Modernist city planning theories, including socialist modernism, assume that planning ideas should correspond with the actualities of built forms. This assumption turns out problematic in Hanoi, where productive development of built forms takes place not because of planning ideas but despite planning ideas. Using two sets of ethnographic materials that relate to the idea of “public” built environment, this paper shows that the looseness of correspondence between planning ideas and built forms is precisely what affords “publicness” of built environment to emerge. Through these empirical discussions, I show that there is room for decolonising the idea of “public” built environment. This is the first of the two contributions that this paper makes to the workshop. The second contribution, then, is a methodological one. Whereas “public” built environment emerges despite planning ideas, local city planners deploy the idea of “public” in ways that align with mainstream social science discourses. This is a complex situation where local theories are themselves modernist and yet they conduce to unexpected practices of making and living built forms. Key is to distinguish between the amorphous local practices of urban inhabiting and the modernist local practices of planning intellectuals, while also acknowledging that both are “local”, and that either of these two does not operate in the absence of the other. By positing these local practices as theory in action, I show that local practices cease to be a unique figure that should be interrogated against the ground of modernist, mainstream social science categories. Instead, I use local practices as themselves a ground, against which to interrogate mainstream theories. This is an anthropological method of figure-ground reversal, useful for shifting blind spots. The paper presents this method as itself an effective path for decolonial theorisation from Hanoi. This method calls for materialist perspectives, and it also enriches the theoretical question of universality and specificity. The paper also amounts to one unique take on the idea of creolisation.
Takanari Fujita is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Takanari’s current research asks how the city of Hanoi is made and lived in processes that involve both human worlds and physical worlds, and he pursues it through ethnography of socialist collective housing. He aims to scale this research as an intervention in social science categories of thought about the relationships between humans and physical materialities. Other aspects of his interest include: co-constitution between socialism and urban materialities; built and population density as method; and scale and affordance in theorisation. He has keen interest in some strands of so-called “ontological anthropology”. Takanari studied at the University of Tokyo and SOAS before, and he also has some professional background in the fields of international aid and disability.
Day 3 – (May 29, Sat HK/SG time)
Panel 7: Developmental Urbanisms
9:30-11am HK/SG time / 2:30-4am British Summer Time (BST) / 3:30-5am Central European Summer Time (CEST) / 9:30-11pm US Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) / 6:30-8pm US Pacific Daylight Time (PDT)