Ties that Mobilize: Migration, Native Place, and the Politics of Belonging in Urban Vietnam (2024)

Transnational Religious Spaces, 2020

The two coastal case studies of Haiphong and Nhatrang in Vietnam are different in scale of geographic extent and their socio-economic characteristics. Hai Phong is situated on the northeastern coast of Viet Nam, about 100 km east of Hanoi, the capital city. It is the third largest city in Viet Nam and possesses the largest seaport in the northern part of the country. It covers an area of 1.519 square km, including two island districts (Cat Hai and Bach Long Vi). Haiphong is located in the Red River Delta, with an average elevation of +0.7 m to +1.7 m above sea level. The city is located in the tropical climate zone with an annual average temperature of 24° Celsius, annual rainfall of 1600-1800 mm and average humidity of 85%. Migration and urbanization have become of major interests to the authorities of Hai Phong city recently. Like other provinces in Viet Nam, migration is associated with unemployment or inadequate jobs. Migration flows have tended mostly to be rural to urban. Acco...

Vietnam! Even the country’s name invokes strong and varied emotional reactions from many people. For some, it represents a beloved and lost homeland. For others, it is a place where loved ones were lost in a war that some believed in and others did not. For still others, it is a land finally free from colonial powers and outside influences. Vietnam’s place was once center stage in the global Cold War. Its name and history still sharply divide people in the United States, as shown by the 2004 presidential election. How can this slender S-shaped silver of a country play such an important role in the lives of so many? This is one of many questions that will be answered in this exploration of the people, places, past and culture of Vietnam.Although many westerners still imagine Vietnam through the lens of war, it is in reality a country filled with captivating natural beauty and tranquil village life. Its highlands and rainforest regions, far from being devastated, continue to yield new species and team with exotic wildlife. Its islands and beaches are among the finest in all of Southeast Asia, and its cuisine is very possibly the most delicious you will ever find. Over two decades have passed since Vietnam was officially united, and in that time it has done a remarkable job of healing its wounds. Today, this gracious and graceful country is an outstanding travel destination.Welcome to Vietnam in the twenty-first century! This is a country located in Southeast Asia on the perimeter of the Pacific Rim and bounded by Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Burma (Mynmar), and the gargantuan People’s Republic of China. It also is a country of numerous sharp contrasts. Physically, Vietnam is a land of spectacular mountains that tower over huge fertile river deltas.It has a long and troubled history of military conflicts, but it has existed in peace for more than two decades. It is rich in natural resources and beauty but is now confronted by environmental degradation that threatens the welfare of its people. It is a land governed by a Communist party, yet it has joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and seems to advocate a capitalist economy. Vietnam now unite politically, many sharp divisions between the northern and southern parts of the country remain. These are just a few of the contrasts that exist today in Vietnam.Despite these many contrasts, Vietnam is finally one country in name. The end of the Second Indochina War, usually called the “Vietnam War” in the United States, finally united Vietnam politically as one country. This event is especially significant to the Vietnamese people, who have been divided for much of their history. They also have frequently been governed by outsiders who have occupied their country. This common history has given the country many heroes and heroines who are still revered today.The flag, adopted on November 30, 1955, is red with a five-pointed yellow star in the center. The red stands for the blood that was lost in the struggle for independence. The star represents the country’s unity under the leadership of the Communist Party. The five points of the star are also symbolic: They represent the country’s workers, peasants, soldiers, students, and intellectuals.Today, Vietnam has become a land of opportunity for its people because of the strong ideological foundations of Nationalism implemented by their government to its bureaucracy. If you work hard, you can succeed, unlike in earlier times, when colonial or more restrictive Communist rule prevailed. Working hard can mean laboring for 10 to 12 hours or more in the fields or in factories that are often built and operated by financiers from outside the country. There are risks: Farmers face the problems of flooding or, seasonally, too little water; there are also agricultural pests, chronically low prices, and even dreaded viruses like avian flu. Urban dwellers may have factory jobs, but that may mean working in an unhealthy crowded environment. Life can be tough, but it is easier than it was during the times of war that dominated several decades of the twentieth century.Like its people, the country is reaching out for new opportunities. These include membership not only in ASEAN but also in other regional and global organizations. New trade opportunities are being created, and old enemies have become new friends and trading partners. Future political changes may help create, or possibly restrict, more opportunities – but most Vietnamese are optimistic about their future.With one of the few remaining Communist governments in the world, Vietnam has a bureaucracy that often hampers progress. Political rights are few and often restricted or controlled by the government. Little freedom of speech or press exists, and Vietnamese do not have the right to assemble. Can economic development proceed further with this political repression? Can a free market system operate under a Communist government? Can Vietnam curtail its population growth and improve the quality of life of its citizens? How lessons from history will guide the Vietnamese? How Nationalism helps the Government to uplift the lives of its people and its own progress? These are just a few of the questions that are addressed in this Literature Review. Your journey through Vietnam is about to begin.

