Tube Housing as Dominant System and Everyday Urban Culture of Saigon-Ho Chi Minh City

A brief history of tube housing in Asia and a clarification of nomenclature

A tube house is rectangular: narrow and long. The average width of a house is three to four metres and it is three to five times longer than it is wide. It is usually surrounded by three other tube houses: two on either side and one at the rear. The walls of adjacent tube houses are often beside each other. In older tube housing – built six to seven decades ago or more – two tube houses may share the same wall. In this study the definition of a tube house includes both shophouses and street houses. A shophouse is a tube house functioning as a shop and residence whilst a street house is a tube house located on street fronts. Tube housing acts as both housing and an urban system used for workplaces, investments and other uses; each purpose shapes the urban form.

One of the most important factors affecting the shape of a house is the value of its frontage. As an indicator of price, street frontage is considered as important as land size. In commercial areas or streets, which every street in Saigon-HCMC has gradually become, the size of the frontage has become more valuable than ever. The busier and noisier the street, the more valuable the house. The length of a street is limited so that every metre of the frontage counts. Only narrow houses – like multiple-level tube housing – can maximise this aspect by expanding vertically.

Politically, tube housing is also a consequence of the regime change from capitalist to socialist Vietnam. By the end of the capitalist period, apartment buildings had started to develop and became a popular housing trend in Saigon-HCMC; within 15 years (from 1960 to 1975), nearly 500 apartment buildings were built (Le, 2019) whilst in 30 years (from 1975 until 2015) only 750 apartment buildings were built under the socialist government (Do, 2015). This trend was halted because Saigon was transformed into a socialist city in 1975. No apartment buildings were built during the first decades under the new government. Even large villas built during the French period were divided into smaller shelters and self-built tube housing became more common than ever (Hoàng, 2013a: 407).

Housing policy and planning in Saigon-HCMC ensure people are the pioneers and innovators and the government follows. In addition, people purchase a long and narrow block of land and build a house on it. Once these areas become large neighbourhoods years or decades later, the government invests in basic infrastructure such as drainage systems and concrete roads. People have significant ‘freedom’ to build their dream house and they usually proliferate existing trends; hence, a tube house is usually the most logical housing type from all perspectives: familial, social and economic. This phenomenon was analysed by Hall and Pfeiffer (2000: 25) in their Urban Future 21 report, which considered the question: ‘How shall all these additional millions be housed?’ They continued, ‘Others [cities in the developing world] made a virtue out of necessity, turning a blind eye to illegal occupations of the land by squatters, and later on trying to provide basic services and legal title to these clandestine high-density low-rise settlements’.

Tube housing first appeared in the 17th century in cities like Hanoi and Hoi An. Tube housing has not only existed in Vietnam but is also present in other countries in tube-like buildings, which may go by different names such as shophouses and townhouses. Yunn Chii Wong and Johannes Widodo argued that ‘the shophouse typology is a quintessential urban vernacular form in Southeast Asia. It is a ubiquitous architectural form that has assumed diverse appearances and meanings’ (2016: 4). Hung Le (2010) claimed that because it was born in a time when a colonial power dominated and opened South-East Asia to a world economy in the 16th century, the prototype of oblong housing – used for both residential and commercial purposes – is ubiquitous in every city of that region. Despite their great diversity, physically and etymologically, according to places, times and contexts, the influence of Chinese migrants and European colonisation in the production of these building forms is widely acknowledged. Although they originated in Southern China (Boontharm, 2016; Sopandi, 2016), the shophouses emerged in most Asian cities. In Ahmedabad (India), shophouses are associated with marketplaces, where they are a variation of the generative house form of the city (Desai, 2016: 23–24). For Bangkok and its sacred and commercial heart, Siam Square, the original shophouse was mainly inspired by earlier models of Singapore and Penang. It developed into a strong generative force of intensive urban growth and became the primary ingredient of both the emergent sprawl and the core of all commercial districts of Bangkok (Boontharm, 2016: 26–29). In Indonesian cities such as Cirebon, Bogor, Bandung, shophouses were common amongst the Chinese community, in the market and temple precincts (Sopandi, 2016: 35–40). These narrow houses also appeared in Malacca (Wong, 2016), Penang (Tan, 2016) and Singapore (Ho, 2016). However, shophouses are mainly artefacts of the colonial era and have subsequently declined as preferred form of housing construction in most cities. ¹

