Co-Creative urbanism: The production of plural evolutionary spatialities through conflicts and complicities between public and private in the streets of Hanoi, Vietnam

Abstract

Under the impact of economic globalization, today cities put a high priority to improve their attractiveness and become ideal destinations for global capital and elites (William S.W. Lim, 2014). Results of these “improvements” are often severe gentrification and spectacularisation processes that compromise resilience of local communities. These have influenced on the materiality of tradition, and as a result historical, social and cultural linkages is being gradually decontextualized and commodified, severely damaging local identity, community and knowledge (William S. W. Lim, 2013). Epitomes of these disruptions of complex rooted linkages are the “creative”, post-consumerist landscapes of consumption, ubiquitously emerging in public spaces in today cities. Contrasting such tendency of producing deterritorialised places, trapping people for hours at a time in hyper-real spaces, relevant socio-spatial instances of resistance are found. This paper explores the complex spatialities of conceptions, everyday actions and practices of one of these places that preserve genuine rhythms of daily lives. The historical central district of Hanoi is chosen as our case study, where local inhabitants develop idiosyncratic tactics to engage with public spaces. These doings notably exemply those that produce differential spaces - using the notion proposed by Henri Lefebvre (1991). Disassociating from regulated, limited, planned and homogenized environments as occurring in present shopping malls and theme parks, streets in Hanoi's central district offer chances for accidental encounters, unexpected events and support a diverse range of local inhabitants in an extremely active and dynamic play. The streets appear as a loosen space (Franck & Stevens, 2007), where unpredictable uses, intermingled spatial interconnections and complex social interrelations generate. This paper discusses the findings of a research that aims to explore the interaction between the multifarious spatial activities of residents and transients, and describe the patterns of such inclusionary relations. So as to achieve the target, the theoretical lenses of Lefebvre’s spatialities and Kim’s spatial ethnography are useful, on the one hand to comprehensively decode and interpret “social space” and on the other hand to clearly describe such space.