Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City

For most, the term “public space” conjures up images of large, open areas: plazas, parks, and the ancient Greek agora. In many of the world’s major cities, however, these are not a part of the everyday lives of the public. Rather, business and social lives have always been conducted along main roads and sidewalks. And now with increasing urban growth and density, primarily from migration and immigration, rights to the sidewalk are being hotly contested among pedestrians, street vendors, property owners, tourists, and governments around the world.

With Sidewalk City, Annette M. Kim provides a multidisciplinary study of sidewalks in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Based on fieldwork over 15 years, Kim developed methods of spatial ethnography to overcome habitual seeing, and recorded both the spatial patterns and the social relations of how the city’s vibrant sidewalk life is practiced. In Sidewalk City, she transforms this data into an array of maps, progressing through a primer of critical cartography, to unveil new insights about the importance and potential of this quotidien public space. Ho Chi Minh City’s sidewalks show us that it is possible to have an aesthetic sidewalk life that is inclusive of multiple publics’ aspirations and livelihoods, particularly those of migrant vendors.

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