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While maps have a long history with political power, propaganda, and regime operations, the recent explosion in critical cartography shows that maps can also be used to question normalized practices and explore alternative ones. The chapter first reviews the various ways Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam have been mapped. Imperial maps facilitated colonial expansion and operations as well as building political support for the costliness of empire-building back in the motherland. Contemporary Vietnamese land management institutions have invested in increasing its technical capacity with the help of international development aid organizations that has expedited the transfer of property rights and increased public finance. International urban planning and design practices import visions for a future HCMC built for elites with large portions of the population missing in the pictures. The chapter then discusses the new mapping practices of critical cartography and GIS that attempt to reconstruct the connection between power and the map by creating alternative visualizations. It outlines some of the limitations in current practices and an agenda for developing its greater self-reflexivity and social engagement.

Chapter 2, “The Materiality of Theory”, tells the story of the (ir)rationalization of the landscape of Palestine and Israel after 1948. It explores how the colonial legacies of cartography continue to influence land management and development efforts. It also outlines the benefits of combining critical geographical studies, including the literature on science and empire, with science and technology studies (STS) research that examines how specific technologies are intrinsically shaped by their social and material contexts.

This chapter presents the core quest of the book: creating a new kind of map that will unveil rather than obscure sidewalk life. The motivation for mapping was to create an alternative set of facts that could help inform the controversies over street vending and the ideal sidewalk. It explains the spatial ethnography fieldwork methods developed that integrate detailed field surveys of space use, hundreds of interviews, the coding of data into GIS, and different sources of visual representation such as photography and difficult to obtain historical, state planning, and private developer maps. The chapter then presents a critical cartography primer that visually discusses through a progression of original maps how cartographic choices and logics veil and unveil phenomenon and knowledge. Seeking alternatives to Euclidean conventions, the maps show phenomena such as sidewalks as social constructs, as space that evolves over the hours of the day and years, the enforcement of micro-properties, and the experiential qualities of HCMC’s sidewalk life. The chapter concludes with the proposition of a mixed-use sidewalk: sidewalk space can be transacted between multiple types of users over the course of the day, expanding the possibilities of public space.

Building upon a review of the main points of each chapter of the book, the concluding chapter also discusses integrative and over-arching issues such as the need for greater inter-disciplinarity in urban planning between the social sciences and urban design which could happen through developing our spatial analysis methods such as critical cartography. The chapter also makes clarifying qualifications about the intention and findings of the book, such as what is generalizable and specific to Vietnam. Sidewalk City is about more than the sidewalk itself; it is an inquiry into how we might become more cognizant of overlooked spaces and the overlooked peoples in them. This book proposed experimenting with alternative mapping as a way to navigate our way to greater urban awareness.

This chapter introduces Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s sidewalk life as an exemplar case in the midst of the current global foment where governments and people are searching for new ways to use and govern this important public space. This chapter outlines fundamental epistemological problems that have been hindering our exploration of this terrain of opportunity and conflict: old boundaries between social science, physical space, and urban design disciplines and conceptual dichotomies such as public/private and formal/informal fail to address the conditions of rapid immigration and urbanization while often introducing perilous urban planning interventions. The basis for the rest of the book, the chapter overviews an alternative theoretical framework for understanding public space that integrates both its physicality and social structure: a) a spatialized ethnography is needed to uncover overlooked urban populations and actual, situated spatial practices rather than assumed ones, b) a rehabilitated property rights theory which views public space in terms of socially negotiated and enforced entitlements and liabilities between property owners, police, street vendors, and the general public and c) a critical cartography that maps new knowledge about urban space.