Land Politics And Livelihoods On The Margins Of Hanoi 1920 2010

In the late 1990s, planning authorities in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi pushed the imaginary line between city and country several kilometres westward, engulfing dozens of rural settlements. This book explores how one such village, Hoa Muc, rapidly transitioned into an urban neighbourhood, and the state regulations and early urban changes that drove this transformation. The compelling story of this single village is both a portrait of a population that has endured despite drastic upheavals and a new analytical window into Vietnam's ongoing urban transition.

In the late 1990s, planning authorities in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi pushed the imaginary line between city and country several kilometres westward, engulfing dozens of rural settlements. As state policies forced rapid urbanization, villagers whose families had farmed the land for generations saw rice fields levelled, irrigation canals filled, and large avenues flanked by residential towers, big-box stores, and office buildings spring up. Danielle Labbé considers a century of change to the settlement of Hoa Muc – a community that underwent a rapid transition from rural village to urban neighbourhood. Through extensive research in the community, Labbé studies not only the changing lives of villagers, but also the state regulations and territorialization projects that drove these changes on the outskirts of Hanoi, and the early urban changes in the decades that preceded the reforms and continue to influence the area’s urbanization. Despite the new buildings, the end of farming activities, and the arrival of a large new population, the former villagers still consider Hoa Muc their homeland. The compelling story of this single village is both a portrait of a population that has endured despite drastic upheavals and a new analytical window onto Vietnam’s ongoing urban transition.

This book explores the complex legal, cultural, economic and human rights issues associated with development-induced displacement and resettlement (DIDR) in Vietnam. As in many parts of the world, urban expansion and large-scale infrastructure projects in Vietnam often rely on forced land acquisition, which can result in the involuntary resettlement of households and entire communities. This book examines the adequacy of monetary and in-kind compensation and the support that resettlees need for successful integration into host communities and for sustainable livelihoods and improved well-being. It presents new paradigms and practices that place affected households at the centre of project planning and implementation to fully address the needs of the most vulnerable. This includes women, the elderly, and ethnic minority groups. Bringing together research evidence, practical experience, and insights of distinguished researchers, this book is the first to systematically examine DIDR in Vietnam, a single-party state seeking to balance state interests with the demands of investors and civil society for human rights and participation by affected people. Combining the latest evidence and research findings on development-induced displacement and resettlement in Vietnam with practical experiences in project implementation, this book will be a useful guide for researchers across development, migration, and Southeast Asian Studies, as well as practitioners and policy makers. Its lessons will also be relevant to other countries facing rapid development.

Most studies on urbanisation focus on the move of rural people to cities and the impact this has, both on the cities to which the people have moved, and on the rural communities they have left. This book, on the other hand, considers the impact on rural communities of the physical expansion of cities. Based on extensive original research over a long period in one settlement, a rural commune which over the course of the last two decades has become engulfed by Hanoi’s urban spread, the book explores what happens when village people become urbanites or city dwellers – when agriculture is abandoned, population density rises, the value of land increases, people have to make a living in the city, and the dynamics of family life, including gender relations, are profoundly altered. This book charts these developments over time, and sets urbanisation in Vietnam in the wider context of urbanisation in Southeast Asia and Asia more generally.

Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh’s mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh’s new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam’s first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.

The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Vietnam is a comprehensive resource exploring social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of Vietnam, one of contemporary Asia’s most dynamic but least understood countries. Following an introduction that highlights major changes that have unfolded in Vietnam over the past three decades, the volume is organized into four thematic parts: Politics and Society Economy and Society Social Life and Institutions Cultures in Motion Part I addresses key aspects of Vietnam’s politics, from the role of the Communist Party of Vietnam in shaping the country’s institutional evolution, to continuity and change in patterns of socio-political organization, political expression, state repression, diplomatic relations, and human rights. Part II assesses the transformation of Vietnam’s economy, addressing patterns of economic growth, investment and trade, the role of the state in the economy, and other economic aspects of social life. Parts III and IV examine developments across a variety of social and cultural fields through chapters on themes including welfare, inequality, social policy, urbanization, the environment and society, gender, ethnicity, the family, cuisine, art, mass media, and the politics of remembrance. Featuring 38 essays by leading Vietnam scholars from around the world, this book provides a cutting-edge analysis of Vietnam’s transformation and changing engagement with the world. It is an invaluable interdisciplinary reference work that will be of interest to students and academics of Southeast Asian studies, as well as policymakers, analysts, and anyone wishing to learn more about contemporary Vietnam.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Luxury and Rubble is the tale of two cities in Ho Chi Minh City. It is the story of two planned, mixed-use residential and commercial developments that are changing the face of Vietnam’s largest city. Since the early 1990s, such developments have been steadily reorganizing urban landscapes across the country. For many Vietnamese, they are a symbol of the country’s emergence into global modernity and of post-socialist economic reforms. However, they are also sites of great contestation, sparking land disputes and controversies over how to compensate evicted residents. In this penetrating ethnography, Erik Harms vividly portrays the human costs of urban reorganization as he explores the complex and sometimes contradictory experiences of individuals grappling with the forces of privatization in a socialist country.

The Making and Unmaking of Colonial Cities is a comparative study of architectural space in four (post-)colonial capitals: Belfast, Northern Ireland; Windhoek, Namibia; Bridgetown, Barbados; and Hanoi, Vietnam. Each chapter takes up one of these cities, outlining its history of building and urban planning under colonial rule and linking that history to its contemporary shape and scope. This genealogical information is drawn from primary source documents and archival materials. The chapters then look to local literary texts to better understand the lingering impact of colonial building practices on individuals living in (post-)colonial cities today. These texts often foreground the difficulty of moving through a city that can never feel comfortably one's own; legacies of racial segregation, buildings that disregard indigenous resources, and street names that serve as constant reminders of a history of oppression, for example, can produce feelings of anxiety, even of unbelonging, for native subjects. However, the literature also highlights ways in which the subversive wanderings of particular pedestrians--taking shortcuts, trespassing in forbidden places, diverting spaces from their intended uses--can contest 'official' topography. Bodies can therefore move against the power of a repressive regime, at least to some degree, even when that power is literally set in stone. Obert argues for the significance of these small gestures of reclamation, suggesting that we must counterpose the potential flexibility of lived space to the prohibitions of the map in order to more fully understand (post-)colonial power relations.