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.