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.
Introduction 3 redeveloped them for urban functions. The pace of change greatly accelerated in the 2000s, following the designation of this zone as an urban administrative district. Soon new bridges were built and large avenues penetrated ever deeper into the city's western hinterland. The provincial authorities then expropriated all that remained of the farmland that the villagers and their ancestors had cared for and tilled for countless generations. In accordance with the capital's master plan, the rice fields were levelled, the irrigation canals filled, and the site was redeveloped into large avenues flanked by residential towers, big-box stores, and office buildings (Figure 2). Changes can be observed in other spheres of Hòa Mục's life. Compared with about a decade ago, the village's population is larger, denser, and socioeconomically more diverse. Between 1997 and 2009, the population of the ward of Trung Hòa (to which Hòa Mục belongs)
Understanding the causes of urban fragmentation in Hanoi: the case of new urban areas 1Since the late 1990s, a new model of urban development has been promoted in vietnam. So-called 'new urban areas' are being built on the agricultural lands at the periurban interface of cities across the country. these large-scale redevelopments feature commodity housing and public services, along with commercial and office space. Foreign scholars have criticised the lack of integration between these built environments and existing urban agglomerations. the resulting urban fragmentation is commonly blamed on the imposition of a foreign model of urban development that promotes a break with previous urban space production mechanisms. this paper provides a nuanced view on these ideas by exploring the history of housing policy in vietnam and in the region of Hanoi in particular. this approach underscores the locally situated nature of the new urban area experiments. at the same time, it reveals the need to explore ongoing shifts in the way various groups straddling the state, markets and society interact in contemporary urban space production processes.The appearance of new urban areas (khu do thi moi, hereafter KDTM) on the outskirts of Vietnamese cities has garnered a great deal of attention lately, especially by foreign researchers interested in the urbanisation process in the post-Doi moi era. 2 In the region of Hanoi, on which this paper focuses, new urban areas mixing residential, commercial and office uses first appeared in the 1990s. Since then, the rural-urban interface has seen paddy fields and other agricultural landscapes give way to high-rise residential towers, large avenues lined with villas and row-houses, and big box stores. At first glance, the new urban landscape that emerged out of the rice fields has little to do with older neighbourhoods in the city centre or with the periurban villages of the surrounding countryside.
Vietnam's land regime is currently undergoing a radical reshaping under policies of "urbanization and modernization." Around large urban centres what could be called a "Third Land Reform" fosters massive land-takings for urban-industrial expansion. The forced appropriation of farmlands unsettles endogenous patterns of mixed-use development or "rural-urbanization" which have developed in these zones since the doi moi, and which are characterized by the combination of small-scale cottage industries with mixed employment, and commuting into the cities for jobs and trade. The Third Land Reform is driven by an official discourse of "modernization" that deems the endogenous rural-urbanization as backward (not modern). This discourse drives and defends an aggressive program of expropriation, to the benefit of corporate capital, to build "real" urban spaces. Foreign, planning scholars should not merely describe these processes, but point out the ideological justifications driving them, and the ways in which the things it rejects as non-viable may, in fact, have virtues that have been missed by the official view.
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