Understanding the nuance of transport in Southeast Asia through productive friction, with Hue-Tam Jamme
Dao Nguyen
Welcome to the next part of the third episode of URBANovation Podcast presented to you by the Young Urbanists of Southeast Asia, or YUSEA. My name is Dao, your host today, and I’m here with Professor Hue-Tam Hello, Professor.
Hue-Tam
Hi.
Dao Nguyen
So before we start, I just want to briefly introduce you about the background of Professor Hue-Tam. So she’s an assistant professor of the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. Her research explores the effects of new technologies on space and society, especially on how people move, work, shop and socialize in cities. At the intersection of planning and innovation, how can people shape urban spaces that are more livable, accessible, and equitable? So thank you so much for accepting our invitation to speak at our podcast. And for your context, this is the second part of our episode on mobility and transportation. In the first part, my co-host Joshua already discussed with young people from various cities about the challenges they face in the cities where they are from or where they are living now. Now we invite you as an educator, a professor and also an expert who has extensive experience to discuss these issues in depth with the hope to bridge the voices of young people and leading experts on pressing challenges in Southeast Asian cities and beyond. In the second part, we are going to run through a couple of key things. First, we will zoom in on the case study and story of Vietnam with a unique motorbike-centric urbanism to understand the challenges which particularly Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh are facing. Second, we are also going to talk about current state of planning and innovative transportation system in reference to youth perspective that had already been shared from the first part. And lastly, we will talk about how to promote innovative urban planning to improve mobility in the city. So we can start with your research about your multi-award winning dissertation, ‘Productive friction and urbanism in transition: lessons from traffic flows and Urban Street Life in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. So I read it with joy and as a Vietnamese, it resonates a lot with me. Could you elaborate more on your concept of productive frictions and also like how it affects the lives of ordinary urban residents in Vietnam like me?
Hue-Tam
Thanks, Dao, for asking and thanks a lot for reading my dissertation. It’s a lot to take on. But thanks a lot for your question. So yeah, the concept of productive friction is very central to my work, not just the dissertation, but what I’m still researching today. But the concept definitely emerged from my observations of Vietnamese streets.I lived in Vietnam for several years before I joined Academia. my intuition was telling me that there was something different going on there in terms of the linkages between how people move around and the street life that one can observe. So the concept of productive friction is that certain forms of mobility are very conducive to interacting with your surroundings while you’re on the move. Like while you’re going from some places, you know, throughout your day to others, from home to work, from, all the things you have to do throughout the day, certain forms of mobility are more conducive to having you, you know, maybe just make eye contact with someone else or make a quick stop on the way and have like a short interaction with a vendor and buy something from them and in that way, creating connections with the places and the people around you. And I started exploring this notion of productive friction in Vietnam because I was very impressed with the number of things, you know, that people do on a motorbike. So anyone who’s traveled to Vietnam or who’s lived in Vietnam knows that.
You might be going from home to work in the morning, but for a lot of people, it’s like a systematic stop on the way, you know, to buy breakfast on the way. And when people talk about, you know, in my interviews with Vietnamese residents of Ho Chi Minh City, I would go about the interview asking the conventional transportation survey question of like,
Okay, tell me about all the trips that you made yesterday. And I would often hear something like, yeah, basically in the morning I went from home to work and that’s about it. But then did you stop somewhere on the way? Yeah, I bought breakfast. Did you buy something on the way? Yeah, I bought breakfast. But this is not thought about as a stop. It’s not thought about as a destination. It’s something that happens on the way, because it’s possible when you’re riding a motorbike, it’s possible to notice the street vendors that sells bánh mì or bún bò whatever on the side of the street. And it’s possible to just pause and buy it real quick and keep going. So this is very different from how transportation scholars think about origins and destinations and access, you know, like as a matter of distance,
People don’t think about how far away is the bún bò from my place. It’s like if the band bar is on my way, I will buy it. If it’s not on my way, I will probably not buy it. It’s also very different from how urban designers think about street life and active public spaces. typically we think that to have a vibrant active public space, street space, what you need is a lot of pedestrians. In fact, in Vietnam, as you know, most people ride motorbikes and don’t walk for transportation. So you do have an extremely vibrant, and you know, like in many ways, inclusive street life, but without pedestrians. So that’s extremely different from how we think about, you know, public space and in urban studies. And yeah, that space is inclusive in the way that a lot of those small businesses and street vendors who sell bún bò and banh mi and everything else. of low-income residents, like oftentimes, you know, recent migrants in the city, and not only, you know, all the small businesses, know, home-based businesses, small restaurants that you have on the ground floor of most buildings in Vietnamese cities. My argument is that they depend, their livelihood, their economic activity depends on those productive frictions.
