Building Socialism
eBook - PDF

Building Socialism

The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Building Socialism

The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Building Socialism by Christina Schwenkel in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & History of Architecture. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. List of Figures, Plates, and Tables
  4. Abbreviations
  5. A Note on Translation and Transliteration
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Introduction
  8. Maps
  9. Color Plates
  10. Part 1. Ruination
  11. Part 2. Reconstruction
  12. Part 3. Obsolescence
  13. Conclusion. On the Future of Utopias Past
  14. Notes
  15. References
  16. Index