![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
The Vietnamese state is envisioning Hanoi as a prosperous, ‘civilised’ capital city with fast, ‘modern’ mobilities and their corresponding infrastructures, including expressways and an elevated railway. Concurrently, slower informal paratransit are increasingly discouraged and marginalised, threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of three-wheeler motorbike delivery drivers. Despite official registration as disabled war veterans, ‘real’ three-wheeler drivers find themselves in an ever more conscribed environment, while other drivers attempting to maintain livelihoods in this way are deemed ‘fake’ by officials and further ostracised. Drawing on conceptual debates regarding people as infrastructure and mobility (in)justice, and ethnographic fieldwork with three-wheeler drivers, I detail how drivers (both ‘real’ and ‘fake’) must negotiate inconsistent policies, a growing discourse that they are obsolete and hence disposable, and new infrastructures incompatible with their livelihoods. Combined, these elements create specific mobility experiences and frictions to which drivers react with subtle and inventive tactics to maintain their rights to the city’s streets.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Ngô Thúy Hạnh for her meticulous and enthusiastic research assistance in Hanoi, and express my sincere appreciation to all the three-wheeler drivers who were kind enough to discuss their experiences and opinions. Thanks also to research assistants Celia Zuberec and Ammar Adenwala, who helped gather secondary materials for this piece, and to Binh N. Nguyen and Philippe Messier who provided valuable feedback on an earlier draft.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Informal economies and informal paratransit refer to economic activities that operate outside formal regulatory frameworks, usually lacking official oversight, formal contracts, and adherence to legal labour standards (Turner Citation2020a).
2 These state-sponsored or approved projects resonate with Christina Schwenkel’s (Citation2015) discussion of ‘spectacular infrastructure’ in Vietnam. Drawing on the example of the Nhật Tân bridge, an elegant cable-stayed bridge over the Red River in Hanoi, inaugurated in 2015, she notes how such ‘grand forms of spectacular postsocialist infrastructure, funded by new aid partners (most often overseas development assistance, or ODA, from Japan), aspire to expand, rather than eliminate, a market economy’ (Schwenkel Citation2015, 524; see also Carruthers Citation2018).
3 For the Vietnamese this lasted from November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, despite overseas military and intelligence involvement being shorter.
4 The term xe lam combines xe meaning vehicle, and lam most likely from Lambro, a series of three-wheeler vehicles produced by the Italian firm Lambretta in the 1960s (https://www.lambretta.com/project_category/three-wheelers/). Interestingly a company near HCMC now sells reconditioned Lambro series three-wheeler vehicles but notes that these are for marketing, coffee carts, or use at private events such as weddings, and are banned from circulation (https://lambrovietnam.com/2020/11/15/5-dong-xe-lam-co-thiet-ke-doc-quyen-tai-lambrovietnam/).
5 One interviewee thought that this term originated from the French les bagages, which had been shortened and reworked through transliteration to become ba gác.
6 To gain Bệnh binh status, an individual needs to be categorised as having been impacted by disease to a degree of 61 per cent or more, with the disease contracted while the individual was performing urgent and dangerous tasks. Individuals with this status are not eligible for war pensions.
7 Interviewees did note that transport police tended to be lenient on non-veteran drivers with disabilities if they could show a disability card from the Department of Labour and Social Invalid Affairs that was registered where they lived.
8 Out of the 41 drivers, 23 were born in Hanoi, while the remainder were rural-to-urban migrants from nearby provinces. Despite potential variations in police responses based on migrant status, we found that the presence or absence of paperwork demonstrating disabled veteran status played a far more important role during encounters with police or other officials. This stands in contrast to the experiences of street vendors, where migrant versus Hanoi-born status was a more salient factor (Turner & Schoenberger Citation2012). Nonetheless, migrant drivers did face instances of discrimination. Due to space limitations, the finer details of their everyday experiences are the focus of another paper currently in preparation.
9 Security guards at small businesses in Vietnam tend to be older, unarmed men. They are commonly employed to watch over stock deliveries, manage motorbike parking or other uses of the premises, and check visitors’ purposes.
10 The Air Quality Index (AQI) system, which reports on the severity of air quality levels frequently places Hanoi in the ‘unhealthy’ (151–200) or ‘very unhealthy’ (201–300) ranges, on a scale of 0–500, and Hanoi had the second worst air quality in Southeast Asia during 2022 (Minh Nga Citation2023).
11 This mirrors other policies in the city regarding public space use. For instance a pro-pedestrian ‘Clean up the Sidewalk’ campaign was initiated in 2017 to clear sidewalks of motorbike parking, encroaching shop merchandise, and street vendor stalls. This campaign was then relaunched in March 2023 with crackdowns starting again, while enforcement in the intervening years was highly erratic (Vo Hai Citation2023). For more on erratic policing of itinerant street vendors see Turner and Schoenberger (Citation2012) and Turner, Zuberec, and Pham (Citation2021).
12 It should be noted that an individual has to serve in the military in a formal position for five years to be eligible for a pension, hence soldiers serving for any shorter time, or volunteers, are ineligible.