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Productive frictions and urbanism in transition: planning lessons from traffic flows and urban street life in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

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Productive frictions and urbanism in transition: planning lessons from traffic flows and urban street life in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

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PRODUCTIVE FRICTIONS AND URBANISM IN TRANSITION:
PLANNING LESSONS FROM TRAFFIC FLOWS AND URBAN STREET LIFE
IN HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM
by
Huê-Tâm Jamme

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
URBAN PLANNING & DEVELOPMENT
August 2020

ii
Dedication
I dedicate this dissertation to my grandparents.
To Nguyễn Minh Nhựt, my late grandfather,
Who joined the bench of my ancestors on March 14, 2020;
To Trường Thi Trang, my grandmother, whose blessings give me wings;
To Rémy and Yvonne Jamme, two lucky stars, whom I never had a
chance to call Grand-Père et Grand-Mère.

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Acknowledgements
This dissertation has emerged from what I call the tripod of my life, three sets of experiences in
three different countries that all feel like home today: the United States, where I discovered a vocation
for research and higher education; Vietnam, where I found not only a passion for urban planning and
development but also some stable ground for the roots of my mixed identity; and France, especially
Normandy, which will always remain the place from where I come. More people than I can
acknowledge here have accompanied me in this cross-continental journey. Those I am not able to
mention must know that I am thankful for their love and support.
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my dissertation chair, Ph.D. adviser, and academic
mentor, Tridib Banerjee. Having him by my side has been like exploring a new world following the
one with the spotlight. This dissertation is infused with the nuggets of knowledge and wisdom on
which he shed light. I cannot thank him enough for his patience and gentle nudging when I was getting
lost. I am deeply indebted to the three other members of my dissertation committee. I was fortunate to
receive guidance from one of the most influential social scientists of our times, Manuel Castells. His
invaluable insights and his unwavering support of my theoretical inclinations have meant the world to
me. Without the constant availability of Marlon Boarnet for tips and feedback, I would never have
trusted my ability to conduct robust quantitative research in transportation. I am especially grateful to
Annette Kim for sharing her extensive experience doing ethnographic fieldwork in Ho Chi Minh City.
I am deeply indebted to the people without whom I could not have completed my fieldwork. First
and foremost, my interviewees have been incredibly generous. This dissertation would not have been
possible without them. I thank them wholeheartedly for making the time, sharing their life stories, and
answering what must have sounded like endless questions about the details of their everyday life. Mai

iv
Tấn Quỳnh was an incredibly smart, proactive, and reliable research assistant. His knowledge of Ho
Chi Minh City was an invaluable asset. He tackled all assignments with the same rigor and patience,
and I know many were tedious to say the least. Special thanks to Thanh Tâm, who helped me with the
interviews. She and Thanh Vân have played a critical role in helping me identify respondents. I also
wish to thank Olivier Tessier for his warm welcome and the charming office space he provided me at
the Ecole Française d’Extrême Orient (EFEO) in Saigon. My fieldwork could not have been as
extensive without the generous support I received through fellowships from the USC Graduate School,
the Los Angeles chapter of the Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS-LA), the Rail Association of
Southern California (RASC), the California Transportation Foundation (CTF), and the EFEO. I am
very grateful for the trust these institutions have put into the project.
I would like to extend my sincere thanks to the faculty and staff at USC who have helped me
complete this Ph.D. in better conditions than I could imagine. Professors Eric Heikkila, James Moore,
Dowell Myers, Lisa Schweitzer, and David Sloane have provided me with insightful feedback at
critical times. I have learnt a great amount in working as a research assistant on various projects, not
only with my advisers Tridib Banerjee and Marlon Boarnet, but also under the supervision of Raphael
Bostic and Genevieve Giuliano. Special thanks to Deepak Bahl with whom it was a pleasure to work
over the years. I very much appreciated his efforts to include me in any research team he and Professor
Banerjee put together during my time at USC. My research experience, publication record, and
summer funding would not have been the same without these opportunities. Many thanks also to Viet
Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins with whom it was a pleasure to reflect on our meaningful ties with
Vietnam. I am grateful for the intellectual and personal connection we have developed. I also wish to
thank Julie Kim, Christine Wilson, and Pauline Martinez for their assistance with all things related to

v
administrative matters, and to Stephen Lambert and Marcus Como, who have provided Price Ph.D.
students with excellent working conditions.
I have met very dear friends at USC who all are wonderful people and brilliant scholars and with
whom I expect to maintain meaningful relationships for many years to come. I could not have gone
through the emotional rollercoaster that the last five years have been without them. I am more thankful
than words can say for having shared every single stage of the Ph.D. adventure with Julia Harten.
Since orientation day, her heart and her house have always remained open to me and I have rushed
there in every moment of disappointment, despair, or intense joy. I am very grateful for the many
passionate conversations I had with Francesca Piazzoni. I thank her for challenging me intellectually
and supporting me emotionally. She helped me grow more than she knows. I would like to express my
deepest gratitude to Gregory Randolph. He has been a wonderful friend and a major source of
inspiration. He has supported me in so many ways, both professionally and personally, through
detailed feedback, careful advice, rich opportunities, and fun experiences. Many thanks to Sahil
Gandhi, who has supported me and nurtured me with immense generosity in the homestretch towards
dissertation completion. I would not have remained sane without him. I also wish to thank Madison
Swayne, Soyoon Choo, Lina Zhu, Andrew Eisenlohr, Neha Miglani, Robyn Goldberg, Lee White,
Raul Santiago-Bartolomei, Nathan Hutson, Seva Rodnyansky, and many others, with whom I very
much enjoyed exploring the nooks and crannies of two fascinating worlds: academia and Los Angeles.
Before joining these two worlds, I was fortunate to work with brilliant planning practitioners in
Vietnam. I am deeply indebted to Shizuo Iwata to whom I owe my interest in transportation as a
development matter. I thank him for sharing his life-long experience promoting contextually
appropriate transportation systems in developing countries. It has been a major source of inspiration. I
wish to express my immense gratitude to Eric Baye for his unwavering support of my endeavors to

vi
build bridges between practice and research, France and Vietnam, and now with the United States.
Many thanks to Fanny Quertamp and Clément Musil with whom I never had a chance to work directly
but whose insights during our annual extended catch ups have always been particularly insightful. Both
have helped me maintain important connections with the ground in Vietnam and their experiences have
been inspirational when transitioning towards academia.
I am especially thankful to my relatives for their unwavering support. My fascination for
motorbikes probably dates back to my very first rides with my grandfather when I was five years old.
In traffic and in life, I believe he has been protecting me since the moment I was born, since he gave
me my name. My grandmother’s unquenched curiosity for my professional and intellectual endeavors
have encouraged me to satisfy her the best I could. I am grateful for her daily prayers. Many thanks to
my aunt Mợ 3 and her children, my cousins, Tuyết Vân, Anh Hải, Tường Vân, Anh Lâm, Thanh Vân,
Anh Nhí and Chị Trang for making me feel home every time I come back to Vietnam. In France, I
would like to thank my aunts Edith and Françoise and my uncle Gérard for their discrete but
determined support always tainted with pride. The same goes to Marie-Claire and Didier Robine,
Cécile and Jean-Paul Bouchasson, and Claire and Guy Paviot, whom I considered just like aunts and
uncles after all these years of being close to our family. Many thanks to my aunt Dì Đào who has
always believed in me. She and Michèle Couade have played a critical role in re-assuring my mother at
times when she worried about my poor decisions. I would like to extend my thanks to Thuý, who gave
me my very first Vietnamese lessons in 2007, and her partner Damien. When I first arrived in America
in 2015, I was fortunate to call family Dianne and Jim Cicchinelli, and Eve Gomez and James Sparks. I
cannot thank them enough for all they did to make me feel home in their country.
Special thanks to the Rocaboy family for all the support and the shared memories over the years in
Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Los Angeles, and Paris. Thiên Nga has always had greater ambitions for me

vii
than I did for myself. She was the first person to nudge me to pursue a Ph.D. Even though I ended up
writing on the motorbikes she refuses to ride, and not on rainwater harvesting as she suggested, I am
glad I followed her advice. It has been an extraordinary experience to discover the wonders of Vietnam
with her husband Thierry, from the mushrooms of Đồng Tháp in 2007 to the pasta of Ho Chi Minh
City in 2018. I have learnt a lot about myself and what it means to be French-Vietnamese in a
globalized world from watching their beautiful children grow up. Many thanks to my dearest little
cousins, My-Lan, Mai-Linh, and Arthur.
I cannot begin to express my thanks to my friends from all around the world who have never failed
to inspire me, support me, and follow me, if not physically, at least digitally and in their thoughts.
Special thanks to Anaïs Billault, whom I have known for longer than I can remember. Her energy,
creativity, and enthusiasm have been a powerful engine, especially in essential transitions. Charlotte
Quéno, Jean-Baptiste Marchal, Rosalie Billault, Hoài Anh, Giang and Hưng, Maxime Lebovics and
Miha Dragan, Eoin Kinsella and Murrough Foley, are just a few who shared with me a major slice of
life in Vietnam while knowing fairly well where I come from. Without realizing it, Angèle Abboud has
been showing me the way to success with her amazing achievements. I am so proud of her. I am
thankful for the encouragement I have received from Laura Héleine, Chétra Téa, Emilie Hallet and
Damien Marquer, who will always remain the one group of friends with whom I celebrate all major
life events. Many thanks to the children of my friends as well for the joy they bring in my life,
especially my godchildren Minh-Vy, Liv, Sofia, and Léo.
I am most deeply indebted to two close ones who have very much influenced who I am, how I
think, and what I do today. They are neither friends nor family, but maybe a bit of both. I am extremely
grateful for the companionship of my chosen sister, Anne-Laure Robine. It seems like we have grown
to believe in one principle that guides both our lives: “follow you heart and the rest will follow.” The

viii
path is much less intimidating when traveled together. Her intellectual abilities have challenged me to
try my best since I was three. Her pure heart has been a haven in which I have confided all my secret
hopes and fears. To her contact, I just want to become a better version of myself. I am equally grateful
to Brian Webb for holding my hand for many years. This dissertation also is a little bit his. I have seen
not only Hanoi, but also Los Angeles and Ho Chi Minh City through his eyes. He tainted my outlook
on the world with his wit and wisdom. He taught me that in order to see, I should look within and not
without. I thank him for letting me join his world, which made mine grow so much bigger. I would be
in a very different place if our paths had not crossed.
Finally, I would like to express my immense gratitude to my closest ones who have always
encouraged me to pursue my dreams, wherever they take me, regardless of how far that is from them. I
cannot think of any more significant proof of love. I thank my parents for trusting me with every single
choice I have made, even when I was contradicting myself. I am especially thankful to them for
instilling in me an appreciation for creativity and adaptability in the face of adversity. The courage they
have shown in their lives has been a tremendous source of inspiration. To my brother Rémy, I mostly
want to say sorry. I know this prolonged long-distance relationship has been especially hard on you
who struggle to communicate with words and crave hugs and kisses more than anyone else. I am very
sorry that I am so far away all the time, but I hope you know that I will never let you down. I am so
thankful for having you in my life. I have learnt from you and only you what unconditional love
means. You made me see from a very young age that the world may be difficult to navigate but also
surprisingly beautiful when seen from the perspective of difference.

ix
Table of Contents
Dedication ........................................................................................................................................................ ii
Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................................... iii
List of Tables ................................................................................................................................................ xiv
List of Figures .............................................................................................................................................. xvi
Abstract ....................................................................................................................................................... xviii
Chapter 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1
1. Topic and Context .................................................................................................................................... 1
2. Focus and Scope ....................................................................................................................................... 5
2.1. Mobility Transition and Urbanism in Transition ........................................................................................................ 5
2.2. A Multi-Scalar and Case Study Approach ........................................................................................................................ 6
3. Relevance and Importance ................................................................................................................... 7
3.1. Mobility Transitions: A Global Phenomenon ................................................................................................................ 7
3.2. Productive Frictions and the Production of New Mobilities .................................................................................. 9
4. Research Questions .............................................................................................................................. 10
5. Overview of the Structure ................................................................................................................... 11
6. COVID-19, Mobility, and the City ...................................................................................................... 13
Chapter 2. Re-thinking Street Spaces from the Perspective of Flows: Literature Review,
Theoretical Framework, and Methodology .............................................................................................. 16
1. Literature Review: The Dichotomic Functions of Street Spaces ............................................ 17

x
1.1. The Dichotomy between Public and Private Realm ................................................................................................. 17
1.2. The Dichotomy between Traffic Flows and Street Life ........................................................................................... 22
1.3. Critical Insights from the Network Society Theory and the New Mobilities Paradigm ............................ 31
2. Theoretical Framework and Research Questions ...................................................................... 37
2.1. The Production of New Mobilities: A Lefebvrian Framework ............................................................................. 37
2.2. Research Questions and Objectives ................................................................................................................................. 40
3. Data and Mixed Methods ..................................................................................................................... 43
3.1. Data Collection .......................................................................................................................................................................... 43
3.2. Summary of the Methodology ............................................................................................................................................ 59
Chapter 3. The Conceived Space of Urban Mobility: Urban Policies Driving the Mobility
Transition ............................................................................................................................................................. 60
1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 60
2. Urban Mobility Trends and Challenges .......................................................................................... 62
2.1. Rising Demand for Motorized Mobility ......................................................................................................................... 62
2.2. The Challenges of Growing Urban Mobility Demand ............................................................................................... 71
3. Policy Responses ................................................................................................................................... 77
3.1. Transportation Policies: A Development Strategy ................................................................................................... 77
3.2. Promoting the Urban Mobility Transition from Motorbikes to Cars and Transit ....................................... 78
3.3. Mobility Transition and Urbanism in Transition ...................................................................................................... 85
4. Conclusion: The Politics of the Conceived Space of Mobility Transition ............................ 93
Chapter 4. The Perceived Space of Urban Mobility: Travel Behaviors and the Production
of Urban Space .................................................................................................................................................... 96
1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 96

xi
2. Measurements ........................................................................................................................................ 99
2.1. Variables of Interest ............................................................................................................................................................... 99
2.2. Research Question and Hypotheses ............................................................................................................................. 107
3. Descriptive Statistics ......................................................................................................................... 108
4. Multivariate Regression Model ...................................................................................................... 111
4.1. OLS Specifications ................................................................................................................................................................ 111
4.2. Robustness Check: Poisson Regression ...................................................................................................................... 112
5. Results .................................................................................................................................................... 113
5.1. Hypothesis 1: Driving a Motorbike is Conducive to Making Socializing Trips .......................................... 113
5.2. Hypothesis 2: Living in Narrow Mixed-Use Street Environment means More Optional Trips .......... 121
5.3. Hypothesis 3: Motorbike Is Use Most Conducive to Optional Trips in Narrow Mixed-Use Street
Environments ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 125
6. Conclusions ........................................................................................................................................... 130
6.1. Summary of the Findings .................................................................................................................................................. 130
6.2. Policy Implications .............................................................................................................................................................. 133
6.3. Limitations and Next Steps .............................................................................................................................................. 134
Chapter 5. The Lived Space of Urban Mobility: How ‘Productive Frictions’ Activate Street
Urbanism ........................................................................................................................................................... 136
1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 136
2. Validation of the Causal Mechanism Between Mobility Practices and Social
Interactions ............................................................................................................................................................. 138
2.1. The Maneuverability of the Motorbike: A Major Explanation for the Positive Relationship between
Motorbike Use and Socializing Practices In Public Space .......................................................................................................... 139
2.2. The Critical Role of Environmental Perceptions: Evidence from ‘Motorbuying’ Pratices .................... 143

xii
2.3. Motorbike Use and Socializing Activities: An Endogenous Relationship ..................................................... 146
2.4. The Negative Effect of Car Use on Social Interactions and the Promises of Non-Motorized Travel 154
2.5. The Endogenous Relationship Between Mobility Practices and Urban Activities ................................... 162
2.6. Summary of Causal Relations .......................................................................................................................................... 165
3. Productive Friction: How Traffic Flows Activate Street Urbanism .................................... 167
3.1. Definition and Relevance of the Productive Friction Concept .......................................................................... 167
3.2. Reading Streetscapes through the Lens of the Productive Friction Concept ............................................. 173
4. Conclusions ........................................................................................................................................... 183
Chapter 6. The Envisioned Space of Urban Mobility: Pathways to Development and
Modernism ........................................................................................................................................................ 186
1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 186
2. The Future of Mobility: Attitudes Towards the Mobility Transition ................................ 188
2.1. The Extinction of Motorbikes: No Real Resistance to a Trend Deemed Inexorable ................................ 188
2.2. Mobility Transition towards Metro Mobility: A Mix of Curiosity and Expectations ............................... 192
2.3. Mobility Transition towards Car Mobility: Promises of Safety, Comfort, and Modern Living ............ 194
3. The Future of Street Life .................................................................................................................. 198
3.1. De-Activating the Friction: Priority to Flows over Street Vending, but with Compassion ................... 198
3.2. The Voice of the Vendors: Moving Along with Modern Development .......................................................... 203
3.3. Modern Street Vending: Sustained Demand and Commercial Gentrification ............................................ 208
4. Toward a Frictionless Future ......................................................................................................... 211
4.1. Dialectical Relationships Between Envisioned, Conceived-, Perceived-, and Lived Spaces ................ 211
4.2. Aspirations Towards Worlding Practices .................................................................................................................. 214
4.3. Societal Trajectory Toward Modernism: The Sum of Individual Transitions ............................................ 216
5. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 221

xiii
Chapter 7. Productive Frictions and Urbanisms in Transition ................................................ 224
1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 224
2. Summary of the Findings ................................................................................................................. 225
3. Theoretical Contribution: Productive Frictions and Socio-Spatial Inclusiveness ........ 228
3.1. Production Frictions and the Relationship between Mobility and Street Life .......................................... 228
3.2. Relevance of the Concept for Analyzing the Production of Inclusive Urban Spaces ............................... 232
4. Planning for Productive Frictions ................................................................................................. 233
4.1. Friction Planning Principles ............................................................................................................................................ 233
4.2. Planning Lessons from Ho Chi Minh City for Ho Chi Minh City ........................................................................ 235
4.1. Planning Lessons from Ho Chi Minh City to Other Cities .................................................................................... 238
Appendices .................................................................................................................................................. 241
1. Supplements to Chapter 2 – Mobility Interview Guide .......................................................... 241
2. Supplements to Chapter 4 – The Perceived Space of Urban Mobility ............................... 250
2.1. Understanding Multimodal Behaviors ........................................................................................................................ 250
2.2. Robustness Checks: Poisson Regression Results ................................................................................................... 253
2.3. OLS Regression Results with Interaction Term ...................................................................................................... 262
3. Supplements to Chapter 5 – The Lived Space of Urban Mobility ........................................ 263
3.1. Street Uses: Counting Procedure Based on Video Data ....................................................................................... 263
3.2. Towards a Measurement of Productive Frictions .................................................................................................. 265
References ................................................................................................................................................... 271

xiv
List of Tables
Table 1 – Open Street Map’s Street Typology ....................................................................................... 47
Table 2 – Proposed Street Typology ...................................................................................................... 50
Table 3 – Selected Street Names and Characteristics ............................................................................. 52
Table 4 – Frequency of Street Observations by District and by Type .................................................... 53
Table 5 – Description of the Sample of Interviewees ............................................................................. 56
Table 6 – Summary of the Methodology ................................................................................................ 59
Table 7 – Frequency of Causes of Road Accidents ................................................................................ 75
Table 8 – Summary of Policy Orientations Supporting the Mobility Transition ................................... 85
Table 9 – Typology of Trip Purposes based on Primerano et al.’s (2008) Classification .................... 100
Table 10 – Mean Population and Street Density by Type (Unit: Residential Zone, N = 254) ............. 105
Table 11 – Travel Behaviors by Usual Transportation Mode .............................................................. 108
Table 12 – Socio-demographic Characteristics by Usual Transportation Mode .................................. 110
Table 13 – OLS Results (Specifications 1.A. and 1.B), Dependent Variable: Optional Trips ............. 115
Table 14 – OLS Results (Specification 1. B) with different Types of Trips as Dependent Variables . 119
Table 15 – OLS Results (Specification 2) with Focus on Street Density Effect, by Type of Street .... 123
Table 16 – Net Effect by Mode and by Quintile of Residential Streets Density (Specification #3) .... 127
Table 17 – Perceived Advantages and Disadvantages for Different Modes ........................................ 142
Table 18 – Snippets of Street Life: Bonds of Conviviality and Solidarity Among Street Users ......... 151
Table 19 – Comparison of Street Activity Variables Along Two Sides of a One-Way Corridor ........ 156
Table 20 – Number of Vendors by Type of Merchandise in the Nguyễn Đình Chiểu Open Market ... 158
Table 21 – Circumstances of Use for Different Modes ........................................................................ 163

xv
Table 22 – Three Items Composing the Productive Friction Construct ............................................... 172
Table 23 – Street Uses by Level of Friction and Type of Streets – Descriptive Statistics ................... 180
Table 24 – Difference in Means between Phu My Hung and Other Mixed-Use Streets ...................... 183
Table 25 – Classification of Three Profiles Supporting the Motorbike Ban ........................................ 190
Table 26 – Modal Share by Trip for Different Professional Categories of Multimodal Individuals ... 251
Table 27 – Trip Purpose by Mode for Multimodal Users .................................................................... 252
Table 28 – Poisson Results (Specifications 1.A. and 1.B), Dependent Variable: Optional Trips ........ 253
Table 29 – Poisson Results (Specification 1. B) with different Trip Types as Dependent Variables .. 256
Table 30 – Poisson Results (Specification 2) with Focus on Street Density Effect by Type of Street 258
Table 31 – OLS Results (Specification 3) with Interaction Term ........................................................ 262
Table 32 – Variables included in a tentative composite measurement of actualized frictions ............. 269

xvi
List of Figures
Figure 1 – Productive Frictions: An Ecological Approach to Street Spaces .......................................... 31
Figure 2 – Theoretical Framework: The Production of New Mobilities ................................................ 39
Figure 3 – Study Area ............................................................................................................................. 45
Figure 4 – Map of Selected Street Segments .......................................................................................... 51
Figure 5 – Example of side video (top) and traffic video (bottom) ........................................................ 54
Figure 6 – Urbanization and GDP Per Capita Trends in Vietnam (1984-2014) .................................... 63
Figure 7 – Images of Rapid Urban Development ................................................................................... 66
Figure 8 – Rising Demand for Urban Mobility in Ho Chi Minh City (all modes) 2000-2017 .............. 67
Figure 9 – Car Sales Forecasts (2016) .................................................................................................... 71
Figure 10 – Actual Car Sales 2015-2019 ................................................................................................ 71
Figure 11 – A Motorbike in a Very Narrow Alleyway .......................................................................... 72
Figure 12 – Cars Congestion on a Major Boulevard .............................................................................. 72
Figure 13 – Map of Ho Chi Minh City's Six Metro Lines (Planned) ..................................................... 82
Figure 14 – Counts of Street Uses at Night on Nguyễn Huệ Street ....................................................... 91
Figure 15 – Nguyễn Huệ Pedestrian Street ............................................................................................. 92
Figure 16 – Images of the Conceived Space of Urban Mobility ............................................................ 94
Figure 17 – Modal Split: Commuting (Left) as opposed to Usual (Right) Transportation Mode ........ 103
Figure 18 – Density of Residential (Narrow Mixed-Use) Streets in Ho Chi Minh City ...................... 126
Figure 19 – Geovisualization of Net Mode Effect by Level of Residential Street Density ................. 129
Figure 20 – Motorbike Parking: A Ubiquitous but Contested Use of Sidewalk Spaces ...................... 141
Figure 21 – Motorbuying: Another Ubiquitous but Contested Practice ............................................... 143

xvii
Figure 22 – A Street Vendor between Formality and Informality ........................................................ 147
Figure 23 – Two Locations of a Modern Chain of Coffeeshops .......................................................... 148
Figure 24 – One Example of Family-Run Coffeeshop on Phan Xich Long ......................................... 149
Figure 25 – Nguyen Kiem One-Way Corridor ..................................................................................... 156
Figure 26 – Screenshot of the Nguyễn Đình Chiểu Open Market ........................................................ 159
Figure 27 – Modal Split in the Nguyễn Đình Chiểu Open Market ...................................................... 159
Figure 28 – Four Street Vending Location Tactics to Catch Different Flows ...................................... 160
Figure 29 – Three People on One Motorbike: An Example of Motorbike Overcrowding ................... 164
Figure 30 – Causal Relationships between Mode Choice and Social Interactions ............................... 167
Figure 31 – Illustrations of Different Street Types ............................................................................... 173
Figure 32 – Example of Regulated Street Food Market in District 1 ................................................... 202
Figure 33 – Selection of Street Vendors ............................................................................................... 207
Figure 34 – Dialectical Relationships between the Four Spaces of Urban Mobility ............................ 214
Figure 35 – Personal Mobility Transitions for the Upper Middle Class .............................................. 220
Figure 36 – Motorbike Mobility and Productive Frictions ................................................................... 230
Figure 37 – Non-motorized Mobilities and Productive Frictions ......................................................... 230
Figure 38 – Transit-based Mobility and Productive Frictions .............................................................. 231
Figure 39 – Car Mobility and Productive Frictions .............................................................................. 231
Figure 40 – Friction Planning: Planning for Various Levels of Friction .............................................. 235
Figure 41 – Illustration of the Street Use Counting Methodology ....................................................... 263

xviii
Abstract
Drawing on a case study of Ho Chi Minh City where the vast majority of the population ride
motorized two-wheelers (motorbikes), this dissertation advances a new way of thinking about the
urbanism of street life as the result of a “productive friction” between traffic flows and the built
environment. Motorbikes are to Ho Chi Minh City what gondolas are to Venice, that is, a contextually
appropriate transportation mode. Not only does the motorbike flow fit the urban form; it also shapes
street urbanism as its friction with the built environment produces opportunities for social interactions.
Therefore, what are the consequences for the future of urbanism of the shift promoted by policy from
motorbike- to car- and possibly transit mobility? This is the overarching question that this dissertation
addresses, using a mixed-methods approach that combines ethnographic fieldwork with multivariate
analyses of a transportation survey. The results show that current transportation policies favoring car-
based frictionless mobility may presage the end of the urbanism for which the city is long known, that
is, its vibrant street life. Furthermore, the on-going mobility transition disproportionately affects the
urban poor, motorbike-dependent individuals and millions of street vendors in particular. The
livelihood of the latter largely depends on the daily commerce with customers on motorbikes. A
transition towards mass transit would sustain street activity as it emerges from transportation flows,
especially if coupled with policies promoting non-motorized and micro mobilities. This dissertation
enables us to think about mobility transitions and the social transformations that ensue, not only in
developing economies but in cities of the Global North as well, as the result of a spatial re-organization
of friction points in the city. The conclusions include recommendations for friction planning as a way
to design and plan for vibrant urbanisms and inclusive urban spaces.

1
Chapter 1. Introduction
1. Topic and Context
If you ever are invited to the house of a friend, a colleague, or an interviewee, whose address in Ho
Chi Minh City includes two or more street numbers separated by a slash symbol, your best option
probably is to go by motorbike. Thus coded, an address means that the house is to be found somewhere
inside the maze of alleyways (hẻm) that fill up the patches of urban fabric seamed together with
straighter streets and boulevards. As Xuân
1
asked me to meet him at his house prior to my interviewing
him on a Sunday afternoon, I had to ride around the block a few times before I finally spotted the
narrow entrance, somewhere on the left side of Võ Thị Sáu, a major one-way corridor that cuts through
District 3 and flows towards the city center. I had the same feeling as I entered the alleyway as when I
stepped in Xuân’s house where his baby girl was napping. Once the threshold passed, the atmosphere
suddenly felt cozier, darker, cooler, and so much quieter. Alleyways are to neighborhoods what
hallways are to houses, and they are barely any wider.
From the house, we walked to the closest coffee shop just a few steps away. In fact, it was more
like Xuân’s neighbor’s bare living room with two coffee tables instead of one and the doors opened
onto the alleyway as a sign that customers, as rare as they may be, were as welcome as the modest
extra income they would bring in. For the two hours that the interview lasted, the owner sat at the other
table reading a newspaper and smoking cigarettes. Only once was he interrupted, by a child who

1
All the names of interviewees are pseudonyms.

2
walked in to buy candy. Meanwhile, Xuân was telling me about his personal trajectories, both his life
journey and yesterday’s itineraries.
Xuân is an average middle-class Vietnamese young man. In his mid-thirties, he is a husband, the
father of two daughters, a keen helper with the household choirs, an IT engineer, and an English-
language learner on his spare time; and to connect the dots of his busy life, he usually rides a
motorbike (xe máy). He blends into the crowd as he rides around. There were more than eight million
of these motorized two-wheelers that go faster than a bicycle but are lighter than a motorcycle on the
streets of Ho Chi Minh City in 2018. That is almost as many motorbikes as there were people living in
the city. Xuân’s motorbike plays a central role in the logistics of his everyday life, but that is not a
permanent state of affairs. When he was a student, he only had a bicycle. In the future, he may be
owning a car. Actually, during the interview, he said he “never considered it.” But in a sense, he
seemed prepared. He already had his car driver’s license.
For the time being, Xuân as well as all the other motorbike users I interviewed seemed rather
content with his transportation mode. “Feeding” (nuôi) a motorbike does not cost much. It is “light,”
“flexible,” and “easy to park.” It enables to stop “anywhere, anytime,” to zigzag through congested
traffic and to ride through the narrowest streets, such as the alleyway that brings Xuân home. People
literally ride motorbikes from the inside of their living room where they park it at night to the entrance
door of any destination without having to walk at all, where walking is considered most inconvenient
in this hot, humid and crowded city. Motorbikes do not only fit within dense neighborhoods and small
living quarters, but also in most families’ budget constraints. And in terms of mobility, that is, the
ability to move (El-Geneidy & Levinson, 2006), in Ho Chi Minh City, nothing equals the motorbike.
The day before the interview, Xuân had gone to ten different places. He went out to eat a bún bò Huế
(beef noodle soup) for breakfast and then to hang out at the park with his family; he shopped at three

3
different stores, including one motorbike repair shop and a supermarket; he met up with a friend; and
on his way back, he made more purchases from four street vendors – each one selling a different
ingredient: rice, vegetables, meat, tofu. When buying from these vendors, he did not even need to get
off his motorbike. He just paused for a moment, stepped one foot on the ground, made his purchase,
and kept going.
As I met with Xuân’s wife for lunch a few months later (she is a close friend of mine), she told me
that they had paid a deposit to be one of the first owners of a Vinfast. The Vietnamese carmaker had
just made its global debut at the Paris 2018 Motor Show where the first two models were unveiled. The
event was covered in the news as a major milestone in Vietnam’s development. Now that Vinfast was
extending presales around the country, Xuân and his wife shared the motivations of others who
explained to me why they bought their first car: for the kids to be safer in traffic, to put a windshield
and a filter between themselves and the exhaust pipes of motorbikes, to enjoy the comfort of air
conditioning, and simply because they could afford it. That is, in sum, a range of totally understandable
personal motivations. However, I could not help but remember Xuân’s reaction when I asked him
whether he could have reached all ten places he had gone that day if he had been driving a car. He
pondered for a minute, going in his mind over yesterday’s routes, before coming to the conclusion: “I
guess not.” The reasons were quite simple. Either the streets were not wide enough, or “there [was]
nowhere to park.” He added, slightly confused, “I never thought about that. […] I guess I’ll have
breakfast at home then, and I’ll buy everything from [the supermarket].” I could not help but wonder:
What will become of the soup vendor, the mechanic, the vendors of rice, vegetables, meat, tofu, and all
the other street vendors, as more and more people, like Xuân, are shifting to the car?
Xuân’s everyday life experience speaks to three interrelated distinctive features of Ho Chi Minh
City’s contemporary urbanism, in the broadest sense of the term, that is, a “way of life” (Wirth, 1938).

4
First, motorbikes are to Ho Chi Minh City what automobiles are to Los Angeles, gondolas to Venice,
the Metropolitan to Paris, and bicycles to Copenhagen. They are the transportation signature of the
city. They provide a contextually appropriate mode of transportation (Hansen, A., 2017a; Truitt, 2008).
Second, the network of narrow alleyways that cut through the densest neighborhoods constitute the
living environment of 85% of all urban dwellers (Gibert & Son, 2016). Finally, as people travel
between the anchors of their everyday life, on motorbikes for the vast majority (83%) (JICA, 2016),
they take part in a particularly active and vibrant street life that blurs all boundaries between private
and public uses of public spaces (Drummond, 2000; Gibert, 2014; Gibert, 2018a; Kim, Annette Miae,
2015; Piazzoni & Jamme, forthcoming). At any time of the day, on the sidewalks and in the alleyways,
people are making purchases, eating, drinking, cooking, vending, exercising, socializing, praying,
among many other things, thus generating in street spaces a myriad of social interactions that bring
people together.
Therefore, how will the urban way of life, or urbanism, be transformed as more and more people
shift away from motorbike mobility and adopt the automobile, and possibly, mass transit? This
question is a major motivation of this dissertation. There were about one million cars registered in
2016 (Kim, Hun Kee, 2017) and car ownership rates have risen by 20% per year since then
(MarkLines, 2020). Meanwhile, massive transportation investments are superimposing on the existing
urban fabric not only a car-oriented infrastructure but also a new urban rail transit system. Yet, as of
today, there is no viable mass transit alternative available – two metro lines are currently under
construction, but they are expected to meet at most 2-3% of the demand for urban mobility by 2025
(Anh, July 19, 2019). As alleyways are inaccessible to cars for the most part, will new car owners
move away from the typical narrow townhomes nested in the alleyways of the densest central
neighborhoods and prefer the new apartment buildings with underground parking garages in the

5
periphery? How will their shopping and leisure habits evolve? Will they use public spaces as
intensively and frequently as they do nowadays? To what extent will the extinction of motorbikes
affect Ho Chi Minh City’s vibrant and inclusive street life? What will be the consequences for the
poor, especially urban migrants, whose livelihood depends on street vending opportunities and on the
connection to the motorbike flow?
2. Focus and Scope
2.1. Mobility Transition and Urbanism in Transition
This dissertation is about the future. It is about the transformations of urbanism that the on-going
mobility transition from motorbikes to cars and possibly transit brings about in Ho Chi Minh City,
against the backdrop of rapid economic development. Originally defined as a socio-technical shift from
carbon-based to non-motorized mobilities, a mobility transition is more than a modal shift; it is a
transformative process from one “particular moment of assembled technologies, infrastructures,
societies, and economies” to another (Temenos et al., 2017). The conversation on mobility transitions
was initiated by scholars of the new mobilities paradigm (Sheller & Urry, 2006) – sociologists and
human geographers for the most part – interested in the meanings and politics of mobility. It is
anchored in the multi-level perspective interested in the non-linear process supporting the
decarbonization of (Western) societies. New mobilities scholars raised the question of “how this
process will evolve. […] What kind of societal changes will this entail?” (Temenos et al., 2017), a
question which, I argue, is equally relevant in the context of a “reverse mobility transition,” towards
car-based mobility.

6
While drawing on the mobility transition literature, this dissertation informs it in several ways, by
engaging in a conversation with urban design and land use and transportation scholarships (Chapter 2).
But most importantly, in addition to the question of “what societal changes will [Ho Chi Minh City’s
mobility transition] entail” (emphasis added), a research project in urban planning and development
such as this dissertation requires to focus at least in equal measure on its spatial consequences as well.
What kind of socio-spatial changes will the mobility transition of Ho Chi Minh City bring about? That
is the overarching question I address in this dissertation.
2.2. A Multi-Scalar and Case Study Approach
I propose to develop a case study of the mobility transition of Ho Chi Minh City and to adopt a
multi-scalar approach, both socially and spatially. From a social perspective, I articulate the class
dynamics involved in the process with the individual experiences of the mobility transition. In the
spirit of Amartya Sen’s emphasis on the human experience of development to understand how the
development process shapes inequalities (Sen, 1992; Sen, 2001), I focus on the human experience of
the mobility transition to better grapple with the structural transformations associated with the process.
As Manuel Castells and Pekka Himanen (2014) noted, development should be about enhancing not
only material wealth but also people’s well-being and sense of dignity as human beings. I contend that
the same is true of a mobility transition. It should enhance not only urban mobility but also the well-
being and the sense of dignity of urban dwellers. Moreover, I approach the structural transformations
of social relations through the lens of everyday social interactions between individuals, especially in
public spaces. I focus on the interactions between street users of all walks of life – students riding the
bus or a bicycle, average residents riding motorbikes, upper-middle-class and the urban elite driving

7
private automobiles, small business owners and street vendors whose livelihood depends on the “daily
commerce” (Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin, 1986) of passers-by.
From a spatial perspective, I articulate observations at the city-, neighborhood-, and street levels.
The picture is very dynamic. Rapid urban and economic development constitutes the backdrop of the
mobility transition which involves major spatial transformations. I see this changing context as a
window of opportunity to look at the interplay between mobilities and human activities citywide, but
also in different parts of the city with varying levels of modern planning and development, and finally
on a selection of streets in these different urban environments. I posit that the streets are where
mobility problematics meet public sphere challenges. They are the ultimate “places of movement”
(Sheller & Urry, 2006) at the intersection of their two functions as traffic corridors and public spaces
(Gibert, 2018). Therefore, much of the attention in this dissertation is devoted to a close examination of
the relationships between mobilities and social interactions in street spaces.
Finally, as mentioned above, this dissertation is all about the future, but only so much can be said
about the future through empirical research. Therefore, to inform the future transformations that a
reverse mobility transition brings about, I resolve to teasing out the mechanisms through which
mobilities explain the urbanism of the present in order to anticipate how these will play out as the
result of a change in mobilities.
3. Relevance and Importance
3.1. Mobility Transitions: A Global Phenomenon
All cities around the world have experienced one or more mobility transitions throughout history. I
adopt here an extended definition of the concept of mobility transition, to include transitions in both

8
directions: away and towards carbon-based mobilities. Northern cities went from the horse car to the
automobile during the industrialization of the late 19
th
– early 20
th
century. They are now struggling to
shift away from automobile dependence. Despite their promises from a sustainability perspective, new
mobility services that have appeared faster than ever in recent years – bike sharing systems, on-
demand ride-hailing services, dockless electric bikes and scooters, and so on – are deemed disruptive
as they challenge existing urban transportation systems. Meanwhile, many cities of the developing
world are rapidly shifting away from non-motorized mobility towards what Urry (2004) calls the
“system of automobility,” where the automobile – its production, consumption, and associated
individualistic lifestyle – is deemed to play a critical role in the transformation of the political economy
and in the globalization process. Vietnamese cities are no exception in this regard, except that the
motorization trend has happened in two stages: first, from biking to the motorbike after the
liberalization of the economy in the early 1990s, and now, from the system of “moto-mobility”
(Hansen, 2017) to that of “automobility” in the globalization era.
Several studies have made the case that modern urban environments supportive of car traffic act
against the system of social interactions that shape inclusive urban spaces while others have
established the correlations between non-motorized transportation and vibrant street spaces.
Nevertheless, there has not been any study so far that has grappled with and generalized the
mechanisms through which different forms of mobility relate to social interactions, and how this
relationship informs socio-spatial change. Such an understanding holds potential for transportation
planners and urban designers to shape inclusive urban spaces as they promote a mobility transition,
whether it is away from automobile dependence as attempted in cities of the Global North, or towards
motorization as it has been the case in most cities of the Global South.

9
3.2. Productive Frictions and the Production of New Mobilities
The productive friction concept is the main theoretical contribution of this dissertation. It results
from minute observations of street dynamics today, of the micro social and spatial arrangements of
street spaces at the intersection of mobilities and activities. The concept stems from a case study in Ho
Chi Minh City of the role of motorbike mobility in shaping vibrant and inclusive street spaces. An
example of “provincialized” knowledge (Roy, 2013), it can be generalized to other contexts in order to
analyze and organize the relationship between flows and activities. I call productive frictions the
opportunities for social interactions that result from the contact of an adhesive flow of
movement, such as motorbike mobility in Ho Chi Minh City today, with the built environment it
traverses. The more productive frictions, the more active and inclusive the street spaces. I argue that
the interplay of people, places, and movement characteristics generates varying levels of friction in
urban spaces, and that such an understanding can help anticipate, and therefore plan for the socio-
spatial distribution of social interactions. Planning for productive frictions holds promises for
transportation planners and urban designers to create inclusive urban spaces in shaping the spaces of
urban mobility.
Productive frictions are at the core of the lived space of urban mobility in the theoretical
framework I advance to investigate the production of new mobilities. This framework is an application
to the field of urban mobility of Henri Lefebvre’s (1974) theory of the production of space (Chapter 2).
The power relations embedded in a mobility transition are thus addressed through the lens of the
dialectical relationships between the conceived, perceived, and lived spaces of urban mobility. The
three Lefebvrian poles of the proposed framework motivate the specific research questions and the
organization of the findings.

10
4. Research Questions
The overall objective of this dissertation is to analyze how a mobility transition relates to the
transformation of urbanism. In particular, in the case of Ho Chi Minh City, I investigate the socio-
spatial transformations that the mobility transition brings about, in terms of modernization of the urban
space, changes in the urban way of life, and the human experience of urban and economic
development. Specifically, the dissertation addresses the following research questions:
• In the conceived space of urban mobility, what role does transportation planning and policy
play in explaining the on-going mobility transition in Ho Chi Minh City? More specifically,
what are the rationale and narratives driving the mobility transition? What future of urbanism is
being projected and can be anticipated?
• In the perceived space of urban mobility, to what extent do different mobility practices relate to
other everyday urban practices? In particular, how do different mobility practices relate to the
production of social interactions in the city?
• In the lived space of urban mobility, how do mobility practices inform the active uses of public
spaces, such as street vending? More specifically, under what circumstances and through what
mechanism do mobility practices shape inclusive street spaces, that is, public spaces that are
truly accessible to everyone and where people of different backgrounds come together as a
public? As mobility practices evolve, what consequences can be anticipated in terms of socio-
spatial inclusiveness?
• How does people’s lived experience – past, present, and anticipated – of the urban way of life
relates to the conceived, perceived, and lived spaces of urban mobility?

11
5. Overview of the Structure
Chapter 2 – Re-Thinking Street Spaces from the Perspective of Flows – promotes a movement-
based perspective on street spaces as a complement to the conventional place-based paradigm of urban
design and land use and transportation scholarships. Based on a literature review, I borrow from
sociologists and human geographers’ new mobilities paradigm (Sheller & Urry, 2006) according to
which mobility practices are imbued with meanings and representations. I argue that re-thinking street
spaces from the perspective of flows enables to understand the production of everyday social
interactions in public spaces at the intersection of movement, places, and people. The chapter also
introduces the theoretical framework, research questions and objectives, and methodology.
Chapter 3 – The Conceived Space of Urban Mobility – addresses the perspective of local planners
and decision-makers as they shape future mobilities and urban spaces. It builds on a review of urban
policies driving the mobility transition. It reveals a narrative of progress and development that gives
priority to movement over social interactions on the streets, and to transportation modes considered
more modern than motorbikes, typically, cars and mass transit.
Chapter 4 – The Perceived Space of Urban Mobility – addresses the mobility practices of Ho Chi
Minh City residents as they connect the anchors of their everyday life. Regression analyses of travel
survey data collected from a large-N representative sample of the city’s population show that, all else
being equal, motorbike users engage significantly more in discretionary activities with great
interactional content – shopping, eating out, visiting friends and relatives, and so forth – than users of
any other transportation mode. While supporting the hypothesis that motorbike mobility is most
conducive to such activities, the findings of this chapter raise another hypothesis: that motorbike use is
a great contributor to the street life of Ho Chi Minh City, considering that such socializing and
transactional activities are likely to occur in public space. Not only is this hypothesis supported by the

12
findings of the next chapter, but the analysis also provides explanations. It sheds light on the causal
mechanisms embedded in the significant relationship highlighted in this chapter.
Chapter 5 – The Lived Space of Urban Mobility is the core chapter of this dissertation. It is
centered on the notion of productive frictions. Drawing on more than sixty interviews with residents,
street vendors, and store owners, and more than 300 systematic video recordings of street life, ground
up theorizing leads to a definition of productive frictions as the opportunities for social interactions that
result from the contact of an adhesive flow of movement with the built environment it traverses. I
identify motorbike mobility as particularly conducive to productive frictions, and therefore critical to
the survival of millions of small businesses and street vendors. Because of the ease of stopping on a
whim and parking in tight spaces, motorbike mobility enables a range of vending, shopping, and
socializing practices on which millions of urban dwellers depend for their livelihood and quality of
life, especially the urban poor. In contrast, car drivers and transit users do not engage as much in social
interactions in street spaces for reasons that are mostly related to their constrained mobility and not so
much due to self-selection. In other words, car and transit use are not as conducive to productive
frictions as motorbike use; but walking and biking, which are not common practices in Ho Chi Minh
City, would be at least as supportive of productive frictions.
Chapter 6 – The Envisioned Space of Urban Mobility – articulates the dialectical relationships
between the conceived, perceived, and lived spaces of urban mobility. In particular, it solves the
apparent contradiction between the ban on motorbikes promoted in the conceived space and the sizable
public support this policy receives, including from those whose livelihood would be most negatively
impacted. There is indeed a tension between the support for the ban and the convenience and
widespread use of motorbikes in the current situation. Public support comes from the fact that street

13
users of all walks of life share common aspirations to modern development, where the development of
the self is expected to occur in a frictionless urban space.
Finally, Chapter 7 – Productive Frictions and Urbanisms in Transition – summarizes the lessons
learnt from this case study in Ho Chi Minh City. I promote an understanding of mobility transitions as
a spatial re-distribution of “friction points” in the city, which, I argue, is a critical mechanism in the
socio-spatial production of inclusive urbanisms. As car flows are not conducive to productive frictions
in the context of Ho Chi Minh City, a transition towards automobile dependence is likely to remove
millions of opportunities for people to get together and make a living from the connection to the street.
In contrast, a transition towards transit-based mobility (coupled with walking) may preserve more
friction points but may lead to a spatial re-distribution of friction points around transit nodes. The
productive friction concept, a contribution to the fields of urban design and transportation planning in
particular, is presented as an example of theorizing the “21
st
-century metropolis” from the Global
South (Roy, 2013). Friction planning in practice is promoted as a way to conceive, plan, and
implement transportation networks as a system of social interactions. The productive friction concept
therefore speaks to the normative goals of fostering inclusive public spaces and equitable access to
opportunities. It holds promises not only for cities of the Global South transitioning towards
motorization, but also for car-dependent cities of the Global North that seek to re-inject some friction
in their transportation systems.
6. COVID-19, Mobility, and the City
Before delving into the core of this dissertation, I cannot help but mention what the world was
going through at the time of writing. I wrote most of this dissertation in the midst of a global pandemic.
When California issued the first state-at-home order in the United States on March 19
th
, 2020, to slow

14
down the spread of COVID-19, I felt extremely privileged for being one of the very few people for
whom practically, nothing would really change in the short-term. I was fortunate enough to have a
stipend guaranteed at the end of the month. I had already spent weeks confined in the walk-in closet of
my Koreatown studio where I have a cozy office space set up, and I had not planned on leaving my
closet until the dissertation is completed. Yet, naturally it made a huge difference to go from being
confined out of choice and convenience to staying at home for public health reasons. It made a huge
difference to know that outside my window, millions of people were getting sick, losing their jobs,
their homes, thousands were dying, and the world was on the brink of the greatest economic crisis
since the Great Depression. I will admit that this turn of events put a serious dent in my productivity
for a little while. I felt overwhelmed by a sense of unimportance. What was the point of writing about
mobility, street life, and social interactions, when these things had to be avoided at all costs, when
staying put and social distancing had become an absolute necessity for saving lives?
Or, another way of looking at it, was that suddenly, millions of people around the world were
experiencing what I had been thinking and writing about for five years: there is an intrinsic relationship
between mobility and socializing, and when this relationship is broken, the essence of cities is
challenged, and the most vulnerable ones teeter on the brink of exclusion. One month after the
outbreak in China, more than half of all household businesses were shutting down in Hanoi, even
though there were very few COVID-19 cases reported in Vietnam. Such businesses, along with street
vendors, drive the country’s development forward as they employ millions of low-income urban
residents and contribute the second largest share of GDP after agriculture. As people were simply not
moving around as much, not stopping as often to eat and drink and socialize on the sidewalks as they
typically do, life in the city was shutting down. Everywhere around the world, stay-at-home orders hurt
small business most immediately. Millions of people whose livelihoods depends on others’ ability to

15
move, that is, mobility, were losing their jobs. There is indeed an intrinsic relationship between
mobility, social interactions, and structural power dynamics, which I have felt even more compelled to
write about in the context of COVID-19.

