Sylvie FANCHETTE has a doctorate in geography from the University of Paris VIII. She has been conducting research at IRD since 1993 and is a member of UMR Ceped. Her main research interests are the urbanisation process in densely populated rural areas and the conditions of population densification in the Nile and Red River Deltas. In Vietnam, she studies rural industrialisation and the peri-urbanisation process in the context of the Vietnamese capital's metropolisation. She is the author of “Hanoi, a metropolis in the making” and “Discovering craft villages in Vietnam”.