Read more
"With captivating ethnography and trenchant analysis, Erik Harms delves deeply into two communities created and destroyed by redevelopment in contemporary Ho Chi Minh City. He poignantly shows how master plans defining personhood in terms of property rights empower some to live in luxury, while leaving others in the rubble of dispossession.”—Ann Marie Leshkowich, author of Essential Trade: Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace
"Beautifully written. . . . A remarkable achievement in urban studies and a must-read for anyone interested in changing spatial form, sociality, rights consciousness, and class dynamics in neoliberal times.”—Li Zhang, author of In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis
"Once in a while, a book comes along and makes us rethink how cities and capitalism work. Luxury and Rubble is one of those, giving us new conceptual insights into urbanism and doing so through an intensely lived and beautifully narrated ethnography.”—Ananya Roy, editor of Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global
"An invaluable contribution to the ethnographic literature on ‘creative destruction,’ Harms’ rich comparative study of two planned urban developments in Ho Chi Minh City brings much needed attention to the sobering consequences of the reordering of post-imperial and late-socialist urban space in Vietnam by offering a deeply humanistic portrayal of those very urban actors whose social worlds hang in the balance between precarity and prosperity.”—Christina Schwenkel, author of The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation
"In this meticulously researched investigation, Erik Harms brilliantly maps the new geographies of dispossession, property rights, political subjectivity and everyday life that are emerging in conjunction with urban redevelopment projects in post-liberalization Ho Chi Minh City."—Neil Brenner, author of Critique of Urbanization and New State Spaces
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Luxury and Rubble
Part I. Luxury
1. Civilizing the Wastelands: A Short History of Urban Development in Phú M? Hung
2. Civilization City
3. Exercising Consciousness: Self and Society in a Privatizing Space of Exclusion
Part II. Rubble
4. Th? Thiêm Futures Past: A Short History of Seeing without Seeing
5. Building a Civilized, Modern, and Sentimental City
6. From the Rubble
Conclusion: Civility and Dispossession
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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.
Summary
Tells the tale of two cities in Ho Chi Minh City. This book portrays the human costs of urban reorganization as the author explores the complex and sometimes contradictory experiences of individuals grappling with the forces of privatization in a socialist country.
Additional text
"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."
