The wrong side of the tracks

As part of Hanoi’s recent master plan for extending ‘urban civilization’ into the surrounding countryside, officials have annexed dozens of peri-urban villages, remade local landscapes according to ‘rationalized’ forms of development and embarked on ambitious infrastructure projects to ease the city’s chronic traffic congestion and showcase the city’s modernity. Drawing upon recent ethnographic fieldwork in Phu Dong Ward—one such outlying annexed space—this paper explores how citizens experience large-scale construction projects and displacement along the city’s ever-shifting urban margins, where membership in the city and claims on its space can be tenuous, detailing just what kinds of places, and what kinds of politics, emerge in the folds of marginal urban spaces yet to be ironed into their final forms. It details the material and symbolic presence of state and capital power as manifested through invasive construction sites alongside the countervailing corporeal and economic presence of resourceful citizens remaining in their compromised communities. It shows both: (1) how displaced citizens in Phu Dong engage a politics of presence in response to construction projects by circumventing official spatial directives, conspicuously contesting eviction and compensation policies, and repurposing urban places in ways that undermine the teleology of Hanoi’s planned reform and reconstruction; and (2) how the authority of state and capital maintains its own coercive presence—both physical and symbolic—through the urban railway’s material manifestations in newly annexed sites like Phu Dong—the equipment, construction signage, rubble and battered streetscapes that accompany the project and signal the inevitability of peri-urban change.