The transformation of mobility in post-đổi mới Vietnam

Abstract

This paper explores how mobility has changed in late-socialist Vietnam in the context of increasingly entangled intersections between private aspirations and state policies, economic development, and urbanisation. Based on “motorbike ethnography” in Ho Chi Minh City, the paper focuses on traffic as a major site where social actors negotiate dominant discourses on modernity, access to public spaces and citizenship. Traffic is also a marker of social inequalities and uneven distribution of motility. Traditional means of transport such as the bicycle and the cyclo, usually associated with lower social classes, must yield to more powerful means, in particular the car. Indeed, although motorbikes still dominate city traffic, the car plays a central role in contemporary notions of modernity and has become a symbol of conspicuous consumption for urban middle classes. In this paper I seek to understand the persistence of motorbikes, the increasing popularity of cars, and the relations between the two means of transportation in present-day Ho Chi Minh City from a mobilities perspective.