Who Will Build the Vietnamese City in the 21st Century? Globalization and Tradition in Land and Housing in Hanoi

Vietnam is in transition from a command economy to a market economy. Changes in investment patterns, different systems of urban management and images and fashions by the media, rapidly replace the former socialist cities' aesthetics and structures. This paper presents an analysis of processes and patterns of change in Hanoi, capital of Vietnam. The case of Hanoi is chosen to highlight how these new conditions are affected by a mixture of local and global processes, largely outside control of conventional urban planning disciplines. This research attempts to search the theoretical basis to form new ways of dynamic strategic planning in which the urban planning practise is not a producer of static plans but is used as a strategic tool able to recognize the many mixed global & local processes active in a specific environment, the ones shaping the actual physical city. The research is searching for tools that respond to the dynamic processes of rapid urbanization due to globalization and industrialization in a specific environment with Hanoi as a test case. Hanoi is chosen because the city can provide us with distinct insights into the implications of globalization into a specific urban milieu, since in Vietnam the rapid emergence of urban spatial economies where previously it was non-existent. The city's emergence has been a rather sudden one which is shaped largely outside the control of conventional urban planning. Most of the analysis presented in this paper is based upon extensive field research through observations, interviews, data and materials gathering and discussions during eight months of research in 2000–2002.