City Rhythms: Urban Mobility Relations in Ho Chi Minh City

Abstract

Moving beyond a rhythmanalysis approach to banal mobilities and diurnal journey making – commuting, visiting, shopping, leisure – this paper explores how place-dependent forms of transport shape the feel and flow of the city. Theorizing the city as polyrhythmic reveals multiple traces of local/global and past/present in the socio-historically situatedness of urban mobilities. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Ho Chi Minh City, I reconsider the dis/orderliness of different movements in the mega-urban postcolonial Global South. The paper's main arguments are arranged around the thick description of a scene in HCMC's everyday traffic flows as experienced from the curbside of one of the city's busy streets. I draw on concepts from avant guard musical composition to rethink the de-synchronization and disharmony of congested roads as polyrhythmic relations. Firstly, I deploy the concept of aleatory to offer an alternative explanation for unpredictable elements in metropolitan traffic flow. Secondly, I apply the concept of phasing, or syncing, to sensory experiences of roads to explore co-production of polyrhythmic relations. Thirdly, I reflect on isorhythmia and stochastic processes to analyze influences of models of digitization on repetition and randomness in mobilities.