Rhythmanalysis: Rethinking the politics of everyday negotiations in ordinary public spaces

Introduction

In recent years the notion of rhythm(s) has emerged as an important concept in the social sciences (Edensor, 2010; Kitchin, 2019; Reid-Musson, 2018; Smith and Hetherington, 2013; Southerton, 2020). In urban studies, rhythm has become a key issue in relation to the globalization process and its urban corollary, the metropolization process. Metropolitan areas – understood as major cities in which economic, politic and cultural power is concentrated in an unprecedented way – differ from pre-globalized cities in their particularly complex and entangled rhythms (Smith and Hetherington, 2013: 4). Much research draws on the notion of ‘time acceleration’ (Rosa, 2010) and the ‘cult of immediacy’ said to be specific to a ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000) with 24/7 availability (Hassan and Purser, 2007; Kitchin, 2019; Mallet, 2014). In this context, various researchers have focused on the specific time slot of ‘night’ and its related ‘nightscapes’ (Chatterton and Hollands, 2003; Schwanen et al., 2012). The notion of rhythm is also mobilized by researchers dealing with temporary urbanism solutions (O’Callaghan and Lawton, 2016) within urban projects. Studies such as these highlight new rhythms through new entanglements of everyday activities that emerge in metropolitan areas.

The idea of rhythm is usually linked with order and regularity, and often refers to periodic movements (Oxford Dictionary online; You, 1994). In this paper, I use a more comprehensive understanding of this polysemous concept, distancing myself from strict definitions involving the notion of regularity: rhythm also encompasses the irregular and spontaneous organization of time. Envisioned as such, the concept of rhythm serves as a heuristic tool to analyse and rethink the ‘production’ of contemporary metropolitan areas in the sense put forth by Henri Lefebvre (1974). By production, Lefebvre envisions urban space not as a passive backdrop but as an active political construction that invites a critical reading of the city and the conditions that shaped it. This article focuses on metropolitan public spaces, characterized by high density and diverse social practices. Public spaces can be understood both as urban structures and as social spaces open to contestation. As such, they provide qualitative insight into the sociopolitical construction of the metropolitan environment. Constantly in motion, they are typified by an unprecedented superposition and entanglement of different rhythms, “but they have nothing to do with any overall orchestration or any mass coordination of routine across the city” (Allen, 1999: 56). Deciphering the (often informal) terms of everyday tradeoffs in ordinary public spaces can provide us with a political reading of the city during a period of rapid globalization.

This article therefore brings together rhythm studies and a political reading of everyday metropolitan production. Broadly, it seeks to assess how rhythms can help us to study everyday political negotiations inordinary public spaces, and how this political perspective can bring greater analytical rigour to rhythm studies. I investigate in particular the political meaning of the sequencing and ordering of temporal practices in metropolitan public spaces over the course of the day. My hypothesis is that this alternation of activities is not neutral, but reveals entrenched power relations, which are constantly renegotiated and reaffirmed in the context of metropolitan production. By viewing power relations through the lens of urban rhythms, I investigate both theoretically and empirically the ways in which public spaces are constantly shaped and reshaped by the alternation of stakeholders and their activities, repeating day after day in a never-ending rhythm. This perspective invites us to question both the spatiality and the temporality of power in the metropolitan context. It has been asserted that spatiality not only reveals or expresses relations of domination, but also frames and constitutes them (Raffestin, 1980). I assume here that the same holds for temporality.

Acknowledging that “the drama of co-presence and co-existence” unfolds in the everyday (Lefebvre, 1970), this study revolves around local public space at the neighbourhood scale. This allows us to avoid a totalizing theory of the everyday: “everyday people are not always a unified, organized group but in urban settings involve a variety of people with different tactics and understandings” (Kim, 2015: 8). The analysis centres on dwellers, sellers and anonymous passersby in all their diversity, providing a grounded and ethnographic perspective on metropolitan power relationships. Moreover, this approach challenges representations of the local neighbourhood as a ‘place of belonging’: it suggests that this belonging is not guaranteed to all city dwellers on a 24/7 basis, but constantly has to be negotiated and renegotiated, even for access over short periods. I contextualize this approach by presenting and discussing data collected in the context of the research programme of the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network (SEANNET), for which I coordinated the fieldwork in Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) between 2017 and 2019.

