1At the end of 1980, Vietnam abandoned a centralized, state-run economy in favor of a socialist-oriented market economy, Đổi mới, or “Renewal.” The city of Hanoi experienced rapid urban expansion that involved megaprojects, rural to urban migration, establishment of an informal housing market, and land speculation. Between 2000 and 2010, 11,000 hectares of farmland around Hanoi were expropriated by the state and transformed into economic and residential zones (Fanchette et al. 2011, 2016; Geertman 2003; Gubry & Linh 2010; Kim 2007; Labbé 2014; Labbé & Musil 2013; Quertamp 2010; Thinh & Gao 2021). By 2024, the city had over eight million people and included 148 periurban villages that were integrated into the city as new districts.
2Since the late 1990s and 2000s, the urban expansion of Hanoi with the creation of both economic zones and housing development projects has resulted in the state’s appropriation of large farmlands, for which farmers have received inadequate financial compensation, leading some farmers to protest the unfair practices (Kerkvliet 2018; Phan 2022; Labbé 2016). For example, in the Tây Hồ district of Hanoi’s West Lake region, the state took farmland to build a residential neighborhood; farmers were compensated, but not enough to benefit from the land market windfall. In other rural communes, farmers whose income depended almost entirely on farming found themselves in precarious situations (Duchère 2019; Phan 2022; Vansintjan et al. 2019). Farmers with usufruct over the agricultural land were excluded from negotiations between local cooperatives and the state (Vansintjan et al. 2019).
3In other cases, farmers revolted against local authorities, accusing them of corruption. In the village of Đồng Tâm in 2020, deadly clashes broke out between farmers and police over the construction of a military base’s airfield on the village’s farmland (BBC 2020). The leader of the protest, Lê Đình Kình, a retired local official and a Communist Party member, was killed during the confrontation. Farmers were contesting insufficient compensation for lost land and blaming corrupted local authority rather than the Communist Party. These demands corroborate Pierre Brocheux’s argument about the 1975 decline of collective productivity in favor of family plots:
This withdrawal cannot fail to be interpreted as the main form of peasant resistance to imposed collectivism, but it should not be confused with a rejection of the Communist Party and its agrarian policy; it rather demonstrates the deep attachment of peasants to family farming, as well as the rejection of a form of Taylorism. (Brocheux 2002: 324.)
4The relationship between the state represented by party and society, in this case farmers, is what Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet (2018) calls “mobilizational corporatism,” which relies on various organizations, typically one for each major social sector, that the state establishes and runs:
Using these organizations, the state can mobilize people to support its programs and policies, maintain channels of communication between authorities and each sector of society, and manage social and economic groups that otherwise might become unruly. (Ibid.: 161.)
5In this new market-oriented economy—much like during the nineteenth-century French colonization of the Mekong Delta—major changes disrupted farmers’ economic activities and way of life. For instance, the drainage of the swamps and the building of canals in the Delta made more fertile land available, which created more economic opportunities for farmers. In Miền Tây, some Vietnamese farmers became wealthy by buying land and practicing usury and by taking advantage of both the local economy and the colonial free trade market based on rice monoculture (Brocheux 1995). However, land speculation, the prevailing financial system, and lack of property rights regulations bankrupted small landowners who joined the underclass landless farmers in the Delta (Brocheux 1995: 92).
6In the twenty-first century, land use rights and acquisition are at the center of Hanoi’s urban expansion (Bousquet 2015; Kim 2007; Labbé 2016; Fanchette 2016). As state enterprises appropriated large swaths of agricultural land to build high-rise housing complexes, former urban villagers, among them farmers, were also able to take advantage of this urban project by developing their own land (Bousquet 2015). Teresa P. R. Caldeira (2017) refers to the production of urban space in such periurban communities as peripheral urbanization and argues that this characterizes the urban processes of cities in the global south. Often with the complicity of local authorities but ignored by city planners, small landowners have engaged in urban development by building affordable housing on their own lands (Bousquet 2015).
7Over the last thirty years, urban development and expansion have transformed all of Hanoi’s periurban villages (Bousquet 2015; Labbé 2016; Fanchette 2016). An example of this is Khưong Hạ, a former village at the edge of Hanoi. Over a twenty-five-year period, this village has been transformed into a densely populated neighborhood. Khưong Hạ, located along the Tô Lịch River five miles from Hanoi, consists of five hamlets. Because of its proximity to Hanoi, the village has always been connected to the city. Before French colonization, the river was a commercial corridor, and the village was a stopover for merchants going to and from Hanoi. Before its integration into the city, the village depended on mixed economic activity consisting of both farming and cottage industries due to its proximity to factories (Bousquet 2015). This article is based a longitudinal anthropological study of almost thirty years. After a year and half of living and doing fieldwork in Khưong Hạ, I returned regularly to the former village, which allowed me to observe over the years both the impact of social changes on successive generations and the consequences of the village’s physical transformation into an urban space (ibid.).
