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City Opaque is a book about how cities are produced—not just with plans, money, concrete and cranes, but through grey spaces that operate through erasure, ambiguity, and the overproduction of contradictory laws and regulations. Set in Ho Chi Minh City, widely known as Saigon, Hun Kim follows developers, state officials, investors, and residents as they navigate one of the fastest-growing urban economies in the world. Through years of close observation and lived encounters—from rooftop bars overlooking glittering construction sites to neighborhoods quietly erased by disappearing planning maps—he reveals a city shaped as much by what is hidden, revised, or forgotten as by what is planned and recorded.
Rather than treating corruption, legal ambiguity, and disorder as failures of development, this book shows how opacity itself is a form of governmental reason and a strategy for producing space in the city. Laws multiply but rarely clarify. Archives disappear. Plans are rewritten after the fact. These practices are born out of rationalities that enable land to be reassigned, capital to move, and futures to be reimagined—often at great cost to some residents, but with enormous payoff for others. Moving beyond familiar stories of "corruption" or "failed governance," City Opaque offers a new way of understanding urban development in Southeast Asia and beyond.
"This is an incredibly gripping, timely, and theoretically sophisticated book on the political and cultural economy of city-making in Saigon. Its central argument that the city is produced through a paradoxical unity of opacity and transparency is novel and necessary and holds great import for studies of contemporary capitalism well beyond Southeast Asia." —Malini Ranganathan, The American University