On November 3rd, 2014 our class took a trip to view more of Ho Chi Minh City’s (HCMC) Urban Development areas. In our environmental studies class and in other research proposals, we’ve been discussing Vietnam’s plan to modernize the up and coming cities. The greatest focus is of modernization is in Hanoi, the capital. Second to Hanoi is Ho Chi Minh City. This tour of areas under development gave us a look into the process of how they are modernizing HCMC. Our bus tour started in district 1, passed through district 4, spent a good amount of time in district 7, and concluded our tour in district 2. There were some highs, such as more open streets and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) companies building infrastructure to attract tourists and more importantly expats. However, there were also some lows, such as buildings unfinished due to FDI pulling out before finishing projects as well as displacement of homes to many of the working class.
This map shows the tour of where we went throughout the development areas of HCMC.
Prior to taking this tour through the development areas of HCMC, I read an article called “Rural to Urban Immigration in Vietnam” by Vietnamese scholar Cu Chi Loi. Cu discussed how many rural citizens of the developing world, more specifically Vietnam, are migrating to big cities in search of improving their wealth and status. Cu states that economists look at this phenomenon as a labor movement from rural areas to urban. Cu later discusses Todaro’s findings on rural to urban migration among citizens of developing countries. Todaro’s argument stated that “throughout the developing world, rates of rural–urban migration continue to exceed the rates of job creation and to surpass greatly the capacity of both industry and urban social services to absorb this labor effectively” (Todaro, 1976). If Todaro and Cu found these observations to be true then I would expect to discover that most of the labor movement would migrate back to the country side. However, reading further into Cu’s article and seeing the developing areas with my own eyes, it was the exact opposite. The rural-to-urban migrators stay in the big cities because they have a better chance for better pay and higher living standards in the city rather than the countryside. This observation sparked the questions: Where is this labor movement living?
During our tour I quickly found out that the labor movement lives adjacent to the development projects set up by FDIs. In District 7 I found skyscrapers being built on one side of the street and shantytowns on the other side of the street. The arrangement of the living situations really did a good job at showing the class divide in the developing areas of HCMC. Most of the labor movement living areas were located to rivers or other bodies of water. They were living in homes that were built rapidly by themselves in order to quickly get secure shelter. Professor Coe mentioned that some workers even live inside the infrastructures currently being built. Workers bring in hammocks and minimal living necessities to the building sites and sleep there because most of the time they have nowhere else to go.
The bigger question that presents itself from these findings is where are the labor movement workers going to go when the entire area becomes modernized? District 2 gave us the government’s answer to the question which is deliberately pushing the migrators off of their land.
These pictures show us the development on the left side of the river and the lack of development on the right side of the river. According to Professor Robert, the area on the right side of the river use to homed by 60,000 plus citizens of HCMC. Some of those workers helped build the massive structures on the left side of the river. Unfortunately, Professor Robert informed me that the shantytowns and 60,000 individuals were removed a few years ago from their plot of land. The government did this because they started making plans to develop the area, and they did not need the labor from those individuals anymore.
These pictures also show the high amount of wealth and the severe poverty just seperated by a river in HCMC. The class divide was very apparent during out tour through these districts.
As the development continues, it will be interesting to see what these areas look like a short 5 years from now.