Tacit Cultural Contexts: Branding Smart Cities

The paper presents a research project embedded within the urban fabric of District 4, and how this may inform the process of branding Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) as a smart city. It asks the question: 'Can an archive of creative observation develop a city image that embraces the nuances of urban life, that in turn develop a smart city strategy that is inclusive, not imposed?' The debate surrounding the implementation of a branding strategy for the city has much in common with the debate surrounding the implementation of a smart city. The paper presents a research project that records the 'ordinary city' through a process of creative observation. The paper argues that this process of observation not only records the ordinary city but should be the genesis of developing the branding of a smart city. The research project is an ongoing investigation and exploration of the hems in wards 14 & 15 of District 4 in HCMC. The project has focused on the role of creative observation, as a way of developing lenses with which to visually encode these spaces two they can be seen through the contexts of Event, Space, and Movement, as defined by the Architect Bernard Tschumi (Tschumi, 1994). The first process of observation focuses upon the experiential and recording of the hems. The second employs a designed set of lenses that create unique visualisations which present differing qualities of the space, from the ephemeral to the concrete - these visualisations, generated through a process that reconfigures the 'ordinary' to provoke questions around event, space, and movement within the confines of the location of the study. Finally, the research is being archived by RMIT Vietnam library, as a publicly accessible resource, and this forms the third phase of observation which is through the potential of public engagement with the research, either through accessing the material or even contributing to the archive with new material. The production of the material offers the potential t