Looking high and low in Hanoi and HCMC

For many years, as a Ph.D. student in economics, I lived in Paris. This is a city everybody loves for its beauty and its charm, and I am not an exception. I have remained enamored of the city for my entire life, and keep returning to “her” on a regular basis.
Interestingly, Paris is a city without a single skyscraper in its urban core. Most buildings are six-stories high, pleasantly “rhythmed” by balconies on the second to the fifth floors, and by unmistakably French mansards on the top floor.
The low-rise beauty and charm of Paris made me feel encouraged when I read that Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc instructed authorities in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in April to stop approving the construction of high-rise buildings in the urban core of both cities.
The urban cores of Hanoi and HCMC have much in common with Paris. Important parts of their street layout were designed in the 1930s by Ernest Hébrard, a talented architect who mastered the urbanization ideas of the French Enlightenment.
Hébrard also understood and valued traditional Vietnamese buildings, and is credited with having created the amazing Indochine architectural style. The University of Pharmacy, on Hanoi’s Le Thanh Tong Street, is a stunning example.
Hanoi and HCMC also have many extraordinary public buildings left by the French colonial administration. And the urban core of Hanoi is graced by more than one thousand French villas that give an unmistakable character to the city. Few other major urban agglomerations in East Asia have such a strong European legacy. Mostly everywhere else urban cores are made of tall buildings with no individual style and no collective coherence.
True, in instructing the authorities of the two cities to stop authorizing the construction of tall buildings, Prime Minister Phuc evoked economic considerations, not urban aesthetics. And he was right: a street layout conceived for a population of a few hundred thousand people cannot accommodate the traffic congestion that millions of people living in high-rise buildings would create. But in this case, economics and aesthetics reinforce each other.
There is no doubt that Hanoi and HCMC need to accommodate millions of new residents. The growth of these two cities is essential to the successful development of the country. By the time Vietnam completes its urbanization process, each of the two cities could host more than 10 million people, the equivalent of the Paris metropolitan area today.
The question is: what is the best way to accommodate this massive population growth? The answer needs to take into account that preserving some of the European charm in Hanoi and HCMC would give both cities a clear advantage over other, bland and generic East Asian metropoles. As cities develop, their productivity increasingly depends on attracting top talent, and not just on having good infrastructure. The very special character of Hanoi and HCMC is one of Vietnam’s assets in the global competition for the best talent.
This same question was asked in relation to Paris by Edward Glaeser, a Harvard professor who is also one of the leading global thinkers in urban economics. In his book Triumph of the City, he discusses the lessons (good and bad) from a city that grew in space, population and density without losing its character.
Indeed, the urban core of Paris may be low-rise, but it is very compact. As a result, it accommodates 21,500 inhabitants...


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