of individual outhouses evacuating their
untreated waste directly into one of the citys many canals? The
small incivilities of the vernacular city are always visible, up
front, in ones face. By contrast, it is much more difficult to
comprehend or visualize the great size of civilitys footprint. The
New Urban Zones do not smell of waste. Residents travel by scented,
airconditioned automobile from clean airconditioned homes to sleek
downtown offices and stylish cafes, restaurants and lounges. There
are no tangled balls of electric wire, no motorbikes parked on the
sidewalk. Restrooms have almond-
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Civilitys Footprint 253
scented soap, and sewage is treated by a central processing
plant, while convoys of trucks cart away garbage to be dumped out
of sight in distant landfills.
In Ph My Hng the wind blows unimpeded through broad avenues,
there is little dust in the air, ones feet are always dry, and the
parks and riverside promenades seem to fulfil the advertised
promise that this new world is not only civilized but also appears
sustainable and green as well. The discourse of civility has
obscured its own footprint. But any meaningful concept of the
sustainable city must bring discussions of sustainability and
civility into the same conversation. It must recognize that
civility can only be sustained in the context of an awareness of
its impact on other people. Promotion of this awareness can itself
be understood as a very civilized project, because the recognition
of the impact that one has on others is at the core of any notion
of civility. Such a conversation might produce ideas that are both
sustainable and civil always aware of civilitys footprint.
Acknowledgements
Funding for this research was provided by National Science
Foundation Award No. BCS-1026754. The ideas in this paper were
originally conceived for a panel on sustainable cities at Rice
Universitys Chao Center for Asian Studies, where it benefitted from
the incisive comments of Aynne Kokas, Kimberly Hoang, Gke Gnel,
Jessica Lockrem and Allison Truitt. At Yale, Karen Hbert and Sayd
Randle directed me towards important sources and debates. Further
comments and inspiration came from participants at a workshop
organized by the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla,
where I benefited from the comments of N. Jayaram, Vivian
Bickford-Smith and K. Sivaramakrishnan (the younger). The
manuscript benefitted from the expert editorial and conceptual
suggestions of Michael Montesano, and two very thorough yet
constructive reviewers.
Erik Harms is Assistant Professor in the Department of
Anthropology, P.O. Box 208277, Yale University, New Haven,
Connecticut 06520-8277; email: [email protected].
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254 Erik Harms
NOTES
1. While this example refers to a single encounter, the themes
discussed came up quite regularly during nine months of
ethnographic fieldwork conducted during three research trips
between 2010 and 2013, primarily in Districts 2 and 7 in Ho Chi
Minh City. The observations also resonate with more than fifteen
years of research in the city.
2. For a compelling analysis of how motorbikes have come to
symbolize, among other things, a sense of individualism, see Truitt
(2008, p. 3).
3. In Vietnamese, the slogan reads: Tat ca v muc tiu dn giu, nc
manh, dn chu, cng bang, van minh.
4. In Vietnamese, the term is, rt tien mot cch van minh. I
encountered this term written on an ATM in Hanoi in 2006. (Authors
field notes, summer 2006).
5. The phrase in Vietnamese reads: Hy tn trong moi ngi & xem
phim mot cch van minh. I encountered the phrase in 2011, at the
Megastar Cineplex in Ho Chi Minh City, which played a short clip
before all its film screenings depicting a couple dressed as
peasants, eating with their mouths open and talking loudly on their
cell phones. (Authors field notes, 30 January 2011.)
6. Similar tensions are evident in India and China. In a recent
edited volume about urban ecologies in India, Rademacher and
Sivaramakrishnan note that civility and sustainability appear
sometimes as linked, and at other times as mutually exclusive
concepts. Compare, for example, the way that civility can at once
be linked to formations of collective sentiment and deep democracy
as well as to beautification projects that lead to spatial
cleansing (Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan 2013, pp. 412). In
China, civility can be in some cases articulated as a discourse of
social-improvement, and in others used to relegate migrants and
urban villagers to social margins (Siu 2007 pp. 33133).
7. Traffic is a clear case in point. Taxi drivers, for example,
often lament how uncivil the traffic is. They say that the city
operates according to the law of the jungle (luat rng). In cursing
other drivers and urging them to be more civilized, they are in
many ways insisting that others participate in a collective effort
to create a more orderly and efficient way of driving through the
city.
8. The idea of shared responsibility is a core value in most
discourses of sustainability, regardless of ideological position.
Across different and often contradictory perspectives,
sustainability tends to emphasize what might be called collective
values, which often invoke feelings, define or direct us to goals,
frame our attitudes, and provide standards against which the
behaviours of individuals and societies can be judged (Kates et al.
2005, p. 16).
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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
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256 Erik Harms
c tnh bao trm cua th Ph My Hng chnh l t tng nhn van, v con ngi,
phuc vu con ngi, tao cho con ngi c c nhan thc v tnh cam rang th Ph
My Hng l th cua yn lnh, cua nep song van ha, van minh. Con ngi d
thuoc tang lp no, trnh o no, khi l c dn cua Ph My Hng th eu rat tn
trong nhau, rat c van ha trong ng x v giao tiep, trong x l cc quan
he dn s cua khu dn c, rat t gic chap hnh cc quy che sinh hoat, van
ha nh l hnh lang php l hng dan ieu chnh cc hnh vi cua cc c dn.
(Nguyen Van Kch et al., p. 263).
19. Interview with author, male, born 1982. Ho Chi Minh City, 16
February 2011.
