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A Review of “Saigon's Edge:On the Margins of Ho Chi MinhCity”Jamie Gillen a

a Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, SingaporeVersion of record first published: 28 Dec 2011.

To cite this article: Jamie Gillen (2012): A Review of “Saigon's Edge: On the Marginsof Ho Chi Minh City”, The Professional Geographer, 64:1, 152-154

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152 Volume 64, Number 1, February 2012

the many unknowns relating to how climatechange and global warming will actually play out around the world.

Advances and the success of Morris’s positivescenario depend clearly on major and timely

scientic and technological breakthroughs todeal with the earth’s declining arable land andfreshwater resources and the West’s wasteful,bankrupting obsession with militarization andconstant wars.

With these words Morris ends the last chap-ter’s section titled “The Great Race”:

Much of this of course sounds like science c-tion, and it will certainly take enormous tech-nological leaps to usher in such an age of

abundant clean energy. But if we do not makesuch leaps—and soon—Nightfall [worst-case sce-nario] will win the race. . . . For the Singularity [positive scenario] to win we need to keep thedogs of war on a leash, manage global weirding,and see through a revolution of energy capture.Everything has to go right. For Nightfall to win,only one thing needs go wrong. The odds look bad. (pp. 612–13)

I agree with Morris’s statement that “Ris-ing social development has always changed themeaning of geography,” but I disagree with hisassertion that “in the twenty-rst century, de- velopment will rise so high that geography willcease to mean anything at all” (p. 619).

I disagree because I believe that Morrismisses a key point about the prospects forhis two scenarios. The human race still has adigestive system and body chemistry like that of our hunter–gatherer forebears, and we must continue to depend on healthy food from theearth’s limited and declining endowment of arable land. Fresh water availability also isa critical issue. As of now the Earth is sadly overpopulated. Our high-tech civilization andagriculture might be a temporary spike in thehuman struggle to survive.

Morris’s book is a valuable and easy read with many insights, but his “For Now” chap-ter leaves dangling basic questions about thefuture.

Key Words: “backwardness” advantage, develop-ment ceiling, future scenarios, Social Development Index, Western/Eastern cores.

Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City. Erik Harms. Minneapolis: Uni-

versity of Minnesota Press, 2011. xiv and 294pp. $75.00cloth(ISBN978-0-8166-5605-9).

Reviewed by Jamie Gillen, Department of Ge-ography, National University of Singapore,Singapore.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, known collo-quially as Saigon, is like many megacities inSoutheast Asia in that its makeup resemblesthat of the Greek goddess Medusa: The deter-mined intensity and aggressiveness of Medusa’sface matches theurban cores of Manila, Jakarta,Bangkok, and Saigon. With a shock of snakesfor hair, Medusa’s serpentine appendages burst forth chaotically, functioning both on behalf of and autonomously from her. Likewise, in citieslike Saigon, periurban districts have deni-tive links to the urban core but also oper-ate independently, never entirely comfortable with their connections to the city center,or it often seems, to the world beyond thelarger metropolitan area. Erik Harms, a cul-tural anthropologist by training, wrestles withthe narratives of residents of one of Ho Chi Minh City’s “appendages”or periurban regions

known as H ´ ocM ˆ on and uses their stories toevaluate what it means to live “on the edge”of a transforming Vietnamese society. Leaningon an assortment of geography-friendly termsthroughout the text, Harms introduces and ex-ercises the binary structure of Vietnamese soci-ety to demonstrate how districts like H ´ ocM ˆ onand their residents blur the lines between ru-ral and urban, traditional and modern, insideand outside, and wealthy and poor, at the sametime playing into and reinforcing these binariesin their everyday lives. For Vietnamese studiesscholars, this book is an instrumental additionto the ways in which the country and its peo-ple make sense of and contribute to the worldaround them. For geographers, the book’s at-tempt to make an argument about spatial rela-tions through a eeting engagement with geo-graphic terms and debates will leave some of usfrustrated.

