Sidewalk City
Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City
For most, the term "public space" conjures up images of large, open areas: community centers for meetings and social events; the ancient Greek agora for political debates; green parks for festivals and recreation. In many of the world's major cities, however, public spaces like these are not a part of the everyday lives of the public. Rather, business and social lives have always been conducted along main roads and sidewalks. With increasing urban growth and density, primarily from migration and immigration, rights to the sidewalk are being hotly contested among pedestrians, street vendors, property owners, tourists, and governments around the world.
With "Sidewalk City", Annette Miae Kim provides the first multidisciplinary case study of sidewalks in a distinctive geographical area. She focuses on Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, a rapidly growing and evolving city that throughout its history, her multicultural residents have built up alternative legitimacies and norms about how the sidewalk should be used. Based on fieldwork over 15 years, Kim developed methods of spatial ethnography to overcome habitual seeing, and recorded both the spatial patterns and the social relations of how the city's vibrant sidewalk life is practiced.
In "Sidewalk City", she transforms this data into an imaginative array of maps, progressing through a primer of critical cartography, to unveil new insights about the importance and potential of this quotidian public space. This richly illustrated and fascinating study of Ho Chi Minh City's sidewalks shows us that it is possible to have an aesthetic sidewalk life that is inclusive of multiple publics' aspirations and livelihoods, particularly those of migrant vendors.
About the Author
Annette Miae Kim is associate professor of public policy and the founding director of SLAB, the Spatial Analysis Lab, at the University of Southern California.
Reviews
"'Sidewalk City' is an important book which takes a big step forward in our understanding of that key public space – the sidewalk. Mixing urban theory, ethnography, observation, and innovative mapping, Kim has produced a new conceptual and representational paradigm. Both scholarly and readable, 'Sidewalk City' should interest anyone who thinks about cities, public spaces, and people" – Margaret Crawford, UC Berkeley
"Using critical cartography and spatial ethnography, 'Sidewalk City' brings to life an unwritten realm of claims and practices. Kim brilliantly persuades us with her theoretical framework which identifies a particular type of rights not associated with shared sidewalks: property rights negotiated in public space" – Saskia Sassen, author of "Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy"
"'Sidewalk City' is visually powerful, socially explanatory, and politically revealing. Kim delivers an exceptionally rich contribution to the emerging domain of urban humanities with her multilayered close analysis of a seemingly prosaic socio-spatial environment – the sidewalks of Ho Chi Minh City. As such, she provides as much creative clarity to those interested in photography, multi-media art, and critical cartography as she does to those who care about economic development, property rights, urban planning, public policy, and ethnographic method" – Lawrence J. Vale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of "Purging the Poorest"
"Opening with an exciting ethnography of sidewalk life in Ho Chi Minh City, Kim goes on to unfurl a revolutionary collection of mapping subjects, techniques, and strategies that let her, as she says, map the unmapped. As Kevin Lynch did in 1960, Kim inaugurates an utterly new fork in the history of mapmaking, enabling her to return at book's end to the sidewalk both reconsidered and reimagined. 'Sidewalk City' is essential reading!" – Denis Wood, author of "Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas"
