Flowing borders: border thinking, leisure, and the Saigon River

Urban rivers in pluriversal cities function as socio-political borderlands, not merely ecological infrastructures; where memory, leisure, and environmental change converge. Using decolonial border thinking, this study examines the Ho Chi Minh City’s Saigon River, a site inscribed with the rhetoric of modernity and logic of coloniality through layered histories of colonial occupation, postcolonial war, national reunification, socialist reconstruction, and neoliberal redevelopment. Drawing on 42 community narratives, it investigates everyday leisure practices, such as fishing, religious rituals, walking, attending festivals, and digital photography, as forms of epistemic delinking from modernist, productivity-driven ontologies, practices that shape belonging and resilience amid ecological uncertainty.Findings reveal three intertwined dynamics. First, the river operates as a relinked decolonial mnemonic landscape, where colonial and wartime histories persist as forms of mnemonic resistance. Second, leisure practices function as spiritual and mnemonic labour, negotiate class and belonging while relinking communities to the river's geo-bio-culture. Third, redevelopment and climate change position the river an ecological frontier, met by communities through negotiated agency and grassroots care.The article contributes to urban geography by theorizing rivers as socio-political borderlands, to critical leisure studies by highlighting leisure as a site of epistemic delinking, and to Southern urbanism by theorizing the Saigon River City as a space where border thinking generates pluriversal insights into urban survival and justice.