Critical urban theory of the Global South has brought our attention to the systematic dispossession and displacement of marginalized and racialized populations as a result of the global expansion of neoliberal policies (see, especially, Roy 2009). Such urban injustices continue to occur despite organized resistance and collective action by a rights-claiming public. A core theme running through much of this work is the unmaking of the commons, or enclosure, as an inevitable outcome of totalizing forms of “planetary urbanization” and predatory, global capitalism. But what if the loss of commons was not always as inevitable as it is assumed in the literature on neoliberalism or if that loss unfolded differently across spaces? I asked myself these questions as I saw different dynamics play out in my field site in urban Vietnam under the historical and material conditions of socialism and its forms of state-led collectivization that shaped how urban society has been organized. What of these other, less-examined strategies of resilience in under-researched cities to contest resource vulnerability and the threat of displacement and enclosure by making demands to commoning and the flourishing of life over wealth (Berlant 2016: 398)?
This article takes a feminist approach to the city to examine the diverse forms of refusal if not opposition to the denationalization of social housing in urban Vietnam, where modes of commoning have been critical to life and livelihoods in tandem with the state allocation of public goods—and their rollback. In calling attention to the unique specificities of the urban condition in a “transitional” economy where the private sector is not wholly dominant, I seek to draw attention to the existence of gendered social and economic arrangements deployed to meet people's needs that are rooted in non-capitalist urban histories. As Susan Parnell and Jennifer Robinson have argued, “in a world of globalizing cities, we need a greater range of theoretical initiatives to interpret processes of urbanization—and we certainly need to diversify the starting points” beyond northern cities (2012: 596). I would also add that in addition to attending to the diversity of socioeconomic processes other than neoliberalization that shape urban lives and livelihoods in the Global South (2012: 594), processes that are themselves highly gendered, we also need to attend more to history given the unique ideological emphasis on cities (and land) for people and not profit in late socialist or postsocialist cities. These ideologies, I argue, continue to influence how people, especially women, think about, use, and treat public goods as commons. They also influence how neoliberals have responded to collective ownership of property as “barriers to economic development” in need of swift privatization (Pickles 2006: 180).
As Anne-Christine Trémon argues in the Introduction: “Public goods are ‘commoned’ when they are reclaimed for common uses against appropriation for private accumulation and conversion to exchange values.” In what follows, I show how shifts in socialist housing policies in my research site led to social and economic arrangements that refuted marketization and the transformation of public goods to private assets that threatened people's housing and livelihood security. These hybrid arrangements were associated with modest, female-led strategies directed toward the maintenance of common resources across shifts in political economy from a socialist system based on public ownership of the means of production to a socialist market economy with co-existing forms or “mixed” ownership of assets. Bringing an intersectional lens to the study of the city through gender and generation, I highlight the efforts of elderly women, in particular, to appropriate state property and maintain the commons to support everyday subsistence and sociality in ambiguous spaces undergoing slow urban change.
The term “slow” here is meant to highlight the temporality of state-directed urban redevelopment by homing in ethnographically on a lingering moment of meanwhileness or an “endless meantime” of suspended privatization betwixt and between state property and market regimes (Jansen 2015, see also Harms 2013). This sense of “suspended temporality” (Degen 2018) allowed senior female residents to actively and productively make claims to not-yet-commodified resources by establishing them as “common” in their usage. But rather than organize outside formal institutions as the literature emphasizes, their modes of commoning brought informal practices and ways of non-rivalrous organizing “into the porous structure of the state” (Pikner et al. 2020: 712) to blur public and private boundaries for collective benefit. This observation allows us to see how informality is itself a planning regime that constitutes “the urban” (Roy 2009) by way of coordinated action, which became manifest through a politics of housing that appropriated public goods in ways that pushed the state to accept existing commoning practices while keeping the threat of enclosure at bay (Kip 2015: 55).
My aim is to understand other distinctive modes of commoning in the interstices between state authoritarianism and market speculation that call into question the public-commons divide (see Introduction) and that operate both inside and outside market capitalist logics across scales (Dellenbaugh et al. 2015). Here I use “commons” as both substantive noun and active verb to acknowledge a shared domain of resources that takes its shape as the effect of practices and solidarities that emerge in the production of that very domain (Jensen 2017), while remaining leery of any overly optimistic claims to “emancipation” (Pithouse 2014). Commons are not things, Sylvia Federici reminds us, or mere spaces for that matter, but social relations rooted in collective action that can be fraught at times (2019: 93). A focus on practice shows urban commoning to be a dynamic process of collective making, laboring, and managing of dense and “saturated” spaces and resources that bring both tight-knit communities and strangers together who share the same goals of material and social security (Huron 2015: 969). In so doing, they produce a sense of belonging and of participating in the social norms and tacit agreements that underpin commoning practices (Stavrides 2016).
