Writings and Research

CLUSTER: SONIC STUDIES; NARROWNESS; PUBLIC CULTURE OF CITIES

THE CITY OTHERWISE

The City Otherwise is a curatorial and research-driven zine series. Emerging from long-term fieldwork and collaborations with local practitioners, it brings together interviews, observations, and collective reflections. The zine serves not only as a mode of dissemination but as a generative tool that actively shapes the research process. As such, it proposes a situated methodology for engaging with urban transformation and collective authorship— particularly in contexts where vernacular knowledge, cohabitation, and everyday practices are central to understanding, inhabiting, and negotiating space.

The name "The City Otherwise" suggests a reimagining or alternative reading of the urban landscape—one that challenges dominant perspectives, practices, or narratives. It's a way of asking: What if we understood, inhabited, or designed the city differently?
Presented as part of ResearchX: Mapping Future Heritages – Spatial Studies in Ho Chi Minh City during VNxSymposium, The City Otherwise contributes a process-driven perspective to the forum’s broader inquiry into spatial practices. Through themes of narrowness, memory, and observation, the first three issues reflect on how places are continuously made and remade—socially, politically, and culturally—across time and scale. In this context, the zine becomes a space for speculation and resistance, foregrounding small, situated practices as active agents in shaping the city’s evolving urban imaginaries and socio-spatial narratives.

CASC: CRAFTING A SONIC CITY

This zine attempts to integrate sonic qualities into the field of urban studies by reframing the concept of 'noise.' By bringing together practitioners and experts from various disciplines through interviews, workshops, and field recordings, it seeks to foster a dialogue between the sonic field and city-making.

Eng Version

Viet Version

REINTERPRETING NARROWNESS {in progress}

Reinterpreting Narrowness will collect the efforts of a community of 25 architects across Vietnam in reinterpreting the vernacular model of the tube house. The selected projects stand out for their significance in addressing contemporary urban challenges and pioneering a new architectural language while preserving a key feature of Vietnam's urban landscape. The book will also explore the importance of 'narrowness' as a critical component of the built environment and its role as a cultural phenomenon that has evolved alongside these spaces through the contributions of researchers and practitioners {PhD Andrew Stiff, PhD Matteo Aimini, Arch. Nguyễn Mạnh Tuấn, PhD Candidate Pham Vu Hoang Linh}.