Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam

East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild after the U.S. bombing campaigns, but their utopian visions for Vinh's new built environment were challenged by postwar uncertainty and alternative cultural logics. Christina Schwenkel's book explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and obsolescence.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 432 pages
Publication date: 20 November 2020
Publisher: Duke University Press

East Germany played a significant role in helping Vietnam rebuild after a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns, exemplifying socialist solidarity. Christina Schwenkel's book, Building Socialism, explores the utopian visions of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who aimed to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Through archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany, Schwenkel examines the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the rapid obsolescence of Vinh's new built environment. She highlights the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty, demonstrating how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South were modified 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.

Weight: 682g
Dimension: 231 x 154 x 27 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478011064