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

该奖项资助的研究考察了城郊土地和社会变革。其目标是解决更广泛的问题，目前和未来的轨迹农业社会在世界上越来越多的特点是农业土地剥夺，农村土地转为城市用途，农村向城市迁移。这些进程的一个结果是，在过去长期从事农业经济的地方出现了越来越多的人口超过1 000万的特大城市。随着城市的发展，农民失去了土地和生计，城市周边的郊区成为集中贫困和不发达的非正式住区。 该研究将解决以下首要问题：失去农业土地的农业家庭如何应对其生活的巨大物质和社会变化？他们对土地剥夺和土地使用变化的反应，从地方一级的应对到公众抗议和政治参与，如何融入城市发展的进程和战略？对那些生活在城市边缘的人来说，城市扩张的微观和宏观层面的影响进行全面调查是很重要的，因为它将阐明当代全球城市化，土地掠夺和农村政治运动的发展。这项研究将在越南河内的城市周边地区进行，由耶鲁大学人类学博士生艾米丽·阮在埃里克·哈姆斯博士的指导下进行。河内是一个合适的研究地点，因为越南最近的经济改革政策和城市总体规划战略推动了农业用地大规模转化为工业和高端住宅区。这些事态发展的新近程度和强度将突出需要审查的关系，从而使这些关系更易于研究。研究结果可以扩展到世界各地的其他地点，包括美国。研究人员将通过混合方法收集经验数据，其中包括：按性别和世代分层的半结构化访谈，口述历史的启发，参与者观察，档案文件分析和土地利用绘图。从研究结果将产生一个理论和方法的平台，了解如何正式的规划，非正式的使用空间的做法，以及人口反应的多样性走到一起，改变农业景观。 研究结果也将是有益的政策制定者进行资本驱动的城市规划的背景下，社会主义农业历史。

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.