With more than 10 million inhabitants, Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) is a fast-emerging metropolis of Southeast Asia. Local land-use conflicts – from obstacles in major projects to daily frictions in the use of public space – are multiplying and have become central to the recalibration of metropolitan power, requiring constant arbitration. Over 30% of the inhabitants of HCMC depend directly on public space for their economic activities (Kim, 2015: 17). In the current metropolization process, however, the social pact which sustains a balance in the multiple uses of public space in HCMC is increasingly being challenged. I performed a rhythmanalysis of the Kiến Thiết market (in ward 14 of the pericentral Phú Nhuận district), a local marketplace that contrasts with the iconic, tourist-filled central metropolitan areas and encapsulates the everyday metropolitan rhythm. The methodology involved, first, a systematic data collection of all usages and users of the plaza from 5 AM to 9 PM. I present these data on a new type of timeline which I call ‘urban tempo’, revealing a sophisticated urban ballet with very few spatial encroachments or clashes despite the proliferation of activities being performed in a contained area. This was confirmed through the second set of data, which consists of in-depth interviews with local inhabitants, passersby and authorities. These interviews draw attention to the countless small negotiations which illustrate so many power relationships and the ability to make the most fruitful use of space and time in this local setting.

The article is divided into five parts. Section ‘Rethinking the temporal sharing of everyday public space as political’ describes the theoretical framework, which entails revisiting the politics of ordinary public spaces in contemporary metropolises using a temporal approach. Section ‘Rhythmanalysis as method’ unpacks Lefebvre’s (1992) understanding of rhythmanalysis and describes the methodology in more detail, as well as the conditions of data collection in the Vietnamese context. In Sections ‘Evidence from Ho Chi Minh City’ and ‘Unequal negotiations and time tradeoffs’, I examine the daily patterns in which local inhabitants in the pericentral Phú Nhuận district of HCMC negotiate access to more or less valuable time slots and spaces. At this stage, my ‘urban tempo’ timeline offers an insightful basis from which to conduct focus interviews, harnessing rhythmanalysis to uncover power relationships and tradeoffs. This allows me to identify four types of actors, classified according to their negotiating power. Finally, Section ‘Addressing the politics of the everyday through rhythmanalysis: methodological and theoretical implications’ draws attention to the methodological and theoretical implications of this work, paving the way for future comparative research in the field of urban inequalities studies.

Rethinking the temporal sharing of everyday public space as political

Public spaces provide a revealing perspective from which to explore the encounters between policymakers’ intentions, governance practices and the everyday practices of ordinary citizens during the rapid urbanization process that characterizes Asia in particular (Miao, 2001; Qian, 2014). As such, shedding light on the logic of the various everyday uses of public spaces in a city of the South – such as Ho Chi Minh City – allows us to interrogate the politics of the everyday in the urbanization process.

Even as it becomes increasingly prevalent in the field of urban studies (Bodnar, 2015; Iveson, 2007; Madanipour, 2003; Mitchell, 2003; Vigneswaran et al., 2017), the notion of public space faces challenges when applied outside the context in which it is traditionally used, as in contemporary Vietnam (Gibert, 2018a; Kim, 2015; Kurfürst, 2013). What does ‘public’ mean under the authoritarian regime of the Vietnamese party-state? And how can we account for the vibrant social contribution of markets and privately owned cafes, themselves strongly associated with Vietnamese urban identity, within a theoretical understanding of public space that has traditionally subscribed to an irrelevant public/private dichotomy (Houssay-Holzschuch and Thébault, 2017)? To address this theoretical challenge, I draw on ‘regimes of publicity’ (Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008), an alternative explanatory framework for assessing the degree of ‘publicity’ by means of three components: ‘property’, ‘political legitimacy’ and ‘social norms and communities’(each of which can vary according to time and place). These three levels – the legal, the political and the social – are intertwined, but not necessarily equally important when it comes to the conception of publicity. Even a place with a private legal status can benefit from a certain regime of publicity if it allows, for instance, for diverse individuals and groups to come into contact freely (Houssay-Holzschuch and Teppo, 2009; Tyndal, 2010). Drawing on this framework, I argue that the publicity of a place in Vietnam is mainly forged through small-scale urban appropriations by a city’s residents.