Saigon-HCMC was born in 1698 and the rise of tube housing correlates with the development of the city itself. Some international documents claim that shophouses in South-East Asian cities were introduced by immigrants from Southern China (Boontharm, 2016; Sopandi, 2016). This could be the case for tube housing in Saigon-HCMC. A report from the United Nations Development Programme states that the Chinese are the only ‘minor ethnic group’ that mostly resides in urban areas in Vietnam (62%) (2017: 21). Whilst the shophouses could have been brought to Saigon-HCMC by the Chinese, they were localised and have represented typical Vietnamese tube housing for many years now. Studies on Hanoi’s ‘Old Quarter’, for example, usually categorise these structures as tube houses built before the 1900s; those built after 1986 (the economic reform Doi moi) are neo-tube houses (Kien, 2008). There are only a few traditional tube houses left in Chinatown in District 5 of Saigon-HCMC. ² Vietnam seems to be the only nation that has continued to develop tube housing as a dominant form of modern construction and Saigon-HCMC is its leading exemplar.

Saigon-HCMC’s modern tube housing as distinctive urban assemblage

Saigon-HCMC’s tube housing is neither ancient nor traditional; rather, it is a modern response to living in an emergent mega-city experiencing ‘informal hyper-growth’ (Hall and Pfeiffer, 2000). Saigon-HCMC is a social entity in which tube housing and other city elements interact in dynamic ways to form a holistic system and everyday urban culture. Here we examine tube housing in conjunction with the city’s other distinctive components, including motorcycles, sidewalks and ‘sidewalk economies’, and their integrated social dimensions of everyday life.

A city comprises ‘multiple partially localized assemblages built of heterogeneous networks, spaces and practices’ (Farías and Bender, 2009: i) and it ‘can hardly be conceptualized without a physical infrastructure of buildings, streets and various conduit[s] for the circulation of matter and energy, defined in part by their spatial relations to one another’ (Delanda, 2006: 73). Saigon-HCMC is an assemblage composed of elements that affect each other and work with each other to make the contemporary city. For example, small motorcycles fit inside tube-shaped housing. Almost every street house can be a shophouse due to the common occurrence of small or family businesses in these tube-shaped houses. Sidewalks as an extended function of tube housing and ‘sidewalk economies’ are an important urban space for the working class. The specific quality of this urban space arises from the simultaneous presence of the different value systems of ethnic, cultural and social groups and their activities. The urban space unites these different elements and makes them cohesive and productive (Schmid, 2012: 48) such that the physical and social interactions keep the city both functional and fruitful.

Nevertheless, this urban assemblage (tube housing, motorcycles and laneways) is viewed by government planners as an obstacle to urban modernisation and they have worked to overcome them on all three fronts (Spencer, 2014: 54). First and foremost, both the state and city governments wish to replace tube housing with apartment buildings. For the areas connecting urban and suburban districts, land division into small lots for building tube housing is limited nationally (Vietnam’s Construction Decree in 2010, section 5, article 10). In the Saigon-HCMC’s five-year plan of 2016–2020, the transformation of low-storey housing into modern apartment buildings is encouraged. Consequently, six urban districts, including Districts 2, 7, 9, 12, Thu Duc and Binh Tan, are strongly encouraged to build apartment buildings along main roads (Hoa, 2018) ‘Apartment buildings not only solve the issue of our limited land resource but also create a modern and civilised lifestyle’, said the Deputy of Minister of Construction in a housing conference in 2019 (Dung, 2019). In addition, housing developers have been granted favours (e.g. low interest rates, special building permits and infrastructure subsidies) to invest in apartment buildings for low- and average-income families. Many commercial apartment buildings have not been sold in recent years due to low demand. To help real estate developers to sell their apartments so that they can pay back the banks (most big banks in Vietnam are state-owned), since 2012 developers have been allowed to divide a 75 m² apartment into two to three smaller apartments (of 25 m²) and sell these at lower prices. A similar process has been adopted to transfer ‘commercial housing’ to ‘social housing’ so that it can be sold quickly (Lan, 2013). For example the Park Residence project in Nha Be District, which originally had only 648 apartments, was further divided to house 1,224 apartments. Similarly, the Tam Phu project in Thu Duc District, which originally had 583 apartments, was further divided to house 1,006 apartments (Khang, 2005). Yet, it should be noted that the presence of very small apartment buildings in these districts may create overcrowded high-rise slums in Saigon-HCMC in the future.

