Urban destruction and land disputes in periurban hanoi during the late-socialist period

Pacific Affairs

Volumn 84, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 435-454

  Labbé, Danielle ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

Hanoi; Land politics; Periurban; Popular resistance; Vietnam

Indexed keywords

PERIURBAN AREA; POPULAR PROTEST; SOCIAL CONFLICT; TERRITORIALITY; URBANIZATION;

HANOI; VIET NAM;

EID: 80052780043     PISSN: 0030851X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5509/2011843435     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. The d{stroke}ôi mói (literally, renewal) refers to a set of reforms launched by the Vietnamese party- state starting in the 1980smisctext>, that have led to a greater reliance on market mechanisms and material incentives to producers, away from the tight central planning policies and highly ideological government discourse of the preceding decades.
2. Golf drives Hanoi farmers off their land, Thanh Niên, 18 August 2009, online, http://en.baomoi.com/Source/Bao-Thanh-Nien-English/113/p/408.epi, last accessed 25 October 2009.
3. Tran Thai, Fun or Food? Vietnam Economic Times (May 2008): 34-35.
4. Tran Dinh Thanh Lam, The great Vietnam land grab, InterPress Service, 10 August 2006.
5. Bill Hayton, Vietnam: Rising Dragon (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010), chapter 2.
6. Much of this scholarship develops on ideas epitomized in James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
7. Andrew Hardy, Rules and Resources: Negotiating the Household Registration System in Vietnam under Reform, SOJOURN 16, no. 2 (2001): 187-212.
8. David W.H. Koh, Wards of Hanoi (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006).
9. Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, The Power of Everyday Politics: How Vietnamese Peasants Transformed National Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
10. Notable exceptions include: Dara O'Rourke, Community-driven regulation: balancing development and the environment in Vietnam (Cambrige: MIT Press, 2004).
11. Hy Van Luong, The state, local associations and alternate civilities in rural northern Vietnam, in Civil Life, Globalization, and Political Change in Asia: organizing between family and state, ed. Robert P. Weller (London: Routledge, 2005).
12. Tran Thi&dot below.
13. Thu Trang, State-society relations and the diversity of peasant resistance in Viet Nam, in Agrarian Angst and Rural Resistance in Contemporary Southeast Asia, eds. Dominique Caouette and Sarah Turner (London: Routledge, 2009).
14. Kevin O'Brien, Rightful resistance, World Politics 49 (October 1996): 31-55.
15. Ban châp hành d{stroke}ang bô{below dot}Phuòng Trung Hoà [Administrative Board of the Party of Trung Hòa ward], Li{below dot}ch su cách ma{dot below}ng d{stroke}ang bô{dot below}nhân dân phuòng Trung hòa 1930-2004) [Revolutionary History of Trung Hòa Party Committee and People 1930-2004] (Hanoi, Hanoi publishing house, 2005), 45.
16. During the 1950s and 1960s, Vietnam implemented a household registration system known as hó{dot below}u to control population movements and access to state services to the particular place of residence of each citizen. Recent reforms of this system allow easier circulation on the national territory but migrants are still required to register with the police when they move temporarily or permanently.
17. See Michael DiGregorio, Stephen J. Leisz and John Vogler, The Invisible Urban Transition: Rural Urbanization in the Red River Delta, paper presented at the International Congress of the Asian Planning Schools Association, Hanoi, September 2003.
18. Olivier Chabert, Les campagnes périurbaines de Ha Noi: espaces et société dans la transition (Ph.D. dissertation, Universite ́ de Bordeaux III, 2004).
19. For an excellent introduction to land politics in post-d{stroke}oI mo ́ Vie^tnam, see Laurent Pandolfi, Une terre sans prix: Réforme foncière et urbanisation au Viêt-Nam, Hanoi, 1986-2000 (Ph.D. dissertation, Universite ́ Paris VIII, 2001).
20. For more details on the urbanization policies during this period, see Nigel Thrift and Dean Forbes, The Price of War: Urbanization in Vietnam 1954-1985 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986).
21. Ministry of Construction, d{stroke}i{dot below}nh huóng quy hoa{dot below}ch tông the phát triên d{stroke}ô thi{dot below} Viê{dot below}t Nam 2020 [General planning orientations for urban development in Vietnam to 2020] (Hanoi: Construction Publishing House, 1999).
