Navigating the state-market nexus: Private planning practices in Vietnam

Across Asia, large-scale land redevelopments have become a defining feature of market-driven urbanization. In Vietnam, as in other rapidly urbanizing contexts, these projects are not only privately financed and developed but also planned by private consultants. While such private-sector practices are increasingly widespread in Asia, they have received limited scholarly attention, particularly regarding how they shape planning processes and professional agency. This paper advances urban scholarship by examining the role of private planners as key intermediaries in state–market urbanization regimes. Our analysis focuses on Vietnam’s “new urban areas,” large-scale master planned residential and mixed-use developments typically built on converted peri urban land. We situate planning practices for these developments within a hybrid governance regime that layers market-oriented reforms onto a persistent state-directed planning system. Drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews with local professionals and an analysis of institutional and economic conditions, we analyze how these actors navigate the competing demands of regulatory constraints, profitability imperatives, and their own professional aspirations. Findings show that planners deploy adaptive strategies by aligning goals to produce functionally complete environments with market logics and leveraging regulatory frameworks to temper development pressures. Yet these strategies are bounded by the same structures they mobilize, limiting their capacity to address broader equity concerns or challenge a profit-oriented urban model. By interrogating how professional agency is constituted in such hybrid governance settings, this study contributes to scholarship on planning privatization and urban neoliberalization beyond the Global North, offering new insights into how planners mediate, sustain, and subtly reshape market-driven urbanization.