Second, motorcycles are blamed for ‘chaotic traffic’, congestion and pollution. The government is currently planning to replace or at least radically reduce motorcycle use by building and integrating new metro train and bus systems. Plans for discouraging motorcycle ownership and reducing motorcycle traffic were also put into practice; for example, an individual is permitted to own only one motorcycle – ‘one person, one motorcycle’ – and all freeways connecting Saigon-HCMC to adjacent cities are for cars only (Truong-Young, 2011: 69). For Hanoi, authorities voted to ban motorbikes by 2030 (Ponsavady, 2018: 216). ‘Skinny’ tube housing in long and narrow laneways has been labelled as ‘slums’. Neighbourhoods with tube housing are looking backwards rather than looking to the future (Hoang, 2013b: 107).

Third, the same sentiment applies to sidewalks and ‘sidewalk economies’. They are blamed for making the city look disorganised and unattractive and the city government has aimed to clear them. Despite all the claims by the government, these city dynamics, particularly tube housing, are still dominant because of their compatibility with how the city has developed and is developing, and are at times against the government’s best laid plans for large-scale modernisation of the city’s infrastructure (Spencer, 2014: 54–76). This article examines tube housing as a modern development that is lively and adaptive to people’s everyday lives in the built form of Saigon-HCMC. It is not an element of the past alone, but rather a living material culture of the newly urbanising working classes. This article then represents a documentation of this collective achievement and a political intervention that resists their banning by planners and developers in the interests of building gated cities of high-rise apartments connected by highways. ³ Tube housing is part of the city’s dynamics and it supports the other key elements of the city’s economic and social flows and needs to create the assemblage of tube housing, motorcycles, sidewalks and sidewalk economies. The assemblage is an underappreciated urban typology. ⁴

A culture of tube housing and motorcycles

In relation to HCMC tube housing interacting with other facets of city life, tube housing and motorcycles are the most remarkable features. The two have been closely associated for many years and, thus far, no other types of housing or transportation have been able to replace them or surpass their popularity. A small motorcycle fits comfortably in a narrow tube-shaped house in a way that a car never could. Tube housing and motorcycles combine well in the small streets and narrow laneways. Road densities in 2004 and in 2016 were 1.45 km of road/km² and 1.97 km of road/km², respectively. At this development rate, it would take 167–230 years to reach the current world standard road density (Su, 2017). No matter how small a motorcycle is and how little space it occupies on a street, traffic congestion happens daily. It is almost impossible for more than 13 million city dwellers to travel by motor car in such a road system.

Saigon-HCMC’s inadequate and overwrought public transport infrastructure is also characterised by a high density of buildings and people. In the city’s assemblage, housing and urban transport both work together and against each other. ⁵ Tube housing and motorcycles are mutually supportive, whilst tube housing and motor cars are not yet compatible. There is a clear lack of space for cars, both on the road and in terms of at-home parking. Parking for motorcycles in public places is in short supply to provide enough parking for cars. As tube housing seldom has yards or garages, motorcycles are generally parked within the house (in the living room) to prevent theft (see Figure 2). Most houses are located in long and narrow laneways that cannot accommodate larger modes of transportation.

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Figure 2.

Tube housing interacts with other city dynamics.

The severe shortage of car parking facilities contributes to the popularity of motorcycles. People who can afford cars are apprehensive about choosing them as their primary mode of transport because car owners usually are required to pay overnight parking fees at private parking lots, fuel stations, schools and factories (see Figure 3). On a daily basis, people drive motorcycles to these temporary parking places and from there, drive their cars to work. In some cases, despite having no need to use them, car owners are obliged to remove their cars from schools or factories before 7 am, when students go to school or factories start the working day.

