To an outsider, Hanoi can seem like a city trying to consume itself. Jackhammers chatter and circular saws whine like cicadas. Sparks from welding shoot into oncoming traffic and exhaust fumes lace the air with a metallic twinge. Careening through the streets on the city’s estimated 4m motorbikes, people drape mesh netting over their babies’ faces to block dust from construction sites, while women in conical hats dig through the rubble of newly demolished lots for scrap metal. The intense humidity causes mould to sprout, paint to peel, wood to rot.

On a typical Hanoi wall, crisscrossing layers of plaster, paint and mildew, you will see a multitude of stencilled adverts, all with similar fonts and a string of numbers beginning with 09, and all including the letters KCBT. It’s an abbreviation for khoan cắt bê tông – concrete cutting and drilling. These are illegal adverts for demolition services, and they tattoo the walls of the city, as if to say, “See this building? It could be gone tomorrow.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illegal adverts for demolition services on a typical Hanoi wall. Photograph: Lauren Quinn

The stencilled numbers have become ubiquitous. They tell of the illegal construction that has shaped much of Hanoi’s rapid growth. Haphazard it may be, but the city’s expansion has one feature that makes it stand out among peers of its size and level of development – its relative lack of slums.

Unplanned planning

Across the developing world, rural inhabitants are constantly migrating to the big cities and capitals looking for work. They often set up lives on the edge of cities, with homes made from whatever building material is available on whatever land they can find. Their homes are built illegally, so there is no state provision of services – no electricity, running water, waste or sewerage provision. And shack by shack, the slum is born.



Hanoi has faced the same population pressures as other Asian cities. But thanks to vague and informal conventions, the state has been able to avoid extreme levels of disservice, even to the most impoverished new urban areas. And the construction of homes themselves has remained at least loosely connected to the regulations of the more formal suburbs. Together these factors have prevented the formation of slums as they are typically defined. But how has this come about?

By some estimates, 90% of the buildings in Hanoi have been built without official permission – the land untitled and never surveyed – the effects evident from even a cursory view of the city. Skinny buildings abut each other on narrow plots of land, and from the motorbike-choked thoroughfares, narrow alleys splinter off into neighbourhoods. The unplanned developments have been carried out by the quasi-legal construction industry. Reach a working KCBT number, and someone can usually come to survey your property and provide an estimate the same day. A standard one-storey house can be demolished for around 10m Vietnamese đồng (£280), with the work taking about three days. Because securing permits is the responsibility of the property owner, the company will not ask to see paperwork or government-seal red stamps – they’ll just assemble a crew and get to work.

It’s not easy or safe work. On a hot June afternoon this year, a six-man crew in plastic sandals were at work demolishing an extension to the C1 building of the Khu tập thể Bộ Quốc Phòng public housing block, to replace it with a five-storey extension. The men drill into cement, snip wires and drag windows into a wheelbarrow. It’s a typical job, says one of the workers, Nam. He pauses to take a swig from a water bottle. As we talk, residents in the block peer down. They have agreed to the demolition and are willing to endure a month of it, followed by an indeterminate length of time for construction, to increase their living space by about five metres.

Growth brings pressures

Hanoi’s seemingly endless appetite to build itself up and tear itself down is relatively new. For the majority of its 1,000-year history, it was a small city, with never more than 400,000 inhabitants. It endured wars, heavy bombing and agriculture campaigns that kept its population growing modestly. The 1980s however brought dramatic change. Increasing stability and economic reforms led to a massive rural-to-urban migration. Hanoi’s population began to grow by 3% a year, reaching three million by 1990.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hanoi’s seemingly endless appetite to build itself up and tear itself down is relatively new. Photograph: Age Fotostock/Alamy

Under socialist decree, all citizens were entitled to homes. Private property and construction was heavily restricted. Instead, housing was provided in state-run Soviet-style collective flats. But as growth increased, the new government struggled to maintain existing facilities and keep pace with demand. Occupants began building their own additions, often circumventing the arduous permit process. Other residents built illegally on public land.



