DOES SIDEWALK CULTURE BELONG TO PUBLIC SPACES?

Walking down

the busy streets or into the small alleys of HCMC, it is not difficult to run into a small coffee stand, a food stall, a newsstand, a small bikes repair in the corner of a hustling main road. If it were to cover all the activities taking place in the streets, it would take quite a while to compile and publish a more detailed article. On a usual day, if you were born in the hustle and bustle of HCMC, the image of sellers sitting on the sidewalk has become an indispensable cultural impression. The sound of carts creaking, or the sound of the salesmen untying the rolls of tarpaulins, the shrill opening sound of the old iron doors, the chatter of vendors, laughter, the sound of the rushing delivery trucks will wake you up every morning. Having lived for seven years in the center, on Nguyen Thiep Street, which is few minutes away from downtown; then, about two years in Cho Lon (Chinese district in HCMC), needless to say, I had a splendid time to experience all the excitement of the city regardless of its noise, pollution, disorganization. Despite the disorientation in setting up the lives of the street, I always ask the question, if history changed and urban Vietnam was organized more scientifically, what would the current situation be? Of course, in reality, historical accounts cannot be easily changed, cannot be rewritten, and cannot be erased. So, from a historical, social, and cultural perspective, although it is not fully explained, we can partly illustrate how modern Vietnamese society was built upon. Although being a significant character of the city to many, it is true that the history of Saigon and the literature that create the picture of sidewalk culture still remain unclear. There is almost no official survey on what people in the informal business really do, how they feel or care about their work (in some cases, their only means of survival), their living condition, their future, or what the citizens of HCMC think about these economies on the pavements. Arguments are just arguments when everyone keeps their standpoints and this situation would not lead the issue to anywhere.16 Therefore, does sidewalk culture belong and make a part of public spaces?

How the history of Saigon has affected the sidewalk culture

According to Kim, present day HCMC actually started as two separate but symbiotic towns: the French colonist built Saigon as a tropical mini-Paris with monumental buildings connected by boulevards and traffic circles, and the Chinese immigrants built the neighborhood of Cho Lon, an area which belongs to mostly Chinese citizen, with narrow streets that curved towards the river.17 As urban planning design from the French colony implemented on the city of Saigon and Cho Lon, separation in the population has started to arise between people who worked for the municipality and people who were small sellers. Therefore, Saigon and its center only allowed people who had the residency to accommodate (politicians, French, Vietnamese bourgeoisie) and pushed the people of working class and without residency to make a living on the river or in other regions nearby Saigon and Cho Lon. This can be considered the begin of sidewalk culture.

Long before the sidewalk culture was formed and popularized to the present, the street trade was born in the first Northern period 179 BC, there has not been any specific research on the trading route. Although it can be seen that Vietnam’s agricultural economy has had a strong impact on mobile commerce or the presence of a centralized form of commerce (market hall) and decentralized (peddling market). When the French colonized Vietnam in the late 19th century, to ensure the rule and management of the colony, they gave a definitive physical impact to destroy many centralized buildings, and communities at that time, including temples (chua) and communal houses (dinh).18 Instead, the French constructed their new Administrative centers, Post office, and City Hall. And in the following years until the 20th century, the constant change in the government system and the fighting between the different regimes in the north (Hanoi) and the south (Saigon), except for the household businesses. At home, the majority of small individuals or individual sellers cannot concentrate on one place to trade, therefore, they have formed small retail clusters on the street, both convenient for commuting, also flexible, and can be reachable to more consumers (Figure 1.1 & 1.2). The reason for this can be traced back to the tightening of community activities in the Post-colonial state. Although up to the current time, there has been limited research on Vietnam’s street culture from a historical standpoint, nor has there been an in-depth assessment of the sociological background of street culture. One thing is clear, throughout history, the impression of street vendors and small-scale merchants has played a significant role in building the distinctive sidewalk culture of Vietnam.

