ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses fieldwork through the development of interpretative mapping and
projective cartographies in order to (re)read and (re)write potentials in the existing water
and urbanization logics of the millennium-old capital city of Hanoi, Vietnam. Fieldwork is
understood as a sort of critical realism (critical in the process of selection of what to
map), as well as the initiation of ‘design research’. A diachronic perspective frames
Hanoi’s urbanization from the feudal, through to its colonial, Soviet and present-day doi
moi development impositions and tendencies. Although Vietnam’s doi moi is popularly
likened to the Soviet Union’s Perestroika (meaning ‘restructuring’), it is actually a reform
programme of renovation. According to William Duiker, in the years following the end of
the Second Indochina War, Hanoi became one of the most orthodox practitioners of the
Stalinist approach to nation-building, with its emphasis on socialist industrialization. Even
after the Party leaders decided to embark on the road to reform at the Sixth National
Congress in December 1986, the new programme was not nearly as much a departure
from past practice as was the case in China or even in the Soviet Union. It is equally clear
that, for some members of the senior leadership, the ultimate goal of building a fully
socialist society has by no means been abandoned (Duiker 1995: 159).
