From Socialist Modernism to Market Modernism? Master-planned developments in post-reform Vietnam
Keywords:
Following Doi moi, Vietnam’s economy experienced unprecedented growth and urbanization accelerated. Vietnamese cities were expanding at a staggering speed. Master-planned developments, called New Urban areas (NUAs) have been promoted in the past fifteen years as the model for urban development in post-reform Vietnam (Government of Vietnam 1999; Government of Vietnam 2006). The majority of NUAs are self-contained enclaves that cover vast areas of a few hundred hectares built on green field land at the city’s periphery. These grandiose developments are corporate-invested, profit-driven developments that explicitly target the middle and upper income groups in the population. The explosion of these developments has greatly transformed the peri-urban landscapes of many Vietnamese cities. Considering that these developments are actively promoted by the state of Vietnam as a recipe for modernization of Vietnamese cities, also as a means to regain state control over urban development, the case may be more complex. The role of the state and its social engineering endeavours in the name of modernization and progress need to be examined. This chapter intends to examine Vietnam’s urban policies and the development of NUAs in the light of modernization discourse, a modernist ethic and symbolism. The chapter explores the rationale behind NUA development by local governments, corporate actors, as well as residents. It intends to provide a contextualized interpretation of master-planned developments in Vietnam to understand the complex path-dependent transitional trajectory of Vietnam’s post-reform urban development. The chapter is based on an analysis of NUA developments in Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam. It includes a study of Vietnam’s post-reform urban policies, of promotion materials of Hanoi’s NUAs and case studies of four NUAs in Hanoi. The case studies’ materials comprise planning documents, inventories of the built environment, use of space, structured interviews with residents and with representatives from the areas’ management boards.