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Figure 3.

Three motorcycles parked in a living room at night.

In addition, door-to-door culture is common in Vietnam, which further binds tube housing and motorcycles together. People do not choose public transport (only buses are available whilst metro trains are being built) because bus stops are only located along the main roads, whilst the major part of the city population lives in tube houses in long and narrow laneways. The city’s total laneway length (5,019,857 km) is longer than that of the streets (2,815,084 km) (see Du, 2013). Further, the bus system’s low efficiency is locally notorious. Despite the subsidy of approximately US$6 million per year, the number of bus passengers decreased 14% in the first 11 months of 2019 (ANTV, 2020). Motorcycles are best, even for trips to the city centre, and those who do not own one use systems like ‘Grab’ that allow patrons to order a bike on a mobile phone application.

Deciding where to live and what type of house to settle in also depends on what sort of vehicle people wish to use. A typical tube house is a good functional fit with motorcycles, but in apartment buildings or non-tube houses in gated communities where car parking facilities are provided, residents are more likely to upgrade to a car. ‘Participant 2’ sold a front-street house in Binh Thanh District and bought two apartment buildings in a gated community in District 7. He also bought a car after moving into the gated community, where there are security guards and cameras. More importantly, his apartment building has a parking garage. The upper middle-class neighbourhood is called South Saigon or Phu My Hung. It is a miniature version of Saigon-HCMC city but one with integrated modern planning. There is no traffic congestion in this area. Cars in this area are adequate for local transport – a significantly different matter than travelling through other sectors of the metropolis. Another participant (‘Participant 11’) lives in a tube house in an inner district but has already purchased a piece of land in a suburb. He has obtained a car driver’s licence but is still travelling by motorcycle. He plans to upgrade to a car once he can afford to build a house with a garage on his block of land in Nha Be, a suburb. There are two basic reasons for this: more space for car parking and less traffic on the suburban roads. On having to travel to the inner districts for work, ‘Participant 11’ stated: ‘I will still use [my] motorcycle’.

As car ownership becomes more popular, people will shift to large houses with garages capable of accommodating cars. To own a larger lot of land and a bigger house, people must consider moving to the city outskirts. This is a housing trend that is a popular option for retirees. If this trend continues and begins to be adopted by individuals in other age groups, the suburban areas of Saigon-HCMC will have less tube-shaped housing and more cars. Nevertheless, car culture, even as it grows in scale, is unlikely to outstrip motorcycle culture, let alone replace it. A more likely scenario is a two-tiered spatial system for the mega-city – low-density car suburbia on the outer edges and high-density tube housing and apartment blocks in inner city Saigon.

Tube housing and a motorcycle are the essential commodities of life for every Saigon family. As James Gillen notes ‘in its position as the primary form of transportation and as a class symbol in a rapidly developing country, the motorbike in Vietnam is akin to the automobile [car] in the Global North’ (2016: 65). The car in Saigon-HCMC is a luxury item – a treat but not essential for meeting everyday work and the commercial needs of the family. Even as the car grows in popularity – not least due to its global status image as the vehicle of individual freedom and taste – the hegemony of the motorcycle in Vietnamese cities is guaranteed for many decades to come and not least for short trips (the majority of daily trips) and for riding as a hobby (especially for young people).

As the greater part of the city’s population lives in laneways, they are, therefore, intrinsic to the current urban ecosystems and infrastructure. In the laneways, houses are beside houses, creating a new and different world of streets and street houses. A motorcycle can fit in a small laneway, along a small sidewalk and in streets that are 5 or 6 metres wide – a car cannot. Likewise, there were 8.12 million motorcycles in Saigon-HCMC in mid-2019 (not including migrants and their motorcycles) (according to HCMC Department of Transport (2019) cited in An and Ha, 2019); if they upgraded to cars, the traffic congestion would bring the city to a standstill. In addition, there is no space for parking cars at homes, in the laneways or on the sidewalks. The current assemblage of tube housing, motorcycles, and streets and laneways that make up the city function synergistically. City planners need to view housing and transport as one system – for changes in one without the other may cause great inequities and inefficiencies in one and both aspects of its material and everyday cultures.

