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Thesis Statement

Within the present context of an ever-expanding capitalist order, the predominance of private property, developer autonomy, and the accelerated drive to capitalize on the production of built space, underscore the inherent deficiencies of conventional urbanism. Driven by economic imperatives, the ongoing dispersal and privatization of the urban morphology has subverted the goals and methods of urbanism to account for the implicit transferability of ground, i.e. the mobility of networks and functions that constitute the urban fabric.  This transferability undermines the significance of intentional planning, giving way to temporal patterns of land-use, ownership, and revolving occupancies.  Even as a property rights and zoning laws hold the ground, and a building holds the ground, the architectural dimension of transferability exceeds the ground.

This notion of transferability challenges former urban systems where relationships were understood as fixed objects on a neutral ground, and instead, identifies ground as an active element that is transitionally defined by local phenomena and information inherent to a place. Therefore, ground is no longer bound to the physical, empirical or formal specificities of place, but is instead perceived as a temporal landscape through which cultural information and urban patterns are transferred over time.

Although master plans provide a legal framework concerning land-use, the pace of urbanization today exceeds the ability of these guidelines to regulate the development of non-built space within the city, thus creating an opportunity for autonomic processes to occur.  As in the case of many developing cities, this process is comprised of a network of private individuals, operating within the framework of land transition, who develop and construct semi-legal spaces that alter intentional urban plans i.e. parasites. Drawing on this phenomenon of unofficial land markets, this project proposes a reconstitution of the public realm, using the multiplicity of these parasite spaces, to create an urban landscape that integrates while at the same time subverts the architectural banality that capitalist tactics seem to elicit.

Site

As a testing ground for this proposal, the city of Saigon, Vietnam has the potential to provide an understanding of this relationship through analysis of its layered socio-economic history in relation to its recent positioning within the global market. Recognized as a new, emerging market, Saigon is a city transitioning from a socialist command economy to that of a socialist market economy fueled by the liberalization of global capital. The previous dominance of the state economic sector is being democratized through non-state ownership and capitalist economic enterprise.   As a result of this transition, two major organizational agents emerge: first, the state controlled public sector of big land and housing developers, participating through joint ventures with foreign investors, and second, an autonomic and non-controlled network of small-scale speculators and self-building individuals who are able to function within an administrative authority that remains unclear and undefined during this transition.Understanding the negotiation between these two agents, seen as complex and deeply interrelated systems, provides a strategy for figuring this project within an expanded urban network.

For a further understanding of how these organizational agents function, the administrative system in Saigon reveals an embedded bureaucracy comprised of a structure of various spatial units. At the top is the central government followed by a stratum of provincial and municipal units which are broken up into city districts with an elected committee, in this case, The People’s Committee of Ho Chi Minh City. A strict hierarchy underlies the system from the governmental level to the local level, and although this administrative system appears centralized and pervasive, it accommodates autonomy at the local level due to the lack of horizontal management.  For urban developers, this management system at the local level provides a critical connection to a network of social groups, with various degrees of access to power, which become the tool through which urban development is controlled, but even as the city government uses central organization to achieve collective stability, the inefficiency of the centralized system gives way to flexibility and enables processes from below to emerge

Parasites

The transitional socio-economic lifestyle in Saigon intensifies embedded cultural processes that expose a high degree of flexibility towards change. Rather than reducing urban complexity, which is a cultural preference in the West, Saigon exposes cultural preferences for absorbing urban complexity.

As a trope for global modernization, rapid urbanization reveals the incapacity of the state to produce adequate housing to accommodate increasing densities brought on by urban migration. Unable to meet this demand, city authorities are forced to handle construction without permission in a flexible manner. Furthermore, construction approval by the central authority is a lengthy process, full of delays, giving networks of private individuals, speculators, land brokers, small enterprises, families, etc. the ability to operate within the long standing framework of land transitions, to speculate around new projects, buy land from farmers with help of local managers, and develop on it; thus altering intentional urban plans.    Such as system produces an unofficial land market through which a formal recognized private sector is able to operate and produce housing for personal use outside the management of city authorities and initial zoning. This autonomic process of “semi-legal” production of housing and non-control over land use promotes the emergence of parasite developments that occupy all non-built space within the city centers.

 Unique to a city like Saigon, this process is not only limited to the poor like in most developing cities, but is dominated by the middle and upper class of society, exposing an embedded cultural phenomenon that is heritage of the early redevelopment of the late 1950s in which several families living in one house sought to extend livable space through makeshift construction. As urban density continued to increase, the Vietnamese people popularized a method of self-built expansion called, nhay du, or parachute jumping, a famous expression in the city for the phenomenon of whole families who ‘jump’ out of their dense multi family conditions into gardens, streets and other non-built spaces to “extend” their living space without paying any attention to the environment or previous architectural appearance of the buildings.
It can be said that the patterns in Saigon developed within a culture of complete non-control, comprised of bottom-up processes, resulting in urban growth patterns shaped with forces that are internal to the society. These autonomic processes underline the inherent complexity of Saigon’s urban networks which express a degree of openness toward self-organization within the urban management system, and it is this relationship that generates local particularities. Through the analysis of these unofficial land markets, this project seeks to take advantage of the potential within this transitional socio-economic environment to intensify embedded cultural processes and local particularities, with the ambition of making more precise interventions that interact with the autonomic processes that are inherent to the city.

Urban Morphology

Prior to the period of doi moi, or economic renovation, period beginning in the 1980s, urban movement was restrained to a minimum based on the socialist ideal of autonomous spatial units in which people lived and worked.  Since doi moi,  an easing on the previous socialist restrictions on population mobility, specifically,  the mechanism of ho khau that once kept people in one place through government control of jobs, housing, and the provision of food subsidies, have largely been abandoned. This resulted in a large-scale, spontaneous migration from the countryside to the city as well as movements within city. Related to these migrations, new social groups and relations have emerged and social stratification has become more severe. As a result of these changes, Saigon has rapidly transformed into a highly complex urban environment exposing a mixture of Vietnamese culture with previous colonial and recent global urban models. Within the framework of this migration, Stephanie Geertman, in her essay, The New Vietnamese City, identifies four major urban transformations taking place:

1. Multi-nucleation – the reorganization of the city around multiple business nodes and service centers. This is in line with the transition of the city based on production to a city based on consumption. The commercial sector is promoted through urban state planning, which is comparable with other South East Asian cities that are seeing the development of large-scale grocery stores and shopping malls. Counter to this is the emergence of local trade network that has taken over the streets in and outside the city. Many informal commercial markets have emerged, for example, mobile markets that are based on bicycle and motorcycle circulation. These markets have distribution centers functioning at night in places where during the daytime another function will take place. These markets existed before but are no longer underground operations due to liberalization.
2. Functional specialization - the increased separation of housing areas from manufacturing and commercial districts (this happened by clearing slum areas). These people were given plots of land to build their own house through the ‘privatization of the land market’ provided by the provision of long-term leases. This motivated people to move inside the dense city to seek more space and economic profit. Also emerging are new specialized industrial districts. During the command economy, industry was dispersed to promote live-work, now the trend is to move industry out of the central city and into outlying areas.
3. Zone planning - the establishment of large-scale development zones. To cope with rapid urbanization the Vietnamese government uses the tool of master planning to re-organize the city. The current process of master planning started in the early 1990s, and these zones have preferable conditions for foreign investors. These zones are massive planned areas designed to attract and utilize outside capital investment resources.  The connection with the global market accumulated large amounts of global capital which helped to realize bureaucratic urban mega-plans that have proven to be successful in wiping out the past and local patterns by rudely cutting through the existing micro-patterns and making all urban areas looking similar.
4. Public areas -leisure time has become more important; citizens demand more comfort not only in material sense but also in experience. In the new consumer economy and with increasing incomes, semi-public commercial leisure spaces have developed. During the command economy, people had less leisure time, but had access to more spaces free of charge. Now public spaces have changed to semi-public spaces as a fee is charged to access the spaces. Thus, the use of these spaces becomes limited to more affluent citizens. These newly developed places are exploited by the city to generate profits and for global identity building. These spaces are not places suited for common citizen so they use streets, sidewalks, and even construction sites or formal spaces for leisure.

Urban Field Conditions

How do we engage all the complexity and indeterminacy of the city through the methods of a discipline so committed to control, separation and unitary thinking? We thrive in cities exactly because they are places of the unexpected, products of a complex order emerging over time.

The morphological transformations taking place in Saigon is in line with the understanding of the city as an urban field condition, and represents a trend that is common within developing cities in South East Asia.  The urban field is understood as a dynamic system, characterized by forces rather than forms, and the transformations described previously, which include multi-nucleation, specialization, and dispersal determine the forces within this field condition.  Field conditions are characterized by what Stan Allen describes as bottom-up phenomena: defined not by overarching geometrical schemas, but by intricate local connections. Overall shape and extent of the parts are highly fluid. Form matters, but not so much the forms of things as the forms between things.

Although it is evident that urban planning has had great difficulties in adequately addressing the complexities of urban life, there is little evidence that the discipline is adapting itself to the new field condition. Urban questions have usually simply been questions of large-scale form or fabric. As a major position of this project, instead of form, patterns of organization are to be addressed on the urban scale. Understanding the city as a field means accepting it being in a state of continual flux and continuous change. Thus, as a result of late capital, urban ground is now understood as a relationship of networks through which the flow of goods, money, people and information are transferred.  Processes also flow through the urban field and influence the form of urban space i.e. public spaces. Such a field phenomenon is defined by simple local conditions and is in fact relatively indifferent to overall form and extent of the city, but certain agents, in this case, parasite developers, behave according to local conditions such as habits, tradition and consensus. Increasingly, these agents have become critical of their environment and want to be directly involved in planning the development of their district. Therefore, the grounding of this project is not through formal specificities of site, but through participation of the public.

Landscape Urbanism

What constitutes public space in the contemporary city? Can the public sphere still exist in the urban context? Should public space be fought for by architects and urban designers? Or, as Allen proposes, is it the landscape architects alone who have been quick to realize the potential of the empty spaces in our cities as a ripe terrain for change?

Public spaces have become a telanovela, and individual yet shared experience. Public space does not disappear but multiply, it loses its hierarchy and has become more temporary.

As a strategy, the rise of landscape urbanism parallels the emergence of the city as a dispersed field condition in the late 20th century, and represents a thinking that has to do with ecology, infrastructure, and urbanism. Landscape urbanism, notably in Waldheim’s formulation, embraces all of the indeterminacies of time, contingencies of site and aesthetic ambiguities that the functionalists sought to calculate away. Temporality and transience, traditionally attributed to nature and ecology, have now become an important aspect of designing public spaces in dispersed environments. For further understanding of these concepts, Stan Allen outlines the principles of landscape urbanism:

1. Connectivity - It’s no accident that there is a parallel fascination in architecture and landscape for surface.  Surface is the territory of landscape, and there is an idea that the warped surface promises total connectivity, doing away with architecture’s vertical dimension, which has become associated with partitioned space. This is of course attractive but naïve. It becomes easy to fall into a false utopia of total connectivity, continuous flows, etc. This suggests closer attention to breaks, discontinuities and separations – and their social/programmatic value – in both landscape and architecture.
2. Indeterminate Program or multi-use - Here, too, there is this attractive idea that on an open field anything can happen – sports, festivals, demonstrations, concerts, picnics, etc. To my mind, it is something of an abdication of responsibility, a kind of loose thinking where it is possible to say don’t worry about program. This approach can be seen analogous to the notion of the 1960s universal space – a space, in theory, where anything can happen, yet where, as was often the case, nothing happens.  The architect’s obligation to specificity and design remains.
3. Emergence - In both architecture and landscape there has been a fascination with self-organization and emergence, the notion that the architect supplies a kind of infrastructure and then you just let things happen over time.  This is based on a loose appeal to the ideas of ecological succession.  The idea that self-organization and emergence are associated with lack of specificity and lack of design is itself a misunderstanding.  What an ecologists will tell you, on the contrary, is that emergence does not happen all by itself, in a vacuum.  It’s triggered by differences and imbalances in the initial conditions.  In the urban landscape realm, where we are talking about artificial ecologies, you don’t get emergence without very carefully designed initial conditions.  The architect’s obligation to design those initial conditions with a high degree of precision and specificity remains.

Drawing from the ideals of the Landscape Urbanist, this project seeks to develop an urban continuity, using the mechanism of parasite developments to reconstitute the public realm. The multiplicity of these agents, seen as a complex network, has the potential to create a temporal landscape through which cultural information and local processes are transferred over time. Methods include developing new forms of analysis capable of integrating disorder and an accelerated rate of change in to the production of space. This logic represents a shift from an emphasis on aspects of control, focused on locating geometric and functional order, to an emphasis on aspects of interpretation. With growing recognition of the urban field architectural objects tend to loose their traditional form and design process - we move from the one toward the many, from objects to fields.