To answer the question whether sidewalk belong to public space, it is essential to look into the different arguments and how researchers define the interrelationship between public and private space. Taking Lisa Drummond’s discussion on public space and private space in Vietnam as an example (Table 1), although giving examples of the differences, mentioned them as inside and outside spaces, either comparing them as community versus domesticity, masculinity versus femininity, although there is little evidence of the public “sphere” in Vietnamese society during the pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial period, it is not impossible to realize that all of these period has strongly influence the way Vietnamese arranged the public space as their private space. Public spaces in Ho Chi Minh City, according to the research of Hiemstra, van der Kooy and Frese, fabricated a female-dominated environment where women join the informal sector of the economy19 which goes against the

18 relation of public and private space argued by Lisa Drummond. In reality, the historical evidence of this can be found in paintings which illustrates the life on the street (Figure 1.1 & 1.2). As a result, the presence of women in the urban pictures appeared to be recognizable. Historical documents in the past and modern show that the public space appears a lot of street vendors, stalls selling goods on the sidewalk, or images of women wearing conical hats contrasting with the urban (Figure 1.7). A survey by UNFPA shows that the Vietnamese population dropped since the war, the man who fought the battle lost their lives during the war. Therefore, it can be considered an explanation on how women dominates the informal sector of the economy in this period of time. Shortages of man in the household created a need for income among woman to raise their children and make ends meet for the entire family.

SAGE, 2000, 2381.

Since the reformation in policy -Vietnam’s Doi Moi (“Renovation”) in 1986, the national communist political economy now established a domestic free market, private ownership, and participation in international free trade.20 Therefore, the boundaries between public and private spaces, sidewalks and the residences are blurred due to the need of making living. Thanks to this new establishment, the national economy has been transformed incredibly and encourage all class of the population to join in the mission of developing the city. On the street, the vendors and the residents negotiated to create a beneficial relationship since retal prices in central areas were out of reach for them. Luckily, for those who can afford the rent, they shared the space with the owner and manage to separate their working zones with the other part of the house. In fact, the sidewalk is the transition of the spaces in the city, of private spaces and public spaces. What have been established on the street was mantained as daily activities due to the habits of using the public spaces, fast and effective. The consumers creates a habit for the vendors and vice versa, as habit, unlike instinct, is learned, cultivated.21

The

infiltration of the sidewalk culture to the life of Vietnamese working class

Hanoi and HCMC, two metropolitans of Vietnam both experience the similarities and differences in culture and history. Although when it comes to street culture, the majority of studies focus on the large northern urban area, Hanoi. Thus, it is impossible not to mention the area of 36 Streets Old Quarter in the center of Hoan Kiem District. Report from the field: “Street Vendors and the Informal Sector in Hanoi”, Martha Lincoln described the livelihood in the central area as:

“…heavily staffed, energetic, and ubiquitous. In the Old Quarter, women with shoulder poles carry meat, fish, eggs, bread, vegetables, bananas, mangoes, fresh coconuts, flowers, and plastic bags of sliced pineapple all over town; tourists sometimes borrow the vendor’s baskets and conical hat to pose for a photograph. From early morning to midnight, vendors maneuver bicycles, carts, and wagons stacked with merchandise through traffic. Vending is highly specialized and the goods are diverse: baskets, feather dusters, lottery tickets, incense, haircuts, chewing gum, and motorbike taxis; for tourists, postcards, purses, and photocopy editions of Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American are on offer.” 22

In Pedestrian and Street Culture research by Mateo-Babiano and Ieda, informal economy agglomerations are mostly found near activity central such as school entrances, in front of shops and stores, churches, shopping malls, access towards train stations and at intersections. This provides them assurance of steady flow of customers. The type of economic activity is dependent on the activity generator, usually complementing such enterprise. Most common goods sold by these sidewalk peddlers and hawkers are consumables such as food products. Within the central business districts, the most common stalls are shops providing lunch, snacks and drinks. Sometimes, tables and chairs would complete the ensemble creating a distinct street architecture, however inferior the materials used or shabby it may seem to onlookers. The inventive minds of these store owners allow them to create and put apart such stalls within few minutes.23

