DSpace at VNU: Becoming and being urban in Hanoi: Rural-urban migration and relations in Viet Nam

Becoming and being urban in Hanoi: Rural-urban migration andrelations in Viet Nam Nguyen Tuan Anh, Jonathan Rigg, Luong Thi Thu Huong and Dinh Thi Dieu The discourse of the rural-urban m

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Becoming and being urban in Hanoi: Rural-urban migration and relations in Viet Nam

Nguyen Tuan Anh , Jonathan Rigg , Luong Thi Thu Huong & DinhThi Dieu

Published online: 01 Mar 2012

To cite this article: Nguyen Tuan Anh , Jonathan Rigg , Luong Thi Thu Huong & Dinh Thi Dieu (2012)

Becoming and being urban in Hanoi: Rural-urban migration and relations in Viet Nam, The Journal

of Peasant Studies, 39:5, 1103-1131, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2011.652618

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Becoming and being urban in Hanoi: Rural-urban migration and

relations in Viet Nam

Nguyen Tuan Anh, Jonathan Rigg, Luong Thi Thu Huong and Dinh Thi Dieu

The discourse of the rural-urban migrant is that of a sojourner in the city, a man

or a woman who will almost inevitably return to his or her rural roots andre-engage with farming and village living In this paper we ask whether rural-urban migrants can ‘become’ urban and shed their identification as temporarydenizens of the city We develop a conceptual framework that provides five entrypoints to explore this process of becoming urban, and then apply the frameworkdrawing on the experiences of migrants to Viet Nam’s capital, Hanoi We arguethat even when migrants do return to their homelands they do so with alteredpriorities and on different terms The experience of migration was not infre-quently transformative and life-changing While migrants may not ‘become’urban in the fullest sense, their homeland had become a space of familial originand emotional identification, not a place where people necessarily sought toreside, work, raise their children and build their lives

Keywords: Viet Nam; migration; urbanisation; livelihoods; rural-urban relations

The discourse of the rural-urban migrant

In Asia, the main contributing factor to urbanisation remains internal rural-urbanmigration (UN Habitat 2009, 25) One view of rural-urban migrants in Asia is of adislocated, disenfranchised and marginalised proletariat, displaced from rural areas tourban contexts In more radical interpretations, this is explicitly linked to the disruptiveeffects of capitalist transformation Davis refers to the ‘brutal tectonics of neoliberalglobalization’ and the ‘forcible incorporation into the world market of the greatsubsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa’ with an end result of ‘rural ‘‘semi-proletarianization’’, [and] the creation of a huge global class of immiserated semi-peasants and farm labourers lacking existential security of subsistence’ (Davis 2006, 174,and see Glassman 2004) Other scholars are more positive about the motivations for,and the outcomes of migration seeing the process as livelihood enhancing and sociallyempowering As Bird and Deshingkar categorically state in their review of circularmigration in India, ‘there is overwhelming evidence that internal migration can lead topositive change in both sending and receiving areas’ (2009, 3 [emphasis added]), a viewthat Ploeg and Ye Jingzhong (2010) also endorse in their study of China.1

1‘This circular pattern [of migration in China] has a specific set of characteristics thatpositively feed into the process of industrialisation and simultaneously help to avoid majorsocial and political unrest and the high levels of deprivation typically associated with ‘miserybelts’ elsewhere’ (Ploeg and Ye Jingzhong 2010, 514)

