SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia Vol. 29, No. 2 (2014), pp.

22362
DOI: 10.1355/sj29-2a
2014 ISEAS
ISSN 0217-9520 print / ISSN 1793-2858 electronic

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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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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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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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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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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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 futureorientation reflecting the interest of the social whole. Instead they

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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 selfinterest (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 futureorientation, 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 futureoriented: 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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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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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 standalone 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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FIGURE 1 Ph My Hng, Civilisation City, Human Oriented Community.

District 7, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Photo by the author.

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

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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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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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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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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 resourceintensive 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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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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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.

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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 workingclass 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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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 bottomup solutions could often provide organic solutions to the problems of

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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

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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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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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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however, the report celebrates modern, civilized urban development,

which any Vietnamese reader would quickly understand as masterplanned 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, resourceintensive, land-hungry mode of existence. The tension between
civility and sustainability thus arises in the move from ideas to

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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.

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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 park
5. 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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FIGURE 5 Park regulations in Ph My Hng. Photo by the author.

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

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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 selfcontrol 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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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 coproduce 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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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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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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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: erik.harms@yale.edu.

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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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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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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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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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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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