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Review
Building Little Saigon:
Refugee Urbanism in American Cities and Suburbs
Book by: Erica Allen-Kim | University of Texas Press, 2024

Review By: Min Kyung Lee

January 31, 2025

Erica Allen-Kim’s Building Little Saigon: Refugee Urbanism in American Cities and Suburbs studies how cities negotiate what is valued, built, and preserved with respect to their Vietnamese refugee communities. Forms and methods of placemaking under the relentless exigencies of capitalist development lie at the center of Allen-Kim’s concept of “refugee urbanism.” This term is not simply a reference to the status of exiles and arrivals from Vietnam during and after the war. It deals with the continual practices of claiming and shaping space—both near and far, both material and symbolic—under precarious conditions due to minority status, economic vulnerabilities, geographic dislocation, or political disenfranchisement. It encompasses both mundane and extraordinary acts: war memorials, storefronts evoking homelands, suburban developments with French colonial motifs, renamed street signs, and small shops selling reminders of Vietnam. Ultimately she asks: How can placemaking offer communal refuge amid diaspora?

The book is organized into five chapters based on different everyday building typologies and refugee and migrant stakeholders that outline varied modes of refugee urbanism. While each chapter takes place in a different US region or city, the focus on the practice of placemaking in Houston, Westminster (California), Chicago, and Southern California transcends the physical spaces of ethnic enclaves. Chinatowns feature as a central reference because of the long history of Chinese migration that preceded Vietnamese refugee settlement in the US, the geographic proximity and economic dependence of the Vietnamese to these ethnic neighborhoods, and how they served as a model for creating spatial identity in diaspora. While both may be considered ethnic enclaves, Allen-Kim argues that Little Saigons are marked by refugee origins and more overt political expressions tied to memories of the Vietnam War. Rather than sites that secure economic and cultural visibility through outward public relations, Little Saigons comparatively are often more politically charged spaces focused on memory practices. They serve as anchors for war refugees, providing spaces for businesses, cultural events, and social services, where economic activity is often tied to transnational networks and diaspora politics rather than tourism.

The first three chapters employ architectural-scale frameworks to interpret how communities are made and remade through processes of spatial negotiation. The first chapter, “Pagodas, Dive Bars, and Storefront Museums,” focuses on Vietnamese refugees’ integration into Chicago and how they created spaces for cultural expression. By describing the creation of a small community-driven Vietnam War museum, Allen-Kim locates a unique urban space of exchange and storytelling between American and Vietnamese War veterans, and where place- and memory-making are linked. This intimate process paralleled another more public one where the ethno-spatial identity of a “New Chinatown” was threatened by refugee-driven entrepreneurship. This “branding” conflict highlighted competing visions for the Argyle neighborhood: while Chinese leaders emphasized tourism and continuity, Southeast Asian refugees prioritized community building and political memory.

The second chapter, “The Social Life of Mini-Malls,” analyzes how Vietnamese refugees in Orange County in Southern California transformed suburban mini-malls into vibrant community spaces. Unlike typical American mini-malls, these spaces became social and cultural hubs. By hosting businesses like restaurants, grocery stores, and salons, the malls mirrored the thương xá (indoor markets) in Vietnam and created a familiar environment for refugees while adapting to American suburban life. The third chapter, “Memorials to a Never-Ending War,” discusses political expression in the war memorials and public spaces of Little Saigons. For example, in Westminster and Houston, Vietnamese communities built war memorials that honor South Vietnamese soldiers and assert anticommunist sentiments. They function not only to commemorate the past but also to symbolize the community’s ongoing connection to homeland and political identity. In contrast, Allen-Kim describes how Chinatowns generally emphasize cultural heritage and economic success with less overt political activism, so that their public image aligns with assimilation narratives and multiculturalism. Rather than capitalizing on foreignness to create a tourist experience within the American city, Little Saigons often act as political spaces where refugee identity and anticommunist sentiment are central. Her comparative analysis stresses the question of who the visitor is and how otherness is created and experienced.

