Seeing Sapa: Reading a Transnational Marketplace in the Post-Socialist Cityscape












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            Ezra Rawitsch


            Abstract:
            Central and Eastern European post-socialist states have undergone profound political and e

            in the three decades since 1989. Although the dramatic transformations of the immediate po
            period were highly visible and widely documented, recent political and economic developmen
            to understanding the region’s contemporary conjuncture. The broad trend of moving away fro

            and toward an emergent authoritarian politics, both in the Visegrád states and elsewhere, 
            uncertainties regarding the rule of law, the civil rights of minority groups, and the stat

            rule. Meanwhile, the region’s increasingly globalised economies have variously embraced an
            economic influence, maintaining and cultivating trade and political linkages with the form
            ecumene” and in Southeast and East Asia, notably China and Vietnam.

            Amid these trends, novel forms of urban space locate and reveal a variety of perspectives 
            the post-socialist transition. Since its founding in 1999, Sapa marketplace, on the outski
            has become a focus of transnational trade networks and a cultural centre of the Vietnamese

            in Czechia. Czech scholars have emphasised Sapa as an important centre of Vietnamese-Czech
            the Czech Republic; I consider more expansively how Sapa can be conceptualised as a transn
            postsocialist urban space, and how legacies of migration and informal economic activity ha

            to its formation. I explore the material present of Sapa, which helps to locate, focus, an
            legacies of the socialist past and the dynamics of the post-socialist transition.


            Keywords: Sapa marketplace, urban space, transnationalism, post-socialist cities, Vietname

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