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Despite a centralized political system, nation-wide legal reforms, and similar high housing demand pressures, property rights have evolved differently in Vietnam’s two leading cities Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City during the transition period.  Using ethnographic fieldwork and a hedonic price model, the study shows that the two land and housing markets price tenure ambiguity differently.  The different price structures indicate the importance of norms, as socially constructed by local political interests and culture, in the efficacy of land title regularization programs.

Land takings controversies around the globe have been making headline news recently.  This article examines the similarities, differences, and ironies between what has been happening in China, Vietnam, and the U.S.  Even though these places are different on many levels, their fiscal constraints and land management responses have led to strikingly similar public debates about the very nature of property rights and the legitimacy of local government.

Introduces the collective purpose and significance of the articles in the special issue: to present grounded case studies of relatively equitable outcomes under Asian, authoritarian regimes. Comparative analysis indicates the inter-governmental dynamics and social narratives deserve further study.

Explains the collective purpose of this special issue: to provide empirical case studies of when there have been relatively equitable outcomes in land disputes under Asian authoritarian regimes. Comparative analysis indicates that inter-governmental politics and social narrative processes deserve further study.

Planning aspires to intervene and make positive change. However, our ideas about how to create institutional reform need to be revisited because they do not fully account for the changes we have witnessed. This article assesses the state of our knowledge about institutions, and of how we construct and change them. It identifies the major deficiencies in new institutionalism in planning theory and searches for how to influence positive institutional change.

Ordinary North Korean citizens have been coping with economic hardship by eking out livelihoods for themselves. Grassroots markets and local petty economies have become commonplace.

Around the globe, streets and sidewalks in cities are being contested as spaces that should be used for more than transportation. This article challenges our understanding of both property rights and public space by applying a property rights framework to situate sidewalk use debates. It analyzes and maps the sidewalk property regimes of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam through a novel integration of surveying and ethnography. The case illuminates the feasibility of a mixed-use sidewalk that can be shared between various kinds of uses and users.

Why have some countries been able to escape the usual dead end of international development efforts and build explosively growing capitalist economies? Based on years of fieldwork, this book provides a detailed account of the first generation of entrepreneurs in Vietnam in comparison to those in other transition countries. Focusing on the emergence of private land development firms in Ho Chi Minh City, the author shows how within seven years the private sector produced the majority of all new houses in the real estate market.

Sidewalks are potentially the most important and most overlooked public spaces in the city. This vast network of narrow, open spaces can be places where classes mix, economies flourish, and a vital urban life is lived. Now, more than ever, people around the globe are trying to unlock their potential by contesting the purpose of and rights to the sidewalk. Street vendors, property owners, local government, and the general public are engaging in innovative experiments in some places and bloody conflicts in others.