Vietnam

Urbanisation and population growth in Vietnam

Jackie (Johnny Cash)

Saigon has changed a lot since I was a child, especially over the last 20 years. When I was younger there were a lot of parks for children to play in. Like everyone in Saigon in that time I used to walk everywhere, I hadn’t even heard of a motorbike. Depending on the season I could hear birds or cicadas as the city was very quite.

Many of the changes in Saigon have been brought by foreigners. The Vespa motorbike arrived with the French, then Honda motorbikes from the Japanese. The Americans changed the layout and construction of the city, as they built bigger roads and some high buildings. I think the biggest change however, arrived with the tourists, from about 1996 to the present day. Before then there were very few restaurants and shops in Saigon, but now there are many.

One of the biggest changes to the city has been caused by the growth in the population. When I was 5 years old (1956) I think the population of Saigon was around one million, while at the end of the war in 1975 it was three and a half million. Today the population is estimated at 8 million. Many people have come from the Mekong region looking for work. Many are the sons and daughters of farmers who have been forced to look for work in the city as the farms are not big enough to provide income to support all of the offspring. Many of these people have migrated to the city illegally and do not have permits to work in the city.

With so many people migrating to the city, many problems have been created. For example, now I think there are over 3 million motorcycles. It’s very noisy in the city now. When I was younger the air was fresh, now there is a lot of pollution.

The canals of the city are very polluted with litter. The canals used to be very narrow and lined with trees. Now they are wide and are sometimes blocked because of the litter. The water from the canals flows into the Saigon River which is now black, polluted and smelly.

In the past, plastic waste did not exist and was not around to block the canals. For example, we would wrap our food in the banana leaf, make buckets from straw and drink directly from the coconut. We used to use this organic waste to make fertilizer. Now we all use plastic and we can’t re-use that as fertilizer.

Even with these changes, life for people in Saigon is definitely better now than before. When I was young I didn’t have anything. I didn’t have toys, good clothes, nor shoes. I had to eat plain rice everyday. Today children are stronger and healthier than before. We now have hospitals, medicine and education. Children receive free vaccinations against disease, provided by the government and they have fresh milk, not powdered milk. Life is definitely better today.