Affecting mobility: Consuming driving and driving consumption in Southeast Asian emerging markets

This article examines emergent consumption patterns in Vietnam’s shifting transportation market and then considers them within broader design and marketing infrastructures shaping emerging markets in the Southeast Asian region. First, I explore the strategies and histories of Vietnamese buyers and sellers participating in the transportation commodity market starting with the motorcycle and transitioning to the automobile, demonstrating how they are entangled with a range of practical, affective, and symbolic valuations. However, shifts in manufacturing and recent regional and international trade agreements mandating tariff reductions are delinking informal consumption and valuation practices while also reorienting material and temporal relations to the market. Moving from micro examinations of transportation user experiences to macro perspectives on market design, I discuss how a transnational transportation industry is anticipating and engaging new consumer publics in not only Vietnam but the Asia region more broadly through an exploration of affective notions of mobility, and in the process framing and projecting an emerging Asian cultural market infrastructure. I suggest that identifying collaborative opportunities for stakeholders in academia, industry, and policy to explore emergent issues of transportation and mobility preferences and developments in Asia may be a productive arena for further lateral learning and analytic insight