In the case that follows, I discuss how this active making and organizing occurred through the treatment of state property as a public good and type of urban commons that contested redevelopment through the production of female solidarity by way of collective struggle, or what scholars have called “feminist commoning” (McLean 2021). My use of the term “feminist” is informed by scholarship on Southern feminisms that offer alternative frameworks beyond the West rooted in shared values that challenge gender-based inequality and top-down power hierarchies through diverse forms and ways of understanding anti-capitalist work (Mohanty 2002). This includes making visible women's labor and their collective forms of organizing to better utilize and distribute resources. My approach shows both the mutability of public space and property managed by the socialist state—from common to commons—and the ways that commoning takes place in and through acts of publicizing. These acts laid claim to particular urban rights (e.g., secure housing) and access to vanishing public goods for individual and collective benefits (see also Introduction), including maintenance of a sense of “ordinary” neighborhood place through diverse modalities of place-making (Lombard 2014).
Scholarship on the production of urban space that takes neoliberalization as axiomatic has disregarded the hundreds of socialist-planned cities and “new towns” where capital accumulation was not the primary mode of social organization nor the motor of production before the collapse of the Soviet Union. This history is important to recognize because socialist governments were known for their substantial investments in social infrastructure, especially generous public (e.g., green) spaces and public goods and services to maintain legitimacy, even as they kept such spaces and goods (and their distribution) under tight control. With postsocialist urbanization, and the embrace of capitalist models of development that threaten enclosure and dispossession, these goods and resources have become part of an embattled commons at the frontline of debates over who gets to define, use, and thrive in the future city, now reimagined. Important as it is to critically analyze the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, it also remains necessary to recognize the existence of alternative histories and imagined futures of the city, and the extent to which decollectivization remains at the center of urban political and socioeconomic struggles, particularly in the Global South (see Pickles 2006).
This was the situation for the industrial city of Vinh where I conducted my research in central Vietnam, the country's first planned socialist city built with the assistance of East Germany, which exported its mass housing prototypes to Vietnam. Years later, the city's rapid decline and obsolescence would provide the rationale for urban renewal, which focused on the demolition of its large housing estate or microrayon in the center of the city. This dense residential complex was the first of its scale in Vietnam with public services, including schools and daycares to assist with social reproduction, and large open spaces between the twenty-two housing blocks that spanned three areas or neighborhoods, one of which I lived in during my fieldwork. This prompted opposition and collective action, but not in the form of rebellions or protests that scholars have shown to be an incitement to common the city (Holston 2019). Rather, I examine other equally important expressions of political agency through corresponding acts of commoning and publicizing by older female inhabitants of social housing who demanded the right to survival in the city by talking with rather than back to the state to achieve their goals—and whose actions blocked redevelopment plans for ten years (Schwenkel 2015, 2020). In the process uncertain alliances formed between citizens and local government authorities, some of whom were also residents in the housing estate, as women appropriated, expanded, and redefined the commons as a dynamic and yet fraught realm where intersections between people, goods, and the state were ethically and politically negotiated (Gibson-Graham 2008: 623).
Focusing on stalled renovations to the housing blocks and their common areas, I show how collective appropriation of public goods and state property rhetorically “owned by the people” served as a rebuttal to urban renewal policy that viewed the vast green spaces of the housing estate as wasted land in need of redevelopment for wealth accumulation. In so doing, residents, especially older women once promised social protections, made such public goods “common” by transforming them into shared resources of leisure, livelihood, and social life to halt encroaching precarity and housing insecurity. They did so in defiance of calls for market-based solutions to urban poverty that threatened to eradicate the urban commons and its “solidarity economy” (Harvey 2011) that formed the ethos of coordinated action against housing speculation across the housing complex. The intertwining of what I identify as “feminist commoning”—the different iterations of women decisively acting and being in common—and top-down socialist planning pushes us to think beyond binaries (public/private, state/market, or even rivalrous/non-rivalrous) to imagine new urban possibilities for retired female workers in social housing that broaden our understanding of the commons beyond Western liberal ideals of self-production and self-management (see also Quilligan 2012). This approach encourages a move away from Western European and US contexts, where much of the literature has been focused, to consider how common resources may be used and shared in the Global South to enable survival in late socialist cities undergoing profound—and highly uneven—transformation.