With a plethora of competing urban practices, public spaces also give rise to daily frictions and confrontations. Multiple claims to limited space ensure that tensions run high, especially in urban contexts where public spaces sustain the livelihood of a large part of the population, as in Vietnam. In this competitive context, constant spatiotemporal negotiations are needed to gain access to space in which to perform the activities required to secure one’s livelihood. At the same time, most metropolitan areas of the Global South engage in an active rewriting of the rules of public space by arbitrating on which spatial practices can be considered legitimate (Haid and Hilbrandt, 2019; Kim, 2015). In this context, informal street vendors are among the most precarious urban actors (Anjaria, 2016).

The literature on the competition for public space primarily focuses on the strategies of various stakeholders to gain access to urban amenities (Beazley, 2002; Qian, 2020; Sen and Silverman, 2014; Turner and Hanh, 2019). This article aims to add a temporal approach to the study of the power relations that constantly shape and reshape everyday public spaces in dense metropolises. I hypothesize that the apparent chaos that characterizes the banal everyday usage of Vietnam’s streets is constrained by asymmetric power relationships and meaningful small-scale negotiations. Indeed, the polyrhythmic succession of activities in small public spaces constitutes a “fine-grained pattern of a remarkable amount of coordination of space between people” (Kim, 2015: 124) that reveal as many unequal negotiations. This perspective calls for a focus on the political mechanics of ‘sequential versatility’ in the uses of public space, be they one-off or recurrent activities, planned or unexpected and, most importantly, chosen or undergone.

My objectives in this article are twofold. First, I aim to give a comprehensive account of the temporal organization of an ordinary public space in the dense Vietnamese metropolitan context, revealing the rhythms that structure this space. This will result in a re-evaluation of the ephemeral uses of public spaces, ultimately ascribing greater weight to such uses. Second, I aim to shed light on the power relationships that govern this sharing of time. Indeed, time is not a neutral container for social life but “a source of values, concepts and logics that are used to negotiate the complexity of social life” (Temporal Belongings Network, 2011).The rhythmanalysis employed here seeks to disentangle the multitude of intertwined forces at play locally and to identify different modes of negotiations, from the ‘strategies’ of official actors to the ‘tactics’ of informal ones (Certeau, 1988). As such, it will answer the following research questions: Who defines the norms for sharing time in public space, and according to what criteria? Who has access to the most valuable timeslots and under what conditions?

Rhythmanalysis as method

In his writings generally, and in his Éléments de rythmanalyse (1992) ¹ in particular, Henri Lefebvre describes the study of daily rhythms as the gateway to a political reading of the city. The framework he develops focuses on the lived experiences of capitalist space and time. ² In Lefebvre’s view, everyday life, in its relationship to time, is a source of alienation. Consequently, rhythmanalysis presents a fundamental critique of everyday life (Revol, 2015). Furthermore, rhythm is the result not only of what can be observed or felt, but also of other elements that “present themselves without being present” (Lefebvre, 1996: 223), such as rules on the opening hours of shops and offices or the regulation of traffic. Thus, the “music of the city” results from both presence and absence, and rhythms are understood as constitutive of the urban experience itself. By encouraging us to turn the concept of rhythm into “a science, a new field of knowledge […] with practical consequences” (1992: 11), Lefebvre invites us to develop a “praxis that can take charge of the gathering together of what gives itself as dispersed, dissociated, separated, and this in the form of simultaneity and encounters” (1996: 143). In recent years, Lefebvre’s conception of rhythms has been applied in a great deal of empirical research (Otway, 2014; Reid-Musson, 2018; Simpson, 2012; Spinney, 2010). In this article, I mobilize rhythmanalysis as an analytic lens to investigate the political underpinnings of how patterns of local behaviour are temporally structured in the metropolitan context. In doing so, I borrow Lefebvre’s focus on praxis, paying specific attention to the concrete conditions of the experience of social life that emerge from the various ways in which city dwellers interact with space. I use rhythmanalysis as a tool for the critical exploration of the public space and social times thus produced. Both everyday space and social times are far from abstract concepts, and arise from a constantly renewed network of (power) relationships.

