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In the northern Vietnam uplands, the socialist state’s urbanization plans are rapidly expanding the region’s small cities and re-configuring their built form. Drawing on conceptual debates concerning small cities, urban space production, and everyday politics, we investigate dynamics of urbanization in one such small upland city, Cao Bằng. While legislative planning documents and official ideologies prioritize Cao Bằng’s regional economic expansion, we find the resulting transformations in the city’s built form engender  sprawl and fragmentation. In reaction to both these physical changes and retributions for “disorderly” space use, the city’s most marginalized residents adapt their everyday spatial approriation tactics, while implementing a range of covert resistance approaches to protect their livelihoods. We suggest that such contentions between residents, state officials, and the plans they implement, reflect broader struggles regarding the state’s “territorialization” project for these remote uplands, with the region’s small cities being adopted as useful entry points.

Small city politics in the Global South: state imaginaries and everyday realities of a frontier city in northern Vietnam