8Academic urban studies on Vietnam’s urban production and urban sprawl have largely focused on land use rights, land conversions, and expropriation. However, the city’s high demand for affordable housing, coupled with the government’s inability to meet this demand over the past two decades, has created opportunities for some farmers to develop their own plots of land, thereby also contributing to urban production. While in the past, farmers had only limited knowledge of land value, over the past twenty-five years, they have asserted their agency and have become engaged negotiators in financial and real estate transactions. This paper explores the ways in which loopholes in housing demand and land use rights have been exploited. I will argue that this was not for the farmers’ personal interest, but rather for the protection of family members from displacement through cooperation and mutual aid within the community. Using the everyday life framework, this paper demonstrates how farmers have negotiated and continually adapted to changing urban policies on land use rights across various periods.
- 1 Hàng xóm, a sino-Vietnamese term, literally means “people who are alike and live in the same neig (...)
9In the village, residential lands consisted of domestic dwellings that included homes surrounded by gardens inside wards. The hamlets, called xóm, were the earliest form of settlement in Northern Vietnam and predated the village. Each patriarchal extended family established its own hamlet (Lương & Nguyễn 1992; Nguyễn 2002; Kleinen 1999). The aggregate of hamlets in close proximity made up a village.1 Even after a village was established, newcomers would continue to create their own hamlets on the village’s outskirts, and these hamlets would be incorporated into the village years later (Nguyễn 2002). The hamlet term xóm has since been substituted by the term cụm, meaning “ward,” partly due to official linguistic policy and partly because of the village’s incorporation into an urban district. Each ward was attributed numbers replacing the former hamlets’ names, for example, the bridge Hamlet referring to its location near the bridge or the Đình hamlet located near the communal house.
10After the 1945 independence, in the North, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) recognized different types of land ownership, state, collective, and private (Nguyễn 2010). At the time, farmers’ residential land consisted of farming land and dwelling land inside the wards. When the government launched a series of land reforms from 1953 into the 1960s to establish socialist-based agricultural production, it confiscated all farmlands. However, the residential lands inside wards privately owned by farmers’ extended families were not included (Labbé 2014; Kim 2007).
- 2 The “land use rights” of land are independent rights arising from the land ownership of the entire (...)
11In the late 1980s, the government adopted a new constitution that nationalized all land in Vietnam, eliminating collective and private ownership (Nguyễn 2010). However, in order to address the issues of land management, a new law, the 1987 Law on Land, was introduced, adopting the concept of land use rights.2 While the state gave land use rights to organizations and individuals, it did not allow financial transactions (Nguyễn 2010; Kerkvliet 2006). In the wards, the residential land’s status changed from private ownership to land use rights, which stopped families from still claiming the land as their own. As one farmer’s son commented, “This land has always belonged to the family, cửa mình.” Nonetheless, the introduction of a new law in 1993 would have irreversible consequences for the village’s urban development, families’ welfare, and community life. The 1993 Law on Land added other provisions to land use rights by allowing users to claim land title, transfer, lease, and mortgage their land. The 1993 land use rights certificates allocated to households were perpetual, freely transferable, and inheritable (Gillespie 1998: 570). The certificates were formal legal documents called “red papers,” sổ đỏ (Nguyên & Ngoc 2018; Nguyễn 2010; Kim 2007). That period was often referred as the land fever, cơn sốt đất. Land inside the wards became very valuable and sought after because all residential land carried the land use right certificates.
12By selling part of their residential land inside wards, essentially gardens surrounding houses, families for the first time had access to capital that they used to improve their living conditions. They built modern and bigger houses but kept the rest of the land surrounding the house for farming-related activities. Many families were still farming, and front yards were used to dry rice after the harvest and to sort out vegetables such as the ubiquitous small round eggplants. In the backyard, they had a pigpen, a chicken coop, and a stable if the family had a cow.
- 3 An incomplete regulatory system, poor central supervision, lack of appropriate training, and unsati (...)