Building on Lefebvre, I aim to arrive at a political understanding of metropolitan rhythms at the scale of an ordinary weekday in the public space of a city of the Global South. The case study presented here is based on a subset of findings from the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network (SEANNET) research programme, which focuses on the current evolution of ordinary neighbourhoods of Ho Chi Minh City. With two students, I performed a rhythmanalysis of the KiếnThiết local market in ward 14 of the pericentral Phú Nhuận district, primarily between June and November 2017. This rhythmanalysis uses a Phú Nhuận mixed-methods approach involving (1) a preliminary draft of the data-collection protocol, (2) on-site physical surveys, (3) systematic temporal observations over the course of a full day (including photography), (4) the production of a timeline representing these observations visually, and finally (5) in-depth interviews. Each of these methods involves different epistemologies.

First, in line with the sociocultural context of Ho Chi Minh City, I developed my observation protocol by visiting the market in question on multiple occasions at different times and on different days. Data collection was limited to the period between 5 AM and 9 PM. During these ‘social hours’, a range of activities take place in public spaces in Vietnam; after nightfall there is considerably less activity. Such a choice should of course be adapted to the city under investigation and the overall aims of the study.

Second, our on-site surveys enabled us to divide the space into four meaningful subcategories in which to organize our observations: the centre of a local plaza, the ground floors of the surrounding buildings, the thresholds between ground floors and the street, and the street itself. This spatial division also draws on my prior understanding of the daily functioning of urban space in Vietnam, where the country’s trading heritage results in fuzzy borders between public and private spaces (Drummond, 2000; Gibert, 2018a).

Third, systematic temporal observations were performed in person. Due to the costs and ethical issues involved, we avoided technologies such as surveillance cameras. We divided our team into three groups, each positioned in a strategic location with a 360° view; specifically, the centre of the Kiến Thiết plaza and two intersections where alleyways open onto the market plaza. Here we recorded the number of people who entered the market and the duration of their visit/passage through the site.

Fourth, each observation was formatted for use with UrbanTempo, a package I designed in the R programming language and software environment. The package contains computer code to automatically plot urban temporalities from our observational data. ³ Ultimately it produces an ‘urban tempo’ timeline, which provides the basis for further critical analysis. Specifically, this timeline allows the viewer to grasp at a glance the ‘sequential versatility’ in the uses of metropolitan space at the local scale, and to adjust it following interviews. Unlike traditional, large-scale metropolitan cartography, the timeline draws attention to hitherto overlooked and unseen dimensions of the everyday metropolitan experience.

On the basis of these preliminary visual results, we selected 30 interviewees. These were mainly people who engaged indirect social interactions during their time at the market. We sought the greatest possible variety of local actors, from local authorities to established or more informal vendors, but also customers, waste collectors and walkers. This allowed us to clarify not only the status of people in the neighbourhood, but also their capacity to negotiate their presence there for longer or shorter and more or less valuable periods of time. As such, these interviews deepened our understanding of public space as well as the struggle for valued time slots in the city, thus enabling us to bring a political perspective to bear on the changing – and changeable – nature of public space.

