As the flycam rises, Hanoi becomes much easier to misunderstand.
From the three-way junction, the city never gives you enough distance. You are pressed behind your parent on a motorbike, watching the road appear in fragments: the back of a bus as a kid, roughly your age, stares at you, a shoulder or two, your dad’s two mirrors reflecting the gray cars behind you. You see it as a sequence of small survivals. Piece by piece, it becomes a microcosm of the city’s strange, self-contradicting logic.
From above, everything improves too quickly.
Tran Duy Hung Street: the place where a retail store once stood, now lies in ruins, within the awkward afterlife of a project. A structure loses dignity very quickly once nobody needs it to sell anything anymore. One day, it belongs to dazzling lights and customers going to and fro. The next day, it belongs to the machinery.
From above, the plot looked almost reasonable. That frightened me a little. The drone made the absence clean. It placed the broken land inside the wider curve of Ring Road 2.5, where Vu Pham Ham St. is meant to meet Tran Duy Hung St. and complete a stubborn missing link in western Hanoi. In planning language, this incomplete patch has a designated purpose. In a printing facility somewhere, that patch would become a line that made a map or an atlas less embarrassed by itself. The explanation is reasonable. That is exactly what makes it unsettling.
I kept the flycam steady over the cleared ground longer than I meant to. The road surface had turned pale with sand, and passing vehicles dragged the dust outward as if the construction site were slowly leaking itself into the rest of the city. Nothing in the footage looked dramatic enough to deserve grief.
That bothered me. The land felt stripped of tragedy, reduced instead to something administrative. I close my eyes and imagine the process: a Word document, printed, passed from one authority to another, stamped in red, official. Alas, all that for some earth left alone, which, from above, looks incapable of defending itself.
That may be the cruelest thing about land once the buildings are gone: silence. A standing shop can still argue by existing. It can insist on its own inconvenience, glow at night, collect customers, send someone out to sweep the entrance in the morning, and pretend, with admirable stubbornness, that the city has no right to move on without it. But once the walls fall, the site becomes strangely obedient. To be obedient is to treat authority with the courtesy of surrender. The cleared ground does not protest the line drawn through it. It simply waits to be renamed. And blankness has always been useful to power.
Yet, the strange thing about emptiness is that it is rarely empty to those who remember it. I remember what stood there, not perfectly, but enough to feel the road had lost its face. So what makes land truly empty: the absence of walls, or the absence of anyone left who can say what stood there?
The house before it becomes land
I noticed this only recently, during the latest summer holiday, and went almost instinctively to Google Earth, as if the satellite might remember what the street had forgotten. It did, in vivid detail. Looking at the three satellite images, I feel a strange temptation to read them from backwards, from right to left.
This is the house before it becomes land. The houses are packed together like atoms in a lattice, each one held in place by the pressure of the others. From above, they look disordered, but perhaps disorder is only what intimacy looks like when seen from the wrong height. Roof presses near roof. Walls lean close enough to suggest argument. The road, still unsure of its own authority, has to negotiate with what’s already in place: fixed.
Then the negotiation weakens. The road begins to speak with a straighter voice. Space opens where closeness used to be. The rounded median appears, calm and faintly smug, as if it has solved a problem no one else could articulate. Around it, the old density starts to loosen. The city becomes easier to draw. That is the suspicious part. A place becomes easiest to plan at the exact moment it becomes hardest to remember.
By the time the junction looks complete, the earlier crowding has almost vanished from the image. The houses leave no dramatic scar. No outline remains to say: rooms were here. The road simply absorbs them into its own confidence. It continues, smooth and practical, as though the land had always been waiting to become useful.
Yet after looking at these satellite images, I cannot stop thinking about the scale at which it stops looking solved. From the eyes of an urban planner, things come and go: structures age, parcels change function, land is recovered, roads are widened, the map updates itself, and, eventually, everyone learns the new route. For a bystander (oftentimes, a jaywalker), a mother, a grandfather, or the security guard who once worked inside the retail shop, the question is less elegant. It is not what the land will become on the plan, but what it will become inside them. A shortcut? A blank canvas? A place they avoid looking at? Regardless of what it is, I imagine myself telling a story.
A story that begins, for years after, with: this used to be…
A room is not a rectangle
A room is not a rectangle. That is only what it becomes after it has been measured, drawn, priced, and handed over to a plan. Looking at the exposed house, I can still sense the family inside it, though the family itself has vanished from the frame. The wall has been cut open, and suddenly the private interiors of the home are visible: a couple of bathroom tiles, a wooden drawer, the outline of a wardrobe, perhaps a bedroom in the corner where the light no longer knows whether it is entering or trespassing. The house has become a palimpsest.