16
Chapter 2. Re-thinking Street Spaces from the Perspective of Flows:
Literature Review, Theoretical Framework, and Methodology
How to arrange for the harmonious co-existence, in street spaces, of vehicular traffic, pedestrian
movement, and street activity? This is a deeply rooted and arguably unresolved planning conundrum
that speaks to a range of issues at the core of the discipline, that of safety and public health,
sustainability, and inclusiveness. First, in the review section of this chapter, I engage with various
strands of literature that have tackled this vexing issue with varying levels of emphasis on either the
mobility or the activity uses of the street. These writings span the fields of urban design, mobility and
accessibility, and land use and transportation. I argue that conventional knowledge on the street as
public space has internalized some dichotomies between what has often been depicted as incompatible:
traffic and street life, motorized and non-motorized mobility, congestion and sociability, in short,
between traffic flows and street activity. Against this backdrop, the streets of Ho Chi Minh City may
appear quite idiosyncratic at a first glance, considering how they typically support both vibrant and
inclusive street life, and abundant flows of private motorized mobility. The question then arises of
whether the case of Ho Chi Minh City is indeed peculiar and atypical, or instead, suggestive of a
symbiotic relationship between traffic flows and street activity that may have remained overlooked in
the literature so far. I argue the latter in this dissertation.
Second, I borrow from the network society theory and the new mobilities paradigm to show how a
movement-based perspective on street spaces, as opposed to the conventional place-based approach of
transportation and urban design scholars, can help understand the relationship between mobility and
social relations. Third, I advance a theoretical framework that is an application of Henri Lefebvre’s
(1974) theory of the production of space to the field or urban mobility. The research questions

17
addressed in this dissertation derive from the proposed framework. It enables to articulate the
transformations of street spaces in the lived space with that of lifestyles in the perceived space and the
mobility transition promoted in the conceived space of urban mobility. Finally, the last section
describes the data and mixed-methods approach supporting the empirical analyses of the next chapters.
1. Literature Review: The Dichotomic Functions of Street Spaces
1.1. The Dichotomy between Public and Private Realm
The Street: The Quintessential Public Space
A major premise of this dissertation is that the “daily commerce” (Bruner et al., 1986) of people on
the streets is of critical importance for cities to be safe, cohesive, and inclusive. Jane Jacobs’ (1961)
seminal book, The Death and Life of American Cities, and her description of the “daily ballet of
Hudson street” (p. 54) in 1950s’ Greenwich Village in New York City remain probably one of the
most vivid accounts of the mixture of activities, sounds, colors, rhythms, ambiences, and most
importantly, human interactions that take place on the sidewalks of a lively neighborhood. She posits
the uses of sidewalks as exemplary of the “peculiar nature of cities,” by which being in the presence of
strangers yields a sense of safety as opposed to discomfort or danger. The notion of “eyes on the
streets” (Jacobs, 1961: 64) indeed implies that people keep an eye on each other. Furthermore,
residents and passers-by are able to go about their private life in the anonymity that cities afford while
constantly generating contact with others. Strangers are not complete strangers but semi-strangers.
Strollers, neighbors, shop-owners, customers get to see each other on a regular basis as they go about
their daily routines. They might nod as they recognize each other, wave, or exchange a few words.
They might not recognize each other but still be able to situate, imagine and relate to a certain extent to

18
the life circumstances of others. From there grows a mutual understanding of each other’s role and
situation, trust between individuals and ultimately, tolerance within a group.
The tolerance, the room for great differences […], are possible and normal only when streets of
great cities have built-in equipment allowing strangers to dwell in peace together on civilized
but essentially dignified and reserved terms (Jacobs, 1961; p. 72).
By “built-in equipment,” Jane Jacobs means the sidewalks. It took three decades for her ideas to
become mainstream in architecture, urban design, and sociology. The idea is now entrenched that
streets and sidewalks are “the main public spaces of a city, […] its most vital organs” (Jacobs, 1961; p.
29), the “quintessential public space” (Mehta, V., 2013), “the most important and the most overlooked
public space” (Kim, 2015). Public space is the physical space in which Habermas’ (1991) concepts of
civility and public realm are embodied. It is “the common ground […] that binds a community” (Carr,
Francis, Rivlin, & Stone, 1992) through a sense of belonging, not only to a place, but also to a group.
Public space in the elementary socializing space. Drawing on Goffman’s (2008) observations of
individual behaviors in public space, Lofland (1998) argues that two strangers gazing at each other on
opposite sidewalks are engaging in a behavior that is as social in nature as an intimate conversation
between two lovers.
On the Role of Commercial Activity and the Blurry Boundary Between Public and Private
Scholars have recognized the importance of sidewalks for facilitating tolerance and socio-economic
integration, provided that they are truly inclusive, that is, accessible to everyone and conducive to daily
encounters with the other. After observing and working for several years with booksellers on the
sidewalks of Greenwich Village, black and homeless men for the most part, Duneier and Carter’s
(1999; p. 313) depicted the sidewalk as a space that fosters “new kinds of enlightened understanding

19
from the citizenry, leading to greater tolerance and respect.” In that sense, they circled back to Jane
Jacobs’ point on tolerance, but the picture was grimmer. The demographics of the neighborhood had
changed dramatically compared to Jacob’s time forty years earlier – mostly white middle-class at her
time. Access to the street was in the case of Duneier and Carter’s booksellers a matter of survival for
those whose basic needs – for shelter, food, and income – were unmet in the contemporary urban
society. They concluded that “[i]t is vital to the well-being of cities with extreme poverty that there be
opportunities for those on the edge to engage in self-directed entrepreneurial activity” (Duneier and
Carter, 1999; p. 317).
The street is the ultimate public space in the sense that it is the last space accessible to the “class of
people who have nowhere else to be but in public” (Mitchell, 2003), those who have no room of their
own to bed down, no place to work, nowhere to be. In the impoverished urban environments that
Duneier, Carter and others have described (Anderson, 2013; Duneier & Carter, 1999; Mitchell, 2003),
the street is where urban migrants who are unable to access formal employment opportunities find
means of economic survival (Bostic, Kim, & Valenzuela Jr, 2016). Street vending practices are indeed
instrumental for the socio-economic integration of the urban poor both in cities of the Global South
and the Global North alike (Bell & Loukaitou-Sideris, 2014; Bhowmik & Saha, 2012; Donovan, 2008;
Eidse, Turner, & Oswin, 2016; Kim, 2015; Piazzoni & Jamme, forthcoming; Ehrenfeucht, 2016).
Street vending scholars commonly frame vendors’ claims to public space as a matter of “right to the
city,” drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s concept according to which the urban form is the spatial expression
of social relations, and the city the space where class struggle unfolds (Lefebvre, Henri, 1996).
The major difference highlighted in the literature between streets of the Global North and streets of
the Global South lies in the level of regulation and separation between public and private uses of urban
spaces. In cities of the Global North, streets are known for being more regulated than in the Global

20
South. Asian streets in particular have been the object of much attention. Many scholars have shown
interest in the great social and economic diversity they support. Streets and sidewalks have been
described as an extension of people’s private quarters – their house or their store – and characterized
by a blurry boundary between public and private uses (Drummond, 2000; Mateo-Babiano and Ieda,
2007). The street is indeed the stage for mobile, static, private, public, and domestic uses alike,
including vending, meeting, squatting, gossiping, eating, exercising, and so forth (Edensor, 1998; Lisa
B. W. Drummond, 2000; I. Mateo-Babiano, 2009; I. B. Mateo-Babiano & Ieda, 2010). As a result,
Southern streets are known to be much more vibrant and inclusive than most streets in the Global
North. Some urban scholars have questioned whether this was a matter of cultural difference (Anjaria,
2012; Edensor, 1998).
Not only informal street vending but commercial activity in general has been posited to play an
important role in defining active and inclusive urban spaces. This point further contributes to blurring
the lines between public and private realms (Piazzoni & Jamme, forthcoming). The uses of adjacent
private properties lining the sidewalks have received attention as they contribute to shaping socializing
spaces in the city. Oldenburg (1999) focuses on “third places,” that is, places that are neither home nor
work but foster a sense of belonging and community: commercial places such as bars, coffee shops,
and bookstores. Zukin, Kasinitz and Chen (2015) looked at the streets of New York, Shanghai,
Amsterdam, Berlin, Toronto, and Tokyo, and found that commercial places such as art galleries, bars,
and coffee shops participate in the vibrancy of the street but are the expression of two forces that shape
the contemporary urban form in cities around the world, that is, globalization and gentrification. These
observations about the role of commercial uses in shaping the publicness of street spaces raise a critical
question that looms in the background as I go about investigating street activity in Ho Chi Minh City.
Not all social interactions resulting from commercial transactions are equal from the perspective of

21
coming together as a public. There is a major difference between inter-personal human interactions that
are critical to the integration, or even the survival, of vulnerable groups, and impersonal interactions
that are purely restricted to commercial transactions.
What About the Role of Movement in Shaping Public Spaces?
Finally, streets and sidewalks are contested spaces first and foremost because of the tensions
between their two functions as public spaces and transportation networks (Gibert, 2018). While urban
design scholars have shed light on their critical importance as the expression of the public realm,
transportation planners tend to focus on their function as infrastructure (Ehrenfeucht & Loukaitou-
Sideris, 2010). But the planning, design, and regulation of transportation networks has been posited as
an exclusive practice. It is a way of controlling who has access to public space (Blomley, 2007;
Duneier & Carter, 1999). Streets and sidewalks thus are places of tensions between identity and control
(Fyfe, 2006).
As they shape movement on the streets, transportation planners de facto shape public space,
potentially causing irreparable damage to the “publicness” of streets and sidewalks. Only in some
places, in a discontinuous manner, do transportation planners shift lenses and focus primarily on the
public character of urban space, as they strive to activate great public spaces: in “pedestrian pockets”
or “transit oriented developments” (Calthorpe, 1993), on “complete streets” (Golub, 2015; Newsome &
Pleasant, 2014), in “shared spaces” (Hamilton-Baillie, 2008), and so forth. This discontinuous and
localized approach to public space is paradoxical given the fact that, by definition, by shaping
movement as it takes place on the streets, transportation planners are always shaping and reshaping the
most continuous (and largest) public space. There has not been any study so far that has really grappled

22
with the mechanisms through which mobility supports or hinders the formation of vibrant and
inclusive public spaces.
1.2. The Dichotomy between Traffic Flows and Street Life
Non-Motorized Transportation and Active Street Spaces
Yet, land use and transportation as well as urban design scholars have documented the positive
correlation between non-motorized transportation and street and the negative correlation with
motorized transportation. Non-motorized transportation and public transit are commonly associated
with vibrant street urbanisms (Calthorpe, 1993; Ewing, Reid H. et al., 2013; Mehta, Vikas, 2008).
Pedestrian counts are typically used as a proxy for measuring street life and the vibrancy of public
spaces (Gehl & Svarre, 2013; Whyte, 1980). Over the last decade, a growing number of studies has
explored the relationships between streetscape characteristics and pedestrian activity (Boarnet, Marlon
G., Forsyth, Day, & Oakes, 2011; Ewing, Reid & Handy, 2009; Ewing, Reid, Hajrasouliha,
Neckerman, Purciel-Hill, & Greene, 2016; McDonald, 2008; Wang & Cao, 2017) and have found a
positive and significant relationship between street activity and walkability.
In research and in practice, urban design experts therefore focus on pedestrian-oriented designs
when grappling with the vexing problem of activating street spaces. The characteristics of successful
streets as public places have long been identified, where small blocks, a diversity of buildings, street
furniture, transparency (windows), encroachments on the sidewalks by cafes and restaurants, for
example, are known to create more pedestrian-friendly environment supportive of a sense of place and
belonging (Bosselmann, 2012; Jacobs, 1961; Montgomery, J., 1998; Montgomery, John, 1997).
Attempts at “re-inventing the street” (Banerjee, 2001) and activating the street by design have proven
elusive, however. In the context of North-American cities, Banerjee (2001) described the “withering of

23
public space” through the privatization of large public spaces and the “publicization” of private spaces.
He questioned whether the street-like environment of an outdoor mall, for example, although
pedestrian-only, busy, and vibrant, could be considered a public space. He showed the disconnect
between their exclusive nature and the notion of public realm to which public spaces relate.
Cars, Modernity, and the Death of the Street
On the contrary, several studies have made the case that car-oriented modern urban environments
act against the system of social interactions that shape inclusive urban spaces. To cite just a few
examples, Jane Jacobs (1961) most famously warned against the death of American cities as she was
battling Robert Moses’ modernist planning efforts to develop freeways in New York. Anthropologist
James Holston (1989) wrote about the “death of the street” in modernist Brasilia, Anna Grenspan
(2014) about the “vast roads […] devoid of street life” in the new city of Pudong, China. The
modernization of transportation networks is a process that generally aims at taming and bringing order
in a complex, seemingly “messy” environment through modern planning, regulation, and control. It
involves clarifying the blurry boundaries between public and private space, between movement and
non-movement (Gibert, 2018; Hou & Chalana, 2016; M., 2008; Scott, 1998).
When Holston (1989) wrote about the “death of the street,” he referred to the fact that streets were
simply absent of the modernist plan of Brasilia. Instead of streets, there were only roads, that is, spaces
dedicated to movement only. The spaces of commercial activity were disconnected from the spaces of
movement. He showed the failed attempt to have people enter the stores from the parks separating the
roads from the main entrances. But people soon started entering through the backdoors. They turned
the back alleys into streets, that is, places where traffic and activity are enmeshed.

24
As the car had become the ultimate technology of mobility in the United States, Webber (1963)
identified a phenomenon that he called the “community without propinquity.” In the age of
automobiles and sprawling cities, people do not need to share the same spaces anymore to form
communities: “as the transportation-communication technologies change to permit interaction over
greater distance at constant or even at falling costs, […] never has intimacy been so independent of
spatial propinquity" (Webber, 1963).
2
In Vietnam like in other developing countries, as people are
shifting to cars and acquiring the mobility means to travel longer distances to reach people and
destinations of their choice, the idea of the “community without propinquity” raises the hypothesis that
greater connectivity between far-away places may weaken existing ties between strangers and semi-
strangers who nowadays are in constant contact with each other as their paths cross on the streets.
The Antagonism between Traffic Flows and Street Life and the Idiosyncratic Case of Ho Chi Minh
City
If non-motorized and transit-based transportation are key to activating street life, and motorized
transportation act against it, then in many regards, Ho Chi Minh City appears as an idiosyncratic case
that goes against conventional knowledge. As mentioned in introduction, the city supports a
particularly rich, vibrant, and active street life and yet, nobody walks (only 1% of the population
typically travels on foot); rail transit is on the way but not operational yet; and 83% of the population
typically travels by motorbike, a private motorized transportation mode (JICA, 2016). This apparently
idiosyncratic case, and yet not so uncommon compared to other cities of the developing world,

2
Webber observed the “community without propinquity” phenomenon not only at the community scale but also at the regional scale. Car-oriented
infrastructure provide firms or individuals with an unprecedented degree of freedom to choose from a large set of locations separated by long distances.
“[A]t this territorial scale, it is apparent that economic and social propinquity is not dependent upon spatial propinquity” (Webber, 1963).

25
suggests that urban design and transportation scholars may want to pay more attention to the ways in
which different forms of mobility contribute to shaping and preserving the street as quintessential
public space.
In Ho Chi Minh City, like in many other cities, modernization of street spaces is happening, and it
aims at clarifying the boundaries between movement and non-movement. Priority is given to
unimpeded flows, as attested by repeated sidewalk clearing campaigns justified by a need to give
sidewalks back to pedestrians, street widening projects and parking investments motivated by a need to
tackle congestion (Gibert, 2018b). The death of Ho Chi Minh City’s streets may be around the corner.
Harms (2009) has already documented the retreat of street life into airconditioned private spaces
around the Turtle Lake located near several Ho Chi Minh City universities, The Turtle Lake is a small
park that used to be an active public space filled with people – students for the most part – sitting
outside small coffeeshops. Harms shed light on the paradox according which civic life in public space
is slowly disintegrating in the name of a “civilizing process” that justifies clearing the sidewalks of
such street activity.
Such efforts clash with the current situation. Ho Chi Minh City has long been known for its vibrant
street life and for the variegated uses of its street spaces. On the sidewalks she surveyed in Ho Chi
Minh City, Annette Kim (2015, p. 103) found that most of the space that is not reserved for pedestrian
movement is used for motorbike parking (42%), followed by merchandise spillover from conventional
stores (26%), leisure (13%), outdoor sitting from restaurants and informal food vendors (12%), and
other uses such as motorbike taxis and services. Like other Asian cities such as Bandung, Bangkok or
Manila, non-movement has precedence over movement on Ho Chi Minh City’s sidewalks (Mateo-
Babiano, 2010).

26
Re-Thinking Street Spaces in Light of Productive Frictions
The normative idea that streets should be for the people and not for cars is at the core of Northern
discourses on street design and urbanism, sustainable mobility and accessibility, and integrative public
spaces (Cervero, Guerra, & Al, 2017; Jacobs, 1958; Tiwari, R., 2017; Wallström, 2007). I argue that
such a premise has crystallized an antagonism between traffic flows and street life. In a side note of his
seminal work on the public sphere, Habermas (1991) observed that the “technical requirements of
traffic flows” impede “public contacts (...) that could bring private people together.” Indeed, the
conventional approach considers that motorized mobility prevents the formation of streets as active and
inclusive public spaces. I argue that the antagonism between traffic flows and street life and the
established correlations between motorization and street activity limit our understanding of the role of
mobilities in shaping vibrant, active, and inclusive street life.
There is a need for urban planning to overcome the place-based paradigm in which the dichotomy
between movement and non-movement is entrenched and to re-think street spaces at the articulation of
their two functions as transportation network and public spaces. Both transportation planners and urban
designers share an understanding of the streets that give priority to unimpeded traffic flows, even in
their efforts to promote walking and the expected street life that is associated with it. Blomley (2010)
calls this rationality “pedestrianism.”
Pedestrianism understands the sidewalk as a finite public resource that is always threatened by
multiple, competing interests and uses. The role of the authorities, using law as needed, is to
arrange these bodies and objects to ensure the primary function of the sidewalk is sustained:
that being the orderly movement pedestrians from point a to point b (Blomley, 2010; p. 3).
Thus defined, pedestrianism does not differ much from the rationality of transportation engineers
when it comes to traffic flows, as their original concern is to favor unimpeded flows between point a

27
and point b and to limit as much as possible any form of friction along the way. The notion of friction
is typically associated with the negative externalities of poor transportation planning: congestion, or,
worse, accidents. It refers to a force that acts against mobility, that slows traffic down. Friction is to be
avoided at all costs. But the friction could also be seen as a necessary force that enables mobility
(Cresswell, 2010; Cresswell, 2013).
I contend that under certain circumstances, which relate to the characteristics of movement, places,
and people, the friction of movement through the built environment enables activity. I call such a force
the productive friction in this dissertation, by which the contact of a flow of movement with the built
environment generates opportunities for social interactions; therefore, it activates street urbanisms.
Going back to the question about the difference between streets of the Global North and the Global
South, I argue that the key difference lies in the extent to which mobility and activity uses of the streets
are enmeshed, in the level of friction between traffic flows and the built environment. It is not a matter
of unsurpassable cultural difference. It is a question of how transportation behaviors relate to other
behaviors (active uses) supported by street environments, and how, in turn, the sum of behaviors
ranging from mobility to activity patterns shape those environments.
When looking at street environments, I adopt an “ecological viewpoint” to human-environment
interactions as initially promoted by environmental psychologists Roger Barker and his associate
Herbert Wright (Barker, 1968). Such a viewpoint focuses on the interface between patterns of
behaviors and the milieu (or environment) in which they unfold. It is grounded in the notion of
“behavior setting,” of which Wicker (1984; pp. 8-12) summarized the essential features. Behavior
settings are bounded milieus that include both human and non-human components, both actions and
objects, in a “synomorphic” relationship (emphasis added): closely connected, both classes of
components influence each other, so that human behaviors match the milieu in which they take place

28
while reciprocally, the milieu is shaped by human behaviors. Nevertheless, the primary essential
feature of behavior settings – their boundedness: “[t]heir time and place boundaries can be pointed out
precisely” (Wicker, 1984; p. 9) – cannot be attributed to street environments as they do not exist in
isolation from the network to which they belong and from the built environment that surrounds them.
The productive friction concept draws more closely on the ecological approach to transportation
networks promoted by French scholar George Amar’s (1993) and his notion of “adhérence.” The word
translates into “adhesiveness,” “grip,” or “stickiness” and describes what Amar calls the accessibility
of movement. According to Amar, accessibility is not a characteristic of places but one of movement.
Different types of movement have different levels of built-in accessibility depending on whether they
“stick” to the built environment. Walking typically affords the greatest accessibility in the sense that
every step presents an opportunity for the pedestrian to add or change destination. Flying on a plane,
on the contrary, is least adhesive as it only “lands” in the built environment, both technically and
figuratively. Between origin and destination, the flow of air travel is otherwise disconnected from the
built environment so the user on the move has no possibility to interact with it. Antoine Brès (2006)
extended Amar’s ecological approach by focusing on what he calls the riveraineté, or “riparian nature”
(where riparian literally means “along the river”), defined as the intensity of the connection between
transportation flow and the space it traverses. This intensity is determined according to Brès by the
opportunities for stopping, for movement to make a halt in the built environment. As he focuses on
automobile flows in suburban environments, he argues that opportunities for automobile parking create
adhesive points between the flow and the built environment thus generating situations of greater
urbanity.
Amar and his successors thus promote a reverse paradigm compared to transportation scholars’
typical place-based approach. A fundamental premise of transportation research is indeed that urban

29
mobility is a derived demand, a cost to overcome that derives from the need to reach places. Places are
valued because this is where human activities take place, but the space of movement that separates
places has no intrinsic value. Key transportation concepts are place-based by definition. Mobility is the
ability to move between places; accessibility the ease to reach valued destinations; proximity a short
distance between places; and connectivity the ability to connect places (El-Geneidy & Levinson, 2006;
Hansen, W. G., 1959).
Furthermore, going back to human-environment interactions, a major premise of the productive
friction concept is the critical importance of mobility in influencing environmental perceptions. “A city
is sensed in motion” says Kevin Lynch (1960; p. 107) in The Image of the City. The way humans move
through space is indeed a sensory experience (Hiss, 2017) that affects perceptions and cognitive
representations of the built environment. This idea can be found in the urban design literature in the
tradition of Kevin Lynch (Banerjee & Southworth, 1990; Lynch, K. & Appleyard, 1990; Lynch, 1960)
who proposed in his earlier work with Rodwin to analyze the urban form as a combination of “adapted
spaces” and “flow systems” (Lynch & Rodwin, 1958). More recently, the idea re-surfaced although
rather incidentally in the literature on Everyday Urbanism concerned with understanding the city from
the perspective of people’s lived experiences, ordinary uses, and mundane routines. In the introduction
of Everyday Urbanism (Chase, Leighton & Crawford, 1999), Margaret Crawford claims that “the city
of the bus rider or pedestrian does not resemble that of the automobile owner.” In a subsequent chapter,
John Leighton furthers this argument building on the example of two pieces of urban furniture in Los
Angeles: a “giant revolving (winking) chicken head” aimed at catching the attention of automobilists
driving on the freeway, in contrast with a “doggie drinking fountain” on a sidewalk of West
Hollywood for the use of pedestrians or, more likely, their thirsty dog. He writes:

30
Motorists whiz past the sidewalks—they cannot interact tangibly with the streetscape as they
speed by. Pedestrians can participate in their environment on a moment-by-moment basis—
ancillary activities can be easily incorporated into a journey on foot (Leighton, J. in Chase et
al., 2008, p. 111).
In sum, re-thinking street spaces in light of the productive friction concept necessitates to take into
consideration the interface between human behaviors and the milieu in which they take place, the
adherence of movement with the built environment they traverse, and the sensory experience of
movement through the urban space. The premise is that of a synomorphic relationship between a range
of human behaviors that include both mobility and activity patterns, which influence each other, with
the built environment. While street spaces are not considered behavior settings per se for the reason
mentioned above (they are not exactly bounded), the ecological framework I propose to analyze street
spaces (Figure 1) draws on environmental psychologists’ later work on visual perceptions. The
framework is an adaptation of that typically used in child-place interactions studies that build on the
concept of affordances (e.g., Kyttä; 2002). At the interactions between individuals and the environment
is a field of affordances, or actions supporting human lives, as defined by Gibson’s (1979) ecological
approach to visual perceptions. The environment comprises a field of potential affordances, which
individuals perceive (perceived affordances), in which they may engage (utilized affordances) and to
which they can add new affordances (shaped affordances). The process is influenced by individual
needs, preferences, and other characteristics. The major addition I make to this framework adapted to
street environments in particular is the idea that environmental perceptions are influenced by mobility-
related characteristics such as flexibility, speed, rhythm, route, and the experience of movement
(Cresswell, 2006), thus influencing human-environment interactions. The friction of people’s mobility
with the built environment they traverse determines the potential affordances people perceive

31
(perceived affordances) and whether they engage in activities and social interactions on the streets
(utilized affordances).

Figure 1 – Productive Frictions: An Ecological Approach to Street Spaces
(Source: Adaptation of Kyttä, 2002)
1.3. Critical Insights from the Network Society Theory and the New Mobilities Paradigm
Streets as Places of Flows and Spaces of Places
How can re-thinking the streets from the perspective of flows help understand the transformations
that a mobility transition entail? Re-thinking the street from the perspective of flows can be
summarized as looking at street spaces as places of flows. Streets are literally both “spaces of flows”
and “spaces of places” (Castells, 1989). They support vehicular and pedestrian traffic while serving
adjacent places (houses, stores, services, and so forth) and also being a place in and of themselves for

32
the public to get together – a public space. Drawing on the work of sociologist Manuel Castells who
has authored the concepts, the streets lend themselves to analyzing how the interplay between their two
functions as “spaces of flows” and “spaces of places” shapes and reshapes social relations.
Castells’ theory of the network society is an opportune lens through which re-examining
transportation systems, precisely because of their networked nature. It helps evaluate their socio-spatial
impacts, how they shape the urban at the articulation of space, time, culture, economy, and politics. I
build in particular on the physical, spatial and geographic aspects of the network society theory, as first
formulated in The Informational City (Castells, 1989), and then consolidated in The Rise of the
Network Society (Castells, 1996) – the first volume of The Information Age trilogy (Castells, 1996;
Castells, 1997; Castells, 1998).
In his earlier work on the urban question (1977), Castells had highlighted the need to look at urban
transportation as a sociological problematic. He wrote:
[C]irculation in an urban area should be regarded both as an expression of its flow patterns (and
therefore of its structure) and as an essential element in determining its evolution. […] The
study of the system of circulation is systematically transformed into a debate on the means of
transportation. Now it is clear that to oppose the motorcar to public transport in itself, outside a
given situation, is an ideological discussion directly determined by the economic interests
involved. […] A sociological problematic of transportation must resituate the different
technological means in a given social structure, from which they derive their meaning (Castells,
1977; p. 191).
The network society obviously addresses much broader issues that just transportation networks. It
deals with the consequences for humankind of a historical moment, that of a technological revolution
initiated in the 1970s by the rise of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the

33
subsequent state of the world in the “informational age” that supplanted the “industrial age,” and the
transformations of space, time, modes of production, and overall social structure that ensued.
Nevertheless, Castells explains the extent of the structural transformations in the informational age as a
result of the networked nature of ICTs. Several key ideas of the network society theory translate into
theoretical premises for this dissertation, as I investigate the socio-spatial transformation of urbanism
as the result of the networked nature of transportation systems.
First of all, modernity does not result from technological change only, but from its articulation with
cultural, economic and political change. In other words, technological change is not the cause of
structural transformation but is only instrumental in its actualization. Second, as networks expand,
spaces of flows play an increasingly important role in organizing the social structure as individuals and
organizations become increasingly less place-dependent. Therefore, spaces of flows tend to supersede
the historically dominant spaces of places, and socially meaningful places tend to disappear.
Nevertheless, places do not all disappear; as networks co-exist, the places where multiple networks
intersect become increasingly meaningful and powerful nodes. Finally, networks are differentiated,
which supports the culture of autonomy, but also generates unprecedented levels of inequalities.
Networks have indeed the capacity to connect as well as to disconnect, thus re-enforcing pre-existing
power asymmetries, through social fragmentation, disintegration, and then reintegration.
There is a fundamental difference between ICTs and transportation networks though: while ICT
networks have expanded rather autonomously from governments, which contributes to destabilizing
power structures, transportation systems are designed and implemented by government organizations
concerned with controlling the circulation of goods, people, and information across space. This
fundamental difference makes transportation planners accountable for the socio-spatial implications of
transportation networks.

34
Castells’ theory of the network society therefore helps frame my case study in Ho Chi Minh City of
the relationship between transportation networks, street networks in particular, and the socio-spatial
transformations that these entails, in two major ways. I investigate how the technical component of
transportation planning relates to conceptions of progress and modernity embedded in the social
structure. By definition, mobility transitions are a complex process of sociotechnical change, in which
technical change is a necessary but insufficient explanation for larger social, cultural, economic, and
political transformations (see below). Second, I make sure to address the roles of different forms of
mobilities, supported by multiple transportation networks that co-exist and intersect, in order to
investigate how differentiated mobilities relate to fragmentation, disintegration, and reintegration
processes in the social structure. In sum, in the context of a mobility transition, framing street spaces as
places of flows enables to learn about the physical, spatial, economic, sociological, and cultural
implications of changing dynamics between spaces of flows and spaces of places.
The New Mobilities Paradigm
Initiated by Mimi Sheller and John Urry (2006), the new mobilities paradigm has marked a mobile
turn in the social sciences. It followed on earlier work concerned with the structuring effect of the
automobile on societies (Sheller & Urry, 2000; Urry, 2004). In the new mobilities paradigm, mobility
is considered meaningful, as opposed to being thought of as an abstract line between two points on a
map, a derived demand from the need to reach destinations, as it is usually the case in transportation
research. It is conceived as an “entanglement of movement, representation, and practice” (Cresswell,
2010). Mobility is a sensory and a social experience, and therefore should be considered from the
perspective of the people on the move, not that of the locations in which movement lands. The new
mobilities paradigm thus advances a mobile ontology to explore social phenomena, arguing that after

35
the spatial turn of the 1980s, as initiated by Edward Soja (1980) in particular, the social sciences have
remained static and location-based in their way of addressing dynamics of exclusion. In her latest book
Mobility Justice, Sheller (2018) makes the case that by focusing on the spatial distribution of
transportation resources, costs, and opportunities, studies on destination accessibility and
environmental justice have failed to consider the injustices rooted in uneven mobilities. Mobilities are
uneven at all levels, and all levels are interconnected, from everyday bodily moves constrained by
individual capabilities, gender, sexual and racial circumstances, to cross-country migrations bound by
international relations and climate change. Sheller demonstrates how a mobile ontology helps explain
power dynamics in the contemporary world.
As the new mobilities paradigm invites to address social relations from the perspective of
mobilities, the emphasis often tends to be on structural inequalities between social groups, but the
politics of everyday social interactions that are permitted (or not) by mobilities have been overlooked,
as well as the individual experiences of mobilities. I further contend that the sustained effort by the
new mobilities paradigm to supersede the spatial turn by a mobile turn in the social sciences has led to
a situation where the spaces of mobility have now fallen in the background. It seems important,
especially as part of an effort to draw on the new mobilities paradigm to inform planning and
development, to bring the focus back on the social production of “places of movement” (Sheller &
Urry, 2006), as originally conceived in mobility research, at the intersection of movement, space, and
people (Cresswell, 2006; Cresswell, 2016).
Understanding a Mobility Transition from the Perspective of Street Spaces
As mentioned in introduction, “new mobilities” scholars have recently engaged in theorizing
mobility transitions. Temenos, Nikolaeva, Schwanen et al. (2017) define the concept as a process, a

36
shift from one “particular moment of assembled technologies, infrastructures, societies, and
economies” to another, and they ask: “What kind of societal changes will this entail?”
While drawing on the mobility transition literature, this dissertation extends and informs it in
several ways. Most importantly, in addition to the question of “what societal changes will [Ho Chi
Minh City’s mobility transition] entail” (emphasis added), I focus on the spatial consequences as well.
The urban transportation literature has addressed extensively the implications of different mobility
systems for the urban form, where automobile dependence is typically associated with urban sprawl
and its negative externalities such as pollution and congestion, whereas transit-based and non-
motorized mobilities are known to support a denser, more diverse, and more sustainable urban
environment (Boarnet, M. G. & Crane, 2001; Cervero & Kockelman, 1997; Ewing, Reid & Cervero,
2010; Newman & Kenworthy, 1999). As reviewed above, at street level, transportation scholars and
urban designers have related different forms of mobilities with different street environments of varying
levels of vibrancy and inclusiveness.
Second, by focusing on the streets as both “spaces of flows” and “spaces of places,” I bring the
focus back on the “places of movement.” I consider the street space an observatory of the generation of
inequalities at the intersection of their mobile and static uses, of their place, movement, and people
characteristics. I articulate the transformation of street spaces and of the social interactions they
support on an everyday basis with broader trends of socio-spatial change.
Finally, existing mobility transition literature has focused on the promises and challenges of low-
carbon transitions but has yet to address a mobility transition that is happening in reverse, towards
carbon dependence, in the Global South. Geels’ (2002) multi-level perspective on socio-technical
transformations, which looks at the interactions between technological and structural components
explaining the adoption of new technologies, has driven the mobility transition research agenda.

37
Environmental sustainability and the adoption of green technologies have been the primary
motivations for the multi-level framework. Therefore, “new mobilities” studies have investigated
mobility transitions away from automobile dependence, in places like the Netherlands, England,
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (Geels, 2012; Jeekel, H.,
2016; Jeekel, J. H., 2014), but have yet to embrace mobility transitions occurring in the Global South,
towards automobile dependence. To complicate the matter, several transitions may be occurring
concomitantly in a city like Ho Chi Minh City, towards both sustainable and carbon-based mobilities
(Jones, 2016). Yet, little is known about in the developing world mobilities in general (Kwan &
Schwanen, 2016), Asian mobilities in particular (Cresswell, 2016), and transportation studies focused
on the Global South (Cervero & Golub, 2007; Cervero, 2013; Mateo-Babiano & Ieda, 2007; Mateo-
Babiano, 2009) have never embraced the new mobilities paradigm to address the question of social
change.
2. Theoretical Framework and Research Questions
2.1. The Production of New Mobilities: A Lefebvrian Framework
The use of the adjective “socio-spatial” in the overarching question addressed in this dissertation –
What socio-spatial transformations will the mobility transition of Ho Chi Minh City entail? – calls for
a reference to Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre and his theory of the production of space. He posits
spatial production as a social process imbued with the politics of class struggle (Lefebvre, 1974). An
adaptation of this theory to the production of new mobilities serves as a theoretical framework for this
dissertation.

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According to Lefebvre, space is both socially produced (a product) and the means of reproduction
of social relations and productive forces. He sheds light on the dialectical relationships between three
spatial components – the spatial triad. First, the representations of space are the conceived space of
the powerful, the decision-makers, the experts and the technocrats, a space that imposes a certain
“order” through abstract signs and codes (Lefebvre, 1974; p. 43). This space is the dominating space
(p. 48-49) and is embedded in the relations of production. Second, the spatial practice is the perceived
space of the people, the stage of all moves and activities constitutive of everyday life. Lefebvre
exemplifies the spatial practice with the movements between work, private life and leisure (p. 48).
There is a temporality, a corporality, and a sensory experience attached to daily commutes that users
perceive through repeated rhythms and perceptions. This perceived space is then both produced and
reproduced in a dialectical interaction. Through their spatial practice, on the one hand people slowly
produce space by dominating it and appropriating it; on the other hand, they reproduce space through
the continuity and relative cohesion that rhythm and perceptions create between places and spatial
structures (p. 42). Third, the spaces of representations are the lived spaces of the users, artists and
philosophers, as they strive to describe, think, imagine and inhabit space to appropriate it. This space is
made of complex images and symbols that are not necessarily coded (p. 44). It is a dominated space as
well (p. 49). The history of successive spaces of representations can be traced, but they are bound
neither by coherence nor by cohesion (p. 52).
As a theoretical framework, I advance an adapted version of the spatial production theory to address
the production of new mobilities and the social, spatial, and structural changes entailed (Figure 2). I
propose to investigate the on-going mobility transition of Ho Chi Minh City through the lens of the
dialectical relationships between the conceived-, perceived-, and lived spaces of urban mobility. First,
the conceived space of urban mobility is the set of images and narratives that motivate the efforts of

39
planners and decision-makers as they imagine, plan, code and deploy the new mobility means. Second,
the perceived space of urban mobility is the city that people experience and produce through everyday
mobility practices. It is a dominated space in the sense that people’s mobile experiences are determined
by how urban mobility has been planned and implemented in the conceived space. Third, the lived space
of urban mobility is the set of contested uses of street spaces that result from the productive frictions of
transportation flows as they traverse the built environment. Such contested uses involve fleeting social
interactions through which people appropriate public spaces and relate to class dynamics that shape
society. The friction advanced above between mobility and the built environment it traverses is qualified
as productive in the sense that it contributes to the production of new mobilities, and to the production
of new urban spaces.

Figure 2 – Theoretical Framework: The Production of New Mobilities
The proposed framework is instructive in two ways. First, it is a comprehensive use of Lefebvre’s
theory in urban studies. The application to the field of urban mobility restricts the scope of the spatial
production theory in a way that makes it possible to present an empirical analysis of the dialectical (or,

40
more exactly, “trialectical” ot triadic) relationships between all three poles of the triad. Lefebvre’s
theory has served as a theoretical framework in urban studies in the past (Ng, Tang, Lee, & Leung,
2010; Salama & Wiedmann, 2013; Yacobi & Shechter, 2005), but their scope is generally limited to
the dialectical relationships between the lived and the conceived spaces. Second, while the overall
framework aims to tease out the power relations embedded in the production of new mobilities, it
enables to extend the new mobilities paradigm to the multiple scales of analysis mentioned above. The
conceived space is about the planners, the city as a whole, and the future. The perceived space focuses
on people’s everyday mobility practices in relation to their other uses of the city today. The lived also
focuses on the individual level in the present, but with a focus on contested uses of street spaces. As it
articulates individual and societal levels of analysis, this approach also enables to bring forward the
human experience of the production of new mobilities, and of the transformation of urban spaces.
2.2. Research Questions and Objectives
Under the proposed framework, the case study of the mobility transition in Ho Chi Minh City
addresses the following questions and objectives:
• In the conceived space of urban mobility, what type of mobility transition are transportation
policies promoting and implementing in Ho Chi Minh City? More specifically, what are the
rationale and narratives driving the mobility transition? What future of urbanism is being
projected and can be anticipated?
o Enumerate, review, and classify urban transportation policies;
o Elicit the rationale driving these policies, especially the stated development goals and
“images of development” (Banerjee, forthcoming);

41
o Predict implications for future mobilities and depict the implications for the future of
urbanism (meanings, ambiences, organization of urban life);
• In the perceived space of urban mobility, to what extent do different mobility practices relate to
the production of social interactions in the city?
o Describe people’s everyday mobility practices and urban activities in the contemporary
city;
o Examine the distribution of these practices by usual transportation mode;
o Test the hypothesis that the motorbike is the transportation mode that is the best fit in
Ho Chi Minh City’s contemporary urban form, in the sense that if affords the greatest
mobility and supports opportunities to engage in a range of street activities, including
socializing interactions;
o In contrast, test the hypothesis that the car is the transportation mode that is the poorest
fit in the sense that it affords the poorest mobility and fewer opportunities to engage in
street activities.
• In the lived space of urban mobility, how do mobility practices inform the active uses of public
spaces, such as street vending? More specifically, under what circumstances and through what
mechanism do mobility practices shape inclusive street spaces? As mobility practices evolve,
what consequences can be anticipated in terms of socio-spatial inclusiveness?
o Garner evidence of the nature of the relationship between mobility practices and street
life;
o Conceptualize the mechanism – later referred to as productive friction – articulating
individual mobility practices and street activity;
o Outline tools for identifying and measuring productive frictions;

42
o In light of the productive friction concept, specify how different regimes of individual
mobility influence the nature and intensity of street activity;
o Generalize the principle according to which individual mobility relates to the
inclusiveness of street spaces;
o Predict how the on-going mobility transition in Ho Chi Minh City influence future
socio-spatial inclusiveness.
• How does people’s lived experience relate to the conceived, perceived, and lived spaces of
urban mobility?
o From the perspective of mobility, relate people’s individual experiences of past, present,
and anticipated lifestyles with the mobility transition promoted in the conceived space;
o From the perspective of urban activities, explore how different categories of users,
including street vendors, imagine the future of street life and the related transformations
of their lived urban experience;
o Explore the dialectical relationship – tensions, contradictions, complementarities –
between people’s urban experiences and aspirations, and transportation policies’
expected outcomes for the future of urbanism.
• How can transportation planners and urban street designers integrate the productive friction
concept to shape, in practice, new regimes of mobility that are supportive of inclusive street
spaces?
o Draw planning lessons from the case study in Ho Chi Minh City;
o Formulate friction planning recommendations for the mobility transition in Ho Chi
Minh City;
o Assess the generalizability of planning for productive frictions.

43
3. Data and Mixed Methods
The methodology was largely informed by my experience of living and working in Vietnam for six
years, including two years in Ho Chi Minh City (in 2007-2008 and in 2010) and five years in Hanoi
(2010-2015). A mix of methods mobilizing both quantitative and qualitative analytical tools appeared
most appropriate to grapple at once with broad trends of socio-spatial change and the individual
experiences thereof. I build on a rich dataset that includes travel survey data, and self-collected video
recordings of street life, interview data, and participant observations. The study concerns the
metropolitan at large but focuses on other levels of analysis as well, different urban environments (in
different districts), a selection of street spaces belonging to those different environments, and a sample
of more than 60 interviewees.
3.1. Data Collection
Secondary Data
Most of Chapter 3 – The Conceived Space of Urban Mobility – and other sections of the
dissertation focused on the general context draw on secondary data such as development and statistical
indicators available online, existing literature including academic writings and consulting reports, and
newspaper articles.
Household and Travel Surveys
Household and travel survey data supports the quantitative analyses conducted in Chapter 4 – The
Perceived Space of Urban Mobility. The data was collected between January and March 2014 by a
consortium led by ALMEC Corporation, a Japanese consulting firm specialized in transportation
planning and urban & regional development, within the framework of a study titled “Data Collection

44
Survey on Railways in Major Cities in Vietnam.” The Vietnamese Government was the beneficiary of
the study, which was funded by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA). The objective
was to revise the plans for Urban Mass Rapid Transit development in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City,
based on updated household travel and traffic surveys. The final report was published in March 2016
(ALMEC Corporation et al., 2016). The data supporting the report is not publicly available. However, I
was able to access it and to use it for this dissertation, with the consent of ALMEC Corporation, due to
my previous involvement in the aforementioned study, as a consultant.
The data was collected from a representative sample of the entire metropolitan area. According to
the definition of the Ministry of Construction, the metropolitan area encompasses the city-province
3
of
Ho Chi Minh City as well as fifteen urban centers located in four neighboring provinces – Long An,
Binh Duong, Dong Nai, and Ba Rieu-Vung Tau – within a 50-kilometer (31-mile) radius of the center
of Ho Chi Minh City. The study area was divided into 254 residential zones whose boundaries almost
overlap with the administrative boundaries of sub-districts (phường) inside Ho Chi Minh City. The
shapefile of the study area, including residential zones, was part of the dataset provided by the
Japanese study team. The total population of the study area was 12.1 million in 2013 based on
estimates from the Population Bureau of Ho Chi Minh City and the 2013 Statistical Yearbook for
neighboring provinces (Figure 3).

3
Vietnam is divided in 63 provinces, included five municipalities with the administrative status of “City-province.” These include Ho Chi Minh
City, Hanoi, Hai Phong, Da Nang, and Can Tho.

45

Figure 3 – Study Area
The Japanese study team organized an in-person survey with a representative sample of 20,000
households, accounting for 1 percent of the population in the study area. The response rate was nearly
100 percent as the data includes 19,999 household observations. To my knowledge, this survey
remains the largest representative household travel survey ever conducted in Ho Chi Minh City. Each
face-to-face survey interview was conducted in two parts. The first part was an interview of the
household head to collect information on the household as a whole – address, housing conditions and
ownership, household size and composition, income, vehicle ownership – as well as personal opinions
regarding urban and transportation policies. The second part consisted of individual surveys of each
household member of age 6 or older, including the household heads. Household members were asked
about individual socio-demographic information (e.g., age, gender, educational attainment, disability,
residency status, occupation, income), personal vehicle ownership, typical commuting mode, work

46
location. Most importantly, they were asked to provide a one-day travel diary. For each trip they made
on a targeted day, or on a usual day if they could not answer for the targeted day, they provided
information about the origin, destination, trip purpose, transfers, travel mode for each leg of the trip,
travel time, parking, and so on. A total of 60,397 individual surveys were recorded. The study team
compiled the data in two separate datasets, hereafter referred to as the household- and individual
datasets, respectively. For the sake of anonymity, exact addresses were deleted from the datasets, but
all locations mentioned in the survey responses (e.g. for home and work addresses, trip origins and
destinations) were geocoded by the “residential zone” in which they fall.
GIS Data
The ArcMap 10.6 software was used to compile a Geographic Information System (SIG) dataset
including population density and street network characteristics by residential zone. Population figures
were included in the attribute table of the original “residential zones” shapefile. I computed surface
areas and population densities in GIS. The original dataset did not include any data related to the street
network, however. I extracted street network data for Ho Chi Minh City in June 2018 from
OpenStreetMap (OSM), a collaborative world map available online. Each street or road segment is
represented by a line and has, among its attributes, a type defined according to OSM’s road and street
typology:
4
e.g., motorway, primary-, secondary-, tertiary-, residential road, pedestrian street, service
street, cycleway. Table 1 includes some examples of descriptions from OSM street typology. Using the
“overlay” and “intersect” tools in GIS, I computed the linear density (in mi. per sq. mi.) of each street
type per residential zone.

4
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway

47
Table 1 – Open Street Map’s Street Typology
OSM Street Type Description
Roads
Motorway A restricted access major divided highway, normally with 2 or more running
lanes plus emergency hard shoulder. Equivalent to the Freeway, Autobahn, etc.
Trunk The most important roads in a country's system that aren't motorways. (Need
not necessarily be a divided highway.)
Primary The next most important roads in a country's system. (Often link larger towns.)
Secondary The next most important roads in a country's system. (Often link towns.)
Tertiary The next most important roads in a country's system. (Often link smaller towns
and villages)
Residential Roads which serve as an access to housing, without the function of connecting
settlements. Often lined with housing.
Special Road Type
Living street For living streets, which are residential streets where pedestrians have legal
priority over cars, speeds are kept very low and where children are allowed to
play on the street.
Service For access roads to, or within an industrial estate, camp site, business park, car
park etc.
Pedestrian For roads used mainly/exclusively for pedestrians in shopping and some
residential areas which may allow access by motorized vehicles only for very
limited periods of the day.
Paths
Footway For designated footpaths; i.e., mainly/exclusively for pedestrians. This includes
walking tracks and gravel paths.
Cycleway For designated cycleways.

(Source: wiki.openstreetmap.org)
The OSM descriptions of street types are quite generic and arguably Euro- or US-centric.
Expressions such as “legal priority over cars,” “speeds are kept very low,” or “may allow access […]
only for very limited periods of the day,” suggest that the key was created to read and organize
streetscapes that are more heavily regulated than those of cities of the Global South. The fieldwork and
especially the detailed recordings of street characteristics for a sample of 20 streets (see below) gave an
indication of the extent to which OSM categories could be used to quantify the characteristics of Ho
Chi Minh City’s street network in quantitative analyses.

48
Video Recordings of Street Environments
The analyses presented in Chapter 5 – The Lived Space of Urban Mobility – were conducted at the
street level, using a “street segment” as a unit of analysis. Observations were made on 20 streets
located within the boundaries of the city-province, i.e., in the core of the metropolitan area. The
selected streets belonged to different urban environments, including typical districts characterized by a
dense network of alleyways and narrow mixed-use streets (Phú Nhuận and District 3), the historical
and institutional center (District 1) planned according to a grid pattern during the colonization era, and
the Phú Mỹ Hưng neighborhood (District 7), which was planned and developed in the last two decades
in ways supposed to offer the comfort of modern life to those who are able to afford it (Harms, 2012,
2016a, 2016b; Kim, 2008).
To select the streets, I developed a typology of street environments based on criteria related to
adjacent land uses, number of lanes, and traffic regulation. With the exception of residential alleyways,
all selected streets were lined with 3- to 6-story mixed-use buildings typical of Ho Chi Minh City’s
urbanism, with stores on the ground floor and additional commercial or residential space in the upper
floors. The typology distinguishes between the following types:
a) Residential Alleyways: narrow alleyways (hẻm in Vietnamese) which by definition cut through
residential neighborhoods; no wider than one-lane, most of the time without any sidewalk,
rarely wide enough for cars to go through; adjacent land uses are almost exclusively residential.
b) Commercial Alleyways: same as above, except that the residential ground-floor uses are
interspersed with some commercial uses; some sections may be wider than one-lane and large
enough for cars to go through.
c) Commercial Streets: two-way streets with one lane on each side; have a sidewalk; lined with a
continuity of ground-floor commercial uses.

49
d) Commercial Boulevards: same as above, except that there are two lanes on each side and the
sidewalk is generally wider; traffic regulation requires that cars and other large vehicles (buses,
trucks) drive on the inside lane whereas motorbikes, bicycles, and other small vehicles drive on
the outside lanes (hereafter referred to as separated traffic).
e) One-way Corridors: wide one-way traffic corridors with at least four lanes of traffic going one
direction only; traffic is separated.
f) Segregated Corridors: wide two-way traffic corridors with at least four traffic lanes in each
direction; traffic is segregated, meaning that a hard separation makes the outside lanes
inaccessible to large vehicles.
g) Markets: like commercial streets, one traffic lane in each direction and mixed adjacent land use,
but the lane space that would typically be “reserved” for traffic is used throughout the day by
vendors of produce, meats, clothes, and other goods.
h) Pedestrian Street: the Nguyễn Huệ pedestrian street is the only pedestrian-only open space in
Ho Chi Minh city. Located in the core of District 1, this iconic boulevard has always remained
a symbol of power since the French colonial era. Nowadays, it connects the People’s
Committee, where the city government rules, to the banks of the river. In front of the People’s
Committee stands a tall statue of Ho Chi Minh, the nationalist leader, overlooking the activity
on the boulevard. It was turned into a large open space reserved to pedestrians in 2015 (Tran,
Q., 2017).

50
Table 2 summarizes the proposed street typology.
Table 2 – Proposed Street Typology
Type Adjacent Land Uses Number of Lanes Traffic Direction Traffic Regulation
Residential alleyway Mostly residential One Two-way Mixed traffic
Commercial alleyway Mixed-use One Two-way Mixed traffic
Commercial street Mixed-use One in each direction Two-way Mixed traffic
Commercial boulevard Mixed-use Two in each direction Two-way Separated traffic
One-way corridor Mixed-use ≥ Four One-way Separated traffic
Segregated corridor Mixed-use ≥ Four in each direction Two-way Segregated traffic
Market Mixed-use One in each direction Two-way Priority to activity
Pedestrian street Mixed-use Open space Pedestrians only Pedestrians only

The map in Figure 4 shows the 20 streets where observations were made. Table 3 enumerates street
names and various characteristics of selected street segments. They were 0.3-mile long on average.
When looking at the types that apply to each street segment, my proposed typology and the OSM
typology seem to align quite well. The difference is that my proposed typology includes more refined
categories that are also more context specific. For example, what I categorized as “one-way” and
“segregated” corridors fall into the “primary” OSM category; “commercial boulevards,” and
“markets” under “tertiary;” and what OSM classified as “residential” streets are in fact lined with both
commercial and residential uses and classified in my typology as either “commercial streets” or
“commercial alleyways,” depending on their width and on the balance between residential and
commercial ground-floor uses. Finally, the narrowest “service” streets as per OSM typology are
“residential alleyways” in my proposed typology, the only type of streets that are lined almost
exclusively with residential uses.

51

Figure 4 – Map of Selected Street Segments

52
Table 3 – Selected Street Names and Characteristics
# Street Name District Type (My Topology) OSM Classification
1 Phan Xích Long (1) Phú Nhuận
5

Mixed-use boulevard Tertiary
2 Phan Xích Long (2) Phú Nhuận Mixed-use street Tertiary
3 Chợ Nguyễn Đình Chiểu Phú Nhuận Market Tertiary
4 Nguyễn Kiệm Phú Nhuận One-way corridor Primary
5 Hẻm 257 Phan Xích Long Phú Nhuận Residential alleyway Service
6 Hẻm 293 Phan Xích Long Phú Nhuận Mixed-use alleyway Residential
7 Hẻm 419 Phan Xích Long Phú Nhuận Residential alleyway Service
8 Hẻm 440 Nguyễn Kiệm Phú Nhuận Mixed-use alleyway Residential
9 Nguyễn Thái Bình District 1 Mixed-use street Residential
10 Chợ Tôn Thất Đạm District 1 Market Secondary
11 Phó Đức Chính District 1 Mixed-use street Residential
12 Trần Hưng Đạo District 1 Segregated corridor Primary
13 Phố đi bộ Nguyễn Huệ District 1 Pedestrian boulevard Primary
14 Tôn Thất Thiệp District 1 Mixed-use street Residential
15 Nguyễn Văn Linh District 7 Segregated corridor Primary
16 Đường số 6 District 7 Mixed-use street Residential
17 Tôn Dật Tiên District 7 Mixed-use street Residential
18 Điện Biên Phủ District 3 One-way corridor Primary
19 Nguyễn Thượng Hiền District 3 Mixed-use street Tertiary
20 Hẻm 419 Điện Biên Phủ District 3 Residential alleyway Service

The unit of observation is a ‘street segment,’ spatially defined to encompass the ground-floor of the
buildings along the property line, the sidewalk in front, and the traffic lanes between curb and median.
In other words, as I observed two-way streets on both sides, each side counted as a separate
observation. Segregated corridors led to two observations per side (one for the inside lane[s], and

5
The Phú Nhuận District served as a pilot case, which explains its overrepresentation in the sample. I was quite familiar with the neighborhood
because I was living there during fieldwork. I started recording street activity on streets that I knew functioned differently in terms of their organization of
traffic and street activity. And then I formalized the typology. For this reason, the Phú Nhuận sample includes several streets of certain types (commercial
and residential alleyways in particular). In other neighborhoods, I identified the street segments with the typology in mind. I would drive around for a
significant amount of time and talk to people who were familiar with the neighborhoods, such as long-time residents or workers in the neighborhood. I
would explain the different characteristics I was looking for and people would provide me with names of streets to check out. In District 1, I purposely
included three streets that were part of the scope of Annette Kim’s study (Kim, 2015) in order to enable comparisons.

53
another for the outside lane[s] with adjacent sidewalk and property line). Given the narrowness of
alleyways, properties on both sides and traffic in both directions were counted as part of the same
observation. All street segments led to 6 measurements throughout the course of one day, except for
the segments in District 3 where the 12:00PM observations went missing due to technical reasons, and
for Nguyễn Huệ pedestrian street where only three evening recordings were made, when pedestrian
activity is most intense. In sum, the sample of street segments includes 185 observations (Table 4)
Table 4 – Frequency of Street Observations by District and by Type
Street type District 1 District 3 District 7 Phú Nhuận Total
Streets Obs Streets Obs Streets Obs Streets Obs Streets Obs
Residential alleyways - - 1 5 - - 2 12 3 17
Mixed-use alleyways - - - - - - 2 12 2 12
Mixed-use streets 3 28 1 10 2 18 1 12 7 68
Mixed-use boulevard - - - - - - 1 12 1 12
Market 1 6 - - - - 1 6 2 12
Pedestrian boulevard 1 6 - - - - - - 1 6
One-way corridor - - 1 10 - - 1 12 2 22
Segregated corridor (inside) 1 12 - - 1 6 - - 2 18
Segregated corridor (outside) - 12 - - - 6 - - - 18
Total 6 64 3 25 3 30 8 66 20 185

In order to capture both traffic and street activity on each street segment, I used an action camera to
film each street segment at six different times over the course of one day (at about 6:30 AM, 9:30 AM,
12:30 PM, 3:30 PM, 6:30 PM, and 10:30 PM). First, a tracking shot was used to record ‘side videos’
(Figure 5) of the sidewalk and background properties, by moving along the curb either on foot or on
the back of a motorbike; second, a static shot was used to record 5-minute-long ‘traffic videos’ framed
so as to capture both motorized and non-motorized traffic. All the videos were recorded in November,
during the dry season, so the weather was quite similar from one day to another, with temperatures
ranging between 73°F and 88°F, and basically no rain. The waiting times between recordings were

54
used for participant observations of street life, taking photographs, and conducting short interviews
with street vendors and retailers. Due to measurement error, traffic videos are missing for the markets.

