Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon / Edition 1

by Erik Harms

Overview

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Luxury and Rubble is the tale of two cities in Ho Chi Minh City. It is the story of two planned, mixed-use residential and commercial developments that are changing the face of Vietnam’s largest city. Since the early 1990s, such developments have been steadily reorganizing urban landscapes across the country. For many Vietnamese, they are a symbol of the country’s emergence into global modernity and of post-socialist economic reforms. However, they are also sites of great contestation, sparking land disputes and controversies over how to compensate evicted residents. In this penetrating ethnography, Erik Harms vividly portrays the human costs of urban reorganization as he explores the complex and sometimes contradictory experiences of individuals grappling with the forces of privatization in a socialist country.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520292512
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	10/21/2016
Series:	Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes , #32
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Erik Harms is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University and the author of Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Introduction: Luxury and Rubble 1

Part I Luxury

1 Civilizing the Wastelands: A Short History of Urban Development in Phú My Hung 27

2 Civilization City 58

3 Exercising Consciousness: Self and Society in a Privatizing Space of Exclusion 86

Part II Rubble

4 Thu Thiêm Futures Past: A Short History of Seeing without Seeing 117

5 Building a Civilized, Modern, and Sentimental City 154

6 From the Rubble 183

Conclusion: Civility and Dispossession 211

Acknowledgments 223

Notes 229

Bibliography 261

Index 275

Editorial Reviews

"Harms’s book offers a remarkably insightful and well-rounded ethnography of emergent urban aspirations, discontents, and imaginaries. The book is well on its way to making a serious and lasting contribution to the social science fields of cultural and economic anthropology, urban sociology, geography, and postsocialist studies, among others."

H-Net

"Erik Harms’s Luxury and Rubble is a work of fine-grained thick description that patiently walks readers through the rapid economic, cultural, and socio-spatial shifts that remade Ho Chi Minh City. . . superb, even-handed."

Cross-Currents