Designing cities for life, not profit
To provide a historical context for the role of the Vietnamese state as the designer and provider of public goods, such as social housing, we need to first turn our attention to place annihilation at the hands of US imperialism. To set the scene, a decade of air strikes by the United States during the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1973 leveled the small industrial city of Vinh in the north-central province of Nghệ An, historically considered to be a poor and unruly backwater town, but also the cradle of the anticolonial revolution. Mass bombing galvanized movements of international solidarity with socialist governments responding with promises to help Vietnam build back better through multilateral investments in technological and industrial modernization meant to integrate the postcolonial country into the socialist world economy.
Total destruction of Vinh, as I have outlined elsewhere (see Schwenkel 2020), offered an opportunity for experimental planning and for transforming the small industrial town into a model socialist city according to the universalist aspirations of modernism. This included the city's first planned mass residential community or integrated housing estate for fifteen thousand workers, a large percentage of whom were women, made homeless by the war. The aim of this ambitious project was to eliminate spontaneous and disorderly patterns of postwar resettlement after people returned from years of evacuation, through provision of universal housing and urban infrastructure on an unprecedented scale. Socialist urban design was thus imagined as a collective tool to carry out the broad and equitable distribution of public goods as the basis for a new moral and political order in the service of the “common good” (lợi ích chung).
Socialist reconstruction was as much a material project—with the aim to reconstitute the built environment holistically—as it was a civilizing process meant to engineer an enlightened socialist humanity with the goal to increase labor productivity through a city designed for workers’ optimal well-being. Equal attention was thus paid to building both physical and social infrastructure, from roads to schools, pipes to parks and other public spaces to create a radically new people-oriented city that would stabilize, reform, and benefit the whole of society.
Of course, architects have always dreamed of building a better world, but this seemingly “tabula rasa” situation presented a team of local and international planners with a unique opportunity for the application of Eurocentric ideas of tropical modernism and beliefs in egalitarian urbanism that produced contradictory results. On the one hand, the idea of universal housing with modern integrated facilities was appealing to Vietnamese planners and many workers who would be allocated apartments, a significant percentage of whom were rural female construction workers who helped to build the complex while large numbers of young men were at war. Socialist planning at the time aspired to lift populations out of poverty through rapid industrial and infrastructural development to secure equitable access to public goods, including housing, while collectivizing the means of production and undoing colonial inequalities. People were inspired by and committed to this hopeful vision of a just city that seemed to offer an end to postwar poverty and privation, especially in female-headed households where male relatives had perished on the battlefield.
On the other hand, tensions between aspirational planning and postwar realities exposed the incompatibility of modernism's claims to transferability, even as its promise of transformation to overcome “backwardness” remained appealing. Competing socialist logics and ideas about urban futurity transpired with the “vernacularization” of European designs for modernity. For example, as I outline in the larger study, Vietnamese authorities were skeptical of East German plans for single-family housing that emphasized the nuclear family as the basic unit of social organization and consumption. In seeking a balance between housing need and supply in an era of collectivization, they turned single-family units into shared living arrangements. Not surprisingly, Vietnamese residents had entirely different ideas about what urban life should look like and how public goods and spaces should be collectively used and arranged in accordance with their own needs beyond state property or, after economic reforms, capitalist commodities. As such, the design models and technologies that traveled between the socialist North and the postcolonial South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics, turning that which was common—those collective assets managed by the state—into an assemblage of shared resources for commoning that would allow non-elite actors to “sustain themselves in non-commodified ways” (Nonini 2017: 35) over the longue durée.
Precarity before and after reforms (Đổi Mới)
Literature on public goods in late socialist and postsocialist societies examines the shrinking, but not wholly absent, role of the state as a provider of resources and services to ensure the well-being of the population. This scholarship is also quick to point out the ways the socialist state fell short of its ambitious goals of equality and prosperity, only to produce new forms of social stratification and rampant scarcity. The idea of universal entitlements “aroused great expectations among the public,” the Hungarian economist János Kornai, observed, but the “standards for their provision embittered many who felt that the communist state had failed to keep its promises” of abundance and egalitarianism (1998: 273).
