Believing the Future: Credulity, Rhetoric, and the Fetish of Success in Vietnamese Urban Planning

Abstract

This essay explores how belief in modernization continues to animate the making of cities in contemporary Vietnam. It argues that post-reform urbanization has not abandoned developmental conviction but has re-animated it through the rhetoric of planning. Drawing on the example of Hanoi’s New Urban Areas—planned satellite districts designed to embody modernization and prosperity—the essay traces how planning language, policy discourse, and popular imagination converge to sustain a shared credulity toward futurity. Terms such as order, modernity, and civility do not merely describe development goals; they enact success ahead of time, translating ideological visions into administrative, spatial, and emotional realities. Yet, this credulity is also strained by the contradictions between rhetoric and materiality: the promise of coherence in planning often yields fragmented or suspended urban landscapes. The essay aims to reframe this tension not as irrationality or failure, but as an essential part of Vietnam’s planning modernity, where “believing the future” becomes both the engine and the symptom of its rapid urban transformations.

Received: 2^th July 2025; Revised: 10^th September 2025; Accepted: 20^th October 2025