The Sidewalk economy has strongly influenced and deeply ingrained in the social life of every Vietnamese. In the biggest metropolitan of southern Vietnam - Saigon, the images of street vendors, roadside stalls, and sidewalks are best depicted through contemporary photographs and film footage. The most famous footage can be found in the French movie L’amant (Annaud, 1992) (Figure 1.3, 1.4 & 1.5), which is based on the novel of the same name by French writer Marguerite Duras. Saigon is known for its vibrant and bustling, modern mixed with ancient features, wealth contrasts between the poor working class, and those working classes are the people who make up the culture. typical sidewalk. The film depicts the cries of street vendors, the sound of bells, the sound of motorbike engines running through the crowded alleys Cho Lon,24 the smoky image of the restaurants in the process of being prepared, tailors sitting fixed in a corner of the sidewalk, work hard to finish a day, buyers, regardless of class and status are welcomed. Besides, other movies about Saigon that illustrates the picture of Saigon sidewalk lives can be mentioned as The Quiet American(2002), Stars and Roses(1989). The illustration of the streets and scenes the director has shown that sidewalk culture has been a part of the image of HCMC.

22 Martha Lincoln, Street Vendors and the Informal Sector in Hanoi. Dialectical Anthropology, 2008,1.

23 Hitoshi Ieda & Iderlina Mateo-Babiano, Street Space Sustainability In Asia: The Role Of The Asian Pedestrian And Street Culture, Journal of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies, Vol. 7, 2007, 1925

24 “Cho Lon mostly evokes one of the neighborhoods of the city, roughly corresponding to the fifth district (quan 5) adjacent to the central districts. This apparent banality, however, masks the extraordinary destiny of what was for a long time a city in its own right.” <http://www.gis-reseau-asie.org/en/cholon-little-china-heart-saigon>

Unlikeentering a high-end restaurant, where people have to dress up in fancy and formal clothes, on the sidewalk, everyone is equal. Regardless of your age, education, gender, background, occupation, class, or social status, in the oldest and crowdest markets, you can always come across people who informally dressed up sitting between the ordinary working people. They are all exposed facing the street and transparent to the eye of every one passing by. The most well-known example of this is an article writing on the 48th US President Obama, during his visit to Vietnam,25 a series of newspapers published a picture of him with Anthony Bourdain in a small tiny street shop. A similar event occured with the Australian Prime Minister, during his diplomatic trip to Vietnam, the image of a man wearing a suit and white collar coming to buy food at a roadside restaurant went viral on newspapers and the internet at that time.26 As a result, it will not be surprising to see visitors from other countries trying to squeeze themselves into the narrow space of the vendors, in which the space includes a small knee-high foled-table, some tiny plastic chairs that are only meant for small-figure individual. However, despite the uncomfort, extreme heat, humidity, and inconvenience, no one complains or acknowledges about considering the non-standard proportions of these small-scale vendors, nor the fact that restaurant owners should renovate their corner. As Kim also stated that another common mistake of an outsider is to impute one’s own values, tastes, or interpretations onto subjects or a situation. What is crowded to some people maybe cozy to others, what is enjoyably sunny to some might be unpleasantly bright to others.27 Needless to say, these incredible real-life images had made up the undeniable democracy of the Vietnamese sidewalk culture and filled the gap in cultural differences.