And motorbike mobility is extremely conducive to productive friction. Car mobility, not as much. Like when you’re driving a car in a city like Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi, it’s basically like being in a tunnel. It’s very difficult to stop. There’s no productive friction. There’s very little interaction that’s possible with the places and the people around you.
So this notion of productive friction I’ve been examining it in other contexts as well, and now I’m building on this notion to think about mobility, accessibility, and street life.
Dao Nguyen
I see, that’s a very interesting concept. I also, I think it resonated with me, because I think that me also, like my families and my friends, oftentimes, like we also stop at like various stop, street vendors to buy different stuff, drink, lunch, dinner, even like small stop to eat like snacks. I think that one thing that you mentioned before in your research is about the gradual transition in the mobility mindset and also social transformation in Vietnam caused by the car based change in space policy of the Vietnamese government. another problem is the increasingly popular use of VINFAST, a Vietnamese car maker in Vietnam that has been very, very famous right now. So in your point of view, how does the increase of private car ownership impact what you just mentioned, the street life, street vendors, traffic flow, also the accessibility in the Vietnamese cities, which are oftentimes and traditionally dominated by motorbikes.
Hue-Tam
It’s a big change, it’s a massive change that’s happening with the rapid growth of car use and car ownership. It’s a change that is totally understandable in many ways. A lot of people, emerging middle class, upper middle class wants a car, it’s a symbol of success in many ways and you know, when people tell me, share with me their motivations to buy their first car, the motivations are totally understandable. They want their kids to be safer in traffic. They’re tired of sitting in motorbike traffic and breathing in the exhaust fumes, like at the red light. And all of these motivations are totally understandable. The car is in a really comfortable transportation mode. And yeah, there’s like, there are broader, deeper, let’s say, political economy factors.
You mentioned VINFAST. VINFAST is the first, the only national car manufacturer and the car manufacturing industry is considered a key sector in this current phase of Vietnam’s economic transition. So promoting car consumption and the car as a primary consumption good makes sense as well from the perspective of the national government to sustain the economic development of Vietnam. So for all of these reasons, we have to deal with the cars. Cars are here to stay. People want the cars and we’ll have to deal with that. The thing is, our cities, Vietnamese cities, definitely the older ones, the bigger ones, are not really well suited to accommodate the car, not well suited to accommodate the car as an everyday transportation mode. What I’m challenging here is this idea that the car might come and replace the motorbike.
Maybe for some people that’s the goal, but actually in people’s experiences, like, you know, what my interviewees share with me is that they’re very aware that the car is not an extremely convenient way of moving around. The roads are so busy and the parking situation is really difficult. When you’re on the streets, you have all of these signs on the building saying, no parking allowed. because there’s a really strong competition between people who want to use the sidewalk and the access to the street for productive friction to have their stalls and their business to run their business and people who are looking for places to stop. So there’s a big competition. It’s the parking is really the key issue and just the traffic is not as convenient. It’s definitely does not compete. The car does not compete with the motorbike to move around in a smooth and you know, like to zigzag in traffic and so on. So you’re much slower and you have much fewer possibilities to stop and do the things you wanna do when you’re driving a car around. yeah, the car is definitely not conducive to productive friction. it kind of like, it creates this tunnel effect I mentioned before, and it creates this disconnect with the places and the people around you, but it’s not necessarily meant to be used as a transportation mode for everyday transportation for all of the small trips throughout the day. Hopefully, Vietnamese cities will move toward a model where those everyday transportation moves can be made using other modes. I guess that’s the plan behind, you know, developing public transit in the city. But the problem, the problem with current transportation and urban planning at the moment in Vietnamese cities is that there are deliberate plans to give priority to cars and to accommodate the cars. Accommodating the cars means making, taking room away from these other forms of mobility. And that is where, you know, there might be a problem.
