Suchergebnisse

Chronology -- Introduction -- The Early Urban Transition (1920-40) -- Uneven Socialist Revolutions (1940-65) -- Eating by Points and Coupons Is Not Enough (1965-80) -- The New Urban Territorial Order (1980-2010) -- Land for Fresh Ghosts, Land for Dry Ghosts -- Conclusion.

This article explores the role of media-led dissent in Vietnam's contemporary land struggles. The analysis focuses on Vietnamese-language material published online by domestic and foreign media about the so-called Văn Giang incident - a high-profile land dispute that shook the country between 2009 and 2012. Looking at how the media treated this incident broadens studies of land struggles in Vietnam, which up till now have focused on peasants' resistance strategies. This case not only shows that media practitioners engage in dissent with regard to land politics, but also that they engage in more straightforward criticism of the state and its corporate redevelopment partners than what most analyses of rural land struggles in Vietnam, centered on the micro-level and on "lawful" (O'Brien) forms of resistance, would lead one to believe. Illustrating this point, the author shows that media dissent throughout the Văn Giang land dispute openly challenged the government's justificatory discourse about "displacement for development" as well as the mismanagement of land resources on which political and economic elites rely to dispossess peasants from peri-urban lands. If it has not yet provoked major institutional changes, the media's contribution to land struggles has nevertheless succeeded in creating a genuine, national public debate on land politics in rapidly urbanizing Vietnam. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

The rise and spread of commercially built residential projects in East and Southeast Asia has attracted growing scholarly attention since the 1990s. This scholarship has notably explored how the private production of new residential developments has altered urban governance across the region. However, few studies have analyzed how private corporate actors' new roles in city-making processes shape governance logics at the neighborhood scale. This paper begins to fill the gap by exploring the governance dynamic of three new urban areas (NUAs) built on the edge of Hanoi in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Our analysis builds on a conceptualization of local state-linked organizations in East and Southeast Asia as "straddlers" Relying on interviews with local community leaders and homeowners, we find that the privatization of urban space production has not sidelined residents and government from micro-local politics in Hanoi. Instead, conflicts between homeowners and developers over land uses, property rights, and management practices and responsibilities have led to a repositioning of the old socialist neighborhood administrative apparatus to accommodate the governance of NUAs. The self-protection response of NUA homeowners during these conflicts played a key role in this process. By deploying what we call institutional straddling, these people forged a new mode of neighborhood governance that weaves together the neighborhood administration apparatus inherited from socialism and new residential property self-management bodies.

Starting in the 2000s, there has been a rise in youth-led appropriation of public spaces in Hanoi, Vietnam. Through case studies of skateboarders and traceurs (practitioners of parkour) in two of the city's formal public spaces, we explore and analyze the tactics deployed by these young urbanites to claim a part of the characteristically overcrowded and socio-politically restrictive public spaces of the Vietnamese capital. These case studies show that, by seeking to access public spaces for their new activities, skaters and traceurs have had to confront multiple sets of rules, imposed by not only the state, but also corporate actors and resident-driven surveillance. We find that skateboarders and traceurs deal with these forms of control largely through small-scale, non-ideological, and non-confrontational tactics. As a result, these youth practices have become normalized in Hanoi's public spaces. These findings broaden the discourses on everyday urbanism and social-political transformations in post-socialist urban contexts, and shed light on the ways in which contemporary youths engage with the city. (Pac Aff/GIGA)

Starting in the 1990s, the Vietnamese state sought to expand and modernise the country's urban system after four decades of anti-urban policies. This paper examines the reworking of the socialist land regime that followed from this shift. It begins by explaining how new legislation and institutions combined market and socialist principles to lure domestic enterprises into realising the state's new urban ambitions. It then shows how this hybrid reordering of policy triggered local experiments with periurban land redevelopment and new forms of alliances between the state and private capital. Using the case of the Land-for-Infrastructure mechanism, which uses land as in-kind payment for the building of infrastructure, it is found that this experiment undermines the implementing of official planning orientations and regulations. Finally, the paper explores the relationship between this problematic outcome and the political-economic environment within which recent land policy changes have been implemented in Vietnam.