20. Interview, Ho Chi Minh City, 16 February 2011. While the
project manager claims to be thinking about efficiency and the
rational maximization of space, by certain criteria the New Urban
Zones make less efficient use of space than spaces of vernacular
housing. For example, Tn Phong ward, where Ph My Hng is located,
has a very low population density of fewer than 2,200 persons per
square kilometre. Meanwhile, densities in the contiguous
spontaneously planned wards of Tn Qui and Tn Thuan Ty exceed 21,000
persons per square metre. Furthermore density in District 5, home
to Ch Ln, Saigons famous Chinatown, was over 40,000 persons per
square kilometre. Thus, despite the tendency to think that the
greater floor-to-area ratios afforded by Ph My Hngs professionally
designed apartment towers imply efficiency, the district as a whole
is relatively empty compared to the rest of the city (Ho Chi Minh
City Statistics Office 2011). Nevertheless, in Vietnamese planning
circles, and even among residents, unplanned urban development is
derided precisely for its ability to pack people into a small urban
footprint. It is seen as overcrowded, unregulated, and lacking in
systematic vision. New Urban Zones, by contrast, are celebrated for
being open and less crowded. In response to these figures, my
friend the planner said that no one could endure living as they do
in Ch Ln. Such unplanned crowding, he argued, should not be seen as
a sign of efficiency but of poverty and overcrowding that people
would eagerly escape if they had greater incomes. This line of
argument was based on a sense that a sustainable livelihood was not
just about maximizing efficiency alone, but about combining
efficiency with room to live and breathe. What he is really
concerned about is a sustainable form of civilized living. This
worry about the negative effects of population density is a common
and long-standing concern in Vietnam, both in cities and in the
country as a whole (Thng tan x Viet Nam, 2005).
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Civilitys Footprint 257
21. By this anthropological approach, I mean the tradition of
respecting alternative forms of knowledge that extends from
Durkheims injunction to systematically discard all preconceptions
(Durkheim [1895] 1982, p. 72) on through Lvi-Strausss 1966 work in
The Savage Mind to understand the logic of social organization and
local knowledge in their own terms rather than through culturally
determined external categories.
22. For examples of radical planners and anthropologists who
have recognized the logic of informal housing, see Solomon Benjamin
(2005) and Anne Rademacher (2009).
23. These dense mixed-use neighbourhoods are also always watched
by what Jacobs called eyes on the street, which provide a kind of
popular security system (Jacobs [1961] 1993, p. 45).
24. According to research described in the World Bank report,
average commutes in Danang were 15 minutes in 2008, in Hanoi 18
minutes in 2004, and in Ho Chi Minh City 20 minutes in 2002. Given
the different dates for these data and the rapidly transforming
transit landscape, it is difficult to use them for anything more
than a general impression. However, the report also notes that it
is clear that the commutes are changing for the worse because of
urban population increases and increased ownership of private
automobiles (World Bank 2011, p. 128).
25. The report states outright that The general insight provided
in this section [on urban form and mobility] is that the high
population densities and low amount of road space in cities
indicate that the mass adoption of private cars is not sustainable
as a major means of urban transport. Motorcycles, on the other hand
use road space much more efficiently, and together with
well-planned transit systems, may provide a mobility solution
suitable for Vietnams larger cities (World Bank 2011, p. 127). The
report also notes that a motorcycle occupies 1.8 square metres of
space and a car eight times that of motorcycle, taking up 14 square
metres of space. A moving car occupies 40 to 65 square metres, or
about four times that of a moving motorcycle (ibid., p. 127).
26. Recent trends in urban ecology have shown the importance of
the concept of social nature, which insists that the environment
always be understood as constructed in tandem with social processes
and imaginations. For a recent review of such work, with an
emphasis on ideas of sustainability, see Anne Rademacher and K.
Sivaramakrishnan (2013). See also Mark Davidson (2010), Nancy B.
Grimm et al. (2013), Kates, Parris and Leiserowitz (2005), Chris
Sneddon et al. (2006) and Erik Swyngedouw (2007).
27. The criteria for an urban area are detailed in Government
Decree No.
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258 Erik Harms
42/2009/ND-CP on the Grading of Urban Centers (Government of the
Socialist Republic of Vietnam 2009) and Circular 34/2009/TT-BXD of
the Ministry of Construction (Ministry of Construction of the
Socialist Republic of Vietnam 2009).
28. Most critiques of civilizing logics, I would hazard, are
born from a postcolonial distaste for vestiges of the mission
civilisatrice. This is at least where my own critique comes from;
it critically notes the parallels between elite Vietnamese
discourses of civilization and the language of Vietnams former
French colonizers. But it is also worth considering that Vietnamese
use the concept of civility in a more complex and multifaceted way
that accounts for its semantic fluidity, even as we attend to its
contradictions. Furthermore, the critique of how others deploy
notions of civilization can quickly devolve into the same
triumphant celebration of our modes of analysis. Critiquing the
ways that others use the language of civilization is a kind of
ethnocentric civilizing mission of its own.
29. Punctuation follows the original.30. The project manager was
not alone in mentioning this issue. In fact, the
problem of spontaneous urbanization ( th ha t pht) came up in
nearly every conversation I had with urban planners, urban studies
scholars and even city residents. In newspaper reports and even
academic publications the term is often preceded by the qualifier
nan, which indicates that it is seen as an evil or a serious
problem. See for example, an article by a professor L Huy B, who
calls spontaneous urbanization an evil, and laments that the
government has given up any attempts to control it. Ultimately, he
calls for more coordinated planning (L Huy B 2006).
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