Dao Nguyen
I think that like the promotion of car based or like change in spatial policy in Vietnam. I actually been like changing significantly how people drive in so-called me in the city. So previously I worked for the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences and then our Institute also proposed a concept of like sidewalk culture because in the Vietnamese economy, the pit way or like the street vendor actually play a really important role in the local economy also culture as well.
So I believe that you have been talking with people from different social groups, for example, a passenger or like street vendor owners or like the policy makers. So my question is how have the transition in transportation policy, also transportation modes have been affecting the people’s everyday life from different social groups?
Hue-Tam
Yeah, as part of my work, I do talk to not only residents about their transportation habits, but also with the people who depend on those productive friction. So we are talking about small businesses and informal vendors and, you know, it’s like they adapt. They adapt in whomever there’s an opportunity for a business owner that has the space or you know an opportunity to accommodate just one or two cars where there’s like space available in front of their business for one or two cars to park it attracts all of a sudden it attracts a different customer base because it creates a car destination, you know and most places by default are not car destinations When it comes to street vendors that are mobile not all street vendors are mobile as you know When it comes to the ones that are mobile, it’s just very obvious like if they tell you you know that they will pick the places where there’s less car traffic and more either pedestrian traffic or motorbike traffic because these are the flows that they can catch
So they move around, know, they adjust. And depending also on the time of the day, certain street intersections will be so busy with cars that they will move around, but they can only do that. You know, there’s a point after which it’s gonna be, it might become difficult to find the spots where you can catch the motorbike traffic, like flowing, I don’t know.
One opportunity for sure is this new form of transportation coming in large Vietnamese cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. I’m talking about the metro systems. So both cities have had their first lines open in the last two years or so. So starting in Hanoi, now the first line just opened in December in Ho Chi Minh City. When you think about what transit-based mobility is like from a productive friction perspective, obviously you have zero possibilities to interact with your surroundings between stops, but where there’s an opportunity to connect is at the stops. And when you think about it, those transit station areas in transit based cities, especially the old ones, think about the old systems of old Europe, for example, like transit station areas or little villages, you know, that’s where a lot of the economic residential activity is concentrated. That’s like the very concept of transit oriented development, right? That’s like the goal is to… organise through planning this type of like strong integration of land uses, residential uses, commercial uses around transit station areas. So these are where the nodes of activity can take place. As of today, when we’re going back to Vietnamese street vendors, they are excluded from the organisation of these transit systems and transit station areas. These are the places where they’re not expected to be. Because if you think of other places around the world where transit systems are developing, I’ve lived in Los Angeles for five years now, I’m in Arizona where extremely car-centric, culturally car-centric, historically car-centric cities, when transit systems develop there, there’s this idea that these are the systems, is public service, these are the last resort systems for people who have no other way of getting around. Where new systems are being implemented in places like Vietnam or Bangladesh or where those mass rapid transit systems are being developed in Asia. These are the systems that serve a certain elite. Even the type of movement that these systems promote are movements between the suburbs and the city center. And these movements where people go from home in the suburbs to work in the city center, this is the type of movement that only white-collar workers have. People who do work small businesses at home don’t have this type of transportation patterns at all. Like their transportation patterns are a lot of small trips around their home to take care of their children, to take care of their business. It’s nothing like where you make one trip in the morning, another one in the evening, one direction in the morning, the other direction in the evening.
So there’s this idea that mass rapid transit systems are for a certain elite. They are a symbol of modernity. They are definitely not associated with a high level of productive friction where you have like all sorts of activity, know, bubbling up within and around those transit systems. yeah, transit productive friction is being removed by design, you know, from the inside and the surroundings of the systems.
Dunya
On the point of historically car-centric cities, why is it that some cities in Southeast Asia are historically more motorbike-centric? Where does this culture come from in the first place? Is it a planning issue or is it a social economic thing?