Evidence from Ho Chi Minh City

A rhythmanalysis of the Kiến Thiết market

The Kiến Thiết market, in ward 14 of Phú Nhuận district, is representative spatially and temporally of alleyway neighbourhoods in HCMC: in contrast to the iconic, tourist-filled central metropolitan areas, it embodies the ordinary, everyday rhythm of urban life in HCMC. Ward 14 illustrates the many layers of identity in the city’s historical development. Its local identity is linked to the Catholic community, who settled in the area in the 1950s following their escape from the communist regime in northern Vietnam. Many local families have lived in the area for several generations and are still active in the Catholic community. Despite its high population density (around 11,000 people in 14 ha), the ward is relatively wealthy by HCMC standards; residents are disproportionately employed as government officers. The ward is home to numerous colonial villas, as well as more recent developments built by newer residents. This part of Phú Nhuận also illustrates the metropolitan diversification of HCMC today. To the south it is bordered by the Nhiêu Lộc canal, the banks and the road running alongside of which have been upgraded in recent years. This area now forms a bustling commercial space with new cafes and restaurants. As the ward becomes increasingly dynamic, it faces new development pressures which threaten both its historical layout and its sociocultural identity.

Although Kiến Thiết is a small market at the metropolitan scale – it does not have a covered market hall, for instance – it serves as a commercial hub and a nerve centre locally. In the morning and late afternoon, commercial activities cover most of the small plaza opening onto Đặng Văn Ngữ street, along the mid-rise Kiến Thiết building (which gives its name to the market), and the adjacent main alleyways as far as alleyway 525 Huỳnh Văn Bánh. These activities occupy four distinct types of spaces: the ground floors of shophouses, where fruits and vegetables or clothes are typically sold; the thresholds of some shophouses, directly on the public space of the alleyway, where temporary stalls have been established; the centre of the alleyways, where street sellers stop to serve customers; and the central plaza itself, which is put to different uses over the course of the day. These four types of space are shown on our ‘urban tempo’ timeline (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

The ‘urban tempo’ timeline: identifying patterns.

The timeline in Figure 1 reflects the general pattern of daily rhythms, repeating on a daily basis, around the market. The morning hours (between 7 AM and 1 PM in particular) are the most dynamic and commercially active, together with the late afternoon hours (between 5 and 8 PM). This is evidenced by the high frequency of street-vendor activities and the fact that the majority of the shops and stalls are open. Economic activities are at their peak between 7.30 and 9.30 AM. This reflects the average city rhythm in Vietnam: people generally wake up early, around 5 or 6 AM, to make the most of the relatively cooler hours, while the hot midday hours are dedicated to rest and nap time. Office hours in Vietnam are usually between 7.30 or 8 AM and 5.30 or 6 PM, with an early lunch break between 11.30 and 12.30. Most offices usually close around 6 PM, followed by a commercially dynamic period with many night markets. ⁴ Between these rush hours, the early afternoon (from 1 to 3 PM) is quiet: most shops are shut, street traders thin out and visitors return to their homes. Typically only a few locals can be seen chatting on the threshold to their homes, and the few people outside are resting. The shops reopen around 3.30 and generally stay open until 8 PM. Thereafter the neighbourhood becomes quieter again, with most commercial activities, restaurants and bars moving down the Nhiêu Lộc canal.

Commercial activities in the morning are different from those in the afternoon and early evening. In the morning, most shops and temporary stalls sell fresh fruits and vegetables, groceries, clothes or fabrics, while in the afternoon many shops specialize in clams (quán ố c) or become restaurants, bars and cafes. This goes hand in hand with a change in the ‘noisescape’: after 3.30 PM the marketplace is quieter than during the morning rush hours. Stalls on the thresholds rotate the fastest: many street stalls switch to selling different products every hour or two. These thresholds can be understood as ‘liminal spaces’, marking the intersection between public and private uses (Jones, 2007). As such, they are ambiguous, hybrid and thus easily reappropriated and moulded to meet changing needs: they are the most versatile spaces within the neighbourhood. In addition to this versatility, customers and passersby change throughout the day: early visitors to the market are usually local inhabitants, revealed first and foremost by their outfits. Most women doing their shopping at this time wear a comfortable outfit they wear inside the home, which they change after preparing lunch. By contrast, when lunchtime comes, many customers in local restaurants are dressed in office clothes (white shirts and trousers or skirt), some even with badges. These visitors use the local stalls as their daily canteen.

