The Efficiency of Forgetting

The city of Hà Nội has recently discovered that it is possible to demolish a French-colonial villa and erect a seventeen-story mixed-use development in approximately the same time it takes to process a heritage-protection application. This is not irony. This is logistics.

The villa on Phố Lý Thường Kiệt — the one with the bougainvillea that had been climbing the eastern wall since before most current residents were born — came down on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, a banner had appeared announcing LUXURY RESIDENCES: LIVING IN HARMONY WITH HISTORY. The banner featured a rendering of the future building, which had a small decorative arch on the ground floor that nodded, loosely, to the concept of the past.

A woman named Bà Minh, seventy-three, who had lived in the lane behind the villa for forty-one years, told a reporter from an online newspaper that she felt sad. The reporter wrote that residents expressed mixed feelings about urban renewal. The headline read: Community Embraces Modern Development While Honoring Heritage. This is what is known, in certain circles, as a faithful summary.

The question nobody is seriously asking — not in the meetings, not in the approved public consultations — is not whether Hà Nội should grow. Of course it should grow. Cities grow the way children grow: constantly, impractically, leaving behind shoes that no longer fit. The question is what a city decides to keep, and what it decides to misplace, and whether there is any meaningful difference between the two.

Consider the sidewalk economy. Hà Nội's pavements have, for decades, operated as a secondary city — breakfast stalls, motorbike repair, tutoring sessions, the entire negotiation of social life conducted at knee height on plastic stools. Municipal authorities have, on roughly a dozen separate documented occasions since 2008, announced campaigns to reclaim the pavement for pedestrians. Each campaign arrives with posters. Each campaign departs, quietly, around month three, when someone in a relevant office calculates what it would cost to actually enforce. The stools return. This has been reported as failure. It might equally be reported as a city conducting a pragmatic referendum on itself, repeatedly, with the same result.

What is more interesting than the stools is the language used to remove them. The official term — published in circulars, read aloud at neighborhood committee meetings in the particular tone reserved for reading things aloud at neighborhood committee meetings — is chỉnh trang đô thị. Urban beautification. The phrase is technically accurate and contains essentially no information about what is being made more beautiful, or for whom, or at whose convenience the current arrangement was found ugly. Official language is very good at this. It describes the destination without mentioning what is being left behind.

There is a particular kind of young professional in Hà Nội now — educated, often returned from studying somewhere that has better air quality — who speaks fluently in both registers. To their colleagues they use the vocabulary of smart cities, sustainable development, green corridors. To their parents they say yes, yes, I know, I know, the old neighborhood was nicer. They are not hypocrites. They are people living inside the gap between two entirely coherent worldviews, which is an uncomfortable place to live, and which produces, as a coping mechanism, a very specific form of exhausted pragmatism. You see it in the way they talk about traffic. Not with rage. With the calm of people who have accepted that the problem is structural and that they will be late again on Thursday.

Bà Minh's bougainvillea, incidentally, had been growing partly onto public pavement. It was, strictly speaking, a violation. She had been asked, several times, to cut it back. She had not cut it back. For forty-one years the violation bloomed fuchsia every spring and nobody had found the energy to insist. This is also a form of negotiation. This is also how cities work.

The heritage-protection application, when it was finally reviewed by the relevant subcommittee, was found to be missing one supporting document — a site survey certified by a licensed assessor on the updated Form 14B, not the old Form 14A, which the applicant had submitted in good faith, having downloaded it from the official portal, which had not yet been updated to reflect the new form. The subcommittee noted this regretfully. The matter was returned for resubmission. By then, of course, there was nothing left to survey.

The banner on Phố Lý Thường Kiệt still says LIVING IN HARMONY WITH HISTORY. It is printed in gold on a red background, which are lucky colors. The bougainvillea is gone. The arch on the ground floor of the rendering is, by all accounts, very tasteful.

The committee meets again next month.

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