Gentrification or …? Injustice in large-scale residential projects in Hanoi

Abstract

Chinese

Large-scale residential developments on expropriated lands in periurban Hanoi resemble forms of gentrification seen elsewhere. But is it gentrification? Current debate over the definition of gentrification has focused on whether the term has become too broad to be useful in different institutional and spatio-temporal contexts. While some push for a generalisable definition based in capitalist development, others argue that the term harbours Western assumptions that fail to usefully explain unique local circumstances. The paper first identifies one such conceptual assumption that must be made explicit since it provides the term’s politicising thrust: displacement generates an experience of social injustice. Then, drawing on surveys and interviews with residents as well as interviews with real estate agents, government officials and academics conducted in Hanoi between 2013 and 2017, the paper evaluates five types of displacement on the city’s outskirts. Because displacement only occurs in marginal cases and generates limited feelings of social injustice, the term ‘gentrification’ is of little use. Instead, the paper suggests that in a context of rapid urbanisation and relatively inclusive economic growth such as that of Hanoi the terms ‘livelihood dispossession’ and ‘value grabbing’ may better capture the experience of social injustice and are therefore more likely to generate political traction.

Keywords

gentrification Hanoi large-scale residential projects periurbanisation social justice

Introduction

The sense of injustice is eminently political. (Shklar, 1992: 83)

The periurban landscape of developing Asia is undergoing a profound transformation typified by the expansion of urban forms, functions and socio-economic relations into rural territories, often well beyond established city boundaries. An important instantiation of this process in the periurban zones of Hanoi is the massive development of large-scale residential projects geared towards the rising local upper middle and upper classes and towards expatriates. These comprise both master-planned communities of 20 ha or more known as ‘new urban areas’ (khu do thi moi in Vietnamese, hereafter NUA) and mixed-use commercial and residential complexes built on smaller sites.

Most NUAs are built in densely settled peripheral areas where former agrarian communities and migrant populations drive a largely in situ urbanisation. Since the 1980s, rural settlements around Hanoi have transformed into urban or quasi-urban places with limited geographical relocation of their populations. In contrast to city-based urbanisation processes dominated by rural–urban migration, the populations living around Hanoi have expanded into non-agricultural work, adopted urban settlement patterns and housing forms, and embraced ‘urban’ ways of life without permanently leaving their place of residence (DiGregorio, 2011; Nguyen, 2009). While increased incomes and living standards accompanied this in situ urbanisation, Hanoi’s periurban areas are still home to significantly less-wealthy populations (General Statistics Office, 2017).

The migration of capital and residents to these zones appears to be gentrification. The redevelopment of urban spaces for more affluent users situates this transformation in line with Hackworth’s (2002) definition of gentrification as ‘the production of space for progressively more affluent users’. But appearances may be deceiving.

Grounded in the comparative urbanisms debate, current disagreement over the definition of gentrification has focused on whether the concept has become too broad to be useful in different institutional and spatio-temporal contexts. While some authors push for a generalisable definition based in capitalist development (e.g. Lees et al., 2016), others argue that unique local circumstances call the application of the term ‘gentrification’ into question (e.g. Maloutas, 2012; Yip and Tran, 2016). The latter contend that superficial similarities between local urban transformation and gentrification processes in the West disguise substantively different urban processes because they surreptitiously embody socio-spatially distinct ideological and ontological assumptions. Just because a process resembles gentrification in other locations it does not mean that it is gentrification (e.g. Betancur, 2014; Ghertner, 2014). This concern with the applicability of ‘gentrification’ is explored here through the case of Hanoi and its large-scale periurban residential developments.

This paper first outlines and responds to the debate over the applicability of generalised conceptions of gentrification, particularly in East Asia. Adopting a class-transformation-based notion of generalised gentrification, it then applies displacement experienced as unjust as a measure of gentrification to the test case of Hanoi. After offering evidence that displacement occurs only in marginal cases, we offer two alternative concepts that may better characterise the injustices experienced by our interviewees and offer more political traction: ‘livelihood dispossession’ and ‘value grabbing’.

Generalised gentrification

In their proposal for a ‘planetary gentrification’ research agenda, Lees et al. (2016: 203) conclude that the concept of ‘gentrification’ is generalisable and applicable across a wide range of contexts. This conclusion lies at the current endpoint of a trajectory that began with Glass’s (1964) description of middle-class gentrifiers returning to London in the 1960s. This cultural and class-specific concept of gentrification expanded to describe similar processes of neighbourhood change in other Western contexts (e.g. Smith, 1986). Later it was used to describe not just residential but also commercial and even sectoral gentrification as commercial uses displace industrial uses (Clark, 1992; Lim et al., 2013). While the original notion of gentrification focused on individual homeowners, the range of actors involved quickly expanded. It soon became apparent that in some cities, real estate developers and the state play an active role in capturing rent by fostering gentrification. This consistent broadening of the term has led to a fairly common definition of gentrification as ‘the production of space for progressively more affluent users’ (Hackworth, 2002: 815; see also Clark, 2005).

