ABSTRACT
Recent state-led efforts to develop and modernize Hanoi (the Socialist Republic of Vietnam’s capital city) have sparked processes of rapid growth, initiating an urban transition that is reshaping the city’s physical and socio-economic landscape. Hanoi’s government is effectively redefining access to urban space in the capital through large-scale master plans and urban governance policies aimed at modernizing the city. In 2008, the municipal government introduced a street vending ban, prohibiting vendors from trading on 63 streets and in 48 public spaces. This policy privileges auto-mobility and positions vendors as obstructions to traffic flow and urban development. Considering the state’s attempt to eliminate vending from the urban core, informal traders face increasingly precarious working conditions. Nonetheless, vendors do not receive this policy passively, and undertake careful negotiations to ply their wares and stake a claim to Hanoi’s streets. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I assess the pressure on mobile vendors and explore the ways in which vendors push back against state sanctions. To understand the complexities of the contest for Hanoi’s street spaces, I draw on a post-structuralist feminist approach, informed by scholarship on social spatialisations, mobilities and everyday politics. I explore vendors’ lived realities and their connections with and contestations of local, regional and global political-economic systems. Set against the backdrop of a post-colonial, socialist cityscape undergoing rapid transformation, I find that mobility itself is a tool for resistance; by remaining on the move, vendors maintain their livelihoods and stake a claim to Hanoi’s pavements, despite threats of exclusion.