Figure 5 – Example of side video (top) and traffic video (bottom)
Interviews
The qualitative sections of Chapter 5 – The Lived Space of Urban Mobility, and Chapter 6 – The
Envisioned Space of Urban Mobility, draw on interview data. I interviewed 68 individuals, including
32 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Ho Chi Minh City residents focusing on their mobility

55
practices (hereafter referred to as “mobility interviews”), 36 shorter and unstructured interviews with
street vendors and business owners about their vending practices (“activity interviews”), and
interviews with six key informants.
6
The objective was to understand how mobile and active uses of
street spaces relate to each other. All the interviews were conducted in Vietnamese, except for two
mobility interviews that were conducted in English. All the mobility interviews were voice recorded
and fully transcribed with the support of two research assistants. The activity interviews were not
recorded. Notes were jotted down after each interview was completed. I coded all the interview data
manually for analysis. The names used in this dissertation are pseudonyms.
The mobility interview guide was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of
Southern California in August 2018. It was translated in Vietnamese by one research assistant. The
interview guides in English and in Vietnamese are in Appendix 1 (Supplements to Chapter 2 –
Mobility Interview Guide). As a test run, I conducted one interview in English with a Vietnamese
friend who is fluent in English and then asked him to review the interview guide to ensure that the
translated questions were true to the idea I wanted them to convey. Eligible participants were 18 years
or older and had lived in Ho Chi Minh City for at least one year. The interview process involved their
signing of a consent form before starting the interview. The final sample included 32 participants. It
was purposely not representative of Ho Chi Minh City’s population as it was stratified to include a
diversity of profiles in terms of usual transportation mode (motorbike, car, bicycle, bus, electric

6
These included the director a consulting firm specialized in transportation planning and urban development; the former director of an international
cooperation program between Lyon, France, and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, dedicated to capacity building of local government agencies in charge of
urban development and utilities management; an urban and transportation scholar focusing on the role of transportation investments in urban growth
development patterns; a Professor at the University of Economics of Ho Chi Minh City; and a Professor at the University of Transportation of Ho Chi
Minh City who also works as a consultant on transportation infrastructure projects for local and national government agencies.

56
bicycle, Grab or other on-demand ride-hailing services, or walking), age, gender, and income (Table
5).
Table 5 – Description of the Sample of Interviewees

Male
Female
Age 18-25
Age 26-35
Age 36-55
Age >55
Motorbike
Car
Bicylce
Bus
Electric bike
Grab
Walking
Low income
Middle income
High income
TOTAL
Male 4 1 7 4 10 1 2 1 0 1 1 6 5 4 16
Female 3 7 4 2 6 1 1 3 1 0 4 9 5 2 16
Age 18-25 4 3 3 0 1 2 1 0 0 5 2 0 7
Age 26-35 1 7 5 0 0 1 0 0 2 2 5 1 8
Age 36-55 7 4 6 2 0 1 0 1 1 4 2 5 11
Age >55 4 2 2 0 2 0 0 0 2 4 1 0 6
Motorbike 10 6 3 5 6 2 6 7 3
16
Car 1 1 0 0 2 0 0 0 2
2
Bicycle 2 1 1 0 0 2 1 1 0
3
Bus 1 3 2 1 1 0 3 1 0
4
Electric bike 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0
1
Grab 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1
1
Walking 1 4 0 2 1 2 4 1 0
5
Low income 6 9 5 2 4 4 6 0 1 3 1 0 4 15
Middle income 5 5 2 5 2 1 7 0 1 1 0 0 1 10
High income 4 2 0 1 5 0 3 2 0 0 0 1 0 6
TOTAL
16 16 7 8 11 6 16 2 3 4 1 1 5 15 10 6 32

Participants were selected through a snow-balling strategy. The mobility interviews lasted for 45
minutes to one hour on average, with a few outliers (one 15-minute and one four-hour interview). They
comprised five sections on the following topics:
1. Life circumstances: Interviewees answered question about their past and present personal
circumstances in regards with family, job, education, and housing situations, and their

57
projects. They were also invited to talk about their expectations and preferences in these
regards.
2. Mobility means: Participants described their past, present, and anticipated mobility means.
3. Everyday mobility and activities:
a. Travel diary: Following the structure of the travel diary included in the travel survey
mentioned above, interviewees described the trips they made and the activities in
which they engage on the day prior to the interview. Compared to the travel diary,
the interview process enabled to ask questions about motivations and circumstances
associated with the answers. In addition, they were asked whether these activities
would have been possible with the mobility means they had in the past and those
they anticipate (or hope) to have in the future.
b. Habits: They also spoke more generally about things they commonly do, especially
leisure activities, and associated mobility means, as part of their usual weekly
schedule.
4. Meanings and Perceptions: The fourth section aimed at revealing meanings and perceptions
attached to different streets and urban environments.
5. Policy support: Finally, open-ended opinion questions addressed three major policies likely
to transform the urban space in HCMC: the metro project, the ban on motorbikes by 2030,
and the sidewalk clearing campaigns.
The 36 activity interviews were conducted with 25 informal street vendors and 11 staff or
storeowners of conventional businesses. All selected conventional businesses were making use of
informal vending practices, using the sidewalk as a vending space. Much shorter in time,
approximately 10- to 20-minute-long, these interviews were conducted between sessions of video

58
recordings of street life. These interviews were unstructured, more like participant observations
involving a conversation with the business owner or employee, and most of the time, a commercial
transaction as well. Nevertheless, I made sure to have certain questions answered by all interviewees,
including some that Annette Kim (2015; p. 94-95) asked when conducting her survey of 270 street
vendors in Ho Chi Minh City in 2010 (highlighted with an asterisk below), to which I added
transportation-related questions about the business’ accessibility:
1. *How long has the vendor been selling?
2. *On what days and at what times does s/he works?
3. What are the busiest times of the day?
4. *Does the vendor always come to this exact location or does s/he also sell in other places?
5. Is this location near or at home?
6. Has the vendor changed location in the past?
7. *How does s/he store goods?
8. *How much profit does s/he make?
9. *Where is his/her hometown province in Vietnam? If s/he migrated, what year did s/he
migrate?
10. What is her family situation?
11. *What district in the greater Ho Chi Minh City metropolitan area does s/he currently live in and
commute from?
12. *Does s/he have to pay rent to sell on the sidewalk? What are her/his interactions with the
property owners, shop owners, and neighboring vendors?
13. What are her/his interactions with the customers? Are they regulars?
14. How do customers typically access the location (transportation mode, and parking situation)?

59
15. Why did s/he choose this vending modality (cart or stall on the sidewalk, mobile vending
practices, a formal vending space integrated in the built environment, or other)?
3.2. Summary of the Methodology
Table 6 summarizes the mix of data and methods supporting the result chapters that follow
(Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6). More detail about the specific methods of analysis are provided in
introduction to each result chapter.
Table 6 – Summary of the Methodology
Chapter Objective Data Methods
Chapter 3 – The
Conceived Space of
Urban Mobility
Analyze the political economy of
the on-going mobility transition
- Academic literature
- Archival data: technical
reports and newspaper
articles
- Interviews with key
informants
Literature Review
Chapter 4 – The
Perceived Space of
Urban Mobility
Assess relationship between travel
behaviors and social interactions
- 2014 household and
travel survey data
- 2018 OSM street network
data
Quantitative methods:
- Multivariate regressions
- Spatial analyses in GIS
Chapter 5 – The
Lived Space of
Urban Mobility
Validate, explain, and predict
relationship between travel
behaviors and social interactions
- Interviews
- Video recordings
Mixed methods:
- Content analyses
- Descriptive statistics and
correlations
Chapter 6 – The
Envisioned Space of
Urban Mobility
Relate people’s life trajectories to
the conceived, perceived, and lived
spaces of urban mobility
- Interviews Qualitative methods:
- Content analysis of
interview data

60
Chapter 3.
The Conceived Space of Urban Mobility: Urban Policies Driving the Mobility Transition
1. Introduction
“This is not what the modern city looks like.” Here is the excerpt that best encapsulates a
conversation I had with a professor at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Transport, who regularly
intervenes as local consultant on urban transportation projects. This, as he refers to it, is the mobility
landscape of Ho Chi Minh City today. More precisely, this is its unique feature that no other city in the
world shares to the same extent: the ubiquitous use of motorbikes to meet most urban transportation
needs. As for the “modern city,” that is Singapore, Seoul, Moscow, Tokyo, many cities to which the
professor referred several times during the interview. He spoke with great admiration about the
transportation systems he had experienced there during field trips organized by local transportation
agencies in search for “best practices.” These allegedly “modern” cities have structured their mobility
landscape around car- and transit-oriented infrastructure. By no means do they rely on motorbikes as
heavily as Ho Chi Minh City residents do.
The conceived space of urban mobility is the set of images and narratives that motivate the efforts
of planners and decision-makers as they imagine, plan, code and deploy the means of future mobility.
It is an application to the field of urban mobility of the notion of “conceived space,” also referred to as
“spatial representations,” in Henri Lefebvre’s (1974) theory of the production of space. Lefebvre
insists on the importance of the rational and seemingly scientific approach to impose a certain order
that is supportive of the mode of production (Lefebvre, 1974; pp. 43-48). With a focus on the
conceived space of urban mobility in a rapidly context, this chapter draws on a review of scholarly and

61
specialized literature to address the following research questions: What mobility transition are
transportation policies promoting and implementing in Ho Chi Minh City? More specifically, what are
the rationale and narratives driving the mobility transition? What future of urbanism is being projected
and can be anticipated?
After reviewing the urban mobility challenges resulting from rapid urban and economic growth, I
turn to an overview of transportation policy responses. The efforts deployed in the conceived space of
urban mobility follow three major goals: i) shifting away from motorbike dependence, ii) facilitating
car travel, and iii) meeting the bulk of the mobility demand with mass transit. The notion of “modern
city” that informs transportation policy formulation corresponds to an array of motorbike-free images
that are in tension with the reality of the mobility landscape today. The narratives guiding these
policies have sustainability concerns in the foreground, and modernization and development objectives
in the background. I then turn to on-going efforts to re-shape street spaces in ways that fit with the
conceived future of mobility. These efforts tend to give priority to traffic flows over other uses of
public space, especially street vending and the social interactions that this common practice entail.
In conclusion, the progressive replacement of motorbikes by cars and transit that is being promoted
would bring about a more modern urban space with clearer distinctions, both spatial and temporal,
between where (and when) people live, work, and play. However, the conceived space of urban
mobility is quite inequitable, in the sense that it aligns with the interests and aspirations of the urban
elite but clashes with the contemporary mobility needs of the vast majority, especially those of the
most vulnerable groups.

62
2. Urban Mobility Trends and Challenges
2.1. Rising Demand for Motorized Mobility
Background: Rapid Urban and Economic Development
The explosion of urban mobilities in Ho Chi Minh City has resulted from rapid urban population
growth and economic development. World Bank economists Annez and Buckley (2009) have
highlighted a common trend around the world, that is, simultaneous urban and economic growth, with
a clear economic take-off once the 20% urbanization rate threshold has been reached. They identified
this trajectory in China, India, and Brazil in recent decades, as well in as in the United States in the
1930s. Figure 6 shows that Vietnam crossed this exact 20% threshold around 1992, that is, three years
after the communist party that still rules the country today implemented the Doi Moi policies
(“Renewal”, or “Change for the New”), by which the economy went from being state- to market-
driven. Thirty-three percent of the country’s population is now urban (United Nations, 2017) and the
urbanization rate is expected to continue to increase to reach 54% in 2050, thus getting close to the
60% threshold after which, in the past, rich countries have reached income levels of US$10,000 per
capita (Annez et al., 2008). The GDP per capita has increased tremendously post reforms in Vietnam,
with an annual GDP growth rate averaging at 6.8% (World Bank, 2020). As a result of concomitant
economic development and urbanization trends, the country went from being one of the poorest
countries worldwide in the early 1990s to a middle-income country today.

63

Figure 6 – Urbanization and GDP Per Capita Trends in Vietnam (1984-2014)
(Source: from World Bank Development Indicators, 2016)
The total population of Ho Chi Minh City’s metropolitan area is now 10.1 million, including 7.1
million inhabitants counted as urban population according to a preview by demographer Patrick Gubry
(2019) of the results of the latest national census dated April 1
st
, 2019. Ho Chi Minh City concentrates
more than 10% of the country’s population (96 million), thus driving its rapid urbanization and
development. Ho Chi Minh City is by far the largest metropolitan area of Vietnam. It is more than
twice as large as the capital, Hanoi (Gubry, 2019).
7
Gubry (2019) considers, however, that the census
tends to underestimate the urban population. In addition to measurement errors, two reasons he puts
forward include i) the non-enumeration of foreigners living in Vietnam, and ii) an overlook of the

7
At the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the population of Ho Chi Minh city was about 2.4 million (Fielding, 2016). According to the United
Nations’ World’s Cities report (2017), it was 4 million in 2000, and 7.5 million in 2016. The annual growth rate has been 3.4% since the last census in
2009. Most of the recent growth has been concentrated in the neighboring provinces of the metropolitan area, especially Binh Duong and Dong Nai.

64
“floating population,” which mostly includes unregistered urban migrants who work in the informal
sector or are poorly employed.
The boundaries of the informal sector and the size of the workforce it employs are difficult to
assess. As in many other developing countries, the informal sector employs a significant share of the
population, providing recent urban migrants vital economic opportunities (Anyidoho, 2013; Bhowmik
& Saha, 2012; Donovan, 2008; Kim, 2015; Martha Lincoln, 2008).
8
Household businesses and the
informal sector together employs one third of the population and generates a significant share (23%) of
the GDP. The weak linkages with other sectors of activity play a critical role in the resilience of the
Vietnamese economy; at the same time, they make household businesses and the informal sector
particularly vulnerable to any external shock.
Ho Chi Minh City has experienced a surge of development as a result of economic and population
growth. This rapid urban development has been tainted, like in most cities of emerging economies
(Cervero, 2013), with spatial decentralization and growing income and spatial inequalities. As a result
of the liberalization of the land market since the early 1990s, the real estate sector has been extremely
dynamic in responding to a strong demand for new urban housing units, and also for new dwelling
forms and other amenities designed for a new consumer class. Three out of 19 urban districts have
experienced most of the burgeoning of large apartment building complexes, that is, District 2, District
7, and Binh Thanh District. For example, the latter is home to the Vinhomes Central Park, a major
complex that includes the Landmark 81 building – the tallest skyscraper in the country – surrounded

8
Robbie (2012) reported that urban migrants (most likely uncounted as mentioned above) represented 14% of the total population of Ho Chi Minh
City’s metropolitan area in the early 2010s. A recent survey conducted in twelve different Vietnamese provinces, including Ho Chi Minh City (Pasquier-
Doumer, Oudin, & Thang, 2017) showed that household businesses and the informal sector altogether represent the second largest employment sector in
Vietnam after agriculture.

65
with 16 mixed-use and residential towers (Figure 7). Vinhomes is a national company and the largest
real estate developer in the country; it was the primary investor in the complex. Driven by developers’
interests and speculation, large expanses of new urban land have been built up or redeveloped. The
planned city of Phu My Hung in District 7 has received much attention in the literature because it was
the first and largest planned city in the country and also because it resulted from the first joint venture
with a foreign developer (from Taiwan). Phu My Hung is composed of a mix of large complexes of
high-rise apartment buildings and detached houses designed for mononuclear families. It was the first
neighborhood not only in the city, but also in the country, shaped by capitalist interests (Kim, 2008)
and has now become a prototype of modern and global urban living in Vietnam (Douglass & Huang,
2007; Harms, 2016; Huynh, Du, 2015). Across the Saigon river from District 1 and District 7, the Thu
Thiem peninsula (Figure 7) in District 2 is planned to become a new urban area that will be home for
130,000 inhabitants and a new Central Business District (Sasaki, 2020). The 647-hectare peninsula
used to be a dense neighborhood of at least 60,000 that “had been populated for as long as Saigon
itself” – where Saigon is the former name of Ho Chi Minh City which locals still use to designate the
city center); it was turned into piles of rubble at the beginning of the 2010s in preparation for re-
development (Harms, 2016). Furthermore, Ho Chi Minh City has experienced much peri-urban land
development permitted by the conversion of agricultural land into urban land while making use of
innovative financing tools such as the Land-for-Infrastructure mechanism (Labbé & Musil, 2014).
Spatially, there is no clear consensus on the spatial definition of the edges of the city, that is, on the
boundaries between rural and urban, or formal and informal settlements (Acolin & Kim, 2016; Gubry,
2019; Harms, E., 2011).

66

Figure 7 – Images of Rapid Urban Development
Notes: 1) Top Left: Landmark 81 and the New Skyline of Ho Chi Minh City in the Background (2018); 2)
Bottom left: A re-developed sector of District 7 seen from a yet to be-redeveloped sector (2018); 3) Middle:
The Thu Thiem peninsula after land clearances and demolitions viewed from a plane (2018); 4) Top right:
One of the rare few houses standing on the Thu Thiem peninsula (2016); 5) Bottom right: The “spectacle of
development” or the Skyline of District 1 seen from the banks of the Saigon river on the Thu Thiem side
(2018).

As a result of the rapid urbanization of the region, the demand for urban mobility has exploded in
Ho Chi Minh City (Gubry & Linh, 2010). Figure 8 shows the rise in numbers of daily passengers
carried in Ho Chi Minh City between 2000 and 2017; it has skyrocketed from 0.5 million to 3.0 million
passengers per day (General Statistics Office of Viet Nam, 2020). A JICA study (JICA, 2016)
estimated the number of trips per day at 16.7 million in 2014, a sharp increase compared to 11.5
million in 2002.

67

Figure 8 – Rising Demand for Urban Mobility in Ho Chi Minh City (all modes) 2000-2017
(Source of data: webpage of the General Statistics Office of Vietnam, 2020)
Motorization 1.0: From Non-Motorized Transportation to the Motorbike
As of today, most of the demand for urban mobility is met by motorbikes. Recent data indicate that
more than 8 million motorbikes are registered today (Kim, 2017). Streets and intersections flocked
with motorbikes have become the transportation signature of the city. The aforementioned JICA study
estimated that motorbike trips represented 83% of all trips in 2014.
9
While the poorest choose the bus
(or the bicycle) to save on transportation costs, most people prefer the motorbike for the convenience
of effortless door-to-door mobility and the ease of trip chaining (Tuan, 2015). The motorbike has been
the dominant transportation mode after it progressively replaced bicycles on the streets. This was the
first stage of motorization, starting with the liberalization of the economy. The motorbike became a
primary consumption good for the growing middle and upper-middle classes, thus becoming a vector
of new values for the Vietnamese society, such as hedonism and individualism (Dormeier Freire, 2009;

9
With the bus coming second with a low 6.3%, followed by the car (5.3%) and the bicycle (2.8%) (JICA, 2016; Chapter 3, pp. 12-13).

68
Thu, 2016).
10
Many households went from buying one first motorbike in the 1990s to transport the
entire family—two parents and several children on one motorbike used to be common practice—to
having one motorbike for each household member of driving age (16 years old) or above.
11
Ranging
from the cheapest manual mopeds manufactured in China to the most expensive Honda scooters from
Japan, motorbikes have become a sign of class distinction (A. Hansen, 2017). Although less markedly
than previous generations, young consumers still express their self-identity and collective identity
through their choice of scooter brand, thus achieving a form of individualization and emancipation that
can be seen as contradictory with the communist idea of a collective identity (Nguyen, Nhat Nguyen,
Özçaglar-Toulouse, & Kjeldgaard, 2018a; Nguyen, Nhat Nguyen, Özçaglar-Toulouse, & Kjeldgaard,
2018b).
The transportation signature of the city was radically different less than three decades ago. The
picture of any busy street or intersection used to show many more bicycles than motorbikes. Along
with walking, the bicycle used to be the dominant transportation mode in Ho Chi Minh City before the
economic reforms of the late 1980s – early 1990s. While no statistics exist regarding the modal split at
that time, it is safe to say that most trips were non-motorized as it was the case in most Asian cities
(Replogle, 1992; Tiwari, G., 2002). Years of war and restrictions under communist rule had left the
population unable to afford any other transportation mode. But after the market reforms, the bicycle
share dwindled fast.
12
The motorbike appealed to households as it was as convenient as its non-

10
Less than one million motorbikes were registered in HCMC in 1994 as opposed to 3 million in 2004, 6.3 million in 2014, and 8 million in 2017
(Kim, 2017).
11
As of today, 98.6% of all households own at least one motorbike, 48% own two, and 31% more than two (JICA, 2016; Chapter 3, pp. 13).
12
Only ten years after the reforms, the bicycle share had dropped to 32%. In 2004, it was 9.4% (ALMEC Corporation, 2004), and in 2014, 2.8%
(JICA, 2016).

69
motorized predecessor, the bicycle, to navigate in traffic and through the maze of narrow alleyways
that is characteristic of the local urban form, while being relatively cheap to purchase and maintain and
providing effortless mobility (Truitt, 2008). The major difference between the before and after the
transition from bicycles to motorbikes lies in the number of riders on the road and the pollution,
congestion, and traffic fatalities brought about by the massive use of motorbikes (see below). While his
fieldwork was in Hanoi and not in Ho Chi Minh City, Arve Hansen (2016) found that many
households still owned a bicycle but only for specific uses: for women to go to the market in the
morning or for the children to go to school. Only street vendors would use it throughout the day. He
also noticed a rising trend among middle-class individuals that consists in riding a fancy bicycle to
exercise.
13

Finally, very few locals rely on walking as a transportation mode in Ho Chi Minh City and those
who do, foreigners for the most part (expats and tourists), report that they find it extremely difficult to
walk in the city because of the traffic and sidewalk conditions (Tuoi Tre News, 2017). That is not to
say that no one is on foot on Ho Chi Minh City’s streets. In fact, like many other Asian developing
cities, the sidewalks of Ho Chi Minh City count many people sitting or standing on their feet on the
streets and sidewalks but not necessarily in movement (Mateo-Babiano & Ieda, 2007).
Motorization 2.0: From the Motorbikes to Cars
Ho Chi Minh City is now undergoing a second phase of motorization, towards automobile
dependence. In recent years, the urban upper-middle classes have been increasingly attracted to car
ownership. The car has now replaced the motorbike as a symbol of social distinction and a vector of

13
I made similar observations in Ho Chi Minh City (see Chapters 5 and 6) where 28.6% of all households still own a bicycle – a sharp decrease
though compared to 48.7% in 2002 (JICA, 2016).

70
individualization (Nguyen et al., 2018; Nguyen et al., 2018), that is, a social marker of economic
success and personal achievement; it also appeals as a safer and more comfortable transportation mode
to those who can afford it (Hansen, 2017; Hansen, 2017b; Thu, 2016; Tuan, 2015).
14
Car mobility has
also been soaring because of the success of Uber-like on-demand transportation services which entered
the market in 2014 (DTI News, 2017a). According to recent estimates, there are now one million cars
registered in the city (Kim, 2017) but the actual figure might be closer to 8.5 million now. Figure 9 and
Figure 10 show the 2016 car sales forecasts and the actual volume of car sales nationwide in the last
five few years.
15
A total of 1.4 million new cars were purchased between 2015 and 2019, the majority
of which were added to the traffic of Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.
Vietnam therefore takes part in a global trend where the total vehicle stock has been projected to
grow from 800 million in to over 2 billion units in 2030, with the bulk of the increase taking place in
emerging economies. China’s increase will have been nearly twentyfold for example (Dargay, Gately,
& Sommer, 2007). As a result, even though the share of car travel is still low in Vietnamese cities as is
the case in most developing cities, they have already been facing huge congestion and pollution issues
(Kahn & Schwartz, 2008; Kahn & Walsh, 2015). City streets have indeed become increasingly more
congested, more polluted and less safe in Ho Chi Minh City.

14
The share of households who own a car rose from 1.2% in 2002 to 8.2% in 2014, and the share of car trips from 1.9% to 5.3% over the same
period (JICA, 2016). This was just the beginning of the rising trend. Nationwide, car sales have increased by more than 15% per year since 2014; more
than one million new cars were registered in 2016, 45% of which were added to the traffic of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (DTI News, 2017b).
15

71

Figure 9 – Car Sales Forecasts (2016) Figure 10 – Actual Car Sales 2015-2019
(Source: coram-research.com) (Source of data: marklines.com)
Notes: Each year there is a peak of sales near the end of the year and a low point at the beginning, which
corresponds to the lunar new year when the whole economy slows down. In 2016, car sales exceeded
expectations as they peaked at more than 33,000, that is nearly 10,000 more units sold than forecasted.
The 2017 peak was lower than the 2016 peak and lower than the forecasts as well, probably because
people were waiting for the commercial release of the Vinfast models. Indeed, in October 2018 the first
Vietnamese carmaker Vinfast launched two models in great fanfare at the Paris motorshow and extended
pre-sales soon after, which may explain the peak of sales approaching 35,000 in December 2018. This peak
again exceeded the 2016 forecasts. Car sales remained at similar levels in 2019.
2.2. The Challenges of Growing Urban Mobility Demand
Limited Road Capacity and Resulting Congestion
Congestion levels have been growing exponentially due the conjunction of the rising number of
cars coupled with low street coverage. The road space represents 8,8% of the built up area of Ho Chi
Minh City (Tuoi Tre online, 2019), which is very low compared to approximately 30% of all urban
land dedicated to traffic and parking in cities of the United States, for example. Furthermore, the street
hierarchy is poor.
16
A maze of narrow alleyways that are sometimes barely wide enough for the

16
There are important missing links between the 2,800 km (1,740 mi.) of conventional roads (of which only 14% are more than 12 meters [40 ft.]
wide) and the 5,000 km (3,106 mi.) of narrow alleyways (Huynh, Du The & Gomez-Ibanez, 2017).

72
handlebar of a bicycle or motorbike to pass (Figure 11) cut through the densest neighborhoods and
serve 85% of the population (Gibert, 2014). Most alleyways are inaccessible to cars. Except for the
parts of the city that were developed by the French (in Districts 1, 3 and 5) and the newer residential
areas, most of the development of Ho Chi Minh City happened in a rather unplanned fashion. The
unclear and poorly hierarchized grid is a consequence of such an organic development pattern. Like
most emerging economies, the city was built as a non-motorized city (Cervero, 2013; Mateo-Babiano
& Ieda, 2007). Not only is the road space accessible to cars limited, there are also very few on-street
and off-street parking possibilities in the city (Chu & Thi, 2017).

Figure 11 – A Motorbike in a Very Narrow Alleyway Figure 12 – Cars Congestion on a Major Boulevard
Against this backdrop, rising demand for car mobility had led to important congestion issues
17

which has been held responsible for a 2-3% loss in GDP (Chu & Thi, 2017). As of today, although the

17
There are 36 points of severe congestion in the city (Tuoi Tre online, 2019). Chu and Thi (2017) reported 227 cases of gridlock traffic jams that
lasted for more than one hour in Ho Chi Minh City between 2008 and 2017 – that is almost two per month. They estimated that if the rising car and
motorbike ownership trends of previous years were to continue, by 2025 vehicular traffic with exceed the carrying capacity by 7.58 times, and the gridlock
situation would be reached in 2030, with 10.56 times more traffic than the road capacity allows.

73
number of cars is still relatively low compared to that of motorbikes in Ho Chi Minh City (a ratio of 1
to 8 approximately), cars can already be blamed for the bulk of the congestion.
18
Figure 12 (above)
depicts the consequences of such an imbalance on a segment of the Dien Bien Phu one-way corridor
that was surveyed for the purpose of this dissertation. In fact, according to the traffic counts (see
Chapter 5), cars represent only 2% of all private motorized vehicles (motorbikes and cars) on that
specific segment, but as shown on the picture, in certain places they occupy most of the street space
already. Motorbikes were sharing half a lane out of three near the intersection from which the picture
was taken; motorbikes are nearly invisible on the picture, which was taken from the car lanes.
The rise of automobiles therefore aggravates congestion and increases travel times for everyone.
Before the surge in car ownership, average travel times for motorbike riders were not particularly long
– 17 min per trip according to the latest city-wide travel survey conducted in 2014 (JICA, 2016). Car
trips were already more than 50% longer in time (29 minutes), as cars riders cannot navigate in busy
traffic with the same ease as motorbike riders. Finally, motorization has undoubtedly caused other
negative externalities, especially traffic accidents and pollution. Like congestion, while these issues
have arisen from motorbike mobility, they have been significantly aggravated by the on-going shift
towards car mobility.

18
Cao and Sano (2012) estimated that one car equals 3.4 motorbike-equivalent units (MEU), taking into consideration the different mode speeds and
space needed between vehicles. Using this estimate, a back-of-the-envelope calculation for one million cars and eight million motorbikes sharing the roads
of Ho Chi Minh City means that cars take up the space of 3.4 million MEU and motorbikes 8 million MEU, that is one third of the road space for cars
although they represent only 11% of the private motorized vehicles.

74
Traffic Injuries and Fatalities
In Ho Chi Minh City, and in Vietnam in general, traffic accidents
19
are the leading cause of injuries
and also the leading cause of injury-related mortality (Nguyen-Phuoc, Oviedo-Trespalacios, Nguyen,
& Su, 2020), but people are not equal in the face of the risk of accidents. Pedestrians, bicyclists, and
motorbike riders are more at risk than car users on urban streets that are shared by all modes. Yet, car
drivers are disproportionately responsible for traffic accidents compared to the share of vehicles they
represent on the roads while being the least vulnerable to the risk.
20
Pedestrians have the highest
mortality rate (Nguyen-Phuoc et al., 2020). Motorbike users account for 87% of traffic-injury-related
hospitalizations and 90% of traffic-injury-related deaths according to the data of a hospital of a
suburban district of Ho Chi Minh City (Ha et al., 2018). Children are disproportionately vulnerable to
traffic accidents, especially high school students who ride a bicycle (Vu & Nguyen, 2018). Young
children are especially vulnerable to the risk of head injuries as they are still much less likely to wear a
helmet when carried by adults on motorbikes (Pervin et al., 2009). Men represent the vast majority
(85%) of the people involved in road traffic accidents.
21
Data by the Department of Traffic Police

19
According to a recent study by Vu and Nguyen (2018), there were 2,562 traffic accidents reported to the Department of Traffic Police of Ho Chi
Minh City over the period 2010-2015. The trend seemed to be on the decline over that period, from 1,101 accidents in 2010 to 771 in 2015. The data
suggests that minor accidents are underreported, however, considering that the same data shows 692 traffic-related deaths and 268 injuries out of 1,101
accident cases in 2015.
20
Nationwide, according to the Road Safety Performance Review conducted by the United Nations (2018), 27% of all people involved in reported
traffic accidents were car users in 2016, although cars represented only 6% of all registered motorized vehicles. The review did not include any statistics
related to the breakdown of injuries and fatalities by mode, but other studies suggest that car users are not the most vulnerable parties involved.
21
According to Ha et al.’s (2018) study, head injuries are the most common type of injuries; they represent 70% of traffic-injury-related
hospitalizations. They found that the 2007 mandatory helmet law increased the share of people wearing a helmet from 30% to 90-99% of adults today,
which significantly reduced the risk of head injuries.

75
shows that driving the wrong way or in the wrong lane – a tactic almost exclusively reserved to
motorbike riders – was the lead cause for traffic accidents (United Nations, 2018) (Table 7).
Table 7 – Frequency of Causes of Road Accidents
Causes of road accident Frequency (%)
1 Going the wrong way, wrong lane 25.95
2 Unspecified causes 25.30
3 Over speeding 9.59
4 Change of direction 9.14
5 Do not give way 6.81
6 Wrong overtaking 6.15
7 Wrong driving process 6.14
8 Use of alcohol 3.58
9 Error of pedestrians 3.43
10 Unlicensed driving 1.95
11 No compliance with road signals 1.15
12 Wrong standing and parking on roads 0.42
13 Vehicle and equipment is not safe 0.24
14 Road in bad condition 0.13

(Source: United Nations’ Road Safety Performance Review, 2018)
Air and Noise Pollution
Air pollution is another negative externality of dominant private motorized transportation in Ho
Chi Minh City.
22
The 2018 Air Quality report by IQAir (2018) ranked Ho Chi Minh City the 15
th
most
polluted city in Asia, where Jakarta ranked first and Hanoi second. Based on measurements of PM2.5,
the most harmful particulate matter for human health, they classified Ho Chi Minh City as a
moderately polluted city compared to other cities in the world.
23
Yet, the pollution level of Ho Chi

22
Nationwide, transportation is the third largest greenhouse gas emitter and within the transportation sector, road transportation represents the largest
share (68.5%) (Dematera et al., 2015).
23
The annual mean of PM2.5 is 26.9 μg/m
3
, which is much lower than Delhi, India, for example, which ranked most polluted city worldwide with
113.5 PM2.5 μg/m
3
per year.

76
Minh City is still more than double the standard set by the World Health Organization. According to
the IQAir webpage on Ho Chi Minh City,
24
exhaust fumes from motorized vehicles are the main cause
for air pollution.
25

Finally, the intensity of Ho Chi Minh City’s traffic gives the streets a rather fast pulse, an active
feel, that external observers may describe as loud and relentless. Noise pollution is indeed another
negative externality of motorized traffic, especially due to the sound of motorbikes’ combustion
engines and their frequent horn sounds (Phan, Yano, Sato, & Nishimura, 2010). Nevertheless, a study
found that the “community annoyance” was lower than expected when measured in terms of
conversation and sleep disturbances (Nguyen, Thu Lan et al., 2011).
In sum, the joint movement of urbanization and economic development has led to an explosion of
the demand for urban mobility in Ho Chi Minh City. The vast majority of the population has found in
the motorbike a convenient and affordable means of transportation that is well suited to the local urban
form. The shift from non-motorized transportation to motorbikes was made possible by the rise of the
middle-class after the liberalization of the economy and the on-going rise of car ownership is a
continuation of the same movement. Both phases of motorization have not been without causing major
issues in terms of congestion, traffic accidents, and pollution, which negatively affect the country’s
development. The next section focuses on the government responses to tackles these issues.

24
https://www.iqair.com/us/vietnam/ho-chi-minh-city
25
Followed by the “smoke from 1,000 large factories, construction dust, and urban and crop burning.” The same source indicates that air pollution is
at its worth between November and January, during the dry season, and that hospitalizations increase by 5-10% during the most polluted days at the
Saigon General Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City.

77
3. Policy Responses
3.1. Transportation Policies: A Development Strategy
Meeting the rising demand for urban mobility has become a development challenge in Vietnam.
Transportation policies in general have been granted a major role in the development strategy of the
country. The economic development literature provides evidence of positive and significant effects of
policies facilitating the movement of goods and people on a country’s GDP (Banister & Berechman,
2001; Ozbay, Ozmen-Ertekin, & Berechman, 2003; Ozbay, Ozmen-Ertekin, & Berechman, 2006),
which is the underlying rationale for transportation investments and policies. As of today, the causal
relationship between transportation policies and urban growth, both spatial and economic growth, has
been well established (Baum-Snow, 2007; Berg, Deichmann, Liu, & Selod, 2015; Cao, X.,
Mokhtarian, & Handy, 2009; Zhou & Kockelman, 2008). Vietnam’s Transport Development Strategy
up to 2020 remains a key component of the country’s overall Socio-Economic Development Strategy
and Poverty Reduction Strategy. Transportation investments have played a critical role in the country’s
rapid development post reforms.
26

Furthermore, Vietnam has benefitted from the support of the international community in
developing transportation systems. The country is the second largest recipient of Official Development
Aid (ODA) in the world (World Bank, website). International donors such as the World Bank, the
Asian Development Bank and other multilateral or bilateral cooperation agencies tend to put
transportation systems at the core of their strategies for sustainable development, including urban

26
Vietnam spent VND 113,000 billion (US$ 5.6 billion) in the transportation sector from 1999 to 2007, and these investments (together with
telecommunications) have represented a steadily growing share of the GDP, from approximately 1% in 1995-1997 to 7% in 2007; 80% of transportation
investments were targeted towards roads, either for construction, upgrading or maintenance (Thanh & Dapice, 2009).

78
transportation. In Vietnam today, 35% of ODA is allocated to transportation infrastructure projects
(World Development Indicators). ODA has been especially mobilized in supporting the development
of mass transit systems in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Transportation investments are funded
through either city budgets, ODA loans, or public-private partnerships (Bui, 2017).
3.2.Promoting the Urban Mobility Transition from Motorbikes to Cars and Transit
The Pull Away from Motorbikes
Urban transportation policies in Ho Chi Minh City are all directed towards the same long-term
goal, that is, to move away from motorbike dependence. The Deputy Prime Minister made this policy
objective explicit in 2013, when he first mentioned the idea of a complete ban on motorbikes in major
Vietnamese cities (TN News, 2013). The idea turned into projects of partial and gradual bans in Hanoi
and Ho Chi Minh City. In April 2019, the Ho Chi Minh City-based newspaper Tuoi Tre online
published a “MegaStory” titled “Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City prior to the policy to progressively ban
motorbikes”
27
(Tuoi Tre online, 2019). Specifically, about Ho Chi Minh City, the story describes the
project to ban the use of motorbikes in four urban districts (1, 3, 5, 10) and two newly developed urban
areas (Thu Thiem in District 2 and Phu My Hung in District 7) by 2030, while making several
references to the only known case worldwide of a complete ban on motorbikes, in Yangon, Myanmar,
in 2013.
28
The rationale of the ban is that by 2030, there will be viable public transportation
alternatives available and that reducing the number of motorbikes on the streets will ultimately help

27
My translation.
28
A pilot implementation phase is planned for 2020 in Ho Chi Minh City, with a focus on a few selected streets of District 1 where the use of
motorbikes will be forbidden. The plan is to expand the scope of application to the whole District through 2021-2025 and then to draw lessons from these
preliminary phases to expand the ban to all aforementioned areas.

79
alleviate traffic congestion and environmental pollution. The story also addresses some concerns raised
by this policy. It estimates that 40% of the population will be directly impacted as they either live or
work in the targeted areas. Furthermore, they report the “anxious voices” of people whose livelihood
depends on motorbike riding, such as motorbike taxi riders – including conventional xê ôm who wait
for customers on street corners and those using ride-hailing apps such as the very popular one called
Grab – and also street vendors whose customer base is composed of motorbike riders only. The
anticipated effect of the mobility transition away from motorbike dependence on street vending is the
specific focus of the next chapters of this dissertation.
Given the aggravation of transportation issues due to the rise of automobiles, it is natural to wonder
why not limiting car use instead of motorbikes. But that is not the priority of the government. The Tuoi
Tre story reported the words of a professor at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology who
claimed that “although limiting the use of private cars in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City would be
necessary, these big cities do not seem ready for it.” Another interviewee added “only when the
necessary infrastructure has been provided, when people have more options, can we restrict the use of
personal cars.”
The Push toward Car Mobility: Infrastructure Investments and Regulation
In fact, recent transportation investments and policies have aimed at facilitating car travel rather
than limiting it. This is the main difference between the on-going phase of motorization compared to
the previous one. The on-going shift towards the car has been in part imagined and planned and is
being supported by infrastructure investments and other transportation policies. This was not the case
of the first motorization phase where the progressive replacement of bicycles by motorbikes happened
rather organically, through behavioral changes permitted by rising purchase power. While consumer

80
behaviors partly explain the appeal of the car, they are not the only reason. Through regulation, the
government is now in favor of making the car a consumer good that will support economic
development. This is a recent turnaround. Due to the lack of available space for both travel and
parking, the government had supported for many years a policy aimed at limiting the growth of
automobile ownership, mostly through high import taxes (Dematera et al., 2015). This policy was
relaxed in the mid-2010s, on the one hand because it no longer prevented sales from increasing, on the
other hand because the automobile industry was being integrated into the strategy for industrialization
and modernization of the country's economy (Hansen, 2016). This major shift explained the sudden
surge in car sales reported above. The national government has placed the car industry at the core of its
development strategy. At the end of 2018, the newly established Vietnamese car manufacturer Vinfast,
a member of the Vingroup joint stock company mentioned above, unveiled its first models at the Paris
Motor Show and the company has been actively promoting sales from then on. The government
strategy to spearhead Vinfast and promote the national car industry can be seen as an attempt to
diversify and specialize the industrial sector in order to avoid what Ohno (2009) calls the middle-
income trap, by which Vietnam could fail to create internal value to sustain its economic growth.
Car-oriented infrastructure investments include the construction of new roads, especially ring roads
and inter-city roads, the widening of existing roads, the construction of underground parking lots,
raised bridges over the most congested crossroads (flyovers) and tunnels underneath. When it comes to
flyovers, the professor and consultant interviewed in the context of this dissertation fieldwork admitted
that they are little more than a short-term solution; at best they temporarily send traffic jams to the next
intersection. However, he drew the attention to the fact that they require little investment, do not
require external technical or financial assistance, and their construction is relatively quick. Thus, he
thinks that flyovers are sending a message to the public that the government is firmly tackling the

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congestion problem and preparing for the car-based mobility of the future. Finally, ODA has been
involved in infrastructure upgrades, which can also be interpreted as a globalizing force influencing the
transformation of the local urbanism.
29

The Push toward Transit-Based Mobility: Metro Development, Bus Upgrades, and Taxi Regulation
Finally, the rationale behind the anticipated shift away from motorbike dependence is that people
will massively shift towards public transportation, once the mass rapid transit (MRT) system, also
referred to as the metro system, will be available. Some authors have found that local planners and
decision-makers were actually counting on aggravated congestion as a lever to encourage the modal
shift from motorbikes to public transit in the near future (Lockrem, 2016; Tuan, 2015). The city has
been deploying significant efforts over the last two decades to develop an MRT system and to upgrade
the bus system that should eventually become the feeder network supporting MRT ridership. An
ambitious public transportation system has been a pivotal component of the Master Plan of Ho Chi
Minh City since 2001. Ultimately, with six metro lines (Figure 13), a monorail line, a tram, and a
dedicated bus line (BRT), the network should become the most extensive rail-based transit system in
Southeast Asia (Musil & Simon, 2014). In addition to government funds, the project has been
supported by loans from numerous development aid institutions, including the JICA, the Asian

29
For example, the Vietnam Urban Upgrading Project contributed to upgrading narrow alleyways in Ho Chi Minh City with the support from a
US$382 million loan from the World Bank and US$140 million counterpart funding from the national government. The project focused on upgrading 200
low-income neighborhoods in Ho Chi Minh City and three other cities (Hai Phong, Nam Dinh, and Can Tho) between 2004 and 2014. It supposedly
benefitted 7.5 million residents. The webpage of the project presents the feedback of some residents whose livelihood has been improved through better
pavement, water supply and sewerage connections in the alleyways that lead to their houses and businesses, thus making the “street[s] cleaner and safer,”
less exposed to flooding risks and mosquitoes, for people who live and do business on these streets (World Bank Group, 2014).

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Development Bank, the KfW group (Germany), the European Investment Fund, and the World Bank
(Musil & Simon, 2014).

Figure 13 – Map of Ho Chi Minh City's Six Metro Lines (Planned)
(Source: tuoitre.vn)
The 2004 national transportation strategy
30
presented above as a key document in the country’s
development strategy had a presumptuous objective according to which 50 to 60% of daily trips would
be by public transit by 2020 (Dematera et al., 2015).
31
But to date, there is no mass transit option
available yet, and the bus share remains quite low. The metro Line 1 project was approved in 2007 and

30
Decision No. 206/2004/QD-TTg
31
A recent presentation by a leading official of the Ministry of Transportation mentioned a revised target of 25-30% by 2025 with the metro system
meeting 2-3% of the demand (Anh, July 19, 2019).

83
originally scheduled for completion in 2014.
32
The opening is now expected for 2021, that is seven
years behind the initial schedule (Tuoi Tre online, 2019). Mostly elevated, the 19.2-km (12 mi.) Line 1
will connect the Ben Thanh market in the city center to Suoi Tien in the periphery, in District 9. As a
symbolic gesture, the Opera House metro station that is located right in the core of District 1 has been
announced to open to visitors, without being operational, by April 30, 2020, which is a major national
holiday (Saigoneer, 2020). As for Line 2, which will connect Ben Thanh to the Tan Phu District,
construction was supposed to start in 2014 but has been pending for financial reasons and blockages in
the resettlement process. The other lines are still in the planning stage of their development.
Meanwhile, the local government of Ho Chi Minh City has deployed significant efforts to
modernize and expand the bus system, but the transit share is slow to increase. It has been low for
decades (6% in 2014 according to JICA [2016]).
33
Le and Trinh (2016) showed that employees and
students were willing to switch from motorbike to the bus provided that the system is upgraded. Since
2017, the city has engaged in a vast campaign to expand and renew the bus fleet and to move towards
greener fuel technology (compressed natural gas – CNG). The new fleet is composed of smaller
vehicles able to serve residential areas where streets are narrow while providing passengers better

32
It is financed by a loan from the JICA (Tatarski, 2017). The construction works only started in 2012. Numerous bottlenecks, related in particular to
the disbursement of funds and fluctuations in the exchange rate of the Japanese Yen, have caused significant delays and additional costs. At the time of
approval, the total investment was VND 17.4 trillion ($750 million). In November 2019, the National Assembly allowed an additional investment of VND
43.6 trillion ($1.88 billion) (Cong, 2020). According to a newspaper article dated January 2019 (Saigoneer, 2019), 60% of the project was completed at the
time. Recent news dated February 2020, one year later, reported a 71% completion rate with an objective to reach 85% by the end of the year; the
construction phased is now completed though, and the project is reportedly moving towards the installation of the “rail, electromechanical and signal
systems along the entire line, as well as the installation of equipment and the completion of the stations” (Cong, 2020).
33
Currently the bus network of Ho Chi Minh City includes 138 bus lines, including on BRT line, 2,800 buses, and it generates 17,000 trips per day
according to the Ministry of Transportation (Anh, July 19, 2019).

84
comfort and accessibility (VNA, 2017).
34
Finally, the bus system is highly subsidized – a bus ticket
costs VND 6,000 (US$ 0.25), and the local government regularly launches educational and
advertisement campaigns to encourage pupils, students, public servants, and city officials to prefer the
bus over private transportation modes (Tuoi Tre online, 2019). As a result of these efforts, some
statistics report that the bus share has been on the rise, up to 9% in 2019 (Tuoi Tre online, 2019). But
the increase has been slow, especially as the bus does not gain much appeal faced with ultra-
competitive on-demand mobility services offered by Grab, Go-Viet, or Be (Vien Thong, 2019).
Finally, the taxi industry
35
as well as the bus service of Ho Chi Minh City has suffered the boom of
the ride-hailing industry since 2014. On-demand car and motorbike rides accounted for 191 million
trips in 2019 and were held responsible for a 3% drop of bus rides that year. Motorbike rides have
become the cheapest transportation mode, cheaper than the bus while providing faster and door-to-door
mobility.
36
The rise of on-demand mobility is therefore depicted as an issue in the news and by local
authorities because of the competition it represents for public transit while most likely increasing the
volume of motorized trips.
The Overlook of Non-Motorized Transportation
Current transportation planning in Ho Chi Minh does not encompass any substantial plans to
promote walking and biking. The need to improve walking conditions is an argument that appears in
official discourse, but always in relation to another agenda that is to clear the sidewalks of contested

34
A 2018-2020 investment plan by the Department of Transportation of Ho Chi Minh City aimed for 75% of all new buses to run on CNG, but the
plan is constrained by the limited number of fueling stations in the city – there are only four to date (Saigoneer, 2019).
35
The taxi fleet is estimated to include 11,000 vehicles, including car-based ride hailing services, and to serve 200 million passengers per year,
according to the Ministry of Transportation
35
(Anh, July 19, 2019).
36
Averaging at VND 5,000 (US$ 0.21) for a ride that is less than 8 km (5 mi.) (Phong, 2019).

85
uses such as motorbike parking and street vending (see below). Hansen (2016) raised the question of
why Vietnamese cities do not try harder to bring back the bicycle in order to move towards more
sustainable transportation practices. Despite its promises for tackling congestion and pollution, the
bicycle suffers from the stigma of being the mode of the past, of the poor, or of the children, in sum, of
those who cannot afford private motorized transportation. One of my interviewees, for example,
mentioned that biking on a regular basis would look like “a social failure to the eyes of other people”
(see Chapter 5 for more on people’s affect regarding different modes). As Jain and Tiwari (2009) noted
in their work on declining trends of bicycle riders in India, enhancing the bicycle’s attractiveness
would require reversing its social status, as eco-friendly and trendy instead of the poor man’s vehicle.
3.3. Mobility Transition and Urbanism in Transition
Mobility Transition and the Transformation of the Urban Space
The policy orientations mentioned in the previous section drive a mobility transition away from
motorbike dependence, towards car- and transit mobility, most strikingly illustrated by policies such as
the anticipated ban on motorbikes and car- and transit-oriented infrastructure investments.
Table 8 classifies the different measures included in the overall urban transportation strategy of the
Ministry of Transportation according to these two different directions that the mobility transition is
pursuing.
Table 8 – Summary of Policy Orientations Supporting the Mobility Transition
Away from
Motorbike Mobility
Progressive ban on motorbikes
Towards
Car Mobility
Towards
Transit Mobility
- Increase the share of urban land dedicated to
transportation from 8.8% to 16-26%
- Build urban railway
- Expand the bus system

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- Build new roads
- Upgrade existing streets, including street widenings
- Build bridges (including flyovers) and tunnels
- Develop parking sites for cars
- Increase the quality of the bus system
- Renew the bus fleet

(Source: based on Anh, 2019)
In any case, the mobility transition involves not only transformations of the way people move
around, but also of the urban spaces that are the stage of urban mobility. These transformations must be
understood within broader trends of modernization of the economy, the society, and of the local
urbanism as a result. First of all, the main motivations behind the on-going efforts to progressively
remove motorbikes from the city’s streets, instead of limiting car use, are rooted in a broader strategy
of modernization of the economy, in which the automobile industry is expected to play a pivotal role.
The argument that replacing motorbike traffic by cars and transit will reduce traffic congestion holds
only if priority is given to public transit. In comparison to the space that a motorbike need, barely more
than a bicycle, one bus with a carrying capacity of approximately 50 passengers corresponds to 10.4
motorbike-equivalent units (MEU) according to Cao and Sano’s (2012) estimates. In contrast, one car
corresponds to 3.4 MEU, where cars oftentimes drive around with no more than one person in it. The
argument according to which the city is not ready for limiting car use is purported by an elite
concerned with representing the interests of the leaders and upper classes who are most attracted to the
symbolic status attached to car mobility, one of distinction and modern living.
Furthermore, several authors have suggested that the involvement of international development
institutions in the development of mass transit systems, as it is the case in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh
City, contributes to promoting a global system of values, institutions, objectives and urban forms
(Mann & Banerjee, 2011; Musil, 2013). In Ho Chi Minh City, the MRT system has been designed as a
commuter rail that will best serve people who live in the periphery and work in the city center

87
(ALMEC, 2004), that is, middle-class individuals whose lifestyle can be considered modern, with a
clear separation between home and work locations, and work and leisure times. The promoted shift
from motorbike- to transit-based mobility is one from many short and door-to-door trips in dense and
highly mixed-use urban environments to fewer and longer trips between urban areas that are
modernized and therefore more “legible” in the sense of James C. Scott (1998), which, in this case,
means with clearer distinctions between areas with different dominant uses – residential, commercial,
institutional, and so forth.
Finally, Marie Gibert-Flutre’s in-depth analyses of the transformations of Ho Chi Minh City’s
alleyways put the emphasis on the fact that their various improvements and upgrades, which have
benefitted from the support of the international community as well, result from a modern conception of
street spaces that give priority to their function as traffic network over their other function as public
spaces (Gibert, 2014; Gibert & Son, 2016; Gibert, 2016; Gibert, 2018). The same argument holds for
other public spaces, especially sidewalks and pedestrian streets.
Sidewalk Clearing Campaigns
Sidewalks are the most contested public spaces. As mentioned in the literature review section
(Chapter 2), everywhere around the world there are tensions between their function as paths for
pedestrian flows and places for diverse activities along the continuum from public to private uses of
public spaces (Bell & Loukaitou-Sideris, 2014; Duneier & Carter, 1999; Hidayat, Choocharukul, &
Kishi Ph D, 2011; Kim, 2015). Such tensions are especially acute in Ho Chi Minh City where
sidewalks are crowded with a multitude of objects – parked motorbikes, tables, chairs, and stools,
vending stalls and baskets, makeshift on-ramps for vehicles to park, stairs to access adjacent buildings
– and hundreds of people engaging in a myriad of activities – security guards watching over the

88
parking activity, street vendors, residents and other passers-by socializing and going about their daily
activities, and among all these people, some pedestrians. This is the case almost anywhere there is
sidewalk space available, except in the most recent parts of the city.
37

Drawing on minute observations of the sidewalks of Ho Chi Minh City, Annette Kim (2012)
called for sidewalks to be planned and regulated as mixed-use spaces as opposed to transportation
networks only. In reality in recent years, planning and regulation efforts have drawn on the argument
that sidewalks should be dedicated to pedestrian flows, another example of “pedestrianism” (Blomley,
2007; 2010), that is, and exclusive practice that gives priority to the unimpeded flow of pedestrian
movement over other competing uses of sidewalk spaces and the users associated with them. The
sidewalks of Ho Chi Minh City are the stage of regular crackdowns on street vendors under the
pretense that their presence impedes pedestrian flows (Kim, 2015pp. 167-175). Each campaign affects
thousands of vendors who find themselves faced with at least a fine, if not unemployment when their
stall and merchandise is confiscated.
At the beginning of 2017, the deputy chairman of District 1 Doan Ngoc Hai made a pledge to turn
Saigon into a “Little Singapore” (Tran, D., 2018). The motto of his campaign, the most aggressive one
ever conducted against non-pedestrian uses of sidewalks, was: “we must restore order in public spaces”
(VnExpress, 2017). Newspapers gave him the nickname of “Captain Sidewalk” because of his
belligerent methods. He was leading cleanup patrols to the front every day. Pictures of him pointing a
hostile finger at sidewalk encroachments went viral, along with pictures of him ordering police officers

37
The width of Ho Chi Minh City’s sidewalks varies from one urban environment to another. According to measurements conducted by the JICA
(2016; Chapter 3, p. 10), sidewalks are 8.27 ft wide in the older parts of the city, where streets have been planned and built by the colonial regime (Kim,
2015; p. 30), but much narrower in the newer parts of the urban core (3.28 ft) which developed without much planning. Sidewalks are the widest in
recently developed suburban areas (8.92 ft) but probably less likely to be used there as intensely as they are in more central parts of the city.