In the peri-urban zones of many South East Asian cities, capital has flowed into the development of new, middle class urban enclaves. A significant body of scholarship sees these places as embodying some of the worst elements of American-style suburban, gated communities: sterile, disconnected from their surroundings, isolating wealthy people from the surrounding urban life, etc. While it is no doubt true that such a negative view is frequently warranted, through a closer examination of two projects in peri-urban Hanoi, the authors show that Vietnam's new urban enclaves can hardly be assimilated into the hermetically sealed enclaves described in much of the critical literature. The study cases from Hanoi reveal much more porosity: a strong influence of traditional modes of housing production and allocation, a mixing of built forms and the integration of the new enclaves into the surrounding communities.

Mobility in History, 2016

The 11th Engaging With Vietnam Conference CallVietnam in Europe, Europe in Vietnam: Identity, Transnationality and Mobility of People, Ideas and Practices across Time and Space15-16 July 2019, Leiden, the NetherlandsIn conjunction with The 11th International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 11) Conference 16-19 July 2019, Leiden, the Netherlandsengagingwithvietnam.org & engagingwithvietnamconference.orghttps://iias.asia/event/icas-11Engaging With Vietnam is very delighted to announce its 11th Engaging With Vietnam Conference (EWV 11), which is going to be held on 15-16 July 2019 in Leiden, the Netherlands, alongside the 11th International Convention of Asia Scholars Conference (ICAS 11) on 16-19 July 2019.

The Routledge Handbook of Informal Urbanization, 2019

Drawing on the informally developed housing sector in Hanoi, this chapter explores what it means to secure space in a post-reform communist city that has recently integrated with the global economy. The study sheds light on the means by which citizens have secured living space with relatively few constraints from the party-state. Building on discourses that highlight how political engagement works through multiple levels, as a continuity between various spheres of life, this chapter shows how ordinary citizens employ non-confrontational tactics in order to achieve their right to the city, and have succeeded in changing government legislations and practices, ultimately leading to a normalization of informal housing in Hanoi. The chapter concludes by situating how this case from post-reform Hanoi contributes to the understanding of emerging forms of political engagements in our global urban world.

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 2008

Southeast Asia is currently undergoing an accelerated and globally-driven urban transition. This process raises new social and political questions about the rise of civil society and the evolution of the “right to the city” (Lefebvre, 1968). This paper aims to address the contemporary mechanisms of urban change in Vietnam that can be seen through public spaces, at street level. With a very dense network of narrow neighbourhood lanes, street life culture is one of Ho Chi Minh City’s strongest features. But the ongoing urban renewal, with streets and alleyways (hẻm) widening projects, bring into question public spaces as a tool of social inclusion in an emerging metropolis. This process leads to a shift from multiple-use public spaces to single-use ones, from a neo-functionalist perspective. Such urban projects question not only the ways a city is shaped by its inhabitants, but also the effective role, power and voices of the various stakeholders. Using Michel de Certeau’s idea of “tactic” (De Certeau et al., 1990), the aim of this paper to analyze the everyday strategies used by the dwellers to impose their vision of the street in a transitional context.Based on an empirical and ethnographic approach, my research focuses on city dwellers’ urban practices in response to new conceptions and regulations of streets and alleys. My analysis is the product of several years of participatory observation and interviews in the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. First, I conducted 30 in-depth interviews both with representatives of the city’s authorities at different administrative levels and with local residents living along the city alleyways. I also conducted an extensive survey based on 120 qualitative questionnaires, both before and after the implementation of the alleys widening projects. This survey covers four neighbourhoods of the inner districts of Phu Nhuan, Binh Thanh, district 3 and district 6. My long stays in Ho Chi Minh City also allowed me to follow local debates about the evolution of street uses in the Vietnamese media.My observations and analysis contend that the streets of Ho Chi Minh City are “spaces of negotiation” at least as much as they are “spaces of control”. By altering the streets, by adapting them, the people are inviting themselves into the construction of the city. In that sense, streets constitute a relevant scale of analysis to propose a renewed approach to the urban transition in post-reform Vietnam.

