1The province of Hà Nội is made up of several rings with a demographic density that diminishes the further they are from the city. Long inhabited, the Upper Delta, site of the capital, is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with average densities of 1,400 inhabitants/km² in 2009. The map of demographic densities is the end result of a process of many millennia of occupation by populations of a space that is rich hydraulically, but difficult to manage owing to high risks of flooding. This very intensive occupation of deltaic space depends upon multi-activity associated with wet rice farming with transplanting, which uses a very large workforce and can achieve very high yields. In addition, the maintenance of the hydraulic network requires a sizeable workforce, requisitioned by the administration until the 1980s in the form of public corvées.

2Concentration of population is ubiquitous: its grouping into large villages can be explained by the necessity of the village community to organise the management of water and protect themselves against the incursions of pillagers. This social cohesion for the organisation of hydraulic works has for centuries been one of the factors favouring the maintenance of a dense population in the Delta and the development of very diversified productive capacities (craftwork, trade). Similarly, in this plain much prone to submersion by floodwaters, the inhabitants have long been settled on mounds, levees, hills, or artificial embankments.

3These high demographic densities linked to wet rice farming are found in other regions of monsoon Asia, particularly in certain parts of Java in Indonesia, where non-agricultural activities are numerous in villages (craftwork, trade, services, etc.). T. McGee has developed a model to define these areas that he calls desakota. He identifies urban cores situated in the heart of very populated rural spaces where agriculture retains an important place. The originality of these zones derives from the fact that they become industrialised and diversify their ways of occupying and consuming space without triggering a rural exodus or an urban explosion. According to this classification, the metropolitan economic space is made up of five subcategories:

• the major cities of the urban hierarchy, which are often dominated in the Asian context by one or two extremely large cities;
• the peri-urban area, which are those areas surrounding the cities within a daily commuting reach of the city core;
• the area labeled desakota, which is a region of intense mixture of agricultural and non-agricultural activities that often stretch along corridors between large city cores. There areas were previously characterized by dense populations engaged in agriculture, generally but not exclusively dominated by wet rice;
• densely populated areas, which set aside for intensive rice farming;
• the sparsely populated frontier areas found in many Asian countries that offer opportunities for land colonization schemes and various forms of agricultural development.

4This model can be found in various forms in densely populated rice-growing Asia. The level of development of these desakota depends on the diversification of activities, the share of the non-agricultural sector in GDP and the value of investments. The desakota of Hà Nội’s metropolitan area differs from others in Southeast Asia, which rapidly integrated into the global market and became more industrialised.

5The process of metropolisation in the city of Hà Nội has speeded up since the 1990s in a context of urban sprawl catching up, after decades of anti-urban policy. It manifests itself by an acceleration of demographic growth in the first and second peri-urban rings and by maintaining processes of natural growth, thanks to multi-activity associated with intensive rice farming. After several decades of control of migratory movements, the rural exodus is speeding up and heading to the fringes of the capital. However, this flow remains modest when compared with those that have transformed the outskirts of the big cities of the region where investments in industry and construction have been on a huge scale and have attracted several million migrants since the 1970s. Hà Nội remains a capital of very moderate size when compared with Jakarta, Hồ Chí Minh City or Bangkok.

6However, an extreme fragmentation of the territory can be observed, created by large-scale urban and highway projects and the emergence of the new focal points that the satellite towns have become, along with big shopping centres or transport hubs. Metropolisation and economies of scale linked to macroeconomic processes of agglomeration advocated by the prevailing liberal orthodoxy are threatening the process of in situ urbanisation based on the spontaneous development of dense and diverse rural conurbations that dominate in desakota areas. Very large-scale land expropriations, the disappearance of rice farming around the city and the soaring price of land push up costs of production for local craftwork and market gardening. The peri-urban area spreads further out, galvanised by investment in highways and the construction of new urban areas and industrial zones completely disconnected from their rural environment. Areas growing rice are relegated into the last peri-urban ring.

7One of the challenges of Hà Nội’s metropolisation is to retrain villagers expropriated by urban projects and offer them new jobs, particularly in the factories that are set up in industrial parks. Lagging more than ten years behind Southeast Asian capitalist countries, Vietnam has entered the globalised industrial age and has abandoned the state factories of the revolutionary period. Another challenge is to maintain very intensive peri-urban agriculture, which has fed the capital for many centuries, and to protect it from urban expropriation.

8Yet how, in a context of very high land prices and of liberalisation of land ownership by the state, is it possible to maintain less profitable activities such as craftwork and growing crops when compared with selling off land? Are the foreign companies in the industrial parks, preoccupied by profitability of invested capital and competition between countries in the sub-region, prepared to adapt to the social and economic contexts (age, gender, qualifications) of the areas of potential employment where they settle?