Friday, November 7th, 2008 Reforming the Urban Landscape: The role of Vietnam’s emerging middle class in transforming Hanoi

Description

During the twenty-plus years of doi moi (economic renovation) policy, the spatial fabric of Vietnam’s cities has undergone significant transformation. In a now-familiar pattern from cities the world over, Hanoi has predictably though with alarming rapidity developed outward into seemingly ever-expanding suburbs, and upward into high-rise hotels and apartment complexes. More importantly, the landscape of urban everyday life has been resculpted through the middle class’ role in consumption, actual and aspirational, with effects on modes of shopping, leisure, transportation, and, critically, attitudes towards the use and users of public space. In this paper I consider the impact of socio-economic reform on the capital city of Hanoi, focusing specifically on the ways in which the middle class, made possible by doi moi, has and continues to alter the urban landscape.

Lisa Drummond is Associate Professor of Urban Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. After living and working in Hanoi, Vietnam in the early 1990s, she completed a degree in Human Geography at the Australia National University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the National University of Singapore. Her research has focussed primarily on urban social life in Vietnam, including analyses of popular culture, specifically in television serials and women’s magazines, women’s roles in Vietnamese society, and the application of western concepts such as public and private to the use of space in Vietnamese cities. Her publications include several co-edited books, most recently Consuming Urban Culture in Contemporary Vietnam, with Mandy Thomas, and Gender Practices in Contemporary Vietnam, with Helle Rydstrom.