While generalised gentrification points to a core process that can be employed in comparative studies, others argue that such definitions are so open-ended that they lose their utility (Ghertner, 2014). Maloutas (2012), for instance, argues that gentrification is a historically, culturally and geographically specific phenomenon and that this generalisation of the concept has produced a ‘half-way de-contextualization’ that distorts our understanding of non-Western urbanisation by ignoring the particular circumstances under which the concept has been theorised, viz. deindustrialisation, neoliberalism and urban abandonment.

Recent interventions build on this critique to interrogate the applicability of this broad conception of gentrification in non-Western contexts. One notable trigger was Ley and Teo’s (2014) argument that the absence of the term ‘gentrification’ in government, newspapers and academia despite its ontological reality in Hong Kong was evidence of an epistemological gap that was only recently being reduced as the term gained currency. This article prompted a number of researchers based in and around Hong Kong to counterclaim that the absence of the term reflected its contextual inadequacy (Cartier, 2017).

This group’s objections follow two rough strategies. First, a ‘too narrow’ strategy returns to earlier, more culturally and geographically narrow definitions of gentrification to argue that the term does not apply in East Asian cases (Lui, 2017; Tang, 2017). The second approach, which we call the ‘too broad’ strategy, highlights the Western bias inherent in gentrification studies and contends that it blinds researchers to other relevant processes or conceptualisations such as Hong Kong’s ‘culture of property’ (Haila, 2017; Smart and Smart, 2017; Tomba, 2017).

The ‘too narrow’ strategy, however, ignores the methodological goal of generalising the concept (cf. Boddy, 2007; Davidson and Lees, 2010). Broadening the definition to a mid-level theory aims, at least for Lees et al. (2016), to facilitate comparisons across contexts, a position endorsed by Robinson (2015). Paradoxically, some of the works produced through this strategy show generalised gentrification’s methodological utility by demonstrating how it plays out in different contexts and by identifying other factors that must be incorporated to fully understand these local instantiations.

From the ‘too broad’ perspective, Tomba (2017), however, suggests that generalised gentrification simply describes fundamental urbanisation processes, especially in Mainland China. In the same vein, Haila (2017: 506) asks, ‘Does it really matter whether we call the phenomenon “gentrification” or something else?’ In this immediate sense, the answer is ‘no’. The broader definition of gentrification seeks to identify a political economic process of spatial and class transformation and is a product of the evolution of research on socially unjust neighbourhood change. In a sense, then, the phenomenon could be called by a less culturally specific term. In the same way, those accusing Western-trained researchers of fetishising ‘gentrification’ and allowing the concept to limit their vision may also be guilty of the charge.

In another sense, naming does matter. The ‘too broad’ strategy suggests that using the gentrification lens can limit researchers’ field of vision by carrying along unrecognised Western cultural baggage. This argument does not reduce to the claim that using the gentrification lens cannot work; it reduces to the claim that some researchers do a sloppy job of exploring gentrification processes in other contexts, making the uncritical assumption that Western institutions and practices also apply in these other contexts. This paper seeks to excavate one of these assumptions to help avoid future misapplications of the gentrification lens. Specifically, it argues that gentrification is an inherently political term that is dependent upon the experience of a given transformation as socially unjust.

Similar to Lim et al. (2013), Tomba (2017) has argued that the broad definition of gentrification matches that of redevelopment and aims to explain the same broad class transformation (see also La Grange and Pretorius, 2014). Both terms describe the progressive displacement of poorer users by wealthier users. The central difference lies in one’s perception of whether the transformation is good or bad. Those who consider the outcomes to be positive (generally focusing on the new users) prefer to call the process redevelopment. Those who consider the outcomes to be negative (generally focusing on the displaced users) prefer to call it gentrification. As Robinson (2011: 22) reminds us, ‘The vocabulary we use can perpetuate certain assumptions about power relationships.’ Though academics may conceive of the terms as strictly analytical, they remain political and are used to mobilise different and typically conflicting interests (see also Davidson and Lees, 2005; Lees et al., 2008; Slater, 2009). The significance of this terminological politicisation goes beyond pointing out that gentrification is deeply embedded in power relations. It also unearths at least one of the Western assumptions some scholars argue are buried in the concept of generalised gentrification: the presupposition that gentrification produces social inequality and injustice.

Displacement in Western cities is consistently experienced as socially unjust (e.g. Curran, 2004; Newman and Wyly, 2006; Slater, 2004). And, as Marcuse (2010) argues, ‘If the pain of displacement is not a central component of what we are dealing with in studying gentrification … we are missing the central point that needs to be addressed.’ But as Slater (2006) points out, for gentrification studies to retain their critical edge they need to more clearly identify the social injustice involved in displacement.

