The case of the missing maps: cartographic action in Ho Chi Minh City

Abstract

In May 2018, Ho Chi Minh City officials declared that they had lost the original planning maps to the city’s most important urban development project. The case of the missing maps revealed core tensions about urban planning in the city, galvanized popular resistance to city planning authorities, and prompted a series of investigations into government misdeeds. While it is common to criticize maps as artifacts of state power, this case shows how citizens can reappropriate the meaning of maps and transform them into a form of quasi-legal evidence that demands accountability and responsiveness from state officials in a non-democratic single party state. The transformative entanglement of maps and people, however, works reciprocally–just as social groups can transform the meaning of maps, maps also participate in the transformation of social groups. The concept of “cartographic action” seeks to account for the entangled relationship among maps, political life, and social action.