89
to “attack” street vendors, businesses, public agencies, and five-star hotels alike, with a jackhammer if
necessary, to destroy the steps providing access to the buildings or to remove the vehicles encroaching
on the sidewalks for example. Cars of diplomats and public officials were towed, as well as thousands
of motorbikes. Barriers were installed to prevent motorbike users from parking, thus creating chaos on
the streets. Popular at first, his campaign was soon criticized after pictures of street vendors crying in
despair started circulating on the internet. His superior, the city chairman, expressed in public that
Doan Ngoc Hai’s methods were “inhumane” and that a “more subtle approach [was] necessary rather
than kicking poor vendors off the sidewalks” (Nguyen, Tuyet, 2017). After receiving death threats, in
January 2018 he finally stepped down and wrote in his resignation letter: “I have failed to keep my
promise to the public” to turn Saigon into Singapore. The reason he advanced for the surge of
unpopularity was that “his campaign had collided with businesses that had million-dollar interests on
the sidewalks, and a large number of officials backing them” (Tran, 2018).
Now remain from his campaign two food zones in District 1 – regulated street food markets
inspired from those that exist in Singapore, which are considered exemplary of how street vending
could be managed in more places in the city (Hoa, 2017). Other than that, street life has resumed in Ho
Chi Minh City soon after his resignation. Three months later, VN Express published a short but
provocative video titled “Saigon, three months after sidewalk cleanup campaign” (VnExpress, 2017). It
showed the comeback of business as usual on the sidewalks – busy waiters setting dozens of tables at
dawn, hundreds of people eating and drinking, thousands of parked motorbikes, some driving on them
as well as a few cars, and amidst this intense activity, a few pedestrians. There was no text
accompanying the video, just a provocative subtitle asking: “Are we Singapore yet?” The video ends
on one note that says: “But for now, Saigon will be Saigon,” an urban space where the non-pedestrian
uses of sidewalks have proven again and again to be resilient.

90
Nguyễn Huệ Pedestrian Street: An Example of Pedestrianism
Finally, the pedestrianization of Nguyễn Huệ street in 2015 is another example of “pedestrianism”
(Blomley, 2010). It further illustrates how the modernization of public spaces is associated with
exclusive regulations in the name of making space for pedestrians. The project turned four inside lanes
of the largest boulevard of District 1 into a large open space that is accessible to pedestrians only and
where the enforcement of anti-vending regulation is the strictest in the city. Two traffic lanes have
remained on each side. Video recordings of street activity around 6:00 PM and 10:00 PM on a
weekday showed that motorized traffic is actually quite voluminous in the traffic lanes (Figure 14).
The sidewalks are lined with businesses that are mostly targeted towards tourists (travel agencies,
hotels, restaurants, art galleries). Very few street vendors were recorded on the entire street (nine on
the sidewalks and twelve in the pedestrian space over the course of two recordings). As for the
pedestrian-only space in the middle, there were more people hanging out without being in movement
than people walking per se at both times of recording.

91

Figure 14 – Counts of Street Uses at Night on Nguyễn Huệ Street
The resulting public space is nothing like a normal street connecting two intersections. It is a
destination in and of itself that functions like a typical public square or plaza as defined by Kostof
(1992), one that can be justified by its ritual aspect and that can also be seen as a demonstration of
power. The pedestrianization project turned the boulevard into a large forecourt for the People’s
Committee of Ho Chi Minh City. Between the monumental colonial building and the river at the other
end of Nguyễn Huệ street is a statue of the nationalist leader after whom the city was named, Ho Chi
Minh, overlooking the crowds that gather on the plaza. Nevertheless, the planning and implementation
of the conversion project was driven by a narrative of sustainable transportation, according to which
Ho Chi Minh City needs to promote walking and therefore to create more pedestrian-only spaces
(Chau, Huong, Ly, & Nam, 2017; Minh & Nguyen, 2011).

92

Figure 15 – Nguyễn Huệ Pedestrian Street
From top left to bottom right: 1) Statue of Ho Chi Minh City in front of the People’s Committee, overlooking
the Nguyễn Huệ pedestrian area; 2) “No street vending allowed” sign; 3) Old apartment building at 42,
Nguyễn Huệ, converted into a shopping center; 4) Crowd gathered for the screening of a soccer match; 5)
One of the few highly mobile street vendors on Nguyễn Huệ street; 6) Children playing in the fountains at
night.

The pedestrianization of Nguyễn Huệ Street has been a complete success considering that
thousands of people (Figure 15) gather on the plaza every evening and very large crowds for major
events, such as soccer games or New Year Eves (lunar and solar). Most people I interviewed about
their affect for different places mentioned Nguyễn Huệ as one of their favorite streets in town, for
reasons that included its “beautiful design” and the possibility for children to run around and play in
the fountains. One of the top reasons people mentioned was “the comfort of walking around” without
worrying about traffic, which echoes the sustainable transportation rationale mentioned above. Some

93
older people said they preferred going in the morning to exercise. One middle-class young woman said
that Nguyễn Huệ was her usual meeting point when she goes shopping with her friends on Saturday
afternoons. However, the lived experience of street vendors makes Nguyễn Huệ a rather exclusionary
as opposed to an inclusive public space (see Chapter 5).
4. Conclusion: The Politics of the Conceived Space of Mobility Transition
In the conceived space of urban mobility, Ho Chi Minh City is meant to shift away from motorbike
dependence and to transition towards car- and transit-based mobility. The advertised rationale is
grounded in the conventional sustainable transportation discourse, where the focus is on issues of
congestion, pollution, and other externalities associated with high motorbike dependence. These
externalities are posited as problems to be solved, which they undoubtedly are, and the proposed
solution is threefold; i) progressively ban motorbikes from the future of urban mobility, ii) facilitate car
travel, and iii) improve and develop public transit. It is interesting to note that none of the plans or
policies supporting these orientations are backed up with studies predicting their effects, the type of
scientific approach that is often used in democratic systems where local authorities must prove to their
constituents that their tax money is put to efficient use. In Ho Chi Minh City, the sustainable
transportation discourse seems to have been simply borrowed from allegedly “modern” cities that local
consultants visit in search of “best practices,” and inserted directly in local policies.
The underlying but less explicit rationale is a broader agenda of modernization of the economy, the
society, the urban space, and associated urban lifestyles. In that sense, the promotion of car use relates
to what Urry (2004) calls the “system of automobility,” which is about a whole system of values,
meanings, globalized linkages, and consumer behaviors. To that list should be added new urban forms.
The conceived space of urban mobility promotes an urbanism that is supposedly less “messy” (Hou &

94
Chalana, 2016), more orderly, and more “legible” (Scott, 1998) than that of Ho Chi Minh City today.
To illustrate this point, Figure 16 shows some pictures that a Vietnamese transportation expert (Bui,
2017) selected to illustrate a PowerPoint presentation he gave about Ho Chi Minh City’s transportation
sector. Following a slide titled “core problems and issues” were three pictures of congested traffic,
including one close-up on a group of motorbike riders and one image of traffic on a flooded street that
dates back to before the time when wearing a helmet became mandatory and cyclos were forbidden
(mid-2000s). The slide about infrastructure development and the last slide titled “for a better future of
[…] Ho Chi Minh City” were illustrated with perfectly smooth and orderly car flows making use of
modern (and seemingly oversized) tunnel and roundabout that could be anywhere else in the world. By
circulating such images, the development of car-oriented infrastructure has been erected to the rank of
“worlding practices” (Roy & Ong, 2011) that are synonymous with catching up with the modern and
globalized world. That is true of urban rail transit infrastructure as well.

Figure 16 – Images of the Conceived Space of Urban Mobility
(Source: Bui, 2017)
However, the mobility transition that is planned, coded, and deployed in the conceived space of
urban mobility fosters socio-spatial inequalities. Every car that is added to the streets of Ho Chi Minh
City increases tremendously the comfort of a privileged few but everyone else in the city suffers from

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an impingement on their mobility, an increase in the risk of fatalities, and more time spent in congested
traffic. Not everyone would benefit equally from the promoted shift towards public transit either.
Those who would benefit most are the middle classes with office-hour jobs who live near a metro
station in the suburbs and work near another station in the center. Anyone living in a narrow alleyway
(85% of the population today), and whose life is organized around a multitude of places within short
distances from each other, will have to cope with long walks under the sun or in the rain to get to any
transit stop, which may be worth doing only for longer and therefore fewer trips. Promoting and
planning for walking, biking, and micro-mobilities such as dockless shared electric bikes and scooters
would in fact be the most inclusive, sustainable, and contextually appropriate transportation policies.
But these forms of mobility do not align with the ideal of car- and mass transit-based modernity that is
at the core of the conceived space of urban mobility.
In sum, the urbanism that the mobility transition is expected to bring about is one that is remiss of
the ambient disorder associated with motorbike use. But for three decades the motorbike has been the
transportation mode that affords nearly everyone the comfort of door-to-door and effortless mobility,
exhaust fumes and the obvious risks of accidents notwithstanding. What is depicted in the conceived
space of urban mobility as disorderly and chaotic is in fact the fast pulse of millions of people going
about their everyday life, or “spatial practice,” in the perceived space of urban mobility.

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Chapter 4.
The Perceived Space of Urban Mobility: Travel Behaviors and the Production of Urban Space
1. Introduction
The perceived space of urban mobility is the city that people experience and produce through
everyday mobility practices. It is the dominated space of urban mobility in the sense that people’s
mobile experiences are determined by how urban mobility has been planned and implemented in the
conceived space. The need or desire to be present in different places at different points in time justify
the temporary “dis-placements,” in the most literal sense of the term (movements between places), of
people in the urban space. Physically and conceptually, everyday mobility allows for spatial
agglomeration; indeed, daily commutes between outlying localities and urban cores are official metrics
sometimes used to define the spatial boundaries of metropolitan areas (Duranton, 2015; Lang & Knox,
2009; Morrill, Cromartie, & Hart, 1999). A core argument in this dissertation is that everyday mobility
also allows for the contact of diverse people with each other, which I see as equally critical to the
definition of urban spaces as cohesive units, not only spatially, but socially as well. In this chapter, I
address the following research question: To what extent do different mobility practices relate to the
production of social interactions in the city? Looking at contemporary Ho Chi Minh City, in the
context of the current mobility transition, I explore the idea that different forms of mobility can be
varyingly supportive of social contacts.
At the core of this chapter is the notion of perception. I intersect two uses of the concept: that of
Henri Lefebvre (1974) in the Production of Space, and his notion of “perceived space,” and that of
environmental psychologists with their focus on visual perceptions. Lefebvre (1974; p. 48) defines the

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“perceived space” – or “spatial practice” – as the stage of all movements and activities constitutive of
everyday life, such as daily commutes. As opposed to the “conceived space” (Lefebvre, 1974; p. 43)
that of planners and technocrats, the perceived space is that of the users who take part in the production
and reproduction of space as they trace again and again the paths of their daily routines. Since the
beginnings of the discipline (Barker, 1968; Gibson, 1979), environmental psychologists have posited
sensory perceptions, especially visual perceptions, as shaping cognitive representations of
environmental (actionable) affordances, thus informing individual decisions of engaging in different
actions. As explained in Chapter 2 – Re-thinking Street Spaces from the Perspective of Flows, the
conceptual framework on which I draw establishes mobility practices as influencing people’s
perceptions of the environmental affordances, thus shaping cognitive representations thereof, and
determining the activities in which people engage. The conceptual premise of this chapter is the
following: the way people usually move around – their usual transportation mode – is a significant
determinant of potential urban affordances they may perceive and utilize in the urban environment, and
therefore the number and type of activities in which they may engage.
Motorbike mobility is central to the “spatial practice” of the vast majority of residents in
contemporary Ho Chi Minh City (83%). Driving a motorbike affords a particularly unmediated
sensorial experience of the built environment (Truitt, 2008). As motorbike riders move through the
urban space with ease, not only are they able to cover greater distances than if they were walking or
biking, they are also directly exposed to their surrounding environment without the mediation of a
windshield to tamper their perceptions of its affordances. Thus, as they receive more direct stimuli,
they are more aware of their surrounding environment. For this reason, I hypothesize that compared to
other transportation modes, motorbike mobility is associated with a greater number of opportunities to
interact with places, and people, and therefore with a greater propensity to engage in discretionary

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activities, including those that are rich in social interactions. The streets of Ho Chi Minh City afford
innumerable opportunities for such activities. Furthermore, I take into consideration the peculiarities of
Ho Chi Minh City’s street network, such as the dense and intricate network of narrow alleyways in
residential areas and the continuity of commercial uses that line most types of streets. A second
hypothesis is that the interaction of motorbike mobility with the dense and mixed-use environment of
Ho Chi Minh City is particularly conducive to activities that are rich in social interactions.
To test these hypotheses, I use a representative sample of travel surveys collected in 2014 and I run
multivariate regressions of people’s number of optional trips (dependent variable) on their usual
transportation mode (explanatory factor) while controlling for socio-demographic and built
environment factors. The range of purposes of optional trips include activities such as eating out, going
to the pagoda, meeting with friends or relatives, and so forth, activities that are assumed to be rich in
social interactions, potentially with strangers.
The regression results support the hypothesis that in 2014, driving a motorbike on an everyday
basis in Ho Chi Minh City was more conducive to making such optional trips than other transportation
modes, especially walking, biking, or being given motorbike- or bicycle rides. However, the sample of
observations for car drivers was too small to draw any conclusion regarding the relationship between
car mobility and optional trips. The transition towards four-wheeled mobility had barely started at the
time of data collection. As for people with multi-modal behaviors, including those who couple
motorbike use with bus or other modes, the results seem to suggest that they make even more optional
trips conducive to social interactions than people who usually drive a motorbike only. I conclude that
the perceived space of urban mobility in 2014 Ho Chi Minh City was made of strong and significant
associations between dominant transportation behaviors, i.e., motorbike mobility, and socializing
activities in the urban space. This raises the question of a possible tension with the conceived space of

99
urban mobility, which promotes a transition away from motorbike mobility, thus possibly challenging
the socio-spatial inclusiveness of urban street spaces.
In what follows, I first present some methodological considerations regarding measurements of the
variables of interest; second, some descriptive statistics regarding the number of daily trips of different
types depending on people’s usual transportation mode. Third, I propose a multivariate regression
model to test the significance of the relationship between the variables while controlling for socio-
demographic and built environment factors. Finally, I summarize and discuss the regression results.
2. Measurements
I compiled a unique cross-sectional dataset comprised of 60,397 individual observations. It results
from the merging of representative household and travel surveys conducted in 2014 by ALMEC
Corporation, with Open Street Map data downloaded in 2018 (see Methodology section in Chapter 2 –
Re-Thinking Street Spaces). The dataset on which this chapter draws therefore includes information
about travel behaviors, individual and household characteristics, and street network attributes.
2.1. Variables of Interest
Number of “Optional” Trips per Person per Day, A Proxy for Social Interactions
The main outcome of interest in this dissertation is the nature and volume of social interactions in
which people engage in the city, especially in public space. The household travel survey does not
include any direct measurement of social interactions. Instead, based on individual one-day travel
diaries, I use as a proxy the number of optional trips whose purpose is conducive to social
interactions. I focus on optional trips, which is a sub-category of discretionary trips, because of their
assumed contribution to quality of life (Chapin, 1974).

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For each trip reported in travel diaries, participants selected one out of multiple choices regarding
the trip purpose: 01) to home, 02) to work, 03) to school, 04) private matters (e.g., bank), 05) company
business, 06) to eat (not home), 07) social/recreation/religious, 08) shopping/market, 09) pick-up/send
off, 10) joy riding, 11) others (sic). I assume that trips to eat outside of home (06), and trips for social,
recreational, or religious purposes (07) are most conducive to social interactions. I suppose indeed that
people who checked these boxes went to restaurants, coffee shops, pagodas, churches, parks, movie
theaters, and other “third places” (Oldenburg, 1999), that is, convivial places that foster a sense of
belonging not only to a place but also a community. They met with friends, colleagues, relatives,
strangers, and semi-strangers. These trip purposes fall within the category of “optional activities” as
per Primerano et al.’s (2008) classification of trip purposes. I categorized the rest of the trips according
to Primerano et al.’s definitions of “mandatory” and “flexible” trips (Table 9). I created a separate
category for “joy rides” (10), in other words for trips that are just for the sake of enjoying moving
around in the city. Non-classified trips include those for which the purpose label was either not
sufficiently explicit (“company business” and “others”) or not a perfect fit for any of the defined
categories (“pick-up/send-off”).
Table 9 – Typology of Trip Purposes based on Primerano et al.’s (2008) Classification
Category Definition (Primerano et al., 2008) Trip Purposes (travel survey)
Mandatory Mandatory activities: frequency (typically daily),
location and timing are all fixed (e.g., work and
school)
01) to home
02) to work
03) to school
Flexible Flexible activities: performed on a regular basis but
some characteristics can vary, such as timing and
location (e.g., shopping, banking)
04) private matters (e.g., bank)
08) shopping/market
Optional Optional activities: discretionary, all characteristics
can vary (e.g., social and recreational activities)
06) to eat (not home)
07) social/recreation/religious
Joy Ride 10) joy riding
Non-Classified 05) company business
09) pick-up/send off
11) others

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Again, the dependent variable primarily considered in this chapter is the total number of optional
trips per person per day, because of their assumedly high potential for leading to activities rich in
social interactions (possibly in public space). However, I also consider other trip categories for
comparison. As opposed to optional trips, I hypothesize that mandatory trips are least conducive to
social interactions in public space, and that flexible trips fall somewhere in between. Arguably, some
shopping, which falls here within the “flexible” category, is also conducive to social interactions, but
the data does not enable to identify whether the shopping that happened at destination did indeed foster
social interactions. Furthermore, some forms of shopping are more conducive to social interactions
than others, such as buying from street vendors, which can be assumed to be a richer experience in
terms contact with others than shopping at a supermarket for example. As for joy rides, conceptually
they may be considered a form of motorbike “flânerie” (Benjamin, 2006) that is even antithetical to the
very notion of social interactions. Several studies have shown that driving around, without any specific
destination in mind (Dormeier Freire, 2009; Tran, A. L., 2012; Truitt, 2008), is a common practice in
Ho Chi Minh City among motorbike riders in search of intimacy and freedom away from the tight
spaces of crowded homes. In these ethnographic studies, the saddles of motorbikes on the move have
been depicted as one of the only true “private” spaces in the city. Put in a different way, people are
engaging in private times that take place in public spaces (Banerjee, 2001). In the anonymity of an
ever-changing crowd on wheels, said saddles support indeed the most private types of interactions,
ranging from intimate conversations with a trusted one to some form of bodily contact with a lover that
would otherwise be deemed inappropriate in “public” (Dormeier Freire, 2009).

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Usual Transportation Mode
I posit the way people move around as a critical but overlooked explanation for the extent to which
they engage in social interactions in the urban space. Therefore, people’s usual transportation mode is
the main explanatory factor considered in this quantitative section of the project.
For those who answered the question “[…] which transport mode do you often use when
commuting?” (sic), I considered the answer to be their usual transportation mode. Respondents could
choose between seven categories: 01) Motorbike, 02) Bicycle, 03) Electric bicycle, 04) Walking, 05)
Bus, 06) Car, and 07) Others. However, students and other non-working individuals did not answer this
question, which initially resulted in 12,597 (21%) missing observations for this key variable.
Furthermore, 5,595 respondents (9%) answered “others.” Whenever possible, I re-coded these
observations where the usual transportation mode was either “missing” or recorded as “other” based on
the actual transportation mode they used and reported for each of the recorded trips. If an individual
had consistently used the same transportation mode for each leg of all trips throughout the day, I
considered this mode their usual transportation mode. Only for “bus” was the rule slightly different, as
bus rides are typically complemented with other transportation modes for the first and last mile. If at
least one leg of all trips was by bus, I considered the user to have multimodal habits that include bus
use.
38
When looking at the transportation mode reported for each trip of the day, it appeared that a
significant share of individuals (5% of total) who had checked “others” systematically traveled as the
passenger of a motorbike or a bicycle. Therefore, I created a distinct passenger category. Furthermore,

38
A close comparison between the two groups, those who answered “bus” as their usual commuting mode, and those who answered “others” but
used the bus for all trips, confirmed that in both cases, the actual trips were multimodal, where walking and using a motorbike (as either driver or
passenger) were the most common modes for the first- and last mile.

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I discovered that more than 4,000 people who had not answered the commuting question only walked
throughout the surveyed day. Following this data transformation, there were zero missing observations
for the “usual transportation mode variable” and 4,744 observations in the “others” category. Finally, a
close look at the “other” modes used on the surveyed day revealed multimodal behavioral patterns
(more detail in Appendix 2.1 – Understanding Multimodal Behaviors). The remaining “others” were
people who, for example, walked in the morning to go eat breakfast, to shop, or just to take a walk, and
then rode a motorbike throughout the rest of the day. The remaining “other” observations were
therefore recoded as “multimodal (without bus).” Figure 17 shows how the modal splits compare
between the two “commuting” and “usual” transportation mode variables. The most striking difference
is that after re-coding, the walking share is twice as large (12%) when measured as a “usual”
transportation mode than when measured based on people’s report of their commuting mode (6%).

Figure 17 – Modal Split: Commuting (Left) as opposed to Usual (Right) Transportation Mode
Street Network Characteristics
In this chapter, the density of narrow mixed-use streets is a variable of particular interest, based on
the premise that motorbike use is particularly well suited for navigating them. The conjunction of

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motorbike mobility with a tightly knit built environment interwoven with many alleyways and narrow
mixed-use streets is conceived as enhancing the accessibility and proximity of opportunities for
optional activities. Furthermore, the density of other street types serves as a proxy for the diversity of
land uses, which is known to be closely associated with travel behaviors (Boarnet & Crane, 2001;
Cervero & Kockelman, 1997; Ewing & Cervero, 2010). While the narrowest alleyways are typically
lined with residential uses, larger urban streets are generally lined with ground-floor commercial uses
in Ho Chi Minh City. Most urban areas have expanded without significant planning and zoning and are
de facto mixed-use. Different types of streets support different types of commercial activities and
various degrees of integration of other uses, especially industrial and institutional uses.
39

Therefore, to account for spatial constraints, I merged the individual- and street network- datasets
by home address (residential zone). I kept the distance to center and population density, as well as
linear densities for the different types of streets. Mean population and street densities, by type, are
presented in Table 10. “Service streets” as per OSM classification, which correspond to narrow
residential alleyways, have the highest linear density on average (M = 8.63 mi. per sq. mi.), followed
by “residential streets” (M = 7.10 mi. per sq. mi.), which are the narrowest type of mixed-use streets
lined with commercial uses on the ground floor of adjacent properties.

39
For example, it is plausible to imagine a motorbike dealership, a woodworking workshop, and a large hospital abutting a primary road, as per the
OSM classification, but much less likely along a tertiary road. The latter would more likely be lined with a large majority of smaller businesses, including
small eateries, corner stores, coffee shops, and so on, interspersed with the occasional school or local administration.

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Table 10 – Mean Population and Street Density by Type (Unit: Residential Zone, N = 254)
Mean Min Max Std. Dev.
Area (sq. mi.) 22 0 1554 136
Population Density (inhabitants per sq. mi.) 59,170 0 223,180 57,218
Linear Density by Street Type (mi. per sq. mi.)

Motorway 0.02 0.00 2.36 0.17
Trunk roads 0.22 0.00 4.82 0.61
Primary roads 2.50 0.00 22.98 4.33
Secondary roads 1.45 0.00 23.14 2.70
Tertiary roads 3.18 0.00 16.02 3.21
Footway 0.36 0.00 12.94 1.27
Pedestrian streets 0.02 0.00 1.05 0.11
Living streets 0.03 0.00 1.61 0.17
Residential streets 7.10 0.00 25.25 4.98
Service streets (residential alleyways) 8.63 0.00 57.74 11.83
Paths 0.04 0.00 3.41 0.35
Cycleway 0.01 0.00 0.44 0.04
Steps 0.01 0.00 0.48 0.05
Tracks 0.04 0.00 3.15 0.25
Unclassified 0.46 0.00 6.43 0.76
Unknown 0.03 0.00 2.18 0.17
Total All streets 24.11 0.64 80.40 17.59

Socio-Demographic Characteristics and Travel-Time Constraints
Many other factors are likely to influence the relationship between usual mobility practices and the
number and type of daily trips people make. Among them are socio-demographic factors. The
individual dataset includes a few individual-level variables, such as age, gender, educational
attainment, and occupation. However, there is a large number of missing income observations at the
individual level. I merged the individual- and household- datasets by household identifier and kept
household-level variables related to income, as well as household size, number of young children (less
than 6 years old), number of years lived in dwelling. I consider the latter an indication of how
established the household is in their neighborhood, and therefore how extended the knowledge they
have of the people, places, and opportunities surrounding them. In addition, I kept household-level data

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related to the time of the survey, whether it was on a weekday or a weekend, and the month when the
survey took place.
40
Unfortunately, 4,245 individual observations could not be matched with
household-level data.
The travel time budget is another constraint expected to influence the number and type of trips
people make. Commuting times indicate the time workers have to spend traveling on a typical
weekday. There were 12,583 missing values for this variable in the individual dataset as students
without a side job, housewives, retired, and unemployed respondents did not answer the question. I
replaced these missing values by zero values indicating that these individuals have no set time budget
to be spent on traveling on a typical day.
A recurring issue in travel behavior research is that one-day travel diaries do not account for the
day-to-day variability of travel behaviors (Dharmowijoyo et al., 2016; Hanson & Huff, 1981). I believe
that this caveat is not too problematic in the case of this study, for the following reasons: 1) Avoiding
this caveat is precisely the reason why the main independent variable is not about the actual travel
mode used for the recorded trips but about a transportation mode they use regularly. In the case of
commuters, their usual commuting mode does not change from day to day. 2) It is indeed very likely
that the time of the week affects the number of optional trips people make, but this is controlled for by
including a dummy variable for weekend in the regression model, and the sample is large enough to
have all days of the week represented.

40
The data was collected between January and March 2014, around the Lunar New Year, which was on January 31
st
that year. Proximity to this event
may have influenced the number and type of trips people recorded. For example, the few weeks leading to the Lunar New Year typically generate
additional shopping trips as people go about preparations. The few days immediately prior and after the New Year, traditionally people are off, they stay at
home on the first day of the year, visit close relatives on the second, and then progressively extend their visits to wider social circles. Only after a few days
do they go back to their usual routines.

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2.2. Research Question and Hypotheses
Based on this data, the specific purpose of this chapter is to provide answers to the following
research question: How do different mobility practices (motorbike, bicycle, electric bicycle, motorbike
or bicycle passenger, pedestrian, car, and multimodal mobility) relate to the production of social
interactions in the city? In light of the data available, the three following hypotheses are the focus of
this chapter:

H1: All else being equal, people for whom driving a motorbike is the usual transportation
mode make more trips that are conducive to social interactions than people using other
transportation modes. Because of the convenience of the mode, and the greater exposure
to environmental stimuli mentioned above,
a) … they make more stops that corresponds to optional trips;
b) … they make more stops that corresponds to flexible trips.

H2: The density of narrow streets in the area of residence positively and significantly
influences the number of optional trips people make;
a) The denser the network of residential alleyways, the more optional trips;
b) The denser the network of narrow commercial streets, the more optional trips.

H3: Driving a motorbike on a usual basis is even more conducive to making optional trips
when living in areas with a high density of narrow mixed-use streets.

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3. Descriptive Statistics
Table 11 – Travel Behaviors by Usual Transportation Mode

Usual Transportation Mode
a

Motorbike
Bicycle
Electric Bicycle
Walking
Bus
Car
Moto Passenger
Bicycle Passenger
Other mode
No answer
All

N=37,733 N=4,171 N=470 N=7,356 N=2,575 N=347 N=2,868 N=133 N=1,686 N=3,058 N=60,397
Trips / person / day, by type
Optional trips, including: 0.41 0.23 0.30 0.32 0.33 0.44 0.22 0.18 0.37 0.40 0.37
- To social activities 0.10 0.09 0.09 0.09 0.14 0.06 0.08 0.04 0.12 0.16 0.10
- To eat out 0.32 0.14 0.21 0.23 0.20 0.38 0.14 0.14 0.24 0.24 0.27
Mandatory trips, including: 2.38 2.63 2.77 1.89 2.53 2.35 2.12 2.32 2.64 1.93 2.32
- To home 1.56 1.57 1.61 1.52 1.57 1.39 1.28 1.27 1.76 1.92 1.57
- To work 0.71 0.18 0.08 0.19 0.22 0.90 0.15 0.02 0.24 0.01 0.51
- To school 0.10 0.87 1.08 0.18 0.74 0.05 0.69 1.03 0.64 0.01 0.24
Flexible trips, including: 0.42 0.33 0.27 0.66 0.35 0.19 0.27 0.17 0.40 1.01 0.46
- To private affairs (e.g., bank) 0.07 0.06 0.05 0.11 0.08 0.07 0.03 0.03 0.08 0.15 0.08
- To shop 0.35 0.27 0.22 0.55 0.27 0.12 0.24 0.14 0.32 0.86 0.38
Joy rides 0.04 0.04 0.03 0.23 0.05 0.02 0.01 0.02 0.11 0.25 0.08
Non classified trips, including: 0.32 0.15 0.16 0.17 0.19 0.44 0.17 0.05 0.30 0.35 0.28
- To company / business 0.02 0.01 0.00 0.01 0.01 0.09 0.00 0.00 0.02 0.00 0.02
- To pick up or drop off someone 0.18 0.06 0.05 0.04 0.03 0.19 0.08 0.03 0.09 0.11 0.14
- To others 0.12 0.08 0.10 0.13 0.15 0.16 0.09 0.02 0.19 0.24 0.12
Total number of trips 3.58 3.37 3.52 3.27 3.46 3.45 2.79 2.73 3.82 3.95 3.51

Notes:
a
The distribution presented here is after transformation of missing variables and “others” values
based on actual transportation mode used throughout the surveyed day.

Table 11 describes the mean number of trips of different types and average socio-demographic
profiles of different groups of individuals based on their usual transportation modes. On average,
motorbike drivers make 0.41 optional trips per day out of a total of 3.58 trips. If the data were
representative of people’s everyday travel behaviors, this would mean nearly three optional trips per
week for motorbike drivers. They make nearly twice as many optional trips as bicycle riders and
motorbike- and bicycle passengers (M = 0.23, 0.22, and 0.18 optional trips per day, respectively). In
fact, they make more optional trips than users of any other transportation mode, except for car users

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who make a slightly larger number of 0.44 optional trips per day. As for flexible trips, motorbike riders
also make more of such trips (M = 0.42) than users of any other mode, except for people who usually
walk. In comparison, motorbike users make 2.32 mandatory trips per day on average, which is the
same as car users, slightly less than riders of bicycles, electric bicycles, buses, and multimodal users,
but more than people who typically walk or ride as passengers.
Descriptive statistics are not sufficient to infer that there is a significant relationship between the
usual transportation mode and the number of trips of different types. It appears indeed that people with
different usual transportation modes differ on many other accounts, especially in terms of socio-
demographic characteristics (see Table 12). The motorbike and the car appear to be the modes of
people in working age. Typical users are 37 and 39 years old on average, respectively. In contrast, the
bicycle, the electric bicycle, the bus, and the passenger seat of bicycles and motorbikes appear to be the
usual mode of younger people, 16 years old on average for bicycle passengers, 27 years old for bus
riders. The majority of users are students (e.g., 85% of electric bicycle users). On the contrary, walking
is the usual mode of older people on average (M = 45). Usual transportation modes are also gendered.
The majority of motorbike drivers are male (60%), and car users almost exclusively male (85%). On
the contrary, a majority of female users fall in the bicycle, electric bicycle, walking, and passenger
groups. In terms of space-time constraints, the average commuting time is about 16 minutes for most
users. There are two exceptions, including people who typically walk – their average commuting time
is much shorter (M = 7 minutes) – and people who take the bus – theirs is twice as long (M = 29
minutes). People who usually walk tend to live in denser neighborhoods than average. Their
surrounding environment includes a much higher linear density of narrow residential alleyways for
example.

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The differences highlighted here, between the groups of users of different usual transportation
mode, are as many potential confounding factors in the relationship between usual mode and
socializing trips. A multivariate regression model seems appropriate to control for these.
Table 12 – Socio-demographic Characteristics by Usual Transportation Mode

Usual Transportation Mode
a

Motorbike
Bicycle
Electric Bicycle
Walking
Bus
Car
Moto Passenger
Bicycle Passenger
Other mode
No answer
All

N=37,733 N=4,171 N=470 N=7,356 N=2,575 N=347 N=2,868 N=133 N=1,686 N=3,058 N=60,397
Individual Demographics
Age (in years) 37.2 24.2 19.8 45.4 26.6 39.1 22.3 16.3 23.3 49.7 36.2
Male 60% 47% 42% 38% 49% 85% 46% 54% 53% 32% 54%
Type of job
Fixed-hour job
b
20% 4% 2% 2% 8% 28% 3% 2% 4% 0% 14%
Flexible-hour job
c
62% 19% 12% 28% 17% 63% 14% 2% 39% 0% 46%
Student 8% 66% 85% 14% 60% 5% 64% 86% 57% 0% 19%
Unemployed or retired 4% 2% 0% 26% 7% 3% 8% 3% 0% 38% 8%
Housewives 7% 9% 0% 30% 9% 1% 10% 7% 0% 61% 13%
Individual Travel Time Constraints
Commute time to work (min)
d
16.6 14.9 16.1 7.3 29.5 24.2 13.3 13.4 12.3 0.0 16.2
Total travel time on surveyed day (min) 61 50 57 35 86 86 41 37 51 53 56
Household Demographics
Household size 3.7 3.8 3.8 3.9 3.8 3.8 3.9 4.2 3.8 3.7 3.7
Household income (VND x 1,000,000)
e
13.0 10.6 12.6 11.7 11.6 21.9 11.7 10.2 12.2 11.8 12.5
Household Location Characteristics
Home distance to center (mi.) 7,7 8,7 8,9 7,1 8,1 7,8 7,8 8,8 7,8 7,0 7,7
Density near home (x1,000 pers. / sq.mi.) 51.7 45.6 44.9 62.0 45.9 45.7 46.7 45.0 50.8 56.4 52.2
Alleyway density near home (mi. / sq.mi.) 7,2 6,3 6,4 9,1 5,9 6,8 6,4 5,8 7,3 8,2 7,3

Notes:
a
The distribution presented here is after transformation of missing variables and “others” values
based on actual transportation mode used throughout the surveyed day;
b
Fixed-hour job is a dummy
variable for which the value is 1 if respondent checked one of the following occupation categories: 01)
Manager/Professional, 02) Office Staff, 04) Soldier/Policeman; 06) Home helper; 11) Student (working) (sic);
c
reciprocally, flexible-jour job is a dummy variable for which the value is 1 if the respondent answered 03)
Skilled worker, 04) Laborer, 05) Craftsperson, 06) Salesperson, 08) Driver, and 10) Other occupation;
d
The
average commuting times presented here are before transformation of the variable, meaning that these
average concern only people who are in the workforce and reported a commuting time different than zero.
e
US$ 1 = VND 21,236 at the time of data collection (JICA, 2016) .

111
4. Multivariate Regression Model
4.1. OLS Specifications
I propose an OLS regression model to analyze further the relationships between the total number of
trips of a certain type per person per day (dependent variable), the usual transportation mode and street
characteristics (explanatory factors), while controlling for socio-demographic and built environment
variables. In terms of type of trips, I am mostly interested in the number of optional trips, but I also run
part of the analysis for counts of other types of trips as a dependent variable, for comparison.
The equations below introduce four different specifications for the proposed model. The first and
second specifications support the testing of hypothesis H1 relative to the relationship between usual
transportation mode and the number of trips by type. The difference between specifications (1. A) and
(1 B.) is that the former includes only control variables from the individual dataset, whereas the latter
includes all socio-demographic controls from the household dataset. The second specification supports
the testing of H2 that focuses on how different types of street environments influence the number of
optional trips people make. The specification therefore includes a vector of street network
characteristics. Finally, the third specification serves to test H3 concerned with the joint effect of mode
and high density of narrow mixed-use streets, hence the interaction term between the mode and street
network variables. In all cases, I use the vce(robust) command in Stata to account for the clustering of
data at three levels of analysis (individual-, household level, and area code), except with Specification
(1. A) for which it does not apply (it only includes individual-level data).
!"#$%& () *&+,-
./
= 1
2
3
2
+ 1
5
3
5
+ 1
6
3
6
+7 (1. A)
!"#$%& () *&+,-
./
= 1
2
3
2
+ 1
5
3
5
+ 1
6
3
6
+1
8
3
8
+1
9
3
9
+7 (1. B)
!"#$%& () *&+,-
./
= 1
2
3
2
+ 1
5
3
5
+ 1
6
3
6
+1
8
3
8
+1
9
3
9
+ 1
:
3
:
+7 (2)

112
!"#$%& () *&+,-
./
= 1
2
3
2
+ 1
5
3
5
+ 1
6
3
6
+1
8
3
8
+1
9
3
9
+ 1
:
3
:
+1
2
3
2
∗1
:
3
:
+7 (3)
Where i = Individual
t = Type of trip by purpose:
optional, mandatory activity, flexible activity, joy ride
X1 = Typical transportation mode:
motorbike, bicycle, electric bicycle, walking, bus, car, passenger, multimodal
X2 = Vector of individual characteristics:
age, gender, educational attainment, occupation
X3 = Individual travel time constraints:
commuting time, total travel time
X4 = Vector of household characteristics:
income, size, number of young children age < 6, years in house, house location
(area code or distance to center)
X5 = Vector of variables related to the time of the survey:
month, weekday or weekend
X6 = Vector of street network characteristics:
linear density of streets by type (primary, secondary, residential, service, etc.)
4.2. Robustness Check: Poisson Regression
The advantage of the OLS model is the ease of coefficient interpretation. However, OLS might not
be the best fit considering that the dependent variables are count variables. As a robustness check,
Poisson regressions served to assess the reliability of OLS results. Poisson results are provided in
Appendix 2.2 - Robustness Checks: Poisson Regression Results. For the usual transportation mode

113
variables, which are the key explanatory factors of interest in this chapter, all coefficient signs and
most significance levels match those reported in the result section below based on OLS regressions. If
not the best fit, OLS modeling therefore appears as a reasonably reliable strategy to assess and interpret
the relationship between usual transportation modes and trip purposes.
5. Results
5.1. Hypothesis 1: Driving a Motorbike is Conducive to Making Socializing Trips
Motorbike Drivers Make More Optional Trips than Non-Motorbike Drivers
The OLS results for specifications (1.A) and (1.B). are presented in Table 13. The results support
the hypothesis that all else being equal, people who usually drive a motorbike tend to make more
optional trips that are conducive to socializing activities – trips to eat out, for social, recreational, or
religious purposes. The overall model is statistically significant with both specifications (F = 224.26, p
< 0.05 and F = 30.96, p < 0.05, respectively), but the independent variables collectively explain a
larger share of the variance in optional trips with the specification (1. B) (R
2
= 0.12 as opposed to R
2
=
0.06). Despite a drop in the number of observations, due to unmatched observations between the
individual- and household datasets, (1. B) is therefore considered the preferred specification.
Coefficient estimates reported in the text of this section are those resulting from specification (1. B).
Given that the usual transportation mode is a categorical variable, the motorbike category was
omitted. The constant (b0 = 0.26, p < .05) therefore is an estimate of the average number of optional
trips for motorbike drivers when all other predictors equal zero. Mode coefficient estimates are
interpreted relative to the motorbike reference category. All mode coefficients have negative signs
except for the “Multimodal (no Bus)” category, which means that people typically using one mode that

114
is not the motorbike tend to make significantly fewer optional trips than motorbike riders. The
coefficients are significant at the specified .05 level for the bicycle, walking, and passenger modes. The
difference is the greatest for passengers (bpassenger = -0.10 ± 0.01, p < .05) and the smallest for
pedestrians (bwalking = -0.04 ± 0.01, p < .05). Although negative signs for the bus and car coefficients
suggest that these modes may also be less conducive to optional trips, the results are not statistically
significant. Furthermore, large standards errors indicate that the effect may be null in both cases. Such
an uncertain effect size and lack of significance can be attributed to the small number of observations
in the case of car users (N = 347). However, in the case of bus riders (N = 2,575), it may be the case
that they do not make significantly fewer optional trips than motorbike drivers. Only people with
multimodal transportation modes (without bus) tend to make significantly more optional trips than
motorbike drivers (bmulitmodal/noBus = 0.03 ± 0.01, p < .05).
All the control variables related to age, gender, educational attainment, employment status, travel
time constraints, household income, size, composition, location, and time of survey, significantly
influence the number of daily optional trips, which justifies controlling for them in the regression
model. Variance inflation factors (VIF) ranged between 1.0 and 3.6, which indicates that the model
generally satisfies the condition that there is no multicollinearity between the independent variables.
Among the control factors, the “gender” and the “retired/unemployed” factors have an especially
strong influence on the number of optional trips. All else being equal, men make more optional trips
than women (bgender = 0.19 ± 0.01, p < .05) and retired and unemployed individuals more than people
in the workforce (bunemployed/retired = 0.20 ± 0.01, p < .05). Furthermore, although coefficients for income
categories are not always statistically significant, the signs align with what one would expect. People

115
belonging to households in the bottom half of all income brackets tend to make fewer optional trips
than average, whereas higher-income household members tend to make more optional trips.
Table 13 – OLS Results (Specifications 1.A. and 1.B), Dependent Variable: Optional Trips
Optional Trips
(1. A)
Optional Trips
(1. B)
Usual Transportation Mode

Motorbike Omitted Omitted

Bicycle -0.080 -0.065

(0.008)*** (0.009)***
Walking -0.042 -0.019

(0.008)*** (0.008)**
Bus -0.009 -0.016

(0.011) (0.012)
Car -0.028 -0.022

(0.029) (0.029)
Passenger -0.100 -0.067

(0.010)*** (0.010)***
Multimodal (no Bus) 0.031 0.036

(0.009)*** (0.010)***
Individual Characteristics

Age -0.002 -0.002

(0.000)*** (0.000)***
Gender 0.176 0.185

(0.005)*** (0.005)***
Education: Primary Omitted Omitted

Education: Secondary 0.024 0.029

(0.007)*** (0.007)***
Education: High School 0.053 0.059

(0.007)*** (0.008)***
Education: College 0.091 0.096

(0.009)*** (0.009)***
Flexible Job 0.043 0.050

(0.008)*** (0.008)***
Student -0.083 -0.084

(0.010)*** (0.010)***
Housewife -0.056 -0.037

116
Optional Trips
(1. A)
Optional Trips
(1. B)

(0.010)*** (0.010)***
Unemployed or retired 0.185 0.199

(0.013)*** (0.014)***
Travel Time Constraints

Total travel time 0.001 0.000

(0.000)*** (0.000)***
Commuting time -0.002 -0.001

(0.000)*** (0.000)***
Household Characteristics

Monthly income (million VND)
< 2.5 -0.026

(0.021)
2.5-4.0 -0.073

(0.016)***
4-6 -0.047

(0.010)***
6-8 -0.027

(0.008)***
8-10 -0.027

(0.008)***
10-15 -0.012

(0.007)*
15-20 Omitted

20-25 0.025

(0.011)**
25-30 0.039

(0.015)**
30-50 0.088

(0.022)***
> 50 -0.026

(0.028)
Household size -0.023

(0.002)***
Children < 6 years old -0.024

(0.005)***
Years in current house 0.001

(0.000)***
Location (study area) Controlled
a

117
Optional Trips
(1. A)
Optional Trips
(1. B)
Time of Survey

Weekend 0.051

(0.009)***
January 2014 Omitted

February 2014 0.053

(0.009)***
March 2014 -0.004

(0.009)
_cons 0.283 0.263

(0.013)*** (0.022)***
R
2
0.06 0.12
N 60,206 55,291
* p<0.1; ** p<0.05; *** p<0.01
Notes:
a
Control variable included but coefficients are not reported because of the large number of
categories (254 residential zones).

Motorbike Drivers Make More Flexible Trips than Non-Motorbike Drivers
Comparing the results presented above with that of regressions having other types of trips as
dependent variables further supports the hypothesis that motorbike mobility is especially conducive to
trips leading to social interactions. Table 14 shows the results when running specification (1. B) of the
OLS model with optional-, flexible-, mandatory trips, and “joy rides” as dependent variables.
Assuming that flexible trips (to shop, to the market, to private affairs) come second to optional trips in
terms of the intensity of social interactions they support at destination, a motorbike driving is again
more conducive to making such trips than being a bicycle rider, a pedestrian, a passenger, and also a
car user. Corresponding mode coefficients are indeed either negative and significant, or extremely
small and non-significant. The only exception is once again the “multimodal (no bus)” category
(bmultimodal/noBus flexible = 0.09 ± 0.01, p < .05). If the “multimodal (no bus)” category had nothing to do

118
with motorbike driving, it would not be possible to reject the null of hypothesis H1. But the analysis of
its composition proved that it does – the large majority of individuals falling into this category
(initially coded as “other”) drove a motorbike during the surveyed day but also one or several other
modes for different trips. Therefore, it seems reasonable to infer that all else being equal, people who
usually drive a motorbike make more socializing trips than people who do not, especially if they
couple the motorbike with other transportation modes.
In contrast, while driving a motorbike is positively and significantly associated with optional and
flexible trips, it is not the mode that is most conducive to mandatory trips (between home and work or
home and school) and “joy rides” – the two types of trips that are least likely to generate social
interactions, especially with strangers. Indeed, people who typically ride a bicycle make more
mandatory trips than motorbike drivers (bbicycle mandatory = 0.14 ± 0.01, p < .05). As for “joy rides,”
bicycle riders, pedestrians, and even bus riders seem to enjoy such trips in greater number than
motorbike drivers.
41

Finally, a word about the car category for which the results were inconclusive when looking at
counts of optional trips alone as the dependent variable: in comparison, the car coefficients are
statistically significant when the dependent variable is a count of flexible, mandatory trips, or joy rides.
The negative signs of the beta coefficients indicate that car drivers might make significantly fewer of
these types of trips than motorbike drivers. However, one should remain cautious in inferring anything
from these car results given the distinct characteristics of car drivers. The descriptive statistics
presented above showed that car drivers at the time of the survey were almost exclusively men

41
Nevertheless, OLS results for “joy rides” must be interpreted with caution for two reasons considering that the constant is negative and that the
Poisson model yields different significance levels with similar specification (see Appendix 2.2).

119
pertaining to households whose income was nearly twice as large as average. The significant car
coefficients are likely picking up some of the gender and high-income effect.
Table 14 – OLS Results (Specification 1. B) with different Types of Trips as Dependent Variables
Optional
Trips
Flexible
Trips
Mandatory
Trips
Joy
Rides
Usual Transportation Mode

Motorbike Omitted Omitted Omitted Omitted

Bicycle -0.065 -0.011 0.141 0.016

(0.009)*** (0.009) (0.014)*** (0.004)***
Walking -0.019 0.012 -0.007 0.134

(0.008)** (0.009) (0.011) (0.005)***
Bus -0.016 0.028 -0.089 0.017

(0.012) (0.012)** (0.015)*** (0.005)***
Car -0.022 -0.120 -0.169 -0.022

(0.029) (0.024)*** (0.046)*** (0.009)**
Passenger -0.067 -0.061 -0.246 -0.019

(0.010)*** (0.011)*** (0.016)*** (0.004)***
Multimodal (no Bus) 0.036 0.093 0.209 0.106

(0.010)*** (0.010)*** (0.010)*** (0.006)***
Individual Characteristics

Age -0.002 0.003 -0.004 0.002

(0.000)*** (0.000)*** (0.000)*** (0.000)***
Gender 0.185 -0.253 0.065 -0.001

(0.005)*** (0.005)*** (0.006)*** (0.002)
Education: Primary Omitted Omitted Omitted Omitted

Secondary 0.029 0.049 0.047 -0.031

(0.007)*** (0.008)*** (0.011)*** (0.005)***
High School 0.059 0.044 0.048 -0.030

(0.008)*** (0.008)*** (0.011)*** (0.005)***
College 0.096 0.061 0.054 -0.031

(0.009)*** (0.009)*** (0.013)*** (0.005)***
Flexible Job 0.050 0.121 -0.270 0.002

(0.008)*** (0.007)*** (0.011)*** (0.003)
Student -0.084 -0.017 -0.004 0.023

(0.010)*** (0.010)* (0.014) (0.004)***
Housewife -0.037 0.570 -0.852 -0.001

(0.010)*** (0.011)*** (0.014)*** (0.005)

120
Optional
Trips
Flexible
Trips
Mandatory
Trips
Joy
Rides
Unemployed/retired 0.199 0.102 -0.899 0.126

(0.014)*** (0.014)*** (0.015)*** (0.008)***
Travel Time Constraints

Total travel time -0.001 -0.008 0.005 -0.001

(0.000)*** (0.000)*** (0.000)*** (0.000)***
Commuting time 0.000 0.001 0.002 0.000

(0.000)*** (0.000)*** (0.000)*** (0.000)***
Household Characteristics

Monthly income (million VND)

< 2.5 -0.026 -0.027 -0.035 -0.012

(0.021) (0.023) (0.030) (0.011)
2.5-4.0 -0.073 -0.024 0.043 0.007

(0.016)*** (0.018) (0.023)* (0.010)
4-6 -0.047 -0.041 0.036 0.007

(0.010)*** (0.010)*** (0.013)*** (0.005)
6-8 -0.027 -0.019 0.015 0.003

(0.008)*** (0.008)** (0.011) (0.004)
8-10 -0.027 -0.028 0.016 0.002

(0.008)*** (0.008)*** (0.010) (0.004)
10-15 -0.012 -0.020 0.018 -0.001

(0.007)* (0.007)*** (0.009)* (0.003)
15-20 Omitted Omitted Omitted Omitted

20-25 0.025 -0.011 0.016 0.006

(0.011)** (0.011) (0.014) (0.005)
25-30 0.039 0.022 -0.021 -0.008

(0.015)** (0.016) (0.020) (0.007)
30-50 0.088 0.048 -0.100 -0.009

(0.022)*** (0.020)** (0.027)*** (0.011)
> 50 -0.026 0.037 -0.042 -0.029

(0.028) (0.032) (0.041) (0.012)**
Household size -0.023 -0.029 0.026 -0.001

(0.002)*** (0.002)*** (0.003)*** (0.001)
Children < 6 -0.024 0.016 -0.034 -0.002

(0.005)*** (0.005)*** (0.007)*** (0.002)
Years in house 0.001 -0.000 0.000 -0.000

(0.000)*** (0.000)*** (0.000)* (0.000)
Location Controlled Controlled Controlled Controlled

Time of Survey

121
Optional
Trips
Flexible
Trips
Mandatory
Trips
Joy
Rides

Weekend 0.051 -0.001 0.018 -0.009

(0.009)*** (0.009) (0.011) (0.004)**
January 2014 Omitted Omitted Omitted Omitted

February 2014 0.053 -0.021 0.046 -0.001

(0.009)*** (0.010)** (0.012)*** (0.005)
March 2014 -0.004 -0.014 -0.039 0.001

(0.009) (0.009) (0.011)*** (0.004)
_cons 0.263 0.408 2.203 -0.026

(0.022)*** (0.022)*** (0.031)*** (0.010)**
R
2
0.12 0.30 0.34 0.14
N 55,291 55,291 55,291 55,291
* p<0.1; ** p<0.05; *** p<0.01
5.2. Hypothesis 2: Living in Narrow Mixed-Use Street Environment means More Optional
Trips
Table 15 shows the regression results using Specification (2) of the model. The dependent variable
is a count of optional trips, the explanatory factor the usual transportation mode, and an addition to the
socio-demographic variables included in Specification (1. B), this specification includes the road
density variables for different types of streets. The only other difference with Specification (1. B) is
that distance to the center replaces dummies for residential zones as an indication of geographic
location because of the high multicollinearity between the residential zones and the linear densities by
type of streets.
42

The results support the second hypothesis according to which a dense network of narrower streets
in the area of residence is positively and significantly associated with the number of optional trips

42
Population density was removed because of multicollinearity with street densities. Densely population neighborhoods are indeed the ones with the
highest densities of narrow alleyways and the lowest densities of larger roads.

