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.