ABSTRACT
Urban space is central to the rich and still largely unexplored corpus of creative works produced by younger generations of Vietnamese and Algerians raised in France. As sites of creativity and loss, desire and decadence, perceptions of urban space in cultural productions by members of France's Vietnamese community echo many older themes from the French imperial past. Comparing the treatment of urban space by Vietnamese and Algerian cultural actors, however, we discover important conceptual differences based on divergent imperial legacies. Very different socioeconomic profiles, housing experiences, wars of decolonization, and stereotypes from the imperial era are key determinants that influence dissimilar visions of urban space.
