Tropical Paris and Chinatown
Tropical Paris and Chinatown
The History and Resilience of Ho Chi Minh City’s Sidewalks
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s history shows us how sidewalk practices have regularly not followed the plan and are not dictated by the built environment. Present-day HCMC started as two distinctly separate towns 300 years ago: Saigon, the headquarters of the French colony Indochine, and Cholon, the larger and thriving Chinese diaspora trading port town. The city has gone through a remarkable succession of political and economic regime changes, particularly in the last 70 years: colonial, post-colonial nationalist, communist, and market transition. Historic photographs and accounts reveal that sidewalk space has always been a recreational and street vending space and not solely a transportation corridor despite the urban planning regulations of various regimes. Its urban history also shows that HCMC has been a city of immigrants from its inception, an unspoken narrative. Furthermore, the fact that both the Haussman-esque boulevards in Saigon and the narrow feng-shui sidewalk designs of Cholon host a vibrant sidewalk life counters behavioural determinism and colonial theory which presume physical space has strong power to control populations.
Keywords: Cholon, Saigon, Indochine, urban history, Vietnam, French colonialism, urban planning, Chinese diaspora, immigrant, street vending
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