Sidewalk City

For most, the term "public space" conjures up images of large, open areas where people congregate, socialize, and exchange thoughts and goods: the ancient Greek agora; modern town community centers; vast, green parks for festivals, games, and meetings. In many of the world's major cities, however, public spaces like these are not woven into the urban fabric. In urban areas, business and social lives have always been conducted along main roads, and when vehicles overtook the roads, the essential public spaces were relegated to sidewalks-which has led to clashes over the hotly contested rights of pedestrians, street vendors, tourists, and governments to use sidewalks. Despite their important sociocultural role, sidewalks have been studied by remarkably few scholars. With Sidewalk City, Annette Miae Kim provides the first multilayered case study of sidewalks in a distinctive geographical area. She focuses on Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, a rapidly growing and evolving city. Throughout its history, the city's sidewalks served as areas for community-talking, eating, playing, and selling.Today, however, thousands of street vendors trek continuously with their wares on shoulders or carts, struggling to eke out a living since police began enforcing laws that bar non-pedestrians from sidewalks for the sake of traffic flow, public health, and cosmopolitan appearance. In her fascinating study of how Ho Chi Minh City's society is re-negotiating sidewalk space, Kim shows how it is possible to successfully share the vital public space of sidewalks and meet the needs of diverse populations.

"Sidewalk City is an important book which takes a big step forward in our understanding of that key public space--the sidewalk. Mixing urban theory, ethnography, observation, and innovative mapping, Kim has produced a new conceptual and representational paradigm. Both scholarly and readable, Sidewalk City should interest anyone who thinks about cities, public spaces, and people."-- "Margaret Crawford, UC Berkeley", "Sidewalk City is devoted to a part of the urban landscape that is often overlooked. The book details the multiple benefits of seeing a sidewalk as a mixed-use public space. Kim is interested in calling not just for new analytical lenses, but for ways to apply them to legitimizing sidewalk life. The example inSidewalk City is of the tourist path and map she and her colleagues proposed to local officials. Their idea was to use HCMC's inevitable tourism to guide recognition of sidewalk street vendors and promote pedestrianism. This tourist pedestrian path is an example of Kim's approach to scholarship: one that is inseparable from advocacy."-- "Environment and Urbanization", "Sidewalk City is visually powerful, socially explanatory, and politically revealing. Kim delivers an exceptionally rich contribution to the emerging domain of urban humanities with her multilayered close analysis of a seemingly prosaic socio-spatial environment--the sidewalks of Ho Chi Minh City. As such, she provides as much creative clarity to those interested in photography, multi-media art, and critical cartography as she does to those who care about economic development, property rights, urban planning, public policy, and ethnographic method."-- "Lawrence J. Vale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of Purging the Poorest", "Sidewalk City takes the reader on a journey throughout the author's framework analysis of public spaces--namely the sidewalk--from a historical and geopolitical contextualization, to a critical analysis of the results, to visual narratives and further applications. . . . As a final verdict, this book may become an essential reading when analyzing public spaces. Every chapter of the book introduces an important step for their analysis, whether the subject is sidewalk living areas or public spaces at another scale."-- "Cartographic Perspectives", "Opening with an exciting ethnography of sidewalk life in Ho Chi Minh City, Kim goes on to unfurl a revolutionary collection of mapping subjects, techniques, and strategies that let her, as she says, map the unmapped. As Kevin Lynch did in 1960, Kim inaugurates an utterly new fork in the history of mapmaking, enabling her to return at book's end to the sidewalk both reconsidered and reimagined. Sidewalk City is essential reading!"-- "Denis Wood, author of Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas"

Annette Miae Kim is associate professor of public policy and the founding director of the Spatial Analysis Lab at the University of Southern California.