This aligns with Shklar’s (1992) argument that, regardless of any purportedly objective determinations of injustice, individuals’ belief that they have experienced injustice and the accompanying indignation are essential for the politics of reconstructing social understandings of justice and remedying injustice. Shklar suggests that individuals consider negative outcomes that cannot be attributed to the concrete actions or inactions of others as ‘misfortune’, while those attributable to others are considered ‘injustices’. The first leads to a begrudging acceptance of fate, while the second engenders a ‘political sense of injustice’ (114) that fosters political action.

Shklar recognises that the distinction between the two is blurry and shifting, but for her it depends fundamentally on social expectations, which evolve as social conditions, morality and ideology change. She suggests, for example, that though being a woman was long seen as an unavoidable misfortune, as expectations of gender equality have increased over the last century, the experience of inequality has fostered a stronger sense of injustice and political mobilisation. Such political mobilisation can in turn lead to new forms of formal distributive justice through legislation and judicial processes. For Shklar, the experience of injustice drives the evolution of legal justice.

We might similarly view the pain of displacement as indignation at the injustice of failing to realise social expectations of emerging rights, such as the right to affordable housing, the right to the city and the right to community. Thus, to the extent that gentrification is a politicised term that works to secure such rights, displacement must be experienced as an affront to justice in order to constitute gentrification. This warrants a redefinition of gentrification that incorporates the perception that the process produces injustice. On this basis, we adopt a definition of generalised gentrification as the displacement of less affluent users by more affluent users that is experienced as socially unjust.

If the experience of social injustice is seen as central to a politicised conception of gentrification, then it is perhaps possible to reinforce Ley and Teo’s claims about Hong Kong. Rather than a form of intellectual colonialism, some scholars’ and activists’ application of the gentrification lens in that context would reflect their perception of injustice in Hong Kong’s ongoing class transformation. Meanwhile, the diminishing epistemological gap they report would indicate that displacement has not been experienced by local residents as socially unjust and therefore as ‘gentrification’ but that there is an increasing perception that the class-based displacement is unjust. As will be shown below, this more nuanced notion also complicates efforts to label the case of periurban Hanoi as gentrification, as only some displaced persons experience redevelopment as unjust.

Analytical framework and methodology

To classify a given process as gentrification in accordance with our definition, it is thus necessary to demonstrate that displacement has occurred and that it is experienced as unjust. In a seminal article, Marcuse (1985) identified four types of displacement that fall into two categories. The first category of direct displacement includes physical and economic displacement. Physical displacement refers to the forcible, physical eviction of existing residents. Economic displacement refers to residents being forced to move because they are unable to afford housing in their current neighbourhood. The second category of indirect displacement includes exclusionary displacement and displacement pressure. Exclusionary displacement refers to the inability of households to move into neighbourhoods they previously would have been able to move into. Displacement pressure, meanwhile, refers to rising prices inducing current residents to move out before they are actually priced out.

To these four types of displacement Davidson and Lees (2010) add phenomenological displacement, a form of indirect displacement. They argue that displacement goes beyond mere spatial displacement, that is, the moment of forced exit from a particular space. Rather, displacement entails an ontological scission between the person and the security or identity embedded in one’s lived experience of a place. Thus, this form of displacement refers to the loss of a way of life or local identity as a result of neighbourhood change.

The academic literature offers at least two suggestions supporting the view that large-scale periurban residential developments such as those around Hanoi constitute a form of gentrification. First, Smith’s notion of the rent gap has been employed to inform both gentrification and periurbanisation. The rent gap refers to the difference between the capitalised ground rent (the land value based on current rent) and the potential ground rent if the property were redeveloped. When the potential ground rent exceeds that of the capitalised ground rent and amortised redevelopment costs, there is pressure to redevelop the property for more affluent users (Smith, 1996). That is, there is gentrification pressure. This notion is at the core of political economic understandings of gentrification and was developed to explain them (cf. Lees et al., 2008), but it has also been applied to periurbanisation. Shatkin (2017), for instance, has argued that the rent gap between the capitalised ground rent of agricultural land in periurban areas and the potential ground rent of new master-planned developments drives periurbanisation in several developing Asian countries. This claim is aligned with a second set of arguments that large-scale redevelopment can constitute ‘new build gentrification’ (Davidson and Lees, 2005), especially in the rapidly urbanising Global South. Ha (2004) and Shin (2009), for instance, have argued that such developments have been the pre-eminent form of gentrification in Korea. Periurbanisation thus generates pressures that often reallocate land use from agricultural to residential, positioning periurban gentrification as a type of sectoral gentrification by which a ‘newer and higher use’ displaces agricultural uses.

