‘Civilized city’: how embedded civil society networks frame the debate on urban green space in Hanoi, Vietnam

Abstract

This article explores the framing mechanisms used by an embedded civil society network of urban planners, architects, and journalists in the burgeoning city of Hanoi, Vietnam, to structure the terms of debate in a controversy over the use of public space in Reunification Park. The network drew on the values of collectivism, modernization, and nationalism propagated under the socialist government’s ‘civilized city’ campaign in order to pressure the city government to preserve green space in its largest park and cease development plans for a hotel. By analyzing the content of the investigative reporting on the SAS hotel investment controversy in Reunification Park covered by the online journal of the Vietnam Urban Planning and Development Association, this article demonstrates how this embedded civil society network used methods of ‘rightful resistance’ in framing the issue, pressuring the government to be accountable to its own purported values. It shows that there are social movements both associated with, and outside of, the Vietnamese state that are competing in the construction of meaning around the debate of citizen rights to public green space in the city.