“What I realized is that they have very little power,” Mr. Viet, 28, said of his fellow urban planners. “The fates of the buildings were being decided by someone else.”

[...] when Ho Chi Minh City’s property market perked up after a slump that followed the 2008 financial crisis, dozens of prewar buildings — spanning the colonial to modernist eras — were razed to make room for new ones. As the city’s modest skyline grows, residents are watching with a mixture of awe and trepidation. — nytimes.com

Colonialism found in the Modernist project a powerful and willing partner for the shaping of conquered territories in the southern hemisphere. Today, amid a new wave of colonial activity based on subtler and less easily identifiable strategies, little is done to understand its effects on the way people live and give form to their shelters. Neo-colonialism is an urgent issue but one which most of the profession is ill-prepared to interrogate. — Architectural Review

They would never discuss issues of repression or land grab directly. There is a certain pact of silence around the political dimension of architecture there. Schools of architecture depoliticise the profession, they put it very much within the domain of aesthetic experimentation — MIDDLE EAST MONITOR