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Unlike the nineteenth century urbanisation process in Western Europe andNorth America and currently in much of Africa and Latin America (Ploeg and YeJingzhong 2010), most rural-urban migrants in Asia do not relinquish their attach-ments – material, emotional and symbolic – to ‘home’ in the countryside Everylunar New Year, China experiences what has been called the world’s greatest humanmigration (Chang 2008) as scores of millions of urban migrants return to their ruralhomes.2The same occurs in Viet Nam over Tet, in Thailand during the Songkranholidays, in the Philippines at Christmas, and in Indonesia during Idul Fitri Fromthis has emerged a discourse of the Asian migrant that stresses their status assojourners in the city In this schema, rural-urban migrants, who are mainly youngand single and increasingly female, leave home as part of a family strategy to supportthe livelihood of the natal household They engage in work which is usually marginaland low paid, often informal, and rarely upwardly mobile Such migrants neverthrow off their identity – both self-expressed and externally reified – as ruralites;farmers on the make Their stay in the city remains a sojourn, where return isinevitable, and as such they never fully become members of urban society Migrantwork is one component of an inter-locking livelihood, where income generation inthe city must be understood in the context of livelihoods ‘back home’ Children,futures, parents, identities and aspirations remain rooted in the countryside, evenwhile these migrants live and work in the city.3

Asian rural-urban migrants, therefore, constitute a large and significant portion

of the urban population but they are not urbanites in the classic sense Such urban migrants occupy what has been conceptualised as an interstitial – or ‘in-between’ (see Resurreccion 2005, Agergaard et al 2011) – social and economic space.They are denizens of the urban, but not its citizens; they live in the city, but belong tothe countryside They work in the industrial and service sectors, but at core remainpeasants (farmers); they are out of place, therefore, in multiple ways For govern-ments, the rural-urban migrant represents a problem of management in the context

rural-of rapidly expanding urban populations and creaking city services; for scholars, theyare a hard-to-pin-down population who are difficult to categorise and a challenge toresearch given their mobility; and for NGOs, migrants are the flotsam of capitalismwho need to be protected and supported

And yet it is also clear that not all migrants live on the edge of subsistence,scraping a living at the margins of the Asian miracle Some build productive andrewarding lives in the city They may arrive as refugees or speculative sojournersfrom the countryside, and yet make a relative success of their stay, so much so thatsome, over time, make the transition from rural migrants, to city sojourners, tourban citizens.4It is this process of ‘becoming urban’ that the following paper seeks

to illuminate How and why do some migrants manage to make this transition, andwhat prevents – or inhibits – others from doing so? And how can we measure and

2China has some 130 million rural-urban migrant workers: ‘Together they represent the largestmigration in human history; three times the number of people who emigrated to America fromEurope over a century’ (Chang 2008, 12) Including rural-rural migrants, the total number onthe move at the end of 2008 numbered 225 million (Ploeg and Ye Jingzhong 2010, 515)

assess this progressive process of urban insinuation? As it has become common toobserve, the world recently reached ‘an invisible but momentous milestone’: for thefirst time in human history, the greater portion of the globe’s population live in citiesand towns, and the world is now more urban than it is rural (UNFPA 2007, and seeSatterthwaite 2006) However, as we briefly outline below, the contours of thetransformation are not as clearly delineated as this striking and resonant claimsuggests In terms of numbers, living conditions, livelihood pathways and futures,for example, there are gaps in our knowledge of the migrants who make up such asignificant part of the burgeoning but often highly unstable urban population.

Becoming urban: establishing a heterodox conceptual framework

One of the key reasons why the contours of the urban transition in Asia are indistinct

is because it is often unclear quite when and how rural-urban migrants becomeurban, and when they should be counted as urbanites, rather than as ruralites It isnot unusual for Asian households to have representation in both urban and ruralspaces and associated economies, and they embrace both urban and rural sensi-bilities The aggregate data, as noted above, may identify an epochal shift in thebalance of the rural and urban populations, yet very significant numbers do not fitinto such neat, categorical boxes A question addressed towards the end of thissection as well in the conclusion of the paper is whether this large population of

‘neither-rural-nor-urban’ should be counted as occupying a third, ‘in-between’category

