Ho Chi Minh with Tu Truong and Triet Le

Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, is a metropolis of intense fascination. A city of close to 10 millionpeople, it has experienced explosive growth in the 21st century after emerging from a turbulent 20th century—under French colonial occupation as Indochina until 1954, and reunited with North Vietnam in 1975, when it was almost instantly renamed. Today it is a city with a famously intense street life, incredibly fine-grained density, and an increasingly favoured destination for international tourism and foreignbusiness investment. The city continues to undergo rapid transformation, with anew underground metro line and plans for a newairport, sea port, and several additional metro lines. In this episode, we are joined by two HCMC locals currently based in Melbourne. Tu Truong is an architect and urban designer, trained at the University of Architecture in Ho Chi Minh City, who has worked at the HCMC urban planning department and is currently researching the wet markets of Vietnam—visiting Australia for thefirst time as part of that research. Triet Le is an architect and director of the Vietnam-based practice 6A. He grew up in Saigon, completed his architectural education in Oregon, and now resides in Melbourne while carrying out PhD study and continuing to build works in hishome city. The episode draws on the book Supertight by Graham Crist and John Doyle, which took Ho Chi Minh City as a key subject—fascinated by the intimacy and looseness of its urban environment. Together, the conversation explores what makes this city so compelling: its layered colonial history, the fine-grained texture of its streets, and the ongoing tension between rapid modernisation and the enduring vitality of everyday urban life. Check out the references from this episode.