Transforming the edge: Socio-spatial governance and migrant place-making in Ho Chi Minh City

Since the Communist Party of Vietnam launched economic reform in 1986, the peri-urban areas of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) have undergone a significant transformation induced by unprecedented urban expansion and rural-urban migration. These internal migrants provide a large labor force for economic growth, and their settlements significantly impact peri-urbanization. The spontaneous practices in making migrants’ places intersect with the state-led production of space generated socio-spatial paradoxes and contradictions, highlighting that these locations become arenas for diverse agents involved in interweaved economic, political, cultural, and spatial processes associated with urban issues such as uneven development, marginalization, and social exclusion. Such complex practices, actors, and structures challenge reductionist views in urban politics/studies. This project analyzes and explains the process of peri-urbanization based on the “cultural political economy” (CPE) approach by studying dynamic socio-spatial production and governance related to problems of rural-urban migrant workers’ settlements on the urban edge. The insights CPE draws on the strategic-relational approach, state theory, regulation theory, and their institutional, spatial, reflexive, and cultural turns, alongside related mid-range concepts and Territory, Place, Scale, Network (TPSN) scheme, providing relative premises from which this study departs. By combining the aim of the CPE to study the variation, selection, and retention in producing (counter-)hegemonies and Lefebvrian-Foucauldian-Neo-Gramscian dialogue on urban (counter-)hegemonic struggles, an analytical framework is concretized and employed for analyzing socio-spatial production and governance practices, and mechanisms that they are selected in different patterns and sedimented in hegemonic, counter-hegemonic, and sub-hegemonic projects. Moreover, CPE’s roots in critical realism inform the appropriateness of critical grounded theory methods, which combine theoretical and fieldworks in this research. In particular, this study is based on a multi-layered analysis and process tracing to explore the data from the field in the reflexivity with established theories. The research findings suggest that transforming socio-spatial production and governance on the urban edge involves tensions between different strategic selectivities in spontaneous and state-led practices and how they are inscribed in hegemonic, counter-hegemonic, and sub-hegemonic projects. While the state selects the strategies of territorialization and territorial governance to serve their hegemonic project of the civilized and modern socialist city, marginalization by these strategies has promoted place-making and place-based governance strategies of migrant workers and some local people as a manifestation of counter-hegemony. In the context of migrant workers’ spontaneous places increasingly lacking in sustainability by facing crises and transitions, the strategies of liminalization and multi-spatial meta-governance that emerge through state intervention reflect temporary transformations through a sub-hegemonic project. Such dynamic transformations are explained and interpreted through “soft hypotheses” derived from the discussed theories as responses to contradictions and dilemmas in different socio-spatial regulation models to stabilize the socialist-oriented market economic model. Accordingly, these state-led transformation strategies can be explained through their priorities for economic growth and their art of authoritarian neoliberalism to solve them. Furthermore, the hegemonic struggle perspective also implies that these transformations are not simply constituted by consensus but are better understood as a consensus-coercion continuum. The study on the CPE of transforming socio-spatial production and governance on the edge of HCMC provides insight into the nature of economic innovation and political reform in Vietnam. It also contributes to urban politics/studies in concepts such as migrant place-making and liminal space, concretizing CPE to an analytical framework, and rethinking power and (re)production in exploited and/or dominant socio-spatial relations. Such a study can help promote future research beyond formal-informal and state- or society-centered dichotomies in urban politics, highlighting the importance of continually politicizing the complexity of transformation processes to “becoming urban.”