As a form of small-scale populist capitalism, street vending is cited approvingly by pro-market sources like the DFID and the Asian Development Bank, who point out that street vendors embody capitalist “self-help” and also serve as a lifeline for poor and working people. In this vein, Vietnamese street vending is figured as a form of “microbusiness” and, as such, a subject of study for economists, business and management researchers, and contributors to journals like Vietnam Investment Review.28 According to a research paper investigated by Hiemstra, van der Kooy, & Frese on the Assessment of Psychological Success and Failure Factors in2006, street vendors are defined by three identical characters. The first is a configuration of small-scale business which operate from fixed spots at a specific location, in which there are usually accessible site, for instance, marketplaces, busy street corners. These businesses can be classified as stationary (Figure 1.6). Some sellers prepare their products at home and sell it while moving across the city. Most of the time, their location frequently changes from one place to another, commonly by bicycle or on foot, to advertise their goods. That form of businesses can be defined as ambulatory (Figure 1.7). There are also vendors who choose to prepare and sell their foods at home, this type of street vendors can be named as residential (Figure 1.8).29 These three type of vendor have constructed a solid foundation for the sidewalk culture in HCMC in the current time. They can be seen as individuals or in groups, and mostly owned by women. In other cases, the vendor can be run by a group of relatives where their shift changes during the day.

25 Barack Obama Drop-In for Pork Soup Stuns Vietnam Street Shop Owner. <https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/barack-obama-drop-in-forpork-soup-stuns-vietnam-street-shop-owner-1409378>

26 Foreign Prime Minister Tastes Vietnamese Street Food . <https://iut.vn/news/foreign-prime-minister-tastes-vietnamese-street-food>

27 Annette Miae Kim, Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City, The University of Chicago Press, 2015, 14.

28 Martha Lincoln, Street Vendors and the Informal Sector in Hanoi. Dialectical Anthropology, 2008,2.

29 Annemarie M.F. Hiemstra, Koen G. Van Der Kooy & Michael Frese , Entrepreneurship in The Street Food Sector of Vietnam– Assessment of Psychological Success and Failure Factors, Journal of Small Business Management, 2006,4-5.

A vendor’s workday can be divided into different periods within 24 hours. In contrast to officers, who are privileged to get an 8-hour job, the vendor takes over and change their shift depending on the amount of targeted customers and the products. As according Dang, he conlcuded 5 periods of times in a day: 6AM-10AM, 10AM-1PM, 1PM-7PM, 7PM-10PM, and 10PM-1AM to match with the main actives of a day: Breakfast time, Lunch time, After lunch time, Out for Dinner time, and Late night. There are three objects of observation: Food stall, Coffee stand (which not only sells coffee but also other drinks), and other informal street economic activities.30 Other activities that was not listed by Dang can be mentioned as: bike repairs, tobasco, barber, lottery tickets, kid toys, insects, pets and birds, worshiping items, flowers, scrap collectors, knives/scissors repair, newstands and gasoline.

It is inevitable to discuss that sidewalk economy sector plays an essential role in forming a network of activities between sellers and consumers in HCMC (Table 2). The reason for the emergence of these forms is the slow development of the urban public transport infrastructure. In HCMC, the majority of workers travel by personal transportation (motorbikes, cars and bicycle), rather than using public transport, such as buses, which fail to meet the demand of commuters travelling in a day. In addition, the operating time of the bus is also limited from 6:00 am to 7:00 pm, causing a shortage in the needs of the people. Due to the mobile convenience and the large occupation of motorbikes, the sidewalk has become a perfect place to display commercial activities during the day, where sellers creates favorable conditions for traffic users to interact, exchange, as well as faster and more convenient transactions. On the other hand, that will be very unlikely in the case of a car, bus, metro or tram. Therefore, the infiltration and influence of sidewalk culture into the lives of every citizen in HCMC is a long historical process, from the way people communicate, the distribution of public space, the small house area to Typical form of urban transport of Saigon.

In addition to the operation of the dense and overloaded traffic system (in reality), the characteristics of tube houses (Figure 1.9) and small personal spaces have partly formed the outdoor living habits of the people. citizen. Different from garden houses in suburban areas, tube houses are a feature not only in HCMC but also in Vietnam in general. The narrow and long tube houses with a narrow width have created a unique architectural culture of Vietnam. That can be seen most easily in large urban areas like HCMC. Due to the shortage of land and the increase in urban population, the tube house has become a signature architectural type of buildings. With the lack of open space and yards, residential sellers also take advantage of this type of architecture to divide working and living spaces, and make use of the sidewalk area as a place to socialize, sell and display (Figure 1.10)