Caught in a bind, having forbidden private construction but unable to house everyone, the government caved in and allowed private construction but with minimum standards. “Effectively, anyone could build a house on a minimum plot of about 20 square metres,” says Michael DiGregorio of the Asia Foundation. But oversight was limited, and a culture of partially and completely illegal construction began to flourish.

The city spreads

As the 1990s progressed, increased wealth fuelled demand, and illegal construction grew sharply. In 1995, there were about 1,000 illegal projects in the city – and those were just the reported cases. The city also began to spread out, progressively consuming villages and rice paddies to keep pace with demand for homes. Urban planners call this “spontaneous urban development”. Most of the world calls it “slums”. But in Hanoi, with the unusual mixture of basic regulation and control, a strange thing happened. “The negative side of this development was substandard infrastructure,” says DiGregorio, “but there was also a positive.” That positive came from the enlightened regulatory attitude of authorities.

In the culture of semi-legal construction, if someone built a structure that adhered to minimum standards, it became legal – and for the most part was provided with basic services such as electricity and sanitation. In most developing cities, those flooding from the countryside end up living in sprawling squatter encampments, lacking basic sanitation and vulnerable to eviction. But in Hanoi, the new arrivals could build houses that didn’t have official permission but often received basic services anyway. Because the buildings were legal, residents had incentive to improve and rebuild with stronger materials when their finances allowed. As well as these new homes, there was a similarly positive trend in the existing overcrowded and under-serviced public housing blocks, with an incentive for residents to improve the buildings.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Throughout Hanoi there is a culture of semi-legal construction, from new floors to entirely new buildings. Photograph: Lauren Quinn

Towards regulation

Times are now changing in Hanoi’s construction industry, which is becoming more regulated. “In the 90s, all this was rice paddies,” said Mai Dinh Chinh, 44, sweeping his arm across a bustling area filled with cafés, strolling couples and toddlers in squeaky shoes. Chinh is at a public housing block in Hanoi’s New City, an area of planned development south of the city centre, with wide pavements and a grid street layout. Over his 25 years in the demolition industry, he has worked as a supervisor for numerous KCBTs and once relied heavily on the wall stencils, which his workers would apply across the city at night.

But times are changing. These days, demolition projects such as the C1 building are properly licensed, DiGregorio says. As the country develops, Hanoi is reining in the culture of illegal construction. But the process of titling land and enforcing laws has been a long and difficult one, and the city still lacks the infrastructure to completely end the ad hoc construction culture. In 2012, the city issued 8,508 building permits, with 788 reported violations – a vast improvement from 1988, when offences outnumbered licenses 1,768 to 769, more than 2:1.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Efforts have been growing to improve regulation in the construction sector, and bring some uniformity to the city. Photograph: Nguyen Huy Kham/Reuters

There has also been a change to the companies working in the sector, and how they advertise. Frustration with the KCBT stencils has mounted. Many residents whitewash walls to cover the adverts, or ask phone companies to block the numbers. Call two dozen KCBT numbers, and almost a third will be discontinued. During Hanoi’s millennial celebrations in 2010, anti-graffiti enforcement became stricter in an effort to beautify the city, wiping out many of the adverts. Chinh now advertises his new demolition company, Duc Chinh Co Ltd, only on his website. As Vietnam moves deeper into the digital age, he finds the stencils less effective.

Preserving heritage

In recent years, the pace of construction has slowed. But a new trend has become evident, with building owners feeling themselves under growing pressure to capitalise on high-value land by building bigger. In the city centre, single-family houses are being demolished to make room for luxury serviced apartments. For owners of colonial villas, the incentives to demolish and rebuild are complicated by issues of architectural heritage: the government has declared that colonial buildings should only be demolished if deemed uninhabitable, but given that most pre-liberation structures were built atop foundations of bamboo rammed into the ground, the preservation of these villas can seem perilous.



In time, Hanoi’s culture of ad hoc demolition and construction may be completely tamed and the KCBT stencils forever fade. The effects of the illegal construction culture, however, are unlikely to be erased, from the narrow plots of land to the lack of urban slums. Like the wide boulevards where streetcars once rattled, the KCBT stencils may not completely disappear, but rather sink into the fabric of the city, just one more layer in the sensory cacophony that is Hanoi.