My Vietnamese respondents in the housing estate also expressed their bitterness at the failure of the state to deliver the promised goods. Vietnam's attempts to achieve socialist emancipation through accelerated industrialization and collectivization had met with many challenges, including crushing hunger and poverty during the postwar subsidy years (1975–86), called thời bao cấp. Their unfulfilled needs notwithstanding, my respondents pointed to the healthcare, education, and housing—rights enshrined in the Vietnamese constitution—which their workplaces had provided in exchange for their labor and contributions to nation-building. In truth, access to public goods was not universal. Around the world, even beyond state socialism, scholars have shown the extent to which exclusion and inequality, including racial and ethnic disparities in wealth and opportunity (An et al. 2018), plague the administering of public goods, including access to basic infrastructure like water. Similarly, the socialist system produced its own imbalances in the distribution of resources based on a reward system that bestowed state employees, such as factory workers and civil servants, fundamental state protections. Those outside the state-run economy, like petty traders, were not considered productive and deserving; on the contrary, their work was seen as counterrevolutionary (Leshkowich 2011). Allocation of public goods was thus tied less to citizenship than to moral categories of belonging based on subjective political assessments of contributions to socialist nation-building, including in wartime. Respondents understood this moral economy as driven by a logic of reciprocity that affirmed the basic tenets of the social contract: rights and protections in exchange for duty and loyalty. The end of “state care” (sự quan tâm của nhà nước) that followed economic reforms incited outrage among the more vulnerable populations with whom I worked, fueled by a sense of betrayal of such core values of security and stability (ổn).
Đổi mới reforms in 1986 liberalized the economy and ended most state subsidies, including allocation of housing, but for broad segments of society, life did not improve, at least initially. Instead, for many people, Đổi mới made life more difficult, especially for women, who were disproportionately impacted by the end to the universal provision of basic needs. With economic restructuring, workers experienced what was once unimaginable: joblessness. This new reality—the abandonment of state delivery of public goods and services—marked a shift away from state ownership of the means of production as factories began to shut down or reduce the size of their workforce. It also transformed the built environment, as laid-off workers—mostly women—were forced out of the state sector and into the informal economy with fewer social protections, leaving them economically vulnerable but housed nonetheless. Informal social and economic activities that appeared to spontaneously emerge across the housing complex began to encroach on threshold places of party politics like courtyards and “culture houses” (nhà văn hóa) where community and Fatherland Front meetings took place, blurring the lines between official and unofficial activities in what had always been multifunctional spaces. The large expanses between the buildings also became opportune sites for “calculated informality” (Roy 2009: 82), that is, livelihood and other practices that sought to maintain community and forge new possibilities for women to sustain life by making collective claims on state property that resisted incorporation into the logics of urban restructuring.
In no way was commoning among the working class entirely new. Shadow economies and ad hoc practices, like urban gardening, to overcome scarcity were well-established in centrally planned, socialist economies around the world. In Vietnam they were critical to supplementing the inadequate provision of government-rationed goods during and after the war. At stake was an ethics of “life as survival” that allowed upstanding citizens to keep their moral and political worlds intact (Jacques Derrida, cited in Fassin 2010: 82). This meant that diverse strategies for subsistence rather than profit beyond the purview of the state were tolerated by sympathetic authorities, who were themselves engaged in similar survival practices based on collective social arrangements. What was new after reforms, however, were the scales of expansion of the “unplanned” into planned urban space, and the contours of care and curation that commoning took to contest changes to housing policies and forms of ownership. Expectations of “rule by sentiment” rather than rational legal authority (Schwenkel 2015: 212) emboldened residents to use state property to generate alternative modalities of urban life through the collective work of commoning that “acknowledge[d] a broken world and the survival ethics of a transformational infrastructure” in the name of urban livability (Berlant 2016: 339). While this “tolerated encroachment” produced novel arrangements and compromises between the state and citizens seeking to overcome precarity and create new ways to flourish in the city, the contingencies of such tolerance continued to reproduce the very conditions of residents’ vulnerability (Rao 2013: 775).
Invoking rights to public goods: Publicizing practices
Vietnam's first planned city fell quickly into unplanned obsolescence, which was the focus of the fieldwork that I conducted in the housing complex in 2010–2011, with annual field visits through 2021. Buildings meant to have a lifespan of 80 years soon crumbled into disrepair owing to a lack of maintenance by housing authorities. By 2010, more than two-thirds of the original residents continued to reside in the housing blocks, where they had lived as neighbors for more than 30 years. When I began my work, this population was in the throes of protesting the messy process of denationalization of state property—called xã hội hóa or socialization rather than privatization, which would contradict the principles of the ruling Communist Party. They did so through a series of collectively organized civic acts, including the coordinated submission of rounds of petitions to city officials that contested plans for urban renewal.
Through these publicizing acts residents collectively—across all nine wards—laid claim to the city and to housing as a social obligation by publicly decrying the adverse effects that marketization and the retreat of the state would have on their livelihoods and communities. They did so by appropriating the language of the state and its claims to “democratic socialism” to demand due process—and to set the terms for urban renewal. This included demands for on-site resettlement (tái định cư tại chỗ) and one-to-one replacement of their units for apartments in new buildings, which would keep the urban poor in the city center and hub of social and economic life. Consequently, I came to see publicizing and commoning in this interim period of transition between state and market as a political project (Postero and Elinoff 2019; see also Introduction to this theme section), grounded in shared notions of fairness that challenged market valuation of social housing by mobilizing solidarities around claims to people's rights to material and economic security.