122
people make. The coefficients are indeed positive and significant for alleyway-, residential street-,
living street-, and footway densities. On the contrary, they are negative and significant for secondary-
and primary roads. They are not significant for primary- and trunk roads (the sign is negative for the
latter). Contrary to wider roads, narrower streets have a positive and significant influence, but it is not
only a matter of width; adjacent land uses also seem to matter. The coefficient sizes do not depict a
situation where the narrower the streets, the more optional trips. In fact, of all street types with positive
coefficients, the narrowest type (service streets, which correspond to residential alleyways) have the
smallest coefficient size; it is basically negligible (b = 0.001; SE = 0.000). The largest coefficients go
to “living streets” and “footways” but these are quite rare.
In-between comes the coefficient for “residential streets” (b = 0.006; SE = 0.001). Although quite
small, the positive and significant association between this variable and the number of optional trips is
worth investigating further knowing that “residential streets” correspond to the narrowest type of
mixed-use streets in Ho Chi Minh City. On this type of streets, which mostly cut through residential
neighborhoods, the ground floor of the buildings is almost always used for commercial purposes, fact
that was confirmed on the ground during fieldwork.
43
The positive and significant coefficient for
“residential streets” therefore suggests a positive association of narrow and mixed-use streets in the
area of residence with the number of optional trips people make. Now remains to be seen how that
interacts with the transportation mode effect.

43
For more detail on OSM classification and ground truthing, see overview of the data and methods in Chapter 2 – Re-Thinking Street Spaces from
the Perspective of Flows.

123
Table 15 – OLS Results (Specification 2) with Focus on Street Density Effect, by Type of Street
Optional Trips
Usual Transportation Mode

Motorbike 0.000

(0.000)
Bicycle -0.080

(0.009)***
Walking -0.029

(0.008)***
Bus -0.013

(0.012)
Car -0.030

(0.030)
Passenger -0.087

(0.011)***
Multimodal (no Bus) 0.036

(0.010)***
Road Density by Type (mi. / sq.mi.)

Trunk Road -0.006

(0.004)
Primary Road 0.001

(0.001)
Secondary Road -0.004

(0.001)***
Tertiary Road -0.005

(0.001)***
Footway 0.017

(0.003)***
Living Street 0.088

(0.025)***
Residential Street 0.006

(0.001)***
Service Street (Alleyways) 0.002

(0.000)***
Individual Characteristics

Age -0.002

(0.000)***
Gender 0.178

(0.005)***
Education: Primary 0.000

(0.000)

124
Optional Trips
Secondary 0.026

(0.008)***
High School 0.054

(0.008)***
College 0.087

(0.009)***
Flexible Job 0.049

(0.008)***
Student -0.082

(0.011)***
Housewife -0.045

(0.011)***
Unemployed/retired 0.190

(0.014)***
Travel Time Constraints

Total travel time -0.002

(0.000)***
Commuting time 0.000

(0.000)***
Household Characteristics

Monthly income (million VND)

< 2.5 -0.062

(0.021)***
2.5-4.0 -0.116

(0.016)***
4-6 -0.063

(0.010)***
6-8 -0.037

(0.008)***
8-10 -0.033

(0.008)***
10-15 -0.014

(0.007)*
15-20 Omitted

20-25 0.012

(0.011)
25-30 0.009

(0.015)
30-50 0.061

(0.022)***

125
Optional Trips
> 50 -0.045

(0.029)
Household size -0.027

(0.003)***
Children < 6 -0.024

(0.005)***
Years in house 0.001

(0.000)***
Distance to center (mi.) 0.008

(0.001)***
Time of Survey

Weekend 0.082

(0.009)***
January 2014 Omitted

February 2014 0.024

(0.008)***
March 2014 -0.032

(0.007)***
_cons 0.296

(0.020)***
R
2
0.08
N 55,291
* p<0.1; ** p<0.05; *** p<0.01
5.3. Hypothesis 3: Motorbike Is Use Most Conducive to Optional Trips in Narrow Mixed-Use
Street Environments
Finally, the results provide empirical evidence supporting the last hypothesis, according to which
the positive association between motorbike use and optional trips is amplified for motorbike users
living in areas with a high density of narrow mixed-use streets. Results come from regressing the
number of optional trips on usual transportation mode, the density of streets of different types, and an
interaction term between usual transportation mode and linear density of “residential” streets in the
neighborhood of residence, while controlling for other factors (specification 3 of the OLS model). As
mentioned above, the “residential” street category as per OSM classification designates the narrowest

126
type of “mixed-use” streets in Ho Chi Minh City. The model specification was run six times, the only
difference being that each regression had a different transportation mode (dummy variable) interacted
with linear density of residential streets. Only the mode motorbike did not enter the interaction term as
it remains the reference category.
The regression results are provided in Appendix 2.3 - OLS Regression Results with Interaction
Term. To facilitate the interpretation of the results, I calculated and geovisualized the net mode effects
by residential zone depending on their level of density of residential streets. First, I mapped the density
of residential streets in five quintiles of residential zones (Figure 18).

Figure 18 – Density of Residential (Narrow Mixed-Use) Streets in Ho Chi Minh City
Then, I used the mid-point of each quintile to compute the net mode effect applying to residents of
each zone as follows:

127
!%* <))%=* >(?%
@
A"BC*+D%
(FG)
= 1
@
+[
$−B
2
∗ 1
L
@
]
Where m = usual transportation mode
a = low breaking point of quintile
b = high breaking point of quintile
1
@
= OLS coefficient for mode category
1′
@
= OLS coefficient for mode dummy = 1 in interaction term
The variation in net effects by modes and by quintiles is shown in Table 16.
Table 16 – Net Effect by Mode and by Quintile of Residential Streets Density (Specification #3)
NET MODE EFFET on Number of Optional Trips
Density of residential streets Passenger Bicycle Walking
Multimodal
(with Bus)
Multimodal
(no Bus)
Car
Q5 Very high
(> 11.0 mi. per sq. mi.) -0.65 -0.67 -0.64 -0.60 -0.55 -0.70
Q4 Middle to high (7.51 - 11.00) -0.38 -0.37 -0.32 -0.30 -0.26 -0.34
Q3 Middle (4.51 - 7.50) -0.28 -0.27 -0.21 -0.20 -0.15 -0.21
Q2 Low to middle (1.66 - 4.50) -0.19 -0.17 -0.10 -0.10 -0.05 -0.09
Q1 Low (< 1.66) -0.12 -0.10 -0.03 -0.03 0.02 0.00

The same results are geovisualized on the maps presented in Figure 19. As in the rest of this
chapter, the results must be interpreted in relation to the reference category, that is, the motorbike.
When the net mode effect for one specific mode has a negative sign, displayed in orange on the maps,
that means that all else being equal, a user of this mode living in this quintile makes fewer optional
trips on average than a motorbike user. Reciprocally, a positive sign, displayed in green, means
more optional trips than motorbike users. The orange color that covers nearly all the maps indicate that
all transportation modes are conducive to fewer optional trips than motorbike driving, regardless of the
neighborhood environment in terms of density of narrow mixed-use streets (residential) streets. The

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darker gradients of orange indicate that the denser the neighborhood of residence, in terms of
residential streets, the larger the negative difference. There is only one situation where the difference is
positive, that is for multimodal users (who do not take bus) living in the quintile with the lowest
density of residential streets. This finding is important to make sense of the positive sign observed
throughout this chapter for this modal category. It appears that in the four other quintiles (in green),
multimodal users behave as expected: they make fewer optional trips than motorbike drivers. But the
overall positive coefficient resulting from previous specifications was influenced by multimodal users
living in the outskirt of the city (in orange). Another exception concerns car users living the lowest
quintile where the mode effect is null, meaning that there is no difference between them and motorbike
users in terms of outcome number of optional trips. But for reasons mentioned above – few
observations and almost exclusively make and high-income, caution is required when interpreting car
results.

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Figure 19 – Geovisualization of Net Mode Effect by Level of Residential Street Density

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6. Conclusions
6.1. Summary of the Findings
In this chapter, drawing on one-day travel diaries collected in 2014 from a representative sample of
Ho Chi Minh City’s population, I have estimated the relationship between usual transportation modes
and the number of optional trips people make throughout the course of the day. The premise is that
optional trips typically support discretionary activities that are most conducive to socializing practices,
possibly with strangers and semi-strangers in public spaces. If that is the case, in answer to the research
question driving this chapter, motorbike mobility appeared to contribute most to the production of
social interactions in the city, compared to other modes.
Modal Split and Travel Behaviors: Motorbike Use May not be as Systematic as Imagined
First of all, one unanticipated finding concerned the modal split when focusing on the key
explanatory factor considered in this chapter, that is, people’s usual transportation mode. Walking
appeared as the second most used transportation mode (12%) after adding to people who typically
commute on foot those who only walked on the surveyed day. After including all pedestrians, the
motorbike share dropped significantly (62%) compared to what is usually advertised.
44
A significant
share of individuals was found to have elaborate multimodal behaviors with different mode choices for
different activities. For example, some go for a walk in the early morning to exercise and buy breakfast

44
To this share of motorbike drivers must be added a small share (5%) of people who only ride motorbikes as passengers. The third and fourth
largest modal shares were people with multi-modal transportation behaviors, including those who complement bus transit use with other modes (4%) and
those who do not take the bus (8%). In both cases, multimodal individuals appeared to use the motorbike sometimes, but not exclusively.

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on the way back, but then use the motorbike exclusively. This refined understanding of the modal split
mattered given the significance of walking and multimodal categories in the results.
Motorbike Mobility Particularly Conducive to Optional Trips
The regression results provided statistical evidence supporting the hypothesis that all else being
equal, people who usually drive a motorbike make more trips with a purpose assumed to lead to social
interactions than users of other transportation modes. More specifically, walking, biking, and riding a
motorbike or a bicycle as a passenger yielded negative and statistically significant estimates to be
interpreted in relation with motorbike driving as the reference category; in other words, pedestrians,
bicyclists, and passengers make fewer trips rich in social interactions at destination than motorbike
drivers. However, there appeared to be no significant difference for bus riders in the outcome number
of socializing trips. As for people who combine multiple modes, including the motorbike, they first
seemed to make significantly more socializing trips than people who only drive a motorbike. Further
spatial analysis showed however that the multimodal effect was positive only for users who live in
certain parts of town (in the outlying areas with the lowest densities of narrow mixed-use streets).
Significant Joint Effect of Mode and Mixed-Use Street Environment
When visualizing the net effect of different mobility practices by type of neighborhood
environment, depending on their level of density of narrow mixed-use streets, the interaction of
motorbike use with this type of street environment was found to be most conducive to making optional
trips promoting socializing activities. The regression results with street network characteristics
included in the model supported the idea that the indigenous form of mobility in contemporary Ho Chi
Minh City – motorbike mobility – is particularly well suited to the characteristics of the local built
environment, where most streets are quite narrow and lined with ground-floor commercial uses.

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To my knowledge, this chapter is the first study to look at the joint effect of mode choice and street
environment characteristics on people’s travel and activity behaviors in a rapidly developing context.
Little is known about how people arrange their mobility practices to support their everyday lives in a
city like Ho Chi Minh City. Because street networks and land uses have expanded without any
planning or zoning for the most part, the street network of Ho Chi Minh City shares the characteristics
of most Southern cities, such as low land coverage, poor road hierarchy, no clear grid or radial pattern,
and high densities of adjacent residential, commercial, and mixed uses (Cervero, 2013). For this
reason, I chose to simply include in the regression models the street types provided by OSM as a proxy
for adjacent land uses rather than complex measurements of street network designs based on OSM
centerline data (Boeing, 2017). An extension of this study could consist in replacing or completing the
measurements proposed here with more detailed measurements in general, such as space syntax or
time-space accessibility methods that have been commonly used in Western contexts to analyze the
relationships between travel behaviors, activity patterns, and land use characteristics at the individual
level (Chen & Akar, 2016; Kwan & Weber, 2008).
No Conclusion Regarding Car Mobility
For a dissertation generally concerned with the on-going transition towards car mobility and related
transformations of local urbanism, the dubious results regarding car mobility were quite unfortunate.
There were too few people relying on the car on a usual basis in 2014 for the results to be significant,
and cars were mostly reserved to a very specific high-income male population group. A few years
later, the situation has already changed considerably with the relative democratization of car ownership
(see Chapter 3) and increasing numbers of women getting driver licenses (see Chapter 5). A replication
of this cross-sectional study with more recent data would probably give some indication of how car

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users differ from motorbike drivers when it comes to making trips that lead to socializing activities.
Furthermore, a longitudinal study could statistically predict the effect of transitioning from motorbike
to car, whereas the main limitation of this study is that no conclusion can be drawn regarding
directionality and causality.
6.2. Policy Implications
The results presented here challenge the conventional knowledge originated in the West according
to which non-motorized mobility equates vibrant urban spaces rich in social interactions (Calthorpe
Associates, 1992; Ewing & Handy, 2009; Ewing et al., 2016; Knox, 2005; Loukaitou-Sideris &
Ehrenfeucht, 2010; Mehta, 2008; Montgomery, 1998; Newsome & Pleasant, 2014; Talen, 2012). In Ho
Chi Minh City, compared to motorbike mobility – a private and motorized form of transportation –
walking and biking are negatively associated with socializing activities in the urban space. This finding
does not negate the importance of promoting non-motorized transportation and designing solutions to
address the obvious limitations of motorbike mobility, such as the risks of injuries and fatalities, which
disproportionately affect most vulnerable populations – children and the elderly in particular; the issue
of air and noise pollution, which continues to get worse as population grows and the demand for
mobility increases; the contested use of public space as parked motorbikes encumber sidewalks. For
years, these limitations have been presented as the reasons why people do not walk or bike in
Vietnamese cities. But this chapter showed that this was not exactly true in Ho Chi Minh City in 2014,
where walking and biking accounted for the usual transportation modes of 20 percent of the population
altogether.
In light of these results, on-going policy efforts (originated in the conceived space) aimed to shift
away from motorbike mobility may limit people’s ability to make discretional trips that support

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socializing activities in the city. Such an outcome may have a negative impact on people’s quality of
life and on social contact in the city, assuming that discretionary trips contribute to these factors; and
lower-income people would be disproportionately affected. Only a successful shift towards mass
transit may preserve people’s ability to make discretional trips as often as they currently do today,
especially if motorbikes were to cover the first- and last mile and provided that transit is affordable to
lower-income groups. These predictions remain to be confirmed on the basis of a longitudinal study
measuring the effect of individual shifts towards multimodal mobility after the mass transit system
becomes operational.
6.3. Limitations and Next Steps
In conclusion, the quantitative methods used to characterize the perceived space of urban mobility
provided statistical evidence of significant associations in Ho Chi Minh City between motorbike
mobility, street network characteristics, and number of daily trips that are most likely to produce social
interactions at destination. This cross-sectional study is not conclusive regarding the direction and
causality of the relationship. This is not so much a subject of concern for the purpose of this study. In
fact, strong endogeneity between how people move around and where they stop, what they do, was
expected given the ecological framework that guides this dissertation. Most importantly however, the
major limitation of this quantitative analysis is that it does not provide any explanations for the strong
and positive association observed here between motorbike mobility and socializing trips. The
conceptual framework proposed in Chapter 2 – Re-thinking Street Spaces from the Perspective of
Flows – suggested that environmental perceptions are a decisive mechanism according to the following
chain of causal links: some dimensions of mobility such as speed, flexibility, rhythm, experience, and
friction (Cresswell, 2010) affect people’s perceptions of the street environment and its affordances, and

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therefore influence the type and intensity of activities in which people actually engage. While the
overall relationship between mobility practices and activity behaviors has now proven to be
statistically significant, the causal explanations proposed here remain to be validated.
Furthermore, a major data limitation in this chapter is the lack of reliable measurement for the very
notion of “social interactions,” that is, the dependent variable of interest in this dissertation. The survey
data only provided a proxy for it, that is, a number of what I categorized as “optional trips.” I believe it
is reasonable to assume that an optional trip as defined in this chapter, that is, a discretionary trip
whose purpose is either to eat out, leisure, religious or to meet friends or relatives, is likely to lead to
social interactions. But there is no way to know whether interactions happened indeed at destination,
and if they did, with whom, and where, in public or in private space. In the case of trips to “eat out” for
example, the data makes it impossible to distinguish between a case of eating out at a fancy outlet, in a
fast food chain restaurant, or from a food vendor on the sidewalk. Neither did the data inform about the
situation and decision-process leading to making the trip and stopping to eat. Was the trip planned
anyway, or was the decision to stop made on the way as the person felt hungry or noticed something
they fancied? These distinctions matter both in regard to perception, and from the perspective
promoted in this dissertation, that of socio-spatial integration permitted by everyday social interactions
in the urban space. These different eating-out situations obviously contribute in very different ways to
street life, social interactions, and the use of public space for socioeconomic integration in the urban
space. The research objective of the next chapter – The Lived Space of Urban Mobility – therefore is to
provide clarity on the causal mechanisms behind the significant relationships established in this
chapter.

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Chapter 5.
The Lived Space of Urban Mobility: How ‘Productive Frictions’ Activate Street Urbanism
1. Introduction
The lived space of urban mobility is the set of active, but most often contested uses of public
spaces that result from the productive friction of transportation flows as they traverse the built
environment. The friction is called “productive” when the contact of a traffic flow with the built
environment leads to social interactions through which people appropriate the urban space, thus
participating in the production of active street spaces. In the Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre
(1974) defines the lived space (in general) as the space that users, artists, and philosophers appropriate
by resisting and contesting dominant representations originated in the conceived space. Based on
Lefebvre’s spatial production theory, applied in this dissertation to the field of urban mobility (see
Chapter 2), in this chapter I focus on the everyday practices at the intersection of mobile and static uses
of street spaces. Through mobility and activity practices, people appropriate public space and
sometimes contest the order imposed by urban design and planning regulations (derived from the
conceived space).
Drawing on field observations of Ho Chi Minh City’s street urbanism, of the micro social and
spatial arrangements of street spaces, I address the following questions in particular: How do mobility
practices inform the contested uses of public spaces, such as street vending? More specifically, under
what circumstances and through what mechanism do mobility practices shape inclusive street spaces,
that is, public spaces that are supportive of the contact with and integration of people with diverse
socioeconomic backgrounds? Ultimately, the goal is to provide grounded information about the causal

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mechanisms that explain the relationship between motorbike mobility and vibrant street life in Ho Chi
Minh City, with an effort at generalizing the relationship between characteristics of traffic flows, the
nature of street life, and the future of street urbanism in the context of the current mobility transition.
I draw on six years of unstructured participant observations in Vietnamese cities and five months of
methodical fieldwork in Ho Chi Minh City from August to December 2018. The empirical strategy in
this chapter builds on 68 interviews with urban dwellers about their mobility practices, with street
vendors about their business activities, and with key informants; participant observations of street life
and photographs; and 333 videos of traffic flows and street life (see methodology section of Chapter
2). I developed a methodology to count all street uses recorded on video, including traffic counts,
adjacent land uses, number of street vendors, of people hanging out in public space, and so forth (see
Appendix 3.1 - Street Uses: Counting Procedure Based on Video Data).
In this chapter, I adopt an ecological viewpoint on street spaces that articulates its two major
functions, as traffic corridor and public space, in order to grapple with the complex interactions
between the mobility and activity practices they support (see Chapter 2). I look at the streets as “places
of movement,” (Sheller & Urry, 2006) thus bringing to the fore two original ideas of the new
mobilities paradigm. First, that there is no substantial difference between travel and activities, an idea
that George Amar (1993) promoted earlier in his ecological approach to transportation systems.
“Activities occur while on the move” according to Sheller & Urry (2006). Second, that mobility is
political and defines social relations, which is the central thesis of the new mobilities paradigm
(Cresswell, 2010; Merriman et al., 2013; Sheller, 2018; Temenos et al., 2017). In this dissertation, I
focus on the most fleeting social interactions that occur between strangers in public space and I relate
these short-term interactions to broader social relations, class relations in particular in the specific
context of Ho Chi Minh City. Everyday social interactions constitutive of street life have not been

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addressed extensively in the new mobilities literature but they have been by urban design and, to a
lesser extent, scholars of sustainable transportation (Banerjee, 2001; Edensor, 1998; Ewing et al., 2016;
Loukaitou-Sideris & Ehrenfeucht, 2010; Mateo-Babiano & Ieda, 2007; Montgomery, John, 1997;
Piazzoni & Jamme, 2020; Wang, D. & Cao, 2017).
Following this introduction, two sections compose this chapter. First, drawing on qualitative data
from interviews with residents and street vendors, I provide some validation and further explanation
for the relationship between mobility practices and social interactions assessed quantitatively in
Chapter 4 – The Perceived Space of Urban Mobility: Travel Behaviors and the Production of Urban
Space. Second, I introduce the new concept of ‘productive frictions’ and the process through which
certain transportation flows, such as the motorbike flow in Ho Chi Minh City, produce everyday social
interactions in the urban space and thus activate street urbanism. I draw on detailed counts of all street
uses recorded on video to sketch a measurement of productive frictions.
2. Validation of the Causal Mechanism Between Mobility Practices and Social Interactions
In Chapter 4, based on analyses of travel data, I found a strong and significant relationship between
people’s usual travel mode and the type of activities in which they engage throughout the day. In
particular, all else being equal, motorbike riders appeared to make more optional trips than people
using any other transportation mode, and therefore to engage in more activities such as eating out,
visiting friends and family, leisure and religious activities, and so forth. These trips were of particular
interest because of their assumed potential to support social interactions in public space, which is the
focus of this dissertation. A tentative explanation for the observed relationships was the fact that
motorbike riders experience more direct perceptions of their surrounding environment than car drivers
or bus riders, for example, while also enjoying a greater range of mobility than pedestrians or bicyclists

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(and therefore a greater exposure to environmental affordances). The quantitative analysis conducted in
Chapter 4 had several limitations, however, that this chapter aims to overcome. In particular, it remains
to be confirmed or validated that:
(i) Motorbike mobility is especially conducive to social interactions in public space (the travel
survey data did not provide any measurements of social interactions but just of the type of
activity at destination);
(ii) Visual perceptions of environmental affordances explain the relationship between
motorbike use and participation in social interactions;
(iii) The relationship between motorbike use and everyday urban activities is endogenous in Ho
Chi Minh City, in the sense that motorbike flows contribute to shaping affordances at the
same time as it explains people’s perceptions and use of existing affordances;
(iv) Car mobility is negatively associated with social interactions in public space (the
relationship with optional trips appeared insignificant in the regression results for sample
size reasons). This hypothesis remains crucial to explore considering that car mobility
towards which Ho Chi Minh City is transitioning is expected to have a majorly disruptive
impact on the nature of street life.
2.1. The Maneuverability of the Motorbike: A Major Explanation for the Positive Relationship
between Motorbike Use and Socializing Practices In Public Space
The interviews focused on mobility practices confirmed that motorbike use is indeed much more
conducive to engaging in discretionary activities than any other mode, and that such activities often
support social interactions in public space. The overall maneuverability of the motorbike – its small
size, light weight, and little encumbrance (Truitt, 2008) – is a crucial explanation for the observed

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associations between motorbike mobility and street activity. When asked about the advantages of the
motorbike, people would often mention that it is “flexible,” “convenient,” “easy to stop anywhere,
anytime,” and “easy to park” (Table 17). As a result, people who rode a motorbike the day prior to the
interview reported having stopped at many more places throughout the day, ranging from five to
thirteen, than people who used another transportation mode. In addition to mandatory trips to work or
to pick up and drop off the children, it is common practice for motorbike riders to stop someplace for
breakfast, another for lunch, do some shopping in several different places throughout the day, and
maybe stop for a meal, a drink or a coffee with colleagues, friends or relatives at some point during the
day; whereas car drivers, bicycle and bus riders would have more simple commuting patterns with one
trip to work, another back home, and maybe one extra trip over lunch time.
One consequence of the maneuverability of the motorbike is the ease of parking in tight spaces; it
enables people to experience door-to-door mobility and to stop “anywhere, anytime,” as they say.
Parking on sidewalks, or in the traffic lane next to the curb in the absence of sidewalks, is a contested
practice but it is the typical preliminary step before entering a store, sitting down at the terrace of a
café, having a noodle soup from a street vendor, and basically any other activity in the city. In Ho Chi
Minh City, most sidewalks are indeed lined or filled (depending on the sidewalk width), with at least
one row of tightly parked motorbikes sometimes under the supervision of a security guard (Figure 20).
Such a parking habit is made possible by the light weight and small size of the motorbike, coupled with
the fact that curbs typically have a 45-degree inclination. They are deliberately designed so that
motorbikes (and bicycles) can step up and down between the roadbed and the sidewalk.

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Figure 20 – Motorbike Parking: A Ubiquitous but Contested Use of Sidewalk Spaces
In addition to parking on sidewalks, the maneuverability of the motorbike enables a range of
driving-related contested practices, such as changing lanes abruptly, riding the wrong way, zigzagging
between cars and larger vehicles and riding on the sidewalks when traffic is congested (Nguyen, Long
Xuan, Hanaoka, & Kawasaki, 2014). These practices are indisputably dangerous, yet they explain why
motorbike users find it “easy to navigate” without getting stuck in traffic.

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Table 17 – Perceived Advantages and Disadvantages for Different Modes
Motorbike Personal Car Walking Bicycle Bus Motorbike taxi
(incl. Grab moto)
Taxi
(incl. Grab car)
ADVAN-
TAGES
- Flexible
- Can stop on a
whim
- Fast
- Convenient
- Easy to park
- Easy to navigate
in traffic
- Easy to find gas
- Light
- No physical
efforts required
- Affordable
- Sense of
freedom
- Safer (than
motorbike)
- Comfortable,
especially when
weather is hot or
rainy
- Cleaner (than
motorbike)
- Cool (AC)
- Faster (than
motorbike) when
there is no traffic
- Good for health
- Can listen to
music
- Good for the
environment
- Good for health
- Light - Not as
heavy as the
motorbike II
- Cheap
- Convenient
- Fast
- Cool, has AC
- Can sleep or
watch the
landscape
-- No worries
- No need to
know the streets
- Good for the
environment
- Safer (than
motorbikes)
- Convenient
- In congested
traffic, it is
possible to drop
one, walk
through
congested area,
and grab another
one later
- Cool (AC)
- Comfortable in
the rain
- No need to
worry about
parking
DISAD-
VANTAGES
- Dirt / Dust
- Risk of accidents
- Uncomfortable
in the rain
- Tiring in traffic
jams
- Requires some
physical strength
- Drivers have bad
banners
- Risk of injuries
with kickstand
- Expensive
- Hard to control
the vehicle
- Very difficult to
find parking
- Very slow in
congested traffic
- Difficult and
dangerous to
cross the road in
traffic
- No sidewalks
- Uncomfortable
in the rain
- Potholes
- Inconvenient for
long distances
- Takes too much
time, risk of
arriving late
- Tiring
- Bad image:
social status
- Arrive in sweat
at work
- Few places to
park
- Few repair
shops
- Not flexible
- Can’t stop
anywhere to buy
something on the
sidewalk
- Requires some
walking
- Crowded
- Too loud
- Conductors
have an attitude
- Risk of theft
- Risk of sexual
harassment
- Not clean
- Tiring
- Waiting time
- Feels unsafe to
not have control
n/a
142

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2.2. The Critical Role of Environmental Perceptions: Evidence from ‘Motorbuying’ Pratices
Another contested practice associated with motorbike riding is the act I designate as
‘motorbuying,’ a common practice in Vietnamese cities where a motorbike rider pauses movement for
a few minutes by putting one foot on the ground, and without stepping down of the vehicle, makes a
purchase to take away from a vendor, which can be either formal or informal, but in any case is placed
close enough to the curb that the whole action can take place from the saddle of the vehicle (Figure
21).

Figure 21 – Motorbuying: Another Ubiquitous but Contested Practice
Notes – 1) Top left: from an informal coffee stall, 2) Center: from a corner store, 3) Top right: from a street
vendor (towels), 4) Bottom left: same buyer from another street vendor (sugar cane juice), 5) Bottom right:
close-up on the hook to hang take-away orders.

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Widespread motorbuying practices speak not only to the question of the maneuverability of the
motorbike as a key contributor to social interactions in public space – the small size of the vehicle
makes it possible to stop parallel to the curb without disrupting traffic too much – but also to the
importance of environmental perceptions; visual perceptions in particular determine where and when
people engage in motorbuying practices. In other parts of the world, window-shopping involves
pedestrians wandering on a commercial street while enjoying the option of stopping on a whim and
making a spontaneous purchasing decision that is informed by what they see as they walk. In Ho Chi
Minh City, motorbuying practices result from ‘sidewalk-shopping’ so to speak, which is to the
motorbike user what window-shopping is to the pedestrian. In a sense, the streets of Ho Chi Minh City
can be seen as a giant “drive-thru” where people can make a myriad of small purchases without ever
parking and leaving their vehicles.
As of today, people of all backgrounds engage in motorbuying practices. Several students, street
vendors, employees of banks and large private companies, one engineer and freelancer, one architect, a
few janitors, and a housekeeper, all reported motorbuying for breakfast on the way to work, or for
fruits, vegetables, and snacks as they connect different origins and destinations. All interviewed
motorbike users reported having done some motorbuying the day prior to the interview or motorbuying
on a regular basis, as part of their daily routines. While many small purchases can be made this way,
breakfast,
45
drinks, snacks, and groceries from neighborhood markets are almost exclusively purchased
through motorbuying.

45
Vietnamese people tend to have quite elaborate savory breakfasts that they typically do not cook at home. Breakfast favorites that are convenient to
take away include: bánh mì (sandwiches), xôi (sticky rice), khoai lan (sweet potatoes), among others. Pho, the famous Vietnamese beef noodle soup, is a
breakfast favorite as well. It takes eight hours to simmer a flavorful broth and it cannot be cooked in small quantities. Pho is not something that people can
buy on the go, they would usually mark a full stop and eat in.

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The importance of environmental perceptions in the decision process leading to motorbuying was
made explicit in people’s account of the practice. Several respondents described the act of breakfast
motorbuying in a way that sounded like this: “[As I drive,] I look around. I check what options there
are. If I see something I want [to eat], I buy it and I order to go.” Another respondent explained
further: “Say I see some bánh ướt [steamed rice pancake] and I feel like having that. I stop next to the
vendor, and I just ask ‘one bánh ướt please.’ I wait on my motorbike, and when it’s ready I take it, I
pay, and I go home to eat.” Once the purchase is completed, the motorbuyer usually grabs the item that
the vendor hands out in a plastic bag, ties the bag to a small but sturdy hook located next to the starter
of the motorbike, and resumes the trip. When it comes to deciding whether to eat-in or to take away,
that is, making a full stop or not, the final decision can also be made spontaneously. One respondent
explained that she usually “motorbuys” for breakfast except if she suddenly craves something that is
not convenient to take away, such as a hủ tiếu (noodle soup) for example. Provided that she has enough
time, she might stop and sit down to eat the soup.
Motorbike users conceive motorbuying halts as neither full stops nor complete activities but as an
integral part of their trips. When answering the question “how many places did you go to yesterday?”
respondents would always omit to mention these places where they stopped on the go. Follow-up
questions would be necessary to tease out the motorbuying pauses. For example, with one respondent
the section of the interview about yesterday’s activities started as follows:
HTJ: ‘Let’s now talk about the trips you made yesterday’
Respondent: ‘Yesterday, I didn’t go anywhere. I only went to work in the morning, and then
back home.’
HTJ: ‘On your way to work, did you stop anywhere?’
Respondent: ‘No, I didn’t stop anywhere’

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HTJ: ‘Did you buy anything?’
Respondent: ‘Yes, I bought breakfast.’
HTJ: ‘How did this happen?’
After going through all the stops he had made, in fact this particular respondent had reached nine
different places throughout the day. Five or six motorbuying stops a day are not uncommon for a
motorbike user, including sometimes four stops or more within the same neighborhood market. The
widespread practice of motorbuying suggests that “flexible trips” to shop were undercounted in
quantitative analyses (previous chapter); people most likely did not report motorbuying stops as
destinations at which an activity took place when filling out the travel survey.
2.3. Motorbike Use and Socializing Activities: An Endogenous Relationship
Street Activity Depends on Motorbike Flows
In this sub-section that relates motorbike flows to street activity, I focus on street vending in
particular. The number, location, and practices of street vendors is especially informative in analyzing
the role of traffic flows in shaping affordances – vending opportunities in particular – in the built
environment. Indeed, Street vendors have the greatest flexibility to adjust their location and vending
practices to catch the flows of customers. I consider as street vending any business activity that
encroaches on the sidewalk space (or on the traffic lane in the absence of sidewalk) to use it as a
vending space. Such business can be anywhere on the spectrum between formality and informality.
The line between the two is blurry and especially hard to define as it cuts across two dimensions. One
is from a labor and employment perspective. A registered business is considered formal while an
unregistered one is informal. The other is from the perspective of the uses of the built environment.
Making use of a commercial space and paying rent is a formal practice, whereas encroaching on the

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sidewalk is a contested one. In any case, informal vending practices are aimed to maximize the
catchment area of traffic flows, especially motorbike flows.
In the case of the bún chả giò chay [vegetarian spring rolls and noodle] business shown in Figure
22, the vendor rents out the ground-floor space in front of which she sits, but she does not use it as a
restaurant in which customers can enter and dine in. Instead, she uses it to cook and store her stock of
ingredients, equipment and utensils. To attract customers, every day she sets up a stall on the street
from which she assembles people’s orders. The stall includes a glass shelf on which she displays the
spring rolls and a small counter with soy sauce, paper napkins, chopsticks, and two low plastic stools
for those who would like to eat on site. This is an example of an unregistered vendor (informal
entrepreneur) who rents out a commercial space (formal use of the built environment) but makes most
of her business on the sidewalk (informal use of the built environment). Such vending strategy aims to
maximize the catchment area of customers. Most of them are motorbuyers.

Figure 22 – A Street Vendor between Formality and Informality
In the case of the Laha cafés, a chain of coffee shops with two locations depicted in Figure 23, on
Phan Xich Long (left) and Dien Bien Phu (right), the businesses are registered. They have all the

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attributes to rely on sit-in customers. These cafes are exemplary of formal and modern Vietnamese
coffeeshops. The staff is large and wears uniforms. Inside, customers enjoy an air-conditioned
environment and other amenities (e.g., a strong Wi-Fi connection, many outlets) targeted towards
young professionals who are welcome to sit with their laptops for hours at a time. In contrast, typical
family-run cafés have very little branding (for example, the one pictured in Figure 24 is simply named
after a female household member: Thảo) and generally target regulars who stop for a moment just to
take the pulse of the neighborhood while sitting outside and watching the street. Nevertheless, despite
their modernity, the Laha cafés borrow from the practices of informally employed street vendors to
expand their customer base to motorbuyers. They place a vending cart next to the curb. In both
locations, the pictures show several employees standing outside to run the sidewalk cart and
motorbuyers waiting for their orders.

Figure 23 – Two Locations of a Modern Chain of Coffeeshops

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Figure 24 – One Example of Family-Run Coffeeshop on Phan Xich Long
Street vending practices seek ways to maximize (i) their visibility from the street, and (ii) the
connection to the motorbike flow. Just like businesses in other parts of the world seek to maximize
their pedestrian catchment area, street vending in Ho Chi Minh City seeks to maximize the number of
potential motorbuyers and other customers on motorbikes who might pull over and park in tight
spaces. There is therefore a strong co-dependence between street vending and motorbike mobility.
When asked about the busiest time of the day, one vendor of fruit juices said: “it’s very simple, the
more traffic, the more customers.” This vendor sits in the corner of two narrow and busy commercial
streets near the entrance of an open market in Phú Nhuận District. Cars are rare in that area. There are
no buses and very few pedestrians. Therefore, by traffic, he definitely meant motorbike traffic. Next to
him but on the other side of the corner, a vendor of bánh mì heo quay (grilled pork sandwiches) had a
similar answer, except that in her case, as she sells a breakfast item as opposed to something that
people may purchase at any time of the day like fruit juices, she says that the busiest time for her is the
morning rush hour. Most of her customers are motorbuyers.

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Motorbike Use, Commercial Transactions and Social Relations
Finally, the case remains to be made that mobility practices in Ho Chi Minh City support a wide
range of meaningful social interactions. So far, motorbike use has been confirmed to foster commercial
transactions. While I contend that commercial transactions fall within the scope of social interactions
that are constitutive of street life, the streets of Ho Chi Minh City support many more substantial
interactions as well which often derive from such transactions. If motorbike mobility makes street
vending possible, street vending in particular relates to a wide range of interactions in which are
imbedded notions of mutual understanding and solidarity between strangers, semi-strangers, and
acquaintances.
For example, a 63-year-old professor has the habit of going for a 5-km (3 mi.) motorbike ride every
morning just to enjoy the soft sun of the early hours while the air is still cool and traffic rather quiet.
As part of his route that never changes, he always makes a 2-3-minute stop by a handicapped vendor of
lottery tickets, without getting off his motorbike. Sometimes he buys a few tickets but most of the time
he does not. “Let’s say that I stop just […] to check how he is doing, and then I keep going,” he
explained. He knows the man’s story, but he does not know his name. The man was shot in the spine
when he was about eight years old. Since then, all his moves have relied on a makeshift arm-powered
bicycle because the lower part of his body is paralyzed. The professor was not sure how to describe
their relationship – “I know him in the sense that I have stopped there every day for a very long time.
[…] We’re not exactly friends but there is a certain bond between us” – a bond one could qualify of
distant care for another.
It is common in Ho Chi Minh City to see a motorbike rider on the move wave at a vendor who has
been sitting in the same spot for years. Sometimes a few words will be thrown in the air – “going to
work?” – or there will be a short pause in the swirl of movement to properly share the most recent

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gossip of the neighborhood. Table 18 below reports some notes I took during participant observations
on street vending sites. I selected seven snippets of street life that all describe meaningful social
interactions between street users, where some are on the move, some have made a short pause, some
have stopped, and others are in place, running their business.
Table 18 – Snippets of Street Life: Bonds of Conviviality and Solidarity Among Street Users
Picture Description
1

The chè vendor and his customer who is a doctor
The vendor sells chè (sweet pudding) in front of a school from 6:00-7:30 PM, but not
every day of the week, maybe every 2-3 days. He says that pudding is quite sweet,
people would not want to eat it every day. A woman has stopped in front of his stall
and she is eating some chè out of a bowl of his. She did not motorbuy, but she did not
sit on the stools he provides either. Instead, she is sitting on the saddle of her
motorbike while eating and chatting with him. She tells me that she is a doctor. She
works in a hospital as a French-English-Vietnamese translator and interpreter. Right
now, she is on her way back home. She lives just a little further down the street. She
stopped to chat and catch up with him.
2

The corner coffee vendor who knows all the neighbors
She has a cart with an umbrella in front of a construction site. A man wearing a uniform
and a baseball cap (he might be a construction worker or a security guard) parked his
motorbike by the curb and sat down for five minutes. He did not order anything. They
are just talking about people they know in common. It sounds like someone went out
drinking late last night. She tells me that most customers are regulars here. Despite the
proximity to the tourist area, very few tourists stop to buy from her. She knows one
couple of foreigners though who usually order a cà phê sửa đá [iced coffee with
condensed milk]. She says she makes a very good one, so I order one and we keep
talking. A dad and his kid on the back of his motorbike drive by. She says a few words to
the kid who laughs. Then another man she knows drives by, and she proudly shouts:
“I’ve got a foreign customer!” (me). Of course, everyone knows her in the
neighborhood, she says, because she stands on the street all day. But she adds that she
does not know the other vendors well, that they just wave hello and smile when they
see each other. However, when I asked whose motorbike is parked in front of her stall,
she says it belongs to the hủ tiếu [noodle soup] vendor across the street. At some point
that vendor comes to her and takes a plastic bag from her cart without saying a word.
Later, without a word again he sets up a table in front of her stall to add one to the few
he has in front of his. It is almost noon. He is getting ready to serve lunch to
construction workers. These two vendors obviously know each other.
3

The spring roll vendor and several others who help each other
She sells spring rolls from a cart placed at the entrance of an alleyway. She has two kids
running around the cart and running the business with her. Across the alleyway is a
sugar cane vendor. The little girl served me the spring rolls I ordered. At some point the
mom leaves her stands and goes inside the alleyway (to her house, maybe?). The sugar
cane vendor comes to this side and watches the kids while she is gone. Then a Grab

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Picture Description
Moto rider stops by and parks on the sidewalk. He sits on the chair of the spring roll
vendor. Now he is running the business.
4

The coffee vendor with a cold and her Grab Moto rider friends
She was half asleep with her head in her arms crossed on a cooler as I stood in front of
her stall to order a Grab. A Grab Moto rider was sitting at her coffee stall. He said he
would give me a ride but asked if I wanted to sit down first and have coffee while he
finishes his. She wakes up. They are chatting together. He tells me that they have
known each other for a long time, because he always stops here at some point during
the day to see her and have coffee. She sells from 7:00 AM to 3:00 PM. […] She says
that she has been sitting in the same spot for ten years and she jokingly adds “but I’m
not rich yet.” When I ask her how she is doing today, he answers for her: “she is kind of
sick, she has a cold,” but she corrects him “no, I’m sick of not having enough money”
and they both laugh. Another Grab Moto rider is coming down the street on his
motorbike. He does not seem about to stop but the first rider tells him to. So, he parks
his motorbike, does not say much, he just hands out his bottle for her to fill it up with
iced tea. Then he crosses the street to disappear into an alleyway. They tell me that he
is going home for lunch and that he will be back for coffee in a little bit, as he usually
does. Out of the blue a watch vendor who was quietly sitting a bit further down the
street walks up to us and jumps in the conversation. He just cracks a joke making fun of
the shirt she’s wearing and walks back to his spot. Everyone is laughing out loud.
5

The owner of a tiny coffeeshop with her eyes on the alleyway
I sat down and ordered a coffee after my second round of recordings. There are three
small plastic tables, one in front of a house where the coffee stand is positioned, and
the others on the other side of the very narrow alleyway in front of someone else’s
house. The vendor is at least fifty. She is sitting next to her stall with three other
women her age and they seem to have a lot to tell each other. One is smoking. The
owner tells me that she opens from the moment she wakes up until late in the evening.
She obviously lives here, and her customers probably all live in the alleyway. I passed by
the tiny coffee shop several times throughout the day as I was doing the recordings.
The third time, the owner asked whether what I had in my hand was a camera. The next
time, she asked why I was recording. I am pretty sure the whole neighborhood,
including the authorities, heard about my activities that day.
6

The soft tofu vendor who tries to help the green mango vendor
A vendor of soft tofu desserts is sitting down by a gate with her two shoulder baskets in
front of her in which she carries the large pot of tofu, the ginger sauce, the bowls, cups,
bags and various utensils she uses to serve customers. […] She sells in this spot from
about 12:45 PM until 6:30-7:00 PM every day. As I am talking to her, a green mango
vendor on foot kneels down close to us and says she is looking for a spot to rest for a
minute. The tofu vendor tells her that she can stay where she is, she is fine. But a few
minutes later, a car pulls over trying to enter the gate. The green mango vendor has to
go.

All the social interactions described in this section have taken place in public space. Not all of them
depend on or even involve motorbike users (although most of them do). One could argue that these

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interactions would be equally likely if everyone were on foot or riding bicycles. This is true, with the
exception again that people on foot or on bikes do not have the same range of mobility as motorbike
riders and therefore do not cross the paths of as many people every day. More than anything,
motorbike mobility expands the likelihood that social interactions occur. Furthermore, most of these
social interactions encompass a commercial transaction, but not necessarily, as shown by the case of
the professor and the vendor of lottery tickets. In any case, they are not limited to a commercial
transaction. They involve individuals who know each other personally, if not well, who at least have an
understanding the other’s circumstance, which is the level of acquaintance to which the notion of semi-
stranger refers. These people are not complete strangers. The contact that brings them together is more
than a vendor-customer transaction. These people are able to relate to each other, even when a large
social gap separates them.
Nevertheless, some social interactions can be reduced to commercial transactions and those may or
may not contribute to the matter of socio-spatial integration of the urban poor. It depends on the
characteristics of the business involved, in terms of size and socioeconomic vulnerability of the vendor
benefitting from the transaction. For example, there is a major difference between social interactions
with small business owners or street vendors and interactions with employees in charge of a sidewalk
cart set up by a coffee chain such as the Laha Cafés mentioned above. While both sets of interactions
are induced and permitted by motorbike mobility, the contact with an independent business owner or
street vendor is one of mutual dependence between two individuals, whereas the contact with the
employee of a chain can be reduced to an impersonal commercial transaction. For business owners and
street vendors, their livelihood entirely depends on the connection to traffic flows, and especially on
the possibility to interact with motorbike users; whereas for a coffee chain making use of informal
vending practices, the motivation for catching motorbike flows is just to enhance commercial gain.

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2.4. The Negative Effect of Car Use on Social Interactions and the Promises of Non-Motorized
Travel
The Negative Relationship Between Car Use and Socializing in Public Space
Compared to motorbike mobility, car (as well as bus) mobility is not as supportive of social
interactions in public space for reasons that are mostly related to the constraints the transportation
mode imposes on mobility. Most importantly, car mobility has the disadvantage of lacking the
flexibility that the motorbike affords, according to the respondents. The lack of flexibility is a major
explanation for why they do not engage in as many discretionary – “optional” and “flexible” –
activities as motorbike riders, especially those that take place in public space. Regarding the car,
people mentioned in particular that it is “very slow in congested traffic,” “a waste of time,” and “very
difficult to find parking.” A bus user said that not being able to “stop as [she pleases] to buy
something on the sidewalk” was a major limitation of her transportation mode (Table 17). As a result,
bus- and car use are not as supportive of street activity as motorbike mobility.
The cases of people who had experienced or were considering the shift from exclusive motorbike
use to car use were particularly enlightening to understand the difference between the two modes in
regards with participation in different street activities. When asked whether the numerous stops they
had made the day before, including motorbuying stops, would have been possible by car, two current
motorbike users who were planning on purchasing a car in the near future answered “of course, why
not!” But after re-tracing their trips in their minds, on their own initiative they corrected the answer
and came to the conclusion that “probably not, actually.” Both brought up exactly the same reasons.
One was the lack of parking options. The other was the narrowness of the streets that make it difficult,
or even impossible, to access many places by car in the city. As for current regular automobilists, they

155
confirmed that their range of options was constrained by driving their car compared to when they used
to ride a motorbike. They almost never buy anything from a street vendor; they rarely stop to eat or
drink something on the sidewalk or in a small street food restaurant; they never go to neighborhood
markets. Instead, they concentrate shopping and recreational activities in malls that have underground
car parking. They mentioned that it was not so much out of preference (self-selection) but more out of
constraint, because of limited parking options, coupled with the impossibility to stop spontaneously
without seriously disrupting traffic.
Knowing that car users will not be able to stop as easily, or at all, street vendors avoid contact with
the automobile flow. There is therefore little to no connection between car mobility and street vending.
Out of 36 vendors I interviewed, only one said that he often has people in cars stopping to buy from
him. He sells coconuts for a few hours every day in a large crossroad of District 7 where the streets
were specifically designed to accommodate car traffic. In more typical street environments, where on-
street parking opportunities are very limited for cars, vendors said that they almost never get any car
users as customers and therefore do not try to catch them.
This is most evident when observing one-way streets, where traffic regulation requires that
motorbikes drive on the right lane(s), and cars and other larger vehicles on the left lane(s) (Figure 25).
Typically, street vendors will be concentrated on the motorbike side of the street and there will be
fewer vendors on the left side. The same is true of other businesses. Table 19 shows the differences in
numbers of businesses, including sidewalk vendors, on both sides of the Nguyen Kiem one-way
corridor. The total number of businesses and sidewalk vendors recorded over the course of one day (six
recordings) was much smaller on the car side of the street, and twice as small for businesses and
vendors selling food or drinks, that is, the type of places that are likely to generate street activity. The
lower part of the table shows the means of variables related to street activity across six observations

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per day for each side. The means for businesses and sidewalk vendors open to business, as well as that
for motorbuyers and people hanging out (not walking) on the sidewalks were lower on the car side of
the street, and paired t-tests showed that the difference in means was statistically significant for
motorbuyers and people hanging out at the specified 0.5 alpha level (and significant at the 0.10 level
for open businesses).

Figure 25 – Nguyen Kiem One-Way Corridor
Table 19 – Comparison of Street Activity Variables Along Two Sides of a One-Way Corridor
Variable Motorbike side Car Side
Total businesses 83 54
-- incl. food and drinks businesses 13 7
Total sidewalk vendors 17 11
-- incl. vendors of food and drinks 7 3
Open businesses (mean) 49,83 28,67
Vendors open to business (mean) 4,50 3,17
Motorbuyers (mean) 3,00 0,00
People hanging out (mean) 27,33 13,17

Notes: The results of paired t-tests showed significant differences in means of street activity variables
between the two sides for Nguyen Kiem. Open businesses: t(12) = 1.77, p = .05. Motorbuyers: t(12) = 3.67, p
= .00. People hanging out: t(12) = 2.46, p = .02. The t-test was insignificant for the number of vendors open
to business though: t(12) = 0.99, p = .17.