Hue-Tam
when you think about the history of mobility, I consider that Vietnam reached motorbike peak when the highest level of motorbike dependence are in the mid 2015s. This is when 90 % of all residents had at least all households at least one motorbike. 83 % of all trips were made by motorbike. Maybe I’m biased because that’s like still today the latest and only really decent transportation survey that we work with. Since then, we don’t really know. We never really know how many motorbikes are in use. You know, we know how many are registered. We know how many are sold. We don’t know how many are actually on the streets because people might have a motorbike and not use it all the time. But anyway, Vietnamese cities assuming that that’s the case, reached motorbike peak in the mid 2010s. I’ve been traveling to Vietnam as a child, returning to Vietnam to visit family, relatives and so on since the early 1990s.
There were very few motorbikes. My grandfather had a motorbike, but he was a privileged man in that way. most people were riding a bicycle at the time. It was already true that people, if they can avoid walking, because you know, the climate is such that you would rather have a little bit of assistance, but if they could avoid walking, they would prefer having a bicycle. But Vietnamese cities were very bicycle-centric.
The transition from bicycles to motorbike was a matter of economic development, purchase power, able to purchase a motorbike, was being able to purchase a little bit of extra comfort. And you don’t have to pedal anymore. You go further away, a little bit more assistance, right, in your mobility. And the motorbike was kind of an organic… I won’t say natural, there’s nothing evolutionary in this, but it was an obvious gain in comfort from the bicycle. wasn’t a big change. In fact, the biggest change was in terms of air quality and noise pollution as well, because all the constant honking that’s characteristic of Vietnamese cities, it’s very much associated with its motorbike-centric identity. But in terms of like, when you think about the other externalities of transportation, in terms of safety, yeah, motorbike traffic increased traffic injuries and traffic fatalities. But an accident between two motorbikes was definitely closer in terms of how dangerous it is for the users. It was closer to a crash between two bicycles. When you add to that so many cars and so many trucks on the roads, this is when motorbike traffic becomes associated with really bad accidents.
And it’s terrible to see in the news, you know, like how you have reports of statistics and saying, every time there’s a deadly crash on the streets of Vietnamese cities, a motorbike is involved, like suggesting that the blame is on the motorbike. But what’s not written is that every time there’s a motorbike user that happens to be in a deadly crash, they most likely we’re hit by a car or a truck, you know? So that’s like, yeah, that’s how the transition I would say happened and these are the liabilities of that transition.
Dao Nguyen
Yeah, I just want to add on that because I’m a Vietnamese. for me, like even though like I have a car I also think that like many people are like me that they actually prefer to use motorbike if it’s like a very short distance because it’s pretty easy to travel like between different small alleys in like Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh cities compared to car. But at the same time, think that right now the air pollution in Hanoi, it’s pretty bad. It’s like one of the top most polluted cities in the world. So that’s why people have been switching to cars because they’re aware of the fact that if they use cars to commute, that it will be better on their health compared to using motorbike to travel. it’s also kind of like a symbol of wealth. If you are like middle class, upper class, then you will want to like purchase cars and use car instead of using motorbike. And then like for several occasion when you come to like a business meeting or something like that, you just need to like bring like a car key and then somehow it can define your social status or something like that. So it’s really interesting.
Okay, so we have been talking about the life of ordinary people and transportation and mobility definitely have been affecting the life of people and especially I want to zoom in and also focus more on young people. So currently like in Southeast Asia, we have like over like 200 million people, which account for like think one third of the whole population.
And we had asked young people in the first part of the episode about the challenges and the status quo of mobility in their cities. And we realized that different cities have different transportation system. So my question, I think you already touched upon it a little bit, but here I want to dig deeper. How do different types of transportation, create unique opportunities or challenges for, like, people living in the city, also the street vendors in cities like Vietnam or like Manila or Jakarta.
Hue-Tam
I thank you, Dao, for sharing your experiences, you know, and your perspectives from living in Vietnam as a young person yourself. I recognise in like several things that you said already in this episode, different aspects of the experience of the young people that I’ve talked about. And one of them is, you know, perfect segue with what you just mentioned about you yourself, you know having options like when you’re in Vietnam It sounds like you do have the option of riding your motorbike when maybe you find it more enjoyable or more convenient or using a car if you know that’s more appropriate in certain context that’s something going back to young Vietnamese people’s transportation habits, that’s something that I think is characteristic of that generation – like how multimodal and how comfortable the young generation is with switching between modes and moving away from a model, you know, either as a society or as an individual, as a household, moving away from this notion of dependence on one mode.
