2025/09/05 by Michelle Kee, Sarah Victoria Turner · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Water Governance and Infrastructure #Vietnamese History and Culture Studies #Urban Planning and Governance
paper · doi:10.1080/1523908x.2025.2551567
openalex publication_date 2025/09/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
Low-carbon, urban mobility transitions are being fanfared across the Global South to promote environmental sustainability, while also improving mobility justice. In Vietnam’s capital city Hanoi, an ambitious campaign for such a mobility transition is underway, focusing on creating a ‘green, civilised, and modern’ future. A core feature of this campaign is a new urban railway system. The railway’s first segment, Line 2A, or the Cát Linh – Hà Đông Line, began operations in late 2021 after years of delays and numerous controversies. In this paper we examine how Line 2A has impacted a range of local residents and especially their everyday lived experiences, mobilities, and livelihoods. We draw on conceptual debates regarding infrastructural politics and mobility (in)justices, and ethnographic fieldwork before, during, and six months after Line 2A’s construction. We analyse how local residents have navigated Line 2A’s implementation and early operations, focusing on encounters, entwinements, and tensions that have emerged along the line. We demonstrate how residents’ everyday acts of living with the Line offer insights into how top-down transportation plans and policies are experienced and contested on-the-ground, often deviating from state visions of a ‘civilised and modern’ Hanoi.