Seen and Unseen

Ho Chi Minh City's Sidewalk Life

In many cities, sidewalks are the most important and the most overlooked public space. While not the site of urban design laurels, in terms of square-meter area, a city's sidewalk system usually exceeds the city's parks and large open spaces. More significantly, because of the way that this network of concrete spreads its tentacles to reach people in many parts of the city, drawing them into intimate configurations, sidewalks have the potential to be a remarkable democratizing space. Sidewalks are also important economically as a transportation system and social safety net. After years of inattention, now more than ever, people around the globe are trying to unlock their potential by contesting the purpose of and rights to the sidewalk. Street vendors, property owners, local government, and the general public are engaging in innovative experiments in some places and bloody conflicts in others.

I learned the most about the potential and challenges of sidewalks from walking around and cruising on the back of mopeds in laid-back and balmy Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). I came to realize that the sidewalk space of the city is the city to most people. We do not or cannot enter most buildings, and most people do not even look up to see most buildings. Rather, as others have noted, people look at other people in a public space (Whyte 1980: 90), particularly in HCMC where all segments of the population eat, socialize, and trade on the sidewalk. It is the negative space framed by the built environment that is the city we experience and the most commonly experienced portion of this space is at the street level, narrow and long: the sidewalk.

At the millennium, I lived in the center of the city, in District 1. Then, and for years afterward, my local friends and I would try to figure out what was so vital and special about the city. HCMC, formerly known as Saigon, was different in so many ways from other cities with which I was familiar. It was hard to explain to visiting foreign friends where to locate this wonderfulness on a tourist map. When faced with the map I found that there was not much to point out. While panoramic photos of the urban landscape did not capture anything remarkable, shots framing a more intimate scene started to get closer to what I was trying to explain. At the time, my friends and I mostly exchanged anecdotes and impressionistic descriptions.

I have returned to HCMC many times. Each time I first land in the city, I invariably look for what is different because it has undergone tremendous change. The city has more than doubled its population in two decades and more than tripled its average income in less time. Still, I am usually pleasantly surprised to find how much of the city's charms have remained: vendors and motorcycle taxi drivers, remembering me from years past, greet me warmly while I also enjoy the rapid infrastructure improvements and ever-increasing array of goods, foods, and services in this cosmopolitan, international city. But, by 2010 I noticed that the sidewalks in my old neighborhood were empty. I also noticed that vendors now nervously glanced around while selling their goods, on the lookout for police who might chase them away.

In the early 2000s, the Vietnamese government introduced a series of sidewalk clearance policies and more significantly, these policies started actually being enforced in earnest in the mid-2000s. Police and traffic inspectors now regularly patrol sidewalks and public spaces. I now witness scenes such as a pair of policemen on a motorbike awakening a man napping in the park during his lunch break. The new paradigm seems to be that people on the sidewalk need to keep moving. The biggest targets are street vendors, so thousands of vendors throughout the city keep roaming around carrying their wares on their shoulders, bikes, or wheeled carts instead of staying in one spot. The rationale stated in the policy documents is familiar: we need to clear people off the sidewalks for the sake of traffic congestion and public health, and in order to be a modern, world-class city.

While my earlier research focused on the social conflict over rapid real estate development on the urban periphery of the city (Kim 2008), there was also another kind of struggle happening at a smaller but equally comprehensive scale in the center of the city. Society was renegotiating sidewalk space. I later found that the debate over competing conceptions of the sidewalk was not unique to HCMC but gaining policy attention in cities around the world. As people continue to migrate to urban centers at unprecedented rates, sidewalks are particularly important for the lower-income and marginalized urban dwellers who try to make their living in this space. Many cities in other countries have vendor organizations that advocate for their rights to use public space (Brown 2006; Tinker 1997), even leading to national policy and constitutional support for sidewalk vending in places like India (Sinha and Roever 2011). In North America, people have sometimes framed the conflict as third world practices clashing with first world institutions, especially given the current social tensions around international immigration (Marcelli, Pastor, and Joassart 1999; Kettles 2004; Garnett 2009). But, community recreating and vending practices on the sidewalk have also been viewed as sites of "authenticity" (Zukin 2009). And now a new breed of gourmet street food vendors are recognized as innovators in the culinary arts and economic development and have sometimes been incorporated into city planning (Urban Vitality Group 2008) while other times resisted (Kettles 2004).

This groundswell of debate and activity indicates that the very concept of sidewalks is being contested by the public. However, despite its importance, until recently, few scholars of public space have focused on the sidewalk. Design scholars have often imagined open, green spaces when discussing public space's function in providing leisure as a release valve to the stresses of urban life and reconnecting people to nature and each other. Political scientists and philosophers have harkened back to the plazas and forums of the Greek agora when imagining the ideal public space: large meeting places where different members of society can come out of their private spaces to debate and critique state power and social institutions are seen as key to an effective democracy and the formation ofa civic identity (Arendt 1958; Habermas 1962). However, the civic square was missing in the urban fabric of imperial Chinese cities, in the European market towns of the Middle Ages where business was conducted along the "high street," and even in some classical cities like Ephesus, where the colonnaded avenue was the main public space. In...