This week our class took a bus to district 7 where we looked into aspects of urbanization, development and upward mobility we hadn’t thought about before. Our first stop was at an upscale mall that would seem shockingly huge and expensive even in the US. A map of where this mall is the first image I have posted here. At first my thought was “This is so western, what is this mall doing in Vietnam?” but after thinking more about it I realized that thinking about access to expensive, high quality clothing and products should not be something that is only “western.” These malls are Vietnamese, or at least Asian, but certainly not Western as can be seen by some of the foods available, the teenagers taking selfies in matching T-shirts, the art gallery displaying Vietnamese photographs and the fact that these projects are financed entirely by Asian investors, not Western ones. If people in this area can afford to buy nice things, than why shouldn’t they have access to them? the same can be argued for the upscale housing developments, also pictured above. These houses, located in district 7, are available for purchase for over a half a million dollars in cash. Being wealthy and having nice things should not be looked at as something that doesn’t belong in developing countries, if their is a market of upper class people, than it makes perfect sense for the country to start creating areas where they can live the lifestyle they want and can afford.
The biggest issue I still have with these fancy malls, big houses and upscale supermarkets is that they are being built in places where whole villages or lower class housing developments used to be located. Over the last few years people’s houses and land has been taken by the government, with little compensation, to make room for giant houses to accommodate the growing the upper and upper middle class. I’m not sure where a better place to build these new small cities would be, but it is clearly wrong to disrupt the lives of thousands of impoverished families and force them to either move far away or place them in huge poorly built apartment buildings with thousands of other displaced families.