Beyond commercial activities, which are the most visible, audible and space-consuming activities, the local public space around Kiến Thiết market is also used for a great many other temporary functions (Figure 2). Our data reveal its importance as a place in which to socialize, with dwellers and visitors (including employees of the local authorities, whose small office is also located on the plaza) coming together spontaneously to chat. Some residents walk their dogs around the plaza, which is more convenient than on the crowded footpaths of the bigger streets. Children gather to play around 5 PM (included under ‘social activities’ in Figure 1). As one of the very few open spaces in the ward, the market is also where riders park their motorbikes (from 5.30 AM to 9.30 PM, as indicated in Figure 1).

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Figure 2.

Summary of the five different urban functions supported by the Kiến Thiết market area.

In terms of spatial organization, the edge of the plaza is by far the most used space, with shops and stalls side by side, while the centre of the plaza is dedicated to waste disposal. The waste pile can be more or less prominent over the course of the day, depending on the appearance of different types of recyclers. In the morning, most of them are informal and focused on a specific type of waste (metal, cardboard, organic waste, etc.). Focused interviews revealed that most waste collectors pass by every day, at fixed times. One collector carrying large plastic containers explained that he visits local markets in the city several times a week looking for food for his pigs, which he is raising in the suburbs of HCMC.

Broadly, our data reveal a strong sense of local territoriality and a vibrant social life at the neighbourhood scale. We see a sophisticated urban ballet performed on a daily basis, with very few encroachments of space or overt clashes despite the proliferation of activities. Local streets form a complex socio-spatial apparatus at the interface of public and private life, of the built environment and open space, of anonymity and acquaintance, of movement and parking, of the metropolitan and local scales, of the physical and social dimensions. Beyond these preliminary observations, our next goal is to understand the invisible orchestration underlying this routinized urban ballet. Indeed, our timeline reveals that not all time slots are occupied at the same rate of activity around Kiến Thiết market. Accessing a strategic space in the city at the right moment in time requires countless small negotiations, in which power relations play an important role.

Unequal negotiations and time tradeoffs

Our rhythmanalysis reveals that the temporal succession of activities throughout the day results from constantly renegotiated and reiterated local agreements, in which each urban actor has a different degree of negotiating power. The result is a dynamic local network that also reveals inequalities in power relationships. On the basis of our 30 interviews we were indeed able to distinguish four types of actors, classified in terms of their capacity to negotiate and assert their position. Here we draw on the distinction between ‘tactics’ and ‘strategy’ proposed by Michel de Certeau (1988). The notion of ‘tactics’ embraces all those small, day-to-day actions and negotiations that urban dwellers undertake to deal with an urban condition imposed upon them, the result of decision making in which they cannot participate. In contrast, ‘strategy’ presumes control and power. Tactics are not merely a subset of strategy, however, but reveal a capacity to adapt to an environment shaped by the strategies of the powerful. While strategy tends towards the exclusive and self-referential, tactics, on the other hand, are reactive, constantly being reassessed on the basis of observations of the actual environment.