So there is reason to hypothesise that the construction of NUAs around Hanoi involves displacement that may generate an experience of injustice, positioning them as a solid test case for what Waley (2015: 618) has termed ‘rice-paddy gentrification’. Additionally, selection of a novel case offers two benefits. First, it eliminates pre-existing bias in making a determination of whether or not gentrification has taken place. Second, it establishes a ground for future studies.

Our test case analysis draws on an array of data collected in Hanoi between 2013 and 2017. We rely on a survey of Hanoi’s NUAs and on a review of relevant policy papers, research reports and newspaper clippings related to land and property redevelopment in Vietnam. A dozen interviews with individuals working in government, banking, real estate and academia were conducted to augment these sources of information and enhance our understanding of real estate development in Hanoi.

We also draw on semi-structured interviews with residents of urbanised villages upon whose agricultural land three NUAs were built: Linh Dam, Trung Hoa-Nhan Chinh and Van Quan. These projects display key characteristics of the first generation of NUAs built in the late 1990s and early 2000s: they are located relatively close to the city centre, were invested in and developed by state-owned enterprises, and originally targeted Vietnam’s emerging urban middle class (see Table 1). All three projects entailed forced appropriation of agricultural lands but none involved residential expropriations. Such expropriations, however, occurred for a road-widening project near at least one NUA studied (Trung Hoa-Nhan Chinh).

Table 1.

Characteristics of the NUA studied.

	Distance to city centre	Constructionperiod	Developer	Surfacearea	Population(approx.)	Adjacent urbanisedvillages
Linh Dam(peninsula)	8 km	1998–2008	Hanoi Urban DevelopmentCorp. (HUD)	130 ha	25,000	Hoang Liet
Trung Hoa-NhanChinh	5 km	2001–2006	Vietnam ConstructionImport-Export Corp.(Vinaconex)	32 ha	15,000	Hoa Muc Trung Kinh
Van Quan	10 km	2002–2007	HUD	62 ha	14,000	Van Quan Yen Phuc Yen Xa

Source: Authors’ data.

Focusing on first-generation NUAs allowed us to explore their short- and long-term displacement impacts on the populations living next to them. In particular, we could document how these populations experienced and reacted to NUAs taking over the agricultural land they used to till and to the multiple social, spatial and economic changes these redevelopments brought about in their locality.

We conducted 60 interviews with representatives of local households in the urbanising villages listed in Table 1, except Yen Xa, for which we could not secure authorisations. The politically sensitive nature of land expropriations limited our ability to freely select households. Initial informants had to be recruited through local authorities, but a relaxing of this control thereafter gave us more freedom to select participants through snowball sampling. We sought to reach households with various profiles in terms of educational qualifications, land holdings and livelihood diversification prior to the NUA construction. A majority of the selected households (n = 39) lost agricultural land-use rights to the NUA. This purposeful sampling aimed to capture the experience of the long-term residents assumed to be most negatively affected by the projects. The sample also included a handful of local leaders in each community (e.g. heads of residential groups and local communist party cells). Our semi-structured interviews covered three main themes: evolution of livelihood strategies before and after redevelopment, socioeconomic opportunities and obstacles generated by the NUA, and perception of changing socio-spatial relationships. Data from these interviewees are complemented by observations of activities at the interface of the former villages and NUAs and of social interactions in the public spaces of both areas.

Displacement in Hanoi

Displacement

This section considers each of the five types of displacement in the context of periurban Hanoi. Yip and Tran (2016) argue convincingly that there is effectively no direct displacement by large-scale residential projects in Hanoi’s inner-city, as they are typically built on uninhabited brownfield sites. They do not, however, consider NUAs in periurban areas. Our survey shows that between 1993 and 2016, approximately 27,000 ha were forcefully appropriated for the construction of 252 NUAs across Hanoi. Some complexes are built on smaller sites (10 ha or less), occupy brownfields or other types of ‘vacant’ land, but these represent less than one-quarter of all NUAs. The remaining 75% are much larger redevelopments (20–3000 ha) built on agricultural lands originally farmed by neighbouring populations. In these periurban areas, households typically possess land use rights over residential land in former village spaces and, in the case of farming households, also over agricultural land around it.

Over the last two decades, the Vietnamese state progressively leveraged the limited property rights that users have over these lands and strengthened its powers to forcefully recover vast tracts of agricultural land and to transfer them to corporate actors for commercial redevelopment (Labbé, 2014). Land redevelopment for NUAs rarely involves residential evictions, but this process separates pre-existing periurban households from the productive lands upon which their livelihoods still partially depend, an aspect further explored below. NUAs can nevertheless induce direct displacement. Residential land is often expropriated in order to provide the supporting infrastructure that connects NUAs to the city centre. Residential projects may also encroach marginally upon existing villages, leading to residential expropriations. While comparatively small in scale, direct physical displacement can and does occur in Hanoi.¹

