Threatened Flood-Prone Alleyway Neighborhoods of Ho Chi Minh City: What “Tactics” for Vernacular Heritage?
Résumé
Ho Chi Minh City is especially challenged by flooding. Drawing on ethnographic data on resilience and social differentiation, and applying political ecology to flooding risk, I use de Certeau’s concept of “tactics” to embrace quotidian actions and negotiations undertaken to address largely shared problems, thereby illuminating urban heritage as a source of resilience but also of local socioeconomic inequalities. Local communities’ capacity for resilience largely depends on neighborhoods’ specific historical trajectories; shared heritage is essential for increasing communal resilience. Vernacular flood management, with its improvisatory adaptations, indexes local inequalities, while growing individualism allows authorities to instrumentalize flooding risk as justification for eviction and radical redevelopment. The consequent clearing of vernacular neighborhoods for development thus also vests control in powerful forces.