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

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 and re-engage with farming and village living. In this paper we ask whether rural-urban migrants can 'become' urban and shed their identification as temporary denizens of the city. We develop a conceptual framework that provides five entry points to explore this process of becoming urban, and then apply the framework drawing on the experiences of migrants to Viet Nam's capital, Hanoi. We argue that even when migrants do return to their homelands they do so with altered priorities and on different terms. The experience of migration was not infrequently transformative and life-changing. While migrants may not 'become' urban in the fullest sense, their homeland had become a space of familial origin and emotional identification, not a place where people necessarily sought to reside, work, raise their children and build their lives.