In this paper, we adopt a heterodox position in terms of how we view the process

of becoming urban and, by association what we understand by ‘urban-ness’ and,therefore, ‘rural-ness’ We view the process as consisting of multiple, often over-lapping, tendencies which we group here into five categories or entry points Eachprovides a different perspective to view – or approach – the integration of ruralmigrants into the urban fabric, and each draws on scholarship in different fields, asTable 1 sets out (Table 1) At a very general level, the legalistic approach links withgeographical literatures; livelihoods, to economic and development studies litera-tures; identity and behaviours to anthropology; and networks and associations tosociology As will become clear, none offers a neat solution or answer to thechallenge and to the question of how and when a migrant becomes urban This is

to be expected because, as the paper will illustrate, ‘becoming’ urban is multiple,contingent and – and importantly – reversible

Perhaps the simplest, and certainly the neatest, way to answer the question,

‘when does a rural migrant become urban?’ is to take a legalistic or bureaucraticapproach A rural migrant becomes an urbanite when s/he is officially registered, orcounted, as such This takes the transition from rural to urban as simple andcomplete, achieved through the tick of a bureaucratic box Second, it is possible totake a livelihoods approach in which a rural migrant (and household) becomes urbanwhen he or she builds a livelihood which is predominantly urban in provenance(location), character and weighting So rural migrants might be counted as urbaniteswhen their livelihoods are predominantly based in an urban or peri-urban location,and involve livelihood activities that can be regarded as emblematic or constitutive

of urban living A third way to approach the question is in terms of identity, bothself-expressed and/or externally reified Does a migrant in an urban context considerhim or herself rural or urban, sometimes expressed in terms of ‘home’, and how is

that migrant treated by the rest of the urban population: as someone ‘out of place’,

or as a fellow urbanite? Fourth, it is possible to focus on the behaviours, views,consumption patterns, preferences and everyday practices of migrants to determinewhether they remain rural in their living patterns and practices, or have becomeurban Finally, we can map the social networks and associations – the configurations

of social capital – that migrants deploy and ‘use’ to give meaning to their lives.Where is the centre of gravity of such networks, and who or what constitutes theseassociative relations?

It is the first two of these approaches (the legalistic/bureaucratic and the livelihoodsapproaches) to the question of becoming urban which have the most purchase inpolicy terms for the simple reason that they are the most easily measured and tracked:Where are you registered as living? What do you do? And yet, as we expand in amoment, it is these two approaches which are arguably the most problematic becausethey do not adequately deal with the mixed, partial and contingent processes by whichmigrants and their wider families become, over time, insinuated into the urban fabric

It is through unravelling urban/city and rural/village identities, behaviours,consumption practices and the geographies of their social networks that we come tobetter understand migration as a social process In the remainder of this section, wefocus particularly on the shortcomings of the first two approaches in Table 1, whiletouching more briefly on the limitations of the others

The legalistic or bureaucratic approach suffers from the fact that there are manytens of millions of people living in urban areas of Asia who are still officially ‘rural’

If there is one lesson to be drawn from the experiences of countries across Asia, it is

Table 1 Becoming urban: a conceptual framework

Views of ‘becoming’

bureaucratically; household

or individual registrationrecords them as urban interms of residence; censusand population records treatthem as urban

Wu and Treiman 2004;Wong and Wai-Po 1998;Wong and Rigg 2010;Deshingkar 2006

provenance (location in anurban context) or character(associated with the urban)

de Haan 1999; Rakodi andLloyd-Jones 2002

Identity and

identification

Migrant self-identifies as anurban, city dweller and ittreated as such by other citydweller