Harms begins with a robust introductionin which he outlines the themes of the book, which center on the “ambivalence” (p. 3)H ´ ocM ˆ on’s residents have for the urbanizationprocess in Vietnam. The author does a superb job in explaining why he chooses to support and complicate Vietnam’s binary framework (something he comes back to repeatedly

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Book Reviews 153

throughout the text, which demonstrates atight scope and focus), arguing that it is hisresponsibility as an anthropologist studying Vietnam to accurately convey to the readerthe usage of language in creating Vietnamese

society and to explain the persistence of Vietnam’s binary framework, despite its limi-tations. He creates a term called social edginess to describe how Vietnamese living in peri-urban environments swing between different spatial and class-inected categories. Edginessalso explains the sense of unease that many Vietnamese have in straddling socioeconomicand geographic lines. Harms also writes that H ´ ocM ˆ on’s people are empowered as a result of this oscillation, imbuing a hearty dose of meaning to the phrase. I responded to theterm social edginess used throughout the text by hoping there would at some point be an in- vocation of Joel Garreau’s (1991) foundational“edge city” thesis, now over twenty years old,or Dick and Rimmer’s (1998) geographic takeon edge cities in a Southeast Asian context,but the wish never materialized. Instead,Harms uses anthropological and social theory scholarship, with a sprinkle of geography, to

inform his idea. A brief glossary of Vietnameseterms preceding the introduction is helpful tothe non-Vietnamese-speaking geographer; anabsence of maps detailing H ´ ocM ˆ on’s locationin relation to HoChi Minh City and Vietnam isnot.

The book is divided into three sections, withthe rst part dedicated to outlining social edgi-ness in more detail. Here I believe an explicit engagement with terms from human geogra-

phy’s canon would have elevated the book sig-nicantly. For example, in chapter 3 Harmsexplains that “space is a social process,” yet the role of geography in establishing this point is skimmed over, save a few dated referencesto Harvey’s work (1982, 1989). “Space andpower” is a subsection of the chapter (p. 76).It is invigorating to see terms like these usedby those in other disciplines and speaks tothe peripatetic nature of much of present-day thought in the social sciences, but how a book with such overt geographical themes related tothe blurriness of spatial boundaries omits en-tire canons of geography is the book’s biggest disappointment.

The second part of the book adds a tem-poral layer of critique to the spatial platform,

arguing that H ´ ocM ˆ on’s residents are in a po-sition to contribute to Vietnam’s intense de- velopment through cheap labor and real estate yet are likewise stultied because they cannot escape the feeling that they are part of “tra-

ditional” Vietnam, with all its purity and ig-norance left intact as downtown Saigon zoomspast them. This section reinforces, using the Vietnam people’s penchant for linear markersof development (preindependence → postin-dependence → war against the American ag-gressors → reunication → reform era), thecurious case of H ´ ocM ˆ oncitizens’ “insider” sta-tus in traditional Vietnam, which affords themthe ability to prop up the debased nature of much of Ho Chi Minh City society, whereastheir “outsider” status on the fringes of the city forbids them from snifng the air of the nou- veau riche of true insider urbanites.

Harms hits his crescendo in the third sec-tion, and specically the penultimate chapter, where he adroitly links H ´ ocM ˆ on to Vietnamesehistory and society in general. In this chap-ter he brings in archival research to add to hisrich interview data, drawing parallels betweenH ´ ocM ˆ on’s hesitant role in Ho Chi Minh City’s

development to Vietnamese society’s own am-bivalence toward their function in the globaleconomy. Narratives of the backward, uned-ucated, and honorable peasant, so prominent in Vietnamese conversations in downtown HoChi Minh City (and in the countryside), are weaved together with the Communist Party’sofcial directives to contradictorily transformand nurture rural areas. Harms makes a smart analytic move by not resolving this important

tension, letting it stand as one of the most demonstrable takeaways from the book. The conclusion addresses Vietnam’s socialist

character and its peoples’ push to becomemodern, an abrupt departure from much of themicrolevel analysis on which the book relies. The book is a satisfying read for those inter-ested in contemporary Vietnam because Harmsis a strong writer: He is perceptive, he is a goodlistener, he is patient, he has a keen sense of the Vietnamese language, and he has an elephant’smemory, all of which are valuable traits when working in Vietnam. As a case study, then, it is valuable, timely, even poignant, and an ethno-graphic “game-changer”in Vietnamese studies.I am not well-read enough to know whetherHarms’s contribution counts as innovative in

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anthropological studies of cities, but its value ingeography is less than it should be because thetheoretical impact of edge cities is already deeply embedded in urban and social geogra-phy today.

