Street scenes: Practices of public and private space in urban Vietnam

Abstract

This paper contributes an initial venture into thinking about the uses of the terms 'public' and 'private' space in the context of Vietnamese urban life. It is argued that these terms, while they are critiqued and debated in Western academia, still retain substantial descriptive power at an everyday level. In non-Western societies, however, these terms may be more difficult to apply and the paper provides an empirical section which argues that the boundaries between public and private spaces are fluid and routinely transgressed, as in Western societies, but for reasons and in ways which are distinctive to the Vietnamese situation. The paper concludes by noting that Vietnam is experiencing both a divergence from the Anglo-American urban experience, in that Vietnam displays a resurgence rather than a death of streetlife and a convergence with it in the construction of 'pseudo-public' leisure spaces. Local specificities must therefore be acknowledged when using these otherwise useful Western terms in non-Western contexts.