Silvey and Lawson 1999;Andersson 2001

Social and

cultural behaviours

Norms of behaviour, attitude,dress, consumption patternsand social networksemblematic of urban life

is urban in location anddistribution

Andersson 2001; Curran andRivero-Fuentes 2003

that administrations have failed to keep up with the increasingly mobile nature ofliving and livelihoods From Mumbai to Ho Chi Minh City and Bangkok, officialdata capture only a small portion of what is going on as bureaucrats struggle withcategories that are not fit for purpose and with populations who are far more agilethan they are National censuses often do not pick up short-term movements andpopulation registers are either lacking or provide only rudimentary coverage: ‘Forthe most part, migration data remain patchy, non-comparable and difficult to access’(UNDP 2009, 28, and see Newland 2009, 10) In an assessment of the situation forAsia, Kundu writes that ‘studies on internal migration are seriously constrained bythe fact that no international organisation systematically collects or tabulates eventhe basic demographic information .in a cross sectionally and temporally com-parable manner’, something he consider a ‘tragedy’ given the sheer number ofmigrants and their importance in policy terms (Kundu 2009, 14) As we discussbelow, the issue of getting to grips, in simple numerical terms, with the scale of rural-urban migration in Asia is even more pressing in countries with householdregistration systems, notably China and Viet Nam (World Bank 2003, 22–23, Wuand Treiman 2004) In summary, when people are mobile, their residence ill-definedand temporary, censuses inadequate, social structures fluid, and livelihoods areranged across space, there is a real empirical challenge of knowing the scale andnature of the ‘problem’ (as it is usually framed), and taking a legalistic approach hasconsiderable shortcomings as a result.5

Taking a livelihoods approach to becoming urban also suffers for a range ofequally trenchant reasons: because there are many people in urban areas pursuingagricultural pursuits (in the form of various forms of urban agriculture); there are anincreasing number of factories (‘urban’ livelihoods) in rural areas;6 and it is notunusual for migrants to embrace livelihood complexes that are both rural and urban

in their provenance and character The desire to put people into occupational boxes(‘worker’, ‘farmer’), not least for ease of categorisation, overlooks the mixed andfluid nature of livelihoods in much of the Global South

When it comes to considering the process of becoming urban in terms ofidentities, migrants show an ability simultaneously to embrace multiple identities.Treatment by others is also often ambiguous The same is true of urban ‘behaviours’,where research has clearly revealed that ‘urban’ behaviours, norms and attitudes arenot tied to urban spaces, but have colonised the countryside as some rural villageshave become socially urban (see Thompson 2004, 2007) Finally, mapping networks

of association and their configuration does not provide clarity in terms of the relativeimportance of such associations in functional terms on the one hand, and theircultural and social significance on the other

In briefly setting out the shortcomings attached to all these approaches tounderstanding the process of becoming urban, the intention is not to conclude that thetask is an impossible one Rather, it emphasises that the development process,embodying as it does a number of inter-locking social, economic, political andgeographical processes, is never ‘complete’, and is rarely neat These five lenses offer

5

‘Despite our ability to establish these broad contours of movement, what we know is dwarfed

by what we don’t know Unfortunately, migration data remain weak It is much easier forpolicy makers to count the international movements of shoes and cell-phones than of nursesand construction workers’ (UNDP 2009, 28)

complementary insights into the multiple and progressive ways in which rural migrantsinsinuate their way into the urban fabric as they make the transition from ruralites tourbanites, from denizens to citizens of the city, from sojourners to residents The process

is probably never fully complete for the migrant – perhaps only for their children – butproblematising the discourse of the rural-urban migrant in this way permits us to open

up an avenue for analysis that pays attention to the process of becoming In particular, ithelps to get away from the dichotomous (rural-urban) or trichotomous (rural-inbetween-urban) approach to understanding migrants and migration

Urbanisation, migration and registration in Viet Nam

From 1975 through to the early 1990s, the rate of urbanisation in Viet Nam was low,and rural-urban migration stunted (Table 2) According to official data, there was noincrease in levels of urbanisation between reunification in 1976 and 1990, with thefigure remaining close to 20 per cent throughout the period As in China, this wasbecause a strictly enforced household registration system (ho khau)and its couplingwith access to social goods from education to health and food security stronglydiscouraged people from leaving their place of registration (see below).7With theintroduction of doi moi (‘renovation’, economic reform) in Viet Nam in 1986, theelemental link between an individual’s ho khaui and their access to the state subsidysystem has been progressively eroded, rural-urban migration has accelerated, andrates of urbanisation have increased The Viet Nam Household Living StandardsSurvey (VHLSS) shows that between 1993 and 1998 seasonal migration increasedsix-fold (de Brauw and Harigaya 2007, 434), a large proportion of this human tideflowing to Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi (Figure 1)

