Social housing and feminist commoning in urban Vietnam

Abstract

This article examines challenges to the privatization of public goods in social housing in urban Vietnam, where versatile modes of commoning have been essential to sustaining life and livelihoods. Informed by theories of feminist commoning, it highlights the collective efforts of elderly women, in particular, to appropriate state property and maintain the commons to support everyday social and economic activity in ambiguous spaces undergoing urban change. Female-led strategies of subsistence and sociality have been directed toward the maintenance of common resources across shifts in political economy from state to market socialisms. Rather than organize outside formal institutions only, collective action manifested through a politics of housing that made claims to public goods in ways that pushed the state to accept existing commons and commoning practices.