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Abstract
Urbanisation is progressing in Asia at breakneck speed, producing almost overnight city-regions sprawling vast distances into the peri-urban countryside. As they grow, in unplanned ways, so the problems deepen. The provision of all manner of infrastructure lags increasingly behind with consequent problems of traffic gridlock, seriously inadequate sanitation and, in coastal cities, increasing flooding where the impact of climate change threatens to render whole urban neighbourhoods unliveable. Meanwhile super-rich minorities are emerging where, nevertheless, poverty is—temporarily—kept at bay and a vast mass of new middle classes are attempting to live the modern consumer life amidst rampant corruption that expresses itself particularly in massive oversupply of upper income housing that few can afford with whole developments remaining permanently vacant. Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam is a typical case where currently a kind of euphoria is palpable where much of the population feel they have arrived in the modern consumer world. Whilst officialdom projects growth in all dimensions to be continuing into even the more distant future, one may be sceptical that this can, in reality, continue for much longer.
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Notes
1 See Google images, under ‘Ghost Cities’, for a stunning view of the extent of this phenomenon.
2 All land in the UK ‘belongs’ to the monarchy but this means nothing in the context of actual market relations in land. Of course, where the land actually belongs to the state—as in colonial Hong Kong—then this clearly makes planning and, indeed, the finances of the state and the control of development processes a real potential.
3 Including even determining candidates to be ‘elected’ to the National Assembly.
4 For an excellent analysis of the recent evolution of the role of local government and related governance issues in Vietnam, see Albrecht, Hocquiard, and Papi (Citation2010).
5 Not too different in reality to the way things evolved in Europe.
6 For readers who know little about, but are interested in, the theoretical side of the development machinery—and also the way in which the industrialised countries—and particularly first Britain and latterly the USA—have developed the mythologies and biased the rules and more strategically attempted to stymie the development ambitions of other countries, see the works of Ha-Joon Chang (Citation2002, Citation2007).
7 Some South East Asian regional countries, including Laos and Cambodia and even the Philippines, seem to have little ambition to ‘develop’ in line with other Asian countries. Meanwhile, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and obviously South Korea and Taiwan—and indeed, now China—are all well ahead of Vietnam in the race for higher GDP.
8 There are rumours that the whole event was orchestrated with police connivance. But who should have done this for what reason remains obscure.
9 The following analysis in changes in the workforce come from Cling et al. (Citation2010a) who analysed separately urban and peri-urban employment changes in Hanoi and HCMC between 1998 and 2006.
10 The first local ‘disaster’ of the vagaries of regional real estate booms and busts happened with the ‘Asian meltdown’ of 1998 with one Hong Kong real estate company ‘going to the wall’ following the completion of three 50-storey ‘middle-income’ apartment towers in downtown Cholon. Involving 600 apartments, these have remained vacant now for almost 10 years.
11 Smart-looking, glass-fronted cell phone shops full of videos and twinkling lights can even be found in the main streets of the ‘frontier towns’ out in the provinces.
12 Officially, however, poverty dropped from 58% of the population in 1993 to 12% in 2011.
13 A small selection of the reports includes: MONROE (Citation2009), ADB (Citation2009, Citation2013), Gravert and Wiechmann (Citation2011) and Haskoning (Citation2011).
14 An anthropological study investigating attitudes amongst those evicted from Thu Tiem found that even they, disgruntled at being moved on, are proud of the glittering modern city that is growing up around and then displacing them. See Harms (Citation2012).
15 Few people realise just how much of the world's energy consumption goes these days into moving water from where it is found to where it is wanted: globally this amounts to 8% of total energy consumption.
16 Exports of rice—and indeed most agricultural produce—by country fluctuate wildly from year to year but Vietnam has been between the second and fourth biggest rice exporter over the past five years.
17 More than half the population of the country as a whole comprise smallholding farmers who re-emerged following Doi Moi and the breakup of state farms. However, the damage had been done in the sense of their now mainly practising agrochemical-fed monocultures—mainly rice—for domestic and foreign markets. However, traditionally smallholders in the north of the country practice a system by the modern acronym of VAC—garden, fish pond, livestock shed—that obviates agrochemical farming by recycling organic material. This is today being promoted by a quasi-government NGO VACVINA who assert that such systems are 3–5 times more productive per hectare than monocultural rice production—which obviously greatly increases farm income for those still—or again—interested in farming.
18 Although domestic energy production is currently growing, the Energy Department of the Ministry of Industry and Trade sees demand rapidly overtaking this in the coming years.
19 See the website www.water-energy-food.org and for a more extended explanation, see BMZ (Citation2014).
20 The Transition Towns Movement is disseminating a set of LED procedures under the title of ‘Reconomy’.
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Adrian Atkinson
Adrian Atkinson is a writer, teacher and consultant working, through New Synergies in Development (NSD) and a member of DPU Associates, on urban, environmental and local economic development (LED) issues. Email: [email protected]