Suchergebnisse

Review of AbdouMaliq Simone, Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019; 120 pp. 9781509523368

Following Doi moi, Vietnam's economy experienced unprecedented growth and urbanization accelerated. Vietnamese cities were expanding at a staggering speed. Master-planned developments, called New Urban areas (NUAs) have been promoted in the past fifteen years as the model for urban development in post-reform Vietnam (Government of Vietnam 1999; Government of Vietnam 2006). The majority of NUAs are self-contained enclaves that cover vast areas of a few hundred hectares built on green field land at the city's periphery. These grandiose developments are corporate-invested, profit-driven developments that explicitly target the middle and upper income groups in the population. The explosion of these developments has greatly transformed the peri-urban landscapes of many Vietnamese cities.Considering that these developments are actively promoted by the state of Vietnam as a recipe for modernization of Vietnamese cities, also as a means to regain state control over urban development, the case may be more complex. The role of the state and its social engineering endeavours in the name of modernization and progress need to be examined.This chapter intends to examine Vietnam's urban policies and the development of NUAs in the light of modernization discourse, a modernist ethic and symbolism. The chapter explores the rationale behind NUA development by local governments, corporate actors, as well as residents. It intends to provide a contextualized interpretation of master-planned developments in Vietnam to understand the complex path-dependent transitional trajectory of Vietnam's post-reform urban development. The chapter is based on an analysis of NUA developments in Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam. It includes a study of Vietnam's post-reform urban policies, of promotion materials of Hanoi's NUAs and case studies of four NUAs in Hanoi. The case studies' materials comprise planning documents, inventories of the built environment, use of space, structured interviews with residents and with representatives from the areas' management boards.

This paper presents selected findings from the project 'Privatisation of public housingin Hanoi, the impacts on housing quality and social equality' which was financed by the SwedishInternational Development Authority (SIDA). The project analyses the consequences of privatisationon the housing conditions of those tenants and owners who live in privatised and partly privatisedmulti-family apartment buildings. This paper focuses on the consequences of privatisation on thehousing and living conditions of tenants compared to those of owners, and presents findings. Thepaper concludes that privatisation actually helps to strengthen the existing inequity betweendifferent social groups, in the sense that the privatisation policy supports senior governmentofficials, many of whom are well situated both financially and socially, and ignores poor and lowincomehouseholds. Privatisation also contributes to enhancing the inequality between better-offhousing areas and poorer ones. Mixed ownership, and the lack of regulations about the duties andrights of owners and tenants after privatisation, also lead to serious degradation of common areas inall residential blocks.

"Informal" constructions in Hanoi is commonplace, not just in terms of its extensiveness but also how such extensions been done creatively. Most importantly they refer to a wide range of housing forms and scales: from illegal extentions of balcony and roof-tops to the extra legal apartment hotels in the Ancient quarter, from the single middle class family houses to large scale master planned new urban areas. What is being "illegal" and "authorised" is oftentimes blurry or shifty as regulations are ambigous and conflicting and in constant change. The distinction between practices of resistance (by the residents/entrepreneurs) and complicity (by local government officials) is not always clear. This paper will examine such phenomenon by examining cases of informal/illegal construction covered in the media, studies of the changes and adjustments of building regulations, as well as in-depth interviews with local officials, construction entrepreneurs as well as the residents. Analysing the fluid and negotiating character of state society relationship in the transitional Vietnam, the paper highlights the role of the state and local government in maintaining and reproducing the regime of informality as a means to wield power and exercise of control.

Vietnam has emerged recently as one of the fastest growing economies and widely be perceived as the next transition tiger. State capacity, which is believed to be pivotal to the success of the NIC, is under scrutiny in Vietnam. This paper attempts to examine state capacity of Vietnam in the institutional, political, administrative and technical aspects employing examples in urban and housing development. This paper argues that despite the permeation of state machinery into every levels of society and creates an outlook of a strong socialist party state, state capacity in Vietnam is in fact rather weak. Although the country is striving hard in strengthen its capacity in various areas, such reforms are either yet to take root or being dragged by legacy of the old regime. The unique state-society relationship in Vietnam also shapes the trajectories of adaptation of state capacity in the course of rapidly changing economic and social environment. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

The housing sector in Vietnam follows a 'gradualist' approach of transforming from asocialist system in which the state assumed effective control to a market-oriented system that thelaws of supply and demand rule. Yet the long and winding transition within such a dual systemproduces inevitable contradictions between the state and the market as well as between the economicand the political institutions. This paper explores the dynamics of such interactions andcontradictions in Vietnam's transforming housing system, employing Hanoi as a case study.The paper analyses the functioning and teething problems of the new housing market as well asthe resurgence of the role of the state in solving the contradictions in the reform process.