This book provides an analysis of urban development in Vietnam with a focus on activities carried out by ordinary people. Using Hanoi as a case study, the book offers a rich ethnographic account of people-led development emphasizing spatial practices of the emerging middle/lower-middle and small entrepreneurial class.

The book integrates the concept of interstitial practice with Lefebvre’s framework of the production of differential space to conceptualise the diverse and seemingly ad-hoc space-making activities of urban residents, situating these in relation to the state’s disciplining projects through housing and urban planning. Moving beyond a simplistic, dichotomised discussion of informality and formality, temporality and permanence, the book highlights the tensions between the state visions of modernized urbanisation and everyday space-making practices of ordinary people. It offers a substantive narrative and an in-depth analysis of the power relations, social hierarchies, and complex interactions that are embedded within the differential spaces created by diverse interstitial practices in Hanoi.

As a novel contribution to the literature highlighting entrepreneurialism of the subaltern, and the role of ordinary people in urban development, the book will be of interest to researchers of Vietnam’s urban development, Southeast Asian Studies, Urban Studies and the Global South.

Inconventional planning practice, transit spaces such as bus stations and bus stops tend to be designed as generic technical fixtures. Little consideration is paid to various waiting practices, the different ways transit passengers interact with the material and social structures at the bus stop and its surrounding, and the potential of transit spaces to serve as urban public spaces. From an assemblage perspective, this study proposes to see the bus stop not as a ready-made product, but as a process through which a transit assemblageis produced through a range of waiting practices involving both human (transit passengers) and non-human actors (material artifacts) at the bus stop location. Based on a close observation study of selected bus stops in Malmö and a small survey of user opinions of Malmö’s bus stops, this paper investigates the processes by which a transit assemblage came into being and is maintained. The paper elaborates on how waiting activities are supported by various transit assemblages that are produced through interactions between users and artifacts at the bus stop location involving not only the assigned bus stop facilities but also the surrounding physical and social infrastructure. It highlights the components and processes that constitute and produce stabilized transit assemblages that have the capacity to support a variety of waiting practices by heterogeneous groups of people. The paper emphasizes the quality of emergence and heterogeneity of transit spaces and argues that it is these qualities that enable them to serve as public spaces.

Although large urban areas in cities of the Global South are shaped by individuals, households and small entrepreneurs, these shapings are often dismissed or at best considered as temporary happenings that are tolerated in waiting for the implementation of ‘proper’ large-scale projects. In rapidly urbanizing Vietnam, tensions between the representations of space by the state and capitalist actors and the spatial practices of ordinary citizens are particularly complex in peri-urban areas. This article discusses findings from a study of interstitial practices on a street bordering a gated community and an urbanizing village at Hanoi’s urban periphery. Moving beyond the dualistic analysis based on binary categories of modern versus traditional, formal versus informal, permanent versus temporary, this article highlights emergent practices that emerge in the interstices between these existing categories. It also highlights the role of interstitial practices in filling in the gaps in the state’s development plan and connecting differences. It shows how the urban interstice is about selective seeing and that the construction of the modern Vietnamese city is dependent on interstitial practices. This article draws on interviews with business actors and village residents, and an inventory of the use of spaces along selected sections of the street.

What make a bus stop perceived as pleasant and attractive and another boring and desolate? This investigation calls attention to the affective dimension of bus stops and how it influences our waiting experience. Based on socio-spatial mapping of selected bus stops in Malmö, the paper highlights the role of the urban context, both physical and social, in forming affective atmospheres at bus stops. We argue that understanding constitutive elements of affective atmosphere is important for the design and planning of attractive transit spaces.

This chapter address the first of the key cross-cutting them, that of the regulation is a reflexive practice. The focus is on the construction of categories and knowledge claims in the regulatory process. The chapter examines the ways in which categories and ideas are constructed in the regulatory process and how they are influenced by existing power relations and dominant societal discourses. The chapter explore these issues using a case of planning regulation in Stockholm in which Apple, the global tech giant, applied to build its flagship store in the city’s most popular historical park. The chapter highlights the problems when contested ideas and interests are used as the basis to create categories in the regulatory process. It highlights how the work with categorization is influenced by existing power relations and predominant societal discourses; and how the resulting categories themselves in turn contributes to reproduce this power relation. The chapter also shows how the power of planning monopoly is undermined when planners internalized the neoliberal logic of urban development in which considerations for economic growth was most important. The chapter underscores the need to problematize categories and the work of categorization in the planning regulatory process, and the need to recognize the role of planning regulation in the reproduction of societal discourses and power relations. 

Cities are sites of contestations in which the spaces of people's everyday lives are in constant clash with the spaces envisioned and enforced by planners and politicians. For many modern governments, the spatial ordering of the city according to a certain aesthetic ideal has been a powerful tool to implement the state vision of social and moral order. Oftentimes, this means the suppression of economic activities and spatial practices that do not fit into the prescribed order. In Vietnam, the ordering of urban space has always been used as a tool to establish the state's vision of social order. In its current pathway to a market-oriented economy, ordering is all the more important to shape a 'global city' that is competitive in the global economy. The city's sidewalks are the focus of repeated state ordering projects that aims to create a modern, orderly city. Street vending is perceived as a backward practice and is thus the foremost target for state ordering actions. However, despite increasing ordering actions, vendors have time and again shown a sheer resilience in their struggle for a place in the city. Based on in-depth interviews with 32 vendors in Hanoi, the paper explores vendors' everyday practices to understand their struggle mechanism against the city that excludes them. The paper highlights how rhythm-making are important for vendors' everyday struggle for livelihood, and how vendors are important agents in the production of the polyrhythmic city, as rhythm-makers and space-makers. The paper reveals the complex nature of vendors' everyday rhythms, which are born out of suppression and constraint. These rhythms of endurance require not only synchronization but careful calibration, improvisation, and above all circumvention. The paper argues for the need of an urban politics that focuses on the urban poor, a politics that learn from and support the making of the rhythm of endurance.

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

Malmö, in southern Sweden, has been notable for how it has changed in recent decades and how new patterns of urban development have emerged which have been lauded as sustainable. Attention has particularly focused on the more spectacular developments such as the regeneration of the Western Harbour, and the development of Hyllie, a major transport interchange and new commercial centre alongside residential development. The focus of this paper is away from these major developments and instead looks at Norra Sorgenfri, a former industrial site, presented as a new form of sustainable urban development that moves away from the spectacular and focuses on everyday life. Here we analyse the representations of the city and urban living that are constituted by the planning vision for Norra Sorgenfri and particularly consider the role that urban forms are attributed within this vision.Our analysis highlights the ideas and representations of sustainable urban development with a focus on social sustainability and situates them within the existing literature looking at representations of urban development and urban sustainability within Malmö.

Since the introduction of the economic reform, Doi Moi, in 1986, Vietnam has been advancing, at least on the surface, into market economy in most social and economic arenas. In the housing sector, while the retreat of the state and fast expansion of new urban exclusive enclaves for the growing middle class have been taken as signifying evidence of the triumphing neoliberalisation, this chapter argues against such an over-simplification. Using data on relevant policies and in-depth case studies of four new urban zones in Hanoi, the paper examines the complex interaction of the emerging new market imperatives amidst the adaptive socialist legacy which results in the evolvement of a hybrid system in amalgamating neoliberal urbanism and socialist modernism.