I feel like young Vietnamese people and I would say young people in general around the world like probably definitely even more in Asia, the young generation being so comfortable with the phone, with apps, with on-demand mobility and with seeking different experiences too, you know, being very comfortable with this idea that I have a range of activities throughout my day. I want to exercise. I want to visit my friends. I want to hang out in certain places, enjoy different experiences. I also have all of these other things I’m supposed to do, maybe going to school, maybe going to work, maybe taking care of my relatives. And I might be using a different transportation mode for each of these activities throughout the day. I feel like the young generation is quite comfortable with that. I will go for a ride and maybe have like, I will return to the bicycle. know, the bicycle has basically disappeared from Vietnamese streets as a transportation mode. But since recently it’s kind of reappeared as an exercising mode and young people will be the ones, know, like going back to the bicycle and be like, well, it’s actually a cool way of experiencing the city and exercising early in the morning. It doesn’t mean that I’m gonna… ride my bike all the time or depend on my bike in any way. But you know, like this idea of being very multimodal, think it’s young people are promoting that and I would definitely encourage other generations to imitate them because in terms again of mobility, of accessibility and of participation in urban life, I think there’s an opportunity in being multimodal, there’s an opportunity of being able to do it all.
Dunya
And would you say that’s going to become more common in other Southeast Asian cities as well, where the future of transportation and mobility is going to become multi-modal and not just be led by infrastructure anymore, but by the people themselves as well?
Hue-Tam
If I may add one thing, so definitely I think this point extends to other contexts as well. I want to add also that from, you know, the other side of the picture, the street life, perspective, I feel like the young generation is also more likely to recognize the cultural value of being different, the cultural value of the motorbike culture.
That’s something that, you know, even if you think about like some young people who can afford to choose a motorbike, a model, like, you know, think about the success of the Honda Cub. Like it’s this vintage motorbike that’s now like becoming quite popular. Or like, you know, the design of like those electric motorbikes that kind of resemble older vintage motorbikes. Like there’s like a certain style associated with it.
That to me speaks to a certain recognition driven by the younger generation that the motorbike culture is a cultural aspect of Vietnamese cities. And similarly with the street vending culture, the street vending culture by older generations and by policy circles has been for the longest time targeted as a sign of underdevelopment where I now see the younger generation including the young people from the middle class or upper middle class recognizing that there is something really unique and very cultural that is being cherished. Another point that I want to make is that the young generation, just like many, like you said Dao, young people represent a large share of the population and a population that’s quite vulnerable to unemployment. And small businesses, formal and informal together. Small businesses have forever in emerging economy been a core factor in the resilience of this economy. And now I do have testimonies of young people struggling to find jobs and themselves going to this different way, right? opening like some fancy coffee shop that has some online presence on some app, but also using the same tactics as the street vendors having a stall right next to the flow, enjoying productive friction, but connecting both that digital space and that physical space in that way. That’s something that I see young people doing either as a cool project, or sometimes as a way of, getting some work.
Dao Nguyen
Yeah, I just want to add on that because my latest research also deal with why the question of like, why bike become more popular in the recent years, simply because like previously, like, if you trace back to like 15 years, only 10 years ago. bike is often associated with like the lower class because like normally the middle class and above they have car or motorbike. But lately, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, people have been increasingly using bicycle to buy around the city or buy around the big lake. And then the mayor offices in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, they have been promoting the use of the uses of bike sharing in some central district of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City called Tien Go or the Tien Go in Vietnamese. And then with like… the application on your mobile phone, you can easily use e-bike or bicycle. So they have two types of both e-bike and bicycle to travel around the city. And you just need to park the bike in the parking station, which are often like set up next to the bus or metro station. And then definitely like other young people in our first part also mentioned about the importance of e-bike and bike sharing or car-free days in their cities to reduce the traffic jam, also the pollution in their city. So in the same vein, as cities become more tech-driven, how can we use innovation to make urban spaces more accessible to everyone, including those who may not really have easy access to private vehicles like cars or even like smartphones?
