MOTORBIKE MODULE
2013 Urban Research
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
The motorbike is – for better or worse – the pervasive, inescapable and ubiquitous mode of transportation in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam amongst other Southeast Asian cities such as Manila, Bangkok and Jakarta. Its ease of use, affordability and quick means makes it ideal for developing nations and its residents to own. From 1994 onwards, companies such as… Honda made concerted efforts to push for the continual ownership of motorbikes in SE Asian nations: especially Vietnam [source]. By today the motorbike ownership is rate above 80% and it is climbing even with the prestige of car ownership.
In conjecture with this economic driver, the motorbike represents the symbol of freedom for the youth and liberation for the rural villager as an attainment towards material ownership, modernity and a step away from the backwardness of rural village life. Through its romantic appeal and calculating spread within the gradient from rural concentrating in the urban centers, the motorbike acts as a module of measurement in the proliferation of the city through its arteries. Alison and Peter Smithson wrote of the street:
“In a tight knit society inhabiting a tight knit development… there is an inherent feeling of safety and social bond which has much to do with the obviousness and simple order form of the street… The street is not only a means of access but also an arena for social expression”.
At the same time, the motorbike stands as the unit of mobility with the city as racing swarms of chaos throughout the arteries of the city – hardly requiring any traffic lights or order. To maneuver through the streets of Saigon on a motorbike is not to adhere to any traffic laws but a compromise of in situ decisions: random, dispersive, diverse and hardly controlled. The following video by Rob Whitworth attests to the swarm-like nature of the movement.
But to be within the swarm, is not a situation of panic or stress – just like every fish – in a school, the communication and coordination is insipient. The motorbike entrenchment is totalizing in built environment.
This study maps in section and plan streets of HCMC in areas of old development, and new developments to examine the pervasiveness of the motorbike module onto the built environment. This will demonstrate the embeddedness of the motorbike within the built form and to demonstrate that this embeddedness is not one based on ideal or strict dimensions (as in the regimes of the classical thought) but as an arbitrary pervausiveness, that adheres to the module but flexible in its manifestations.
In this varied definition of the built environment, the motorbike’s laissez faire module adherance and definition is indicative of a larger culture of Vietnam urbanization, one of bottom up, makeshift construction, and an architecture that comes without architects, producing a country to builders – everyone is a builder.
