Saigon’s Unfinished Buildings
A photo-essay highlighting some of the abandoned projects that help shape Ho Chi Minh City’s unique and ever-changing urban landscape.
Ho Chi Minh City, the commercial and financial center of Vietnam, is a bustling, rapidly modernizing megacity. Still colloquially known as Saigon, its former name from prior to the reunification of the country in 1975, it is the largest city in a country that features one of the fastest growing economies on the planet, and is thus constantly undergoing massive changes to its landscape and infrastructure.
One of the side effects of the huge growth that the city has seen — the official population of the city proper has almost doubled in the last 20 years from about 5 million to nearly 9 million, but some estimates place the real population at over 12 million — is that some projects get left behind before they can be finished.
In some instances, overly ambitious ideas prove to be more costly than first expected. In other cases, investments suddenly dry up before construction can finish, or legal battles get tied up for years while half-finished projects sit exposed to the elements. None of these cases are necessarily exclusive to Vietnam or Ho Chi Minh City, but Vietnam’s unique political and economic framework, with…
