Barun Roy: A city on the move

ASIA FILE

The importance and popularity of a city depends a lot on how it looks and conducts itself - Ho Chi Minh City leads by example.

This much can be said for sure about West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's recent visit to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon in its previous incarnation, and HCMC for short): he didn't see any writings on its roadside walls nor any reckless invasion of its streets by hawkers "" two things he is most familiar with in Kolkata. Viet Nam's most important city doesn't allow itself to be defaced.

One doesn't know what his reactions were to HCMC's cleaner look after his open encouragement to hawkers to stay put on Kolkata's sidewalks. He had earlier gone to Singapore and came back similarly unfazed by its garden-city appearance. Some people are too shy to look a beautiful woman directly in the eye. Apparently, when Bhattacharjee goes abroad, he would rather look at the faces of his hosts than at clean streets, orderly traffic, green neighbourhoods, civic discipline, and urban developments that speak of determined efforts to create liveable cities.

A reference to HCMC is pertinent because, like Kolkata, it's also in transition, trying to live down its past and put its best foot forward towards the future, to discard old political attitudes and embrace new market realities. The difference is, Kolkata only talks about mindset change while HCMC makes every effort to prove it on the ground.

HCMC is a very different city today than it used to be even a decade ago. Like the rest of the country, it offers a vibrant face, a feeling of dynamism, and a thousand telltale signs that it's dressing up to welcome the world.

Of course, it still has problems. The Saigon River, for instance, has to contend with illegal dumping of untreated solid waste and oil spills from its heavy port traffic, but riverside factories are closely watched, riverfronts are being swept clean, international cruises are beginning to call, and daily dinner cruises are increasingly popular among HCMC's growing hordes of foreign tourists. Squatters along the city's canals are being removed to better settlements elsewhere. The Nhieu Loc Canal, once notorious for its slums, is now clean enough to bathe in. Its banks have been transformed into green belts, flanked by landscaped streets and brand new buildings.

The overwhelming impression one gets of HCMC is that of a clean and green city with modern architecture and colourful facades, as well as old buildings that are well primed and preserved. From the top of any high-rise building, the city looks organised and fresh. The streets are wide, tree-lined, and "" mark this "" eminently walkable (which Kolkata is definitely not). Cafes in the French style abound on the wide boulevards. Under the city government's "Ten Rules for Clean and Civilised Streets", illegal occupation of sidewalks is banned.

But HCMC's transformation is not merely cosmetic. There are big plans to redevelop the entire urban area as a cluster of liveable neighbourhoods, reflected in the ambitious Thu Thiem project to the south of the city, on the eastern bank of Saigon River. A $10-billion plan has just been announced to develop Thu Thiem from scratch on 770 hectares of what used to be low-yield rice fields. Planned and designed by international architects, it will form HCMC's new commercial, financial, and residential heart, only minutes away from the existing downtown. It will also be an ecological landmark, with built-up areas cleverly interspersed with open greens and waterways.

Something else is going to change in HCMC to further improve its liveability. It's the way people will commute in the city in future. Currently, motorbikes account for almost 93 per cent of all mechanised trips in HCMC, which adds to the city's traffic problems. The authorities want this to change, but their solution is not just widening roads and pressing more buses into service, but building a city-wide system of underground and elevated railways. A 195-km subway network is to be built by 2020, at a cost of between $3 billion and $4 billion, and work on two priority lines will begin soon.

At the back of all this is the concern that HCMC must groom itself well enough for the world's tourists and investors to feel attracted to it (a concern that's totally lacking in the case of Kolkata). And the world has begun to reward HCMC to an extent that Kolkata can't yet conceive of. Just a month ago, Intel announced its decision to invest $300 million in a factory in HCMC's Hi-Tech Park to package and test microchips. At the same time, it announced an option to build a second phase of the project, doubling its investment to $605 billion.

It proves one thing beyond any doubt: a city's importance and popularity depends a lot on how it looks and conducts itself. HCMC is on track to becoming a booming industrial city with clean and liveable surroundings. Is Kolkata?