These solidarities, especially among female-headed households, resulted in consensus voting to block state-holding enterprises from proceeding with plans for rebuilding, effectively refusing to dissolve the commons. Collectively, they formed a powerful political force for asserting their legal and ethical entitlement to public goods—and to remain in social housing on their own terms. One housing block, in particular, allocated to women workers and their families, became the holdout against redevelopment and the terms of compensation, essentially stalling renewal efforts on the northern edge of the estate for close to ten years (see Chapter 10 in Schwenkel 2020). In 2021, the majority of these households had moved into a new high-rise constructed adjacent to their crumbling block, not unlike that which had occurred in the southernmost area in 2017 (figure 1). However, in this case, as of December 2021 five families remained in the now abandoned building due to their ongoing demands for just compensation, thus blocking demolition of the ruins.
On-site resettlement as per the conditions laid by residents, some of whom refused to accept the terms of compensation and thus remain in their dangerously deteriorated building, 2021. Photo by author.
Citation: Focaal 2022, 94; 10.3167/fcl.2022.940102
Such actions that contest the privatization of housing may not be unique—scholars remind us that people around the world have collectively mobilized against capitalist appropriation of common resources on which individual and community survival depends (see Gidwani and Baviskar 2011; Kip 2015; Nonini 2006: 165). However, they do bring important attention to the role that women and social reproduction play in the struggle for rights to maintain access to and control over public goods and services, like child care, that urban restructuring has threatened to abolish. They also demonstrate the degree to which residents in social housing in Vietnam have been able to exercise some control over the future provision of certain urban public resources in the face of privatization.
These forms of publicizing to maintain access to public goods among the urban poor and to prevent dispossession by appealing to egalitarian ideals once espoused by the state were made apparent to me early on in my research. After moving into the housing blocks, I familiarized myself with both the interiors and exteriors of the complex—from the standardized design of the apartments to the shared spaces of hallways and stairways that opened onto bustling courtyards and pathways that traversed the three main areas and wound their way past the vast open fields and verdant community gardens. These lively in-between spaces of social and economic possibility created openings for an emergent politics of common struggle over public goods against the logics of creative destruction or demolition of the old to build anew as a means to accumulate capital.
The limits of modernist planning were quickly revealed to me: functional design attempted to impose clean modern lines on what were historically and culturally fuzzy boundaries in urbanizing spaces, even before socialism. East German architects had wanted to keep separate public and private areas, which are not absolute in Vietnam (Drummond 2000). They had touted the virtues of modern indoor plumbing for nuclear families, a novel for most, to reduce domestic labor and discourage collective living (Schwenkel 2020: 246). And yet, during my fieldwork, it was not unusual to see household activities like cooking or cleaning carried out by women in common areas as people went about their domestic work collectively outside, rather than isolated from one another in their homes. Everyday tasks of social reproduction and mutual care were thus important sources of sociability that drew on a variety of shared resources such as communal space, groundwater (figure 2), and trees.
Community well in the housing estate used collectively for domestic activities. Note that nonresidents also took advantage of this public good, 2011. Photo by author.
Citation: Focaal 2022, 94; 10.3167/fcl.2022.940102
The architects had also attempted to delineate spaces of living from livelihood practices, which are frequently integrated in Vietnam: a ground floor quickly becomes an eatery by day and a sleeping room by night, bringing the public into the private sphere. In other words, despite zoning regulations to maintain clear separations, urban space as common good was mutable and multifunctional. Such mutability shows how tensions between the commons as noncommodified resource with shared use values come up against and even overlap with commodifying practices that, according to Don Nonini, “seek to capture these use values … and transform them into sources for private accumulation” (2017: 26). Nonini rightly argues that such tensions are seldom discussed in the literature on the urban commons. Urban housing in general, and social housing in particular, offers an important empirical context to do so.
Life-making in the commons
There is an uneasy relationship between the urban commons and commodification as commoning activities take place alongside if not entwined with market practices to obtain surplus value. While the literature has made clear that “‘commons’ stand opposed to ‘commodities’” (Gidwani and Baviskar 2011: 43), and while there is a clear threat of common resources being exploited, destroyed, or enclosed, on the ground we may find more blurriness and ambiguity (Amin and Howell 2016: 2). Commoning activities may transpire alongside if not be entangled with market exchange to generate social profitability. For example, common resources may be sustainably “marketized” by collectives to counter food insecurity or to enable cultural recovery, with surplus value directed back to the community (Sato and Soto Alarcón 2019). Market practices, the selling of commodities to secure livelihoods, work in tandem with non-market activities—for example, through forms of affective labor or care-work—to enable sociality and social reproduction.
