Sidewalk city: Remapping public space in Ho Chi Minh City By ANNETTE MIAE KIM Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. 252. Figures, Endnotes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463416000679 Annette Kim's Sidewalk city zeroes in on Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's largest metropolis, and with good reason. Not only are sidewalks in that city teeming with activity, but Vietnam is actively renegotiating its 'sidewalk paradigm' through increased clearance enforcement (p. 21). Ho Chi Minh City serves as an in-situ laboratory for understanding sidewalks as contested spaces because both city districts and wards have been experimenting with sidewalk management policies. Through an innovative approach that combines spatial ethnography with a critical cartography, Kim challenges her readers to see sidewalks anew. The result is a lavish book with resplendent full-colour figures that testify to the importance of sidewalks in urban life, especially in the Global South. The book is composed of seven chapters. The first chapter introduces the major theoretical questions and conceptual tools. Kim asks, for example, how property rights theory may be applied to public space in order to evaluate how claims to space are justified and operationalised in society. Rather than sidewalks in the city as disorderly, she shows why they are better understood as 'mixed-use public spaces', a perspective that may lead to better design and management policies (p. 25). In Chapter 2, she develops three narratives for understanding the importance of sidewalks to urban life. The first narrative is a tale of two cities, or how Ho Chi Minh City emerged out of two distinctive urban environments--Cholon, the bustling commercial area inhabited by Chinese merchants, and Saigon, the orderly city of French colonialism. The second is that the city's sidewalks have long served as both commercial and recreational spaces. And third, that Ho Chi Minh City is a relatively young, multicultural city. She uses these narratives to ward off claims of 'traditional' Vietnamese culture with regard to public space and to underscore that municipal codes must be understood at the ward or neighbourhood level, a point she documents through empirical data in Chapter 4. But in this chapter, she draws attention to the fact that sidewalks have long served simultaneously as commercial and recreational spaces and how the informality of economic livelihoods in the postwar environment only enhanced empathy among residents and police towards itinerant vendors, contributing to the mixed-use character of the city. Chapter 3 opens up a broader discussion of cartography in general. She traces how a Critical Cartography 1.0 allowed scholars to deconstruct maps and then makes the case for a Critical Cartography 2.0 (p. 71), which would deploy new conventions in map-making such as testimony and visionary maps, DIY urbanisms, and new forms of representing space that would 'unveil rather than obscure sidewalk life' (p. 84). This theoretical discussion leads into the empirical bulk of the book, Chapter 4, which is divided in two parts. …