Individual Paper
4. Seeing from the Neighbourhood: States, Communities and Human Mobility
Ha Long is a coastal city in Northern Vietnam. Originating first as coastal villages of fishermen, then developed into an industrial hub of coal miners, it is today one of the most modern green-growth cities of Vietnam with one-of-its-kinds infrastructure system. What this condensed historical summary will not tell us, is that Ha Long was and has never been a place naturally conducive for urban development. Being neatly nested between the mountain and the sea, it possessed limited area of developable land. The history of urban development here has thus always been a story of human struggles to deal with the mountain on one side and the sea on the other side to implant human settlements against such unfavorable inhabitation conditions. Indeed, the city has conducted relentless sea reclamation with the infilling soil supplied by levelling nearby mountains. This process of “terraforming”, either incremental via the corporeal labor of individual migrants decades ago, or massive via spectacular geo-engineering feats ongoing today, has permanently shaped the city’s urban landscape and identity. In this paper, by studying the art of living through and living with “digging the mountain and filling in the sea”, I aim to shed lights on the material and cultural aspects of urban development in Ha Long. As Vietnamese cities embark themselves on unprecedented developmental missions of urbanization, my study will show how certain discourses and practices of urban development have managed to be extremely “sticky” despite their various (c)overt impacts on local communities and ecologies.
Thi Mai Thoa Tran
Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada