Thủ Thiêm Futures Past A Short History of Seeing without Seeing

of we at not materially our of their domestic economy, or general of several and airy construction, each, many managed by a single in picturesque costume, and pleasing; great numbers of native vessels, of different sizes, plying in various direc-tions This study demonstrates that the peninsula, even with its present limited access, has an advantageous time-distance relationship to downtown Saigon. Moreover, the peninsula compares very favorably to other potential development sites within the Saigon Metropolitan Area. These other sites are generally either to the south and west of the City, where major growth is unlikely to occur for many years. As access to the peninsula improves in the future, peninsula land values will rise far above these other areas. In fact, once bridges are in operation, no other location will match the peninsula’s development potential. 71


A Short History of Seeing without Seeing
We will restrict ourselves to the perspective we possess from the onetime future of past generations or, more pithily, from a former future. For as long as Saigon has been a city, its cosmopolitan urban core has ended abruptly at its eastern edge, where riverboat wakes and tidal currents splash against the reinforced banks of the Saigon River. For most of the twentieth century, reaching the edge of the city was easy: one only needed to walk the end of the city's famous tree-lined shopping and entertainment street known today as Đồng Khởi (Uprising) Street, previously known as Tự Do (Freedom) Street during the American War, and before that as Rue Catinat. The street there forms a T-junction with the river, and after crossing the busy riverfront boulevard that curves around the old historic core of the city, one reaches bến Bạch Đằng, the waterfront and wharf that has served as a picturesque boundary to the city ever since the colonial period. 1 It was possible to linger here at the river's edge and gaze at the other side, beyond the edge of the city, looking at a place called Thủ Thiêm. Saigon residents, at least those who see themselves as real "city people, " dân thành phố, have long described the world across the river in Thủ Thiêm as beyond the pale; until a redistricting program in 1997 changed many of the city's district boundaries, it was an "outer-city district, " a space ranked low on the urban status hierarchy. 2 As late as the completion of the Thủ Thiêm Tunnel, which linked the area with downtown on November 20, 2011, city residents described Thủ Thiêm as, at best, a sliver of seemingly untouched countryside housing the marginalized poor just a quick ferry ride across from the city, and at worst, an unhygienic den of bandits, thieves, and other undesirables. 3 One of my closest informants, a longtime Thủ Thiêm resident who lived there until his family was evicted from their home in 2011, often described the negative impressions Saigon residents used to have of the area by repeating a popular ditty: "Eat in District Five; Play in District One; Sleep in District Three; and . . . Brawl in District Four and Thủ Thiêm. " 4 Other Thủ Thiêm residents lamented how people living on the Saigon side of the river stereotyped them as illegal squatters, unemployed good-for-nothings, beggars, gamblers, drug addicts, or prostitutes. Like residents of cities around the world, Saigon residents often rank the districts of their city in a hierarchy of stereotypes. Thủ Thiêm, the proverbial "other side of the river, " had long occupied the bottom ranks. 5 This supposedly underdeveloped, rough-and-tumble world across the river was for many years shrouded in billboards and illuminated neon advertisements. When viewed from downtown, these billboards worked like screens to mask what lay beyond. They also seemed to act like vanity mirrors, reflecting Saigon's hopes and aspirations back onto itself. Standing there at the edge of the city, or sitting on one of the many park benches facing the river, city residents could gaze over at Thủ Thiêm without actually looking at it, dreaming of the products advertised on the billboards and projecting their own desires onto a space they commonly imagined as empty, undeveloped, or in need of improvement. Gazing across the river was more about imagining a city-yet-to-come than about looking at Thủ Thiêm for what it really was ( fig. 4.1). As a result, when city officials renewed dormant plans to build the Thủ Thiêm New Urban Zone in the 1980s and 1990s, it was possible for planners and developers to imagine, and for many Saigon residents to sincerely believe, that they were truly turning nothing into something.
Regardless of the ways the area tends to be depicted, however, the historical evidence is clear: until the demolition and land clearance began there in the 2000s, Thủ Thiêm was not empty. It had not been empty for a long time. Indeed, it had been populated for as long as Saigon itself. Evidence of people living there appears regularly in the historical records. And once the project to build the Thủ Thiêm New Urban Zone officially began, at least 14,600 "dossiers" were registered in the compensation books, each dossier representing a household, sometimes including more than one generation, for a total of nearly 60,000 people. But the story of the people whose lives make up the files in those dossiers has long been told in a rather curious manner-as the story of other people looking at them while erasing their existence, staring directly at their homes without seeing them there, dreaming of what their neighborhoods might someday become while ignoring them for what they are and have always been in their own right. Thủ Thiêm, in other words, has long been the object of sustained attention, but this attention has almost always been distorted by the optics through which it has been viewed. And this attention has more often than not worked to Thủ Thiêm's disadvantage-either rendering it invisible or denigrating the people who live there, leading to projects that bring the area into view primarily in order to change it.

Obscured by Maps and Legends
City maps provide the best visual evidence for this curious relationship between visibility, invisibility, and the will to know about a place in order to radically transform it. From as far back as the French period, the explanatory legends on tourist maps of Saigon have almost always been placed directly over Thủ Thiêm. This practice continued on Vietnamese-made tourist maps well into the first decade of the twenty-first century. Despite the fact that Thủ Thiêm is located close to the historic core of Saigon-Ho Chi Minh City, the placement of these map legends demonstrates precisely the district's reputation as an empty zone, unworthy of notice in its own right. On these maps, Thủ Thiêm is not so much invisible as occluded by other interests, obscured by value judgments its observers make about what counts as urban space or places worth visiting. In a map called "Ville de Saigon" from a book about Cochinchina printed on the occasion of the International Colonial Exposition of 1931 in Paris, Thủ Thiêm is located underneath the legend Thiêm ferry terminal is in the center of the image, directly underneath the faded Fujifilm sign and the sign that reads "Contact CIAT. " The CARIC ship repair buildings, built in the late nineteenth century, are located toward the right side of the image, underneath the Vietnam tourism and LG advertisements. Author's photo, July 2000. ( fig. 4.2). In a map from the American period, in 1964, it is located underneath the compass rose ( fig. 4.3). In a Vietnamese-made map from 1990, during a time when city officials were beginning to actively recruit foreign investors, Thủ Thiêm is completely obscured by advertisements ( fig. 4.4). And in a tourist map from 2005, it is once again located beneath the map legend ( fig. 4.5).
The conceptual disregard for Thủ Thiêm seen in tourist maps does not mean, however, that the space was actually invisible to mapmakers. As I will show in this chapter, in other maps and representations produced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially those produced by geographers and explorers or for reconnaissance purposes, there is clear knowledge that people were living in Thủ Thiêm. Many such maps include small cartographic details-such as road outlines, village names, or building shapes-that plainly indicate that the mapmakers indeed knew Thủ Thiêm was inhabited. While building styles in Thủ Thiêm may have been quite different than in the city center on the other side of the river, the mapmakers' use of small dots to indicate individual houses, as well as lines and hatch marks indicating inhabited spaces, all regularly organized around a riverfront road, is typically quite clear on these maps. In other maps, especially those made by architects and planners throughout the twentieth century and up until today, Thủ Thiêm becomes the opposite of empty: every inch is carefully planned and filled in with imaginative dreams of futuristic urban utopias. But in the process of laying out these visions of the future, the existing space of Thủ Thiêm becomes covered up by the planner's agenda. 6 These future visions universally imagine a new Thủ Thiêm that has been built on a blank slate, devoid of preexisting human occupation, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Although Thủ Thiêm is often described through representational practices or in colloquial speech by Saigon residents, planners, and government officials as a dangerous, empty, or wasted space, it is plainly incorrect to say that Saigon residents, planners, or government officials ever believed it was in fact empty in any real sense. 7 Since at least the Nguyễn dynasty, the area has been registered in the dynastic, colonial, or state records of all the regimes that have controlled it. 8 Furthermore, all the standard technologies of governance-including records of the Village Councils (as they were called in previous eras) or People's Committees (in the current government), cadastral surveys, surveillance records, taxation rolls, land titles, maps-have consistently included Thủ Thiêm in their records. A market was established there in 1751, and since the middle of the nineteenth century Thủ Thiêm has been the site of an active Catholic church as well as a convent associated with the Congregation of the Lovers of the Holy Cross. 9 Furthermore, although the records are scattered and sometimes contradictory, it is clear that even before the nineteenth century the land there was dotted with pagodas, temples, shrines, and community halls. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the space has been even more populated, and there have been public schools, a leper colony,   and scores of other highly visible institutions, including a large ship repair business, a seafood freezing plant, and no small number of People's Committee offices associated with official governance. What all this means is that Thủ Thiêm is not and was never described as empty because it was not known that people lived there; rather, it has been and is described this way in spite of extensive knowledge about its inhabitants. It might even be asserted-admittedly with some (but I think not too much) hyperbole-that over the course of the twentieth century and through the first decades of the twenty-first, official knowledge about Thủ Thiêm and discourses of its emptiness have been mutually reinforcing: as official knowledge about Thủ Thiêm has grown, the more it has been described as empty. In telling this curious story about seeing without seeing, my goal is not to provide a proper chronological history of Thủ Thiêm; instead, my aim, in an anthropological spirit, is to explore a series of "futures past, " all of which show how it has been possible for people in different moments of history to stare at Thủ Thiêm without seeing it. Along the way, in the process of highlighting the various modes of seeing and representing Thủ Thiêm over the years, it will also be possible to catch some fleeting glimpses of this often misrepresented world behind the billboards. SEEING THỦ THIÊM WITHOUT SEEING IT Commonly described in Vietnamese as a peninsula (bán đảo), Thủ Thiêm is more precisely an oxbow, formed at a dramatic horseshoe-shaped bend in the Saigon River across from the heart of Ho Chi Minh City. An extensive network of natural waterways and tributary streams crisscrosses the land here, creating what was for most of its history only partially solid ground, suitable to small-scale agricultural pursuits, temporary housing, and linear settlements built-like many of the settlements in the Mekong Delta region further to the south and west-along river and canal banks and atop raised roadways that double as earthwork embankments. Subject to the rise and fall of tidal currents, and marked by geological challenges that hinder building, the largely swampy land in this space has long thwarted attempts to establish extensive fixed forms of development. Studies conducted in the 1970s determined that any permanent urban development would require adding an average of 1.5 meters of infill across the area. 10 But its position across the river from the city center also means that Thủ Thiêm has almost always been occupied, certainly since 1698, the date commonly cited as the founding of Saigon as a Vietnamese city, and probably longer. 11 The most vivid descriptions we have of the area begin in the nineteenth century and give a sense of life across the river from Saigon, which was then a growing regional entrepôt and a space of bustling commerce protected by Nguyễn dynasty military fortifications. It is worth lingering on some of those descriptions.

Historical Views of Thủ Thiêm
On October 7, 1819, John White, a lieutenant in the United States Navy sailing on the brig Franklin, reached the city of Saigon, which was "hidden from view, by a row of miserable huts, extending along the borders of the river, on which was moored a vast number of the craft of the country. " 12 White's vessel moored "on the opposite bank" from Saigon-likely the site of Thủ Thiêm. 13 His descriptions of a visit ashore provide a sense of life in the area at that time, well before French colonial urban planning transformed the city of Saigon: An intimate view of the few huts on the bank, within fifty yards of the place where we lay at anchor, did not materially raise our opinion of their domestic economy, or general habits. [ . . . ] The appearance of several boats, of light and airy construction, each, in many cases, managed by a single woman, in picturesque costume, was novel and pleasing; while great numbers of the native vessels, of different sizes, plying in various directions upon the stream, gave a busy and lively interest to the scene.
Just below us, on both sides of the river, were the ruins of ancient fortifications, with their glacis overgrown with shrubbery, and their moats filled with reeds, shooting their taper leaves above the "green mantle of the standing pool. " 14 The two fortifications White described were remnants of the Tây Sơn wars, leftover ruins from the time when Nguyễn Phúc Ánh, who became the Gia Long emperor in 1802, set up military posts (đồn) on either side of the river to protect Saigon, which was then part of the phủ (prefecture) of Gia Định. The two posts faced each other across the river: one at Thảo Câu (on the Saigon side of the river), the other at Giác Ngư (đồn Cá Trê) in Thủ Thiêm. 15 Nguyễn Ánh had also constructed a floating bridge connecting the two posts to facilitate traffic between them. A well-known map first produced by Trần Văn Học during Gia Long's reign, published for the first time in 1816, three years before White's visit, not only shows these two forts, but also indicates that there was a village or settlement of some sort in Thủ Thiêm ( fig. 4.6). 16 Although it is difficult to say from these scattered descriptions just what life in Thủ Thiêm was like or how the space looked in any detail, the people in this area were clearly connected to the world beyond the immediate region. White's group, for example, was greeted by a Tagalog man named Pasqual, who was originally from Luzon but who had lived in Cochinchina for the previous twenty years, and was married to the daughter of a mandarin from "Don-nai" (now written as Đồng Nai). The sailors were invited to visit his house, which was also located across the river from Saigon, on what appears to have been the Thủ Thiêm side: "On this side the river banks had been washed away from the edge of the channel, about fifty or sixty feet, leaving a space of very soft mud, between low-water mark and dry land; over this mud flat were erected, at short distances apart, causeways, or stages, constructed of crutched trunks of trees, driven into the earth, supporting rafters of rough timber, on which were laid platforms of hewn plank, to facilitate the intercourse between the river and the shore. " Despite the mud, the ground was arranged in a way that made habitation possible. Yet the houses were relatively impermanent in nature: "[Pasqual's] house was situated in the centre of the enclosure, which was nearly square, containing less than half an acre, and planted with areka nut-trees. A few straggling plants were scattered about without any regard to order or regularity. Some loose stones were laid from the gateway to the house, over which we contrived, with some difficulty, to pass dryshod, the circumjacent grounds being completely inundated by the heavy rains which had recently fallen. " The house stood above the soft ground on stilts: "The habitation was about twentyfive by thirty feet square, and was raised two and a half feet from the earth. It was of one story, composed of rough frame-work covered with boards, and its roof, which consisted of a thatching of palm-leaves, projected about ten feet outside the walls, and descended so low as to render it necessary to stoop in passing under it. " 17 White, who says in his text that he had come to Indochina looking for a rumored El Dorado, was clearly disappointed by Saigon and its surroundings. While he described life on the river as "pleasing" or "busy and lively, " he denigrated the life on shore as impermanent, inundated, eroding, muddy, lacking order, and unfixed. White presents these qualities as unpleasing to his eyes, which were no doubt accustomed to the urban forms of New England, from where he had set sail. Despite being a seafarer himself, he lacked the conceptual ability to recognize life along the river as a form of cosmopolitan habitation of its own. He was looking for buildings and sturdy structures built on solid land, and thus fixated on the remains of the old fort, or the house of his Tagalog host, both of which left him dissatisfied.
Despite White's terrestrial bias, his descriptions still portray a world of bustling activity, humming with commerce. The river was teeming with small boats, which came alongside the Franklin laden with tropical fruits and teas. There were fishermen observing their adventures. And rowboats manned by nine rowers constantly plied a heavily trafficked river route, traveling back and forth from Cape St. James (now known as Vũng Tàu) to Saigon at regular intervals. "To these objects, we may add immense rafts of timber, bamboos, and new canoes, from various parts of the country, constantly arriving at the metropolis. " 18 The people lived largely on the water, and the "population is dense near the river, but scattered farther remote from it. " 19 The scene White described differed from the burgeoning urbanism of nineteenth-century Boston or New York, but despite his disparaging tone, it is clear that areas across the river from Saigon were settled in a manner fairly typical of Southeast Asian riverside settlements, and in a manner well adjusted to the watery landscape of the region ( fig. 4.7). Indeed, the kind of water-based commerce White described was typical not only of the time, but remains so even today throughout the Mekong Delta and other places in Southeast Asia. 20 It may have looked impermanent to White's eyes, but this form of settlement was appropriate to the region and largely integrated into the local political system, as evidenced by its inclusion in Nguyễn dynasty cadastral records. 21 It was neither empty nor invisible.
White's descriptions of life on the river anticipate the modes in which these kinds of riverine habitats have been described throughout the history of colonial and postcolonial urban development. In what sounds like an impossible contradiction, but is in fact a normalized mode of representing unfixed forms of habitation, he manages to see them as both disappointingly empty and teeming with life. Indeed, throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, impermanent settlements along Vietnam's waterways have regularly been depicted using similar kinds of disparaging language. 22 In different eras, despite radically different political ideologies, these kinds of developments have rarely, if ever, been recognized as a specific form of urbanism, one that develops in relationship to the transport and geo-climatic features of the region. Instead, they are denigrated as at best "temporary housing" or "stilt houses"-known as maisons sur pilotis in French, or nhà sàn in Vietnamese-and at worst as "slums, " trou à rats or nhà ổ chuột. 23 But if read differently, suspending moral judgment while paying close attention to the use of space, White's descriptions serve as a useful source for understanding the lived environment of Thủ Thiêm in an alternative sense, as a spatial form of habitation that developed in ways well suited to the nature of the place. Fixed and permanent development was in fact not absent; it was simply organized in different ways, concentrated in linear filaments of land that follow the river and other waterways, enabling maximum use of the transport networks. Homes were clustered in these spaces, creating a linear form of urbanism set against a backdrop of less developed land, which was reserved for agriculture, fishing, and gathering activities. The stiff fronds of water coconut palms growing in this land, for example, have long been used as a plentiful, sturdy, inexpensive, and renewable resource for roofing material; and the snakes, frogs, birds, river crabs, and turtles teeming in the waterways, canals, and wet-rice fields have long been popular local delicacies and sources of supplemental income. Indeed, long after White's time and throughout the twentieth century, the land in the interior of the Thủ Thiêm peninsula was never empty, but was owned and stewarded by people who used it to support their livelihoods, developing it incrementally and organically. Only after urban involution in more concentrated built-up areas reached its limits would the residents further build up the earth, expanding the livable area of solid land little by little away from the densely populated banks of the river. It is indeed possible to see in this slow and methodical form of development a distinctly sustainable model for urban growth, or even a form of garden city development, where urban life and appropriate land use are integrated with built space in ways that suit the unique geo-climatic characteristics of the region-and where urban growth comes through small additions made by everyday residents rather than in grand bursts of top-down planning.
An apocryphal legend for the origins of the name for Thủ Thiêm plays on this notion of incremental habitation, suggesting how people and natural processes slowly expanded the habitable high ground of an otherwise low-lying land. Thủ Thiêm is a place of alluvial silt, and the playful story of how it got its name says that "every day the land grows just a bit higher" (mỗi ngày một cao thêm). The Sino-Vietnamese word for land is thổ, and the Vietnamese word for more is thêm, and so, the folk etymology asserts, a place that each day acquired "more land" became known as Thổ Thêm, which the locals pronounced as Thủ Thiêm. 24 The additive form of development noted in this legend in many ways accurately describes the urbanization that took place there. Indeed, this pattern was seen not just in Thủ Thiêm but throughout Saigon, where, over time, as the city has grown, its swamps have been filled and its canals paved and turned into streets. 25 The focus on settling and clustering near the river impacted Saigon's development as well. Several passages in a description of Saigon written in 1885 by Pétrus Ky note how congested both sides of the Saigon River were around the turn of the nineteenth century. For example: "The shorelines of Saigon were shrouded with houses on stilts. At the end of Catinat street, at the current ferry wharf of Thủ-thiêm, there was the Thủy-các (the pavilion for King of Water), the lương-tạ, the royal bathrooms constructed on the floating bamboo rafts. " And: "What was there opposite Saigon, on the opposite bank? During Gia-long's time, it was the Xóm-tàu-ô (hamlet of the black junks); this place was assigned as the dwellings of Chinese pirates whose small sea junks were painted black. " 26 These descriptions underscore that Thủ Thiêm was not, and never has been, empty, and that it emerged in tandem with Saigon, its form of residential development tied to river commerce and the clustered linear-settlement morphologies common in Vietnam's south. But they also reveal the way in which "the opposite bank" developed a reputation as a place of darkness, home to quintessential "others" like Chinese pirates. Over the years, however, impacted by the terrestrial bias of colonial urban plans, the land use patterns on the Saigon side of the river became standardized into a system of grids and the land was increasingly built up. During this time, the two areas have increasingly diverged in their modes of development. But the absence of extensive permanent building did not mean that the land was not being used in Thủ Thiêm. It was simply being used differently. 27

The Thủ Thiêm Church and Other Fixed Institutions
Not all the buildings in Thủ Thiêm were temporary; indeed, several important structures were built on solid ground. The most significant of these, and the best documented, are the Thủ Thiêm church and the adjacent convent of the Congregation of the Lovers of the Holy Cross (Dòng Mến Thánh giá, or Amantes de la Croix de Jésus-Christ). In 2009, the Thủ Thiêm church published a commemorative volume documenting the 150th anniversary of the Catholic community that would eventually become the parish (giáo xứ) of Thủ Thiêm. According to evidence uncovered by the parish priests, a Catholic community has existed in Thủ Thiêm since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1840, a female Congregation of the Lovers of the Holy Cross was established there, and in 1859 a full Catholic congregation was established under the direction of Father Gabriel Nguyễn Khắc Thành, who served the congregation until 1869. In 1865, Father Gabriel Thành built the first wooden church in Thủ Thiêm. Later, in 1875, Father M. Montmayeur built a parish house for the sisters of the Lovers of the Holy Cross, as well as two religious schools, one for boys and one for girls, before turning his efforts to rebuilding the main church, which he inaugurated in 1885. On May 25, 1921, the Thủ Thiêm congregation was formally declared a parish by Bishop Victor Carolus Quinton of the regional apostolic vicariate. 28 Throughout the twentieth century, further building projects followed: in 1930, a bell tower was constructed to hold the church's five bronze bells, which had been cast in France between 1889 and 1892. In 1956, the church was rebuilt-its third incarnation-under the leadership of Father Phaolô Huỳnh Ngọc Tiên. This church, in the midcentury style shared by hundreds of other churches built in South Vietnam after the 1954 Catholic migrations from the North, still stands in Thủ Thiêm. 29 The parish has remained active ever since, and even after most of the local residents were evicted from surrounding neighborhoods, parishioners returned each week to fill the pews in packed Sunday services ( fig. 4.8). 30 As late as 2016, both the church and the convent of the Lovers of the Holy Cross were as active as ever, and a dedicated community of parishioners maintained the church grounds. Even after almost every other permanent structure in the entire Thủ Thiêm project zone had been reduced to rubble, the Thủ Thiêm church and convent remained standing. The impeccable grounds of the convent, with its manicured flowerbeds, carefully tended bonsai trees, spiritual grottos to Maria and revered saints, and historic buildings with freshly painted walls were carefully kept up, evincing the enduring will of the members of this religious institution to resist eviction. It was also clear that the church was mobilizing its history, as well as its connections to the Roman Catholic Church, as a means to stand its ground and resist eviction. When asked if they would ever accept persistent demands to leave the premises, however, the priests of the church and the sisters in the convent always demurred, carefully avoiding any confrontational words. 31 "We will see, " they would say. But they also remained vigorously at work, leading parish activities, holding monthly feasts, teaching Sunday school classes, and raising vegetables and fish in the convent's large immaculate gardens and ponds ( fig. 4.9). 32 And they would point out that the church had been there for more than one hundred and fifty years.
The church was not the only permanent structure defining the built environment in Thủ Thiêm. A survey conducted by a team of Vietnamese researchers well before the start of demolition catalogued at least twenty-nine religious structures in the three wards lying within the area slated for the Thủ Thiêm project. 33 In An Khánh Ward, there was an important community hall, Đình An Khánh; five pagodas (chùa), Chùa Thiền Tịnh, Chùa Đông Hưng, Chùa Liên Trì, Chùa Hội Đức,  While most of these institutions are less carefully documented than is the Thủ Thiêm Catholic church, several of them are also quite old, indeed older than the church itself. According to one source, Đình An Khánh was established between 1679 and 1725, although this is difficult to verify; in terms of physical evidence, the oldest surviving vestiges of religious artifacts used by ferrymen in the area date only from the year 1858, and there is an undated silk scroll said to have been presented to the đình during the reign of Tự Đức (1847-83). 35 According to local recollection, another đình, in An Lợi Đông, was founded in 1849, but historical evidence combined with oral histories of local residents indicates a more likely date of 1909. 36 The Ông Én local temple, formerly known as the Cây Bàng Temple, is said to have been established in 1888 in a spot facing the Saigon River, but it was moved to its current location, further into the peninsula, in 1960. 37 Many of the other religious institutions were built over the course of the twentieth century, with many emerging in the 1920s and 1930s and others in the 1950s and 1960s. When asked, the residents in the area rarely knew precise dates, but only said the institutions had been there "lâu lắm rồi"-a long time already-or "mấy đời, " several generations. Right up until the demolitions began, and even after they were ongoing, the institutions were popular: crowded during festivals, filled with the sounds of hát bôi at the annual đình festivals, of secretive lên đồng séances at various temples, of Buddhist and Cao Đài incantations, and other human noises of the sort that do not come from empty places.
The built environment in Thủ Thiêm was not confined to religious structures. Houses and businesses abounded. Thủ Thiêm's position on the banks of the Saigon River made it a prime location for ship repairs, and in 1887 a large shipping repair warehouse was built under the name of CARIC (Les Chantiers et Ateliers Réunis d'Indochine). 38 The company's main office was on the Saigon side, along the riverfront road near the intersection with Rue Catinat, but their production facilities remained in Thủ Thiêm until they were demolished in late 2010. Throughout the twentieth century, large numbers of Thủ Thiêm residents were employed in the shipping repair business, and many of the older homes in Thủ Thiêm retained nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century colonial architectural flourishes (until they were demolished in 2010-11). 39 Residents of some of the more elegant of these homes recall their grandparents being employed as managers in these French industrial operations, as minor functionaries in the colonial administration, or at banks on the Saigon side of the river. As further evidence of Thủ Thiêm's role at the center of the shipping industry, enormous wooden posts driven deep into the banks of the river for mooring boats were still visible as late as 2012. These posts were formally recorded in the port records and were numbered, 1 to 17. 40 The historian Nguyễn Đình Đầu even asserts that, contrary to legend, Hồ Chí Minh (known at the time as Nguyễn Tất Thành) boarded his boat to leave for Europe not from the famous Nhà Rồng "dragon house" wharf (now a Ho Chi Minh museum), but rather in Thủ Thiêm. 41 Far from a wasteland, Thủ Thiêm was in fact a prime location, just a ferry ride across from Saigon. As noted above, when demolition and eviction began, more than 14,600 households had to be removed, each with its own home.

THỦ THIÊM FUTURES PAST
Just as Saigon grew and became integrated into a world system made possible by its location on the river, so too did Thủ Thiêm. Thủ Thiêm's perceived emptiness should be understood not in literal terms, but as a symbolic quality that emerges socially, as a function of its proximity to the city. When coupled with the ambitions of planners, this very proximity has made Thủ Thiêm both the object of great speculative attention and a seemingly contradictory, but in fact co-constituted, discourse of erasure. Indeed, it has been the attention paid to Thủ Thiêm that has rendered and continues to render it empty. To understand how it is possible to stare at a place full of people and call it empty, it is useful to look at the work of different planners over the course of many generations and many political regimes. The act of seeing without seeing is not just a recent phenomenon, but marks the work of French colonial planners, Vietnamese nationalist and American Cold War nation-builders, postwar Vietnamese utopian socialists, and contemporary postreform-era Vietnamese market-oriented socialists. 42 Even before the advent of formal French colonial rule, a stark differentiation existed between the Saigon side of the river, with its straight, orderly roads radiating outward from the late-eighteenth-century Vauban-style citadel, and the Thủ Thiêm side, which lacks any sense of geometrical order. This is clear in a well-known early map drawn by military surveyor Théodore Le Brun in 1795 ( fig. 4.10). In this map, the Saigon side of the river appears inhabited, marked with grid lines, while Thủ Thiêm, apart from the depiction of the military forts described in White's memoirs, is rendered as an empty landscape. But it is important to recognize that Le Brun's map views the landscape through a specific optic: he was, after all, working on order of the king of France as one of "his majesty's engineers. " In terms of the kinds of human settlements shown, his map only depicts the citadel and formally demarcated roads. It details not the vernacular landscape but the regular, planned, and ordered landscape of an engineer's image of the ideal city, and is also most likely the first map to place the compass icon or legend on top of Thủ Thiêm. The map attempts to impose a sense of spatial order on Saigon, but in doing so it literally renders the inhabited space of Thủ Thiêm as an empty wasteland.
This conceptual occlusion of Thủ Thiêm can be seen in other maps as well. In 1862, a member of the French engineer corps, Colonel Coffyn, designed what is widely cited as the first formal urban plan of Saigon, "a city for 500,000 souls. " The plan included formal development grids in Thủ Thiêm but shows little else existing in the area ( fig. 4.11). Later, in 1928, Ernest Hébrard's descriptions of a "project d' extension" for Saigon included a grid of roads and city blocks in Thủ Thiêm ( fig. 4.12). 43 During the late 1950s, Ngô Đình Diệm's government entertained serious plans for turning the district into a new administrative and entrepreneurial center (figs. 4.13-14). Project planners at that time exclaimed with confidence that "the building of Thủ-Thiêm is no longer a distant aspiration. " 44 But ultimately, engineering and hydraulic challenges associated with the watery land there proved insurmountable, and utopian plans faded away. 45 In all of these plans, one theme is consistent: visions of the future erase any sense of a preexisting human landscape.
These visions for the future of Thủ Thiêm continued forcefully into and beyond the period of the American advisory and military presence in Vietnam. From the middle of the twentieth century onward, the notion that Thủ Thiêm would have value only if it were wholly transformed emerged with great force, backed first by the "can do" spirit of midcentury modernism and later by the rationalism of economistic expertise. The most striking, and most fully elaborated, examples of this can be seen in two plans developed for Thủ Thiêm, first by the world-renowned modernist urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis in 1965, and seven years later by the San Francisco Bay Area planning firm of Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons. These plans, like all that had come before, envisioned a radical transformation of the Thủ Thiêm area, this time based on rational, modern planning principles. With their utopian designs, their hubris, and their bold promises for the future, these plans also anticipate the logic of the projects planned for Thủ Thiêm by the postwar Vietnamese government.

Ideal Dynapolis: The Doxiadis Plan of 1965
On November 20, 1964, the Government of the Republic of Vietnam (a.k.a. South Vietnam), with financing from the United States Operations Mission to Vietnam, formally contracted Doxiadis Associates International Co. Ltd., of Athens, Greece, to prepare a "five-year action program of housing and a long-range outline  program for the overall development of the Saigon Metropolitan Area. " 46 In just a little over two months-by January 26, 1965-a team of Doxiadis consultants, architects, and planners researched, developed, and presented to the government a three-volume, 518-page, map-filled plan, which they promoted as a "systematic method of approach to the development of the Saigon Metropolitan Area. " 47 Volume 1 presented a long-term program for the development of housing and community facilities of Saigon-Cholon, as well as an outline plan to guide the growth of the city. Volume 2 presented proposals for new forms of urban administration, different housing types, and varied land uses, as well as suggestions for how to maximize the use of local building materials and "human resources. " And volume 3 outlined a "pilot project" of urban development, with a focus on Thủ Thiêm. 48 Work on the plan, which included investigating the history and current state of urban development in Saigon and preparing a comprehensive vision for the city's future development, "was carried out in Saigon and Athens . . . under the personal leadership of Dr. C. A. Doxiadis. " 49 Constantinos Doxiadis, an architect most famous for creating the master plan of Islamabad in 1960, and a prolific architectural theorist who developed the concept of "ekistics" (the science of human settlement), was an urbanist of grand ambitions, cast in the same modernist mold as Le Corbusier. 50 He was a philosopher of human improvement and a draftsman of urban utopias, and his plan for Saigon might be called, borrowing a phrase from James Scott, a "textbook case" of high-modernist architecture. 51 In the Doxiadis plan for Saigon, "the city of the present-the city undergoing an undesirable unplanned growth" would be entirely reconceived as a fully rationalized city designed to maximize human potential. In the futuristic language of ekistics, tinged with neologisms fashioned from ancient Greek, the Doxiadis planners claimed that the city they proposed would become an "ideal Dynapolis. " 52 It was a proposal for a dynamic city, designed to grow. 53 And the center of the plan was Thủ Thiêm ( fig. 4.15).
The "pilot project" outlined for Thủ Thiêm-which like almost everything else in the Doxiadis plan for Saigon as a whole was never realized-involved an experimental new urban development of one thousand houses (of an eventual ten to fifteen thousand) "suitable for Vietnamese environmental conditions. " 54 After field trips, site inspection, air reconnaissance, and "analysis of land reclamation techniques and costs, " Doxiadis decided that Thủ Thiêm was "the best alternative without question . . . [:] large enough; immediately available; very close to the center of employment, shopping, etc.; undeveloped and will not require the relocation of existing settlements . . . " 55 The proposed development in Thủ Thiêm would be connected to central Saigon by a "minimum number of bridges" (only one such bridge appears on the plan, but two others were projected) and would include manmade canals and lakes for transportation, replacing the extensive naturally existing canals and waterways. While this might seem like unnecessary effort-why build man-made canals if there were already natural ones?-it was deemed worthwhile because the massive earth movement the project required would provide a source of land-fill for construction. Furthermore, completely reorganizing the landscape into a grid would allow Doxiadis to create one of his signature contributions to urbanism: "a systematic development of a community on a human scale with a hierarchical order of centers of public facilities to serve them. " 56 The hierarchy of communities Doxiadis proposed entailed a socially engineered series of rectangles nested within rectangles, ranging upward in scale from "Class I" to "Class V" ( fig. 4.16). The Class I community, the smallest rectangle, would be the most "homogenous" in social composition, consisting of approximately ten to fifteen families (depicted as discrete, individual rectangles arranged along a rectilinear alleyway). The families grouped together at this level would be similar in class and social status, and would thus constitute "the primary unit in the interlocking hierarchical system of communities, making up the human sector. " 57 The system would then progressively link these smaller Class I units together as it grew in scale (not unlike a segmentary model of social organization, which functional anthropologists have long identified as systems for maintaining social and political solidarity across space.) 58 Like segments in a larger form of social solidarity, Class II communities would be formed by binding several Class I communities together through shared playgrounds and local shops. Class III communities would unify several Class II communities around primary schools, shopping areas, and a church, as well as a garden or small square to "provide a focal point or public forum. " 59 Class IV communities, which the plan called "the basic component of the urban structure, " would form replicable units, large enough to be self-sustaining but small enough "for a man on foot to remain its master"; they would be able to "accommodate diverse social groups, both in income and cultural levels, " and would be united by secondary schools and civic and commercial centers. 60 And finally, at the highest level of the urban hierarchy, Class V communities would combine four or five Class IV communities, united around a "community theatre, community health center and other specialized functions. " 61 Once joined together, all of these nested communities were designed to engineer a sense of urban solidarity that could theoretically extend across the entire urban landscape: "The basic elements of the design of a community, which achieves a human scale, should be a system of interlocking human communities, each creating optimum conditions for social communication, human growth and organization. " 62 Seen in retrospect, this system of nested classes vaguely recalls a whole series of social technologies common at that time in Vietnam, all dedicated to establishing social solidarity. It recalls the logic of the National Liberation Front (NLF), with its various autonomous cells ultimately united at a higher level for the purpose of revolutionary activity, or the nested hierarchies of a military structure.
The design reflected the ethos of the age, a midcentury modernist commitment to engineering new forms of social solidarity. In a period when Vietnamese and foreign advisors of all persuasions were expending great energy and financial resources concocting ways of preserving allegiance in a time of political unrest, it takes little imagination to understand the allure behind the Doxiadis plan. At the time the report was delivered to the government in January 1965, the U.S. bachelor officer quarters at the Brink Hotel had only recently been bombed in downtown Saigon, on December 24, 1964. It was less than a year after the Gulf of Tonkin incident and only about two months before the first U.S. combat troops formally entered the country. Ngô Đình Diệm had been assassinated less than two years earlier, and the South Vietnamese leadership was itself in a state of constant upheaval. The promise of an urban plan that could engineer social solidarity must have been appealing indeed.
These grand plans for engineering cohesiveness through urban design also promised a way to reimagine the peripheries of the city, which, in addition to being seen as potential spaces for rational urban development, were feared as spaces of subversion, 63 where alternative forces-like the Bình Xuyên, Cao Đài, Hòa Hảo, and of course the Communist agents of the NLF known as "Việt Cộng"-might hold sway. In my interviews with Thủ Thiêm residents, I often heard that the area at that time had a reputation for harboring insurgents, and histories of Thủ Thiêm often reference the role it played in the revolution. Many of the longtime residents we interviewed also mentioned their own involvement with revolutionary activities, and sometimes displayed commendation certificates from the postwar government on their walls, honoring their resistance against the forces of the Republic of Vietnam.
Whether the intent was willful or unintentional is hard to know, but in the process of developing this vision for Thủ Thiêm, the Doxiadis plan occluded the elements of urbanism and human settlement that already existed there. The planning maps that fill the three volumes of the Doxiadis plan for Saigon are striking for their emphasis of formally shaped landscapes that tend to overshadow the vernacular lived landscape of Thủ Thiêm, making it appear at first glance as if it were nothing but a blank, uninhabited space. But this emptiness is an illusion, a form of selective blindness. In fact, it is clear from photographs of the period that Thủ Thiêm was not empty; instead, habitation followed a different pattern, one that was in tune with the natural environment: urban filaments follow the curve of the river, and all the land behind residential housing is subdivided into a patchwork of fields, which are marked by clear berms indicating ownership and property boundaries ( fig. 4.17). Furthermore, evidence from within the Doxiadis plan itself suggests that the planners were indeed aware that Thủ Thiêm was not empty, in spite of the claims to the contrary implied by the project. If one looks carefully at the Doxiadis plan for the Thủ Thiêm pilot project, for example, one can see that it has been superimposed on a detailed base map that indicates, in faded lines, the preexisting natural and built landscape of Thủ Thiêm ( fig. 4.18). Outlines of buildings, roads, jetties, and other forms of construction belie any claim that Thủ Thiêm was empty.
Thus, the Doxiadis map contradicts claims elsewhere in the plan that Thủ Thiêm was "undeveloped and will not require the relocation of existing settlements. " In the text, too, great attention is paid to the problem of Saigon's dense development, which is referred to, at various points, as "haphazard, " "unplanned, " "inadequate, " "insufficient, " or "bad quality" and which is said to be marked by "poor construction, " "congestion, " "obsolescence, " or "deficit. " For a city whose peripheries are depicted as undeveloped and empty, it is surprising that some of the most serious of the thirty-three "problems" Doxiadis identified as hindering urban development in Saigon relate to its extraordinary density. For example: 284. Problem 8: Land overcrowding. The combination of population pressures for housing, lack of land and low purchasing power, has resulted in over-utilization and overcrowding of existing land, housing and facilities in Saigon.
285.The intensive use of the land has produced high population densities per land area [ . . . ] 286. Saigon's density figures are even more alarming in the light of the fact that Saigon is practically a one-storey city.
287. Problem 9: Squatters' colonies. Nearly every piece of available land has been put to use. River and canal banks, swampy areas, garbage dumps, etc., are now the sites of squatter settlements. Densities are suffocating; there is an almost total lack of even the most rudimentary type of neighborhood pattern and community facilities. Construction is poor. Materials used are bamboo, thatch and whatever scraps of wood, cardboard and sheet metal, that can be found. 64 Assertions that "nearly every piece of available land has been put to use" sit uneasily with their claims that places like Thủ Thiêm were empty. On the one hand, the Doxiadis plan states that the lands in Thủ Thiêm were empty and undeveloped, but on the other hand, it also proposed a program of "land expropriation, " thus acknowledging that the land was already owned by Thủ Thiêm residents. This problematic way of justifying land expropriation by describing inhabited lands as empty and in need of development is a matter that would become one of the defining and most controversial features of urban development in Saigon, and later Ho Chi Minh City. As I will show in chapters 5 and 6, "land acquisition" has bedeviled Vietnam's postwar socialist government, both during the period of high socialism and also during the postreform period of expanding engagement with capitalintensive real estate development. While this problem is commonly attributed to the authoritarian impulses of Vietnam's single-party state, or simplistically blamed on "communism, " the Doxiadis plan shows that land expropriation was an idea with roots going back long before the socialist victory in Vietnam. The following language from the 1965 plan could easily be mistaken for text from the pages of a twenty-first-century Vietnamese newspaper account, government report, or academic study: 323. Problem 32: Land expropriation. Execution of existing housing plans has been severely limited by the inability to assemble sufficiently large areas of land for development. Vacant land within the Prefecture of Saigon has been exhausted to such an extent that no new housing is contemplated on land not at present under public ownership. Proposals for urban renewal activities are dismissed summarily because of the difficulty and cost of land acquisition.
324. The methods pertaining to the expropriation of land are archaic, costly and time consuming. 65 As a result of these problems, the Doxiadis plan insists that "legal tools" would need to be devised in order to speed up land expropriation in proposed development areas like the one in Thủ Thiêm so as to minimize the effects of land speculation, which "will certainly be attempted as soon as the preliminary plans are made public. " To avoid such land speculation, the plan insisted: 187. The goals of land expropriation procedure are not only to acquire land and property at realistic prices but also to carry out the procedures in a short period of time and to minimize ill-will from the owners of expropriated property.
188. Methods of speeding up the procedure of land expropriation include the blanket expropriation of many properties at the same time and the provision of special judicial bodies for the specific purpose of settling cases in dispute. 66 References to "owners of expropriated property" and "cases in dispute" indicate that Doxiadis planners were well aware that places like Thủ Thiêm were not empty spaces, even if their plans for the pilot project implied otherwise. Thus, rather than being "illegible" or invisible to project planners, it is more accurate to say that the people living in Thủ Thiêm either were actively overlooked or, when they could not be ignored, were being set up to have their land expropriated. Put differently, it could be said that the Doxiadis planners were actually looking at multiple Thủ Thiêms: a real one full of people, one imagined as empty, and an ideal one they wished to will into existence. The one they wished to will into existence depended on imagining the real one as empty. Perhaps with enough imagination, the ideal could triumph over the real and the people would simply disappear. If not, as the plan explained, their land could always be expropriated.
Although the Doxiadis plan was integrated into the 1968 Saigon master plan, which was then published by the Directorate of Reconstruction and Urban Planning, it was ultimately never realized. 67 During interviews conducted between 2010 and 2014, I asked city planners and members of the Thủ Thiêm Investment and Construction Authority why the plan was never implemented. They blamed the failure simply on "the war, " a plausible enough explanation but one impossible to verify. Other architects with knowledge of the earlier plans sometimes blamed the inherent problems of the Thủ Thiêm site, citing its soft soils and potential for flooding, as well as "the war. " Older Thủ Thiêm residents, many of whom had been vaguely aware of the plan but none of whom knew anything specific about its details, explained matter-of-factly that it was common for Vietnamese government planners to come up with plans on paper that were never carried out. 68 Yet while the Doxiadis plan never did go forward, the dream for wholly redesigning and building Thủ Thiêm never disappeared.

"Saigon of Tomorrow": The Wurster Plan of 1972
In 1973, Guy Wright, a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, wrote: "On my desk is a beautiful picture of how Saigon might look someday. I keep my fingers crossed that it will happen. " 69 The picture to which Wright referred was a colorful map taken from a new, fully reconceived master plan for Thủ Thiêm ( fig. 4.19), part of a lavishly illustrated 78-page document filled with extensive proposals and colorful maps paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development and produced by the San Francisco-based architectural firm Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons. 70 In a way, the Wurster plan picked up from the abandoned Doxiadis plan for Thủ Thiêm, covering essentially the same geographic area and containing similar proposals. The Wurster plan even borrows data from the earlier plan, citing its population projections and using similar language when explaining why the location is desirable. The following passage, for example, echoes sentiments from 1965: This study demonstrates that the peninsula, even with its present limited access, has an advantageous time-distance relationship to downtown Saigon. Moreover, the peninsula compares very favorably to other potential development sites within the Saigon Metropolitan Area. These other sites are generally either to the south and west of the City, where major growth is unlikely to occur for many years. As access to the peninsula improves in the future, peninsula land values will rise far above these other areas. In fact, once bridges are in operation, no other location will match the peninsula's development potential. 71 If the Wurster plan shared much of the same enthusiasm for Thủ Thiêm as the Doxiadis plan, it also differed in several important respects. While the previous plan focused on wholly transforming the space in order to construct utopian forms of cohesive social organization, the Wurster plan favored pragmatic engagement with preexisting social and natural variables. In other words, the Wurster plan, rather than relying on the force of urban design alone, recognized the need to adapt. For example, a major downfall of the Doxiadis project, it explained, was that "it proposed filling the natural waterways and superimposing a costly, geometrically-designed system of canals over the whole peninsula. " 72 Moreover, whereas the Doxiadis plan was rapidly conceived, planned and presented to the government in just over two months, Wurster favored a gradualist approach: " Beginning in 1971, a year-long, detailed study was made of the peninsula, and a new development plan was prepared. Unlike the earlier plans, the primary purpose of the new plan is to encourage development of the peninsula in slow, feasible stages over a period of 20 to 30 years. The new plan emphasizes a combination of private initiative and public investment. It is a plan that is within the range of the economic and institutional resources of Vietnam. " 73 This pragmatic approach, with its emphasis on self-sustaining, economically viable urbanization suited to the " resources of Vietnam, " is dramatically different in spirit from the earlier proposal.
This approach may reflect, at least in part, the change in American attitudes following the unexpected duration and challenges of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Since 1969 and the beginning of its gradual military withdrawal from the country, the United States had supported a policy of "Vietnamization, " encouraging the Vietnamese to become increasingly responsible for waging the war as well as for their own nation-building. While the United States continued to provide enormous assistance to South Vietnam, the focus now was on expert-driven development planning rather than quick solutions. Accordingly, the Wurster plan, rather than attempting to remake society, sought to view it as an existing force to be understood and adapted to, using the tools of social science, especially economic analysis. For example, in Wurster's final accounting report for billable hours spent on the project, 745 went to preparation, 3,157 to planning, 4,636 to the pilot project and the report, and 5,401 to "research. " Furthermore, whereas the principals and project directors claimed 2,730 billable hours, "specialists" accounted for a full 4,241. 74 This reliance on specialist expertise is evident in the report's focus on land use, soil quality, financing, and administration, as opposed to aesthetic design per se. It develops extensive recommendations for a maximum population density of 300 persons per hectare, specifies the kinds of soils to be used for infill (recommending silty sand dredged from the Đồng Nai River rather than the muddy soil of Thủ Thiêm), and insists on making maximum use of existing roads and waterways. Furthermore, it develops economic models for the projected increase in land values following development of the area, thereby suggesting the project's ability to pay for itself. Yet this form of systematic, planned development depended on marketing land, which in turn required creation of a Land Development Agency: "Land will be obtained by negotiation where possible and by expropriation where necessary, " the Wurster plan outlined. "After the land has been prepared for urban use, the Agency will market it through a combination of sales and rentals. In some cases the Agency will provide infrastructure serving a wider area, but will recover such costs from local authorities and private landowners whose property is increased in value by the installation. " 75 In this analysis, once again, the Wurster planners saw Thủ Thiêm as both empty and populated at once. The whole purpose for developing the space was based on the notion that it was undeveloped and relatively empty. But as the above passage shows, as the planners prepared to develop this space, they could not ignore the fact that it was populated by people with whom they would have to negotiate, or failing that, from whom they would have to expropriate the land. In the final instance, despite their different approaches, both Wurster and Doxiadis shared the same mode of seeing without seeing. For them, the people of Thủ Thiêm were problems to be dealt with, rather than proof that what they were dealing with was a populated space.
Despite the intensive research into the actual conditions of Thủ Thiêm, the planners continued on the assumption that the land was empty and underutilizedeven though that same research "revealed that approximately 30 percent of the peninsula is currently owned by the Catholic Church and the Leper's Association. These large landholdings, their location, and the nature of their current use offer unique development opportunities. Large-scale land sales and trades to developer or direct development by the present owners are possible. The primary advantage to the prospective developer is that this land does not require the major consolidation of many small landholdings which will be necessary in other parts of the peninsula. " 76 If Thủ Thiêm were indeed empty, why would it be necessary to consolidate "many small landholdings"? Simply put, because it was not actually empty. In addition to the 30 percent of land owned by the Church and the Leper's Association, Wurster's own research showed that "approximately 50 percent of the peninsula is owned by members of the District 9 Landowners Association. 77 This group was informally organized several years ago to act on behalf of the owners and to promote development of the peninsula. At that time the landowners offered to give the Government 50 percent of their land in return for government funding and construction of roads and utilities, or, as an alternative, to repay the Government for these improvements over a ten-year period. " 78 FINGERS CROSSED Guy Wright, the San Francisco journalist waiting with fingers crossed for the beautiful project to be realized in Thủ Thiêm, captured an age-old mode of looking at Thủ Thiêm: one that recognized the space as well populated and yet, without any sense of contradiction, saw it also as underutilized, even empty. Saigon, Wright wrote, "must expand or explode. " But there was hope: Fortunately, cradled in a loop of the Saigon River just across from the downtown section is a large undeveloped area that begs to become the centerpiece of the Saigon of tomorrow.
This 2500-acre godsend is called the Thu Thiem Peninsula. Not many Americans in Saigon ever went there because there was no real reason. Along the river bank are some small boat works and a Catholic church whose bell still rings the Angelus, and then the land gives way to rice paddy and not much else.
[ . . . ] The beauty of the Thu Thiem plan is that it isn't outskirt development. Because of the peculiar way the river bends, the peninsula is a thumb punching into the middle of the city. You walk down to the foot of fashionable Tu Do Street, look across the river and there it is.
The main reason it hasn't been developed before is because the land is too low and wet. But we have the technology to overcome that. The plan is to bring in fill and raise the level 1.5 meters. We use the same technique to build airfields in the Mekong Delta. 79 In these passages, Wright manages to do what Saigon residents, planners, and developers have long done when looking at Thủ Thiêm: to see it as empty while describing it as the future hope for a city plagued by overcrowding.
Wright's fingers must have remained crossed right up until his death in 2006. By that time, the most recent vision of the project was just getting under way. In the interim, the United States had withdrawn completely from Vietnam. For some, Saigon had fallen in 1975, while for others it had been liberated. Agricultural collectivization had forcefully come and ungraciously gone. New constitutions had been promulgated in 1980, 1992, and 2013. Market reforms had been introduced, and Đổi Mới, the oft-celebrated "change to the new, " had become an old cliché. The Vietnamese Law on Land, revised in 1992Land, revised in , 2003Land, revised in , and 2013, increasingly allowed land use rights permits to be used as a proxy for land transfers; this enabled a real estate market to develop, which for many years pushed land prices to unimaginable heights. This was unfortunately later followed by a painful collapse, right as the houses in Thủ Thiêm were being demolished and the city was saddled with loan debt. The city had gone from postwar scarcity to burgeoning commerce, and while the poor were no longer malnourished, the rich were getting richer. The result was great income disparity, hoarding, and forms of real estate speculation and capital accumulation that have in many cases depended on the dispossession of precarious residents from their land.
After all this change, a great deal was different, not least the fact that the postwar plans for Thủ Thiêm were led by Vietnamese actors. But despite the differences, many of the dreams they held for the space on the other side of the river from Saigon looked curiously the same. Both through its past and into the present day, Thủ Thiêm futures have been built on a long history of seeing without seeing. The most recent version of these plans, described in the next chapter, has led to the wholesale demolition of the landscape in Thủ Thiêm. With the aid of bulldozers and eviction teams, an imagined emptiness has become real.