We can see these tensions play out in the housing commons in Vinh through the modifications that residents carried out to the built environment and surrounding open spaces. Over time, people set about refurbishing their apartments and adjacent areas with an eye toward claiming different types of commons, some of which were managed by the state and others, like community gardens, managed by the residents themselves. Appropriating the atmospheric commons (e.g., air), they built large additions onto their balconies to make room for their expanding, multigeneration families, while some turned such spaces into community resources, like for tutoring children. Next to the gardens, tea stands, where residents debated privatization, and pop-up barbershops, where they gossiped about neighbors, became an integral part of the social commons. Women assembled sheds for making dumplings to hawk to hungry students in the afternoons on their way home from school and attached awnings to exterior walls under which they cooked congee in early mornings to sell to mothers and toddlers outside daycare. They dried rows of incense in the sunny corners of courtyards to collect donations for the nearby pagoda. They turned walkout basements into coops for raising fowl, a practice that dated back to the subsidy era. Through small-scale vending of eggs, bags of rice, or cigarettes, for instance, they participated in the spontaneous “toad markets” (chợ cóc) that sprouted up in the open spaces between the housing blocks. These activities offered social and economic alternatives to commercial establishments for neighbors with long-term relationships to the female vendors, both “insiders” from the complex and “outside” traders (figure 3), demonstrating how access to the urban commons was seemingly non-exclusionary.
Non-exclusionary use of communal space between the housing blocks. Nonresidents are marked by their form of transportation (bicycles) and the wares they bring from the urban periphery to the city center, 2012. Photo by author.
Citation: Focaal 2022, 94; 10.3167/fcl.2022.940102
Many of these livelihood practices were framed as life-making rather than profit-generating, as commoning sustained everyday sociality and forms of noncommodified labor associated with social reproduction to strengthen collective well-being. It should be noted that a number of these small-scale undertakings were made possible by state-led community enhancement strategies, including severance pay that female workers received in addition to a monthly retirement benefit of roughly 80 US dollars at the time of my fieldwork. Others received support from state organizations, such as the Women's Union, to assist with income generation and poverty reduction. The use of government-provided public goods and infrastructures as resources for commoning serves as a reminder of the mutual constitution of “public and common modes of provision and enjoyment,” rather than their opposition (de Jongh 2021: 780).
Common ecological resources, like green space for gardening or open land for grazing, were collectively organized and managed by resident-elected wardens in collaboration with residents and state housing authorities. This active participation of multiple stakeholders produced a sense of belonging among my senior female interlocuters, of their having a stake in shaping both the future direction of housing and the current regulation of the commons. Individual garden plots on communal land (đất chung) used for both subsistence and enjoyment were rotated among households in areas with less green space and allocated to all households per need where land was more plentiful, provided such plots were cultivated and maintained (figure 4). Still, it is important to mention the role of informal regulations and practices that governed the urban commons, the tacit understandings between commoners to secure access to public goods and to share resources without any formal agreement. Rather than a clearly defined governance mechanism, the urban commons in Vietnam shows the limits of ideas about formal organization as the basis of managing and negotiating common resources (Pithouse 2014). For example, an impromptu “toad market” that expanded over time in the large communal space between the buildings in Area C was eventually formalized by the state as an official open-air marketplace, albeit with informal edges where children played, traders lounged, women dried grains, and men gathered to play chess, showing a lack of “clearly defined resource boundaries … as a prerequisite for any commoning effort” (Kip et al. 2015: 15–16). State efforts to formalize informality, and to discipline commoning through cooptation, also show the fluid nature and co-constitution of state property, public goods, and common resources. Commoning, in other words, might not be the absolute “other” of the state form, even as it remains a response to the contradictions of state-promoted capitalism (cf. Linebaugh 2019: xvi).
Garden plots on communal lands become multifunctional spaces, 2011. Photo by author.
Citation: Focaal 2022, 94; 10.3167/fcl.2022.940102
The appropriation of shared space and other atmospheric or ecological resources by residents and, to a lesser extent, nonresidents became a defining feature of the housing estate. Its dynamic social life, dominated largely by women, challenged common notions of modernist mass housing as a stifling place of social isolation devoid of meaningful human interaction (see also Fehérváry 2013). Through a focus on their labor of production and reproduction to overcome alienation, we see how feminist commoning was essential to generating both commodified and noncommodified forms of social goods and spaces as political struggle against the threat of dispossession, while maintaining a sense of social cohesion that nurtured solidarities in the absence of public investments in social housing.
