Institutional straddling: Negotiating micro-governance in Hanoi’s new urban areas

The rise and spread of commercially built residential projects in East and Southeast Asia has attracted growing scholarly attention since the 1990s. This scholarship has notably explored how the private production of new residential developments has altered urban governance across the region. However, few studies have analyzed how private corporate actors’ new roles in city-making processes shape governance logics at the neighborhood scale. This paper begins to fill the gap by exploring the governance dynamic of three new urban areas (NUAs) built on the edge of Hanoi in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Our analysis builds on a conceptualization of local state-linked organizations in East and Southeast Asia as “straddlers†Relying on interviews with local community leaders and homeowners, we find that the privatization of urban space production has not sidelined residents and government from micro-local politics in Hanoi. Instead, conflicts between homeowners and developers over land uses, property rights, and management practices and responsibilities have led to a repositioning of the old socialist neighborhood administrative apparatus to accommodate the governance of NUAs. The self-protection response of NUA homeowners during these conflicts played a key role in this process. By deploying what we call institutional straddling, these people forged a new mode of neighborhood governance that weaves together the neighborhood administration apparatus inherited from socialism and new residential property self-management bodies.