Building Socialism is about the social life of buildings and the people who lived in them, what buildings and society have done to each other, and what they can tell us about Vietnam, East Germany, socialism, the Cold War, and Doi Moi. The book focuses on Vinh, a frontier city that was destroyed by US bombings in the 1970s. How Vinh was rebuilt to represent the futurity of socialism, how it disintegrated almost instantly, and how it continued to mean something are the stories told affectively by Christina Schwenkel. Meticulously researched and compelling, this book will satisfy as well as haunt students of architecture and urban studies, as it shows how far and deep the field could go: how architecture moved from an elite project to become a societal process; from “East German architecture” to become an institutional form of the Vietnamese socialist state; from a communitarian bonding to a mechanism for exclusion; from reflecting the social realities of Vinh to creating a condition for its transformation. And how vulnerable architecture is in all its power to form and transform identity.
The strength of the book lies in the arrangement of different perspectives to convey the affective power of the material environment. Chronologically organized, the story begins with the painful birth of a modernist city—that is, the annihilation of a town that made possible a blank canvas for the construction of a new time and space—and ends with the buildings’ afterlife. Time, however, feels more cyclical than linear, for what has passed returns to haunt or redeem the present. The book is thus made up of memories stored in archives and in people's minds.
The beginning chapters are filled with sensory encounters in which dead bodies and destroyed buildings are interchangeable. Through a set of visual archives (and a powerful narrative of soundscape), readers are invited to witness and experience the setting and to take the position of a “victim.” The message is clear: to counter the dominant representation of the catastrophe by the US Army. Such a painful beginning set the stage for the “sympathetic solidarities” of East Germany for the suffering of Vietnam. The bonding stemmed as much from socialist internationalism as from East Germany's own memory of the ruins of Dresden after aerial attacks in 1945. This “affinity” served as the basis for urban reconstruction in Vinh.
The middle chapters bring home modernist architecture and urban design to the context of Vietnam. This would have been a familiar story of colonial-postcolonial “exported/imported” urbanism, but Schwenkel's contribution emphasizes the gendered dimension of city building, the important role of female construction workers, and the incommensurability of technology transfer. She offers a nuanced account from both sides by highlighting their collaboration as well as their disagreement. For instance, the two sides could not agree on something as basic as scale, for dimension is not an index of functionality but of cultural values and practices. When a consensus was reached, as in a master plan that recalls Le Corbusier's functional city, it was to tackle irregular spatial practices and to restore harmony—a central value of the Vietnamese socialist state. Easier to plan than execute. Schwenkel details the practical challenges, including the dysfunctionality of the donated machinery. Apparently, they were secondhand machines recycled as gifts to Vietnam to jump-start what Schwenkel aptly calls a “secondhand modernity.” Such an unfortunate event and a little more bump, however, did not quite tarnish the solid image of East German engineers, nor did it lead to spiritual decline to build socialism.
The focus of the book is a public housing complex called Quang Trung. It offers a good site to talk about social cohesion, but it is large enough to represent the cosmos of a socialist state. Here the work of ethnography proves to be most rewarding. In this complex, the modernist high socialist architecture is a medium for conceptualizing people not only as equals, but also as hierarchically lower and higher, and at times as different (such as female migrant workers). The neutral block numbering of the buildings slipped easily into different status-based significations, such as the “intellectual block,” the “German-designed block” above the “Vietnamese-designed block,” as well as the messed-up “modified blocks.” Here the modernist building became a vessel of meaning while simultaneously justifying power relations.
The rest of the book tells the “afterlife” of the Quang Trung housing complex and how people used the space, put meanings into it, reworked from within, and eventually transformed the building from inside out. What is significant are the issues around incommensurability, as people did not share the same standard or recognize equally the same disciplinary space. Within the new space, old ways, hierarchies, and differences fell into new relationships. More and more things were at odds with the modernist space. The dislocation of waste and filth turned out to be a language of activism, while female migrant workers were unreasonably scapegoated for ruralizing urban living. The breakdown of modernist/socialist order was further compounded by the force field of a capitalist economy that complicated the contradiction between aspirations and realities of socialism.
Schwenkel makes clear that architecture (when carrying the burden of a dream) is essentially a fragile infrastructure. A built environment alone promises nothing, but it certainly demands maintenance. The final chapters document how occupants had to work together to fix what they could to bear with the decaying building. Yet taking responsibility demands an understanding of spatial identity. Schwenkel shares with us her confusion about what defines areas of private responsibility and which parts of a building are public. And there are “heterotopic spaces” that include stairways, corridors, and courtyards. For sure, the emergence of individual responsibility to keep up apartments seems to further render the state unnecessary.
The ending chapters show how the state refashioned itself to accommodate occupants’ creative self-innovation. To facilitate this private takeover, the disciplinary state took the form of an “empathetic bureaucracy” that was sustained by legal ambiguity. This, in turn, encouraged the production of an unintended space—that is, the extension of private balconies outward (known as coi noi). This extra space became an index of class distinction or class breaking, a breach not only of building codes but also of the socialist code that the building was supposed to safeguard. But none of this seems to undermine socialist political visions, as, after all, the interior is individual responsibility and anything that grows from within signifies the success of the state to cultivate a self-reliant generation. The empathetic bureaucracy, the legal ambiguity, and the fashioning of private balconies thus can all be seen as the development of statecraft in the postreform era. A touching observation that Schwenkel shares with us is the hanging of the portraits of Ho Chi Minh in coi noi. Uncle Ho still has the best new place in the household.
The last chapter is on the effect or affect of capitalist development with the emergence of developers, urban renewals, money, calculation, and speculation. Numbers fill the story, as every dimension of a unit needs to be quantifiable for market assessment. But Vinh entered the capitalist game rather late. People, especially those who became “urban poor” in the modernist housing, hung on to the moral values of Quang Trung as the embodiment not of private capital, but of respect, honor, and the legacy of collectivism. This set of qualities is unquantifiable. It is priceless. Furthermore, after years of living in Quang Trung, people who built the housing blocks developed a strong affinity for the place that affected them deeply, especially women, who organized resistance to reject the spectacle of a new tower and to negotiate for what is acceptable.
The conclusion states that Vinh is a city “that had come and gone all too quickly,” but perhaps it is more accurate to say that it has lived on in the memories of people in Vinh. They will remember (and hopefully will tell the young people of Vinh) that once they had a collective dream, so powerful that it was materialized, no matter how imperfectly. Building Socialism is a keeper of that memory. It is also an indispensable addition to our understanding of urban Asia.