The fourth and fifth chapters undertake a broader urbanistic framework, focusing on the developments of Little Saigon in Westminster and Houston. “Downtown Saigon USA” explores how local politicians and community leaders engaged with the Vietnamese diaspora to shape these urban spaces. In Westminster, Vietnamese American political leaders and community members collaborated to influence urban planning, ensuring that the area’s design reflected their cultural heritage through decorative motifs and façades. The last chapter, “Houston’s Little Saigon: The Architecture of Survival,” in contrast, examines the challenges Houston’s Little Saigon faced and the incremental tactics executed to preserve and recognize the Vietnamese community, with few material gains. Houston serves as a reminder that refugee urbanism is largely shaped through resistance and often forced to conform to symbolic expectations such as orientalizing façades and ornamentation that speak to a general public.

In these chapters, Allen-Kim outlines fundamental practices that define and structure refugee urbanism. First, how the physical built environment is a primary site for refugee communities to navigate issues of identity, citizenship, and belonging. Placemaking is often achieved by modifying existing structures, such as strip malls, mini-malls, and abandoned buildings, turning them into community hubs that mimic homeland spaces. Citing geographer Doreen Massey, these extralocal interventions into the urban fabric occur as an intended consequence rather than as an accident of globalization. Secondly, these small-scale actions undergird the refugees’ agency in shaping their new environments. Refuge is not a passive space but constitutes a continual practice of identity formation. Thus even while striving to survive the conditions of American capitalism, these refugee entrepreneurs did not deny their heritage but sought to imbue the physical landscape with vital cultural symbols and narratives of collective identity. Accordingly, these hyperlocal acts and site-specific interventions are linked to global communities through transnational communications and economies.

Thus refugee urbanism, and perhaps all migrant spaces, share this geographic feature of the globalized local, a central concept of the growing body of scholarship of migration histories of the built environment. Fusing theories and methods that originate from subaltern studies, microhistory, and visual ethnography, the intention is to understand how overlooked details, adjunct spaces, and minor actors can rewrite the dominant history of modern architecture. This methodology requires more than archival research, and Allen-Kim walks these interstitial urban spaces, conducts interviews, takes photographs, and compiles first-hand observations to create a counter-archive that includes the voices that often government and institutional archives filled with official permits, architects’ plans, and city meeting minutes cannot. Studies of “everyday urbanism” by Margaret Crawford, Chicago’s Devon Avenue by Arijit Sen, the “remittance house” by Sarah Lopez, the Mesopotälje in Stockholm by Jennifer Mack, and “small spaces” by Swati Chattopadhyay constitute the historiographic network in which Building Little Saigon is situated. There is also an emergent and significant body of literature that explicitly deals with the architecture of refugees in camps, detention centers, and conflict areas. While there are overlaps in methodology, Allen-Kim’s project is closer to the field of vernacular architecture that argues for the value of quotidian spaces.

In her conclusion, Allen-Kim poses this question: What is the purpose of a history of Little Saigons—Vietnamese ethnic enclaves that provide identity and belonging to refugees in the US? Drawing on Toni Morrison and Viet Thanh Nguyen to consider otherness in writing—”I will write about Vietnamese people, but as if I were the majority”—Allen-Kim extends Nguyen’s majority/minority framework to the built environment by outlining the placemaking practices by Vietnamese refugee communities for themselves and for others. In this sense, her most important intervention is to reveal how the Vietnamese diaspora shapes American everyday spaces. The purpose, then, is to write an urban history of refugee communities not from a defensive position but to reveal their enduring and wide-spanning effects on physical landscapes. When material traces are lost against dominant political forces and capitalist development, accounts such as this one inflect American urban history by pointing to hybrid cultural memories that undo any homogeneous understanding of both nation and urban space. Allen-Kim’s research provides both narrative refuge and resistance for the communities who make their homes in new lands, who contribute to the civic life and cosmopolitanism of our cities, and who have stories to share.


Min Kyung Lee is associate professor and chair of the Growth and Structure of Cities Department at Bryn Mawr College. Her current research addresses the Korean diaspora and its effects on the American built environment, examining the role of export goods such as wigs and plywood during the Cold War.

https://doi.org/10.35483/JAEOR.1.31.2025