22. Vietnam's territorial-administrative system consists of provinces, districts and communes/ wards. Cities can be found at any of these administrative levels. Urban places are distinguished through a classification from 1 to 5 that determines their relative political and economic autonomy. Hanoi is a 'Class 1' city located at the provincial administrative level. It includes both urban (quâ{dot below}n) and rural (huye{dot below}n) districts which are further subdivided into urban wards (phùong) and rural communes (xa̧).
23. Fanny Quertamp, Ha Noi: Une péri-urbanisation paradoxale (Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Bordeaux III, 2003), 214.
24. Growth machine coalitions refer to interlocking combinations of entrepreneurs and governmental units who, in seeking exchange value, form alliances to control property and intensify future land uses in an area. Such coalitions tend to oppose intervention to regulate development on behalf of use values.
25. See John R. Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Places (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 32.
26. See Sun Sheng Han and Kim Trang Vu, Land Acquisition in Transitional Hanoi, Vietnam, Urban Studies 45, nos. 5-6 (2008): 1097-1117.
27. Truong Thien Thu and Ranjith Perera, Consequences of the two-price system for land in the land and housing market in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Habitat International 35, no. 1 (2011): 30-39.
28. Hòa Míc's ritual spaces include two large temples, two communal houses, one pagoda, an ancient graveyard, several small altars dedicated to land deities as well as lineage worship halls. Villagers believe that these spaces are subject to geomantic principles (phong thuy) and can therefore be negatively affected by physical changes in their vicinity.
29. District authorities are charged with the provision of houses of culture to accommodate official community activities, such as local festivals, mass organization's meetings, local elections and sporting events.
30. The dinh is a built compound sheltering the tutelary spirits of a village. During pre-revolutionary times, it was the main site of village public activities (festivals, rituals, political meetings). Hòa Míc has two ÿình: an inner one, in the centre of the village, and an outer one, outside of the traditional settlement area. The villagers (especially the elderly) believe that their fulfilling of material and spiritual obligations vis-à-vis the two ÿình (maintenance of the building and grounds, offerings to deities, etc.) is a guarantee of the village's good fortune.
31. Sherry B. Ortner, Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (1995): 173-93.
32. Luong, The state, local associations and alternate civilities in rural northern Vietnam, 136-137.
33. For further details, see O'Brien, Rightful resistance. Vietnamese researchers recently used the concept of rightful resistance to characterize the strategies of resistance observed in Northern Vietnamese localities.
34. Trán Thi{dot below} Thu Trang, State-society relations and the diversity of peasant resistance in Viet Nam, and Nguyen Van Suu, Industrialization and Urbanization in Vietnam: How Appropriation of Agricultural Land Use Rights Transformed Farmers' Livelihoods in a Peri-Urban Hanoi Village, EADN Working Paper no. 38 (East Asian Development Network, 2009).
35. O'Brien, Rightful resistance.
36. The communal landholding form (d{stroke}át công, literally, public land) is inherited from the prerevolutionary period. Before the land reform (1955), the cultural house's construction site corresponded to an aquaculture pond which revenues covered village ritual expenses. Although the agricultural cooperative of the commune officially took over the management of this particular piece of land in the 1960s, Hòa Mc villagers, especially the elderly, consider that decisions about its use should remain under their control.
37. Trấn Thi{dot below} Thu Trang, State-society relations and the diversity of peasant resistance in Viet Nam".
38. The historian Lê Vǎn Lan, quoted in Lấy d{stroke}́t có Hòa Míc (Hà No{dot below}i) d{stroke}é xây khu ÿothi{dot below} mói [Taking the ancient land of the village of Hòa Míc (Hà No{dot below}i) to build a new urban area], Sài Gòn Gioi Phóng, 14 December 2005.
39. Lâm Sun, O d{stroke}ây xin 'cai cách hành chính'! [An 'administrative reform' here please!], Vǎn Hóa, 23 July 2006.
40. Nguyen Van Suu, "Industrialization and Urbanization in Vietnam.