Hue-Tam
That’s a really good question. When it comes to T &GO and the bike sharing system as they being implemented today, my observation, correct me if I’m wrong, but my observation is that for now, they are not really used as a transportation mode. They more used during weekends or by tourists. They are more used as a recreational mode. Like you’re going to go for a ride and they’re quite expensive, in fact.
But the idea of using, of promoting their use as a first, last mile option, definitely providing options to park and to pick up a bicycle, an electric one maybe, buy a transit station, all of that makes a lot of sense. I would say that when it comes to making different modes, accessible to everyone. there’s like this question of infrastructure and transportation networks, right? Like people might be more willing to use TN GO or even use their own bicycle as a transportation mode if it were comfortable to ride a bicycle around town. Right now, given how you know, how traffic is changing. In bigger cities, cars are not dominant yet in terms of numbers, but in terms of the space that they occupy, in a lot of situations, it feels like there are more cars than motorbikes on the road, right? Like in terms of the space that they use. we’re approaching a situation where moving around Vietnamese cities is, the large ones at least, is uncomfortable for everyone. The sidewalks are so crowded with parked motorbikes that it is really difficult to walk around. It’s not smooth. Driving your car around is really difficult. And the more cars that you have on the streets, the less convenient the motorbike becomes. And we talked about how it becomes also more and more dangerous to ride one. We’re approaching a situation where it’s going to become really uncomfortable for everyone.
I’m not a big fan of flow separation, especially in a context like large Vietnamese cities where you have very scarce road space. I don’t think we’ll ever reach a point where we can have a bike lane, a motorbike lane, and a car lane, and a clear sidewalk where everyone can move around, you know, smoothly, and plus have sidewalk space for all of the places for people to eat out and so on. But there’s definitely a need to really embrace that the Vietnamese sidewalk, there is a sidewalk culture. My former colleague Annette Kim wrote a book about sidewalks in Ho Chi Minh City. There is a very specific sidewalk culture and also a need for a very specific, a unique way of approaching the organization of road spaces, including sidewalks in Vietnamese cities. It has to be just like organically, the way the sidewalk life has developed, for a foreigner who comes in for the first time, it looks like a complete mess. For someone who’s used to that context, you just have to look really closely and it’s actually extremely organized. It’s actually really neat. When you have someone in charge of parking motorbikes on the sidewalks, they are like sardines in a can, right? They are super tight and super neat and they’re like, they are… measures taken to make sure that it doesn’t encroach more than a certain extent, to leave a little bit of a path for pedestrians at least. But organically, sidewalk management is extremely, it’s at the very minute scale. And that is at this scale that planning has to occur. We cannot be adopting broad plans of like, between, year X and year Z, we’re gonna go from 8 % road space in the city, like space for transportation, and move to 12, you know, and increase parking by X percent in every district. Like there’s just no way we can have those broad brush transportation policy. I think design has a really big role to play in making room for everyone and making sure to accommodate all of these uses, you know. My recommendation has been, and that’s work that I’m continuing to flesh out, but my recommendation has been to think about our transportation systems in terms of levels of friction, levels of productive friction. Like we don’t want a high level of friction everywhere because this means unproductive friction. This means discomfort for everyone. We do want a certain network that flows where car traffic can flow, but maybe we don’t want the cars to go everywhere, you know?
Vietnamese policy makers have been approaching low emission zones. This is basically the new term to talk about what before was talked about as, you know, plans to ban motorbikes in certain districts. Now we use the term low emission zones, which is more positive. But in a sense, these plans are to make rooms to exclusive ways of like, you know, excluding certain spaces from motorbike users to leave room to either cars only, or cars primarily, or pedestrians only during certain times. That’s not compatible with how the city works. The city works with mingling all of this, but it requires some minute organization by, you know, what I would say, ideally, by levels of friction so that everyone has at least a network that works as a network, not just an island when you can move around, comfortably using either mode but everyone should have a network where they can travel the city rather comfortably.
