Informal housing upgrades in peri-urban Hanoi: household-led transformations in Kim Chung and Tay Mo

Abstract

Incremental housing upgrading is a defining feature of peri-urban urbanization across the Global South, yet its role in reshaping urban space under conditions of governance uncertainty remains insufficiently understood. This paper examines how household-led upgrading practices reshape peri-urban space through negotiated legality, aspirations, and cumulative morphogenesis. Drawing on a mixed-methods qualitative case study of two rapidly urbanizing wards in Hanoi, Vietnam, the study combines household surveys (n = 60), semi-structured interviews, and field observations to examine upgrading typologies, household motivations, governance interactions, and neighborhood-level transformations. The findings show that upgrading is driven by multiple and overlapping motivations, including improving living conditions, generating rental income, supporting intergenerational living, and enhancing social status. Beyond these commonly reported motivations, the study identifies anticipatory upgrading—most evident in the redevelopment-intensive context of Tay Mo—as an analytically distinctive mechanism through which households invest in housing in response to redevelopment uncertainty, negotiated legality, and expectations of future urban incorporation. Incremental upgrading is therefore conceptualized not merely as adaptive housing improvement but as a future-oriented process that cumulatively reshapes peri-urban morphology and governance relations. By linking household agency with speculative urban transformation and hybrid governance, the paper contributes to debates on informal urbanism, incremental urbanization, and peri-urban change in the Global South.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Geoforum, 2026 · DOI ↗