Some marginal indirect displacement also takes place. At first glance, exclusionary displacement would not seem to apply in Hanoi, since new developments are typically built on non-residential land. Since the 1980s, local governments in periurban areas have been permitted to reclassify agricultural land adjacent to existing residential zones, subdividing and allocating them to local households in need of more housing space (Labbé, 2014). As NUA projects often appropriate the entire agricultural zone surrounding former villages, they remove the possibility of future residential expansions. This has several implications. At the household scale, it reduces the housing options of newly married couples in poorer local families who typically have limited residential land and cannot afford the new housing units in the neighbouring NUA. Echoing a Western gentrification phenomenon (e.g. Newman and Wyly, 2006), they are left with a choice between moving away and living in overcrowded conditions. Commenting on this enclosure, a man living in an urban village next to the Linh Dam NUA remarked, ‘Our generation didn’t have to worry because [residential] lands were bequeathed to us by our ancestors, so we could rely on that … But for our grandchildren, it will be much more difficult’ (15 July 2013).

In a more complex way, there are other interactions with displacement pressure in Hanoi. New commercial activities (cafés, restaurants, hair salons, franchise convenience stores, etc.) generally emerge next to large residential projects. Often located at the interface between old villages and NUAs, these businesses tap into the middle- and upper middle-class customer base introduced by the NUA and therefore tend to offer products and services above the means of or at odds with the needs of the pre-existing populations (e.g. upscale spas and hair salons, private English-language schools and international travel agencies).

While this represents a form of commercial upscaling, the question is who benefits from this change? Both observational and interview data show that residents who owned or bought residential plots adjacent to the three NUAs studied have either established their own commercial activities or rented ground-level spaces to commercial enterprises. Commenting on this locational advantage, a villager who operates a teashop in his house remarked, ‘If there was no New Urban Area, I wouldn’t sell drinks like this. It’s because of this project that I could open this business’ (Trung Hoa-Nhan Chinh, 28 June 2013). Though rarer, some households residing further into neighbouring village spaces have also reported benefiting from or even establishing a new business because of the new customer base brought by the NUA. While these people now enjoy higher returns by operating or renting to businesses, the influx of a more affluent clientele has also boosted potential ground rent in adjacent neighbourhoods, thereby excluding businesses that might otherwise have moved into the area.

Phenomenological displacement is trickier to make sense of in the context of rapidly growing and modernising economies. It is also the phenomenon that most profoundly interrogates the applicability of the gentrification concept in a place such as Hanoi. In the neoliberal context of developed Western cities where inequality is rising and income growth predominantly goes to the already wealthy, such transitions tend to disrupt existing ways of life and the social networks on which the social security of precarious households increasingly depends (cf. Fullilove, 2005). It is therefore easy to understand why such phenomenological displacement is resisted by pre-existing residents in such a setting. However, in the context of rapid and widely – though unevenly – distributed economic growth, such changes may be welcome rather than resisted.

And such is the case in Hanoi. The introduction of large-scale residential developments represents a major transformation of place-based livelihoods and social relations. This was felt most strongly by households who lost their use-rights over agricultural lands for the construction of NUAs. In interviews, members of these households regularly used expressions such as ‘hardship’, ‘strenuous’ and ‘unstable’ to describe their lives in the first years following the land loss. Conversely, households who had stopped farming in the 1980s or 1990s, and therefore were not affected by the land expropriation, recalled having enthusiastically welcomed the NUAs.

Yet, taking stock of the changes in their living environment and households’ economy a decade or more after the construction of the NUA, both farming and non-farming populations concur that these projects have, overall, ushered in a new era of prosperity and wellbeing. The positive changes mentioned include more business opportunities, a wider range of entertainment and services in their immediate vicinity (NUAs’ supermarkets, public parks, etc.) and a better quality of life. Many interviewees also emphasised the accompanying infrastructural improvements. ‘When the project was implemented’, a man living next to Trung Hoa-Nhan Chinh conveyed, ‘land was seized to build better infrastructure. Roads were raised to higher levels, water drainage was improved, there are more great buildings now, and the environmental sanitation is better’ (28 June 2013). Looking back, most ex-farmers expressed a positive view of urban changes. Periurbanisation did not necessarily make them wealthier – and, indeed, left some of them less well off. But many explained that it has put a welcome end to exhausting and precarious agricultural livelihoods and given them access to a small capital fund (i.e. monetary compensation) that they could invest in profitable ways.

