Economic globalization intensifies splintering and deterritorialisation of urban public space, restraining
the production of difference, plurality and multiplicity. Yet, these effects impact on the very same social,
cultural and environmental systems that these forces promote to attract important human and financial
capitals. In cities with millenary tradition and rapidly developing contexts, consolidated autochthonous
space of interplay, true to ecology and history, are being gradually replaced through urban regeneration
and redevelopment programmes driven by modernisation and economic development. Results of these
“improvements” are often severe gentrification and spectacularisation phenomena that compromise
resilience of local communities. Epitomes of these disruption of complex historical, social and cultural
rooted linkages are the “creative,” post-consumerist landscapes of consumption, ubiquitously emerging
in public spaces of ancient central city streets.
An extraordinary example of space of resistance, opposing these disembedding processes of
displacement and commodification, is found in the 36 streets of the historical central district of Hanoi.
This is a place where local inhabitants have developed sophisticated tactics to encroach the sidewalks,
everyday actualising complex sets of conceptions, practices and actions that notably exemplifies those
defined by Henri Lefebvre as differential space. These sidewalks offer chances for accidental
encounters, unexpected events and place a diverse range of local inhabitants in active and dynamic play.
They are self-structuring loose spaces, where semi-predictable uses and users, intermingled dynamic
territories and complex social interrelations generate disassociations from the regulated, limited,
planned and homogenized environments of the malls for modern lifestyle shopping.
The research introduced in this paper aims to explore the interaction between the multifarious spatial
activities of residents and transients, and describe the patterns of such inclusionary relations. To achieve
this target, the study defines a theoretical framework springboarding from Lefebvre’s spatial
praxeology. It develops an empirical ethnography of space that elaborates on a method recently
introduced by Annette Miae Kim for multidimensional spatial analysis. Eventually, the paper provides
a tentative outline of the a complex networks of territories (conceived spatialities), routines
(performative practices) and characters (acting profiles) of this unique (in)formal domain.