Addressing the politics of the everyday through rhythmanalysis: Methodological and theoretical implications

Rhythmanalysis provides an analytic lens for investigating the political underpinnings of how patterns of small, local and often overlooked behaviours are temporally structured in a metropolitan context. Understood as a praxis, it invites the researcher to consider the concrete conditions of social life that emerge from the ways in which different categories of city dwellers interact with ordinary public spaces. This approach highlights the value of ephemeral uses of public space. Like space, time is anything but a neutral container for social life: ‘time-sharing’ is the ‘product’ – in Lefebvre’s sense of the term (1974) – of unequal everyday negotiations, intertwined with the more commonly studied negotiations pertaining to spatial access. Thus, understanding the politics of the everyday and the unequal capacity of various urban actors to access valuable timeslots in public spaces requires us to scrutinize the temporal organization of a place throughout the day, every day, and to delve into the local sociopolitical meanings of time-based transactions.

Here, I highlight three implications of this operationalization of rhythmanalysis as applied to the study of ordinary public space. The first is a methodological one: this article contributes to the development of a cosmopolitan theoretical framework from the perspective of the ‘Southern turn’. Second, it provides a nuanced understanding of time-sharing norms in the Vietnamese authoritarian context. Third, at the theoretical level, it sheds light on the power dynamics at play in multifunctional, ephemeral public spaces, inviting researchers to investigate everyday socioeconomic inequalities from the novel perspective of time sharing in the city.

Vietnam is still considered a developing country of the Global South and, as such, remains largely excluded from global theoretical frameworks in urban studies. I challenge this status by refining and operationalizing the conceptual tool of rhythmanalysis in an ordinary market plaza in Ho Chi Minh City. This not only facilitated the collection and visual representation of particularly dense and contextualized data, but also highlights the importance of paying close attention to variegated types of public space at a time of major metropolitan transformations, thereby transcending the local structures described in this article. As such, the present operationalization of rhythmanalysis contributes to the development of a genuinely cosmopolitan theoretical framework advocated by researchers such as Roy and Ong (2011), Comaroff and Comaroff (2012) and Goh and Bunnell (2013).The specific ‘time-sharing regime’ identified in Ho Chi Minh City can be linked to multiple local factors, including the fact that it is an especially dense metropolis, where more than 30% of the population rely on informal trading to make a living, under an authoritarian political regime that emerged from the country’s socialist legacy. As a cosmopolitan framework, rhythmanalysis can only achieve its full potential through fruitful comparative case studies, be it in other Asian or other metropolitan contexts, in more or less dense urban settings, under different political regimes and focusing on other kinds of public spaces. To this end, the standardized ‘urban tempo’ timeline produced using the R package described in this article, which automatically plots urban temporalities based on observational data, is intended to facilitate further comparative studies.

The present study provides a snapshot of the everyday functioning of a local marketplace in a city undergoing a massive metropolitan transformation. All too often, the study of such urban transformations remains limited to their most exceptional and thus visible forms (e.g. Kennedy, 2015; Rizzo, 2020; Shatkin, 2008). By contrast, this article has investigated the local forces that shape contemporary urban Vietnam today. This perspective gives rise to textured explanations for the ‘becoming’ of ordinary public spaces in Asia, rather than attributing it merely to the process of metropolitan convergence. It also allows for the recognition that the politics of the everyday are subject to negotiation far more than the common characterization of Vietnam as an authoritarian party-state would suggest.

After rigorous investigation of the temporal organization of Kiến Thiết market, I investigated the nature of the exchanges and relationships that played out there. Such an approach contributes to a grounded, nuanced answer to the question of who defines the norms for sharing time in the public space of Vietnam, and according to what criteria. Despite the authoritarian nature of the Vietnamese political regime, local authorities appear to have only tenuous control over the local rhythms and temporal organization of commercial activities. The norms they are supposed to enforce, such as permissible market trading hours or the prohibition of informal street vending, are openly flouted on a daily basis through a multitude of informal arrangements. The real ‘masters of time’ were found to be the local landlords, who exist at the interface between the local authorities and other users who seek to benefit from valuable access, be it only temporary. Beyond owning space, these landlords manage an informal ‘time market’, arbitrating on the value of the different timeslots to be let out daily to interested renters. The latter can access valuable timeslots through two channels: by paying for them, but also by developing long-term relationships in the neighbourhood. Such a fine-grained, locally grounded perspective reveals the everyday political mechanics of ‘sequential versatility’ in the use of public space in Vietnam. The results show that power dynamics in the sharing of coveted space and time are constantly renewed and reaffirmed through everyday negotiations and cooperation between official authorities, local landlords, different types of street vendors and more marginalized actors.

