Low-density, agrarian-urban settlements have become a significant topic in the global archaeology of urbanism. The urban tradition of the Vietnamese can now be added to the relatively rare regional examples worldwide. Although the urban tradition of the Vietnamese has previously been defined in terms of the central citadels in cities like Hanoi, the citadels were actually located within extensive, low-density, agro-urban settlements with dispersed occupation contained within multiple, irregular enclosures. Settlement enclosures have an ancestry in Mainland Southeast Asia, back into the 1st millennium BCE. Among the Vietnamese from the 10th century CE onwards this pattern was then combined with the general Mainland trend toward low-density urbanism, which developed from the mid 1st millennium CE. The major urban settlements of the Vietnamese retained this combined pattern until the 19th century CE, in contrast to the cessation of low-density urban settlements, elsewhere in Mainland Southeast Asia, after the 15–16th century CE.