The social dis/order of feminist commoning
Through women's reinvention of the commons, social housing and its environs became opportune sites for overlapping livelihood and social practices with the retrenchment of state support. As vulnerable residents made collective claims to public goods and common space, they repositioned themselves in relation to the state, market, and privatization policies to ensure urban life. In the process, they created a flourishing solidarity economy that showed the buildings to be inhabited spaces of social action and opportunity, constituting a dynamic neighborhood rather than ruins to be demolished. Commoning, in other words, afforded the kinds of protections that senior female residents felt they were owed.
Scholars have brought our attention to the vital role that gender plays in the organization of the commons around shared commitments or emerging solidarity economies. Feminist analyses have shown the commons to be the product of collective struggle and work to resist inequality and foster common interest (Federici 2019; McLean 2021). As Sylvia Federici (2019: 108) observes, “the ‘commoning’ of the material means of reproduction is the primary mechanism by which … mutual bonds are created.” In social housing in Vinh, these alliances were especially critical for women under conditions of privatization because of their reliance on shared resources and public goods owing to the disproportionate burdens of state and family responsibilities they have borne historically, including manual and emotional labor, also in wartime.
While feminist commoning was made possible by solidarities across social difference—for example, keeping an eye on neighborhood kids or on outside vendors’ goods—it also worked to normalize precarious labor by assuming responsibilities that once fell under the purview of the state (McLean 2021: 243). Competing interests also created new forms of vulnerability in common spaces, as emerging patterns of stratification revealed both the limits of egalitarian politics in social housing and potential conflicts among strangers or even neighbors as a feature of the urban commons (Huron 2015). For example, a few of the small businesses run by nonresidents in makeshift kiosks that encroached on the commons displayed a postsocialist precariat-in-the-making. One female tailor employed several young women who worked without any labor protections, hunched over their sewing machines in a dimly lit walkout basement, a reminder of the asymmetries and “uncommonalities” that lurk beneath or adjacent to a commons not disentangled from capitalism (Blaser and de la Cadena 2017).
These “uncommonalities” aside, commoning practices not only bumped up against or embodied capitalist logics. A long-standing solidarity economy based on mutual aid during the war and postwar subsidy years shaped commoning activities outside of capital, for example, sharing access to water across households or gifting food and money to poorer families affected by the toxic residues of war. Not all selling activity was geared toward income generation. Tea stalls and cigarette stands often broke even or earned pennies a day, my interlocuters reported. These were places of assembly and sociability where housing policies and other politics were debated among regulars (see Schwenkel 2020: 253). They were meant to sustain social life, especially among widows, rather than turn a profit. “I don't make much money,” one female pensioner whose husband had died in the war and whose stand I frequented told me in 2011. “I just enjoy the conversation.”
While residents of all generations took advantage of generous open spaces, a hallmark of socialist planning (and more than 60 percent of the housing estate), transforming them into badminton courts, soccer fields, libraries and poetry clubs, vegetable gardens, sun drying beds, playgrounds, grazing pastures, mini-gyms, game boards, and funerary sites, these shared resources tended to be non-exclusionary. Female traders from rural peripheries, for instance, who biked long distances to sell their harvests in informal markets (figure 3), used common resources on a daily basis, washing their produce at communal wells (figure 2) and taking naps under the housing estate's many trees. They were not permitted, however, to hawk their wares in the buildings, according to posted regulations that limited the penetration of “outsiders,” a reminder of how access to the commons is always delimited (Ostrom [1990] 2015), often in accordance with unspoken norms. For example, local neighbors outside the complex brought their goats to graze on the meadows behind the housing blocks (figure 5), but they did not have access to central plots of land to farm. Small herb gardens on the peripheries, however, were unregulated and could be planted, in theory, by anyone.
Sharing land with animals: a more-than-human commons, 2015. Photo by author.
Citation: Focaal 2022, 94; 10.3167/fcl.2022.940102
Despite serving public needs and making efficient use of limited resources, women's commoning practices were perceived by housing authorities as threatening urban social order. Refurbished walkout basements and ad hoc balcony extensions were coded dangerous, and women's use of shared space for domestic activities was deemed unruly. Petty commerce across the housing blocks, in particular, introduced the threat of urban disorder by appropriating planned common space intended by the state for political and cultural activities. Trash piled behind buildings signaled indiscipline, bolstering the notion of commons as wasteland in need of reform. Social and ecological commoning, in other words, had become constitutive of “the urban” in ways that deviated from the orderly city envisioned by the state, even as this vibrant “infrastructure of common life” served to redistribute much-needed urban resources, from public goods to forms of mutual care and social support (Tonkiss 2013: 322).