Moreover, in line with Ley and Teo’s (2014: 1291) recognition of the aspirational character of redevelopment, neighbouring populations almost unanimously praise the NUA, describing it as ‘clean’, ‘beautiful’, ‘modern’ and ‘civilised’. Commenting on the construction of Linh Dam NUA, a housewife remarked, ‘I’ve been so happy to see the state build up the city properly’ (15 July 2013). Another interviewee stated that urban development is making ‘everything more beautiful and civilised, from village to city’ (26 June 2013). Harms (2016) comes to a similar conclusion in his research on two NUAs in Ho Chi Minh City. He finds that pre-existing populations, including those evicted by these projects, are often ‘very supportive of the project’s underlying development goals’. He argues that this support stems from the prevalent association of large-scale urban schemes with ‘a nationalist vision of Vietnam’s advance into modernity’ (Harms, 2016: 22). Thus, planned periurban land redevelopments represent a new way of life that is welcomed rather than resisted and does not thereby create phenomenological displacement. Or, perhaps more accurately, the phenomenological displacement so produced is not necessarily a negative experience.

This conclusion, however, requires nuance. Earlier studies have identified a generational difference in responses to periurban changes such as those discussed above (DiGregorio, 2011; Labbé, 2014). While younger generations tend to be more accepting of the transformation of their communities, older generations are more likely to resist them. In all three locations, people over 50 years deplored the loss of the earlier ‘village culture’ marked by solidarity and respect for traditional social roles and rituals. But it is not the NUA per se that appears to concern these people. Much more problematic for them are the massive numbers of rural migrants, suburbanising dwellers and expatriates who move into or use their former village space. These ‘outsiders’ (nguoi ngoai), as some interviewees call this new population, not only outnumber native villagers but are also seen as corrupting local mores. As a 50-year-old resident living next to the Trung Hoa-Nhan Chinh NUA explained:

[Urbanisation] surely brought about many benefits for the people here. However, the most disturbing thing is the social safety. Gambling, drinking, and drug addiction affect young generations more than before. In the old days, the village was peaceful, but now there are many ‘love hotels’, karaoke, … Sometimes they fight and quarrel. So noisy all night! (22 June 2013)

Thus, despite a broad welcoming of phenomenological displacement, especially by the youth, it is also experienced negatively by some groups. To the extent that NUAs transform existing settlements, they, too, have this ambivalent impact.

Injustice

In Hanoi, as in Hong Kong, there is only limited evidence that urban transformation is experienced as unjust. In practice, there has been minimal opposition to urban transformation per se. Echoing DiGregorio’s (2011) and Harms’ (2016) findings, the individuals interviewed generally welcome such change, viewing it as both inevitable and generally desirable. This embrace of periurban transformation calls into question gentrification designations that rely on superficial similarities. The in-migration of more affluent households to periurban areas does not ipso facto constitute gentrification. Rather, as we have argued above, any notion of gentrification must include the experience of social injustice. This requires a careful evaluation of the forms of injustice generated by displacement.

Displacement as injustice?

As discussed above, NUA development involves limited residential land expropriations, resulting in minimal direct physical displacement. In fact, when developers plan a new project, they make every effort to avoid encroaching on residential lands because of the extreme difficulties and high cost they incur when they try to displace households from their residential land. This problem is, in turn, directly linked to the specific form of injustice generated by urban development projects in and around Hanoi.

Urban populations across Vietnam perceive direct residential displacement as extremely unfair. As Nguyen (2009) and Labbé (2014) have shown, Hanoi’s periurban residents ‘have long considered housing land as an inalienable form of property on which they can safely rely for the purposes of both social reproduction and economic production’ (Labbé, 2014: 174). Residential land is also seen as the safest way for households to protect and grow their wealth. In the absence of a strong social safety net, real estate acts as a form of insurance. Residential land also plays an important productive role in household economies, especially among the most vulnerable segment of the periurban population. Poorly educated ex-farmers, for instance, are largely excluded from Hanoi’s increasingly competitive urban labour market. These economically marginalised individuals often have no choice but to rely on their residential land for a living. In the three areas studied we found that after losing their agricultural land, these people tended to set up small businesses inside or next to their house (makeshift rental lodging for students and labour migrants, tea stalls, motorbike washing services, etc.). These generally become their main income source. Though the arrival of a NUA can boost residential land’s economic potential, this opportunity is eliminated when projects confiscate residential lands and relocate their occupants to high-rise apartment buildings where it is difficult, if not impossible, to set up a business.

Although a rare occurrence, poorly compensated residential land confiscation spurs a strong sense of injustice among displaced populations. Their indignation drives political action to remedy this injustice: they petition governmental authorities, invite domestic media to cover their cases and, in some extreme instances, organise public protests or even take violent action (see Harms, 2016: chapter 6). Reporters and scholars for the most part sympathise with expropriated households’ injustice claims, emphasising the economic loss that results from direct displacements (e.g. Le, 2009; Pham and Lam, 2000). In contrast to situations documented in the West (Davidson and Lees, 2005; Fullilove, 2005), the deterritorialisation process that follows from households’ relocation (e.g. loss of sense of place and dislocation of place-based community relations) is, however, either ignored or treated as a secondary problem.

