Branding the Night: Entrepreneurial City Logics and the Governance of Pedestrian Streets in Hanoi, Vietnam

ABSTRACT Cities have increasingly embraced pedestrian streets and the night‐time economy in revitalising their downtown, justified by promises of livability and city branding. However, there remains a notable gap in scholarly work regarding the impacts of these programs on local life. Prior research on Vietnamese streets has concentrated on examining the production and usage of these spaces, often ignoring broader policies and their impacts on the streets. This study analyses policies, discourses and governance diapositives around pedestrianisation and the night‐time economy in Hanoi (Vietnam), with a particular emphasis on the social dimensions, drawing on the concepts of entrepreneurial city and governmentality. Our research reveals that Vietnamese authorities have employed aesthetic and spatial governmentality to reshape and to some extent distort the model of the entrepreneurial city. We term this model as a pseudo entrepreneurial city, manifesting in forced policies of exclusion, as opposed to the ‘soft policies of exclusion’ commonly observed in Global North cities. This study contributes to debates on the entrepreneurial city and governmentality by analysing how state‐led urban revitalisation initiatives are implemented not only as strategies for economic growth and city branding, but also as instruments of spatial regulation that reconfigure public space and unevenly affect urban actors, notably street vendors and other informal workers, and local residents.