Uneven state formalization and periurban housing production in Hanoi and Mexico City: Comparative reflections from the global South
比较越南河内和墨西哥城在2000年代初私营部门参与城郊住房生产的情况，发现尽管制度不同，两国均存在国家、市场与市民社会的持续关系，即“不均衡国家形式化”，这比强调新自由主义改革更能解释近期变化。
In the early 2000s, Vietnam and Mexico turned to the private sector to respond to increasing housing demand and tame the growth of uncontrolled periurban settlements. Around Hanoi, such arrangements fostered the construction of vertical developments while large subdivisions of single-family houses spread over former lakebeds in the peripheries of Mexico City. A stronger role of the private sector in the planning and provision of housing is often seen as an outcome of crisis-driven and crisis-inducing neoliberal reforms. However, the cases of Vietnam and Mexico suggest that a fuller understanding of housing production strategies currently favoured by each state needs to account for important elements of continuity in social, political, and economic practices. This continuity is demonstrated through the comparative analysis of three aspects of the restructuring of housing production in Mexico City’s and Hanoi’s periurban areas: (i) the discourses of ‘order’ used to legitimate heightened private sector involvement, (ii) legislative reforms facilitating periurban land appropriation for redevelopment, and (iii) the socio-spatial outcomes of these recent changes in terms of housing affordability, liveability, and quality. We conclude that both city-regions, despite important differences in their institutional and economic systems display enduring state/market/civil society relations associated with processes of ‘uneven state formalization’. This continuity and unevenness, we argue, better explains recent transformations of periurban housing production than an emphasis on the ruptures resulting from neoliberal reforms.