A few days ago, my roommate and I were riding along the Saigon River on a wide and immaculately paved highway in District 1. The road had two separate lanes; one was for cars and the other for motorbikes, and the traffic lights were configured to account for both types of vehicles. The sides of the street were uncharacteristically bare, with not a vendor in sight. As we pulled up at a red light, my roommate remarked, “I wish all of the roads in Ho Chi Minh City were wide like this one. The traffic is so much better.” I thought about this for a moment, and then glanced to my right at the far bank of the river. Tightly packed slum houses were right up against the water’s edge, the ramshackle shelters taking up nearly every inch of available space. “The traffic might be better, but a lot of people would have to move for that to happen, Tu,” I said. He fell silent for a moment, before replying, “Ya, it’s very difficult for change to happen here.”
The highway we were driving on looked very much like the slum neighborhood across the river up until fairly recently. Over the past couple of decades, the Vietnamese government has been clearing these neighborhoods in order to install highways and newer housing projects. On the outskirts of the city, whole villages and towns have been ordered to relocate so that the urban sprawl can continue to march its way across the landscape. While the tenants of these homes are offered compensation, this is often far less than the property value and many times the reward is trimmed by local officials. While there certainly have been positive outcomes of the new developments (shopping malls, improved roads, and more housing opportunities), there is a vast majority of average Vietnamese that has been forced to sacrifice a great deal in the name of “progress”. Daily Vietnamese live is very community-oriented, and so the destruction and relocation of these people can have far-reaching consequences. Waibel et. al (2007) write that “evidence from two inner-city upgrading prorams shows that the resettlement process destroyed the inhabitants’ social and economic networks in many cases and therefore often the basis of their income.” While these shopping malls, high-priced apartments and boulevards may be billed as good for the economy, it seems as though a large section of the populous is increasingly unable to enjoy these benefits.
Adding to this problem, a lot of these development projects are implemented by foreign companies and investors (Crescent Mall in District 7, pictured right, is a prime example) . These companies generally do not have a grasp of the regional needs of the areas in which they are developing. While their models may have worked in their own countries and other developed countries, this does not necessarily mean that the same model is applicable or appropriate in certain Vietnamese contexts.