The Enlightened Regulators of Hanoi?

Lauren Quinn has an
interesting article in The Guardian about Hanoi’s
approach to unlicensed, unplanned construction. Here’s an
excerpt:

As the 1990s progressed, increased wealth
fuelled demand, and illegal construction grew sharply. In 1995,
there were about 1,000 illegal projects in the city—and those were
just the reported cases. The city also began to spread out,
progressively consuming villages and rice paddies to keep pace with
demand for homes. Urban planners call this “spontaneous urban
development.” Most of the world calls it “slums.” But in Hanoi,
with the unusual mixture of basic regulation and control, a strange
thing happened. “The negative side of this development was
substandard infrastructure,” says DiGregorio, “but there was also a
positive.” That positive came from the enlightened regulatory
attitude of authorities.

In the culture of semi-legal construction, if someone built a
structure that adhered to minimum standards, it became legal—and
for the most part was provided with basic services such as
electricity and sanitation. In most developing cities, those
flooding from the countryside end up living in sprawling squatter
encampments, lacking basic sanitation and vulnerable to eviction.
But in Hanoi, the new arrivals could build houses that didn’t have
official permission but often received basic services
anyway.

Read the rest
here. For more from Reason on unlicensed building in
the Third World, go here.