Bringing the countryside to the city: Practices and imaginations of the rural in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Abstract

By zeroing in on the spatial tensions of the urban experience, this paper examines the countryside’s role as a set of everyday practices and imaginative discourses in the growth and transformation of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The argument centres on how urban residents draw on material practices and symbolic discourses of the ‘rural’ to imbue the city with meaning. In doing so, this paper adds another dimension to the literature on Southeast Asian cities by illustrating how Ho Chi Minh City institutions and residents enliven the value of the countryside through urban development. Related to this, I highlight how the folding of the countryside in to the city does not deprive either rural or urban space of meaning. In sum, the findings contribute to debates surrounding the Southeast Asian region in urban theorising, the countryside’s role in linking the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’, and the classic ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors involved in rural–urban migration by rethinking the urban/rural binary in Vietnam.

Urban Gardening and Rural-Urban Supply Chains: Reassessing Images of the Urban and the Rural in Northern Vietnam

“…Additionally, interviewees try to ensure food safety by drawing on their urban-rural ties. This chapter links the empirical findings on urban gardening and the rural-urban supply chains to the broader discussion on the rural-urban dichotomy in Vietnam (Drummond 2003;Fuhrmann 2017;Gillen 2016;Harms 2011a, b;Kurfürst 2012a;Labbé 2016). It concludes that the socially constructed oppositions of the rural and the urban not only inform the way people imagine (urban) space (Gillen 2016;Harms 2011a), but also what they imagine to be clean and safe vegetables.…”

“…Although spatial distinctions between the city and the countryside increasingly seem to dissolve, with more and more people from rural areas moving to the city and urbanites building weekend villas in the countryside, binaries of the rural and the urban continue to inform the way people imagine (urban) space (Gillen 2016;Harms 2011a). Actors designate spaces and practices as either rural or urban, thence (re)producing the binaries in their social interactions.…”

“…Finally, the rural does not so much refer to a specific geographical location, but appears rather to be an imagined space accompanied by a set of specific symbols (Fuhrmann 2017;Gillen 2016;Harms 2011a). The symbols associated with the rural, such as freshness, cleanliness and safety also seem to inform urbanites' consumption decisions in the light of increasing food anxiety.…”

Landscapes of extended ruralisation: postcolonial suburbs in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

“…For some the suburbs have always been defined by the rural, such as through the ‘nostalgia for rural life’ (Miele , 31) reflected in the aesthetics of gardens and interiors, or the sense of the suburb as an escape from the city (Duncan and Duncan ; Fishman ). In contemporary African cities, urban–rural connections remain significant and suburban space must therefore be understood as shaped by social relations that connect city dwellers to the countryside (see also Gillen ; Tang ). In Tanzania, one of the ways this linkage is made is through house‐building strategies that stretch across suburban and rural spaces.…”

The rice cities of the Khmer Rouge: an urban political ecology of rural mass violence

“…A growing body of work questions conventional, Western‐derived, views of rural‐to‐urban transition (McGee ) and explores the emergence of ‘intermediate zones’ that do not fit into traditional rural/urban binaries (Lacour and Puissant ), particularly in Southeast Asia (cf. Gillen ). As this Cambodia example suggests, a sensitivity to socio‐spatial processes across city limits may contribute to these debates.…”