As discussed above, NUAs trigger two other indirect forms of displacement: indirect exclusionary displacement through land value increase and the enclosure of village settlements; and phenomenological displacement through the erosion of local social relations associated with an older ‘village culture’. Neither of these forms of displacement are perceived as unjust by the people living around the NUAs we studied. In the first case, the lack of residential land is generally seen as a misfortune and as a household-scale issue. In the second case, we have seen that phenomenological displacement is felt by only a segment of the pre-existing population. These people, however, do not blame NUA projects or their residents. They are much more concerned by the social impacts of large numbers of ‘outsiders’ living in their midst. In short, both indirect forms of displacement are experienced as misfortune, not injustice. They are attributed not to the construction of a specific large-scale residential project but to a much broader and inevitable periurbanisation process.

Livelihood dispossession and value grabbing

This is not to say that large-scale residential projects have not given rise to other forms of injustice around Hanoi. Quite the opposite: strong claims of injustice stem directly from these projects. But, echoing Maloutas’ (2012) and Ghertner’s (2014) arguments, gentrification falls short of capturing these injustices. This is because the claims of injustice expressed by Hanoi’s periurban people have little in common with the loss of place or of the sense of place as experienced in established neighbourhoods of post-industrial cities. The injustices raised in Hanoi instead concern the distribution of the costs and benefits of land redevelopment as the country rapidly shifts from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban society and economy. At this stage in Vietnam’s urban transition, we suggest that concepts other than gentrification may more effectively evoke the injustices generated by large-scale residential developments. Here we briefly proffer two possibilities for future investigation: ‘livelihood dispossession’ and ‘value grabbing’.

The notion of livelihood dispossession refers to the loss of both livelihoods and natural capital that follows from agricultural land expropriation. But it is not the loss per se that informs this claim of injustice. Several dispossessed interviewees reported that they were ready to stop farming and had hoped that the next generation would be able to transition towards post-agrarian livelihoods. In fact, many households had already started this process years earlier by diversifying their livelihood strategies or investing in their children’s education. The injustice experienced is not that they can no longer farm. Rather, they begrudge the manner and speed with which they were compelled to make this livelihood transition. For this, they attribute blame to local governments and developers. Grievances included: low land compensation rate offered, limited employment opportunities in NUAs (as opposed to industrial zones) and insufficient time given to prepare their transition from farming. Some ex-farmers also complained about local governments’ and investors’ failure to mitigate the loss of livelihoods engendered by agricultural land takings:

The investor promised to create jobs for the households whose land was taken … Beside the [cash] compensation handed to us, they had promised to build companies and factories that would recruit the children of people having lost their land. [But] since the land acquisition, I haven’t seen any such announcement of recruiting the relatives of people who lost their land. (Trung Hoa-Nhan Chinh, 26 June 2013)

The second most important area of contention might be considered a form of value grabbing, which Andreucci et al. (2017: 31) have defined as ‘the appropriation of (surplus) value produced elsewhere through rent – rather than accumulation’ and positioned as a distributional concern. As is the case with most land expropriation practices around the world, land use rights holders in Vietnam are compensated not on the basis of potential ground rent but on actual pre-development ground rent. Thus, the increase in land value from urban redevelopment is grabbed away from pre-existing residents by businesses and governments involved in property development. Again, as in Hong Kong, claims of injustice have grown in Hanoi as this value grabbing becomes more evident. A woman living next to the Linh Dam NUA raised this issue as follows, ‘They gave us only 59,000 VND per m² [in compensation for agricultural lands], then they built and sold buildings for billions. For example, the 70–80 m² flats, they sell them at least 2–3 billion VND. It is right on this peninsula, right on my fields’ (8 July 2013).

Activists, bloggers, reporters and intellectuals (Vietnamese and foreign) regularly amplify residents’ claims of livelihood dispossession and value grabbing (e.g. Brown, 2013; Taylor, 2014; Tran, 2006). Media practitioners in Vietnam (as well as foreign scholars) not only report but also broaden peasants’ claims, notably by denouncing the state’s and land developers’ appropriation of the value generated by periurban land redevelopment and by highlighting its contradiction with the party’s egalitarian discourse (Labbé, 2015). The claims of injustice put forth by these actors are, however, less concerned with the direct impact of projects and more with ways in which their surplus value is distributed.

Conclusion

We have argued that East Asian critiques of generalised gentrification stumble by insisting that the term is used too narrowly or too broadly. In the spirit of these critiques, however, we have unearthed a buried assumption in the Western literature on gentrification: displacement produces injustice. Following Shklar (1992), we argue that it is this experience of injustice that politically mobilises the term ‘gentrification’ and that the absence of a ‘political sense of injustice’ calls the attribution into question. Quite simply, we argue that a determination of gentrification requires both displacement and the experience of displacement as unjust.