Table 2 Urban population of Viet Nam (1976-2020)

For a comparative discussion of China and Viet Nam, see McGee (2009)

Over the period since reunification in 1975, it is possible to identify three broadperiods in Viet Nam’s urbanisation history: 1975–1986; 1986–1993; and 1993-present From 1975 to 1986, urban population growth was largely through naturalincrease To a significant extent, mobility was controlled by the ho khau system andwhen it did occur, was usually officially sanctioned and mostly rural-rural ratherthan rural-urban As a result levels of urbanisation remained largely unchanged In

1986, with the introduction of doi moi the opportunities for movement began togrow, although it was not until the early 1990s, and in particular the promulgation ofthe 1993 Land Law, that the institutional barriers to migration had eased sufficiently

to see a marked increase in rural-urban migration This ushered in the third period ofurban growth, from 1993 to the present day during which there has occurred amarked increase in urbanisation and the relative size of the urban population, driven

by rural-urban migration

The household registration system in Viet Nam

Until the late 1980s, Viet Nam’s household registration system largely ‘fixed’ people inspace In the north of the country this was instituted over the course of the 1950s, andwas then extended to the south with reunification and the creation of the SocialistRepublic of Viet Nam in 1975 The household registration system served severalpurposes It was a powerful tool of surveillance and political control; it assisted in themanagement of resources under a socialist system where residence in an area securedaccess to services; and for the central state, the household registration system was animportant means by which the state could ‘plan’ As Hardy (2001, 192) writes,

Even when one died, the ho khau was still of importance Unregistered residents werenot entitled to commune land for burial Before doi moi [reform], the link betweenidentification and access to rights and services was all embracing To live without a

ho khauwas to live without the rights granted to Vietnamese citizens under the law Andthe ho khau .was intimately tied to place of residence Rights were granted in the place

of registered residence, and in that place alone

To be without a ho khau was not to be entertained lightly It alone guaranteedaccess to the services of the state; quite literally, without a ho khaui one could not eat(see Hardy 2001, 194) In time, the ho khau system was codified into four registrationcategories (GSO 2006, and see Leaf 1999, 305):8

– KT1: a person registered in the district where he/she resides

– KT2: a person not registered in the district where he/she resides, but registered inanother district of the same province/city9

– KT3: a person from another province/city who has temporary registration in theirplace of destination for a period of one year, after which the KT3 registration has

to be re-issued (Since July 2007 the requirement to re-register has been lifted.)

8

In reviewing documents of the city authorities, statistical agencies and the Hanoi CommunistParty it is evident that while definitions of KT1 and KT2 are fairly clearly established andagreed, those for KT3 and KT4 vary considerably It is not particularly surprising, therefore,that interpretations of the latter two categories also differ

– KT4: a person from another province/city who has temporary registration in theirplace of destination for a period of six months, after which the KT4 registrationhas to be re-issued (Since July 2007 the requirement to re-register has been lifted.)There have been important modifications to the ho khau registration systemover time, in particular its loosening, reflecting the reality of everyday lives andliving in Viet Nam during the reform era.10Since July 2007, a migrant with KT3 orKT4 registration can, after one year of living stably in their new location, request

Figure 1 Northern Viet Nam

10The relevant laws, decrees and circulars are: Decree No 51-CP issued by the Government on

10 May 1997 on Registration and household management; the Law on Residence issued on 29November 2006; Decree 107/2007/N D-CP issued on 25 June 2007 on guiding theimplementation of the Law on Residence; Decree 56/2010/N D-CP issued on 24 May 2010

on Amendments and Supplements to a number of articles of Decree No 107/2007/ND-CP;Circular No.52/2010/TT-BCB on 30 November 2010 issued by Ministry of Public Security onDetailed provisions for the implementation of some articles of the Law on Residence; Decree

No 107/2007/ND-CP dated 25/06/2007; and Decree No 56/2010/ND-CP dated 24/5/2010

re-registration to KT1 with the important proviso that the owner of the house wherethey have been living supports the application.

