Rhythm of endurance and contestation: Everyday practices of roaming vendors in Hanoi

Abstract

Cities are sites of contestations in which the spaces of people’s everyday lives are in constant clash with the spaces envisioned and enforced by planners and politicians. For many modern governments, the spatial ordering of the city according to a certain aesthetic ideal has been a powerful tool to implement the state vision of social and moral order. Oftentimes, this means the suppression of economic activities and spatial practices that do not fit into the prescribed order.In Vietnam, the ordering of urban space has always been used as a tool to establish the state’s vision of social order. In its current pathway to a market-oriented economy, ordering is all the more important to shape a ‘global city’ that is competitive in the global economy. The city’s sidewalks are the focus of repeated state ordering projects that aims to create a modern, orderly city. Street vending is perceived as a backward practice and is thus the foremost target for state ordering actions. However, despite increasing ordering actions, vendors have time and again shown a sheer resilience in their struggle for a place in the city. Based on in-depth interviews with 32 vendors in Hanoi, the paper explores vendors’ everyday practices to understand their struggle mechanism against the city that excludes them.The paper highlights how rhythm-making are important for vendors’ everyday struggle for livelihood, and how vendors are important agents in the production of the polyrhythmic city, as rhythm-makers and space-makers. The paper reveals the complex nature of vendors’ everyday rhythms, which are born out of suppression and constraint. These rhythms of endurance require not only synchronization but careful calibration, improvisation, and above all circumvention. The paper argues for the need of an urban politics that focuses on the urban poor, a politics that learn from and support the making of the rhythm of endurance.