Public spaces in an industrial town: what the Covid-19 lockdowns tell us about publicness and everyday urbanism in Vietnam

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Vietnamese cities, adhering to the central government’s mobility and social restriction policies, enacted regulations that curtailed access to and use of public spaces. In industrial towns, measures to create “COVID-free” environments led to even more stringent restrictions and surveillance in residential and work settings. In this article, we examine the changing perceptions and uses of public spaces among the residents of Dĩ An, an industrial town in southern Vietnam, and the impacts of these shifts on everyday life. We completed 15 Photovoice exercises and interviews with residents in 2022, as Vietnam’s lockdown measures were easing, and analyse these findings alongside insights from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the town since 2016. Drawing on a situated assemblage framework of publicness, we propose a typology of public spaces to explore the changes and diversity in social interactions within them. We show that residents’ conceptions of public and private spaces were open and flexible, rooted in socio-cultural norms and immediate needs. Although public spaces and their transformations during the COVID-19 lockdowns were constrained by the Vietnamese state’s authoritarian role in implementing new forms of socio-spatial surveillance, these forms of control varied, creating room for residents’ tactics and differentiated experiences. Discrimination and trauma, alongside resilience, shaped local experiences of public spaces during and after the pandemic. By highlighting how state-society relations, labor conditions, and socio-cultural structures shape the lived experience of urban spaces, our study contributes to a more grounded understanding of public space generation under conditions of crisis and constraint.