Abstract EN:

This thesis is the comprehensive result of thirty years of field investigations focused on observation, transcription and analysis of the colonial and contemporary urban transition in Vietnam and, more specifically, on the architectural and urban background of the city of Hanoi. We have concentrated these investigations on a area so far scarcely explored, introducing a new field of Vietnamese Studies, i. E. The analysis of “spatial cultures”, and of the “ways” local “actors”, in urban development, operate and think. In so doing, this research put the vietnamese architectural and urban phenomena into historical and cultural perspectives. In the present context of fast urban evolution we highlight the “dynamics of change” at work, and, at the same time, the existing dialectics between cultural continuity and social and economic transformations. We have chosen the method of a phenomenological approach to reality, showing an understanding of processes, actions, and thoughts of two categories of actors studied from the inside. On one hand we have “architects” and urban planners in a knowledgeable and erudite relationship to the city. On the other hand, there are inhabitants, who build and invest, and are representative of customary know-how as like intuitive, pragmatic and “practical” ways of constructing their own urban space. Analysis and synthesis show these two categories to be united in the figure of the “Passeur ”, a mediator, who links tradition and modernity, modes of local practice and exogenous knowledge. We thus have an operating link, which allows the understanding of the deployment of endogenous practices of incorporation and adaptation. This model equally permits to identify the historical and contemporary transmutations of Vietnam’s urban space. In particular, we demonstrate that, despite not subscribing to the same scales and temporal rhythms, and thus not having a common denominator, politic, social and economic transformations should be interpreted as being reflected in “Spatial” (i. E. Architectural and urban) transitions, both in their material and symbolic forms. The latter constitute an intermediate stage and an opening leading to a more precise understanding of cultural transitions that largely take place on an underground and unconscious level. In the long run, both of them are historically constitutive of local urban, architectural and social “identities”, which remain consistently deep-rooted and interconnected in the physical and cultural existence of Hanoi, a genuine vietnamese city of the present time.