behind the Dongpalane

The study of the transformations in the shopping street of Dongpalane in Vientiane quickly led us to the forecasted disappearance of old villages and of the Nongchanh marsh, revealing the spatial and social organization of groups to ensure their survival. Faced with the fragmentation and the multiplication of constraints, and, in some way, with new control structures, it is through actions (desires) and reactions (resistances) that the pragmatic elaboration of new living spaces is achieved.

Within this context, it was essential to spot the various « shapes taken by scattered creation » (1). The field survey revealed singular spaces of the familiar, alternative exchange protocols, new forms of sociability and neighbourly relations, from which we tried to deduce the elaboration process in a geographic and historical perspective: assimilation, appropriation, recombining of endogenous and exogenous cultural models.

To understand what was going on required to consider the areas of the district and the city as a vast ecosystem. But the notion of ecosystem, once it is taken from its disciplinary field and applied to the Men and the Urban, can not anymore be merely defined as the base unit consisting of a biotope and a biocenosis. The amplification of the interactions and inter-dependences, positive or negative, between microscopic human practices and the ecosystem, the macroscopic support of their display, opens the latter to the principle of the three ecologies (2).

The Nong Chanh example, an aquatic anthropized area, far from the eyes of passers-by in the shopping street, is representative in this regard. Even though far from operating on their proper field, the inhabitants of the marsh however managed, in a context of shortage (of space, economic resources and individual freedom), to inject and develop their customs made of misappropriations and permanent adjustments on a territory considered as unfit for human settlement. This process led to the creation of a different district in the city, a singular layout of spaces and complementary practices, directly linked to the great Kuadinh market, but invisible from Dongpalane.

(1) Michel de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life, 1984.
(2) There are « … three ecological dimensions, environment, social relationships, and human subjectivity… » Félix GUATTARI, The three ecologies , 1989.