Dao Nguyen
Awesome. That naturally led to the last question that I wanted to ask you. So actually this is the question that my fellow dudes in the first part asked me to ask you because they believe that involving also engaging communities in planning and educating the public will for sure ensure the inclusive and sustainable transportation solutions. And this approach also foster public trust and also encourages the adoption of new system. So as a professor and also an educator, in what way do you think that we can engage local community, particularly young people, in transportation planning and also education to make the city more sustainable and safe for everyone?
Hue-Tam
I mean, when it comes to public participation of underrepresented publics, mean, across contexts, right? What is most needed is to listen to their experiences, like how their voices represented and their experiences represented. In my research in very different contexts, I’ve been, I did work with, kids walking to school, know, and having them talk about their experience of the city, the way they see it, the way they interact with it, is just very different because they are, you know, they are lower, they they have a very different, they are attuned to different things, they have very different experiences and that is true of every social group, you know, young, old, rich, poor. Men, women, you have like very different experiences of the city, the same city will be a very different space depending on who you are and your own challenges, So those different perspectives need to be listened to at the very least, you know, they need to be reported. And I guess researchers have a role to play in gathering these insights, but then making the bridge between research and practice, that bridge is still weak in Vietnam. That is true in other contexts as well. In terms of public participation, culturally, the public does not really participate in the planning of Vietnamese cities, because that’s how the system works.
I would say without proper opportunities for input in the planning process, at the very least, I feel like I would like to encourage young people to at least embrace their way of life and see it as valid. We talked about being multimodal as maybe being in terms of your personal behaviors. I would say that that is the future of mobility. If you want good mobility, equitable accessibility and sustainability at once, in a large megacity, know, megacities cannot become Copenhagen, it cannot become this super livable, sustainable city where everyone moves around by bicycle. Now it’s just not possible. Distances are too long. The only way to get to the best compromise between all of these different goals that we want to achieve in transportation is to be multimodal. In the megacity, that’s the only option. We talked about the fact that young people are the most likely to embrace. That’s kind of what they want, I think. That’s what they do and that’s what they want, provided that the infrastructure makes it possible to live this way. The force of the numbers, right? The young generation is the largest regeneration. So if the multimodal generation is the largest transportation demand, hopefully, you know, policy, transportation policies might make efforts to meet that demand. I would say what I observe in Vietnamese cities is in many ways going in the right direction. There are efforts made to improve the pedestrian conditions in certain areas by the riverbanks, by the canals, by the lakes, in the nice parts of the cities. There are efforts being made, like we talked about T &GO, we talked about, and then there are all of these new options, like all of the app-based on-demand mobility and so on. embracing all of that and making it a model and claiming it as a legitimate way of life, maybe as a new model of urbanism. That’s what I’ve been saying again and again. think Vietnamese cities have an opportunity to shape what postmodern transportation looks like, you know, and aiming for modern transportation made of cars and transit mostly or only. That’s not what postmodernism is like. That’s not what the future looks like. This is from the past already. You know, this is a model of the past. So shooting for something different and for young people to embrace it and implement it in their day-to-day life, I think that’s the best thing that they can do.
Dao Nguyen
Awesome. So that is also what we have been working on at YUSEA to promote meaningful youth engagement in academia policy and also city making process. So that also concludes our conversation today. So thank you, Professor Hue-Tamme for the fruitful discussion. Thank you, Dunya, our podcast manager who is also here with us. And in today’s episode, we have discussed mobility and transportation in Southeast Asia with young people, also with our expert professor.
And the episode offers diverse and unique insights about mobility transitions, which can spark significant changes in people’s lives and how we young people can leverage our voices, action, and text savvy nature to contribute to a more sustainable and inclusive planning in the future. I enjoyed the conversation a lot and I hope that our audience will feel the same when they listen to this episode.
We hope to welcome you again, Professor Hue-Tam, at our other events and activities at YUSEA. Thank you so much and goodbye everyone.
Hue-Tam
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Hosts: Dao Nguyen, Dünya Gürses
Research: Dao Nguyen, Dünya Gürses
Production: John Warren Tamor
Post-production: Joshua Vargas
Communications: Joshua Vargas, Dünya Gürses, Dao Nguyen
Music: Joshua Vargas
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