Temporary migrants in Hanoi should be classified as KT2, KT3 or KT4, with themajority in the latter two classes However, partly because the ho khau systemremains in place at the same time as its logic has been undermined by the economicreforms of doi moi, there is very good reason to believe that there is a widening gapbetween official data on residence and de facto residence, with a substantial andgrowing ‘floating’ population (see Dapice et al 2010, GSO 2006) As the UNDPobserved in 2010, ‘there is a significant gap in data on internal migration [in VietNam], which carries widespread implications for understanding and measuring theparallel processes of migration and development, as well as for exploring howmigration can be used to enhance Viet Nam’s socio-economic development’ (UNDP

2010, 5) An indication of the size of the under-reporting of migration flows isevident from the data on population on the one hand and number of workersemployed in enterprises in Ho Chi Minh City on the other: the former grew by 7.5%between 2002 and 2005; the latter by 39% (Dapice et al 2010, 3) There is everyreason to suppose that a similar discrepancy applies to Hanoi, and Viet Nam’s otherlarger urban centres such as Danang Across the country, it has been suggested thatthis floating population numbers between 12 and 16 million which, if broadlycorrect, represents between 13% and 18% of Viet Nam’s population (UNDP

2010, 5)

While the formerly tight link between registration status and well-being (throughaccess to state services) has been cut, migrants with one of the three temporaryresidency classes (KT2, KT3 and KT4) nonetheless are limited in their access tomedical, educational and other social services as well civil rights including the right

to vote Those with KT4 residency can only legally stay in a location for six months(extendable) and, until 2010, could not own land titles.11 At the same time, it iswidely reported that re-registering (changing residency status) is time-consuming andburdensome, although unequally so across the country (UNDP 2010, 7) In light ofthis, it is not surprising that many migrants do not register their arrival in a newplace (or their boarding house landlords do not do it for them) and, if they do, thenthey do not re-register after six months A new Law on Residence was introduced in

2007 which, on paper, has loosened some of these restrictions but there is evidencethat it has been unevenly adopted, leading to a degree of confusion among migrants

as to their rights (UNDP 2010, 8).12

Methods and research context

The discussion that follows is based on fieldwork undertaken in Hanoi, Viet Nam’scapital, between September and December 2010, drawing on detailed interviews with

30 migrants across the city.13 As outlined above in general terms, because ofuncertainties about the data on internal mobility not only in Viet Nam but across

Asia, many scholars have chosen to work with primary data, using insights gainedfrom micro-level studies to reflect on the wider picture (Kundu 2009, 14) This,clearly, has its own deficiencies, not least the challenge of scaling up and questionsover the ‘representativeness’ of insights gained from such research Nonetheless,large scale surveys – such as, in the Viet Nam case, the VHLSS – do not shed muchlight on the real extent of migration to major urban areas or, and more importantly,the nature of migrant lives in the city.

