Silent Coup by Claire Provost

Author:Claire Provost
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Clean air for sale

We next landed in Hanoi, Vietnam – which celebrated its 1000th birthday in 2010 – to explore how private enclaves were also shaping this ancient city. In its busy Old Town we zigzagged through scooters that flooded knotted, narrow streets. Above hung clothes drying from balconies and messes of electrical wires.

After sunset, lights came on and shops stayed open. People gathered at small cafes, sitting on very low stools. Streets still bore the names of trades that had long clustered there, like Hang Bo (baskets). On corners, elderly women burned fake bank notes in rituals honouring ancestors.

This area’s energy was what had put the city on the map for many international tourists. But it was also, we learned, what had made many elites retreat. A growing number of sometimes giant gated communities had been built around Hanoi. Enormous master-planned developments were taking over farms and rice fields. Former collective housing blocks were being replaced by private complexes.

These developments were inelegantly and very clearly separating the wealthy with high walls and 24-hour private security from street hawkers, congestion and pollution. We were struck by how many of them seemed to specifically advertise cleaner air and environments within their walls, promising green oases for the few that could afford to live there.

In northwest Hanoi, we found one of these developments: the multi-billion dollar Ciputra International City complex, which marketed itself as a ‘peaceful oasis among the hustle and bustle of Hanoi’.6 Surrounded by walls, it covered 3 square kilometers of former farmland. Inside, beige villas were set amid lush gardens with monthly rents as high as £3,000. Under construction were a mega-shopping mall and a private hospital. Wide, quiet roads were flanked by parked, luxury cars, palm trees and statues of Greek gods. The only sound of life was that of children playing at a private school.

Built in the early 2000s to house up to 50,000 people, Ciputra was Hanoi’s first ‘integrated new town development’, and the first overseas project of the Ciputra Group, an Indonesian conglomerate that specialises in large-scale property developments. It seemed designed so that residents would rarely need to interact with the wider world.

Outside the development’s gates, we met Lam, then 40-years-old, who described how he’d grown up in the area which was once covered by fields of rice and cherry blossoms, kumquat and peach trees. Now he had a small business selling custom-made picture frames out of a shop-front carved out of his house. Only occasionally, he explained, did he get business from Ciputra residents as ‘rich people and foreigners will go to big, fancy shopping malls. We are nearby but not many people come here’.

‘Before, most people were poor. Now it’s different’, this man said, about how Hanoi has become more noticeably unequal. ‘I have enough to live on, so I don’t really think about it much. But some people are so rich, and some are so poor.’

‘This side is just ordinary people. Over there, they are rich’, added Mien, then 59-years-old, who like Lam ran a small business out of her home selling tea, cigarettes and bottles of water and soda.

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