Flooding the sanitary city

Urban water flows are constitutive elements of Hanoi's morphology. Regular floods across the city illustrate that Hanoi's amphibious character is a central impediment to the installation of a ‘dry and sanitary city', the global modernist ideal of a separation of urban wastewater flows from public space through their redirection into large underground networks. Currently, the first attempt by the city government to construct a citywide sewerage network since the colonial period is taking place. In accordance with the ideal of the sanitary city, it aims at a unification and centralization of hitherto socio-spatially diverse arrangements of sanitation provision in the city. At the same time, rapid urbanization has radically transformed Hanoi, contributing to a continuous diversity of urban sanitation infrastructures and thus defeating the goal of unification and centralization. Starting from an urban political ecology perspective, this paper takes a historical focus to explain Hanoi's sanitation system as emerging from an interplay of discourses and material urbanization dynamics. Arguing that discourses permeate the material reproduction of urban wastewater flows and infrastructures, the paper focuses on the role of the sanitary city ideal for the reproduction of sanitation infrastructures and the contestations and stabilizations of this ideal in Hanoi. Furthermore, the paper addresses the material reproduction of urban sanitation and drainage in Hanoi as part of broader urbanization dynamics, based on a conceptualization of regular floods at the urban fringe of Hanoi as indicators for persisting socio-spatial fragmentations of the city's sanitation system.