What strikes me the most, however, is the accidental intimacy of vulnerability. A floor plan—heck, even a visual illustration of some sort—would have made the house neat. This does the opposite. It reveals how badly life refuses neat, clean planning. The spaces here resist being reduced to their functions; they carry traces of authority, hunger, irritation, care, and all the quiet moments of conflict that shape a household. These things sound ordinary because they are ordinary, but ordinary spaces are exactly where a family spends most of its life becoming itself. Once the wall is gone, the rooms look smaller than memory would have made them, and somehow more painful.
Compensation: when memory receives a consolation prize
Compensation is the moment memory is asked to behave like land.
Residents raise concerns over nearly VND190 million per square meter for prime land in Thuy Khue, another region affected by construction works, this time, for an underground metro project. The number looks large at first. That is part of its cruelty. Written out in millions, it has the shape of generosity. But in an area where market prices for ownership can run far higher, the figure begins to shrink. It no longer sounds like payment. It sounds like an official version of value, one that can stand beside the market and still avoid meeting its eyes.
Then comes the other word: resettlement.
To resettle. I hate how gentle it tries to sound. It carries the illusion of order, as if displacement were a chair pulled out and pushed back under the same table. But the word hides the wound inside the prefix. To be resettled, you must first be unsettled. You must first have your house, the place you’ve attached yourself to for months or years, separated from your life. The official documentation says there will be housing, perhaps social housing, perhaps an apartment elsewhere, perhaps a new arrangement that satisfies the requirements of policy. It does not say whether the new place will welcome you in with open arms.
That is the translation problem compensation creates. A square meter is easy to price because it has learned obedience. It can be defended in a meeting between the people and the officials. Memory behaves badly. It spreads beyond the property boundary, into the neighbour’s doorway, the all-you-can-buy shop downstairs, the road someone took to school, or the small confidence of knowing exactly where to turn without thinking when you enter a particular alleyway. None of this can be reimbursed without sounding ridiculous.
Maybe compensation is necessary. Of course it is. A city cannot build a metro station or widen a road by paying people in sympathy. Money matters because people need somewhere to go after the wall is violently demolished. But payment performs a quiet trick: it makes loss appear settled because a number has been assigned to it. The grief has no paperwork, so the paperwork moves on.
Singapore: Memory built upward
(Darren Soh, 19 Jalan Sultan)
Singapore complicates the accusation I want to make against Hanoi.
It would be easy, perhaps too satisfying, to say that Hanoi is too careless with memory. But then I look at Darren Soh’s photographs of Singapore, and the argument becomes less comfortable. The Jalan Sultan HDB corridor, seen from above, is almost beautiful in its repetition. One can see various small household objects lined up neatly outside the corridors, a testament to the fact that private life has quietly stepped into public space and made itself at home. Memory, now, is a rather malleable object, getting shaped by whatever architecture is willing to hold it.
As is typical in Singapore architecture, engineers love to stack floors, one by one, along corridors that behave like horizontal streets suspended in the air. Singapore’s public housing story is often told through cleanliness and order, but those words smooth over what happened before. Kampongs were replaced by planned estates, and older flats were later taken back by the state, forcing residents to move again into newly built units with fresh leases. The Selective En bloc Redevelopment Scheme sounds almost gentle in full, as if redevelopment had been creased and later smoothened by bureaucracy. Yet the structure of the process is familiar across all cultures. An old estate is identified. Its land is judged to have higher potential. Residents are compensated and offered replacement flats nearby—the block empties. The building comes down.
The key difference lies majorly in how each government choreographs the process of change. On one hand, we see the house haphazardly being knocked down, leaving traces behind of what used to be, in a continuous period of time. On the other hand, the process may arrive with a more careful language with transition and procedures. The violence is quieter because the state has learned how to make transition look orderly. However, order should not be mistaken for absence of grief. A demolished HDB block is still a demolished home, mind you. So the demolishment of JTC-built flats in 2018, again captured beautifully by Darren, evokes a certain feeling of discomfort. The building is opened up before us, room by room, like a body made suddenly anatomical—a cadaver for doctors, whomever they may be, to examine its cross-section.
Perhaps this is the real similarity between Hanoi and Singapore: both cities ask people to trust that loss will become a public benefit. A certain trade-off is always necessary in the life of a city, though the phrase feels too clean for what it describes. Trade-off sounds like something agreed upon at a table. In reality, the exchange is often uneven. To quote Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: “Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.”