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 million people, 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 foreign business investment. The city continues to undergo rapid transformation, with a new underground metro line and plans for a new airport, 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 the first 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 his home 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.

SUP is hosted by Ian Nazareth, Graham Crist and Christine Phillips.  

This podcast is produced with support from the Alastair Swayn Foundation and the RMIT University School of Architecture & Urban Design.

We acknowledge the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups on whose unceded Country we are recording this podcast.