Paper short abstract:

The paper offers a materialist reading of the cycles of urban development across wartime destruction, postwar reconstruction and post Cold War renewal of a socialist city in Vietnam through the eyes of urban residents who were once beneficiaries of state protections that have now been withdrawn.

Paper long abstract:

Cities have long been at the center of state modernizing projects in socialist countries. In this paper, I examine urban development as an international project that endeavored to produce modern socialist citizens through a rational and scientific approach to urban planning. In particular, I focus on East German utopian designs for radical social change that were applied transnationally to build new urban futures in the city of Vinh in north central Vietnam. Between 1964 and 1973, the city of Vinh was demolished by recurrent US air attacks that left the landscape decimated. In the years following, East Germany pledged material and technological support to redesign and rebuild the devastated city. The first part of this essay examines the production of the socialist person through the modality of modern housing, the allocation of which reflected the division of society into priority and non-priority citizens. With economic reforms and the collapse of state provisioning of housing, these hierarchies changed in unforeseen ways. In the second part of the paper I examine how the transition to a market-oriented model of private ownership generated new forms of stratification as meaningful social identities and social status under socialism were recalibrated to fit the changing urban environment. Tracing the legacies of socialist allocations and their impact on urban lives today, I outline the uneven geographies of redevelopment in the city, driven by new imaginations of home and new aspirations to modernity.