A culture of tube housing sidewalks and sidewalk economies

‘A city can truly be called a city only when its streets belong to the people’ (Friedmann, 1993: 139). In Saigon-HCMC, the streets in actual everyday terms belong to the people. They are where daily activities and life occur and are performed. It is difficult to find a quiet street in the city, except during the siesta period after lunch, as the Vietnamese have a long-standing habit of a post-lunch sleep. Along the streets, tube houses function as shops, restaurants, offices and small warehouses beside one another. Between streets and street housing, sidewalks provide parking for motorcycles belonging to owners and customers of these small businesses. They also host vendors and their stalls and thus, trading activities mostly take place on streets, sidewalks and in street houses. Office buildings in the city centre are viewed as the modern working style reserved for professionals who have at least a university degree. Similarly, people usually visit local markets, grocers and shops for their daily needs; shopping centres are more for a treat rather than a daily necessity and so the types of consumption in these malls are quintessentially different also, e.g. luxury goods and fashion accessories rather than groceries.

Until recent years, vendors have been free to do business on the sidewalks of Saigon-HCMC’s streets, such as opening motorcycle repair shops, food stalls and clothing alteration businesses. Informal employees in Vietnam form a large portion of the urban workforce and the ‘black/informal/vendor economy’ is common and mostly occurs on public sidewalks. For the past decade, the so-called ‘urban order management team’ of the Saigon-HCMC government in each district has aimed to clear sidewalks of this economy. However, these teams do not work every day and they are usually more proactive in the city centre or prior to large events. In addition, vendors cooperate to find ways to avoid them; they inform one another once the first few vendors’ stalls and products have been confiscated and commuters help inform other vendors along the street when the authorities drive past. The vendors then pack away their items in street houses and wait until the urban order management team leaves before displaying them again. Street housing, sidewalks, small businesses and vendor economies are enmeshed to form a whole way of everyday life at street level.

Almost every street house in Saigon-HCMC also functions as a shop and sidewalks are usually full of stalls and vendors. This is due to the historical culture of small businesses and informal economies and it reflects the family-capitalist logic of Vietnamese urbanisms – those of an entrepreneurial and hardworking culture dedicated to enriching their own families. Even under the communist regime, where government work and public service have high cultural status, people who cannot find a job in government offices or companies (which is common) usually open a business and run it independently. It is ideal if they have a street house and enough funds to run their business from home. If they have neither of these, a person may opt for a food stall or motorcycle repair service on sidewalks or in a laneway near their house.

Not only in Saigon-HCMC is the sidewalk an important part of life for the lower income and marginalised population. It also gains policy attention in cities around the world as people continue to migrate to urban centres and the informal sector of the sidewalk accommodates a larger part of the urban population and generates work for those with few urban skills and minimal education (Hall and Pfeiffer, 2000: 21; Kim, 2015: 4). In line with skills and education levels, in 2009 around 84% of the population of the south-eastern area of Vietnam (which includes Saigon-HCMC) had not finished primary school, whilst only 7.9% had earned a university degree (General Statistics Office of Vietnam, 2010). Immigrants who did not usually receive a good education and could not find a job in their hometown could become street and sidewalk vendors in big cities. Decree 39 issued by the Vietnamese Government in 2007 states that there is no need for business registration for street and sidewalk vending (Ministry of Finance, 2007). Partly due to this easy eligibility, in 2016 the rate of informal economy workers of Vietnam was 57.2% of non-agricultural employment (excluding those involved in agricultural, forestry and fisheries households without business registration); and the number of informal economy workers in Saigon-HCMC and Hanoi accounted for more than 20% of all informal economy workers nationwide (International Labour Organization and General Statistics Office, 2016: 12, 13). Saigon-HCMC’s population was more than 13 million in 2017, including 4.5 million migrants and 8.64 million people who are counted as Saigon-HCMC citizens because their names are in household books issued by the local government (Nam, 2018). In the current situation, sidewalks are important spaces for work and there is no formal taxation of this group of labourers. Sidewalks are the public space between a house and a street, and between adjacent households. They provide a lifestyle for the community, although they vary in size. Large sidewalks are usually 2 to 3 metres wide and small sidewalks are less than 1 metre wide. Yet, some roads in Saigon-HCMC have sidewalks that were narrowed to add additional lanes to the road. ⁶

