By Van Hoang, University of Amsterdam
Architecting the socio-spatial conditions for belonging in rapidly changing urban districts is as vital as roads, schools, and water lines. Hanoi’s West Lake – simultaneously a refuge for youth culture and a cosmopolitan “expat enclave” – concentrates these pressures. For local youth of Hanoi, the lake’s perimeter paths, informal hangouts and unpoliced niches have long anchored social life and identity. Yet the same area now hosts internationally oriented cafes, bars, and high-end rentals underpinned by foreign spending power. This post explores how Hanoi’s local youth negotiate belonging in West Lake amid increasing expatriate presence, and how colonial legacies and global mobility patterns shape their everyday experiences.
Narratives by the local youth reveal that belonging is neither simply lost nor fully uninterrupted. Instead, it is heterogeneously negotiated across micro-spaces and social encounters, shaped by each individual’s exposure to international contexts, economic means and personal preferences.
The Fragility of Belonging in an Expat Enclave
When formal urban governance does not proactively steward inclusion, belonging can hinge on contingent practices: who a venue caters to, where investment flows, which streets remain walkable, who is interacted with or ignored. Interviews with a group of Hanoi local youth surface routine exclusions – servers who engage foreign customers but overlook Vietnamese tables, price points that displace locals from central blocks, and uneven attention to basic infrastructure despite high rents. The result is a brittle social contract: a vibrant international offer coexists with local alienation and infrastructural neglect, while encounters between expats and locals – occurring only spontaneously within expat-oriented spaces – stay commercial and rarely deepen into social ties. The conditions for belonging are fragile because they depend on discretionary conduct by venue owners, landlords, and transient populations rather than structured and deliberate efforts for inclusion and shared stewardship.
Global Mobility and Everyday Othering
Two mobility channels – lifestyle migration and employment-driven expatriation – recur across the literature on North-South flows. Both forms of mobility concentrate purchasing power in host cities, often outpacing local incomes and reshaping land use, price levels and cultural offers (Emard & Nelson, 2021; Wortman et al., 2016). Across settings, expatriates tend to cluster in socially and spatially insulated circuits (gated homes, international venues), keeping interactions with locals largely commercial and instrumental (Banks, 2004; Therrien & Pellegrini, 2015). Dual salary practices in many sectors further amplify gaps (ECA International, 2022; Hammer, 2021; Zhou et al., 2010; HSBC, 2016; Hoàng, 2024).
These structural asymmetries expose Othering practices: the subtle centering of a Western “Self” and positioning of locals as peripheral “Others.” In everyday terms, that can mean feeling unseen in a shared space, internalising pressure to be a “model” Vietnamese around foreign strangers, or reading internationalisation as erasure rather than exchange (Bhabha, 1984; Fanon, 2008; Mohrem, 2020). Such moments – mundane yet cumulative – undercut place attachment unless counterbalanced by inclusive practices.
A fusion taco restaurant in West Lake.
The InterContinental Hotel in West Lake.
Beyond Binaries: Local Agency and Instrumental Hybridity
An anticolonial lens is essential in Vietnam’s postcolonial context, but it should not trap analysis in rigid oppositions of coloniser versus colonised, or Western versus local. As Dube and James argue, urban spaces are made in the present through layered social relations. Communities are heterogenous, and alliances do not map neatly onto identity lines (Dube, 2016; James, 2012). In West Lake, local youth routinely instrumentalise hybridity – adopting international elements that fit their preferences while retaining distinctly local practices (Raffin, 2008). The lake’s biophysical presence, open edges, and informal sociality provide durable anchors that many youth continue to enjoy, irrespective of new restaurant line-ups or foreign investments (Erfani, 2022).
Sunset in West Lake.
Locals taking photos of the sunset.
Locals by the lotus fields of West Lake.
Narrating West Lake by its Local Youth
Participants recount selective services and social exclusion in venues coded for foreigners, rising costs that push locals to under-invested alleys, and a perceived absence of collective stewardship. For some, expatriate presence also revives memories of colonial harm – linking today’s lived experience to history. Belonging falters when locals feel peripheral in their own city and when urban change does not include them, leading to disrupted belonging with critical views of expat spaces.
Other local youth read expat spaces as calm, bookish and Western-coded – appealing to Vietnamese with “a more Western mindset”, but not to them. They avoid these venues without animus with their sense of belonging not lost so much as protected through self-sorting away from spaces perceived as culturally mismatched.
In yet other cases, belonging appeared entirely unaffected, with expatriates simply being adjacent for some respondents. One of many quintessential rituals among local youth – twenty-minute motorbike loops around the lake, deep talks by the water – feels incommunicable and thus unthreatened. International venues are tolerated or enjoyed insofar as they serve local youth; otherwise, they merely form part of the local urban canvas, and expats as outsiders to the local script.
For some, an amicable co-presence and friendship with expatriates was described. However, these relationships did not translate into overall attachment to West Lake. Respondents were found to form friendships with expats, but their interactions take place almost entirely inside expats’ apartments – ordinary social visits such as dinners or small gatherings – rather than in shared public venues. This means their connection is to the people, not to West Lake itself, leaving their sense of belonging to the district largely unaffected.
Some local youth thrive in threshold zones where local and international dynamics and practices blend without catering exclusively to foreigners. Here, belonging is located in the “in-betweens.” These hybrid micro-ecologies – Vietnamese-run businesses with international concepts, mixed audiences, porous norms – are where many articulate the strongest fit. Young people who feel at home in these spaces are often those with international exposure or greater economic capital, enabling them to participate in venues with higher prices and global orientations.
Together, these narratives show that belonging is not uniformly eroded or preserved. It is negotiated across micro-spaces and social relations, varying with exposure to international contexts, economic means, and personal preferences.
Uneven Social Geographies of Belonging
Erfani’s three-part schema – place identity (meanings), place attachment (emotions), and place satisfaction (functional fit) – helps explain why responses diverge (Erfani, 2022). Where internationalisation disrupts any one dimension – identity through cultural erasure, attachment through othering, satisfaction through affordability or walkability – belonging weakens. Where hybridity enhances choice without exclusion—and where physical commons such as the lake, green edges, open sightlines remain accessible – belonging endures or even expands. Crucially, process matters: when changes are done with locals – involving them in shaping how spaces are constructed and used – trust and attachment can form; when done to locals, alienation is likely to emerge.
West Lake illustrates a wider urban pattern: global mobility and capital intensify choice and vibrancy while risking exclusion for those who call the place home. Hanoi’s youth narrate five distinct ways of handling this tension – from avoidance to indifference to hybrid embrace – reminding us that belonging is assembled daily in micro-spaces. These narratives also show there is no homogenous experience. Paying attention to both the common threads that bind Hanoi’s youth together and the differences that set them apart is essential for informing structured, deliberate efforts to architect belonging – so that the district’s international transformation deepens, rather than dilutes, local attachment.
References
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