Civility July14

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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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 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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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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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 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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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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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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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 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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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 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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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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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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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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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: [email protected].

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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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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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