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The Positive Relationship between Walking and Biking and Socializing in Public Space
If maneuverability, flexibility, and ease of stopping and parking are important factors explaining
the relationship between motorbike mobility and socializing activities in public space, walking and
biking should be even more conducive to such activities. The practice of deciding to make a
spontaneous stop based on perceptions of surrounding opportunities (perceived affordances) is not
exclusive to motorbike mobility. When it comes to choosing something to eat, a few interviewees
reported a practice similar to motorbuying but on foot, especially at lunch time near the workplace,
alone or with a group of colleagues. Pedestrian flows are indeed also conducive to social interactions in
public space as motorbike flows, for similar reasons. These include the ease of making spontaneous
stops and purchasing decisions, and the role of perceptions (the exposure to environmental
affordances).
After motorbike flows, pedestrian flows are therefore the second type of flows that street vendors
aim to catch. In open markets, where most purchases are made on the go and all business activity is
from street vending, customers are either on motorbikes or on foot, with a few exceptions on bicycles.
People grab groceries as one would put items in a cart and hop from one aisle to the other in a
supermarket, except that behind each item there is one separate street vendor and a distinct transaction
involved. Street vendors typically sell one type of good with very little diversification. Table 20 gives
the exhaustive list of vendors by type of merchandise in the Nguyễn Đình Chiểu market. This market
stretches over 500 ft of the street of the same name in Phú Nhuận District (Figure 26). 64% of the

158
traffic is composed of motorbikes, 31% of people on foot, and 4% of bicyclists (Figure 27), based on
5-min traffic videos recorded every three hours of the day approximately over the course of one day.
46

Table 20 – Number of Vendors by Type of Merchandise in the Nguyễn Đình Chiểu Open Market
Merchandise Street Vendors
Clothing 32
Thịt (meat) 13
Fruits 10
Dried food 6
Cá (fish) 5
Seafood 5
Flowers 4
Other commercial 4
Groceries (diverse) 3
Bàn chải đánh răng (toothbrushes) 2
Food (other) 3
Household appliances 2
Trứng (eggs) 2
Bánh cuốn nóng (rice dumplings) 1
Bánh mı̀ (sandwiches) 1
Bắp (corn) 1
Bún bò (noodle salad) 1
Bún bò Huế (noodle soup) 1
Cam (oranges) 1
Chả cá (fish cakes) 1
Chè (pudding) 1
Chuối (banana) 1
Hành tây và tỏi (onion and garlic) 1
Nước mắm (fish sauce) 1
Ốc (snails) 1
Pastries 1
Restaurant 1
Rice 1
Total 106

46
I recorded a total 908 moving entities, out of which there were only three were electric bicycles and two cars.The cars were near one end or the
other, not inside the market as they cannot go through.

159

Figure 26 – Screenshot of the Nguyễn Đình Chiểu Open Market

Figure 27 – Modal Split in the Nguyễn Đình Chiểu Open Market
On regular streets that are not entirely dedicated to an open market, vendors appeared to use
different location tactics depending on the type of traffic flow they want to catch. Those who primarily
64%
31%
4%
0%
0%
Motorbikes
Pedestrians
Bicycles
Electric bicycle
Cars

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target pedestrians sit low near the ground, facing the sidewalk, and sometimes turning their back to
motorized traffic, as shown in the cases 1 and 2 in Figure 28. Thus, pedestrians can see what vendors
have on display as they walk with their gaze near the ground level. In contrast, case 3 shows a typical
stall targeting motorbuyers. The vendor (not visible on the picture) is standing behind a stall facing
traffic, and the merchandise is at eye level for motorbike users to see what is on display as they drive.
Finally, case 4 shows a specific case where a watch vendor has carefully positioned his stall right next
to the curb, at ground-level, on the sidewalk, not to catch pedestrians but motorbike users in a
particular situation, when they wait at the traffic light (light not visible on the picture).
1. 2.
3. 4.
Figure 28 – Four Street Vending Location Tactics to Catch Different Flows

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Nevertheless, while indeed walking and biking also provide door-to-door mobility and enhanced
environmental perceptions, these advantages are outweighed by the constraints attached to these
modes. Walking and biking are uncomfortable in part because of the large volumes of motorbike
traffic in the lanes and motorbike parking on the sidewalks. Specifically about biking, people
mentioned that “it takes too much time,” it is physically “exhausting,” it does not look good to arrive
all “sweaty at work” and biking on a regular basis would look like “a social failure to the eyes of other
people.” Moreover, bicycle-related services are not as accessible as motorbike-related ones in the city.
“There are gas stations everywhere” said a respondent, but a regular bicyclist complained that it has
become difficult now that very few people ride bicycles to find someone to fix a punctured tire on the
side of the road or guarded and organized bicycle parking as it exists everywhere for motorbikes.
Finally, the electric bicycle might be the only alternative to the motorbike that provides equal
maneuverability while having comparable range of effortless mobility and equal exposure to
environmental perceptions.
47
The reasons why a regular user said she likes the electric bicycle were
that it is even “lighter” (than the motorbike), even “more flexible” and “easier to charge than filling a
tank.” However, she was concerned about the battery life duration, which is the reason several
respondents brought up to explain why they never considered investing in one, in addition to the fact
that they already had a motorbike and such an investment would be redundant. Most respondents said
they never had a chance to try the electric bicycle. One had used his wife’s a few times and said he
liked the feeling of not contributing to air pollution while moving through the city, and that it made
him feel less stressed.

47
The electric bicycle is not included in Table 17 because only one respondent was a regular user.

162
The disadvantages of non-motorized modes mentioned in this section are mostly related to the
current context and socio-cultural factors; but in no way do they weaken the fact that technically, these
modes are supportive of socializing activities in public space, in ways that are similar to motorbike
mobility. They could be even more supportive if their use were encouraged through policy,
investments, and communication. But as of today, as mentioned in Chapter 3 – The Conceived Space
of Urban Mobility, non-motorized mobility is not exactly the primary priority of local transportation
policies despite the sustainable transportation argument that motivates public space management (e.g.,
the pedestrianization project and sidewalk clearing campaigns). For example, there are no bike lanes in
Ho Chi Minh City, and no plan to build any. There are no incentives in place to support a shift from
motorbikes to electric bicycles. The link
2.5. The Endogenous Relationship Between Mobility Practices and Urban Activities
Reverse Causality
While the previous section of this chapter have shed light on how different mobility practices
relates to the urban activities in which people engage, especially in public space, this section sheds
light on the reverse causality that exists between the two sets of practices. In current conditions, most
people use the motorbike for most trips, but they also have multiple modes available and often report
highly multi-modal practices.

163
Table 21 – Circumstances of Use for Different Modes
Motorbike Personal Car Walking Bicycle Bus Motorbike
taxi
& Grab moto
Taxi
& Grab car
Default mode - To work
- To home
- For
weekend
gateways
- For family
outings
- To exercise
- To go for a
walk
(recreational)
- To go to the
park
- To go out for
lunch with
colleagues
- To grab a taxi
- To go to a
nearby market,
store or
restaurant
- To the bus
stop
- To exercise
- To the
market
- For the kids
to play

- To work
- To school
- When
motorbike is
out of service
- To go out of
town or
places in the
outskirts of
the city
- To work
- To the bus
stop
- To a friend’s
party
- When own
motorbike is
not available,
or usual mode
is not
convenient
(e.g., weather)
- When it rains
II
- To go out as a
group, e.g., to
eat out as a
family / to have
lunch with
colleagues
- To the
supermarket
for large load of
groceries
- To go to inter-
city bus station
- For special
occasions (e.g.,
death
anniversaries)

Table 21 reports the circumstances in which people use different modes. The motorbike is the
default mode because of the advantages mentioned previously, its flexibility and maneuverability in
particular. Nevertheless, even when riding a motorbike is an option, people may choose another mode
to overcome the disadvantages of motorbike riding in certain circumstances. The major disadvantages
include the risk of accidents and the direct exposure to uncomfortable weather-related conditions: heat,
rain, dirt, and dust. Therefore, rainy weather is a common motivation for people to hail a taxi or book a
car on Grab, the widely used ride-hailing app. Going out as a group, or a family, is another motivation
for considering the car, given that the motorbike can accommodate only one or two passengers.
However, families of three, four, or sometimes more, sharing a ride remains quite a common sight in
Ho Chi Minh City (Figure 29), even though overcrowding motorbikes is forbidden by law. Other
motivations include going to the supermarket for a large load of household supplies, and special

164
occasions such as weddings or death anniversaries. Several interviewees owned a personal car but said
they use it only for weekend gateways or family outings. The rest of the time, they use their motorbike
to avoid getting stuck in traffic, which is the main disadvantage of the car.

Figure 29 – Three People on One Motorbike: An Example of Motorbike Overcrowding
Walking and biking tend to be recreational modes as opposed to commuting modes. Exercising is
the most cited reason for choosing them. The second-most cited reason is to go buy or eat something
from a location near the place of residence. Several respondents mentioned 400-500 meters (1,300-
1,600 ft) as a walking reasonable distance. As for the bus, some people take it on a regular basis as
their commuting mode. Others take it when the circumstances make it more appealing than riding a
motorbike – when the weather is very hot or rainy, for example. The most widespread use, however, is
for longer trips between the central parts and the outskirts of the city, to reach an inter-city bus station
or an amusement park, for example.
For the same activity, such as eating breakfast for example, people may choose a different mode or
buying modality depending on what destination they have in mind, provided that they made up their

165
mind before starting the trip. One respondent described that she has different modes associated with
different breakfast options (and places):
“There is phở near the apartment building where I live. [If I feel like eating phở], I just walk
out of the building and go there. Bánh giò [a steam rice cake wrapped in banana leave], I buy
on the way. Bánh cuốn [rice paper steamed raviolis], it’s also on the way. For vegetarian food
[she is vegetarian 10 days a month for religious reasons], it has to be inside a restaurant. So, I
go to one, park there, and sit in.”
In sum, people’s mode choice for each specific trip depends on several variables such as the type of
activity at destination, the weather conditions, the load to carry, and the number of passengers on the
trip. This fact confirms that the observed correlations between travel behaviors and type of activity at
destination in quantitative analyses (Chapter 4) encompass complex and multidirectional causal
mechanisms. Moreover, the endogeneity is further emphasized by the fact that the type of activities
available in the built environment – or environmental affordances – changes depending on the nature
of traffic flows.
2.6. Summary of Causal Relations
In Ho Chi Minh City, different transportation modes relate to different opportunities for
discretionary activities supportive of social interactions. Figure 30 below summarizes the direction of
causal linkages between these variables. The endogenous relationship between mode choice and
environmental affordances, where opportunities for discretionary activities are one type of
environmental affordances, was confirmed. On the one hand, people choose the mode of their trip
depending on the destination they have in mind for the type of activity in which they want to engage.
On the other hand, the mode choice determines whether people can engage in additional activities

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while on the move. This decision is informed by some characteristics of the transportation mode –
maneuverability, flexibility, ease of stopping and parking – coupled with characteristics of the built
environment – traffic, parking opportunities, land uses. In turn, the nature of traffic flows resulting
from people’s mode choice influences the production of new affordances (shaped affordances). For
example, I showed that the motorbike flow generates street vending opportunities in the built
environment.
48
Dual causality therefore exists between traffic flows and opportunities for discretionary
activities on the banks of the roadbed, which confirms the relevance of adopting an ecological
perspective to look at the relationships between traffic flows and the built environment.
Finally, discretionary activities generally support social interactions, but their contribution to a
vibrant street life and the socio-spatial integration of street users depend on the nature and
circumstances of the interactions. In what follows, the concept of productive friction helps further
disentangle how the characteristics of certain transportation flows, such as motorbike or pedestrian
flows, are more conducive to vibrant and inclusive street life than others in the context of Ho Chi Minh
City.

48
The connection to traffic flows is of course not the only factor determining the location of commercial activities. For example, the owner of small
street food restaurant selling rice dumplings (banh cuon), a breakfast specialty from the North, said he could not work on the other side of the street
because according to him, the Feng Shui would not be as good. He said he never got any advice from any Feng Shui expert, but that is how he feels it.

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Figure 30 – Causal Relationships between Mode Choice and Social Interactions
3. Productive Friction: How Traffic Flows Activate Street Urbanism
3.1. Definition and Relevance of the Productive Friction Concept
General Definition of the Concept
Based on my observations of the interplay between motorbike mobility and street activity in Ho
Chi Minh City, I advance the concept of productive frictions to designate the opportunities for social
interactions that result from the contact between a flow of movement and the built environment
it traverses. The friction force, a physical notion originally, has been imported in the social sciences
and in research on mobilities in particular by geographer Tim Cresswell (2010), in an article titled
“Towards a politics of mobility.” According to Cresswell, the friction is one of the dimensions to be
considered when analyzing the meanings and politics of mobility. The notion of friction raises the
question of “when and how does it stop?” He defines the friction as “both a force which acts against
mobility – it stops it or slows it down – and a force that enables mobility – without grip we would stay
in place” (Cresswell, 2016). Power dynamics come into play when looking at relationships between
people for whom the friction impedes mobility and those for whom friction enables it. Furthermore,
drawing on Castells’ views on how spaces of flows shape and re-shape places, Cresswell argues that

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through the friction, the “flow produces its own coagulation” and therefore its own geography of
places (Cresswell, 2013). I apply the notion of friction to the scale of the street, where streets are
physically and tangibly shaped at the intersection of mobilities and places. Streets are “places of
movement” by definition (Sheller & Urry, 2006), quite literally both “spaces of flows” and “spaces of
places” (Castells, 1989) as they function as both transportation networks and public spaces.
The adjective “productive” in the productive friction concept comes to define the role that the
friction of movement through the built environment plays in the production of space. When there is
productive friction, the mobile and static uses interact in a way that activates street spaces.
Productive frictions are necessary for streets to become active, vibrant, living, places. The
opposite of the productive friction is the unproductive friction, where the mobile and static uses of
street spaces interact in ways that de-activate them. Congestion is exemplar of unproductive friction
and it is well-known that heavily congested traffic flows are incompatible with vibrant street life.
The friction is productive if several conditions are met. First of all, the flow is “adhesive.” I
borrow the concept of “adhesiveness” (adhérence) from French transportation scholar and practitioner
George Amar (1993). According to his ecological perspective on transportation systems, an adhesive
flow is integrated in the built environment, in the sense that it has a longitudinal contact with it; the
adhesive flow has its own content and space; it enables spontaneous stops and a number of activities
while on the move; it opens up possibilities for improvisations and detours. As a result, there is an
uninterrupted relationship between movement and the built environment, a symbiotic relationship
between movement and the activities it leads to. Amar posits pedestrian travel as the most adhesive
type of flow. Based on his definition, motorbike mobility appears as particularly adhesive as well.
Quite literally, I showed that “activities happen on the move” (Sheller & Urry, 2006) in Ho Chi Minh
City (and other Vietnamese cities), as illustrated by the fact that motorbike users tend to stop

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anywhere, anytime, to motorbuy, in particular, while thinking of these stops and the activities they lead
to as something that is part of their movement. On the contrary, a transportation flow with low
adhesiveness has a contact with the built environment that is punctual (in certain places) instead of
longitudinal (along the way). The movement ‘sticks’ to the built environment only at origins and
destinations but is disconnected otherwise. According to Amar, air travel is the least adhesive type of
transportation flow. Quite literally, the passenger of an airplane lands in the built environment at
destination but is totally disconnected from it while on the move. Arguably, transit-based mobility also
has a punctual contact with the built environment (transfer points and destinations), and so does car-
based mobility as stopping anywhere, anytime, is not exactly an option.
Second, the adhesive flow involves a large volume of people who may engage in social
interactions. That means, the adhesive flow must have a certain thickness and viscosity to it, or
density of users on the move. Furthermore, it must provide users ways of engaging with the field of
environmental affordances within which are embedded opportunities for social interactions, which is
the outcome of interest of the productive friction mechanism. For that purpose, the viscous flow is
rather slow and yet provides a great range of almost effortless mobility; it must afford people on the
move direct environmental perceptions of the urban sensorium and have a propensity to seep
through the banks of the road bed to overflow the built environment, typically, the sidewalk space.
These characteristics have been derived from observations of the conduciveness to social interactions
of the relentless motorbike flow in Ho Chi Minh City, where crowds of motorbike users rarely ride
faster than 15-km per hour (9-mi. per hour) but enjoy great flexibility of movement, ease of stopping
and parking on a whim when they notice something that catches their attention and motivates them to
stop and engage in the corresponding activity. Provided that the critical mass of users is reached, in
principle other forms of mobility gather most of these characteristics – low speed, direct perceptions,

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propensity to infiltrate the built environment – especially pedestrian-, bicycle-, or scooter mobility. The
only difference with a motorbike flow such as the one of Ho Chi Minh City is that the range of
mobility is significantly less for pedestrians and bicyclists.
Third, the built environment presents opportunities for temporary inversions of movement
and non-movement – only when movement slows down, pauses, or stops, do places become
activated. This principle stems from observations of motorbuying and sidewalk parking practices in Ho
Chi Minh City, which makes it possible for motorbike users to engage in any sort of activities in
general, and in social interactions in public space in particular. A vehicle that sits still in the built
environment means there is someone somewhere doing something nearby; the user of that vehicle has
temporarily paused or stopped movement to engage in an activity instead, before movement resumes.
Conceptually, these practices correspond to infiltrations of the traffic flow in the built environment and
to temporary inversions of movement- and non-movement. The fact that they happen everywhere, all
the time, in Ho Chi Minh City, is what makes the motorbike flow continually adhesive. These practices
are contested, though, specifically because of the fact that they blur the line between movement and
activity. What I call motorbuying has not been the subject of much attention in the literature, but
sidewalk parking has. This practice that results from private motorized mobility is often blamed for
impeding pedestrian flows. Public space advocates see is as antithetical to the public nature of the
sidewalk space. In her book Sidewalk, in which she critically maps the contested uses of public space
in Ho Chi Minh City, Annette Kim suggests that there are trade-offs between motorbike parking and
other uses of public space, such as leisure activities and street vending, that support public life. I want
to draw the attention on the fact that the ease of parking on sidewalks is precisely what makes it
possible for people to participate in social interactions that take place in public space in Ho Chi Minh

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City, especially for engaging with street vendors. This contested practice does not go against public life
that make public spaces active and vibrant; it enables it.
Fourth, and last, the built environment is a rich field of potential affordances, that is, activities
in which people can engage. Naturally, commercial and mixed-used streets are most supportive of
productive frictions, and the dual causality mentioned above between mobilities and affordances
creates a situation where the contact of certain traffic flows with the built environment reproduces and
produces (shapes) new affordances. This was made evident in Ho Chi Minh City by the fact that street
vendors move towards the locations where the motorbike flow enters in contact with the sidewalk
space. Streets that lack diversity, that are lined with long stretches of residential, industrial, or
institutional uses do not support interactions between people on the move and still places to which
movement brings them in contact with. This speaks to what Jane Jacobs calls “border vacuums,” where
“borders, whether formed by arterial highways, institutions, projects, campuses, industrial parks, or
any other massive use of special land, can […] tear a city to tatters” (Jacobs, 1961; pp. 264-265) and
thus, prevent the type of street life she extolls in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Kevin
Lynch (1960) refers to such barriers as “strong edges” in The Image of the City, which are not
penetrable, neither through motion nor through visual perception. Both are needed for the friction to be
productive: i) visual permeability of the built environment for perceivers on the move, and ii)
infiltration of traffic flows in the built environment. Permeability and penetrability both depend on
characteristics of the built environment pertaining to land use and urban design.
Measuring Productive Frictions
Based on the conceptual definition of productive frictions as “opportunities for social interactions
that result from the contact of traffic flows with the built environment,” the concept appears to be

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multidimensional, at the intersection of people, flow, and place characteristics. A summary of the
proposed measurements for each item composing the construct is shown in Table 22. The detailed
steps leading to this tentative measurement are presented in Appendix 3.2 - Towards a Measurement of
Productive Frictions. However, further studies are needed for proper scale development and validation,
which was out of the scope of this dissertation.
In regards with measurement, the number of social interactions in public space can be considered
an indication of how conducive a street space is to productive frictions. Indeed, social interactions in
public space are the actualization of the productive frictions, which pertain the field of potentialities.
Productive frictions are indeed defined as “opportunities for social interactions that result from the
contact of traffic flows with the built environment.” Only when street users seize and act on these
opportunities do productive frictions lead to actual social interactions in street spaces, where traffic
flows and the built environment are in contact.
Table 22 – Three Items Composing the Productive Friction Construct
Item Description Proposed Measurements
PEOPLE Street users’
characteristics
- Capabilities: income; age, gender, disability, etc.
- Perceptions: e.g., focus of the gaze (traffic, surroundings, phone, etc.)
- Preferences: regarding discretionary activities and social interactions
FLOW Traffic flows
characteristics
- Volumes (by mode)
- Diversity: modal shares
- Speed
- Maneuverability
- Enclosure (or permeability)
PLACES Built environment
characteristics
- Adjacent land uses
- Share of commercial and recreational uses
- Share of third places
- Sidewalk characteristics
- Street furniture
- Permeability (perceptions): outdoor seating, windows, etc.
- Penetrability (motion): parking, regulation, physical segregation of flows

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3.2. Reading Streetscapes through the Lens of the Productive Friction Concept
Classifying Streets Uses along a Continuum from Mobility to Activity
In this section, I draw on 185 video recordings on twenty different streets (see methodology section
in Chapter 2) to compute some descriptive statistics of all street uses by type of street (Figure 31) and
by district.

Figure 31 – Illustrations of Different Street Types
I classify street uses along a continuum from flows to activities, thus looping static with mobile
street uses.
• Built environment variables include adjacent land uses and street design components such
as number of lanes and whether streets have sidewalks or not.

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• Traffic variables are strictly about flows, as they correspond to counts of people and
vehicles on the move. A sub-set of mobility practices was classified as ‘non-compliant
tactics.’ These include practices such as riding the wrong way, on the sidewalks, and
walking in the traffic lanes.
• Street activity variables, at the other end of the spectrum, are about static uses of street
spaces. These include variables such as the number of open commercial locations, people
hanging out in public space, the number and type of street vendors. For both businesses and
sidewalk vendors, I teased out the share of food and drink businesses which include
restaurants, vendors of soft drinks and street food, as these are usually the type of “third
places” (Oldenburg, 1999) that offer shopping and leisure activities for people to get
together in public spaces.
• Finally, ‘mobility-activity’ variables are neither strictly about movement nor strictly about
activity. They are both at the same time. This subset of variables involves mobility means
that are temporarily static, corresponding the temporary inversions of movement and non-
movement mentioned above. In the case of Ho Chi Minh City, typical ‘mobility-activity’
variables include motorbikes parked on the sidewalks, motorbikes or cars parked in traffic
lanes, and motorbuyers.
Table 23 summarizes the descriptive statistics for all the street uses recorded on video by type of
street. With the exception of residential alleyways, which by definition cut through residential areas, all
the recordings were made on commercial streets and boulevards. On average, the sampled street
segments were 0.3-mile long, almost continuous blocks (very few cross streets and some inevitable
alleyways, but such block discontinuities were nearly inevitable given the density of the network of
alleyways in Ho Chi Minh City). They were lined with a high linear density of adjacent locations. In

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this analysis, I present all linear densities per half mile, where one half mile is typically, although quite
arbitrarily, considered a reasonable walking distance in transportation research (Daniels & Mulley,
2013; Guerra, Cervero, & Tischler, 2012). Nevertheless, this can help visualize how many “things” one
can experience if they are to walk for that distance, which should take approximately 10 minutes. The
results indicate that one will pass in front of 133 different places on average over such a short distance
on a typical street of Ho Chi Minh City, a large majority of which will have stores on the ground-floor
(68%), followed by houses (21%). Institutional uses represent a very small share of all recorded
locations (2%) and there are almost no parking lots.
Against this backdrop, the transportation flows of all surveyed street segments were largely
dominated by motorbikes. A major share of all traffic counts (67%) were motorbikes driving on the
lanes. Cars represented the second largest share of all traffic counts (10%). After converting the modal
shares into motorbike-equivalent units, using Cao and Sano’s (2012) conversion rates, the average car
share on all surveyed street segments (21%) turned out to be twice as large as that measured in terms of
traffic counts (10%),
49
which shows the relatively larger volume of road space that cars use. In terms of
counts of mobile entities, pedestrians walking on the sidewalks came to a close tie with the car share
(11%). In fourth position came the share of bicycles riding in lanes (2%) and all the other modal shares
were almost negligible. People and vehicles engaged in non-compliant mobility tactics represented a
total of 10% of all traffic counts. The most common of these tactics consisted in walking in the lanes
(6% of all traffic counts). A particularly large share of people on the move were counted as such in the
markets (19%), where sidewalks were too busy to be discernable and used for pedestrian traffic, and in

49
The results of a paired t-test indicated that, at the .01 critical level of statistical significance, the mean MEU car share was significantly higher than
that measured as counts, t(166) = 13.03, p = .00

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residential alleyways (13%) where, if any, sidewalks were not continuous and extremely narrow. The
second most common tactic was to ride a motorbike the wrong way (2%). A ‘mobility-activity’
variable, ‘motorbikes parked on sidewalks’ outnumbered all other measurements of what happens in
the sidewalk space. The linear density was 134 parked motorbike per half-mile, that is, one parked
motorbike in front of every location, on average. In addition, some 29 motorbikes were counted as
parked in the traffic lanes. In comparison to motorbikes, the average number of parked cars was much
smaller (M = 9).
Finally, from the perspective of street activity, the linear density of people sitting or standing on the
sidewalks (not walking) was very high as well. Again, if one were to walk for half a mile on a street of
Ho Chi Minh City between 6:00 AM and 10:00 PM, they would notice more than 100 people hanging
out in public space on average, including 25 street vendors, more than half of which serve food and
drinks and most likely have some basic plastic seating available. This is in addition to 43 businesses
that are open on average, out of which about one third serves food and drinks as well, in most cases
with similar seating available on the sidewalk.
Classifying Street Types by Levels of Friction
Based on deviations from averages for all streets, a “level of friction” can be attributed to each type
of street (Table 23). The conceptual definition of productive frictions provided earlier in this chapter
suggests that a high level of friction corresponds to a combination of flow and built environment
characteristics that is highly conducive to street activity. On the contrary, a low level of friction is least
conducive to street activity and that should show in the measurements of variables related to traffic
flows and the built environment they traverse. There are no productive frictions possible on street

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segments that are completely disconnected from the surrounding environment as in the case of the
inside segments of segregated corridors.
Mixed-use streets and markets have a very high level of friction, where markets are a
particularly extreme case. The entire street space is at times filled with productive frictions (especially
during the busy morning). Markets have the largest volume of people hanging out in public space (329
people per half mile, that is three times as much as the average for all streets). In markets, people are
not standing or sitting on the sidewalks but directly in the traffic lanes because the sidewalk is covered
with street vendors. People counted as standing or sitting still mingle with pedestrians, who represent
19% of all people on the move, and most likely take part in the flow of pedestrians as well when they
are not standing or sitting anymore. Markets have by far the largest number of motorbuyers (43 per
half mile) as this is how “non-pedestrians” shop. In addition to the record numbers of street vendors,
people, and motorbuyers, markets are an exceptional case of productive frictions because the contact of
traffic flows is not so much with the built environment it traverses but with the lines of street vendors
in front of the property line. For this reason, adjacent land uses could not be recorded.
Although in smaller numbers than in markets, there are many sidewalk vendors along mixed-use
streets compared to other street types. They also have the largest volumes of people hanging out in
public space (129 per half mile), almost exclusively on the sidewalks. The total volume of traffic that
goes through mixed-use streets is not among the highest compared to other streets, given that these
streets are not very wide (two lanes). This may actually explain the strong contact of traffic flows with
the surrounding environment. The motorbike flow is dominant (68%), followed by cars (12%) and
pedestrians (9%). As for the built environment, mixed-use streets have the largest share of ground-
floor commercial uses (84%) compared to other streets, where each business is an opportunity for

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people to stop. Mixed-use streets have therefore the highest linear density of motorbikes parked on the
sidewalks (221 per half-mile) and of cars parked on the streets as well (19 per half mile).
Mixed-use alleyways, boulevards, and segregated streets (the outside lanes) all have a high
level of friction, despite the fact that they vary in width – from 1-2 lanes for mixed-used alleyways, to
4 lanes for boulevards. These street types fall second to mixed-use streets in terms of street activity,
provided that the number of people hanging out on the streets (ranging from 68 to 79 per half mile) is a
proxy for it. Another thing they have in common is the large number of businesses along the streets.
Although retail locations represent only one third of all locations in commercial alleyways, that is still
approximately 100 businesses per half mile, like mixed-use boulevards. Large numbers of businesses
explain the large numbers of parked motorbikes. Mixed-use alleyways have the most motorbuyers after
the markets. Finally, the high level of friction relates to motorbike and pedestrian flows. The motorbike
flow is dominant on mixed-use alleyways and boulevards. However, compared to other streets, the
outside segments of segregated streets have the peculiarity of supporting large numbers of pedestrians
on the sidewalks (33% of all people on the move) to which can be added pedestrians walking in the
lanes (14%).
One-way corridors have a low level of friction, despite the fact that they have a similar width,
linear density of businesses and street vendors as compared to mixed-use boulevards. The number of
people hanging out in these spaces is twice as low, however (33 per half mile) and the number of
parked motorbikes as well (92 per half mile), thus indicating that fewer people stop to engage in street
activities. One major difference is the traffic volume, which is the largest of all street types on one-way
corridors. Another related explanation for the lower level of friction might be that one-way corridors
tend to be higher-speed streets than all the others reviewed thus far, but average speeds have not been
recorded here. Finally, residential alleyways have a very low level of frictions, as indicated by the

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smallest linear density of people hanging out in public spaces (17 per half mile) of all street types. It
must be related to the fact that residential alleyways are mostly lined with residential uses (88%).

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Table 23 – Street Uses by Level of Friction and Type of Streets – Descriptive Statistics
LEVEL OF FRICTION – Street Type

VERY HIGH HIGH LOW VERY LOW No Friction
All Streets Market Mixed-use
streets
Mixed-use
alleyways
Mixed-use
boulevards
Segregated
(outside)
One-way
corridors
Residential
Alleyways
Segregated
(inside)

Street segment length (mi.) 0.29 0.11 0.16 0.09 0.38 0.73 0.32 0.14 0.73
Street segments with sidewalk (%) 67% 0% 100% 0% 100% 100% 100% 0% 0%
Number of lanes 3 2 2 1-2 4 2-3 3-4 1 6-8
Density of locations (per half mi.) 133.5 n/a 134.4 316.5 109.8 69.2 128.4 260.7 0
-- Retail on ground-floor (%) 68% n/a 84% 33% 77% 81% 66% 12% n/a
-- Housing on ground-floor (%) 21% n/a 10% 45% 7% 7% 11% 88% n/a
-- Institutional on ground-floor (%) 2% n/a 2% 3% 1% 1% 2% 0% n/a
-- Alleyways (%) 5% n/a 4% 7% 7% 3% 7% 0% n/a
-- Cross streets (%) 0% n/a 0% 0% 1% 2% 0% 0% n/a
-- Parking lots (%) 0% n/a 0% 0% 0% 1% 0% 0% n/a
-- Other (%) 4% n/a 0% 12% 7% 5% 13% 0% n/a
FLOW VARIABLES (Mode shares)

In Traffic Counts

Total Counts 143.7 92.3 81.6 73.8 274.3 32.8 577.6 17.6 325.8
-- Motorbikes in lanes (%) 66% 74% 68% 89% 83% 16% 73% 80% 87%
-- Cars in lanes (%) 10% 1% 12% 2% 7% 21% 8% 0% 8%
-- Bikes in lanes (%) 2% 4% 2% 3% 1% 1% 0% 4% 1%
-- Electric bikes in lanes (%) 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
-- Buses in lanes (%) 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 1%
-- Trucks in lanes (%) 0% 0% 0% 0% 1% 0% 1% 0% 4%
-- Pedestrians on sidewalks (%) 11% 0% 9% 0% 4% 33% 12% 0% 0%
-- Others in lanes (%) 0% 1% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 1% 0%
Sub-total compliant mobility uses 90% 81% 93% 95% 97% 72% 96% 87% 100%
-- Motorbikes riding the wrong way (%) 2% 0% 2% 0% 0% 10% 3% 0% 0%
-- Motorbikes riding on sidewalks (%) 1% 0% 2% 0% 0% 4% 0% 0% 0%
180

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LEVEL OF FRICTION – Street Type

VERY HIGH HIGH LOW VERY LOW No Friction
All Streets Market Mixed-use
streets
Mixed-use
alleyways
Mixed-use
boulevards
Segregated
(outside)
One-way
corridors
Residential
Alleyways
Segregated
(inside)
-- Pedestrians walking in lanes (%) 6% 19% 3% 5% 3% 14% 1% 13% 0%
Sub-total non-compliant mobility tactics 10% 19% 7% 5% 3% 28% 4% 13% 0%

In Motorbike-Equivalent Units (MEU)

Total MEU 197.1 70.0 93.2 75.7 319.0 33.2 661.2 15.4 497.6
-- Motorbikes MEU (%) 69% 88% 62% 86% 72% 66% 67% 91% 58%
-- Car MEU (%) 21% 4% 29% 5% 21% 28% 23% 1% 18%
-- Bike MEU (%) 3% 8% 2% 4% 1% 2% 0% 8% 1%
-- Electric bike MEU (%) 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 1% 0% 0% 0%
-- Bus MEU (%) 2% 0% 2% 0% 0% 2% 3% 0% 5%
-- Truck MEU (%) 5% 0% 4% 4% 6% 2% 7% 0% 18%
MOBILITY-ACTIVITY VARIABLES (per half mi.)
Motorbuyers
5.0 43.4 2.6 12.0 2.8 0.0 1.8 0.0 0.0
Motorbikes parked on sidewalks 134.2 52.8 221.1 11.4 215.8 213.8 91.9 0.7 0.0
Motorbikes parked in lanes 29.0 150.6 26.2 57.1 7.3 9.6 7.4 37.9 0.0
Cars parked in lanes 9.1 1.3 18.9 6.1 9.0 3.5 2.0 0.0 0.0
ACTIVITY VARIABLES (per half mi.)
Businesses open for business 43 6 66 53 57 33 52 12 0
Sidewalk vendors open for business 25 210 20 18 8 6 8 0 0
-- incl. sidewalk vendors on sidewalks 15 86 19 4 6 5 8 0 0
-- incl. sidewalk vendors in lanes 10 124 1 14 2 1 0 0 0
Food and drinks businesses (%) 28% 13% 33% 33% 58% 25% 17% 19% n/a
Sidewalk vendors of food and drinks (%) 53% 8% 49% 74% 64% 71% 43% 0% n/a
Motorbike taxis and cyclos 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0
People hanging out in public space 103 329 129 65 79 68 33 17 0
-- on sidewalks 75 18 122 31 73 61 30 1 0
-- in traffic lanes 28 311 7 35 6 7 3 16 0
181

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The Mixed-Use Street of Phu My Hung: Focus on a Low-Friction “Modern” Environment
While mixed-use streets have been classified above as streets supporting high levels of friction in
general, those of Phu My Hung, in District 7, have a low level of friction by regulation and design.
This urban area can be considered the most “modern” environment of Ho Chi Minh City. It has been
developed over the last twenty years and planned according to an ideal of modern city. Although the
built environment meets the conditions to foster productive frictions (mixed uses, narrowness, parking
opportunities), the mixed-use streets of Phu My Hung have a much lower level of friction that other
streets of the same type in more typical districts, as exemplified by the fact that the volume of people
hanging out in public space is twice as low as that observed in similar street spaces of more typical
districts. The mixed-use streets of Phu My Hung significantly differ from that located in other districts
in many regards, but the main reason for the low level of productive friction probably lies in the fact
that the volume of car traffic is much higher than on any average streets of the same type (or any other
street in fact) in more typical districts. In fact, the MEU car share (49%) is even higher than the
motorbike share (45%). Furthermore, there are fewer shopping and leisure activities in public space,
especially from sidewalk vendors. Strict enforcement of anti-street vending policies probably plays a
major role in explaining the absence of street vendors. One surprising difference is that non-compliant
mobility tactics, such as riding a motorbike the wrong way, on sidewalks, or walking in lanes,
appeared more prevalent in Phu My Hung that on other mixed-use streets. Table 24 presents the results
of two-sample one-tail t-tests comparing the difference in means of selected variables between mixed-
use streets of Phu My Hung and all other mixed-use streets in the sample.

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Table 24 – Difference in Means between Phu My Hung and Other Mixed-Use Streets
Phu My Hung All Others t-stat
BUILT ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

Density of locations (per half mi.) 79,4 154 5,60 ***
-- Retail on ground-floor(%) 93% 80% -3,69 ***
MOBILITY VARIABLES

Total Traffic Counts 15,1 107,7 6,28 ***
-- Motorbikes in lanes (%) 51% 75% 4,39 ***
-- Cars in lanes (%) 22% 8% -5,04 ***
-- Motorbikes riding the wrong way (%) 5% 0% -3,36 ***
-- Motorbikes riding on sidewalks (%) 3% 0% -1,35

-- Pedestrians walking in lanes (%) 5% 0% -2,02 **
Total MEU 19,7 122,0 6,05 ***
-- Motorbikes MEU (%) 45% 69% 3,92 ***
-- Car MEU (%) 49% 21% -5,25 ***
MOBILITY-ACTIVITY VARIABLES (per half mi.)
Motorbuyers 0,5 3,4 1,90 **
Motorbikes parked on sidewalks 160,1 243,1 2,11 **
Cars parked in lanes 36,3 12,7 -3,83 ***
ACTIVITY VARIABLES (per half mi.)

Businesses open for business 40 75 3,69 ***
Sidewalk vendors open for business 1 26 5,42 ***
People hanging out in public space 60 143 2,71 ***

Notes: ** t-test significant at the .05 level; *** t-test significant at the .01 level
4. Conclusions
In answer to the first research question addressed in this chapter – How do mobility practices
inform the contested uses of public spaces, such as street vending? – I found that some forms of
mobility are more supportive of street life than others. In Ho Chi Minh city, I found that motorbike
mobility is most conducive to street vending as it enables door-to-door mobility and encourages
impromptu stops for shopping and leisure activities. People’s accounts of motorbuying practices made
especially explicit the critical role of visual perceptions in the utilization of potential environmental
affordances. The causality between travel behaviors and everyday activities appeared as bi-directional

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thus explaining how everyday mobility practices relate to the geography of opportunities in the built
environment. On the one hand, mode choice is informed by the type and location of activities at
destination. On the other hand, small businesses, and especially informal street vendors, choose their
location and vending practices depending on the type of traffic flow they wish to catch. Thus, traffic
flows contribute to shape environmental affordances. Street vendors seek the connection to motorbike-
and pedestrian flows but stay away from the traffic lanes filled with automobiles because car drivers
are least likely to stop along the way. Compared to motorbike users, the reasons car drivers do not stop
and engage as much in socializing activities in street spaces were primarily due to the constraints of
their transportation mode in the local context, where the built environment includes very limited
parking options in particular; individual preferences (self-selection) appeared to be a secondary reason.
Based on these observations, I argued that some characteristics of the transportation mode such as size,
weight, speed, resulting maneuverability (ease of stopping and parking), and enclosure from the built
environment provide an explanation for the variation in how much people engage in street activities
depending on the transportation mode they use.
The second research question guiding this chapter was: Under what circumstances and through
what mechanism do mobility practices shape inclusive street spaces, that is, public spaces that are
supportive of the contact with and integration of people with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds?
Based on this analysis of the mechanisms articulating traffic flows and street life in Ho Chi Minh City,
I derived the concept of productive frictions, that is, opportunities for social interactions that result
from the contact of a transportation flow with the built environment it traverses. Motorbike mobility
appeared as particularly conducive to productive frictions, thus supporting a dense system of social
interactions and integrative uses of public spaces. Millions of people live off the connection to the
motorbike flow in particular in Ho Chi Minh City, not only informal street vendors but small

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household businesses as well, where the activities that support the livelihood of the ones are as many
shopping and leisure opportunities for the others. Thus, street spaces become the stage of innumerable
social contacts in which are embedded notions of mutual dependence and understanding. This system
of social interactions is being challenged by the on-going transition towards forms of mobility that are
not as supportive of productive frictions. In Chapter 7 – Productive Frictions and Urbanisms in
Transition, I show how the analysis of a mobility transition from the perspective of productive
frictions, such as the transition currently underway in Ho Chi Minh City from motorbike- to car- and
transit mobility, can help predict the nature of social relations in the urbanism of the future. But first,
the next chapter continues to draw on individual accounts of the urban experience, not in the present
context as it has been the focus of this chapter, but in the future as Ho Chi Minh City residents envision
it.

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Chapter 6.
The Envisioned Space of Urban Mobility: Pathways to Development and Modernism
1. Introduction
The envisioned space of urban mobility is to the individual what the conceived space is to the city.
It is the space where people devise for themselves plans and ideas about the future of urban mobility in
ways that fit with their imagination regarding the future of urban living – how the urban space will
look and feel like, and how the meanings and politics of urbanism will evolve along with the economic
development trend. In this chapter, I draw on more than sixty interviews with Ho Chi Minh City
residents and business owners, both formal and informal, to explore how the envisioned space relates
to the conceived-, perceived-, and lived spaces of urban mobility.
The chapter is organized according to the continuum from mobility to activity that has arisen in
Chapter 5 – The Lived Space of Urban Mobility: How ‘Productive Frictions’ Activate Street
Urbanism, in which I argued that the nature of transportation flows is intrinsically related to what
people do and how they interact with places, and with each other in public space. I showed in
particular that a mechanism of productive friction explains the very strong correlation between
dominant motorbike flows and vibrant street activity in Ho Chi Minh City today. I shed light on the
role of productive frictions in shaping inclusive public spaces. Productive frictions enable millions of
people to live off the connection to the street; they are especially critical to the survival of street
vendors. Furthermore, productive frictions enable the busy street life, the wide range of street uses, and
the innumerable social interactions between people of diverse backgrounds composing Ho Chi Minh
City’s vibrant public spaces. Therefore, following the mobility-activity continuum, in this chapter I

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first report the accounts of people I interviewed about their mobility practices (mobility interviews)
and then that of vendors I interviews about their business practices (activity interviews). In both cases,
the focus in on the urban way of life they have experienced and anticipate for the near future.
How do people’s life experiences relate to the conceived, perceived, and lived spaces of urban
mobility? More specifically, from the perspective of mobility, how do people’s individual experiences
of past, present, and anticipated mobility transitions relate to the future of urbanism as it is conceived
and promoted through transportation policy? From the perspective of urban activities, how do people
of different socioeconomic backgrounds, including street vendors, imagine the future of street life and
the related transformations of their lived urban experience?
In the first section, I focus on people’s envisioned future regarding mobility practices. To my initial
surprise, I found that people were generally in favor of the government plan to ban motorbikes from
the future of urban mobility, including those for whom there is no concrete alternative available, not
even in the long run. The second section is centered on the future of street life. The idea of limiting and
regulating street vending also received favorable opinions, especially from people who think about it as
a way of alleviating traffic congestion. Two factors, however, mitigate the enthusiasm for clearing
sidewalks of street vendors: i) altruistic concerns for the livelihood of the urban poor, and ii) a general
appreciation for the way of life purported by street vending.
Finally, both trends, related to the future of mobility and that of street life, converge towards a
frictionless urban future that is at the crux of the envisioned space of urban mobility. There is therefore
an apparent alignment between the envisioned space of the people and the conceived space of planners
and decision makers, which may arguably result from successful propaganda efforts by the latter.
While this argument cannot be discarded in the Vietnamese context, it is not sufficient. Interviews
showed that the people of Ho Chi Minh City do not just appropriate the practices promoted in the

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conceived space; they have freedom and agency in the ways they anticipate and actualize them. I
propose two theoretical explanations for the trends observed in this chapter, while attending to the
dynamics of class embedded in them; one is in light of Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong’s concept of
“worlding practices” (Roy & Ong, 2011), and the other grounded in Marshall Berman’s definition of
“modernism” (Berman, 1983).
2. The Future of Mobility: Attitudes Towards the Mobility Transition
2.1. The Extinction of Motorbikes: No Real Resistance to a Trend Deemed Inexorable
An apparently puzzling fact is that most people I interviewed in the end of 2018 were generally
favorable to the government efforts to enforce a shift away from motorbike mobility, even those whose
mobility is entirely dependent on the motorbike today and would be most affected by its extinction. At
the time, local officials were discussing a plan to ban motorbikes from the city center by 2030 (see
Chapter 3 – The Conceived Space of Urban Mobility). The results presented in this section draw on
answers to opinion questions regarding this measure. The plan ended up being on pause for now – a
similar policy was adopted in Hanoi though – but the interview responses are still helpful to understand
public opinions regarding the anticipated shift away from motorbike mobility, trend that is being
supported in many different ways in the conceived space, through car-oriented regulation,
infrastructure investments, and the like.
Among the respondents who did not express any overt opposition to the measure, there is Minh, for
example, a 52-year-old key repairer for whom his motorbike means everything: “It is my freedom,” he
said, “and I like driving my own, I don’t like to be on the passenger seat, because I don’t trust other
drivers.” He has had a motorbike since he was fourteen. Only during the collectivist era (1975-1989)

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did he use another transportation mode, the bicycle, for lack of resources to afford the maintenance of a
motorbike. He never walks, and he bikes only for a little exercise and a quick detour by the market
near his house in District 3 every morning. The meager VND 6 million (USD 257) monthly income he
derives from his key-repair stall by a busy road of Binh Chanh District, more than 20 km (12 mi.) away
from the city center, allows him to contemplate neither the car nor the metro as a future mode of travel.
He admitted that he was worried about the consequences of a motorbike ban, concerned about the
feasibility of such a policy, but surprisingly, he did not say he was against it.
Most interviewees shared a sense of inexorability regarding the anticipated extinction of
motorbikes – someone said: “It will happen. I don’t know when, but it will happen” and others “It’s
going to be very hard. But we have to do it [get rid of motorbikes]” – and like Minh, they did not
oppose to the idea. Favorable reactions can be organized into three levels of support to which three
categories of individuals correspond (Table 25). First, there are the reactions of "mixed support"
expressed by “concerned” individuals. Minh is one of them, for example. The Concerned are those for
whom there is no alternative available to the motorbike; those who are least adaptable, mostly due to
financial constraints. The Concerned also include people who may not be as directly affected but are
worried about the consequences for those who are. The Concerned find reassurance in reminding
themselves that it will be very difficult, or even impossible, to implement a motorbike ban. In the
second group come the reactions of “resigned support” by the Resilient and people who consider
themselves as such. The Resilient demand change, they find it desirable, whatever the cost, even if it
requires personal sacrifice. Third, there is the “resolute support” by the Prepared, people who are ready
to embrace change, mostly because they have the necessary cultural and financial capital to afford the
change. For example, they already own a private car, or they know how to use rail transit because of
past travel and work experiences abroad. More often than not, however, the Prepared say that their

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support for enforcing the shift away from motorbike mobility is conditional to the provision of a viable
transportation alternative, starting with a robust and efficient public transportation system, for those
who cannot afford the car.
Table 25 – Classification of Three Profiles Supporting the Motorbike Ban
Mixed Support
by the Concerned
Resigned Support
By the Resilient
Resolute Support
By the Prepared
“It will happen. I don’t know when,
but it will happen. […] It will be hard
to implement though. […] First of all,
people cannot afford driving a car,
Second, there is not enough road
capacity. Third, it is so much more
convenient to use a motorbike.”
--- Man, 45 years old, janitor in a mall.
Motorbike user. Lives in District 7 and
works in District 1.
“It will be very hard to live without
motorbikes. But we have to do it.”
--- Woman, 32 years old. Employee of
a bank. Usually rides a motorbike.
“It’s a good idea, but the government
needs a solid alternative [to the
motorbike]. They need to build an
efficient public transit system. […] It
won’t change anything for me.”
--- Ngoc, woman, 45 years old, senior
executive of a national coffee
company. Drives her car everywhere.
“I think it’s a good idea. But [the
government] needs to think twice. The
poor will struggle. Many people need
a motorbike to be able to work. […]
There should be some compassion for
the poor who need to work.”
--- Man, 35 years old, waiter in a cafe
in Phú Nhuận District. Exclusive
motorbike user. Sleeps above the cafe
during the week and goes back home
to Hóc Môn (10 miles away) one
afternoon per week to visit his wife
and daughter.
“For sure it will change my life
entirely. […] But it’s a good thing. At
least there won’t be any more traffic
jams for people who go by car.”
--- Woman, 45 years old, janitor in a
mall. Usually gets rides on the back of
her husband’s motorbike.
“First thing I do once they ban
motorbikes: I buy a car. But I still
prefer the motorbike for short trips.”
--- Woman, 28 years old, bank
employee. Lives in an apartment
building in Go Vap District, works in
District 1. Goes to work by bus, uses
her motorbike for short trips.
“There is no way they can do it. This
would hurt the people so bad. […] It
would have a severe impact on
people’s lives. If they ban [the
motorbike], what are we going to
do?”
--- Minh, man, 52 years old, key
repairer on a roadside in Binh Chanh
District. Lives in District 3. Exclusive
motorbike user.
“It might work. Vietnamese people
surprised me more than once. I
thought they would never like to shop
in supermarkets, they do; they would
never adjust to apartment living, they
love this lifestyle now. I thought the
government would never succeed in
making us wear helmets, they did.”
--- Man, 63 years old, retired. Usually
rides a bike, by choice. Rides a
motorbike once every morning just
for fun.
“I want the ban. Of course, it would
be better to ask the people what they
want, but they are so used to
motorbikes that they would vote
against [the ban]. Banning is
necessary to force the shift towards
another mode. I would love to be able
to use transit.”
--- Man, 36 years old, architect. Lives
six months in Vietnam and six months
in Germany.

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Only a few participants expressed unfavorable opinions to the motorbike ban, and these opinions
were not so much about the anticipated outcome – the limitation, and ultimately, the possible
extinction of motorbike use – but about the enforcement method. They would prefer milder measures
to a ban, such as gradual limitations on the number of vehicles allowed per household. Or else, they
recommend simply letting time pass, implying that motorbikes would eventually disappear, thus
echoing the sense of inexorability mentioned above.
One exception, however, was Phương, a 34-year-old housekeeper, who expressed a frank
disavowal with regard to the proposed ban on motorbikes or anything that would result in removing
motorbikes form the range of transportation options available. To her, it was obviously a matter of
class inequality and injustice:
The poor, they cannot afford to buy a car, so they are dependent on motorbikes. The rich, they
will be able to use their car. But when will we have a car? Who doesn't dream of having a car?
Of course, we do, but we can't afford it! We'll have to take the bus. I have nothing against the
bus, I have nothing against the metro either, but we will no longer be able to go wherever we
want whenever we want as we do now. […] I really think this idea is unacceptable. […] I am
totally against it.
Phương's reaction differs in several respects from that of other participants who were also worried
about the consequences for the poor of a potential motorbike ban (the Concerned). First, Phương’s
reaction clearly expresses a strong feeling of injustice, whereas others expressed more like an
underlying concern only. Second, she is clearly opposed to the proposed ban, while others, although
worried or doubtful of its possible success, seemed to give at least some credit to the idea. Finally, the
prospect of an urban future from which motorbikes have been banned does not seem as inevitable to

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her as it may seem to others. Meanwhile, most people are mentally preparing for a mobility transition
from motorbike- to transit- or car mobility.
2.2. Mobility Transition towards Metro Mobility: A Mix of Curiosity and Expectations
All interviewees expressed their support in principle for the current investments to develop a metro
system in Ho Chi Minh City. Among the anticipated benefits, several people mentioned that it will
“reduce the number of vehicles on the road,” “reduce congestion” and “mitigate carbon emissions;”
that it should be convenient;” it should enable to “save time;” and people would be “less exposed to
the sun and the rain.” One young interviewee seemed to have complete faith in the fact that “the state
always has good policies to improve people’s lives” and believed that metro development was one of
them.
Nevertheless, most respondents shared a “wait-and-see” attitude. As things were at the time of
interviews, with only one line under construction and so many delays reported in the news, people
were unsure about their intentions to use the metro. Actually, they were mostly wondering when it
would open. Two interviewees asked, “Is it complete yet?” One of them added, “I noticed they were
doing some construction work 4-5 years ago, but I don’t know where it’s at now.” When asked how
the metro might change their habits, respondents were not exactly sure what to picture. One person was
very pragmatic about it: “I don’t know if it is convenient. I’ll know after it opens, after I try it once.” A
young single and active professional said: “For now, it is hard to tell […]. I suppose I will try to use it
and to use my motorbike less. That means I will walk much more.” She might be one of the most
immediately eligible metro commuters; her apartment and current office are located within walking
distance of two of the metro stations on the first line to open. But even she could not really picture
commuting by metro on a daily basis before she tried it.

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Furthermore, people would speak about the metro as something foreign. The young student with
complete trust in the government said she thinks she will use it, but first, she will “have to try to know
how. This is something only foreign countries have.” Interviewees who had the chance of experiencing
mass rapid transit in foreign countries had a clearer picture in mind of what life could become with a
metro in Ho Chi Minh City. Their expectations were also higher, precisely because of their past
experiences with efficient systems. A young professional expressed hope that the metro in Ho Chi
Minh City will be “like the one in Singapore, hyper efficient and super convenient, [making it
possible] to access suburban shopping centers.” Another participant, who studied in Singapore,
thought it would be ideal to have stations integrated into large mixed-use buildings concentrating all
kinds of shops and services. A young overseas Vietnamese (Việt Kiều) who spends part of the year in
Germany and the rest in Ho Chi Minh City believes that “the metro can solve a lot of problems if it is
designed properly.” By “designed properly,” he meant a system that is as efficient as the one he knows
in Munich, with stations close to each other and short headways. “Then, I would no longer need the xe
ôm [motorbike taxis, his usual transportation mode]. I hate motorbikes anyways,” he said. Finally,
Vân and Giang, two regular bus riders, were the only ones without past experiences abroad who could
yet picture using the metro in the future. Their way of projecting themselves into a practice that is
unfamiliar to them was based on their daily experience of traveling by bus in Ho Chi Minh City today.
According to Giang, “there is nothing like [public transportation]. It's comfortable. You can watch the
landscape. You don't have to worry about anything.” Naturally, a few respondents said that the metro
would not change anything to their lives for the simple reason that they live or work in places where
there is no station planned to open anytime soon.
Finally, the metro was associated in people’s minds with greater access to opportunities, but a
notion of accessibility that is rooted in greater mobility between remote locations, as opposed to door-

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to-door mobility between a variety of places that are close to each other as it is the case today with
motorbikes. Two respondents expressed the idea that the upcoming metro system might be most useful
for accessing places located far away from the center. One of them is Xuân, the father of two daughters
mentioned in introduction, who subscribed to this position. He imagines that the metro will provide
him with greater accessibility to far-away locations to which he never goes nowadays by motorbike.
Here is what he envisions: “By metro, I will be able to take my daughter to play in other parks that are
far away from home, for a change from the one where I usually go in my neighborhood. There might
be some nice places far away.” He likes the idea that his scope of accessible options will expand, not
only in terms of parks, but also in terms of restaurants. The counterpoint to Xuân’s perspective on
expanded accessibility was expressed by a 24-year-old DJ: he thinks that the metro “can only be
partially successful” precisely because people whose life is currently organized around locations in
close proximity to each other – within a small activity space, so to speak – in the central districts, will
continue to drive motorbikes.
2.3. Mobility Transition towards Car Mobility: Promises of Safety, Comfort, and Modern
Living
People who typically own a car or contemplate the idea of owning one in the near future appreciate
the promise of safety that car mobility brings about. However, the safety that a minority of car users
enjoy comes at the expense of the safety of the majority currently riding motorbikes. Ngọc, the 45-
year-old senior executive of a large national company who typically goes everywhere by car, is very
aware of this inequality. As she puts it: “In case of an accident involving a car and a motorbike, most
of the time, someone dies; and it rarely is the person in the car.” Interestingly, this is one of the
arguments that prevents her husband from driving a car on a daily basis as well. He says that he finds it

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dangerous to drive a car, not for himself, but for all other people surrounding automobiles on busy
streets. Yet, parents of young children find especially attractive the safety that the car affords including
those who cannot afford one financially. One of them is Phương for example, the janitor mentioned
above who said that she has a dream that she too might have a car one day, knowing quite well that her
dream will never come true. In her dream, she pictures: “We could all [my family] sit in it and be
comfortable. We could take the children out without any fear of accidents.” Child safety is the
argument that convinced Xuân to purchase a car a few months after the interview. It is the reason why
Ngọc’s two children only go to school by car, chauffeured by a private driver.
There are some trade-offs between comfort and time spent in transportation. As Ngọc’s husband
put it, “You can’t have both safety and freedom,” where the safety attribute goes to car mobility, and
the freedom to the motorbike because of the ease of movement it affords. In order to overcome the
limitations of the car, Ngọc does not always drive her own. She hires a private driver during the
weekdays. This enables her to use the time spent in transportation to let her mind wander, to answer
emails, or to relax, and when she goes to meetings for example, the driver drops her exactly at
destination and goes somewhere else to park further away, or he circles around until she calls him back
to pick her up. She drives her own car only on weekends or on family outings. In these occurrences,
she enjoys the privacy she gets from driving herself. But she drives only if she knows that there is a
mall near her destination – “You can always find a parking spot at the mall.” If not, she takes a taxi.
All three other car owners in the sample agreed about the disadvantages of the car as a quotidian
transportation mode. It is “very slow,” “you get stuck in traffic,” “it’s a waste of time,” “difficult to
park,” “not appropriate for the current infrastructure,” “hard to get around by car.” Therefore, they
do not use their car all the time. One of them was considering making the full shift one day, but then,
like Ngọc, he would hire a personal driver. For now, he still uses a motorbike for most trips, especially

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for daily commutes. A salesman for a famous vodka brand said that a typical trip between two different
selling points takes him about 20-30 minutes by motorbike; it would take at least one hour by car. On
the day of the interview, he had visited eleven stores of his network. He said that for special clients he
sometimes takes his car, but then he is able to visit five stores maximum on these days. All three car
owners besides Ngọc have a similar habit of using their car only for longer and more exceptional trips
than daily commutes, such as weekend getaways – they all mentioned a 30-km (19-mi.) threshold
above which it is worth using the car. The other motivation is when the weather is such that they would
rather spend more time sitting comfortably in their car than shorter amounts of time sitting in traffic in
the rain or in the heat.
Finally, car mobility is tied to an ideal of modern life that differs in all regards from the one most
Ho Chi Minh City residents currently have, arranged around motorbike mobility. This was most
apparent in the case of two young male students in their early twenties who both intended to become
car owners in the next few years. They made clear that car ownership will come along with many other
lifestyle changes. One of them was Đức, for example, a 21-year old student who had a plan: “I will
save money and […] I will buy a car when I am thirty years old,” he said. Currently, he rides his
motorbike everywhere and uses it as a source of income as he works as a motorbike tour guide. He too
shares appreciation for the many advantages of motorbike mobility – it is “light,” “flexible,” “the
fastest mode,” “easy to navigate in traffic,” “very convenient” – which according to him outweigh the
two main disadvantages – the risk of accidents and the discomfort in the rain. The motorbike is the
most suitable mode with his current life situation, as he lives with his parents in Bình Tân District,
quite far away from the city center where he goes to school every day. Furthermore, the private house
in which he lives is located in a narrow alleyway near a market, a pagoda, a park, a swimming pool,
several stores and many other places that are easiest to access by motorbike, including the house. He

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seems to enjoy the neighborhood life: “My neighbors are very friendly. Every weekend we have a
party together […] either at my house, or at someone else’s house. […] We’re always raising a glass
of beer – Dô [cheers].” Nevertheless, he envisions for himself a very different lifestyle for his
independent adult life. Not only would he like to buy a car, he would also like to buy an apartment, in
District 4 if possible, where he observes with amazement a lot of modern development happening in
close proximity to the center. He has dreams of Novaland, Icon 56, or Riverside, the “many beautiful
apartment buildings” where he pictures that “the quality of life is very high; it is high standard.” Such
a lifestyle would be compatible with car ownership.
Car ownership is associated not only with different living conditions, but also with different
shopping habits. As mentioned in introduction, the day before the interview, Xuân had gone to ten
different places in town, including a street food restaurant to eat a bún bò Huế (a beef noodle soup) for
breakfast, a corner store, his neighborhood park, a motorbike repair shop, three different markets,
where he shopped from four different vendors, and one supermarket. When asked if he could have
reached all these places if he were driving a car, Xuân pondered for a minute, going in his mind over
yesterday’s routes, before he came to the following conclusion: “I guess not.” The reasons were very
simple: either the streets were not wide enough, or “there [was] nowhere to park.” His owning a car
might not mean that he will necessarily make a complete shift and drop his motorbike altogether. Yet,
when answering the question of how his habits would change with car ownership, he added, slightly
confused: “I never thought about that. […] I guess I’ll have breakfast at home then, and I’ll buy
everything from [the supermarket].” As Ngọc said, “You can always find a parking spot at the mall.”

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3. The Future of Street Life
3.1. De-Activating the Friction: Priority to Flows over Street Vending, but with Compassion
When Xuân said that once he starts traveling by car (which he did a few months later), he would
not be able to go to the market anymore, he would only be able to park at the supermarket, that meant
as many vendors of meat, vegetables, rice, spices, and so forth, whose livelihood he would not be able
to support anymore. That meant he would have adopted a frictionless form of mobility, one in which
interactions with the urban space, and with others, are not embedded. Previous narratives in Chapter 5
– The Lived Space of Urban Mobility – address the strong correlations between motorbike flows and
inclusive street activity in Ho Chi Minh City today. The productive friction mechanism explains how
buying things on the way, stopping on a whim to engage in social interactions in public space,
practices that are extremely common in the contemporary city, are made possible by the ease of
moving and parking in tight spaces, the unmediated perceptions of the surrounding environment, and
other characteristics of driving a motorbike.
Without using the term, a few interviewees mentioned the productive friction mechanism when
asked for their opinion regarding the sidewalk clearing campaigns that affect street vendors. They
presented the productive friction as a traffic issue that needs to be solved, and sidewalk clearing
campaigns as a straightforward solution. One interviewee understood it as a feedback loop that needs
to be broken: “As long as there are people who sell, there will be people who buy. […]. As soon as
people stop by the curb to buy something, they contribute to traffic jams. This is not good, so I support
the ban [on street vending].” Ngọc, the senior executive who is also an exclusive car user had several
things to say about the productive friction. One was: "I see it's part of my culture that women go to the
market with their motorbike, stop and go and stop and go as they do their shopping. I can see it's

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convenient but that is uncivilized and unsafe." Along the same line of thought, she claimed that it is “a
bad habit that is very much engrained.” Personally, she has been driving a car for ten years and she
has not purchased anything from a street vendor in a very long time. Finally, she exclaimed: “We can’t
continue to live in a place that is completely uncivilized because people want to buy and sell things
everywhere!”
An IT engineer who recently came back from Australia where he used to live for a decade, also a
car owner but still a regular motorbike rider, generally agreed but had a more nuanced opinion. He
finds it rather “convenient in Vietnam that you can eat, shop, anywhere, anytime.” Nevertheless, he
also regrets that: “It’s a mess. It’s not organized.” And he reflects on the fact that he contributes to the
so-called mess: “It’s convenient in a way but you know, like when I stop on the street to buy my
breakfast, it causes traffic jam. It’s a bad thing.” For this reason, he was in favor of clearing sidewalks
of street vendors because he would like to see improvements in the traffic situation – “Traffic jams are
the only thing I need to get used to” he said, “other than that, I am happy with my life in Ho Chi Minh
City.” To him though, it is obvious that “if everyone starts using cars and public transit, it will be bad
for street vendors.”
Indeed, what he observed is also true of transit mobility, which can be expected to reduce the
productive friction between transportation flows and the built environment, or at least, to concentrate it
in certain nodes as opposed to having it in a continuous manner along commercial corridors as it is the
case with motorbike mobility. When the woman who used to live in Singapore suggested that metro
stations should be integrated into large mixed-use buildings, she added that: “the organization of the
city as it is today, with a succession of businesses along the streets, is suited to motorbikes but it will
not be convenient for people using the metro.” By that, she meant that today’s accessibility of all
things along the way is not the best form of accessibility for people who cannot stop as they please. In

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the same spirit, and probably inspired by the Singaporean experience, she would like to see the
government “move vendors to one building, or in one place, instead of having them be everywhere on
the streets.” She was not the only one in favor of such a measure while being aware that new vending
forms would involve new buying modalities – people would not be able “to buy as they go” anymore.
In short, most of the interviewees were strongly in favor of clearing sidewalks from street vendors.
Following traffic congestion, food safety was the second most widespread argument. Interestingly, the
person who was most adamant about food safety was a low-income janitor who eats most of her meals
from street vendors and street food restaurants, by choice, because she does not like to cook. For
breakfast and for dinner, she usually rides on the back of her husband’s motorbike, and in friction
mode looks around and chooses where to stop when she sees something she fancies. On lunch time,
she does the same, but alone, and on foot, near her workplace. As a result, she had more
recommendations for good places to eat than anyone else I have ever met in Ho Chi Minh City, by
types of soups and other foods, and by neighborhood. She would speak about all these places with
great enthusiasm, and yet when asked what she thinks about the government efforts to regulate street
vending, she answered: “That is a good thing. […] Sidewalks are not hygienic.” Naturally, the follow-
up question was whether she ever got sick in years of eating on the sidewalks. Her answer was “No,
never. But that’s because I know where to stop. When I see flies flying around, I know that is a place to
avoid.” Although she admitted that restrictions on street food vending would have a major impact on
her eating habits, as formal restaurants were unaffordable to her, she was willing to give up on the
quality of life she gets from eating out as she pleases in order to move towards a cleaner and more
orderly urban environment.
Nevertheless, favorable reactions to sidewalk clearings were nuanced with a sense of compassion
for street vendors. All but one respondent said they wished that the government could find alternatives

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for streets vendors to make a living. One student added that “we can’t have so many people lose face,”
where losing face is a real affront to human dignity in Vietnamese culture. Someone estimated that
“maybe seven out of ten [vendors] would be okay, but three would suffer” if vending were to be
forbidden, so there needs to be some solution for those three. Someone else heard that there were one
million vendors making a living on the streets, therefore one million people whose livelihood was at
stake when anti-vending policies were implemented – “someone needs to provide them with job
opportunities, something else to do” he said. “In every family, one member will be affected” according
to Minh, the key repairer, probably referring to his own situation. While a professor of economics was
fully aware of the size of the challenge – “the economic structure has to change completely for the
share of the informal economy to go down” – it was not the case of all respondents. Ngọc, the senior
executive, had an answer ready for “the people who say that vendors need a job. Well, vendors have to
accept to do another job.” She also thinks that “vendors are unfair competition to businesses who pay
taxes, rent, and employees.”
Some respondents preferred to change focus and speak about the feasibility issue, as if there was no
need to ponder on whether anti-vending policies are desirable or not, considering that they are not
likely to be enforced. Speaking of her own resilience to past crack downs, a fruit seller explained that
“it is impossible to ban street vending because vendors are the people who cannot afford to do
business in the formal sector. So, ban or no ban, they need to sell.” Another one mentioned the issues
of governance and corruption in the way of enforcement: “Implementation will be very difficult
because of too many governance levels. Between different wards and districts, streets are managed by
different authorities […] and vendors know how to pay the police so they don’t get caught.”
Finally, just a few interviewees were in favor of preserving street vending, for cultural reasons. In
two cases, it may have something to do with their job that makes them attuned to the cultural aspects of

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street vending. One is a young woman who currently works for a tourism agency. She said she likes
the small food markets developed by Captain Sidewalk – the man whose nickname comes from his
aggressive anti-vending campaign in District 1 in 2017 (Figure 32). He created two such markets
which have very little capacity altogether but pioneered a form of regulated street food markets in the
city. The interviewee could see that it also has the advantage of creating a registration system. The
other was an architect. He would like to see more of the little carts gathered together in the Bui Vien
area (in the backpackers’ district where he like to hang out with friends on weekends). Finally, two
respondents clearly said that they were against the idea of clearing the sidewalks of street vendors
because “street vending is part of Vietnamese culture.” One of them added: “not every country has
this, so if it’s here, let it be. This is a cultural trait of ours, so let’s keep it.”

Figure 32 – Example of Regulated Street Food Market in District 1

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3.2. The Voice of the Vendors: Moving Along with Modern Development
Photographs of a selection of vendors whose voice is expressed in this section are presented at the
end of the section in Figure 33. Against the backdrop of economic development and modernization, an
underlying concern shared by most street vendors boiled down to: “How much longer will I be able to
stay?” – in this business, in this location. This is a question raised by a vendor of fried fish balls (cá
viên chiên) in District 7 concerned with the long-term socioeconomic viability of his activity. It has
become increasingly difficult for him to make a decent living from street vending in the area. After he
migrated to the city from his province of An Giang more than twenty years ago, for a long time his
business yielded an income that was high and steady enough for him to raise a family of four children.
He succeeded in paying for their education and everything they needed while growing up. Nowadays,
he earns VND 400,000 per day on average (approximately $17), which is close to the median salary in
the country, and up to one million on very busy days. “This is good money, actually” he says. Yet,
rising living costs have made his margins increasingly thin regardless of how much effort he puts in the
business.
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He cannot envision any future for himself in this city that he has seen change dramatically.
“It may be time for me to go back to the countryside” he said. “I can’t picture doing this job much
longer.” There is no question of whether his children will take over his activity. He has been able to
provide them with the education they needed to find more stable, formal, and higher-pay employment
that his business. From the perspective of his lineage, his street vending activity has enabled the

50
Every morning he goes to the market at 6:00 AM to buy the ingredients. Then he prepares and pre-fry all the fish balls and raviolis. At 2:30 PM he
is place, ready for the first peak of activity around 4:30-5:00 PM after school ends, then for the second peak later at night when strollers head towards the
lake nearby, and in-between for the occasional customer either in friction mode or walking down the stairs of surrounding apartment buildings. He
generally starts packing back up at 11:00 PM.

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upward mobility from the poor and rural lifestyle of his parents to the more comfortable and
established urban future he has made possible for his children.
The question of “How much longer will I be able to stay” is also a short-term issue related to
accessing street spaces. The life and business stories of street vendors are punctuated with episodes of
displacement triggered by the modernization of the built environment. For example, the fish ball
vendor has always been running his mobile business in the same area, but not always in the exact same
location. When demolition occurred in the late 2000s, in preparation for the re-development of a sector
of Saigon South – the modern town planned by a Taiwanese developer – he moved to another sector
that was already completed. The French-Vietnamese hospital and the Saigon South School had just
emerged from the ground up, so he chose the shade of these new institutions as a temporary vending
location. As soon as life picked up again where he used to sell, he was able to move back to his former
location, but it had turned into a completely new environment. For the last three and a half years, he
has been standing next to his cart every day from 2:30 PM until late at night in front of a sleek Korean
restaurant on the ground-floor of a mixed-use residential and commercial building of Tôn Dật Tiên
street.
Across town, other vendors share similar concerns or experiences of displacement intertwined with
real estate development. Somewhere on Nguyễn Thái Bình street, in District 1, a middle-age woman
prepares coffee and soft drinks on a small cart. For now, she enjoys a large customer base composed of
construction workers involved in the development of the parcel in front of which she stands. There
used to be an antique store in a French shophouse owned by a relative of hers, who granted her access
to the patch of sidewalk in front of it. Now, behind the blue tarpaulin and scaffolding, a brand-new
hotel is rising. “The house was always cool because of its thick walls,” she said. “The hotel will never
be as nice.” Beyond this architectural consideration, her main concern is that she has no idea where

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she can possibly move once the hotel opens. When asked why she does not set up her stall near her
house, she said because “it’s in a narrow alleyway (hẻm). There are not so many spots there, and all of
them are taken already.” Somewhere else in Phú Nhuận District, on Phan Xích Long street, an older
woman who sells soymilk had a similar experience after a bank opened. She used to have a proper stall
on the sidewalk with tables and stools, but she had to move once the bank opened. She could not find a
similar spot elsewhere on the street. Now, she only brings one small jar of soymilk every day that she
discretely sets up on the ledge of a fence wall further down the street for a brief amount of time until
she runs out of soy milk. In light of re-development, she and other vendors have to constantly
renegotiate their access to vending spaces in the city.
Furthermore, regulation against street vending has been especially strict in urban areas deliberately
designed as “modern” in the conceived space, thus forcing vendors to remain extremely mobile as they
“play” cat and mouse with the police. This has been the case in Saigon South, where the fish ball
vendor has experienced numerous fines and confiscations of his stall especially in the months that
followed the re-opening of the modernized neighborhood. He said that crackdowns have softened a
little and become less frequent over time. This may explain why in another part of the same
neighborhood, a vendor of rice paper snacks (bánh tráng nướng) is able to walk the streets every
afternoon; and a coconut vendor is able to stop his loaded truck in the middle of a busy crossroad for a
few hours every day. Yet, the coconut vendor deliberately comes at a time when he knows crackdowns
are less likely, and compared to the fish ball vendor who deals with a pushcart and a pots and pans with
frying oil, he and the snack vendor can more easily take off and run away when they see the police
come.
Strict implementation of anti-vending policies has also occurred on Nguyễn Huệ pedestrian street
in the heart of District 1. As mentioned in Chapter 3 – The Conceived Space of Urban Mobility – the

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number of vendors has fallen dramatically after part of the large boulevard was pedestrianized. Street
vending does not pertain to the modern ideal of unimpeded pedestrian movement at the core of the
project. As a result, the few vendors who persist on catching the pedestrian flow are constantly on the
lookout, extremely mobile, and in a perpetual state of fear. For example, a vendor of small, light, and
inexpensive toys – ladybug-like objects with LED lights at the extremities of the wings that one
launches in the air by pulling a rubber band – carries his merchandise in a small transparent plastic bag.
He can run and hide easily if the police arrive; and if they confiscate his bag, he does not lose too much
money. Before pedestrianization, he and his wife used to sell food together every evening on Nguyễn
Huệ boulevard; they had a proper vending cart back then. Now, they sell in different locations so if one
gets caught there remains a chance that the other’s business continues. I first talked to the husband at
6:00 PM. The couple had just arrived on the street together, but the wife was already out of sight. After
he told me how strict the police were with them, I asked why he does not hide his merchandise in a
backpack. “They know how I look,” he answered. “It wouldn’t make any difference.” I talked to him
again around 10:00 PM. The business had not been good that night. The police had approached him six
or seven times in four hours, and each time he had to go hide for a while before he could resume his
activity. That night on Nguyễn Huệ, I also tried to buy from a fish ball vendor who, unlike the one in
District 7, had his cart and frying station set up on the back of a motorbike. Catching him was like
trying to clasp a fly with bare hands. He was moving relentlessly from one side of the street to the
other, marking brief and abrupt pauses here and there. I would walk up and get close to him, he would
already be gone to the other side. I waved to catch his attention, he deliberately ignored me. When he
finally approached me, I asked why he was moving so fast. “To catch customers,” he answered. I
could tell from the look on his face though, while he was hastily frying the fish balls I ordered, that
constantly checking if the surroundings were clear was an integral part of his business model. The man

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was obviously more scared of being caught than concerned about catching customers.

Figure 33 – Selection of Street Vendors

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Notes: From top left to bottom right, 1) Fried fish balls in District 7; 2) Coconuts in District 7; 3) Soymilk in
Phú Nhuận District; 4) Rice dumplings in District 3; 5) Fried fish balls on Nguyễn Huệ pedestrian street; 6)
Successful coffeshop on Nguyễn Huệ pedestrian street; 7) gentrified coffee stall in Phú Nhuận District; 8)
Coffee stall in front of construction side in District 1.
3.3. Modern Street Vending: Sustained Demand and Commercial Gentrification
While the future of street vending seems quite uncertain on the “supply side” so to speak, on the
“demand side” the trend does not seem to be on the decline yet. The case of Nguyễn Huệ pedestrian
street is a striking example of sustained demand for street vending in Ho Chi Minh City, in the sense
that people still have a taste for it and the street life it supports. When interviewing the vendors
mentioned above, I was struck by the stark contrast between their struggle to stay put and the
attractiveness of their business. There were hundreds of dragonfly toys flying in the air that night and a
line of people quickly formed behind me as I was waiting for my fish balls. In many ways, strict
restrictions on street vending go counter to Vietnamese people’s habits when hanging out in public
space, which typically involve eating, snacking, and drinking in public. Since supplying for these
activities is forbidden on Nguyễn Huệ, vendors agglomerate on nearby streets. As mentioned in
Chapter 5 – The Lived Space of Urban Mobility, all the vendors on Tôn Thất Thiệp street
(perpendicular to Nguyễn Huệ) adopt the pedestrian-oriented position (close to the ground, at knee
level, with the back to the curb) that is typical of vendors aiming to catch pedestrian flows. They sell
grilled rice paper (bánh tráng nướng), jelly milk tea (trà sữa), stir-fried corn (bắp xào), dried calamari
(khô mực), and fried fish balls (cá viên chiên), some of the street food favorites of Vietnamese people
when hanging out at night. The vendors target people who are walking between a parking lot further
down the street and the Nguyễn Huệ pedestrian area. Customers buy on the way, in friction mode, and
snack while walking around. Another illustration of the untapped demand for street vending on
Nguyễn Huệ is the tremendous success of the coffee stall run by the owners of a formal Minimart –

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acorner store – along the traffic lane. At 10:00 PM, people are standing in a long line to order coffee.
On the sidewalk, dozens of people, young for the most part, are sitting on the ground or on parked
motorbikes for lack of better seating. Some customers even bring their own tarpaulin to avoid sitting
directly on the ground. The success of this business currently in a situation of monopoly suggests that
if street vendors or small household businesses opened onto the sidewalk were allowed to sell coffee
and soft drinks on Nguyễn Huệ, they would have no issue attracting customers.
Another sign that street vending is a dynamic sector that may still have a bright future ahead is the
fact that within the informal sector, street vending is undergoing some form of commercial
gentrification. For example, a young couple in their twenties just opened a small sidewalk café on Phan
Xích Long street four months ago. Everything about their business is more branded than the typical
sidewalk café. Unlike their, the cart or stand of a typical drink vendor would not have a chalkboard
menu, plastic cups with a logo, and loudspeakers playing music. The young couple is proud of selling
coffee that is “cleaner” and “purer” than any other coffee in town – “There is nothing besides coffee
in our coffee, there is no butter,”
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the young couple explained. Their renewed vending practices seem
to attract a different crowd of customers too. The young boy explained that business had just picked up
one month ago, when they started receiving phone calls from surrounding offices making orders for
deliveries. During the 20-30 minutes I was sitting on one of the two stools next to the cart, sipping a
coffee and chatting with them, most of the business they made was from deliveries. They received two
orders and prepared dozens of drinks while serving only one “conventional” customer who pulled over
with a motorbike and ordered coffee in friction mode. In many ways, the young couple does not fit the
typical profile of street vendors. The main difference is they are not in this informal business for lack

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The use of butter for roasting Robusta coffee beans is what creates the distinctive taste of Vietnamese coffee.

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of formal job opportunities. In fact, they dropped their salary job to start this coffee business, out of
choice and not out of necessity. He used to work in construction, she was a cashier at a B’s Mart
convenience store. They met at B’s Mart and decided to start this business together because they
thought it would be more fun (vui) than working their low-pay jobs with constraining hours. With the
coffee business, they only work from 6:30 AM until 2:30 PM, which leaves them a lot of free time.
They chose their location because it is in front of a vacant property on the street. In a sense, the couple
could be seen as taking away one vending opportunity for someone like the soymilk vendor mentioned
above, who sells on the same street as the young couple but struggles to find a new vending spot after
she was evicted from her former one in front of what is now a bank.
Somewhere in District 3, on Nguyễn Thượng Hiền street, another couple made the decision of
running a street food business as a way to improve their quality of life. They are 30 years old and they
have two children. She used to work in sales for a nail business, but the hours were bad, and the salary
was low. They found an opportunity to rent a ground-floor commercial location part-time for VND 3.5
million a month (USD 150) near their house. Every morning, they bring a cart to the location, two
plastic tables and a few stools that they set up on the narrow sidewalk in front of it, and they sell rice
dumplings (bánh cuốn nóng), a breakfast specialty, just for a few hours. Starting from 4:00 PM, the
same location is rented by other people who sell seafood dishes that are more of an evening specialty
that people consume while drinking. The couple enjoys this lifestyle because of all the free time they
have in the afternoon to take care of the children together. They are yet another example of a new
household business model that is re-visiting the grounds of street vending in a transitional economy.
Finally, the fact that some formal businesses borrow from street vendors their tactics to live off the
productive frictions with motorbike flows (see Chapter 5) is the ultimate embodiment of street vending
gentrification. Several chains of formal coffeeshops staffed with salaried employees have developed

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the habit of putting a cart right next to the curb in order to catch the business of “motorbuying”
customers – motorbike riders who buy on the go in friction mode – to that of people who come in,
order, and sit in. Formal businesses adopting such tactics generate direct competition to informal
sidewalk coffee vendors. The main difference is the former are companies that are well integrated into
the capitalist economy and adopt street vending practices as a marketing strategy, whereas the latter are
vulnerable individuals whose livelihood entirely depends on their access to public space and on the
productive friction with traffic flows.
4. Toward a Frictionless Future
4.1. Dialectical Relationships Between Envisioned, Conceived-, Perceived-, and Lived Spaces
The opinions reported in this chapter compose an envisioned space that is rather well aligned with
the conceived space of urban mobility described in Chapter 3. Indeed, people anticipate a future of
urban mobility from which motorbikes would have been removed, and a future of street life where
informal street vendors would have retracted into private spaces. The result is an envisioned urban
space where everyday life would be organized around distinct places to live, work, and play connected
together in time and in space by frictionless mobility. The expected result is a very different urbanism
from that of Ho Chi Minh City today, where many activities such as shopping, socializing, and hanging
out in public space are embedded in motorbike mobility practices through the productive friction
mechanism. People’s arguments in favor of shifting away from motorbike mobility, of transitioning
towards car- and metro- mobility, and of clearing the sidewalks from street vendors, echo those
presented in the news and policy documents. For example, the metro is presented as a symbol of
modernity, a solution to mitigate pollution and congestion, the promise of a better quality of life.

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Motorbikes, street vendors, and motorbuying practices, as well as other tactics related to motorbike
mobility, are depicted as responsible for traffic congestion and public health issues.
It may be the case that the observed alignment between the conceived and the envisioned spaces
results at least in part from successful propaganda by the government. Admittedly, the envisioned
space of urban mobility is dominated – it is influenced by the conceived space, as indicated by the fact
that respondents’ opinions sometimes echo almost word for word the jargon of the conceived space.
Has the envisioned space been completely co-opted by the government narrative? This is a relevant
question given the political context of Vietnam, one of the last one-party communist states in the
world. Nevertheless, it would be overly simplistic to argue that authoritarianism is the primary reason
for people’s overall agreement with the government policies on urban transportation and public space
regulation. It would be negating the agency people have when determining the path of their own lives,
which they mostly do through consumer choice. Vietnam is indeed the only other communist country
with an open market economy besides China. Against the backdrop of rapid urbanization and
economic development, people envision for themselves a future urban way of life, including future
mobility practices, that will have been modernized, like everything else around them. Not only does
the trend seem inexorable, it also seems desirable for all but one of the interviewees.
The high desirability of a frictionless future of urban mobility puts the envisioned space in tension
with other findings from this dissertation. In the perceived space, I found motorbike mobility to be
particularly well suited to the local urban environment of Ho Chi Minh City nowadays; that from a
rather utilitarian point of view it helps people maximize their discretionary activities, which are likely
to foster a greater quality of life; and that in current conditions, such a quality of life is affordable to
almost everyone. The vast majority, including the urban poor, rides a motorbike and thus has easy
access to a wide range of affordable leisure activities in public space. In the Lived Space, I showed that

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motorbike mobility plays a critical role in characterizing the modes of social interactions in public
space, in shaping vibrant street spaces that are critical for leveling the grounds between the urban poor
and the middle classes, in short, critical to the socio-spatial inclusiveness of the city. From the
perspective of people’s own convenience and from that of social equity and justice, the tensions
between the envisioned space and the perceived- and lived- spaces of urban mobility may appear quite
irrational.
The notion of envisioned space adds one level of dialectical relationships in the production of new
mobility in the Lefebvrian framework advanced in this dissertation. Figure 34 below summarizes the
dialectical relationships between the four spaces of urban mobility in Ho Chi Minh City. The
envisioned space appears in tension (dotted arrow) with the perceived space of urban mobility, where
in the perceived space the motorbike still is the dominant transportation mode, where the development
of the car challenges the mobility of the large majority, where the metro does not really exist yet. The
envisioned space also appears in tension with the lived space of urban mobility, that where the
motorbike seems particularly favorable to the more or less contested practices according to which
number of urban uses (mobility, social and commercial activities, uses of public space) accommodate
the peculiarities of the built environment. However, the envisioned space appears in line with the
conceived space of urban mobility, which promotes frictionless car- and transit-based mobility.

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Figure 34 – Dialectical Relationships between the Four Spaces of Urban Mobility
Two tentative explanations are provided in the rest of this chapter for the tensions observed
between the envisioned space and people’s contemporary experience in the perceived and lived space.
One is that the envisioned space of urban mobility results from aspirations to “worlding practice.” The
other that they result from individual trajectories towards “modernism.”
4.2. Aspirations Towards Worlding Practices
The envisioned space of urban mobility can be understood as filled with aspirations towards
“worlding practices” as defined by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong in their edited volume entitled
Worlding Cities (Roy & Ong, 2011). The book generally addresses the political economy of rapidly
emerging Asian cities. Worlding cities are modeled after Singapore, Taipei, or Hong Kong, and other

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such cities considered exemplary in their development trajectories by less developed cities, especially
of Asia, but somewhat more relatable than cities of the industrialized world. I would argue that
interviewees have adopted the idea that car- and transit- mobility are “worlding practices,” in the sense
that they see such forms of mobility as compatible with their idea of a modern and developed city,
based on the example of Singapore in particular. In contrast, albeit convenient and affordable,
motorbike mobility and related habits can be seen as ‘localizing practices.’ People seem to have
appropriated an ideal of progress and modernity in which the motorbike does not belong, to the point
that they have internalized a few false ideas. According to one of the participants, Ho Chi Minh City is
“lagging behind, because in Singapore, they've had a metro for 50 years” (in fact, the first line opened
in 1987). Another respondent contends that “many developed countries have banned the motorbike for
a long time already,” which remains to be demonstrated. Her opinion about the motorbike ban showed
that for her, shifting away from motorbike mobility definitely is a question of progress and modernity:
“Limiting the number of cars rather than that of motorbikes [to reduce traffic jams] would be going
backwards. Banning the motorbike is the way forward. […] All governments want to give the
impression that living conditions are improving, not that they are declining.” Her friend agreed,
however, the modern city ideal is not just about the car according to her: “Cycling is good too. I’ve
seen people riding bikes in other countries.” She is the only interviewee who made this point, whereas
others spoke of biking as a mode of the past, of the children, or for leisure.
In individual conceptions, taking the metro is also considered a “worlding practice,” as attested by
the people who have experienced it abroad and are therefore willing to adopt it in Ho Chi Minh City,
but only if the system is up to what they have experienced elsewhere. The idea that the metro conveys
the image of a developed country was a recurring argument of people who never used it abroad as well.
Someone thought the metro would “embellish the city.” A 63-year-old security guard, a former soldier

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in the army, believed that a metro is “the best thing to look like a developed country.” Vân, the student
who works as a part-time bookseller, thought that “public transport is a sign of modernity. There's
nothing like transporting hundreds of people at once.” Phương, the janitor mentioned above who was
strongly opposed to banning motorbikes, is of the opinion that the metro “will give the image of a
developed country; we have to imitate” she said. She believed that the metro would have no influence
on her lifestyle. Nevertheless, she would like to try at least once “just to see what it feels like to travel
the same way as in a developed country.” In the same aspirational spirit, Phương explained that every
evening before bedtime, she takes her children to the mall for an hour or two, so they can play around
on the immaculate grounds, breathe in the clean and cool conditioned air,“have a little taste of the life
of the wealthy.”
In contrast, most interviewees depicted sidewalk vending as a ‘localizing practice,’ just like moto-
mobility, one that does not convey the image of modernity. “There are so many of them. They made
the city look messy” complained the 32-year-old woman who used to study in Singapore and now lives
in a modern apartment building in the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. Probably inspired by what she
has experienced in Singapore, she as well as several other individuals was supportive of relocating
vendors in street food markets.
4.3. Societal Trajectory Toward Modernism: The Sum of Individual Transitions
As the envisioned space of urban mobility is filled with personal aspirations towards "globalizing
practices," people appropriate, anticipate, and adjust their behaviors to integrate these practices into
their way of life. If Ho Chi Minh City corresponds to the prototype of a “worlding city,” then the city’s
inhabitants can be defined as worlding individuals. Marshall Berman’s concept of “modernism” as
defined in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air provides a relevant conceptual lens to approach the pathways

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towards development and modernization from the individual perspective – modernism is an “attempt
by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization” (Berman, 1983; p.
5). The apparent contradictions between the aspirations towards “worlding practices” and the reality
described in the perceived and lived spaces of urban mobility can be read as a typical example of
“modernism.” When people describe what their urban living circumstances may become, as urban and
economic development processes continue to unfold, they make themselves not only the objects but
also the subjects of a wide range of transformations applying to all aspects of everyday life, from their
housing situation (e.g., from a tall, narrow, typical tube-house in an alleyway to an condo in a new
apartment building), to their job type and location (not covered in this dissertation), their consumption
habits (e.g., from buying breakfast from a street vendor every morning on the way to work to eating
breakfast at home, or from buying from many markets to one supermarket), and naturally, their
mobility practices. Some people have anticipated these interdependent changes, some have not
considered them thoroughly but believe they will be able to adapt, and others can only dream that they
will not be left out – the Prepared, the Resilient, and the Concerned, to go back to the proposed
category in Section 2 of this chapter. Individual accounts of envisioned everyday life practices have
sacrificial undertones that are most tangible in people’s willingness to get rid of the motorbike
regardless of their appreciation for its advantages; they are tangible also in the readiness of some
regular street food consumers to see street vendors disappear. Berman adds to his definition that
modernism is an attempt by individuals “to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at
home in it” (Berman, 1983; p. 5); in light of the observations made in this chapter, the envisioned
space of urban mobility can be seen as an attempt to get a grip on the modern city and make
themselves at home in it.

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Furthermore, from the perspective of individual trajectories of Ho Chi Minh City residents, the
tensions between the envisioned space and the perceived- and lived- spaces can be interpreted as:
[T]he contradictory forces and needs that inspire and torment us: our desire to be rooted in a
stable and coherent personal and social past, and our insatiable desire for growth—not merely
for economic growth but for growth in experience, in pleasure, in knowledge, in sensibility—
growth that destroys both the physical and social landscapes of our past, and our emotional
links with those lost worlds. (Berman, 1983; p. 35)
In the envisioned space of urban mobility, the notion of “coherent personal and social past” extends
to a coherent personal and social future. This is most evident when looking at the reactions in favor of
the extinction of motorbikes in light of individual life trajectories. Most interviewees reported that they
already went through one or more personal mobility transitions, which makes future personal
transitions both imaginable and acceptable. Different transportation modes have marked different
stages of people’s lives. People have internationalized personal mobility transitions as an integral part
of the course of life. For example, Vân exclaimed as if it was an obvious fact: "I'm not going to take
the bus my entire life!” even though today she usually takes the bus for all trips longer than 10-km (6.2
mi.), and she does not mind. She is the 22-year-old student who works part-time in a bookstore and
bikes to work every day. It is a 4-km (2.5 mi.) ride from where she lives and studies in District 5 to the
bookstore near the Central Post Office in District 1. Nevertheless, it is just a certainty for her: as soon
as she graduates, she will buy a motorbike, despite the fact that she does not know how to ride one as
of now, just because she assumes she will need one "to be able to go to work."
Personal mobility transitions take place at pivotal moments in people’s lives and the mobility
transition affecting society can be interpreted as the sum of personal mobility transitions at the
individual level Figure 35. Typically, the mobility life cycle of a middle-class adult today has been the

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following. The bus or the bicycle were the mode of student life. The motorbike came with graduation,
either as a present from the parents, or as a first major purchase with first paychecks. The car comes
under consideration once a career has been established, income and social status are quite high, and the
children are not toddlers anymore; it has become difficult to move as a family on one motorbike. The
car thus appears as more comfortable and safer option for everyone. Personal mobility transitions
therefore coincide with shifts from one sociodemographic group to another, as defined by age,
education, family status, income, place of residence, among other factors. However, the joint
movement between age, upward mobility, and personal mobility transition seems to be reserved to
people who already have or are eligible to joining the middle classes. In the case of Phương, the janitor
mentioned several times before, she may “dream” about it but she does not expect any significant
upward mobility for herself moving forward. Her firm opposition to the idea of banning motorbikes
from the urban future can be interpreted as the feeling of injustice of those who certainly will be left
behind as the mobility transition unfolds.

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Figure 35 – Personal Mobility Transitions for the Upper Middle Class
In this context, only mass transit mobility holds promises of sustainable and affordable mobility
while also providing everyone with access to modern transportation services. These promises remain to
be met, though, in Ho Chi Minh City. While transit-based mobility is typically considered the most
affordable urban mobility option in developed countries, it is not necessarily the case in developing
countries. In Bangkok (Thailand), for example, the alignment of the Skytrain has been criticized for
serving in priority places where the middle- and upper classes live, work, and play, that is, newer
residential areas, business centers, and shopping malls (Richardson & Jensen, 2008). As of now, the
pricing and ticketing strategy remains unknown in Ho Chi Minh City and as several respondents
pointed out, the planned network connects best outlying areas and the city center but will not enhance
access to opportunities in dense central districts. The metro system of Ho Chi Minh City has indeed

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been conceived like a commuter rail whose main purpose is to connect new residential areas with the
central business district, against the backdrop of metropolitan development (ALMEC Corporation,
2004). Such a network can be seen as promoting a modern way of life that mostly concerns people of
the middle class with clear spatial and temporal separations between work and home.
Finally, unlike residents interviewed about their future mobility practices and everyday life
activities, street vendors who talked about their business activities did not seem as confident in
envisioning ways of making themselves at home in a constantly changing city. The concern of “how
long will I be able to stay” in the business, in the same location, and in one case, in the city, indicated
that vendors were experiencing the current state of affairs in the present, while it is still possible to
make a living on the streets, quite unsure about what the future would bring in terms of regulation or
new developments that could potentially make it impossible for them to continue their activity.
5. Conclusion
Against the backdrop of development and modernization, the objective of this chapter was to
capture people’s imagination regarding the future of everyday life, in relation with changing mobility
practices and transformations of the built environment. I advanced the idea of an envisioned space of
urban mobility to encapsulate these anticipations. In the case of Ho Chi Minh City, the envisioned
space is composed of images where people live, work, shop, travel, and interact with each other in
ways that differ significantly from contemporary experiences. People anticipate two major
transformations: (i) a modern environment in which the “system of moto-mobility” and associated
social life (Hansen, 2017) do not belong, and (ii) a frictionless street environment from which activities
that are correlated with motorbike mobility, especially street vending, would have withdrawn. The
envisioned space thus aligns with the conceived space from which emanate policies that promote a

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shift away from motorbike mobility while giving priority to traffic flows over other uses of public
space (Gibert, 2016). In the field of urban mobility, as Gibert and Segard (2015) observed in
architecture, residents do not seem to question the image of modernity promoted by the government.
The envisioned space adds an additional dimension to the adapted version of Henri Lefebvre's
theory of the production of space (Lefebvre, 1974) that serves as a conceptual framework for this
dissertation. The envisioned space is the space of the actualization and appropriation of the conceived
space at the individual level (where the perceived space is that of its production and reproduction, and
the lived space that of its contestation). I proposed three explanations for the observed alignment of the
envisioned space with the conceived space. One is that the envisioned space is dominated by
government conceptions. This explanation cannot be discarded in an authoritarian political context.
Nevertheless, I argued that this explanation alone would be restrictive; it would deny individuals the
freedom and agency they have in imagining and determining their future urban living circumstances.
The two other explanations are rooted in the concepts of “worlding practices” (Roy & Ong, 2011) and
“modernism” (Berman, 1983), where people aspire to systems of mobility centered on the car and the
metro because of notions of progress and modernity that are attached to these modes. Despite the
sacrifices involved, most people look forward to the mobility transition and its transformative
consequences for many aspects of everyday life. From their perspective, not being significantly
affected by the mobility transition would feel like being left out of a process that is deemed inexorable,
hence the efforts to anticipate and adapt to the extent that it is possible.
Finally, in the face of the dramatic transformations of urbanism brought about by development, the
envisioned space can be seen as the sum of individual attempts to relax the tensions between the
conceived space of urban mobility, and the perceived- and lived spaces in which individual
experiences are embedded. It is nevertheless the responsibility of the government to limit the sacrifices

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and difficulties incurred by the people, especially those who are most vulnerable to dropping out of the
race for development. To this end, inclusive modernity must be imagined, planned, coded and
implemented in the conceived space, so that it can be appropriated as a desirable future that bears hope
for personal and social growth in the envisioned space. Applied to the field of urban mobility, the
image of inclusive modernity can only have metro-mobility as a centerpiece – a structuring element of
everyday life practices – with motorbike- and non-motorized mobilities depicted as state-of-the-art
first- and last-mile options (as opposed to antiquated modes as it often is the case today in the
conceived space of urban mobility), and car-mobility as an afterthought. Only such an image can
induce a mobility transition that does not leave anyone behind.

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Chapter 7. Productive Frictions and Urbanisms in Transition
1. Introduction
In this dissertation, I investigated the transformations of Ho Chi Minh City’s urbanism brought
about by the on-going mobility transition from motorbike- to car- and possibly public transit. Based on
six years of unstructured observations of urban life in Vietnam and five months of systematic
fieldwork in Ho Chi Minh City, I used a mix of methods and data including regression analyses of
travel survey data, GIS, and content analyses of self-collected qualitative data. I proposed a theoretical
framework inspired from Henri Lefebvre’s (1974) theory of the production of space to grapple with the
dialectical relationships between the conceived, perceived, and lived spaces of urban mobility. So far, I
have answered four out of six research questions raised in introduction:
1. In the conceived space of urban mobility, what type of mobility transition are transportation
policies promoting in Ho Chi Minh City? More specifically, what are the rationale and
narratives driving the mobility transition? What future of urbanism is being projected and
can be anticipated?
2. In the perceived space of urban mobility, to what extent do different mobility practices
relate to the production of social interactions in the city?
3. In the lived space of urban mobility, how do mobility practices inform the active uses of
public spaces, such as street vending? More specifically, under what circumstances and
through what mechanism do mobility practices shape inclusive street spaces?
4. How does people’s lived experience – past, present, and anticipated – of the urban way of
life relate to the conceived, perceived, and lived spaces of urban mobility?

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The primary goal of this concluding chapter is to summarize the answers to these questions and to
formalize and generalize its main contribution, that is, the productive friction concept. Furthermore, in
light of this concept, it addresses last two research questions:
5. As mobility practices evolve in Ho Chi Minh City, what consequences can be anticipated in
terms of socio-spatial inclusiveness?
6. What can planners and urban designers do to shape truly inclusive street spaces at the
articulation of their mobility and activity uses?
2. Summary of the Findings
In the conceived space of urban mobility, what type of mobility transition are transportation
policies promoting in Ho Chi Minh City? More specifically, what are the rationale and narratives
driving the mobility transition? What future of urbanism is being projected and can be anticipated? I
found that the transportation policies of the experts, transportation planners and decision-makers all
gear towards promoting a shift away from motorbike dependence. The dominant narrative is a
conventional transportation discourse, where motorbikes are held responsible for the inefficiencies of
the transportation sector and their resulting negative externalities: congestion, accidents, pollution. The
underlying rationale, however, is to foster economic development and modernization of the country. It
is also a question of image. Motorbikes look too messy; “this is not what a modern city looks like” as
an interviewee mentioned. As transportation policies and investments promote a transition towards car
and transit, that implies a modernization of the urban space and also of the urban way of life. Clearer
separations can be anticipated between where (and when) people live, work, and play, and also
between the private and public uses of public spaces. On the streets, flows are being given priority over
any other uses (and that is true of pedestrian flows as well). Finally, the mobility transition that is being

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promoted is inequitable, as the upper middle classes are the only ones for whom a car- or metro-based
lifestyle will be affordable or convenient. These findings clearly are in tension with the current
situation in the perceived and the lived spaces of urban mobility.
In the perceived space of urban mobility, to what extent do different mobility practices relate to the
production of social interactions in the city? In contemporary Ho Chi Minh City, nearly everyone
owns a motorbike and uses it to meet all mobility needs. The mode is well suited to the local context. It
is a good fit with the existing urban form and with people’s socioeconomic circumstances. It enables
the greatest mobility while being affordable. Regression analyses of travel survey data showed that
motorbike users engage in significantly more discretionary activities than any other modes.
Discretionary activities such as eating out, going to a pagoda, or meeting with friends are assumed to
support socializing practices, which are posited in this dissertation as critical to the formation of a
socially cohesive and inclusive urban space. These findings were confirmed in the lived space of urban
mobility, which revealed the causal mechanisms embedded in the significant relationship between
travel behaviors and socializing activities.
In the lived space of urban mobility, how do mobility practices inform the active uses of public
spaces, such as street vending? More specifically, under what circumstances and through what
mechanism do mobility practices shape inclusive street spaces? As mobility practices evolve, what
consequences can be anticipated in terms of socio-spatial inclusiveness? I shed light on a symbiotic
relationship between mobility practices and street uses. From an ecological viewpoint on street spaces,
motorbike flows cannot be separated from the vibrant and inclusive street life for which Ho Chi Minh
City is known. Street vendors live off the connection to the motorbike flow. The great range of
mobility that motorbike riders enjoy, coupled with the ability to stop and park anytime, explains why
they are more likely to engage in socializing activities in public space than users of any other

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transportation mode. The unmediated environmental perceptions that the motorbike affords play a
critical role in people’s decisions to make impromptu stops. I derived from these observations the idea
that the motorbike is conducive to what I called productive frictions, that is, opportunities for social
interactions that are permitted by the contact between a flow of movement and the built environment it
traverses. The more productive frictions, the more inclusive the street spaces. Therefore, a shift
towards car and transit mobilities that are less conducive to productive frictions can be anticipated to
challenge the inclusiveness of the urban space.
How does people’s lived experience – past, present, and anticipated – of the urban way of life
relate to the conceived, perceived, and lived spaces of urban mobility? Finally, I found that people
expect and wish to see their urban way of life transformed in ways that align with what is promoted in
the conceived space, including those who would be most negatively impacted. To move towards the
alignment, they are willing to sacrifice the convenience of motorbike mobility and all the everyday
practices associated with it, such as shopping on the way, eating and snacking on the sidewalks, and so
forth. The reason behind such preparedness is twofold. First, successive mobility transitions are
considered an integral part of the inexorable and desirable development process. The second and
related reason is that experiencing at a personal level the significant changes brought about by the
transformative development trend is the only way for not feeling left out. For this very reason, I have
resisted the temptation of adopting a narrative of loss in telling the story of Ho Chi Minh City’s
mobility transition and attempted instead to disentangle some of the mechanisms at play in the mobility
transition. I coined the term “envisioned space” of urban mobilities to designate people’s imagination
regarding the future of mobility and urbanism.

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3. Theoretical Contribution: Productive Frictions and Socio-Spatial Inclusiveness
3.1. Production Frictions and the Relationship between Mobility and Street Life
The main contribution of this dissertation is the notion of productive friction, which I define as the
opportunities for social interactions that are permitted by the contact between a flow of movement and
the built environment it traverses. I derive this concept from the observations in the lived space of
urban mobility. The productive friction concept helps to explain the mechanisms at the core of the
existential nexus between traffic flows and street life. I have shown that in the case of Ho Chi Minh
City, through the productive friction induced by motorbike mobility, traffic flows play a critical role in
defining the streets as vibrant and inclusive public spaces. Motorbike mobility generates social contact.
It supports continuous and meaningful interactions between strangers and semi-strangers of different
socioeconomic backgrounds. Productive frictions occasion daily commerce on the banks of the streets.
Sidewalks become a field of potential, perceived, and shaped affordances, thus offering opportunities
to live off the connection to the motorbike flow, which are absolutely critical to the survival of the
urban poor, street vendors in particular; for others, their presence as well as that of other opportunities
turn the streets into a field rich in potential affordances for leisure and shopping activities.
The diagrams below break down the causal mechanisms between traffic flows and street life for
different transportation modes in Ho Chi Minh City. In the case of motorbike mobility (Figure 36), the
reverse causal mechanisms that relate mode choice with the number of environmental affordances is
particularly strong for small businesses and street vending activities, but not as strong for large

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businesses and large recreational facilities.
52
The distinction between business sizes matters from the
perspective of the nature of social interactions they support. Street vending locations and small
businesses are highly supportive of social interactions in public spaces, on streets and sidewalks in
particular, imbued with notions of civility and inclusiveness; but discretionary activities supported by
large businesses or recreational facilities bring social interactions into private or “publicized private
spaces” that may have a “presumption of ‘publicness’ […]. But in reality, they are in the private realm”
(Banerjee, 2001). Motorbike mobility therefore appears as particularly conducive to productive
frictions as the longitudinal contact of the motorbike flow with the built environment it traverses
produces social interactions in street spaces that define vibrant and inclusive street life. In comparison,
pedestrian and bicycle mobilities also appear as conducive to productive frictions (Figure 37) but
transit-based mobility not as much (Figure 38), and car mobility not at all (Figure 39).

52
To reach places of the last two types, people may choose the motorbike but they are likely to use other modes (bus or taxi, for example), even if
they have a motorbike available; as for the connection to the motorbike flow, it might not be the primary factor affecting location choice for these types of
businesses, while it is a primary factor for smaller and informal ones.

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Figure 36 – Motorbike Mobility and Productive Frictions

Figure 37 – Non-motorized Mobilities and Productive Frictions

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Figure 38 – Transit-based Mobility and Productive Frictions

Figure 39 – Car Mobility and Productive Frictions

Transit-based mobility is not as conducive mostly because the contact between the flow of
movement and the built environment is not as continuous as that with the motorbike flow along
transportation corridors, but more punctual, concentrated at transit stops. Therefore, the symbiotic
relationship between mode choice and opportunities for commerce-based leisure activities is weaker,
thus supporting fewer and farther apart opportunities for social interactions in public spaces. Ho Chi
Minh City residents explained that they are likely to choose public transit to reach large businesses and
recreational facilities located in the periphery near transit stops, which support social interactions that
are outside the public realm. Finally, in the case of car mobility, the continuous connection of the

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mobility flow with the built environment is rendered almost impossible in Ho Chi Minh City, for
reasons related to stopping and parking constraints. As a result, the symbiotic relationship between
mobility and business opportunities is de-activated, thus explaining why car mobility does not induce
the type of productive frictions that activate street spaces. On the contrary, on the narrow streets of Ho
Chi Minh City, car mobility is likely to generate the unproductive type of frictions, that is, congestion,
which on the contrary de-activates street spaces.
3.2. Relevance of the Concept for Analyzing the Production of Inclusive Urban Spaces
As mobility practices evolve in Ho Chi Minh City, what consequences can be anticipated in terms
of socio-spatial inclusiveness? While productive frictions occur at the street level and support the most
fleeting social interactions, theoretically, the concept enables to predict the transformations of
urbanism that can be expected as a result of a mobility transition. The notion of productive frictions
can help predict the transformations of social relations that will result from the mobility transition. As
per the proposed theoretical framework, at the intersection of the new mobilities paradigm and
Lefebvre’s (1974) theory of the Production of Space, the productive friction articulates mobilities and
social relations, and helps explain how a shift towards new forms of mobility contribute to socio-
spatial transformations.
At the scale of street spaces, a transition towards transit mobility in Ho Chi Minh City would most
likely mean preserving the productive frictions in the lived space of urban mobility (unless such
possibility is removed through regulation). While transit alone may not be as conducive to frictions,
transit mobility is usually coupled with walking, mode that is supportive of the production of social
interactions in public spaces. If Ho Chi Minh City were to become a transit city, as is promoted in part
in the conceived space of urban mobility, there may be a possibility for street vendors and small

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household businesses to continue their business as usual more or less. Street life may continue to thrive
and take the form that can be observed in other Asian transit cities such as Hong Kong or Bangkok.
Some spatial re-distribution of friction points may occur however, with vending opportunities
agglomerating near transit nodes, where flows of pedestrians would be most intense.
If the transition were to tilt towards car-based mobility mainly, that would mean a growing
disconnect between the flow of people on the move and the built environment, and therefore, the
inhibition of productive frictions activating street spaces. In regard to structural social relations, the
productive friction concept relates the nature of movement through the built environment with long-
term power relations that structure urbanism and society. With a shift towards frictionless mobility, the
socio-economic integration of the most vulnerable groups, the urban poor and especially street vendors
in Ho Chi Minh City, would be at stake. Such a shift would lead to a growing disconnect between
people’s trajectories, both literally as they move in the city, and figuratively as they proceed in life.
4. Planning for Productive Frictions
4.1. Friction Planning Principles
This very last section aims to answer the last research question – What can planners and urban
designers do to shape truly inclusive street spaces at the articulation of their mobility and activity
uses? – not only in Ho Chi Minh City but in other cities as well, by applying friction planning
principles.
The goal of friction planning is to spatially organize the friction points, or opportunities for
interactions between movement, places, and people, so that urban spaces at large provide both efficient
mobility and opportunities for social contact and socioeconomic integration. A core principle of

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friction planning is that not all friction is all that bad; not all friction should be avoided at all costs.
Naturally, no transportation network can be filled with friction everywhere. But some form of friction
should actually be promoted and planned for, that is the productive friction, the type of friction that is
conducive to social interactions in street spaces, to the formation of a public, thus producing inclusive
public spaces. The only type of friction that needs to be avoided is the unproductive friction, that is,
congestion, which de-activates public spaces. Congestion is as unproductive as frictionless mobility
when it comes to shaping vibrant and inclusive street spaces. Therefore, as illustrated in Figure 40,
friction planning involves organizing the street network as a whole according to a gradient of “levels of
friction,” from frictionless mobility – all cities needs some street segments for unimpeded movement,
for ambulances to go through for example – to productive frictions.
The general principle is that friction planning is contextually appropriate; planning for productive
frictions means drawing on and working with existing characteristics of movement, places, and people.
As a result, friction planning can be rather low-cost. In Ho Chi Minh City, measured traffic
regulations, small design interventions, and smart demand management (parking policies) can play a
major role in organizing for the spatial distribution of friction points (see below).

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Figure 40 – Friction Planning: Planning for Various Levels of Friction
4.2. Planning Lessons from Ho Chi Minh City for Ho Chi Minh City
Conceive a New Modernity in which Productive Frictions Belong
The main challenge for Ho Chi Minh City is to imagine a new modernity that compromises neither
the ability to move, that is mobility, in the face of growing demand for it, nor on sustainability, nor on
the inclusive uses of street spaces that are permitted by motorbike mobility nowadays. Considering the
importance of the latter for the viability of small businesses and street vendors, which support the
economic development trend to a large extent, that is equally important as promoting the car industry
from a development perspective. The narratives according to which non-motorized transportation
belongs to the past, contemporary motorbike mobility is too “messy” and looks “uncivilized,” and car
and transit mobility the only solution for the future, should be reversed. The powerful state is in a
position to re-frame the images of modern mobility. Multi-modality coupling mass transit with non-
motorized mobilities and micro-mobilities – including not only motorbikes, but also electric scooters

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and bicycles – should be depicted as the optimal mobility solution for extremely dense cities with great
access to opportunities. Vietnamese cities have an opportunity to become exemplary for the rest of the
world that is struggling to incorporate micro-mobilities into their transportation systems. If older
motorbikes were progressively replaced with electric vehicles to the point that the entire fleet is electric
one day, with some economic incentivizing involved, Ho Chi Minh City could become the only zero
carbon city where masses of people move quite slowly, safely, and smoothly through a dense and
vibrant urban space. As a result, the system of mobilities would remain as supportive as it is today of
productive frictions, the type of friction between traffic flows and the built environment that is
conducive to social interactions and therefore produces inclusive urban spaces. Such productive
friction should be presented in the state narratives as an integral part of the promoted image of
modernity, one where the lines between public and private, mobile and static uses of urban spaces are
not as stark as in pre-existing images of modernity; one where the automobile is not so much in the
center; one that is more inclusive and sustainable. Indeed, friction planning holds promises for Ho Chi
Minh City to pursue the modernization of both the transportation sector, the urban form, and the urban
way of life, without jeopardizing the existing street life and socio-spatial inclusiveness attached to it.
Low-Cost Friction Planning and Design Ideas
Regarding traffic regulation, friction planning means regulating traffic flows in ways that fit the
urban form. For example, in Ho Chi Minh City, there is no need for a complete ban on any mode.
People should be able to keep riding a motorbike if that is what is most convenient and to own a car if
that is what they want. A complete ban on either mode would be discriminatory and would foster
unequal access to opportunities, both spatially and socially. As shown in this dissertation, current
policy efforts that give priority to cars and transit over motorbikes favor upper middle classes and put

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disadvantaged socioeconomic groups at risk of being left out of the development process. Past efforts
at limiting car ownership altogether have failed as they go against a natural drive towards safety,
comfort, and distinction by those who can afford it. Admittedly, congestion and other negative
externalities of the transportation sector such as accidents and pollution are important issues to solve as
they negatively impact the country’s development as well as people’s quality of life. Nevertheless,
when it comes to solving the congestion issue, banning motorbikes from city centers in order to make
room for cars does not seem to be an appropriate solution as it does not fit the urban form. Slow and
flexible transportation modes should have priority on narrow and busy streets such as the ones of the
urban core, and in this sense, motorbikes are a better fit than automobiles. Walking and biking would
be even better fits; they deserve to have even greater priority whereas the current policy context does
not promote non-motorized transportation. Reciprocally, automobiles are actually a better fit for long-
distance travel than motorbikes, where motorbike riders are exposed to great risks of accidents on peri-
urban roads where traffic is much faster than in the city center. Limiting motorbike use on such higher-
speed roads with limited contact with the surrounding environment (no opportunities for productive
frictions) would make more sense than limiting it in city centers.
Other examples of low-cost friction planning measures for Ho Chi Minh City include incremental
street design solutions such as raising the curb to 90 degrees instead of 45 in some places. Such small
interventions would contribute to spatially re-organize friction points in the city as they would make it
impossible for motorbikes to park on the sidewalks. Demand management can also play a significant
role in regulating traffic flows. For example, while car ownership does not need to be restricted, the
city is faced with a critical lack of parking spaces and severe spatial constraints to accommodate car
traffic. A friction planning solution would be to build large parking lots in the outskirts of the city
center rather than concentrating them in the city center. De-coupling parking locations from residential

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locations could be a solution for people to be able to access the private car they want to own without
having to radically transform their urban way of life. Owning a car would not necessarily mean moving
away from the residential urban core where parking options and private garages are basically
inexistent. Yet people would have the option to use their private car for out-of-town, special-occasion,
and long-distance travel. These are the circumstances in which current car owners tend to use their car
anyway, as it is quite inconvenient as a commuting mode on an everyday basis. Motorbike use could
remain the weekday commuting mode, in addition to transit, on-demand mobility, non-motorized
transportation, and so forth. All these modes would also be the first- and last-mile solution to access
such car parking locations.
4.1. Planning Lessons from Ho Chi Minh City to Other Cities
This dissertation has shed light on some peculiarities of the “Asianness” of mobilities (Cresswell,
2016). Nevertheless, like most case studies, there is an underlying and implicit comparative
component. The interpretations presented here of the mobility transition in light of the productive
friction concept are for the specific context of Ho Chi Minh City, but I believe that the general
principles can be extended to other contexts experiencing other types of mobility transitions.
Not all friction is to be avoided at all costs is the general planning lesson to be drawn from the
productive friction idea. Transportation networks should be organized according to a gradient of levels
of friction, along the continuum from productive friction to frictionless mobility. As productive
frictions result from the interplay of place, movement, and people characteristics, they are not tied to a
specific mode in particular. There are circumstances in which car mobility is conducive to productive
frictions. It is the case, for example, on relatively narrow commercial streets of cities in the Global
North where speed limit is low and parking options available but limited to short periods of time (for

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temporary inversions of movement and non-movement). Similarly, there are ways of de-activating
productive frictions for all modes. It takes a sign that says “no stopping, no parking anytime” to create
a frictionless urban environment. When it comes to organizing transportation networks, planning for
productive frictions means planning a system of social interactions and therefore planning for
accessible and inclusive urban spaces.
The efforts made in other parts of the world to shift away from “automobility” (Sheller & Urry,
2000) can be interpreted as efforts to re-introduce some productive frictions in the built environment.
Similar diagrams to those presented for the different modes of Ho Chi Minh City could be created for
other forms of mobility (Figures 36 to 39), such as micro-mobilities (e.g., dockless bikes and scooters),
on-demand ride-hailing services, different types of informal transportation services, and so forth.
Furthermore, the productive friction diagram for the same mode in a different context might look
different. The interplay between people, flow, and place characteristics that is at the core of the
productive friction concept is highly dependent on the local context. For example, in a city like Paris
where metro stations are very close to each other, transit mobility would appear more conducive to
productive frictions than it has been estimated in Ho Chi Minh City. It remains to be seen whether the
principles presented here apply in other contexts.
Even if it were not the case, that would mean that a new construct, that of productive friction, has
been invalidated, and therefore tested, which means, acknowledged. As Sheller and Urry (2000) put it,
“[u]rban studies have not ignored mobility altogether; indeed, the diversity, density and stimulus of
urban social life have long been associated with forms of mobility.” They referred to the Chicago
School and the ecological approaches of Burgess and Park to make this case. Nevertheless, to my
knowledge there had not been any analytical work teasing out as the mechanism explaining the
relationships between different forms of mobility and urban social life. This dissertation has addressed

240
this gap. Re-thinking street spaces in light of the productive friction enables to better understand how
mobilities shape social relations, both in the short run in proximate street spaces on an everyday basis,
and in the long run as urban and economic development trends unfold. The productive friction concept
will remain the main theoretical contribution of this dissertation, one that holds lessons for mobility
transitions that happen in any direction, either away or toward carbon-based mobilities around the
world. This dissertation is therefore an example of theorizing from the Global South, of
provincialization of research in urban studies.

241
Appendices
1. Supplements to Chapter 2 – Mobility Interview Guide

242

1

Personal Mobility and Everyday Life in Ho Chi Minh City
Interview Guide

Name of surveyor(s):
Date and time of survey:
Location of survey:
Name of respondent:
Phone number of respondent:
Transcription by:

PART 0. Screening
1. Are you 18 or older?
2. Have you lived in Ho Chi Minh City for at least one year?
[If the respondent answers yes to both questions, proceed with the interview. Otherwise, stop here.]

PART I. Personal Information
3. How old are you?
4. Gender:
5. Are you married yet?
6. Do you have any children? If yes, how old are they?
7. Where is your hometown? Were you born there? If not, where were you born?
8. How long have you lived in Ho Chi Minh City?
9. Where do you live now? House address:
House No.:
Street:
Civil Group:
Ward:
District:
10. What type of house do you live in (private house, apartment, etc.)?
11. If it is a private house, do you occupy the entire house?
12. Are you renting? If yes, how much?
13. How many years have you lived in this location?

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1. At your current address, what kind of household registration do you have?
1. Permanent 2. Temporary (KT3) 3. Temporary (not KT3) 4. Non-
registered

2. Who do you live with?
3. What is the total monthly income of your household (in VND/month)?
4. How many household members are income earners?
5. What is your personal monthly income (in VND/month)?
6. About previous housing locations:
a. Where else have you lived before [no need for exact address; if in HCMC, District and
Ward are enough]?
b. How long have you stayed in each place?
c. What type of house was it in each place (private house, apartment, etc.)?
7. What is your level of educational attainment?
1. Primary 2. Secondary 3. High school 4. Vocational
5. College/University 6. Post graduate 7. None
8. What is your occupation? [Surveyor must circle the corresponding category and confirm with
respondent]
01 Manager/Professional 06 Salesperson 11 Student (working)
02 Office staff 07 Soldier/Policeman 12 Student (not working)
03 Skilled worker 08 Driver 13 Housewife
04 Laborer 09 Home helper 14 Unemployed/retired
05 Craftsperson 10 Other occupation

9. If occupation is 1-10 (i.e., working), what is your field of employment? [Surveyor must circle the
corresponding category and confirm with respondent]
1. Agriculture, fishery or forestry 6. Transport, storage and communication
2. Industry 7. Finance, insurance, real estate
3. Construction 8. Education
4. Trade/ restaurant/ hotel 9. Social service (health, etc.)
5. State management, national defense, party,
associations and international organizations
10. Other

10. If occupation is 1-10 (i.e. working), what is your employment status?
1. Permanent 2. Contractual 3. Self-employed 4. Freelancer
11. If occupation is 1-12 (i.e. working or studying), what is your work or school address?
Name:
Building No.:

244

Street:
Civil Group:
Ward:
District:
City/Province:
1. What other occupation have you had in the past? How long did you work/study in each place?
2. Besides your main occupation, do you have any private business activity at the moment?
3. Is there any family business where customers can stop by at your house location (inside or in front
of the house)? If yes, what type of business?
4. Do you plan on changing occupation in the future? What are your career plans?
5. Do you plan on moving to another residential location in the future? If yes:
a. What type of house would you like to live in?
b. Where? (What area? Or what type of area are you thinking about moving to?)

PART II. Mobility
6. How many vehicles are available in your household? Provide one answer for each type of vehicle
below:
1. Bicycles
2. Electric bicycles
3. Motorcycles
4. Automobiles
5. Vans, Lambrettas
6. Lorries
7. Others (specify)
7. Which of these vehicles do you personally own?
8. Which of these vehicles can you use/borrow?
9. Driver’s license:
a. Do you have a motorcycle driver’s license?
b. Do you have a car driver’s license?
10. Which transportation mode do you typically use?
1. Motorcycle 2. Bicycle 3. Electric bicycle 4. Walking
5. Bus 6. Car 7. Others

245

1. Do you use your transportation mode as a source of income? If yes, how so? How often?
2. How has your typical transportation mode changed over time? For example, what was your
typical transportation mode when:
a. You were a child
b. You were a student
c. You used to live at … [refer to all previous locations mentioned above]
3. About your current typical transportation mode:
a. What do you like about it?
b. What do you dislike?
c. How do you feel when using it?
4. Would you rather use another transportation mode? If yes:
a. Which one?
b. Why would you like to shift to that mode?
c. What prevents you from shifting now?
d. Do you think you will shift to that mode in the future? If yes, when?
5. About the transportation modes mentioned below, other than your typical commuting mode [do
not mention the typical commuting mode]?
a. How often do you use them?
b. In what circumstances do you occasionally use these modes?
c. Why do you never use certain transportation modes [mention the modes that the
respondent never uses]?
d. How do you feel about each of these modes?
1. Motorcycle 2. Bicycle 3. Electric bicycle 4. Walking
5. Bus 6. Private car as a driver
7. Private car as a passenger (including Taxi or Grab car)
8. Private motorbike as a passenger (including xe ôm or Grab moto)
6. If you do move to … [mention housing location where respondent said he/she would like to move
in the future, if any]
a. What transportation mode do you think you will typically use?
b. What transportation mode would be most convenient to use?

246

PART III. Activities
[Surveyor must map the answers on paper maps as the respondent answers, with his/her help].
1. Think of the first trip you made yesterday.
a. What was the address at origin?
b. What was the address at destination?
c. What time did you start?
d. What time did you arrive?
e. What route did you take?
f. Are there any reasons why you chose this route and not another route?
g. What was the purpose of your trip?
h. Who accompanied you on this trip?
i. About your activity at destination:
i. What was your activity at destination?
ii. How long did it last?
iii. Who were you in contact with?
iv. Did you park at destination? If yes, where?
j. Was the destination planned [i.e. anticipated when the trip started]?
k. What was the main transportation mode used for this trip?
l. Did you make any transfers? If yes, where? From what mode to what mode?
m. Did you make any spontaneous stops on the way? [i.e. not anticipated when the trip
started]. If yes,
i. Why did you stop?
ii. Where did you stop? What type of place was it, and how big was it?
iii. What did you do there?
iv. Who were you in contact with?
v. Did you park there?
n. Did you make any other stop on the way to buy something, without getting off your
vehicle?
[Ask the questions again for each trip that the respondent made the day prior to the interview].
2. Of all the places where you went yesterday, are there any places where you WOULD NOT HAVE
GONE (and therefore not done the activity at destination) if you had been using a different
transportation mode?
a. If yes, what places are they?

247

a. Why would you not have gone there if you were using a different transportation mode?
b. Instead, where would you have gone to do the activities you did at these places?
2. In general, are there any places where you used to GO BEFORE, when your typical transportation
mode was [mention previous typical transportation mode] and where you DO NOT GO
ANYMORE because your current transportation mode makes it less convenient? [Prompt
respondent to explain].
3. On the contrary, are there any places where you DID NOT GO BEFORE, when your usual
transportation mode was [mention previous typical transportation mode], and where you DO GO
NOW because your current typical transportation mode makes it possible? [Prompt respondent to
explain].
4. Finally, are there any places where you usually DO NOT GO NOW, but where you think you
WOULD GO IN THE FUTURE if your usual transportation mode were [mention preferred
transportation mode in the future]? [Prompt respondent to explain].
5. For each of the activities mentioned in the table below, please answer the following questions:
a. How often do you do this activity?
b. Please give some examples of locations, with street names, where this activity usually
takes place? Please explain in what circumstances you choose different locations (e.g.
time, weather, company, etc.).
c. What transportation mode do you typically use to access the locations where you do this
activity?
Eat outside for breakfast Go shopping for fun
Eat outside for lunch Go to buy food
Eat outside for dinner Exercise
Have a snack (chè, ice cream, banh etc.) Meet with strangers
Go to church or to the pagoda Talk about politics

6. Besides these 10 activities, are there any activities that you often do outside of home or work and
that we did not talk about? If yes,
a. Which ones?
b. For each of them, how often do you do this activity?
c. Please give some examples of locations, with street names, where you usually do this
activity?
7. How often do you get food delivered by a Grab driver or equivalent? In what circumstances?

PART IV. Streets and Places
8. Please describe the area/neighborhood where you live.
a. Do you live in a “hem”?
b. What is there to do there?

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a. Is it a good area to do … [go through the list of activities mentioned above, including the
ones added by the respondent]?
b. What is the atmosphere like?
c. How often do you talk with people who live or do business in this area?
d. Do you feel like you know these people well?
e. How do you feel about this area?
i. In particular, what do you like about it?
ii. What do you dislike?
iii. How do you feel when you are there?
2. Now, please describe a little bit the area/neighborhood where you work or study.
3. I will give you some descriptions of certain types of streets. Please picture in your mind each type
of street and answer the following questions:
a. What street(s) in particular are you thinking about? Are you thinking about one particular
section of these streets (e.g. in which district, ward)?
b. How likely is it that you would stop on the side of this street type to do some of the
activities mentioned above?
c. What transportation mode would you most likely be using if you were to stop on these
streets for such activities?
Street Type (or exact Street) Activities
Type 1: A large highway with a central separator,
and also an additional separator between the
motorbikes on the side, and the trucks, buses, and
cars in the middle of the road.
Eat outside
Have a snack
Go out to have fun with relatives
Go out to have fun with friends
Go to church or to the pagoda
Have a professional meeting outside of your
workplace
Go shopping for fun
Go to buy food
Exercise
Meet with strangers
Talk about politics
Make a spontaneous stop on the way
Other: ___ [added by respondent, specify]
Other: ___ [added by respondent, specify]
Type 2: A large commercial boulevard with a
central separator; no trucks allowed in the day
time, cars, buses and motorbikes share the roads,
with cars in the inside and motorbikes on the
outside (no physical separator between them)
Type 3: A commercial street with only two lanes,
where cars and motorbikes drive on the same lane
Type 4: An alleyway (hem) where cars can go
through
Type 5: An alleyway (hem) where cars cannot go
through (too narrow)
Type 6: Nguyen Hue Street (pedestrian)
Type 7: Bui Vien (pedestrian)

4. For each of the following questions
a. Please indicate at least three (1) example of streets [make sure to remind the respondent
that alleyways (hem) count as streets]. Be as specific as possible (name, street section,
district, ward, etc.).

249

1

a. Explain why you chose these streets in particular. [Mention that the reasons can be
related to the physical environment (buildings, landscape, traffic, etc.) and to the social
environment (people around)]
1. Your favorite streets
2. Your least favorite streets
3. Streets where you have nice memories
4. Streets where you have bad memories
5. Streets where you feel particularly safe
6. Streets where you feel particularly unsafe
7. Streets where you feel comfortable
8. Streets where you feel uncomfortable
9. Streets that you find particularly exciting (vui)
10. Streets that you find particularly boring (buon)
2. Can you think of some streets or street corners that have changed a lot in the city over the last ten
years? What do you think of these changes?
3. About your knowledge and perceptions of the city in general:
a. Do you think that you know Ho Chi Minh City well?
b. What do you like most about living in Ho Chi Minh City?
c. What do you dislike most?
4. Are you planning on continuing to live in Ho Chi Minh City in the future? If yes,
a. If yes, how much longer?
b. What are your motivations to stay/leave?
5. How do you think your current habits in the city will change in the future (e.g. over the next ten
years)?
6. To what extent changes in the transportation sector in Ho Chi Minh City will influence changes in
your habits in the future?

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT

250
2. Supplements to Chapter 4 – The Perceived Space of Urban Mobility
2.1. Understanding Multimodal Behaviors
This appendix focuses on a sub-group of survey respondents for whom it was not possible to
identify a “usual” transportation mode. Out of 4,744 observations, a large share were housewives
(40%), followed by unemployed and retired people (25%), students without a side job (20%),
“salespersons” (sic) (6%), and people in all other job categories (9%). The vast majority (85%) made
four trips on the surveyed day. Focusing on those who made exactly four trips (N = 4,143), Table 26
breaks down the modal share by trip for different professional groups. Indicative of multimodal
behaviors is the fact that modal shares shift significantly between the first two and the last two trips.
For example, most unemployed and retired individuals walked on their first two trips (58%), but the
walking share decreased by half on the third and fourth trips. In contrast, the motorbike share increased
from approximately 25% on the first two trips to 43% on the last two. The within-a-day modal shifts
are most striking (but expected) for students, the vast majority of whom ride a motorbike as passengers
early in the day (89% on the first trip) but walked later in the day (72%) on the third trip.
Table 27 analyzes the trip purposes of trips 1 and 3 of people who walked for one and drove a
motorbike for the other trip, all professional categories considered. Those who first walk in the
morning either go to eat, most likely breakfast (19%), to shop, most likely at a nearby market (33%), or
just to talk a walk, most likely for exercising (23%). Then as they drive a motorbike later in the day, in
most cases it is to shop (66%), most likely at further way shopping location. In contrast, as of those
who first drive a motorbike and then walk later in the day, one third use the motorbike to shop, and a
large share (42%) take go for a walk for the sake of it, probably to exercise (42%). Walking and

251
driving a motorbike are used alternatively to eat, to shop, and the mode choice most likely derives from
the proximity of the location. Walking appears as a recreational mode.
Table 26 – Modal Share by Trip for Different Professional Categories of Multimodal Individuals
Trip 1 Trip 2 Trip 3 Trip 4
Housewives (N = 1,690)

Walk 43% 43% 36% 35%
Bicycle 11% 11% 4% 4%
Passenger 9% 8% 30% 30%
Moto driver 34% 35% 26% 27%
Others 3% 3% 3% 4%
Unemployed/retired (N = 1,058)

Walk 58% 58% 31% 30%
Bicycle 5% 5% 4% 4%
Passenger 9% 10% 18% 18%
Moto driver 25% 24% 43% 43%
Others 2% 3% 4% 4%
Students without jobs (N = 789)

Walk 6% 20% 72% 62%
Bicycle 2% 2% 5% 5%
Passenger 89% 75% 19% 29%
Moto driver 1% 1% 2% 2%
Others 2% 2% 2% 2%
Salespersons (N = 263)

Walk 43% 47% 35% 34%
Bicycle 5% 5% 2% 2%
Passenger 27% 24% 21% 22%
Moto driver 19% 20% 38% 38%
Others 5% 4% 5% 3%
Other jobs (N = 343)
Walk 29% 37% 37% 30%
Bicycle 2% 2% 1% 1%
Passenger 42% 36% 15% 21%
Moto driver 14% 12% 36% 36%
Others 13% 14% 12% 11%

252

Table 27 – Trip Purpose by Mode for Multimodal Users
Multimodal Profile
Trip Purpose Trip 1 Trip 3
Walk Moto
Home 1 0% 16 2%
Work 7 1% 6 1%
School 1 0% 4 0%
Private 95 10% 95 10%
Company 3 0% 3 0%
Eat 176 19% 105 11%
Social 43 5% 93 10%
Shop 307 33% 302 33%
Pick-up / Drop-off 5 1% 134 15%
Joy 213 23% 18 2%
Others 70 8% 143 16%
Missing observations 0 0% 2 0%
N = 921 100% 921 100%
Moto Walk
Home 1 0% 13 2%
Work 8 1% 4 1%
School 3 0% 1 0%
Private 25 4% 73 11%
Company 0 0% 2 0%
Eat 64 10% 46 7%
Social 24 4% 77 12%
Shop 433 66% 92 14%
Pick-up / Drop-off 51 8% 5 1%
Joy 6 1% 277 42%
Others 44 7% 68 10%
Missing observations 0 0% 1 0%
N = 659 100% 659 100%

253
2.2. Robustness Checks: Poisson Regression Results
Table 28 presents the Poisson regression results for Specifications 1. A and 1. B, to be compared
with Table 13 – OLS Results (Specifications 1.A. and 1.B), Dependent Variable: Optional Trips. The
coefficients for the usual transportation modes, which are the key explanatory factors of interest, have
similar signs and levels of significance to those obtained with the OLS model. Therefore, the
robustness check is considered conclusive; the Poisson results support the interpretation of the OLS
results proposed in the body of the text (see Chapter 4, Section 5.1).
Table 28 – Poisson Results (Specifications 1.A. and 1.B), Dependent Variable: Optional Trips
Optional
Trips
(1. A)
Optional
Trips
(1. B)
Usual Transportation Mode

Motorbike Omitted Omitted

Bicycle -0.283 -0.241

(0.032)*** (0.033)***
Walking -0.122 -0.052

(0.023)*** (0.023)**
Bus -0.012 -0.028

(0.033) (0.034)
Car -0.070 -0.055

(0.066) (0.066)
Passenger -0.372 -0.271

(0.041)*** (0.041)***
Multimodal (no Bus) 0.090 0.110

(0.024)*** (0.025)***
Individual Characteristics

Age -0.004 -0.005

(0.001)*** (0.001)***
Gender 0.483 0.501

(0.013)*** (0.014)***
Education: Primary Omitted Omitted

Education: Secondary 0.078 0.094

254
Optional
Trips
(1. A)
Optional
Trips
(1. B)

(0.024)*** (0.024)***
Education: High School 0.155 0.170

(0.023)*** (0.024)***
Education: College 0.247 0.259

(0.026)*** (0.027)***
Flexible Job 0.106 0.119

(0.019)*** (0.020)***
Student -0.244 -0.243

(0.028)*** (0.029)***
Housewife -0.240 -0.195

(0.032)*** (0.033)***
Unemployed or retired 0.405 0.429

(0.029)*** (0.030)***
Travel Time Constraints

Total travel time 0.001 0.001

(0.000)*** (0.000)***
Commuting time -0.005 -0.003

(0.001)*** (0.001)***
Household Characteristics

Monthly income (million VND)
< 2.5 -0.064

(0.061)
2.5-4.0 -0.224

(0.053)***
4-6 -0.123

(0.028)***
6-8 -0.065

(0.022)***
8-10 -0.066

(0.020)***
10-15 -0.030

(0.018)
15-20 Omitted

20-25 0.065

(0.027)**
25-30 0.110

(0.039)***
30-50 0.218

(0.047)***

255
Optional
Trips
(1. A)
Optional
Trips
(1. B)
> 50 -0.071

(0.083)
Household size -0.062

(0.007)***
Children < 6 years old -0.076

(0.015)***
Years in current house 0.002

(0.000)***
Location (study area) 0.053

(0.115)
Time of Survey

Weekend 0.111

(0.021)***
January 2014 Omitted

February 2014 0.124

(0.024)***
March 2014 -0.013

(0.023)
_cons -1.277 -1.352

(0.037)*** (0.065)***
60,206 55,291
* p<0.1; ** p<0.05; *** p<0.01
Table 29 presents the Poisson regression results (Specification 1. B) with counts of different types
of trips as dependent variables. This table is to be compared with Table 13 – OLS Results
(Specifications 1.A. and 1.B), Dependent Variable: Optional Trips, as it serves as a reliability check for
the results presented in the corresponding section (see Chapter 4, Section 5.2). The Poisson coefficients
for the usual transportation modes, which are the key explanatory factors of interest, have similar signs
to those obtained with the OLS model, which supports the proposed interpretation of OLS results when
it comes to the direction of the relationships between usual transportation mode and number of trips of
different types. The significance levels vary in a few cases, but in ways that do not compromise the
interpretation of the OLS results. For example, all Poisson mode coefficients are significant with

256
counts of mandatory trips as dependent variable, whereas the OLS coefficient was not significant for
the walking mode. Such a situation, where the Poisson coefficient is significant but the OLS coefficient
is not, supports the proposed interpretation of the OLS results. The Poisson model is indeed supposed
to be the better fit with count variables as outcomes, as it is the case in this analysis. In a few cases, the
Poisson coefficients are not significant whereas the corresponding OLS coefficients were significant.
This is the case for the bus coefficient when counts of flexible trips are the dependent variable, and for
the bicycle and the car coefficients when counts of joy rides are the dependent variable. Corresponding
OLS coefficients were interpreted with caution anyway because of reasons related to sample size and
characteristics (car drivers are few and mostly rich males) and number of observations (few recorded
joy rides).
Table 29 – Poisson Results (Specification 1. B) with different Trip Types as Dependent Variables
Optional
Trips
Flexible
Trips
Mandatory
Trips
Joy
Rides
Usual Transportation Mode

Motorbike Omitted Omitted Omitted Omitted

Bicycle -0.241 -0.032 0.056 0.084

(0.033)*** (0.024) (0.005)*** (0.086)
Walking -0.052 0.001 -0.012 1.093

(0.023)** (0.014) (0.005)** (0.042)***
Bus -0.028 0.024 -0.035 0.392

(0.034) (0.032) (0.006)*** (0.094)***
Car -0.055 -0.488 -0.069 -0.593

(0.066) (0.121)*** (0.020)*** (0.372)
Passenger -0.271 -0.287 -0.109 -1.151

(0.041)*** (0.032)*** (0.007)*** (0.182)***
Multimodal (no Bus) 0.110 0.096 0.105 1.002

(0.025)*** (0.015)*** (0.005)*** (0.046)***
Individual Characteristics

Age -0.005 0.006 -0.002 0.018

(0.001)*** (0.000)*** (0.000)*** (0.001)***

257
Optional
Trips
Flexible
Trips
Mandatory
Trips
Joy
Rides
Gender 0.501 -0.629 0.029 0.029

(0.014)*** (0.013)*** (0.003)*** (0.032)
Education: Primary 0.094 0.129 0.020 -0.243

(0.024)*** (0.017)*** (0.005)*** (0.042)***
Secondary 0.170 0.122 0.022 -0.258

(0.024)*** (0.017)*** (0.005)*** (0.043)***
High School 0.259 0.177 0.024 -0.275

(0.027)*** (0.023)*** (0.005)*** (0.056)***
College 0.119 0.330 -0.105 0.139

(0.020)*** (0.024)*** (0.004)*** (0.074)*
Flexible Job -0.243 -0.251 -0.009 0.255

(0.029)*** (0.035)*** (0.005) (0.091)***
Student -0.195 0.725 -0.413 0.154

(0.033)*** (0.027)*** (0.006)*** (0.086)*
Housewife 0.429 0.276 -0.441 0.605

(0.030)*** (0.031)*** (0.007)*** (0.086)***
Travel Time Constraints

Total travel time -0.003 -0.024 0.002 -0.013

(0.001)*** (0.001)*** (0.000)*** (0.002)***
Commuting time 0.001 0.002 0.001 0.003

(0.000)*** (0.000)*** (0.000)*** (0.000)***
Household Characteristics

Monthly income (million VND)

< 2.5 -0.064 -0.056 -0.016 -0.068

(0.061) (0.053) (0.013) (0.137)
2.5-4.0 -0.224 -0.056 0.020 0.101

(0.053)*** (0.035) (0.010)** (0.098)
4-6 -0.123 -0.086 0.016 0.087

(0.028)*** (0.022)*** (0.006)*** (0.061)
6-8 -0.065 -0.040 0.007 0.046

(0.022)*** (0.018)** (0.005) (0.054)
8-10 -0.066 -0.059 0.007 0.031

(0.020)*** (0.017)*** (0.004) (0.050)
10-15 -0.030 -0.044 0.008 -0.027

(0.018) (0.016)*** (0.004)* (0.047)
15-20 Omitted Omitted Omitted Omitted

20-25 0.065 -0.028 0.007 0.095

(0.027)** (0.024) (0.006) (0.064)
25-30 0.110 0.041 -0.008 -0.116

258
Optional
Trips
Flexible
Trips
Mandatory
Trips
Joy
Rides

(0.039)*** (0.033) (0.008) (0.100)
30-50 0.218 0.095 -0.044 -0.074

(0.047)*** (0.043)** (0.012)*** (0.133)
> 50 -0.071 0.048 -0.019 -0.424

(0.083) (0.074) (0.017) (0.229)*
Household size -0.062 -0.063 0.011 0.006

(0.007)*** (0.006)*** (0.001)*** (0.015)
Children < 6 -0.076 0.036 -0.015 -0.057

(0.015)*** (0.011)*** (0.003)*** (0.034)*
Years in house 0.002 -0.001 0.000 -0.001

(0.000)*** (0.000)*** (0.000) (0.001)*
Location Controlled Controlled Controlled Controlled

Time of Survey

Weekend 0.111 -0.003 0.008 -0.106

(0.021)*** (0.019) (0.005) (0.062)*
January 2014 Omitted Omitted Omitted Omitted

February 2014 0.124 -0.035 0.020 -0.011

(0.024)*** (0.020)* (0.005)*** (0.062)
March 2014 -0.013 -0.023 -0.017 -0.015

(0.023) (0.019) (0.005)*** (0.058)
_cons -1.352 -0.901 0.794 -3.895

(0.065)*** (0.056)*** (0.014)*** (0.168)***
N 55,291 55,291 55,291 55,291
* p<0.1; ** p<0.05; *** p<0.01
Table 30 shows the Poisson regression results with the count of optional trips as a dependent
variable and the linear density by type of streets as an explanatory factor, while controlling for the
usual transportation mode, individual and household characteristics, and time of survey. The
coefficients for the different types of streets have similar signs and significance levels as those reported
in the body of the text for OLS results. The reliability check is therefore conclusive.
Table 30 – Poisson Results (Specification 2) with Focus on Street Density Effect by Type of Street

259
Optional Trips
Usual Transportation Mode

Motorbike 0.000

(0.000)
Bicycle -0.283

(0.033)***
Walking -0.088

(0.024)***
Bus -0.021

(0.034)
Car -0.072

(0.069)
Passenger -0.330

(0.042)***
Multimodal (no Bus) 0.104

(0.025)***
Road Density by Type (mi. / sq.mi.)

Trunk Road -0.016

(0.011)
Primary Road 0.002

(0.002)
Secondary Road -0.012

(0.004)***
Tertiary Road -0.016

(0.003)***
Footway 0.039

(0.006)***
Living Street 0.221

(0.061)***
Residential Street 0.016

(0.001)***
Service Street (Alleyways) 0.004

(0.001)***
Individual Characteristics

Age -0.005

(0.001)***
Gender 0.487

(0.014)***
Education: Primary 0.000

(0.000)
Secondary 0.085

(0.025)***

260
High School 0.158

(0.024)***
College 0.235

(0.027)***
Flexible Job 0.117

(0.020)***
Student -0.237

(0.029)***
Housewife -0.213

(0.033)***
Unemployed/retired 0.412

(0.030)***
Travel Time Constraints

Total travel time -0.004

(0.001)***
Commuting time 0.001

(0.000)***
Household Characteristics

Monthly income (million VND)

< 2.5 -0.177

(0.062)***
2.5-4.0 -0.349

(0.054)***
4-6 -0.174

(0.028)***
6-8 -0.099

(0.022)***
8-10 -0.086

(0.020)***
10-15 -0.036

(0.018)*
15-20 Omitted

20-25 0.030

(0.027)
25-30 0.027

(0.039)
30-50 0.151

(0.048)***
> 50 -0.138

(0.083)*
Household size -0.081

261

(0.007)***
Children < 6 -0.073

(0.015)***
Years in house 0.003

(0.000)***
Distance to center (mi.) 0.018

(0.001)***
Time of Survey

Weekend 0.189

(0.019)***
January 2014 Omitted

February 2014 0.053

(0.019)***
March 2014 -0.087

(0.017)***
_cons -1.195

(0.053)***
N 55,291
* p<0.1; ** p<0.05; *** p<0.01

262
2.3. OLS Regression Results with Interaction Term
Table 31 – OLS Results (Specification 3) with Interaction Term
(4)a (4)b (4)c (4)d (4)e (4)e
Dep. Var.: Optional Trips
Bicycle Walking Car Passenger
Multi
(with Bus)
Multi
(no Bus)
Usual Transportation Mode

Motorbike n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

Bicycle -0,074 ** -0,080 ** -0,080 ** -0,080 ** -0,080 ** -0,080 **
Walking -0,029 ** 0,000 -0,029 ** -0,029 ** -0,029 -0,029 **
Car -0,030 -0,030 0,033 -0,030 -0,030 -0,030

Passenger -0,088 ** -0,088 ** -0,088 ** -0,098 ** -0,088 ** -0,088 **
Multimodal (with Bus) -0,013 -0,013 -0,013 -0,013 -0,007 -0,013

Multimodal (no Bus) 0,035 ** 0,035 ** 0,035 ** 0,035 ** 0,035 ** 0,043 **

Mode * Residential Street Density
Motorbike * Residential n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

Bicycle * Residential -0,033 ** - - - - -

Walking * Residential - -0,035 ** - - - -

Car * Residential - - -0,041 ** - - -

Passenger * Residential - - - -0,030 ** - -

Multimodal (with Bus) * Residential - - - - -0,033 ** -

Multimodal (no Bus) * Residential - - - - - -0,033 **

Control Variables

Individual characteristics ü

ü

ü

ü

ü

ü

Travel time constraints ü

ü

ü

ü

ü

ü

Household characteristics ü

ü

ü

ü

ü

ü

Distance to center ü

ü

ü

ü

ü

ü

Time of survey ü

ü

ü

ü

ü

ü

Constant
0,281 0,277 0,281 0,281 0,281 0,281

N =
55,29 55,29 55,29 55,29 55,29 55,29

F(44, 55246)
101.39 101.60 101.49 101.61 101.39 101.39

Prob > F
0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000

R-squared
0.0773 0.0774 0.0773 0.0773 0.0773 0.0773

263
3. Supplements to Chapter 5 – The Lived Space of Urban Mobility
3.1. Street Uses: Counting Procedure Based on Video Data
For each observation, i.e. for each street segment at one point in time (see Methodology section in
Chapter 2), I counted all recorded street uses. With the support of a Vietnamese research assistant, a
methodology was developed to count and classify all the street uses present on the video recordings.
The same research assistant was responsible for all the counting, first under my supervision, for
approximately one third of the work, then alone, in order to avoid inter-rater reliability issues.

Figure 41 – Illustration of the Street Use Counting Methodology
The 5-step counting methodology is described was the following:
• Step 1: Using the 6:30 AM video, list all activities in anchor ‘locations’ along the property line.
Each location was attributed a location number, a name (e.g. the store’s name), a type 1 (e.g.

264
store, house, alleyway, parking lot, institutional use), and in the case of commercial uses, a type
2 describing the type of merchandise sold (e.g., food, clothes, services) and a short description.
• Step 2: Using the same video, add to the list all activities happening in front of anchor
locations. For example, the screenshot in the Figure 41 shows a street vendor in front of
location #3. This vendor was recorded under the same location number (#3), the type was
‘sidewalk vendor,’ and the description said, ‘lottery ticket seller.’
• Step 3: Using the same video, indicate whether the listed activities are ‘active’ (open) or not at
the time of observation.
• Step 4: Count the number of stationary people and parked vehicles (by type) in front of each
location. People (or vehicles) on the sidewalk were counted in another category than people (or
vehicles) in the traffic lanes, provided that the distinction could be made. Pedestrians on the
move were excluded.
• Step 5: Using the 6:30 AM traffic video, count the traffic exited the shot by transportation
mode. Each pedestrian was counted as one in the pedestrian traffic category. For vehicular
traffic (motorbikes, cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, e-bikes), each vehicle was counted as one in
respective categories.
• Step 5: Repeat steps 2-5 for all other videos recorded on the same segment at other times of the
day.
The counting strategy has some limitations. Due to resource constraints, both side and traffic
videos were recorded by the same person in most cases, not simultaneously but consecutively (traffic
video immediately after the side video). This means a risk of double counting, as a person sitting on
the sidewalk at the time of the side video recording could have been counted as stationary, but then
also on the move on the traffic video if she happened to leave in the meantime and pass in front of the

265
camera. Another limitation is that the gender of street users was not recorded in the people’s counts,
which prevents any gender interpretation of the results. Finally, when building the database, the traffic
counts were converted into motorbike-equivalent units using Cao and Sano’s (2012) conversion rates,
which were estimated based on traffic observations in Hanoi (Vietnam), but the article did not include
a conversion rate for trucks. The bus rate was applied, which is an approximation.
3.2. Towards a Measurement of Productive Frictions
This appendix focuses on designing a measurement for the “productive frictions” construct. I
follow the first four steps that McKenzie, Podsakoff and Podsakoff (2011) have described in their
article “Construct Measurement and Validation in MIS and Behavioral Research.” These include: 1)
developing a conceptual definition of the construct, 2) Generating items to represent the construct, and
3) Assessing the content validity of the items, and 4) Model Specification. Not included in this section
are the subsequent steps relative to scale development and validation.
Conceptual Definition of the Construct
The ground up theory in this chapter led to the following definition of the concept of productive
frictions: productive frictions are the opportunities for human interactions that result from the contact
of a flow of movement with the built environment it traverses.
The procedures of McKenzie et al.’s (2011) mention some required elements of definition,
hereafter in italic, for a rigorous delineation of a valid construct. I answer these points for the
productive friction construct.

266
• Type of property: The productive friction is an outcome, that is, it is the result from the
contact of a flow of movement with the built environment.
53
But it is an outcome that
belongs the field of potentialities, considering that a productive friction is an opportunity
for something that may or may not be actualized.
• Entity to which it applies: an individual (either mobile or static), in the sense people
experience the opportunities for human interactions that productive frictions are.
• Fundamental attributes that are necessary and sufficient for something to be exemplar of
the construct:
o A traffic flow: possibly including different types of flows, i.e., different modes,
speeds, traffic regulations, etc.
o Individuals: including at least one individual that is mobile (on the move) and at
least one individual that is static (in place)
o A built environment: where the built environment is considered a behavioral setting,
i.e. it provides opportunities for human actions
• Stability: The construct is generally applicable to all street users at any point in place and
time. But the measurement is expected to vary significantly:
o Across time: at different times of the day, between different eras
o Across places: streets, neighborhoods, cities, countries, regions
o Across individuals: depending on capabilities, perceptions, preferences

53
Other types of properties include “a thought (e.g., cognition, value, intention, subjective norm), a feeling (e.g., attitude, emotion, attitude toward
knowledge sharing), a perception (e.g., perceived ease of use of technology, perceived usefulness of technology, fair ness perceptions), an action (e.g.,
behavior, activity), […], or an intrinsic characteristic (e.g., cognitive ability, structure, speed, conscientious)” (McKenzie et al, 2011; p. 298)

267
• Dimensions: The concept is multidimensional in the sense that it is a function of three
formative characteristics:
o Flow: characteristics of movement through the built environment
o Places: characteristics of the built environment
o People: characteristics of people
Items to Represent the Construct
Flow-, place-, and people characteristics are therefore expected to work together as three major
factors constitutive of the productive friction construct. Developing a scale for measuring productive
frictions would involve collecting data on different variables falling under each of these factors. The
tentative list of variables provided below indicates with an asterisk (*) variables which, according to
existing literature, have a significant effect on the relationship between active travel and the built
environment, especially walking. Such literature is of particular interest for designing a measurement
of productive frictions considering that walking often appears as a proxy for street activity.
• People characteristics, pertaining to street users
o Perceptual (sensorial) abilities
o Capabilities: income, age, gender, disability
o Dominant focus of the gaze: road or traffic, buildings and businesses, phone,
children, other
o Individual preferences in regards with discretionary activities and human
interactions in public space
• Flow characteristics, by mode
o Volume

268
o Diversity: modal share relative to other modes
o Speed average and range
o Maneuverability: stopping distance at average speed, ease of pulling over
o Enclosure (or permeability): level of isolation from environmental factors (sounds,
weather, air quality)
• Place characteristics, pertaining to the built environment, including traffic lanes, and
sidewalks
o Distribution of ground-floor uses
o Sidewalk (yes/no or width)
o Number of businesses, with focus on number of third places (coffee shops,
restaurants, bars, etc.), in buildings / on sidewalk / in traffic lanes
o Measures of street furniture
o Permeability: percentage of businesses in open air, separated from the outside by a
window, total window area
o Physical segregation (hard separations) between traffic flows of different types
o Regulatory separation between traffic flows of different types
o Opportunities for complete inversion of movement and non-movement: parking
spots (occupied, available, total), by type
o Penetrability - opportunities for temporary inversion of movement and non-
movement: pick-up and drop off spots, time-restricted on-street parking, no-
stopping anytime rule
The variables are listed here anticipate a measurement of productive frictions at the finest level of
spatial granularity, that is, applying to individuals on a certain street at a certain time. As mentioned

269
before, the notion of productive frictions is scalable. At aggregated levels of analysis, such as, applied
to the population of a city, some of the variables would not be measurable (e.g., all street design
variables, such as permeability or street furniture).
Content Validity of the Items
The quantitative and qualitative analyses presented thus far made it possible to define the concept
in general terms, and to roughly sketch the outline of the different items constitutive of a measurement.
But the data available is not sufficient to fully measure the items and evaluate further the content
validity of the proposed measurement. Nevertheless, the video data includes some indication of the
volume of human interactions in street spaces, as accounted for by the number of static people hanging
out in public space. These can reasonably be considered as actualized productive frictions, that is, what
happens when people actually seize and act up the opportunity to engage in human interactions. In
addition, the data includes measures for flow- and place characteristics by street segment. With this
data only, it may not be possible to properly measure productive frictions as people experience them,
but it is possible to get a sense of the significant ways in which place- and flow- variables work
together to shape street spaces that are more or less conducive to productive frictions.
Table 32 provides a side-by-side comparison between the composition of the three items listed
above and the approximate match that the video data provides for some of the variables under two out
three items. Indeed, the data does not account for people’s characteristics at the time of observation.
Table 32 – Variables included in a tentative composite measurement of actualized frictions
ITEMS MEASUREMENT OF ACTUAL FRICTIONS
From video data
PEOPLE
Perceptual abilities n/a
Capabilities n/a
Dominant focus of the gaze n/a

270
ITEMS MEASUREMENT OF ACTUAL FRICTIONS
From video data
Individual preferences n/a
FLOW
Volume Traffic counts
Diversity Modal shares
Speed average and range n/a
Maneuverability n/a
Enclosure / permeability n/a
PLACE
Distribution of ground-floor uses Shares of uses by type
Sidewalk Dummy variable = 1 if sidewalk available, = 0 if not
Businesses in buildings
1. Sub-total: number of “third places”
Count of formal businesses by type
2. Sub-total: restaurants + cafes
Businesses on sidewalks and in lanes
3. Sub-total: number of “third places”
Count of encroaching formal businesses
Count of street vendors by types
4. Sub-total: food + snack + drink vendors
Street furniture n/a
Permeability n/a
Physical segregation between traffic flows Hard separation between lanes (dummy)
Crossable curb (dummy)
Regulatory separation between traffic flows Dedicated lanes for different types of flows (dummy)
Movement – non-movement inversion opportunities
5. Complete inversions
6. Temporary inversions
Proxy = actualized inversion:
7. Complete: count of parked vehicles, by type
8. Temporary: count of motorbuying people

271
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Drawing on a case study of Ho Chi Minh City where the vast majority of the population ride motorized two-wheelers (motorbikes), this dissertation advances a new way of thinking about the urbanism of street life as the result of a “productive friction” between traffic flows and the built environment. Motorbikes are to Ho Chi Minh City what gondolas are to Venice, that is, a contextually appropriate transportation mode. Not only does the motorbike flow fit the urban form

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Asset Metadata

Creator Jamme, Huê-Tâm (author)

Core Title Productive frictions and urbanism in transition: planning lessons from traffic flows and urban street life in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

School School of Policy, Planning and Development

Degree Doctor of Policy, Planning & Development

Degree Program Urban Planning and Development

Publication Date 07/29/2020

Defense Date 04/30/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag automobility,Ho Chi Minh City,mobility transition,motorbikes,OAI-PMH Harvest,street vending,transportation planning,urbanism,Vietnam

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Banerjee, Tridib (committee chair), Boarnet, Marlon (committee member), Castells, Manuel (committee member), Kim, Annette (committee member)

Creator Email ht.jamme@gmail.com,jamme@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-350213

Unique identifier UC11663219

Identifier etd-JammeHueTa-8817.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-350213 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-JammeHueTa-8817.pdf

Dmrecord 350213

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Jamme, Huê-Tâm; Jamme, Hue-Tam

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA