Doctoral Dissertation Research: Practices and Policies of Peri-urban Land Conversion

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The research funded by this award examines peri-urban land and social transformations. The goal is to address broader questions about the current and future trajectories of agrarian societies in a world increasingly characterized by agricultural land dispossession, the conversion of rural lands to urban uses, and rural to urban migration. One outcome of these processes has been an increasing number of mega-cities, with populations in excess of 10 million residents, in places that formerly had longstanding agricultural economies. As cities grow, farmers lose land and livelihoods, and peri-urban city outskirts become informal settlements of concentrated poverty and underdevelopment. The research will address the following overarching questions: How do agrarian households that have lost agricultural land engage with the immense material and social changes to their lives? And how do their responses to land dispossession and land-use change, which can range from local-level coping to public protests and political engagement, figure into the process and strategy of urban development? Comprehensive inquiry on the micro- and macro-level implications of city expansion for those living on the urban margins is important because it will elucidate contempoary global developments in urbanization, land grabbing, and rural political movements. This knowledge will aid in future planning for politically, socially, and environmentally sustainable mega-cities.The research will be carried out in peri-urban Hanoi, Vietnam, by Yale University anthropology doctoral student, Emily Nguyen, under the supervision of Dr. Erik Harms. Hanoi is an appropriate research site because recent Vietnamese economic reform policies and urban master plan strategies have driven large-scale conversions of agricultural land into industrial and high-end residential zones. The recentness and intensity of these developments will highlight, and thereby make more amenable to study, the relationships to be examined. Findings can then be extended to other sites around the world, including in the United States. The researcher will collect empirical data through a mixed-methods approach, which will include: semi-structured interviews stratified by gender and generation, the elicitation of oral histories, participant observation, archival document analysis, and land-use mapping. Results from the study will produce a theoretical and methodological platform for understanding how formal planning, informal practices of using space, and diversity in population response come together to transform agrarian landscapes. Findings also will be useful to policy makers undertaking capital-driven urban planning in a context with socialist agrarian histories.