Living in the urban periphery of Ha Noi
Hòa Mục, in the past a small village (203 inhabitants in 1923) in the urban periphery of the Vietnamese capital city Hà Nội, stands central in this book. Danielle Labbé, attached as urban planner to the University of Montreal describes and analyses with much detail the changes that took place in the village during almost a century. In four chapters a chronology covering major periods in the history of Hòa Mục has been followed: early urban influences during the French regime (1920-40), the initial decades of the North Vietnamese socialist transformation (1940-65); the difficult period till the economic renovation of the Vietnamese economy (Ðṍi mới, 1965-80); and the current reform period from 1980 onwards. During each period a major theme is the interaction between the villagers and the spatially, administratively, economically and otherwise expanding forces originating in the nearby big city. Oral history is her major source of information. The voices of (elder) villagers sound throughout the book (naturally supplemented by the usual primary and secondary oral and written sources of bureaucrats, planners, etc.) and make her study a mixture of a social-geographical, historical, anthropological, political and planning monograph.
Villagers dealing with the state
During the French regime, villagers developed side occupations, especially weaving, by taking advantage of the close proximity of the urban markets. During this period, the village developed its peri-urban character, “blurring of the rural/agricultural and urban/industrial distinctions and categories.”(42). During the first decades of the socialist regime, this characteristic was very welcome: its workers could contribute to the industrial development without claiming urban welfare benefits such as housing. From the 1960s onwards, Labbé observes an “informal in situ village urbanization process” (69). On residential plots in the village – land that was not included in agricultural land socialization – private economic activities were performed, including housing, and contrary to formal politics. She concludes that these informal developments in Hòa Mục are not a sign of a weak state. She uses the concept of flexible planning that allows for diverging interests under the same political umbrella.
Logically then, the well known economic reforms (Dṍi mới) of the mid 1980s are in Labbé’s view not really a fundamental watershed in Vietnam’s societal course, but rather a more gradual change. However, she distinguishes two phases of the reform period after 1980 as far as the process of peripheral urbanization processes are concerned. Initially, private informal economic and housing activities were normalized in a discretionary way by the local administration and later acknowledged by the state and included in the so-called ‘State and People Work Together’ approach. This resulted in a massive outburst of privately built two to four storey ‘urban style’ houses and neighbourhoods: the physical incorporation of peri-urban villages in the city.
Villagers and the market
However, the mid 1990s, argues Labbé, form a real watershed in the time-line of the transformations that took place in Hòa Mục (and for that matter, in quite some similar villages adjacent to Hà Nội). The peri-urban space was reorganized by the inclusion of several rural districts within the urban administrative realm. The former village in a rural district thus became a ward in an urban district in 1997. At the same time the ‘State and People Work Together’ approach was abandoned and replaced by a new model of urbanization, that of the ’New Urban Areas’. These areas were to become the shop window of what Hà Nội’s urban planners and politicians were to convey to the world: a modern city with a “global image of order” (108). An essential aspect of the creation of the ‘New Urban Areas’ was that agricultural land was expropriated and handed over to the state (for the construction of infrastructural projects) and state-owned and foreign real estate developers. This changed the life of the villagers completely. Land got a commercial value, could be marketed and turned into a gold mine for many villagers. Of course, the villagers complained about the financial compensation for the expropriated land, but also moral issues were voiced and described by Labbé, such as social justice, corruption and greed. She quotes an elderly villager: “In the past, Uncle Hồ [Hồ Chi Minh] took the land of the rich to share it with the poor. Nowadays, it’s the opposite: the people’s land is taken and shared between officials and developers without any measure to ensure that the inhabitants have a future after the land is gone” (154). There was, Labbé states, a “moral-territorial order”, shared feelings about social justice in the village community, for which the villagers fought since independence and shared as well by both the villagers and political elites. The new logic of urban development has violated this order as private economic gains have replaced the well-being of a community.
Even though Labbé mentions protest movements in Hòa Mục and indeed the land grab may have corroded the regime, a sad conclusion suggests itself after reading her fascinating and detailed book: the villagers could cope with the ‘state’: a colonial administration and a socialist regime, use it and make the best of it. They were, however, less able to cope with the coalition of real estate business and state officials: the ‘market’. Comparative research may be useful to see if, and to what extent, Hà Nội has become just another South- and Southeast Asia metropolis regarding its growth and expansion into its urban periphery.