From "Swamp" to "Golden Land": Class, Aesthetics, and Dispossession in District 2, Ho Chi Minh City

Abstract

This thesis examines gentrification in District 2 of Ho Chi Minh City as a site where Vietnam’s post-Đổi Mới contradictions become visible in land, aesthetics, and displacement. While much of the gentrification literature has been theorized through Euro-American cases, this project asks how urban transformation unfolds in a formally socialist state that has undergone market-oriented reform. I argue that District 2’s redevelopment cannot be understood through a framework of neoliberal state retreat. Instead, it is produced through a state-capital nexus in which bureaucratic authority, domestic developers, and transnational capital convert working-class neighborhoods into sites of luxury real estate, elite consumption, and political control. Drawing on spatial documentation, discourse analysis, and semi-structured interviews with current and displaced residents, this thesis traces three dimensions of District 2’s transformation. First, it situates District 2 within Vietnam’s postwar political economy, showing how Đổi Mới reforms and foreign investment reoriented urban land toward capitalist development. Second, it analyzes how aesthetics, taste, and narratives of modernity reclassify everyday life, making luxury redevelopment appear natural and inevitable before physical removal occurs. Third, it examines the machinery of dispossession in Thủ Thiêm, where state-led clearance, inadequate compensation, and prolonged temporary resettlement reveal the coercive foundations of urban transformation. In doing so, it challenges universalizing models of gentrification and calls for an analysis attentive to post-socialist, post-reform state power, capitalist development, and the ongoing struggle over who has the right to the city.

Read Honors Thesis here.