Community-based Behaviour Towards Affordances in Conservation of Hanoi Old Quarter in the Vietnam Context

Abstract

The 36 Old Street Quarter is a downtown area of Hanoi City, which has over 1000 years old and contains such traces of history and architecture. The grid structure gives it a significant character that is a part of the local heritage facing phenomenon of replacing settings of ancient spaces, stoning the streets and concretizing old buildings due to anti-conservative interplay from its users. Therefore, this paper examines the user’s behaviour in optimizing different settings of Hanoi Old Quarter (HOQ) towards conservation efforts. Theoretically, the research was conducted by making use of ‘affordances’ terminology of Gibson (1986/1979) to understand interactions between the spatial settings and its user. Methodologically, the purposeful method of local people and layout-based sketch of the blocks, and analysed images of outdoor and shared places have been employed for three survey sites respectively. The results of community-based behaviours, its patterns and ‘verb-ability’ are fundamental factor to develop ground-up programs on urban and architectural conservation in the Vietnam’s contextualisation.