Christina Friedrich, Lea Glanzmann

Urbanization along the road-network represents possibly the most generic phenomenon in Vietnam: one layer of housing is built along the roads with road-side commercial activity in the ground floors. The backyard is juxtaposed with a pre-existing, one could say primordial landscape, in an almost surreal relation: the agricultural fields which continue to be worked on, silently, almost unbeknownst to the revving activity on the transit road. This omnipresent phenomenon reshaping the territory of Hanoi's hinterland seems to stem from basic economic urges, but what is it really? How is it absorbed into what is already there, and is it truly the sign of the 'loosening' of a territory allowed by infrastructure and mobility?