Hanoi's Ghost Urban Areas. Shedding Light on an Emerging but (Dys)Functioning Real Estate Market

In the early 1990s, following the reforms that reoriented Vietnam's economic system towards a "socialist-oriented market economy," an urban real estate market reappeared in the country's major cities. This paper focuses on Hanoi where this market has been particularly volatile since its re-emergence, marked by successive boom-bust cycles. This is the context in which "ghost" urban areas took form in the late 2000s. Using a political economic approach, the analysis of the emergence of "ghost" urban areas reveals the "real estate turn" taken by the Vietnamese Party State. This turn has notably involved the adoption and promotion by state authorities of a new urban space production model called "New Urban Areas," the commodification of the land resource and its appropriation by many economic actors (public and private) closely connected to politico-administrative spheres. This study sheds light on how these specificities of Vietnam's political-economic environment shaped urban development practices during the 2000s.