13In the early 1990s, most of the buyers were outsiders, many of them speculators from the city, and among them government employers. While many governmental institutions, such as ministries, universities, and the armies, sold their land to their high-ranking employees, other low-ranking employees looked for investment opportunities in peri-urban communities. They bought land inside the wards because it had the right legal land use document. Some of those investors held onto the land for many years, leaving those lots unattended and creating blights inside the wards. Other buyers were factory workers, some of them retirees who bought small plots to settle in the ward with their family. They built two-story houses along the narrow alleys, turning the wards into dense urban spaces. In addition to the gardens, there were also a few ward plots that were not part of any household’s land. In one ward, for instance, a land-filled small pond was bitterly fought over by families claiming it as their own. Accusation of land grabbing and corruption of local authority3 led not only to the arrest of local officials but also to a legacy of hostility among families.
14By the 2000s, as a city district, the village and its ward ceased to exist as social and political entities. Over the years, while the wards’ physical boundaries seemed to have disappeared, their entrance gates remained. Instead of selling their land, families began buying land from neighbors inside those gates. Families considered those lands as secured investments, partly because they carried the land-use-right documents but also because they had long been established as family residential lands. There were fewer such lands available, and they were one hundred times more expensive than those sold ten years earlier. But families had advantages over outside buyers because they had personal connections to the sellers. One family bought a small lot for one of the daughters after she married in 2005. Years later, they bought other lots that they kept vacant for the grandchildren. Some families bought those lots to build rental units. Forty-five-year-old Bạc bought most of his neighbor’s garden to build rental units. Ten years later, he built four townhouses that he sold to outsiders.
15Unlike the residential land, all agricultural land was state-controlled and managed locally by cooperatives (Phan 2022; Nguyên & Ngoc 2018; Labbé & Musil 2013). While the 1953 land reforms confiscated the land from large landlords and requisite communal and religious land, they also protected the privately owned farmers’ land (Gillespie 1998; Nguyễn 2010). However, in 1960 when the government implemented a Soviet-style planned economy, it forced farmers to give up their land to farming cooperatives and production collectivities (Nguyễn 2010; Nguyên & Ngoc 2018). During the war, from 1955 to 1975, the village’s farmland was entirely devoted to growing rice. During the period of collectivization, all farmers had to work in teams, all team members receiving the same number of points to buy food and other necessities. It was not a positive memorable period for farmers because they were subject to a work schedule that did not take into account their family’s needs, and there were family feuds within teams.
16In the 1980s, the state relaxed its hold on the land by enacting the 1987 Land Law on “land use rights” (Nguyên & Ngoc 2018). In the village, the agricultural land use rights were allocated toward farmer cooperatives. Each ward’s farmer cooperative managed its own agricultural land usually located next to the ward with its own gate access. Land irrigation was also managed separately for each ward. There were no physical border signs between farmer cooperatives, but everyone knew which field belonged to which cooperative and household. The land use rights of the agricultural land surrounding the village were allocated to each ward. At the last land redistribution in 1993, the allocation of plots of land was done according to the number of people in the household. Families with adults working in the fields were given the most land. Some families maintained part-time farming activities and received a few plots of land, but farmers who had totally given up on farming did not receive any land.
17While the village was known for its round eggplant, by 1998, only one family was still growing it. The family, because of its size, had received one mẫu (ten sào), the largest land allocation in the ward (one sào = 360 square meters). As full-time farmers, they were relatively self-sufficient as a family. Their most valuable cash crop was the round eggplant, a very labor-intensive crop. Like many other farmers, they also grew seasonal vegetables that they sold twice a day at the local market. Growing vegetables was a year-round daily activity requiring watering the fields, removing the weeds, and preparing the fields for another crop once the season was over.
18Being full-time farmers required the cooperation of the whole family with all members contributing to the family’s economy. With the exception of the two younger siblings, the sisters all dropped out of school at a young age. When asked why, one of them replied that she did not like school and wanted to work; another said that she enjoyed working on the land. Without education, their only option at the time was to work with their parents in the field and in any farm-related activities. In the early 1990s, the older sisters all worked in the field along with their parents. However, when the oldest daughter married at age eighteen, she sold live chickens and ducks from her bicycle in front of a large market on the main road. One of her sisters later joined her. Her husband went by motorcycle in the early morning to buy poultry from a village twenty kilometers away. Another sister who also disliked working in the field sold the family’s vegetables at the market. Only one of the sisters did farm work with her parents. While farming was the only skill the family members knew, they did not want the sister’s two younger children to become farmers. The teens, unlike the rest of their siblings, did not participate in any farm activities. During harvest, the family called for relatives to help out. These were usually relatives—typically teenagers and young adults—living in distant village who were still farming. They stayed a day or two until the harvest was done, and they were given room and board during their stay. It was part of the cooperation among family members, called làm giúp, or helping (Pannier 2016). When help was needed, the family sent its daughters to assist the relatives.
