Hanoi’s development has experienced a turbulent history with more than a thousand years of foreign influence from China, French colonization (1873-1954), and socialism following the model of the USSR (1945-1986). Since 1986, Vietnam’s Đổi Mới economic reforms brought rapid urbanization and growth as well as greater connection to the global capitalist market. All these economic and political transitions had a significant impact on the development of housing in the city.
Despite the narrative of historic ruptures in the making of the city, Hanoi maintains continuity between its cultural heritage and today’s built environment through a long-standing practice of people modifying, repurposing, and building their own homes. In the post-reform era, the tradition of informal development occurs outside of conventional urban planning, but flourishes based on customary rules, ambiguous legal status, and negotiations between citizens and the state. This flexibility can be viewed as a vernacular model of spatial intervention through which ordinary people claim their right to the city and actualize their aspirations in the context of changing social conditions, and cultural influences.
Hanoi’s complex urban fabric is characterized by close juxtaposition of different housing types, as well as in the hybridization of different forms and ideologies within the housing types themselves. New housing adapted to the structure of the city and resulted in transformations to its historic housing stock as well as the proliferation of self-built housing between existing ones. For many decades, this enabled a mixture of social classes in Hanoi’s city center and contributed to relative stability in land and housing tenure. However, new trends drive increased spatial polarization as upper classes move to new towns (khu đô thị mới) on the city outskirts. Dismissed as unorganized and unsightly, Hanoi’s local urbanisms are increasingly devalued in the wake of the city’s rapid development to reorganize and “civilize” its urban landscape.
