-
Phú Mỹ HӇng and the Contradictions of the Urban Media Ecology
- The Global South
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 9, Number 2, Fall 2015
- pp. 60-84
- 10.2979/globalsouth.9.2.04
- Article
- Additional Information
The Vietnamese edge city of Phú Mỹ Hưng has captivated the attention of global investors and local residents as a master-planned utopia and escape from urban chaos. This article takes up Phú Mỹ Hưng as a construct that can reveal greater trends in state and private developments. Through an analysis of the city’s diverse media ecology, including a horror film, websites, press releases, and online forums, I interrogate the politics of spatial equity alluded to by these various media. The readings of digital, visual, and linguistic rhetorics and their gaps reveal contradicting narratives that refract the strictly managed image of the edge city. Across this distributed transmedia assemblage, Phú Mỹ Hưng emerges as a consolidation of disparate flows of transnational capital, ideologies, and laboring and consuming bodies marked by their nationalities, classes, and otherness.