Planners often characterize the land regime in the city of Saigon as a form of “backward planning,” a transgressive form of planning that involves a seemingly irregular orientation to time and the planning archive. It occurs in its most brazen form when municipalities change or erase parts of the land archive or alter ratified planning documents from the past. These practices can rearrange property relations, possession and ownership in the present and future. Saigon’s municipal authorities specifically have disappeared key planning maps and manipulated property archives in order to change the landscape of de facto ownership and contractual obligations across time both backward and forward in order to solve problems related to growth and development as well as satisfy the shifting needs of transnational capital. These acts of state exception are as much temporal interventions as they are spatial ones, insofar as they refute collective memory and common notions of land possession on the one hand, and (legally) erase itineraries of rights and entitlements to property on the other. These novel configurations of state power invite interrogation into the time orientation of dominant theories of space in the geographic/urban studies tradition, particularly geography’s focus on space-time (and not necessarily property) as the primary mechanism through which the spatialization of capital occurs. This event was recorded and can be viewed here.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Hun Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine. Hun’s current ethnographic work examines inter-Asian and late-socialist connections of urban development and infrastructure in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) , Vietnam. His work specifically focuses on the relationship between urban regulation and models of development that circulate alongside transnational capital that produce urban change in the city, global standards of development and their relation to discourses of corruption, and urban infrastructures of finance and expertise in the city. Hun is currently working on a book project entitled, “Reform Capital: Hedging Saigon’s Urban Future.”
Dr Yimin Zhao is Assistant Professor in Urban Planning and Management, School of Public Administration and Policy, Renmin University of China. Trained as a Human Geographer, he is interested in spatial politics and urban political economy in China’s urban transformation. After previous investigations on Beijing’s green belts and the Jiehebu area, his current research develops along two lines of inquiry, one focusing on the infrastructural lives of authoritarianism and the other looking into the urban mechanisms of “Global China”.