Large-scale real estate investments in Hanoi demonstrate elements of displacement only at the margin. Because NUAs are built on reclaimed agricultural land and leave residential land untouched, direct displacement is virtually non-existent. Households are not economically displaced since they retain residential land use rights. Any physical displacement that does occur is indirect, taking the form of land expropriation for public infrastructure. Indirect displacement is also highly limited. Like economic displacement, displacement pressure is absent, since there is no need to move away. Exclusionary displacement, however, can be associated with the corner case of enclosure that excludes the possibility of expanding urban villages’ residential land to accommodate future generations.

Phenomenological displacement exists for some demographic groups. NUAs introduce new lifestyles and values that create unwelcome phenomenological displacement for some, typically older, villagers. However, the resistance to lifestyle changes triggered by the arrival of more affluent populations in polarising, neoliberal, Western cities is not necessarily prevalent in the rapidly growing economies of East Asia, where such changes may actually be embraced. In the test case examined here, resistance is less about the transformation of community space and more about protecting households’ long-term economic interests. Additionally, in contrast to Western urbanites’ efforts to preserve household financial security in the face of growing precarity through the maintenance of existing social networks, periurban households in rapidly growing economies see ample opportunity and embrace changes that will position them effectively within that transition. Thus, urban transitions that are understood as gentrification in Western cities are often welcomed in countries experiencing somewhat more inclusive forms of rapid economic growth.

Displacement either does not exist or is welcome. However, justice claims are still made. In Hanoi, people typically object not to displacement but to the distribution of value created by land redevelopment. This leaves generalised gentrification proponents with two choices. First, they could argue that the form of injustice in rapidly growing economies may differ from that in developed Western cities. If one accepts Shin’s (2009) claim that the form of gentrification in East Asia differs from that of the West, then it follows that injustice may also take different forms. One could argue that gentrification in the West is experienced as unjust because of the displacement it generates and that this injustice manifests in place-based claims, while the large-scale gentrification of East Asia, on the other hand, is experienced as unjust because of the inequitable distribution of newly created value. That is, the definition of justice must be contextualised. While this would be consistent with Shklar’s claim that the definition of justice evolves through localised experiences of injustice, some might object that this strategy would only further dissipate the concept of gentrification. More importantly, it also risks obscuring the terminological clarity of other forms of injustice that are not unique to one geographical region, such as value grabbing, and thereby undermining the terminological traction for mobilising resistance to those forms of injustice. We thus offer a second option.

If political traction matters, then naming matters (Fainstein, 2010). As argued above, ‘gentrification’ is employed to mobilise political action in the face of perceived injustice. While the word has proven effective where the production of space for more affluent users initiates displacement that threatens households’ wellbeing, it is unlikely to be as effective when displacement offers new opportunities and promises a better living environment (real or imagined). For it is the experience of social injustice through displacement that gives the accusation of ‘gentrification’ its political weight. Following Shklar (1992), it can be argued that the voice of the victims is primary in determinations of injustice that drive political action, and in Hanoi victims are concerned with different forms of injustice. New forms of injustice require new names. To mobilise around the injustice created by Hanoi’s large-scale residential projects, we therefore propose the alternative notions of ‘livelihood dispossession’ and ‘value grabbing’. These terms, respectively, capture the loss of livelihood security and the inequitable distribution of profits from redevelopment, the genuine concerns of villagers.

Our reliance on Shklar’s position that injustice depends fundamentally on the perception of victims opens up an important avenue for future debate. We must now explore whose perception of injustice matters. As Shklar (1992: 39) points out, some people take up the cause of others they perceive to be victims of injustice even when those others do not make justice claims themselves. For instance, as discussed above, outside academics, media practitioners and activists are often involved as political actors in reinforcing and broadening villagers’ injustice claims. If they identify injustice in the absence of victims’ claims, is it appropriate to call an urban transformation gentrification, livelihood dispossession or value grabbing? Perhaps their political action can convince others that they, too, are experiencing a particular form of injustice, as may be the case for Ley and Teo’s claim that the epistemological recognition of gentrification is growing in Hong Kong. Perhaps victims of displacement are also victims of false consciousness and simply misread their plight. Perhaps, as DiGregorio (2011) and Hila Zaban (personal communication, 2018) suggest, social injustice only becomes clear years later after the true costs are reckoned, as expansion turns to overexpansion or socio-economic conditions change. If so, the present welcoming of urban transformation may not reflect long-term costs, and the voices of those currently anticipating or experiencing benefits from displacement must be discounted, a clear challenge for democratic process. If these politically mobilising terms require a determination that social injustice is being done, we are now compelled to ask who has the authority to make that designation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Cuz Potter would like to thank Hila Zaban and Matthew Hayes for their constructive criticism of a very early draft of this paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by research grants from the National Research Foundation of Korea (No. 2015R1C1A1A02036483) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (No. 201-2016-035).

ORCID iD

Cuz Potter

Notes

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