19Rice was not a cash crop. Instead, most families grew rice for their own consumption. However, by 2000, only a few families were still growing rice annually. Like the round eggplant, it was a labor-intensive crop. During replanting and harvesting, the families would call on relatives for help, the previously mentioned làm giúp, a form of labor exchange with the favor being returned later. When relatives were not available, the family would hire migrant workers, usually women from border villages, who would visit farmers at the edge of their fields to ask if they needed help. Some families gave up, however, because of the rat infestation. To protect their fields, farmers had to install plastic sheets around them as a barrier, but these sheets were not always effective. As one farmer stated, “It was too much trouble to make it worthwhile.”
20Flowers and fruits were seasonal and a source of extra cash. Flowers were grown a couple of months before the new year Tết Nguyên Đán celebration. During Tết, flowers were in high demand. People bought flowers for their houses, but more often to decorate family tombstones. During their respective summer and winter seasons, guava and grapefruit were often sold on the street rather than at the market because it was not worth paying a fee.
21Every farming household included farm animals, usually pigs and chickens. Only one family in a ward had a cow, which was used to plow the fields. While pigs were raised to be sold for slaughter, farmers used their manure as fertilizer. Once the pigpen was cleaned, the manure was put in a designated hole in the fields for everyone to use.
22In the early 2000s, many farmers were in their fifties and already thinking about retirement. In some families, the children helped their parents when more labor was needed. After school, children who often played in the fields not far from where their parents worked were frequently asked to perform small tasks such as going home to fill the water kettle for their parents working in the fields. In one family, a sixteen-year-old boy regularly helped his parents clear their fields. It was a tedious job, sitting on a small wooden stool while removing grass around the herbs, but the parents needed the extra help. Yet none of them were trained to become farmers. Most parents did not want their children following in their footsteps. One farmer was vehemently opposed to her younger children becoming farmers. She wanted them to study and get office jobs. At the time, farming was in jeopardy, and farmers were expecting to lose their fields. In the late 1990s, the city master plan included the building of a circular freeway around the city that would take over two wards’ agricultural land. But years later, the city master plan changed, and the freeway was built a few miles away, allowing the farmers to keep their fields.
23By then, some farmers who no longer wanted to grow crops planted fruit trees in their fields. Fruit trees were easy to grow and maintain. Once planted, they only required the occasional clearance of the soil around the trees. However, there was always the risk of the fruit being stolen, which unfortunately was a common occurrence. Farmers would hide the banana stems with banana leaves until the fruit matured enough to be collected. The families who were allocated fields never gave up on their rights to manage them. They knew that if the state reclaimed the land, they would be compensated.
24Another common practice for farmers to keep control of their fields was to rent them to others to grow crops. One rural migrant family of four who moved to the village rented a field to grow rice for its own consumption. A thirty-five-year-old woman who received a plot from her parents rented the plot to a neighbor to grow vegetables to sell at the market for extra income. The woman claimed that she was receiving vegetables rather than money for the rent. After the majority of the farmers in one ward decided to retire, the farmer cooperative stopped providing water to the agricultural fields. For the few families who were still growing vegetables, not having access to water became a challenge. A farmer’s daughter, hoping to make a living farming a few of her parents’ fields, gave up after a year. She had invested in a pump but found that not having access to water was still too much trouble. By then, more fields were left fallow.
25By early 2000, peri-urban communities like Khưong Hạ were at the center of controversy regarding agricultural land conversion due to the pressures of urban economic development with an increasing need of housing for Hanoi’s expanding population (Phan 2022: 159). The national mega project of urban development was based on state reclamation of agricultural land for economic zones and housing developments. Hanoi’s fast-growing economy and its expanding urban population put pressure on peri-urban communities like Khưong Hạ to convert agricultural land into economic zones and housing development in Hanoi (ibid.).
