Like much of the developing world, Vietnam is undergoing a process of rapid urbanization. While urbanization patterns were largely complicated by years of war and reconstruction, the pattern since the late 1980s has largely resulted from massive rural to urban migration.
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest and most rapidly growing urban center, saw net migration increases “from 14,872 a year from 1984 to 1989, to about 100,000 a year in the 1989-99 period, and over 200,000 a year from 1999-2004,” constituting a “urban demographic explosion” according to calculations provided by Hy Van Luong. By 2008, official statistics from the Vietnam General Statistics Office put the official total population of registered Ho Chi Minh City residents at 6.6 million people. Researchers generally agree that total population figures tend to be under-reported and some estimates reach as high as 8 million residents.
This increase in overall living standards has coincided with strains on city infrastructure, precarious settlements and seemingly intractable poverty, which played out along gendered dimensions, led to a dramatic spatial division of wealth and poverty. However, even as the city strains under epochal social, economic and environmental challenges, Vietnamese representations of urban life increasingly celebrate the potential for new, modern modes of social life indexed by the term “urban civility/civilization” (văn minh đô thị).
This study, based in New Urban Zones explicitly marketed as centers of “urban civilization,” explores the degree to which the concept of “urban civilization” is linked to the massive influx of Vietnamese citizens into Ho Chi Minh City.