Hanoi: paesaggi urbani. Viaggio attraverso le mappe storiche

The way the city of Hanoi has changed over the centuries has been recorded (almost uninterruptedly, particularly since the 1800s) by many charts and thematic maps, from which we can come to under- stand the typical urban design of Vietnamese and Chinese cities (which is a world away from Western urban phenomenology). An analysis of such documents allows us to go over the changes (at an urban and territorial scale) imposed by colonial policies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, allowing us to infer the radical alterations undergone by Hanoi’s historic – and not so historic – urban fabric and, in a wider sense, the social, political and economic changes that have utterly trans- figured, to say the least, Vietnam’s urban landscape over the past 200 years.