Cities in Relations: Trajectories of Urban Development in Hanoi and Ouagadougou

Abstract

For many socialist and communist nations, the fall of the Soviet Union spelled the end of critical support and, in numerous cases, marked the beginning of a historic transition to political and economic liberalism. Traditionally, this transition has been analyzed in the domains of political economy or post-colonial studies. Ola Soderstrom’s Cities in Relations represents a strong blow against this reductionist trend and endeavors to create a deeper understanding of the “transition from socialism” by examining urban change in two cities of the Global South. He develops a relational framework to compare the trajectories of change in Hanoi and Ouagadougou since 1990, focusing on how the policies, urban forms, and urban practices in each city are shaped by their relations with “elsewhere”. His process results in a richer and more nuanced picture of urban development in the Global South and provides scholars with a novel set of conceptual tools for future research. At its heart, Cities in Relations is a story of two cities reconnecting with global flows. Soderstrom tracks developments in the capital cities of Vietnam and Burkina Faso – ranked among the least-developed countries of the world – as they undergo significant political and economic reforms in their transition to a neoliberal system. But Soderstrom aims to go beyond traditional ranking-based explanations of urban development and globalization, moving towards an assetsbased analysis built with an appreciation of the complex and far-reaching effects inherent in the web of relations that shapes urban development. By examining the intensity, form, and orientation of global connectivity in each city over time, Soderstrom finds a fundamental difference between their development trajectories, one that would easily be lost in a less detailed exploration: Hanoi boasts superior connections to economic flows, whereas Ouagadougou has established greater connections to political flows. This key divergence goes a long way towards explaining the differing development projects in each city that Soderstrom explores in later chapters. From the outset, then, this understanding moves the discussion of the transition from socialism beyond a typical political-economic vocabulary. Investigating the flows of capital, people, and information allows Soderstrom to highlight what he calls the “emergence of new geopolitics of urban relations” (p. 55), bringing the conversation to a deeper, more subtle place. He then places this conversation into the wider context of the Global South turning away from Europe and North America as providers of models of urban development and reorienting toward South–South or East–East relations. Soderstrom begins the book with a general overview of his theoretical grounding and overall goals. He then launches into the meat of the text: a broad-strokes review of each city’s recent political history followed by a progression through a series of theoretical explorations and practical examples of policy brought to life in the streets. Every chapter introduces a particular set of concepts and then investigates the realization of these concepts in the subject cities, illustrated with the help of concrete projects on the ground. These include the specific local contexts of urban planning and the making of policy of public space in general, the construction of an elite housing development, a farmer’s market, a new highway interchange, and an upscale shopping mall. What emerges is a picture of Soderstrom’s methodological concepts illuminated, as it were, from two sides, via real-life projects in both Hanoi and Ouagadougou. This strategy is successful at bringing to light the more problematic and contradictory aspects of relationally produced policies. In this way, Soderstrom does a good job at explaining why, for instance, policies created for the specific contexts of London or Lyon may not always translate well to the vastly differ-