Hanoi’s street vendors on the move: Itinerant vending tactics and mobile methods in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

In this chapter, we aim to analyze the mobility tactics that itinerant street vendors in Hanoi draw upon to access potential customers and evade prosecution by authorities. While doing so, we highlight how vendors’ knowledge of the city and access to customers is “constructed in and through mobile interactivity” (Brown and Durrheim, 2009: 916). We draw on mobility debates that are centrally concerned with how place shapes experiences of movement, emphasizing how mobile methods can uncover intricates relationships among people, perceptions, experiences and specific places. We adopted a ‘go-along” method to complement our stationary conversational interviews and participant observation. This provided us with nuanced understandings of vendor tactics and everyday decision-making and allowed us to analyse the spatiality, temporality and significance of their routines.