Revitalizing the City: Socialist Architecture, Postwar Memory, and Urban Renewal in Vietnam

FAIN: FA-56615-12

Christina Schwenkel
Regents of the University of California, Riverside (Riverside, CA 92521-0001)

This project explores urban architecture as a site for managing tensions between remembrance and forgetting, mobility and immobility, and dwelling and displacement in contemporary "market socialist" Vietnam. Through ethnographic and archival research, it traces radical urban transformation in Vinh, a once-model socialist city that is now emerging as a regional center of capitalist trade and commerce. Following its complete destruction by U.S. bombing raids, Vinh was rebuilt with East German aid, technology, and urban planning expertise. The project chronicles the postwar reconstruction of Vinh to become a center of global socialist modernity and economic recovery, and more recent urban initiatives toward privatization and sustainable redevelopment. It focuses in particular on new forms of civic engagement among impoverished city residents who have called for the recognition of East German architecture as "heritage" to be restored, rather than socialist "ruins" to be demolished.

Associated Products

Traveling Architecture: East German Urban Designs Abroad (Article)
Title: Traveling Architecture: East German Urban Designs Abroad
Author: Christina Schwenkel
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2014
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity

Spectacular Infrastructure and its Breakdown in Socialist Vietnam (Article)
Title: Spectacular Infrastructure and its Breakdown in Socialist Vietnam
Author: Christina Schwenkel
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2015
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Ethnologist

Reclaiming Rights to the Socialist City: Bureaucratic Artefacts and the Affective Appeal of Petitions (Article)
Title: Reclaiming Rights to the Socialist City: Bureaucratic Artefacts and the Affective Appeal of Petitions
Author: Christina Schwenkel
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2015
Periodical Title: South East Asia Research

Post/Socialist Affect: Ruination and Reconstruction of the Nation in Urban Vietnam (Article)
Title: Post/Socialist Affect: Ruination and Reconstruction of the Nation in Urban Vietnam
Author: Christina Schwenkel
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2013
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Cultural Anthropology

Civilizing the City: Socialist Ruins and Urban Renewal in Central Vietnam (Article)
Title: Civilizing the City: Socialist Ruins and Urban Renewal in Central Vietnam
Author: Christina Schwenkel
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2012
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: positions: asia critique

Socialist Palimpsests in Urban Vietnam (Article)
Title: Socialist Palimpsests in Urban Vietnam
Author: Christina Schwenkel
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2015
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: ABE Journal: Architecture Beyond Europe

Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (Book)
Title: Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam
Author: Christina Schwenkel
Abstract: Following a decade of United States bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh’s mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility, and the quick fall of Vinh’s new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam’s first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://www.dukeupress.edu/building-socialism
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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