Publishing as an Urban Cultural Environment: The Print Ecosystem and Human Sustainability in Colonial Saigon-Cholon (1861-1939)

Background and objective: Contemporary scholarship often frames human sustainability as a policy goal or a set of modern indicators, while the historical conditions and long-term social processes through which foundational human capacities are formed, sustained, and reproduced remain underexamined. This article conceptualizes publishing as an urban cultural environment and examines how Saigon-Cholon’s print ecosystem functioned as a form of soft urban knowledge infrastructure—that is, everyday, non-coercive infrastructures organizing repeated encounters with knowledge—for sustaining human sustainability between 1861 and 1939.Methods: The study adopts a historical and interdisciplinary approach, triangulating contemporary newspapers and printed materials in quoc ngu (Romanized Vietnamese), French, and selected Chinese-language materials with colonial administrative and statistical records and relevant scholarship. Four analytically tractable indicators—literacy, access, inclusion, and resilience—are employed to trace how printed texts were produced, circulated, received, shared, and accumulated over time within urban social life.Results: The findings show that between 1861 and 1913, publishing evolved from an instrument of colonial governance into an emergent urban cultural environment through the establishment of printing infrastructure, the standardization of quoc ngu, and the diffusion of reading and writing practices beyond the colonial state and religious institutions. From 1914 to 1939, commercialization and politicization operated as mutually reinforcing processes that increased the scale and tempo of print circulation while deepening participation, thereby thickening the social reach of the print environment.Conclusion: The Saigon-Cholon case demonstrates that human sustainability can be analyzed as a historically traceable social process rather than a normative policy category. By organizing repeatable encounters with knowledge through everyday knowledge infrastructures, the print ecosystem contributed to the maintenance and reproduction of literacy, access, inclusion, and resilience under conditions of colonial rule and institutional constraint.