Bien Hoa
Vietnam's first industrial zone (1963) is being demolished because it poisoned the river that waters Ho Chi Minh City — autophagy at city scale, with remora-like attachment to successive host economies.
In 1963, South Vietnam built its first concentrated industrial zone on 376 hectares of land beside the Dong Nai River. Bien Hoa 1 became the template for every industrial park that followed — more than 400 across the country. Six decades later, the city is demolishing the original. The factories are being torn down not because they stopped working but because they started poisoning the river that supplies more than half of Ho Chi Minh City's drinking water.
This is autophagy — a city digesting its own founding tissue to fuel the next phase of growth. Bien Hoa is converting roughly 330 hectares of aging factory floor into urban-commercial space while positioning itself as the logistics gateway for Long Thanh International Airport, Vietnam's largest, rising roughly thirty kilometres to the east. The province surrounding it hosts more than 30 industrial parks spanning 12,000 hectares and has attracted billions of dollars in cumulative foreign investment from companies including Bosch, Nestle, and POSCO. The original zone is being consumed so the organism can grow.
Remoras attach to sharks, whales, and sea turtles in relationships that range from commensal to mildly parasitic — cleaning the host's skin and feeding on scraps, but also increasing drag and occasionally grazing on host tissue. Bien Hoa has played the same role for 350 years, attaching itself to whichever larger organism dominates the region: Chinese trading networks in the 1670s, French colonial administration, the American military-industrial complex, and now the Ho Chi Minh City mega-region of 18 million people.
The source-sink relationship with Ho Chi Minh City defines Bien Hoa's metabolism. The Dong Nai River flows from Bien Hoa toward the capital, supplying 57 to 62 per cent of its treated water. Factories that can no longer fit in Ho Chi Minh City relocate upstream to Dong Nai's industrial parks. Labour, capital, and goods flow in both directions along highway and rail corridors first laid for the 1963 zone — path dependence that has locked the region's economic geography for generations.
Meanwhile, the world's largest dioxin hotspot sits inside the city limits at Bien Hoa Air Base — 495,000 cubic metres of contaminated material, more than five times the 90,000 cubic metres removed from Da Nang. The base remains active military land, uncleaned and unusable, a reminder that not all of a city's tissue can be recycled.