Hanoi at the end of 21st century's first decade presents an urban landscape that is often described primarily as "chaotic". Chaos is certainly the impression left by the traffic-which almost all foreign visitors comment upon, as do most Hanoians, too-and the streetscapes which juxtapose buildings of different decades and centuries, architectural styles, functions, and states of repair, side-by-side. Chaotic also seems to describe the markets, the sidewalks, the jumble of advertising signage, and the noise of everyday life in the city.This city, which in 2010 celebrated its millenial anniversary, seems, upon closer inspection, to sit uneasily between old and new. The weight of those thousand years-and particularly the last one hundred or so-certainly hangs heavy over the built environment and the social and political discourse on the city. But the new is also certainly making its mark, scoring deep inroads into the built environment and its historical character. Observation of satellite images of the city (e.g. from Google Maps) reveals not only the clear enduring outline of the citadel, home of the pre-colonial emperors, but the small irregular streets of the pre-colonial Thirty-Six Streets, and the grid-patterned boulevards of the European-built colonial quarters to the south. But following the dike road out past West Lake on these maps also reveals the landscape alterations of a much more recent past-the densely villa-infested shores of West Lake and the river bank, then, almost at the Thȃng Long bridge, the high-rise towers and orderly townhouses of Ciputra, or Nam Thȃng Long, the private gated community ("international city" according to its builder) with its massive gate (modelled on the Brandenburg Gate) onto the airport highway, and, cleverly, its road inwards from the gate in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. Following the map further to the south reveals the transformation of the area around the Daewoo Hotel and zoo, with its wide new roads and new government buildings, and even further