Authorities largely tolerated these improvisations, though the state media criticized women's commoning for violating the “order of urban civilization” (trật tự văn minh đô thị). The local press similarly disapproved of these collective activities, accusing female residents of brazenly “encroaching upon common land” (lấn chiếm sân chung), rather than acknowledging corporate encroachment on those resources that the women held in common already. Ironies aside, here the politics of the commons worked in the service of privatization (Amin and Howell 2016: 5), as critics framed women's attempts to alter the conditions of urban life as standing in the way of mutually beneficial “development.”
The future of public goods
In this article, I have shown how the boundaries between public goods and common resources are never fixed, but part of an ongoing negotiation between state, nonstate, and market actors. Ideas about commoning materialized through modes of publicizing, as a “deserving” public made claims on the state to recognize the entitlements to which they were owed. The shift from socialist to liberal housing policies, I argued, disproportionately impacted women, many of whom, especially retirees and widows, refused to allow public goods to become private assets. Feminist commoning thus provided women with opportunities to mitigate uneven development and the inequalities they faced in a city that seemed to be developing around but without them. It inspired participation in shaping the direction of the future city among a generation of senior women whose historical experience with socialist collectivization and its aim to abolish private property meant that “commonism” was a more familiar form of social organization than market capitalism (Federici 2019: 6). In their hybrid sociomaterial arrangements, commoning speaks to the ways that cities take shape organically—and from the ground up—around common places, histories, and experiences with collective life and action across time (Boym 1994).
The stakes of feminist commoning were not only economic survival but also noncommodified sociality and political struggles over the right to maintain access to mutually beneficial public goods like housing and its environs as part of the social contract (figure 6). This shows how making and publicizing the commons were intersecting projects. Ironically, both citizens and the state drew on similar logics to achieve their goals. The state proposed a market solution to the material deterioration of the aging housing blocks: urban redevelopment with privately owned condominiums. On the one hand, female residents, who constituted a large percentage of the complex, utilized decay—a sign of the withdrawal of the state—to mobilize acts of commoning to achieve better conditions for human flourishing in the city, which some saw as destructive of public property (for example, balcony extensions to expand household space). On the other hand, the state, too, appropriated the logic of obsolescence to advocate for demolition and market interventions. Commoning was thus an attempt by inhabitants to exercise control over the urban future, as developers came to see social housing as expendable. Following James Holston, we might then see commoning as more than the meaningful actions that emerged out of collective claims to shared resources. As a moral-political project, commoning was also generative of a “sense that [people] have contributor rights to the commons thus created” (2019: 136), that is, to the goods and services they jointly built and to which they felt entitled as the product of their labor. In other words, through the commons, elderly women actively contributed to the making of their city as citizens with rights to contest the market logics that threatened to undo the “people-oriented” (định hướng con người) design of their city.
A multigenerational game of afternoon badminton behind a housing block, 2011. Photo by author.
Citation: Focaal 2022, 94; 10.3167/fcl.2022.940102
At a moment when debates about COVID-19 vaccines as “global public goods” have raised moral concerns about inclusion and exclusion as manifest through global inequalities that have redistributed life and death around the world, attention to the relationship between public goods and private commodities takes on new urgency. Global public goods speak to the need for new ethical orientations toward creating and distributing resources that are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, or beneficial to the greatest number of people possible and for the greatest good. Beyond vaccines, this article offers a provocation to rethink the possibility of housing not as a speculative commodity but as a worldwide public good to achieve “homefulness” as a global priority. The COVID-19 pandemic has made us critically aware of the growing number of unhoused people, particularly in the United States. Attention to histories of utopian planning, despite their limitations, and to collective actions among citizens to build a better, more just world through social practices of commoning that are attentive to gender and racial inequality might offer a way forward to reimagining a more equitable society in a time when visions of life beyond capitalism are sorely needed.
Acknowledgments
Research for this article was supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright-Hays, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. An earlier version was presented at the 2020 virtual meetings of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) at a panel on urban public goods organized by Rivke Jaffe and Anne-Christine Trémon. Thank you to the organizers, as well as the discussant, Brenda Chalfin, for the productive conversation that unfolded remotely. I am especially grateful to Anne-Christine for her careful reading and astute suggestions for revisions across multiple iterations of this article. The journal's editors and anonymous reviewers also offered valuable comments that sharpened the arguments presented here.
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