Luminos is the open access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Philip E. Lilienthal Asian Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal. The publisher also gratefully acknowledges that this book has been published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University. ASIA: LO CAL STUDIES/GLOBAL THEMES Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Kären Wigen, and Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Editors 1. Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife, by Robin M. LeBlanc 2. The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, edited by Joshua A. Fogel 3. The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, by Hue-Tam Ho Tai 4. Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, edited by Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom 5. Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915–1953 , by Susan L. Glosser 6. An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898–1975) , by Geremie R. Barmé 7. Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period, 1603–1868, by Marcia Yonemoto 8. Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories, by Madeleine Yue Dong 9. Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China, by Ruth Rogaski 10. Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China, by Andrew D. Morris 11. Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan, by Miyako Inoue 12. Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period , by Mary Elizabeth Berry 13. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination , by Anne Allison 14. After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai , by Heonik Kwon 15. Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China , by Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley 16. Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China, by Paul A. Cohen 17. A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600–1912, by Kären Wigen 18. Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China , by Thomas S. Mul- laney 19. Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan, by Andrew Gordon 20. Recreating Japanese Men, edited by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall 21. Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley 22. Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923, by Gen- nifer Weisenfeld 23. Taiko Boom: Japanese Drumming in Place and Motion, by Shawn Bender 24. Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition, by Elizabeth J. Perry 25. Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660–1950, by Fabian Drixler 26. The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village, by Henrietta Har- rison 27. The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo, by Ian Jared Miller 28. Go Nation: Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China, by Marc L. Moskowitz 29. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History, by Miriam Kingsberg 30. Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press, by Joan Judge 31. The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan, by Marcia Yonemoto 32. Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon, by Erik Harms Luxury and Rubble Luxury and Rubble Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon Erik Harms UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2016 by Erik Harms This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Suggested citation: Harms, Erik. Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon . Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. doi: http://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.20 Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress. isbn 978–0-520–29251–2 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 978–0-520–96601–7 (ebook) Manufactured in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Isabella vii C ontents List of Illustrations ix Introduction: Luxury and Rubble 1 Part I. Luxury 1. Civilizing the Wastelands: A Short History of Urban Development in Phú Mỹ Hưng 27 2. Civilization City 58 3. Exercising Consciousness: Self and Society in a Privatizing Space of Exclusion 86 Part II. Rubble 4. Thủ 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 viii Contents Acknowledgments 223 Notes 229 Bibliography 261 Index 275 ix Illustrations 0.1. The Phú Mỹ Bridge 2 0.2. Map of Ho Chi Minh City 3 0.3. Phú Mỹ Hưng, District 7, Ho Chi Minh City 9 0.4. Thủ Thiêm, District 2, Ho Chi Minh City 10 1.1. Map of Phú Mỹ Hưng 32 1.2. A typical villa 39 1.3. A semidetached villa zoned for mixed-use residential and commercial use 40 1.4. Housing plots with private home construction 40 1.5. Nguyễn Văn Linh and Nguyễn Đức Cảnh streets, looking south 42 1.6. Phú Mỹ Hưng, looking north 43 2.1. Park signs outlining required civilized behavior 61 3.1. The Starlight Bridge (Cầu Ánh Sao) 88 3.2. A typical café in Phú Mỹ Hưng 107 4.1. Thủ Thiêm, looking east from Saigon’s bến Bạch Đằng waterfront 119 4.2. A French map of Saigon 120 4.3. Map of Saigon, November 1964 122 4.4. Detail of Ho Chi Minh City tourist map 123 4.5. Ho Chi Minh City tourist map, ca. 2005 124 4.6. Detail from reproduction of the “Tran Van Hoc map of 1815” 127 4.7. The right bank of the Saigon River 129 4.8. Sunday Mass at the Thủ Thiêm church 132 4.9. Courtyard of the Thủ Thiêm Congregation of the Lovers of the Holy Cross 133 x Illustrations 4.10. Le Brun Map of Saigon in 1795 136 4.11. Project for a City of 500,000 Souls in Saigon by Colonel Coffyn, 1862 137 4.12. Hébrard’s plan for extension and development of Saigon 138 4.13. Thủ Thiêm plans during the Ngô Đình Diệm period, ca. 1957 139 4.14. Thủ Thiêm plans during the Ngô Đình Diệm period, ca. 1958 140 4.15. 