Between conceived and lived spaces: negotiating urban informality in Hanoi’s post-socialist housing

While Hanoi’s Collective Living Quarters (KTTs) are often analyzed architecturally, the social dynamics and grassroots strategies of their residents remain under-explored. As artifacts of socialist urbanism, KTTs serve as critical sites for observing the friction between rigid state planning (conceived space) and fluid daily practices (lived space). Utilizing ethnographic fieldwork, this article investigates how residents exercise “spatial agency” to navigate and reshape their environments within urban informality. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s production of space theory and Global South perspectives, the study identifies three mechanisms of spatial negotiation. First, residents appropriate thresholds, enclosing semi-public corridors through micro-community consensus to manage high-density living. Second, they produce “gray spaces” via vertical expansion (“tiger cages”), a practice governed by a informal ‘vertical social contract’ between neighbors rather than formal legal codes. Third, the management of contested commons (shared yards) relies on “temporal zoning”, balancing economic livelihoods with communal order. The article argues that the perceived “disorder” of KTTs is actually a sophisticated form of informal governance and resilient adaptation to post-socialist urban transitions. By dismantling the public-private dichotomy, this research reveals how communities reclaim the right to produce lived space by rewriting the architectural scripts of aging socialist infrastructures.