Following discussions with local scholars and pilot interviews among migrants indifferent parts of the city, we arrived at a sampling framework with four key criteria

To begin with, all the interviewees were to be from rural contexts, with familylivelihood backgrounds in farming or farming-related activities Second, rather thanfocusing our attention on one district or ward, we took the decision to distribute ourinterviews across the city, covering the districts – though unequally – of Cau Giay,Hai Ba Trung, Dong Da, Ha Dong, Hoan Kiem and Thanh Xuan (Figure 2) Wetook this decision because each district has developed over different periods,attracting different migrants at different times, and offering different employmentopportunities We decided to take their ‘location’ in the city as their place ofresidence, rather than their place of work or employment, although more often thannot the two effectively coincided (Figure 2)

Third, we wanted a rough balance between male and female intervieweesbecause of the different ways that men and women connect, through the life cycle,with their natal communities.14And finally, we took the decision to select migrants

on the basis of their year of first arrival, planning to select around ten intervieweesfrom each of three periods (Table 3) The first period (1986–1992) spans the start ofdoi moi(reform) in 1986 (and the relaxation, around 1988, on restrictions on traveland control of spatial mobility through the ho khau) and ends just before thepromulgation of the new Land Law in 1993, which gave farmers the ability totransfer, exchange, lease and mortgage their land, thus permitting greaterlivelihood flexibility and opening up greater scope for migration (Le Bach Duongand Khuat Thu Hong 2008) It was following the introduction of the 1993 LandLaw that rates of migration and urbanisation accelerated – although data trackingthese trends, as outlined above, are problematic The second period runs from theintroduction of the Land Law in 1993 through to 1999, the early reform yearsduring which Viet Nam was one of Asia’s poorest countries and the poverty rateeven at the end of this period was 37 percent for the country as a whole, and 46percent in rural areas (Figure 3) The final period spans the years from 2000 duringwhich the economy expanded at such a rate that the country is now close to lowermiddle-income status (VNN 2010), with the poverty rate falling to around 15percent by 2006, one quarter of the figure in 1993 The decision to select ourinterviewees in this manner was partly because we wanted people of varying ageswho had migrated to Hanoi during different development ‘eras’ We hypothesisedthat length of time in the city would have a bearing on the depth of their connection

to urban living and life, and we also suspected that different development forceswould be acting on their initial decision to migrate, given changing rural conditions

14

In several of the cases we were, in effect, interviewing a migrant couple so although our firstpoint of contact might have been a man or a woman, the resulting interview includeddiscussions with both husband and wife, and sometimes their children too

and urban opportunities That said, and as the discussion which follows shows,these assumptions often break down and generational factors can be moreimportant than length of time in the city in shaping migrants’ engagement with theurban context.

The actual selection of informants was based on a snowball sampling strategy,initially drawing on the links of the Vietnamese authors of this paper (including theirstudents living in areas of the city with concentrations of migrants), and then usingthe contact networks of the interviewees to identify possible further informants,while at the same time meeting our sampling strategy As Figure 2 shows, in mostcases the places of work and residence of the migrants were co-located; in thoseinstances when this was not the case, we conducted the interview at the time andplace most convenient for the respondent The fact that all our migrants had mobilephones made arranging interviews much easier than would have been the case evenfive years ago For the interviews themselves we had a checklist of topics to cover

Figure 2 Hanoi and respondents’ places of occupation and residence

although, as is often the case, discussions not infrequently veered onto new and,sometimes, unexpected ground.15 We opened each interview explaining what theresearch was about and then gathered information of a contextual nature: age, place

of birth, date of arrival in Hanoi, conditions in source settlements, education, familyand marital status, registration, and so forth We spent considerable time detailingthe migration and livelihood histories of each respondent, and then turned toexploring their links with ‘home’ – remittances, and returns to and the nature of theirengagement with their place of origin This was followed by an often equally longdiscussion of respondents’ engagement with the city, before turning to questionsconcerning their plans for the future We concluded by thanking each respondent,asking if we could return to follow up questions if need be, either by phone or inperson

The field research took as its starting point, ‘the migrant’ We then scaled upfrom the migrant to their wider family/household and, from here, sometimes totheir village of origin or urban social milieu In taking this approach we deviatedfrom much livelihoods research which takes ‘the household’ as the starting pointand then disaggregates, where necessary, to the individual We took this approachbecause we were interested in how migrants sometimes re-shape their engagementwith other social units (‘communities’, ‘families’) over time, due to their migrationexperiences