Key Words: ethnography, rural-urban divide,Vietnam.

ReferencesDick, H. W., and P. J. Rimmer. 1998. Beyond the

Third-World city: The new urban geography of Southeast Asia. Urban Studies 35 (12): 2303–21.

Garreau, J. 1991. Edge city: Life on the new frontier .New York: Doubleday.

Harvey, D. 1982. The limits to capital . Oxford, UK: Verso.

———. 1989. The condition of postmodernity. Oxford,UK: Basil Blackwell.

Delivering Development: Globalization’sShoreline and the Road to a SustainableFuture. Edward R. Carr. New York: Pal-grave Macmillan, 2011. 250 pp. $38.00 cloth(ISBN 978-0-230-11076-2).

Reviewed by Samuel Thompson, Department of Geography, Western Illinois University, Macomb, IL.

Even if you have not lived in a village, youshould enjoy reading this well-written book, which contributes to discourse on development in the developing world. It is based on EdwardCarr’s personal reections on development, af-ter spending more than thirteen years with the

people of Dominase and Ponkrum in the Cen-tral Region of Ghana. After more than a decadein this African country, Carr accumulates many rsthand observations that form thebasis of thebook’s title, Delivering Development. He begins with background narratives on his journey andresearch work in the country. It is during thisperiod that the author discovers the imperfec-tions of Western development ideas in a placethat he calls “the globalization shoreline.”

Throughout the book, Carr refers to thetwo villages to illustrate the volatility of glob-alization and development. Based on Carr’s in-teraction with villagers, he is able to present several compelling development stories in thecountry that, to some extent, mirror situationsin the rest of the developing world. He then

challenges prevailing development approachesand their failures to eliminate or amelioratepoverty and underdevelopment in the devel-oping world. He states that “after centuriesof growing global trade and more than six

decades of formal development (overlaid onmany decades of colonial efforts), however, theimprovement of the human condition has beenuneven at best” (p. 3).

Along the globalization shoreline, Carrmakes the case that these areas bear the brunt of economic, political, and environmental de-cisions made in the developed world. He sys-tematically upends commonly held ideas about globalization and development and points out their failures and consequences. When devel-opment failures occur, the entire world is ex-posed to the perils of an unbalanced globaleconomy. Carr argues that unless Western de- velopment policies change and improvementsin the quality of life of globalization shorelinepeople are attained, the world could see enor-mous pressure on natural resources and envi-ronmental degradation. To better expand onthe failure of development and globalization,Carr formulates four arguments. Each one of

these arguments challenges commonly held as-sumptions about development and its failureto uplift conditions of the poor at the glob-alization shoreline. Carr uses the rst half of this book to tackle each of the four arguments,making references from his days in Dominaseand Ponkrum. From chapter 1 to chapter 7, hefocuses on development issues along the glob-alization shoreline. He establishes that the levelof development is contrary to commonly held

knowledge about development and globaliza-tion. Traveling from the capital city, Accra, tothe central region, Carr provides examples of development failures.

Carr systematically describes all of thefailures of development despite decades of in-fusion of development aid at the shoreline. Tosupport his arguments for a new direction indevelopment that is sustainable, Carr providesdetailed descriptions of the villages in chapters3 and 4. One gets a sense of people living andgoing on with life despite daily challenges anduncertainties all around them. Villagers, mostly farmers, work hard, but the return for theirhard work is small. There is no discernible ev-idence of material accumulation in the villages.Even the infrastructure is lacking in many

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