26Many of those communities became the de facto to meet the city’s demand for affordable housing (Vansintjan et al. 2019). However, the lack of clarity on land acquisition, land use, and compensation have been the source of conflict in many peri-urban communities. The 2013 Land Act was supposed to address the issue of land purchase for conversion compensation, but what constitutes national public interest and private investment for commercial purposes remains ambiguous (Phan 2022). The law stipulates that the amount of compensation is based on two different pricing systems, one set by the government and the other by the market, depending on whether the acquisition was voluntary or compulsory. As a result, in many peri-rural communities, farmers fought the expropriation of their agricultural land, demanding fair compensation (Phan 2022; Lê & Nguyên 2020). Farmers in some of those peri-urban communities who depended on the land for their livelihood lost their income, and the lack of appropriate compensation resulted in the reduction in household welfare (Lê & Nguyên 2020). In other cases, although compensated, farmers were unable to take advantage of the real estate boom in their district. For instance, in the agglomeration of villages in the Tây Hồ district of the West Lake area of Hanoi, after the conversion of agricultural land, the area was developed into large-scale infrastructure and luxury housing (Vansintjan et al. 2019: 80).
27By 2005, in Khưong Hạ like in other former peri-urban communities, the increasing demand for rural migrants’ cheap housing created pressure to convert agricultural land into urban development (Thinh & Gao 2021). At the time, one ward farmer cooperative was able to take advantage of this opportunity because they had stopped farming, and the farmers were allowed to use their land for purposes besides agriculture. However, ten years later, when other ward farmer cooperatives stopped farming, they turned in their land right use to governmental agencies. Although compensated, farmers did not have the same opportunity to exploit their land. Instead, in 2016, a developer built a twenty-five-story apartment building on their cooperative land. Two years later, the land of another ward farmer cooperative was cleared by a bulldozer, erasing any property lines of former farmers’ fields. While farmers have yet to be compensated, the collective land has since been illegally occupied by migrants’ temporary structures.
28In the early 2000s, high-rise residential buildings were already visible at a distance from the fields. The first structure that appeared in one ward’s field was a tiny brick house with a tin roof that belonged to a middle-aged migrant couple who had rented a small plot from a farmer. The house seemed out of place surrounded by farmland. It had no electricity, and the only water available was from the irrigation ditch. The couple had a small pigpen and was raising chickens. A few years later, as more farmers stopped farming, they rented their fields to migrant families, who built temporary housing, mostly wooden shacks with tin roofs; others built rental units on their own fields. At its earliest stage, this temporary settlement could have been mistaken for a slum because of its wooden structures, its dirt paths through high grasses, and lack of sanitation. However, unlike slums, those settlements were not illegally occupied, because farmers had been allowed the land use right that still belonged to the ward farmer cooperative.
29Over the following ten years, the agricultural land of that ward farmer cooperative would be totally transformed into a new ward. Like in other peripheral urbanization in the global south’s cities, the development of that land into an urban space consisted of inconsistencies, improvisation and bricolage (Caldeira 2017: 5). Families acting as entrepreneurs built houses replacing shacks and modest brick structures. By 2007, brick foundations emerged in many fields that were also used as property lines. Some fields had been divided into smaller plots of land. The price of the land varied, depending on whether the land had been developed. A plot without a foundation was $212 per square meter, one with a foundation $511 per square meter, and one with a house $17,000 per square meter. Those foundations, however, were often on contested property lines, which resulted in conflicts among neighbors. In one instance, one family was accusing a neighbor of stealing its land by having built the foundation of a house on its land. The family did not know the neighbor because she was not living in the village; however, she was not an outsider investor but a farmer’s daughter who inherited a plot of land on which she intended to build rental houses. On a Sunday morning in 2008, the local ward leader was called in to mitigate the conflict. Each party was joined by additional family members for support. After screaming at each other, the two parties started measuring the fields with a measuring tape that the leader brought to identify the property line. As a result, the woman was ordered to remove her foundations, which were found encroaching the family’s property. Without delay, the following week, the family built a four-foot brick wall along the property line.
30At the time, there was high demand for land and housing, and neither was available inside the wards. Since farmers were allowed to do their own conversion, they developed their land into real estate properties. Since those properties did not carry the red paper, farmers considered them less valuable than the one in the ward and did not want to use them as primary residences. Some families built homes on the land and then sold them to newcomers. They used the sale money to buy properties inside the ward, which they perceived as secured investment. Others built rental homes to accommodate the high demand for rental units. But it was not only outsiders buying the farmland. Former ward family members also bought fields from other families. Most of them sold the property for money to build better houses in the ward or buy property inside the ward. While famers were selling land, others in the same ward were buying. In this real estate market, family members were also taking over the land. In one family, although the sons helped their parents on occasion, now they were each taking a field, but it was not newcomers who bought land. Farmers were also buying land from each other.