Following each interview, a summary of the issues and the discussion wascompiled The interviews themselves were taped, and then transcribed, translatedand cross-checked against our summary statements We then undertook a secondround of interviews, both face-to-face and by telephone, to follow up on particular

Table 3 Interview sampling frame

Date of first arrival in Hanoi

issues, to confirm areas where we had further questions or doubts, and in someinstances to interview other members of migrant families Finally, we also undertooktwo excursions to the countryside, to Thanh Hoa and Nam Dinh, to visit the areas,settlements and natal households from which selected migrants originated (seeFigure 1).

Becoming urban

We now turn to applying the conceptual framework outlined above through theexperiences of our interviewees We are interested not only in understanding howmigrants may progressively become urban, but also those forces, barriers andpredilections that might prevent them from doing so

Applying a legalistic/bureaucratic approach to becoming urban

Among our interviewees, the balance of registrations showed a small majority ofmigrants falling into the KT3 and KT4 categories (Table 4) There were also twomigrants with no registration whatsoever What is striking is that these migrants,with temporary residency registration status in Hanoi, had on average been livingand working in the city for over 13 years.16Based on our interviews, residency statusprovides little explanatory traction when it comes to delineating migrants’integration into urban space

While registration does not have the legal and material gravitas that it once did, itnonetheless bestows certain benefits and, as we will see, also has certain problematicelements The main benefit for our interviewees, at least among those who hadbrought families with them or were intending to do so, was that it provided greater

Figure 3 Viet Nam poverty rates, 1993–2006

Source: JDR (2007, 4)

16

There are some quite specific categories of migrant who fall by the wayside: universitystudents, for example, whose university registration expires, who stay in town but can’ttransfer this to another city-based unit and, at the same time, are no longer registered in theirhome village Marriage migration is another instance where migrants may become de factounregistered (Personal communication: Andrew Hardy.)

security in terms of access to education and health While it was possible formigrants with KT3 and KT4 registration to have their children educated within thestate system in Hanoi, a number of migrants remarked that they were prioritisedlast with the risk that their children would be denied access to the school of theirchoice Mrs Hong (interview #022, 30.9.2010), who arrived in Hanoi from NamDinh around 100 km south of Hanoi in 1988 and was running a tea stall in HaDong district at the time of the interview while her husband was a xe om(motorcycle taxi) driver, told us that she was willing to relinquish her rights to land

in her home village in order to buy land in Hanoi and obtain KT1 residency in thecity Mrs Hong and her husband traded security in terms of land in their natalvillage for the future of their children, gaining for them a superior education inHanoi and, they hoped, better employment prospects and long-term prospects.17Inthis regard they would seem to have been successful: their 26 year-old son had justcompleted an IT degree at the National University of Ho Chi Minh City whiletheir daughter, who was a year younger, had obtained a high status job in afashion company Schools in Hanoi are superior to those in the countryside, andeducation in such a school significantly raises the chances of passing the nationaluniversity entrance examination, thereby gaining access to one of the country’smore prestigious universities This, in turn, raises the chances of accessing a goodjob on graduation which, in the context of Viet Nam’s limited social securitysystem, helps to secure parents’ livelihoods in old age

A second negative characteristic of a temporary registration (KT3 or KT4) is thatthe holder could not, until very recently, buy land or a house.18The attractions ofowning land in Hanoi are significant, not least because of its investment value (seeTable 5) and the attractions of having a foothold in the capital This was somethingthat Mrs Hong also emphasised when we re-interviewed her with her daughter,Tham (interview #022b, 10.11.2010) If only she could buy a house in Hanoi, she told

us, ‘everything then will be OK’ because it would secure the futures of her children.Having a house in a rural area, she went on to explain, does not help: it is only of use

Table 4 Residency classification of interviewees

Residency

classification

Number ofinterviewees

% ofsample

Average length oftime in Hanoi (years)