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 2013

Central and Eastern European Migration Review 4(1):13-25, 2015

This paper examines the waves of migration between Vietnam and fraternal socialist countries in the Eastern bloc from the 1950s until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Arguing for a collectivist migration framework, it compares and contrasts the various generations of architecture student migrants, their multidirectional movements, and, for most, their repatriation to Vietnam. There is no single uniform narrative of socialist mobility. Each wave was driven by different war and postwar exigencies, and the groups of migrants who left Vietnam confronted a range of unique challenges related to such factors as location, gender and assignment overseas (i.e. student or worker). This paper has two objectives: first, to decentre the West from hegemonic discussions of Vietnamese diasporas in order to advance a broader understanding of the historical development of overseas Vietnamese communities in what are now post-socialist countries; and second, to complicate the story of Vietnamese migrants in Central and Eastern Europe by arguing that past socialist mobilities are constitutive of much capitalist-driven migration today. An examination of different socialist migration trajectories and experiences of living overseas across generations provides important insights into how socioeconomic and political changes that came about in Vietnam with the fall of the Berlin Wall shaped the personal lives and professional futures of returnees and their kin. It also serves to bring the study of socialist migration histories more deeply into the epistemological and methodological fold of contemporary Vietnamese studies.

Journal of Development Studies, 2014

This research is a pilot for a larger collaborative project on how local populations in Vietnam cope with the multiplicity of transformations and uncertainties associated with periurbanization and extreme climate events. In the context of institutional and political redefinition in Vietnam, this project aims to better understand how periurban local people and authorities cope with multiple rapid transformations affecting their everyday lives. More specifically, it looks at two interrelated major forces of change: urbanization (with a focus on land conversion) and extreme climate events (which may be aggravated by global climate change).

Cultural Anthropology, 2013

This article explores the engineering of affect in socialist urban design and subsequent changes in the affective register of a rapidly growing city in late socialist Vietnam. The setting is the north central city of Vinh, destroyed by aerial bombing during the American War and rebuilt with assistance from East Germany. A primary focus of urban reconstruction was Quang Trung public housing that provided modern, European-styleapartments and facilities for more than eight thousand residents left homeless from the war. Drawing from interviews, images, poems, and archival materials that document urban reconstruction, the article foregrounds the complex historical, ideological, social, and gendered meanings and sentiments attached to a particular construction material:bricks. It argues that bricks have figured prominently in radical and recurring urban transformations in Vinh, both in the creation and the destruction of urban spaces and architectural forms. As utopic objects of desire, bricks gave shape to an engaged politics of hope and belief in future betterment, as construction technologies once reserved for the elite were made available to the masses. In Quang Trung public housing, bricks harnessed political passions and utopian sentiments that over time, as Vinh’s urban identity shifted from a model socialist city to a regional center of commercial trade andindustry, came to signify unfulfilled promises of the socialist state and dystopic ruins that today stand in the way of capitalist redevelopment.

Geoforum 43 (6): 1088-1098

The changing nature of rural–urban migration, in the context of transition economies of East and Southeast Asia, is usually interpreted as an outcome of structural transformation, while the longue durée of these migration flows tends to be neglected. Adopting a historical perspective, supported by the ’migration as resistance’ approach, this paper examines the changes in rural–urban migration dynamics in Vietnam from the 1950s to 2010 in relation to the country’s political and economic reforms (Ðổi Mới). Drawing on a case study of female migration between Phu Khe and Hanoi, it analyses how migrants resist and undermine state control over population mobility in order to pursue their movement and migration, and how they develop their migration networks over time. By doing so, the paper highlights a gradual process of the changing nature of rural–urban migration in which migrants themselves, through their resistance to governance of mobility and their establishment of migration networks prior to Ðổi Mới, play an important role.► Critical reading of rural–urban migration in transition economies. ► Historical approach in migration studies. ► ‘Migration as resistance’ may provide a useful analytical tool for studying migration dynamics. ► The importance role of migrant agency and networks.

The meaning and values attached to space and place by different stakeholders in urban development have particular significance in Hanoi's transition from a 'socialist' urban centre to an increasingly neoliberal and unique hybrid of 'megacity'. This essay examines the implications of these changes and interpretations in terms of the livelihoods and wellbeing of Hanoi residents and examines the strategies and concepts that have developed out of this radical transformation. Keywords: Entrepreneurial Urban Governance, production of space, governmentality, discourses of legitimation, subaltern resistance.