Given their ‘side functions’, sidewalks are no longer exclusively for pedestrians. This is partly because people prefer to ride motorcycles even over short distances. In addition, sidewalks are used as housing extensions so that pedestrians no longer want to use them and tend to avoid them: ‘sidewalk economies’ dominates the space. This is a negative aspect of sidewalk informal economies: the lack of protection afforded the pedestrian (and the wheelchair disabled in particular) is both dangerous and inefficient. The disabled get short shrift in Asian cities, and whilst pedestrian traffic is a high percentage of all local traffic the facilities for them are inadequate or simply absent. Moreover, the paths are not only intruded on by local shops and vendors, but they are broken by the heavy weight of motorcycles and cars driving and parking on them. The sidewalks of HCMC are vital and dynamic, but there are costs in terms of a lack of pedestrian safety and disabled access.

Sidewalks also function as parking areas for motorcycles, usually those of shophouse customers. Customers may even stop their motorcycles at kerbs and place verbal orders whilst remaining on their motorcycles, with shopping items being delivered to them (Figure 4). This is a unique ‘drive-through’ service. The physical connection of streets, sidewalks and shophouses creates commercial areas without the need to build a formal shopping centre. This spatial connection expands to the laneways off streets and, thus, houses on both front streets and laneways become shophouses.

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Figure 4.

A ‘drive-through’ service stall – needed to adapt to local people’s habits.

Shophouses have been considered part of a city’s heritage in other countries; this was the case in Singapore after their numbers were radically reduced and a belated conservation process began in the 1980s (Peterson, 2016; Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority, n.d.). Yet this is not the case for Saigon-HCMC. Most tube houses on streets function as shophouses and family businesses in street houses are highly competitive. Like tube housing, family business is ubiquitous. Small shops are unplanned and located everywhere. There is no boundary or separation between commercial and residential areas, which are tightly enmeshed. At an elementary level, a tube house functioning as a shop is the best example of this urban phenomenon.

The owner of a street house usually considers themselves the owner of the sidewalk in front of their house. If the owner opens a shop at their house, the front sidewalk is used for parking. They may also place a glass display of items to sell on the front sidewalk. They may even rent the sidewalk to a vendor requiring space to sell goods or services. The vendor can manage with only a small glass container or desk and that can be stored inside the street house after hours (see Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

Sidewalk in Go Vap district, Saigon-HCMC.

Watching people travelling on streets is entertaining for some Vietnamese, especially children and the elderly. Some consider a street view to be as good as a mountain or beach view, particularly for people from small towns in which traffic congestion has never been an issue.

Eligibility for sidewalk ‘ownership’

Protection rackets that are criminal systems of rent-seeking are common in Vietnam’s big cities. For example, the chairman of Hanoi People’s Committee, who is also a former director of Hanoi Department of Public Security, claimed that 80% of sidewalk ‘bistros’ have the support of a police or a group of police that allows them to remain in business on the condition of financial ‘kickbacks’ (Hai, 2017). Some consider this ‘sponsorship’ a win-win relationship; the business owner pays monthly fees to these wardens or district police and in return, are permitted to run their business on the sidewalk. Indeed, the majority of sidewalk businesses have to pay the police or someone connected to the local government to use sidewalk ‘for free’. Even though vendors do not pay an official fee to the government, these ‘unwritten fees’ are a financial commitment. In early 2018, the vice-chairman of District 1, which is the centre of the old city, claimed in his resignation letter:

[The] sidewalk-clearing campaign has offended many people’s benefit. These benefits worth thousands of million Vietnamese dong. They are owners of sidewalk-parking-lots, high-end restaurants, hotels, street house owners . . . and city officials who get benefit indirectly through the sidewalk business. (Tran, 2018)

He then claimed that as a member of the Vietnamese Communist Party, he had constantly fought to overcome difficulties and opposition from beneficiary groups, even receiving threats to his family. He stated that he needed support and participation from all political and governmental hierarchies to restore the order of law in general and on the sidewalks in particular (see Figure 6), but had received none (Tran, 2018). This demonstrates the competing interests of a modern city: the street life of an informal economy versus the modernising impulses of a government that wants more order, greater mobility and traffic improvement.

