Modernizing Public Life: The Governing of Informal Labor in Urbanizing Da Nang, City, Viet Nam

• In Event: Urban Exclusion in Southeast Asia - Sponsored by the Southeast Asia Council (SEAC)

Abstract

This paper examines the way modernization and labor formalization can produce modes of exclusion. I focus on the lives of street laborers in Da Nang, Vietnam, who are often depicted as an obstacle blocking the development trajectory of the city, which strives to become the economic center of central Vietnam. In the past decade, economic development has paved the way for infrastructural reorganization of Da Nang, and the city has been transformed by tourism, global commerce, and rapid urbanization. In July, 2005, Da Nang became the first city to officially prohibit the operations of informal labor on commercial streets. The city has steadily implemented policies to bring order to public life by demarcating proper and improper areas of commerce. Workers who make a living on the public streets are consistently denigrated as "unmodern," and thus seen as hindering the progress of a modernizing city. They are pushed out of central city spaces, and their property is often detained until they pay fines to retrieve their belongings. To show this, I aim to illustrate the life stories of street laborers, explain how they understand official policies of public regulation, and describe their strategies of working with and against those regulations. My study reveals that the workers are predominantly not from Da Nang and have migrated from other areas due to Da Nang’s recent development. I argue that work on the street grants laborers the freedom of time and mobility versus constraints emplaced by official forms of labor.

Author

• Phuoc Duong, University of California, Riverside