Hanoi’s everyday spaces: ‘imagined’ tradition through paintings of/in the streets

This paper focuses on a street in Hanoi's Ancient Quarter to examine the shifted attitude towards artistic impression of traditional places. It first reviews the street's history, everyday life and architecture. This paper then analyses street paintings by local painters whose identities, experiences and visual expressions reflect Hanoi's architectural tradition and present‐day changes. Local challenges in (re)defining, promoting and maintaining the Hanoi's tangible and intangible identities will be discussed within the larger realm of cultural production and conservation practice. These findings will be supported by a review of relevant literature, which then may lead to some implication for current and future practices of maintaining traditional streets in the face of rapid change to the built environment in Hanoi or elsewhere.