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Figure 6.

A sidewalk with motorcycles, signboards and rubbish: three sources of ‘disorder’ that the government wants to remove from the sidewalks.

Vendors compete for sidewalks, median strips, doorsteps as they do for customers so that these urban public spaces become a private commodity for selling and buying, with transactions governed by commercial syndicates, local politicians and public officials (Goldstein, 2016: 5). Protection rackets are not the only claimants of city sidewalks in Saigon-HCMC. Given that sidewalks are nominally public spaces and therefore by definition should not be freely used for personal/private purposes, the government plans to charge a fee for people to operate their businesses on sidewalks. The fee depends on the sidewalk’s location; for example, it would be US$5/m² in central districts. Local residents are concerned that this plan is no different from encouraging the occupation of public spaces. The ultimate function of sidewalks – as walking space – is a secondary priority after businesses are allowed to operate for a fee. The current issue is whether the fee will be sufficient to maintain the sidewalks or whether the government will have to use the state budget for this purpose. Tube housing, motorcycles, small businesses and the vendor economy have made sidewalks an ideal place to operate a variety of businesses. Everyone wants a ‘piece of the action’ on sidewalks, if not for businesses, then for motorcycle parking. Once sidewalks become legal rental properties, a new protection racket will likely form – but unlike the current situation, it would be formalised. To gain the right to use sidewalks, people would have to lobby (or bribe), most likely paying a final amount that is significantly higher than the government’s official fee whilst the real contribution to the state budget remains low. The government in this case would simply become another layer of rent-seeking agents rather than as a defender of the public interest.

Sidewalk rental issues are endemic to all large developing cities of Asia with the notable exceptions of The People’s Republic of China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea and Singapore. Saigon-HCMC is no exception to the general experience but it is a particularly extensive and intensive case study. Every street in Saigon-HCMC is commercial. Every street house is a potential shop. Every sidewalk is a potential business facility. Further, street vendors and mobile vendors on bicycles or motorcycles are also common. If the city government wishes to apply sidewalk rentals to businesses, it must consider this additional facet of the urban character of Saigon-HCMC as a whole.

Conclusion

The city itself is a social entity in which these ‘multiple partially localised assemblages’ have existed together to make the city functional even as it has experienced rapid growth since the last decade of the 20th century. Tube housing, the dominant housing form, is a product of the people of Saigon-HCMC, who have made it a modern means to solve their housing and livelihood problems. Streets and the dominant kind of transport (motorcycles), sidewalks and sidewalk economies are all essential urban spaces for city residents. This unique relationship of tube housing, motorcycle and urban fabric makes the city work. It would work better if the government were to make the most out of this assemblage instead of trying to ban, deconstruct or convert it in the name of modernisation.

Instead of pursuing a radical remaking of the current urban structures and cultures of Saigon-HCMC, this article has argued that the government should seek to adapt and incorporate into their city plans a recognition that its citizens have been and continue to be active agents in the construction of their city’s streets, sidewalks and laneways. As such, we argue that the current city assemblage meets many of the people’s primary needs and has generated a distinctive urbanism in the ‘global urban ecosystem’ that is as amenable to its very diverse population as it is attractive to international tourists, returning Viet diaspora and expatriate workers (Spencer, 2014: 54f). This is not to deny that this rapidly growing and emergent mega-city needs to embrace new innovations in infrastructure provision, neither is it an argument for the conservation of the current order as such. Rather it is a call for a comprehensive planning process that builds upon the distinctive ecologies, economies, technologies and cultures of Saigon-HCMC and aims to integrate new technologies and systems that respect these indigenous qualities and achievements rather than simply denigrating and banning them in the name of overly rationalised forms of modernisation.