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Following an “agency-oriented Urban Theory” as advanced by Smith (2001), this study takes the urban landscape of Vinh City in Central Vietnam as a starting point into an investigation of multiple visions of modernity (Eisenstadt, 2000) put forward by social actors, as well as into urban change resulting from the implementation of such visions. Focusing on the period from 1973 to 2011, it traces the application of three different visions for urban development in Vinh: The Socialist City, The Modern and Civilized City, and the Participatory City. Projects aiming at implementing these visions in Vinh that are presented in this study have one thing in common: they are informed by a specific view of what a city is and what it should be, and their implementation aims at changing the city in the desired direction. This goal involves not only physical change of the city, but also institutional change in the urban society. To grasp the interplay between visions of a modern city, their application through concrete projects, and the results of these implementations, the study operates with two specific terms: modern projects, and urban change. After introducing Vinh and its history, the thesis presents the period of the vision of The Socialist City and its application in Vinh through cooperation between Vietnam and the German Democratic Republic in the 1970s. It then moves on to contemporary period starting in the 1990s, during which varying and conflicting modern projects for the city were put forward by different social actors cooperating in joint projects on urban development: the Modern and Civilized City and the Participatory City. While the modes of cooperation differed between the two periods, the study concludes with the argument that the impact of these transnational projects has led to path-dependent, as well as ambivalent, urban change in Vinh.
After two decades of almost complete isolation, Cambodia was rather suddenly integrated in 1991 into the global ‘free world’. As a result, the function and the role of the administration had to be modified. These transformations in the name of modernization and development have led to a significant rise of professionals, as these provide the necessary knowledge to manage the ongoing socio-economic and political transformations. Due to their educational socialization in urban centers and overseas, they consider themselves the most modern section of their society. Their common objective is to make the organizations they work for less rigid and to reform them along lines of technical-pragmatic concepts. Especially for the professionals working within the Cambodian state, the movement towards more efficiency and effectiveness in the administration and the strengthening of the rule of law is seen as a means to increase credibility of the Government on one hand and to attract foreign investment on the other. However, due to their functional specialization and expertise, professionals in Cambodia are marginalized from the overall socio-political changes in their environment. This has led to the reduction of their possibilities to communicate and organize effectively. Instead, their knowledge is applied to serve the requirements of their organizations/ patron-client networks and not as a resource to form alliances on a national or on a transnational level. A potential exists though for the professionals working in the state administration to either form a strategic group through processes of hybridization, or to form a ‘neutral’ rational administration after the ceding of the ‘old guard’ and thus their ‘disentanglement’ from old clientele structures.