Saigon-Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) is a typical 21st-century mega-city coping with informal hyper-growth. Government planners are under pressure to provide mass housing, transit and utilities. Yet HCMC has developed a distinctive and effective homegrown informal housing system based on ‘tube housing’. This system of dense housing, motorcycle transport and laneways embodies an integrated everyday urban culture whereby each of its purposes (work, commerce, rest and recreation) in turn shapes the whole urban form. As such, it is argued that these everyday forms of urbanism should be respected and incorporated by city planners into their masterplans rather than be viewed as anachronistic, illegal forms to be overcome and deconstructed.