A grounded study of this kind also sheds light on subtle negotiations that are difficult to capture at a macro level under authoritarian regimes. Indeed, the Vietnamese party-state is not a monolithic block: it is characterized by local flexibility, co-optation and the ability to assimilate different tensions that could threaten its stability (Gibert and Segard, 2015; Kerkvliet, 2019; Koh, 2006; Vasavakul, 2019). In this context, rhythmanalysis can be seen as a tool to shed light on the everyday power negotiations that nuance the overarching power of the party-state. By drawing attention to the notion of time sharing, this case study shows that, even under a centralized authoritarian government, power is embodied in ‘a web of conflict-ridden relations’ (Boudreau, 2019: 405). It therefore offers a heuristic model of ‘power effects’ (Kim, 2015: 130) in highly multifunctional ordinary public spaces, where traffic, trading functions and economic production coexist with social and domestic life, all subject to great temporal versatility. Where Raffestin (1980) envisions a highly ‘territorialized’ power, constantly reaffirmed through spatial practices, the present analysis thus adds a temporal understanding of power.

Finally, on a theoretical level, this study contributes to our understanding of ordinary public spaces as inherently relational and political (Bodnar, 2015; Qian, 2020; Vigneswaran et al., 2017). Drawing on Staeheli and Mitchell’s (2008) ‘regimes of publicity’, I have argued here that the publicity of a place relies on small-scale appropriations by city residents. Therefore, the publicity of any urban space – irrespective of its history, legal status or property regime – should not be taken for granted; it is constituted by daily social (re)negotiations and power struggles (Hou, 2010; Mitchell, 2003). I extend this framework by showing that the struggle to access valued timeslots, not only the space itself, is an additional and necessary piece of the puzzle: everyday negotiations pertaining to time are the key to the ordering of rhythms. Exploring the everyday temporal arrangements in ordinary public space is therefore an important element in the assessment of ‘publicness’, requiring us tore-evaluate (and ultimately give more weight to) ephemeral practices in the production of public spaces. In the very diversity of uses during brief timeslots lies the publicity of the space under investigation. Thus, public spaces are not defined as such by their legal status or their urban location; rather, they are socially performed on a day-to-day basis. Such a conception circumvents the restrictive normativity imposed by the Western tradition, allowing for a more open and dynamic conception of public spaces (Houssay-Holzschuch and Thébault, 2017).

Yet, if public spaces are in essence places of negotiation, these negotiations take place on an unequal footing, affording ‘strategies’ to some, while others have to make do with counter-‘tactics’ (Certeau, 1988).As this empirical analysis has shown, the costs and burdens associated with an individual’s negotiating power are unevenly distributed. In this sense, rhythmanalysis proved to be a promising means of investigating everyday socioeconomic inequalities from the novel perspective of time sharing in the city. This perspective should be developed in further research, especially in the field of metropolitan inequality studies (Anjaria, 2016; Ye, 2017). Metropolitan rhythms produce inequalities in terms of who can benefit from valuable assets and amenities. Here, residents’ administrative and socioeconomic status were revealed to be key factors in their ability to negotiate their own spatial and temporal access to the city. Fine-grained observations throughout the day revealed different degrees of informality and require us to go beyond the simple opposition between the formal and informal economy. I suggest that an awareness of the temporal ordering of activities allows us to identify actors who are able to gain transgressive access to metropolitan assets and amenities, albeit at limited times. In this sense, even as rhythms are directly implicated in creating and perpetuating unequal access to the city, informal users of public space are able to deploy inventive tactics in their use of metropolitan spaces. In turn, this contributes to a constant reshaping of social space and time.