1965 Doxiadis Plan for Thủ Thiêm 141 4.16. Doxiadis plan for developing a structure of hierarchically nested urban communities 143 4.17. View of Thủ Thiêm, ca. 1960s 145 4.18. Detail of 1965 Doxiadis Plan for Thủ Thiêm 146 4.19. Wurster Plan of 1972 149 5.1. The Thủ Thiêm Ferry 155 5.2. Thủ Thiêm before demolition 156 5.3. Flattening the landscape in Thủ Thiêm 156 5.4. Thủ Thiêm after demolition 157 5.5. New billboards in Thủ Thiêm 159 5.6. Master plan for the Thủ Thiêm New Urban Zone, displayed outside the People’s Committee office 163 5.7. 1995 Investment brochure for Thủ Thiêm 172 6.1. The remains of Tâm’s Home 184 6.2. View from the “rubble café” 203 6.3. Image saved on Tâm’s cameras 209 1 Introduction Luxury and Rubble I seek to show that the pure multiplicity of rubble is the void that haunts modernity. —Gastón Gordillo, Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction T H E P H Ú M Ỹ B R I D G E The Phú Mỹ suspension bridge rises from a bend in the Saigon River a little more than three and a half miles south by southeast of District One, Ho Chi Minh City’s downtown core. From downtown, the bridge can be seen from the city’s expensive rooftop bars, at places along the banks of the river, and down recently widened avenues, where breaks in the urban fabric open up views to the edge of the sky. In this former French colony, in the city once (but no longer) called the “Paris of the East” or the “Pearl of the Orient,” these broad roads, ripped through dense neigh- borhoods, evoke memories of the nineteenth-century labors of Baron Haussmann, whose reconstruction of Paris under Napoléon III replaced crooked streets with grand boulevards. Today, as Ho Chi Minh City’s neighborhoods are flattened, new vistas emerge, including the view of the bridge stretching across the river in the distance, its elegant spans, two modern towers, and graceful suspension cables framing the southeastern horizon like a gateway to the city (fig. 0.1). The Phú Mỹ Bridge connects District Two and District Seven, two of the city’s newly urbanizing and formerly rural districts (fig. 0.2). On one side of the river, to the east of downtown, in a still partially rural but rapidly urbanizing section of District Two, the bridge rises out of rice fields, which are in turn hemmed in by newly subdivided residential housing and recently constructed apartment com- plexes built to resettle thousands of residents who have been displaced by the Thủ Thiêm New Urban Zone, a major new urban development project. On the other side of the river, the bridge’s hulking cement columns and its massive on- and off-ramps pierce the dense urban fabric of District Seven, cutting through the 2 Introduction working-class neighborhoods that have expanded throughout the district over the past two decades of rapid periurban growth. A sleek flyover connects the bridge to an area of District Seven called Saigon South, bypassing the dense city below, conveying traffic straight into the heart of an upscale residential and commercial development known as Phú Mỹ Hưng. LU X U RY A N D RU B B L E This book is about Phú Mỹ Hưng and Thủ Thiêm, two master-planned urban de- velopment projects located on either side of the Phú Mỹ Bridge. My primary aim is to show how large-scale urban infrastructure projects become entangled with the lives and aspirations of people living in a rapidly growing city, and to show the role these projects play in the complex political and economic dramas taking place in an urban world increasingly driven by the market logics of real estate development. The dramas of urban development described in this book are staged on contested parcels of land and set within a city and country that have endured a tumultuous twentieth century marked by colonialism, devastating warfare, and a postwar period marked first by the utopian ambitions of building socialism, then by the dystopian consequences of that project, and, more recently, by the rampant real estate speculation that followed the introduction of a market economy. Figure 0.1. The Phú Mỹ Bridge. District 2 is in the foreground; District 7 is on the far side of the bridge. The faintly visible apartment towers in the background rise from the Phú Mỹ Hưng New Urban Zone. Author’s photo, July 2012. Figure 0.2. Map of Ho Chi Minh City indicating the location of Phú Mỹ Hưng and Thủ Thiêm. The boundaries of Districts 1, 2, and 7 are marked by dotted lines.