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Following a decade of U.S. 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.
List of contents
List of Figures, Plates, and Tables vii
Abbreviations xi
A Note on Translation and Transliteration xiii
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
Part I. Ruination
1. Annihilation 25
Interlude. Urban Fragments 1 43
2. Evacuation 45
Interlude. Urban Fragments 76
3. Solidarity 78
Part 2. Reconstruction
4. Spirited Internationalism 105
Interlude. Urban Fragments 3 129
5. Rational Planning 131
Interlude. Urban Fragments 4 159
6. Utopian Housing 161
Part 3. Obsolescence
7. Indiscipline 211
8. Decay 232
9. Renovation 260
10. Revaluation 293
Conclusion. On the Future of Utopias Past 316
Notes 323
References 357
Index
About the author
Christina Schwenkel
Summary
Christina Schwenkel analyzes the collaboration between East German and Vietnamese architects and urban planners as they attempted to transform the bombed-out industrial city of Vinh into a model socialist city.