31Some of the other field lands were divided into small lots and sold before the government had given permission. Because the lots were small, their homes occupied the totality of the lot. In 2014, I met one of those newcomers, Nghia, a retired fifty-year-old woman who bought a small lot in 2002 as an investment property. She lived in downtown Hanoi and was building a five-hundred-square-foot house on the lot for her son and his family. She spent a total of $43,000 for the land and the house. On the same street were many migrant families who had also bought lots. Two neighbors, both middle-aged men who had previously moved to the city to work in nearby factories, had managed with the help of relatives to buy small plots to build their homes. Semiretired, they were working as “xe ôm,” motorcycle taxi drivers.
32According to the marriage and inheritance laws, women and men equally inherited from their parents. However, in order to circumvent those laws that ensured women’s property rights, families would allocate the land before the parents’ death. In rural villages, agricultural land-use rights in the form of inheritance did not go to daughters, even in sonless families (Bélanger & Xu 2009). During the real estate fever, families who sold part of their land for desperately needed cash ended up with a reduced family land holding. To ensure that future generations could afford to stay in the community, families would negotiate land distribution among members regardless of gender. The land was not equally divided among siblings. Sons still inherited most of the land, and daughters, if they were living in the community, were given a small portion of the land to build a house on. If they had moved to a different community, it was assumed that they would enjoy their husband’s land.
33Xuân’s parents, for instance, divided the land among their eight children, two boys and six girls. The sons were given a large share of their parents’ property, which included the garden and the house. The elder son lived with his wife and children in his parents’ house, which would be his after the parents died. The rest of the large portion of property was given to the younger son. The three oldest daughters did not receive land from the parents because each of them had moved out of the village and was living in her husband’s village. The three youngest daughters, who had married former soldiers from other villages, were given only a small portion of the familial land’s asset. Xuân, for instance, received part of the family’s garden near the fields. However, she wanted to live in the ward and therefore negotiated with her younger brother to buy a small part of his lot. While the brothers enjoyed larger homes with a courtyard, the sisters and their families lived in much smaller homes with no yard. However, by building their homes on the family’s land, the sisters were protected in case of divorce because their husbands were considered to have no property rights to that familial land.
34However, in peri-urban communities like Khưong Hạ, families were more adaptable. In families with only daughters, even before the new inheritance laws, it was customary to divide the land equally among the daughters. The oldest daughter usually moved in with and took care of her parents, maintained the ancestral altar, and performed family rituals .Mình, a seventy-five-year-old woman, and her sisters, for example, received equal shares of their parents’ property. Mình, the oldest, did not take her mother’s house, since she and her husband had already moved into his paternal grandparents’ house. Instead, the second-oldest daughter moved into the parents’ house. The ancestral altar was on the top floor of that house. All of the family rituals used to be celebrated at the family’s house. Another woman, Vương age eighty, lived in her parents’ house. She was the third child of a family of daughters. Her sisters left Khưong Hạ when they married. Vương was the only daughter to marry a man from the village. Her husband was the second oldest of a family of two sons and two daughters. His older brother and his wife moved into the parents’ house, so Vương and her husband moved in with her parents and kept the house when her parents passed away.
35By the early 2000s, a large influx of rural migrants who, many of them young men, went to work in the city’s booming construction industry, found cheap lodging in peri-urban communities like Khưong Hạ. Some of them eventually married local women. Families concerned about the welfare of their daughters married to migrants gave them land on which to build a house. However, there was a preference to give land inside the ward to their sons because that land was more valuable, and they gave land that was formerly gardens outside the ward to their daughters. At the time, young people wanted to be on the main street to set up businesses, even though those lands were less valuable because they did not have the red paper. In one family, the two youngest daughters, who had married migrants, and their two brothers were given those former garden lands on the main street. However, fifteen years later, the family bought land from a neighbor inside the ward for one of the sons. The oldest son was expected to take over his parents’ home. If the daughters wanted land inside the ward, they had to buy it. One sixty-four-year-old woman who lived in another district bought her parents’ last piece of land inside the ward in 2018. In another family, a fifty-five-year-old woman had to buy herself an expensive house to be able to live inside the ward, while her only brother inherited many properties.
