Contesting Street Spaces in a Socialist City: Itinerant Vending-Scapes and the Everyday Politics of Mobility in Hanoi, Vietnam

In 2008, Hanoi's municipal government banned street vending from numerous sites, significantly delineating and redefining access to urban space. The ban privileges certain forms of movement by designating streets and sidewalks for the fluid movements of “modern” transportation, rather than the staccato “traditional” mobilities of street vendors who stop frequently to ply their trade. In this article, we explore the everyday mobilities of Hanoi's vendors in light of this ban, focusing on the careful negotiations vendors undertake to secure rights to the city's streets and highlighting how vendor mobilities are socially, politically, and culturally produced and reworked. We combine Cresswell's six facets of mobility with Kerkvliet's everyday politics to form a hybrid everyday politics of mobility. In doing so we highlight vendors' daily experiences of mobility and the politics affecting itinerant vendors compared to their stationary counterparts. Based on eight months of fieldwork in Hanoi, incorporating interviews, mobile ethnographic methods, and vendor journaling, this article contributes an in-depth examination into the politics of (im)mobility in the Global South, considering how mobility is framed and produced in a distinctly socialist context. By focusing on the everyday politics of vending in Hanoi and the tactics undertaken to carve out mobilities in the urban landscape, we illustrate these vendors' daily lived realities as well as their connections with and contestations of local, regional, and global political–economic systems. We find mobility is a mechanism of resistance, as vendors strive to maintain mobile livelihoods despite threats of state sanctions and exclusion.