Beauty as Control in the New Saigon by Erik Harms

Beauty as Control in the New Saigon by Erik Harms

Ben Cohen

In Beauty as Control in the New Saigon, Professor Erik Harms argues that the ambiguous concept of beauty is used by national urban developers to control and order space in Saigon. Residents resist governmental encroachment on an individual level, squabbling about corruption and poor compensation, yet they never challenge the development plan or the concept of “beautifying” the city, ultimately affirming the city’s assertion of beauty and thus the development project.  

According to Harms, beauty and fresh air are mechanisms of control because they can be deployed in many modes: beauty contains fluid meanings, which can resonate with people from different social statuses (738). Beauty isn’t “unambiguously hegemonic,” allowing for individuals to shape their desires and even reimaginings of space (738). At the same time, the fluid quality of beauty enables nationwide acts of dispossession to be legitimized and go unchallenged. Harms mentions that many families in Thu Thiem, a neighborhood that is in the process of being turned into “new development,” are very upset by their evictions and paltry monetary aid, yet they also express that the governmental vision of a breathable, beautiful city is a positive, worthwhile goal. When they express their resistance, it is in the details, which are clouded by numbers, calculations, and other more “objective” measures. Harms cites these measures as subordinating the more qualitative and creative aspects of beauty for understandings that are more aligned with the state view. 

The cause of dissatisfaction with the city plans is expressed as exasperation, which Harms defines as an oppressive force caused by financial precarity that increases with poor compensation and geographic displacement coupled with weak land rights. Residents are very critical of the government’s implementation of the resettlement, which is seen as corrupt, stingy, and misleading after promising smooth and desirable resettlements to make way for a more beautiful district. Yet the critics focus on the details of their cases, not thinking about the ethically dubious nature of the redevelopment projects themselves, even agreeing that the plan will make the city more breathable and desirable. 

The government uses “beauty” as a masking device for the extraction of and investment in land (and therefore capital). The state couches their project in neoliberal terms, favoring a middle class with consumer choice, freedom, and harmony between city and nature (743). City planners reify beauty in organized city structures that defy the “chaos” of unplanned city development, which is considered to be “ugly” (745). Order is also “coupled with culture” of elites and those who favor the ideologies and city arrangements of the West (744). 

Yet for many of the displaced, such as Duyen, the project is admirable and aligns with their understanding of what a beautiful city should be like. The fluidity of “beauty” enables it to resonate with those the government is displacing. Residents do hold onto a multiplicity of beauties—the old Thu Thiem was a breathable and beautiful area, as well, even if the new one will also be beautiful. And yet this nostalgia is ultimately subordinated to the new concept of beauty, which, for residents, overpowers their memories of the old district.

I am curious about the “blinding” nature of beauty—it seems as though the beauty of these projects are unconditionally accepted by otherwise frustrated and resistant residents. Are they blind to the project’s dispossessive and capitalist power? Towards the end of the piece, Harms relates the story of a man who asks, “how can a person contest government policy?”, before concluding that the policy must be making things more beautiful (746). Does the urban plan truly seem beautiful to the man, or does he feel helpless before the power of the government? The phrasing of the initial question might suggest the latter. I don’t think that this changes any of the analysis in the piece; I just wonder if the atomization of resistance causes a sense of powerlessness and subsequent acceptance of the government plan, which would complicate the notion of beauty’s power to obscure the government’s capitalist spatial project. 

I am also curious about the details that create the concepts of “breathable” and beautiful.” Do planners advertise all of the resources and restructurings that will create better air, quieter streets, etc? And if so, I’m curious if the displaced know about these conceptual building blocks and if they too resonate with them. I only wonder because many urban renewal projects are implicitly, as Harms mentions, for a specific class of people: bourgeoisie with free time, money to buy privacy, and cars to access the city. If the displaced don’t have cars, much free time to walk around, or money to buy a secluded home close to a park, why would they be invested in the government’s concept of city beauty? Does the abstract idea carry more weight than the facts, or are the facts of the development project also compelling? Finally, are there other reasons for the atomization of dissent? Perhaps an influx of resettlers, a generally weak sense of community and obligation, class/ethnic differences in different wards is contributing to the lack of collective resistance

 

Quotes

  1. “Residents expressed anger about the effects the project had on their individual households. The focus on individual household compensation led primarily to a fragmentation of interests and little sense that residents had a shared plight. In this context of individualized, fragmented contestation, they still described the project itself as beautiful” (743).

  2. “Ideas of beautification operate as modes of control precisely because they allow different people with different stakes in a project to feel they believe in them and understand them as “positive” concepts that resonate with their own interests, even when they do not” (743). 

 

Questions

  1. How does the atomized dissent of Tu Thiem residents compare with Malaysian villagers’ “weapons of weak” described in Scott?

  2. How does residents’ scathing criticism of the beautification development project coexist with an affirmation of the project’s goals? Can they coexist?

Comments

Ben,

Great and thorough summary of the text. I like your invocation of how beauty blinds– it goes well with Prof. Harms’ description of how beauty masks the dispossession that residents experience. When one thinks of beauty, one generally conjures images of what we consider beautiful (e.g. a painting), and I think a focus on what we see and do not see gives us another means of thinking through the ethnographic detail of the piece. Here I am thinking of how people envision development and the “proper” amount of compensation. In doing so, they get bogged down in the details of how land is classified, etc., and lose sight of the larger structural conditions that created their plight in the first place.

Ben,

Thank you for the careful reading of my paper. It is a supreme act of generosity for a reader to take the time and work through the ideas one has tried to convey on paper, and it is gratifying to see that you have been able to capture the nuances I was hoping to convey when writing it.

On your questions about atomized dissent, all of the points you raise–influx of different generations of settlers, etc–play a real role. The question about “weak sense of community” is somewhat delicate, because in some sense it is the destruction of community that can be highlighted as the biggest injustice in a project like this one, so politically one does not want to suggest that the community was anything but brimming with solidarity. But I believe the idea of “close-knit community” in many urban Saigon neighborhoods is more of an ideological wish than an actual reality. This begs the question of why? My hunch is that there are decades of mistrust, and that the legacy of war, partisan divides, political authoritarianism, and so on continue to undermine the possibility for sustained solidarities.

Finally, one major weakness in my approach in this particular article is the failure to seriously address the omnipresent threat of being arrested for overt political resistance. It’s something I should have been more explicity about.

Your points about comparing and contrasting this with Scott’s concept of Everyday resistance are worth discussing in class. I think you can see how I both agree and disagree slightly with that approach. The notion that beauty might be a kind of masking device is in some ways hard to reconcile with Scott’s ideas about subordinated groups never buying into ruling ideologies. In a different article, I talk about a concept of resistance through indifference–everyday forms of indifference.

-Erik

Author: 
Ben Cohen