36During collectivization, gardens were called the ten percentage land (mười phần trăm đất) and were allocated by the state to the wards’ farmer cooperatives. They were managed by the local authority and were not subject to government control. As John Gillespie argues, “land management and consequently land reforms fall into the central-local disjunction, of three subsystems, state, village and family” (Gillespie 1998: 571). The ten percentage land was divided into small plots or gardens of five hundred to seven hundred square feet and then leased to farmers to supplement their income by growing vegetables to sell at the market or for their own consumption (Kerkvliet 2006). Gardens are “landscape multifunctionality, which includes production of food resources, ecological services, and socio-ecological functions, each of which benefits the health of surrounding community” (Poulsen et al. 2014: 69). This is like in Eastern Europe under the Soviet Union where allotment gardens were part of the planned economy to address food insecurity in peri-urban communities (Moskalonek, Połom & Puzdrakiewicz 2020). Unlike the agricultural land, the ten percentage land was not included in land redistribution, and therefore its tenure was not constrained by a limited time period (Fanchette et al. 2016). Although those lands did not have land use rights, farmers considered them as an extension of their household’s land.
37After the 1987 land reforms, tenants of the ten percentage lands were allowed to use them for purposes other than gardening. By the late 1990s, all gardens located along the village’s main road were developed into housing. Farmers’ extended-family members, often married children, took over those lands to build homes for themselves. Families used those homes to set up business on the first floor. However, they were also warned that their homes were at risk of being demolished (Harms 2016). The city had planned to enlarge the road to deal with the increased traffic on this main corridor to the next village. But this uncertainty did not stop families from carrying on with their lives. When a family was asked about one day facing eviction, they were not worried and claimed that “if it happened, we would be compensated and we would move.” Fortunately, fifteen years later, that plan was abandoned. Instead, the city built a parallel new road on the outskirts of the village along the Tô Lịch River to ease the traffic congestion on the main road. No homes were demolished, and all are still managed by the same families, even if they no longer live there.
38For many years, gardens located away from the main road, bordering the fields, could not be developed into housing. Their only access was by dirt path. In the early 2000s, some families who were still farming used their garden for fruit trees such as guava and banana trees, and they would sell the fruit at the market for extra cash. In one family, the children were given the task of picking up the guavas from the trees and selling them at the market in the summer. To keep the thieves away, they built a five-foot wall around the garden. Other families who had given up farming in the 1990s and therefore were not allocated fields at the last land redistribution still kept their garden to grow vegetables for their own consumption and sometimes for extra cash. One family grew flowers in the winter to sell at the market for the holidays.
39While the majority of the ward’s cooperative land was transformed into a new ward, some families held onto their gardens and a few of their farmland plots for small-scale farming. Although families had other sources of income, they still wanted to maintain some form of farming activity. Farmers who in the past had experienced years of food insecurity still wanted to be self-sufficient:
As a longstanding practice, urban farming is also a nod toward residents’ rural histories that constitute an important part of their contemporary urban identities that in the end the master plan could not fully redesign or reform. (Schwenkel 2022: 64.)
40Families were growing food for either their own consumption or for extra income. One family’s garden, located at the edge of the ward, used to have banana trees before houses were built in most of the fields. Then the garden was no longer an extension of farmland but rather a green patch in the midst of three-story concrete buildings. The garden belonged to former full-time farmers, husband and wife, in their seventies, who spent most of their days working in their garden. They mainly grew vegetables that they used for the family’s own consumption. They never bought vegetables at the market. Growing their own food was a self-sufficient practice that they had always maintained as farmers. Since water was no longer provided through irrigation canals, they carried water from their house to the garden. Gardening was not a chore because they enjoyed working outside and growing vegetables (rau muống). Gardening was far different from the former stress of making a living from farming. They attended the garden mostly in the early morning and late afternoon when it was not too hot, and it was also a family affair with two of her sisters joining them to work in the garden.
41Another family that had converted its garden or ten percentage land into rental housing kept half of its farmland plots to use as gardens. The four fields were part of a large agricultural land space between the cemetery and the boundary of the next village. For some years, those fields were left fallow. They were part of the 1990s city planning infrastructure expansion for highway construction, but once the project was abandoned, farmers reclaimed the land. However, they knew that it was only a temporary reprieve as the city was planning to build administrative offices on it eventually.
42Because those fields were no longer connected to irrigation canals, some farmers had to use a collective well in the middle of the fields and carry water containers to their plots. Others had built retaining cemented holes and used hoses from nearby houses. Some farmers had rented their fields to rural migrants who used them to grow vegetables and flowers located in the midst of other farmers’ gardens. The other three located in a separate area were each surrounded by ten-foot fences and gates. In one, the forty-year-old son raised ducks and dogs to sell online. Fearing thieves, the family had hired a migrant family to live in the garden and care for the animals when he could not. Their living quarters were rudimentary—a wooden shack with a tin roof. The two other gardens, also fenced in, were orchards with guava, banana, and grapefruit trees. His mother was the only one caring for the fruit trees.
43Because the family had rental income, they used the gardens for their own consumption and to supplement the income of some family members. One of the main characteristics of urban gardens was to provide familial assistance in producing their own food (Okvat & Zautra 2011). Those gardens became a lifeline to married daughters whose respective incomes were insufficient to support their own families with whom they lived either in the village or close by. One daughter, who lived at her in-laws’ house in the next village, sold fish at the morning market. In the afternoon, she helped her mother care for the vegetable garden and then take the vegetables to sell at the evening market for extra income. In addition to providing food security, gardening as a collective activity maintained close-knit relations among family members. After marriage, daughters considered their husband’s family as their new family and distanced themselves from their birth family. Having children on their own and living and caring for their in-laws, they usually did not have time to spend with their birth parents. With one family, gardening provided a space for nurturing the mother-daughter relationship. While the mother cared for the orchards, one of her daughters joined her to pick fruits—guavas in the summer and grapefruits in the winter—to sell on the streets for her children’s school supplies and tutoring. A week before Tết in 2023, her mother went along with her to sell grapefruits on the street. Sitting on the sidewalk in front of a friend’s store with grapefruits on a tarp, she was enjoying helping her daughter with an activity that in the past she could not have participated in as she had little time to venture outside the ward. For some retired farmers, gardening was a lifestyle that they regarded as a healthy physical activity, in contrast to farming, which was often described as a strenuous physical occupation. In gardening, retired farmers did not have the pressure of having to work in the fields because their livelihood did not depend on farming. When a seventy-one-year-old woman stopped working in the field for some years after her husband died, she developed many medical ailments. During those years, confined to her home, she was constantly tired and sick, but this all changed when she started gardening. Sharing her house with her son and daughter-in-law, she found that there was nothing to do at home, so she happily spent her days attending her gardens and enjoyed working outside. But there were also other retired farmers who did not want to keep a garden. Mai, a seventy-five-year-old widow who used to grow herbs with her husband, was glad not to have to work in the fields anymore. She lived with her oldest son’s family and took care of the house. All the fields that she had were converted into housing.
- 4 The Khưong Hạ’s hamlet’s agricultural land conversion was a unique case since other hamlets’ agric (...)
44Hanoi’s rapid urban expansion has led the state to revoke farmers’ agricultural land-use rights for state-run housing and commercial projects, often without providing adequate compensation (Labbé 2016; Labbé & Musil 2013; Phan 2022). These policies of expropriation have opened the way for what Gray Brakke (2023) terms an “insurgency of self-builders”—people who occupy and build on land without legal claims. Brakke argues that the government frequently turns a blind eye to such practices and even retroactively legalizes self-building because the government aligns with the ideology of developmentalism (ibid.: 1135). The paper shows that farmers have embraced the idea of developmentalism only as long as it aligns with their own interests. Policy changes in land use rights, combined with the urgent demand for housing twenty-five years ago, enabled the conversion of agricultural land in one Khưong Hạ hamlet into a monetary commodity, providing farmers with new economic and financial opportunities.4 Farmers have viewed their claims to their land as legitimate, either because the land is ancestral or because it was allocated to them by the state at different times in the past. In their understanding of land use rights, they have sought to control their land while adapting to the state’s constantly changing land policies. Solidarity among farmers was usually based on mutual aid among family members and associates. This was the case in the Mekong Delta village studied by Brocheux (1995: 209), where family was at the core of networks of mutual aid and cultural activities. Family networks and solidarity both allowed urban adaptation and safeguarded family members’ access to land and housing. Even the few plots of land converted into urban gardens were meant to contribute to a family’s household consumption. Likewise, land conversion in Khưong Hạ shows that farmers prioritized the interests of their own families over those of the community. As Brocheux argues with respect to the Mekong Delta (Brocheux 1983; 1995: 231), a “moral economy” may have existed, but farmers’ solidarity in Khưong Hạ was all but obliterated by acquisitiveness, if not greed, and the drive to maximize income for their own families.