South Viet Nam: The Urban Trend

From the air, Saigon appears to shimmer in the midday sunshine. The light dances off mile after mile of tin-roof shacks, and reflects from the waters of serpentine rivers. On the ground, unfortunately, the city has lost its glitter. Though it remained gracious and unhurried until four or five years ago, reports TIME Correspondent Marsh Clark, Saigon now suffers from the ills that afflict modern cities—and then some. No fewer than 894,000 vehicles, ranging from Lambrettas to lumbering trucks, jam the city's streets. Their fumes engulf Saigon in a noxious blue haze that is killing the city's stately tamarind trees. Sidewalks are crowded with vendors. Alleys are scenes of chaos, as dogs, children and chickens scurry amid garbage and rubble.

Row after row of shacks are built on stilts and often are constructed from sheets of rolled beer cans. One family lives with hundreds of Miller High Life emblems as the facade of its house, while a neighbor may prefer the hues of Pabst Blue Ribbon or Budweiser. Beneath many of these dwellings flow canals whose black waters reek of raw, pungent sewage. In the shacks, which have no electricity and little furniture, adults and children sleep side by side in a single room usually measuring no more than 8 ft. by 10 ft. Even so, they are lucky. Other residents of Saigon are forced to sleep on sidewalks, under bridges, or even in unused sewer pipes.

Ahead of Hong Kong. Saigon is bursting at the seams. Swelled by wave after wave of refugees and of peasants seeking prosperity from the war boom, South Viet Nam's capital has grown by 50%, to 2.2 million, since fighting was stepped up in 1964. Today it is by far the world's most densely populated city, with half again as many people in each square mile as in Hong Kong, the world's second most congested urban area. What has happened to Saigon is indicative of what is happening all over

South Viet Nam. The small nation of 18 million has experienced a migration to the cities unmatched in the history of Southeast Asia. During the past ten years. South Viet Nam has been transformed from a rural nation where 80% of the people lived on farms into a society where 40% to 50% are city dwellers. Other South Vietnamese cities have grown at an even faster rate than Saigon: since 1964, Cam Ranh has nearly quintupled to 85,000, Tarn Hiep has tripled to 62,000, and Danang has more than doubled to 400,000.

Experts disagree on the ultimate effects of the mass migration. Samuel P. Huntington, professor of government at Harvard, has argued that by accident the mass urban migration may turn out to be a great benefit for the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies. "In an absent-minded way, the U.S. in Viet Nam may well have stumbled upon the answer to 'wars of national liberation,' " he has written. Huntington's thesis: since the government controls the cities, the population shift has made the countryside much less important politically. As a result the Communists are finding it far harder than before to apply Mao Tse-tung's guerrilla strategy of using the rural areas to choke off and finally conquer the isolated and outmanned cities.