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No material resource and public good is more critical to sustaining urban life than water. During postwar reconstruction in Vietnam, planners showcased urban infrastructure as a spectacular socialist achievement. Water-related facilities, in particular, held the potential for emancipation and modernity. Despite East German-engineered systems, however, taps remained dry in socialist housing. Lack of water exposed existing hierarchies that undermined the goal of democratic infrastructure yet enabled new forms of solidarity and gendered social practice to take shape in response to the state's failure to meet basic needs. Infrastructural breakdown and neglect thus catalyzed a collective ethos of maintenance and repair as the state shifted responsibility for upkeep to disenchanted tenants. I track these processes in a housing complex in Vinh City, where water signified both the promises of state care and a condition of its systemic neglect.

Christina Schwenkel's absorbing study explores how the American War is remembered and commemorated in Vietnam today -- in official and unofficial histories and in everyday life. Schwenkel analyzes visual representations found in monuments and martyrs' cemeteries, museums, photography and art exhibits, battlefield tours, and related sites of trauma tourism. In these transnational spaces, American and Vietnamese memories of the war intersect in ways profoundly shaped by global economic liberalization and the return of American citizens as tourists, pilgrims, and philanthropists.

This article explores the engineering of affect in socialist urban design and subsequent changes in the affective register of a rapidly growing city in late socialist Vietnam. The setting is the north central city of Vinh, destroyed by aerial bombing during the American War and rebuilt with assistance from East Germany. A primary focus of urban reconstruction was Quang Trung public housing that provided modern, European-style apartments and facilities for more than eight thousand residents left homeless from the war. Drawing from interviews, images, poems, and archival materials that document urban reconstruction, the article foregrounds the complex historical, ideological, social, and gendered meanings and sentiments attached to a particular construction material: bricks. It argues that bricks have figured prominently in radical and recurring urban transformations in Vinh, both in the creation and the destruction of urban spaces and architectural forms. As utopie objects of desire, bricks gave shape to an engaged politics of hope and belief in future betterment, as construction technologies once reserved for the elite were made available to the masses. In Quang Trung public housing, bricks harnessed political passions and Utopian sentiments that over time, as Vinh's urban identity shifted from a model socialist city to a regional center of commercial trade and industry, came to signify unfulfilled promises of the socialist state and dystopic ruins that today stand in the way of capitalist redevelopment.

The rich body of literature on the cultural legacies of East Germany has privileged white German perspectives on material culture at the expense of non-white and non-European encounters with socialist things. In shifting the spatial lens to the global South, and to the foreign students and workers who lived for extended periods in East Germany, I trouble the implicit whiteness in the study of GDR cultural memory. Popular identification with GDR goods extended beyond the borders of Germany to newly decolonized countries that were the beneficiaries of the GDR’s solidarity policies. Using the example of Vietnam, I challenge formulations of Ostalgie as a site of white German memory production only, highlighting consumption of East German products by racialized foreign Others. In examining the objects that Vietnamese migrants amassed and transported back to Vietnam, and their subsequent use and circulation through today, I offer a different take on the temporal and spatial relationship between people and commodities, one that assigns value and agency to imported socialist things. In contrast to reunified Germany, where socialist-era goods were deemed disposable and obsolete, in Vietnam, East German products did not lose their utility and associations with modernity. The essay argues for a more inclusive exploration of memory and approach to Ostalgie that takes seriously the alternative logics of time, space, and materiality that informed the circuits of consumption, trade, and meaning of GDR things.

This article examines challenges to the privatization of public goods in social housing in urban Vietnam, where versatile modes of commoning have been essential to sustaining life and livelihoods. Informed by theories of feminist commoning, it highlights the collective efforts of elderly women, in particular, to appropriate state property and maintain the commons to support everyday social and economic activity in ambiguous spaces undergoing urban change. Female-led strategies of subsistence and sociality have been directed toward the maintenance of common resources across shifts in political economy from state to market socialisms. Rather than organize outside formal institutions only, collective action manifested through a politics of housing that made claims to public goods in ways that pushed the state to accept existing commons and commoning practices.

Recent examinations of religion in postreform Vietnam point to relationships between economic growth and increased ritual activity; some argue that new conditions of precarity have fed the explosion of popular beliefs and investments in a pantheon of spirit beings. Little of this research draws on urban theory, however, and most studies of rituals and festivals remain tied to rural geographies. This essay examines the nexus of urban growth and ritual practice—what I am calling “religious reassemblage”—to challenge the idea that socialist-built cities are rationalized spaces of secular modernity. Focusing on the city of Vinh in north central Vietnam, I show how urban expansion is entangled with the spirit world to reconfigure the model of functional urban planning developed during socialist reconstruction after the end of the air war. An analysis of two temples—one newly built by local authorities and another renovated through grassroots contributions—reveals ambiguity between state forms of commemoration and popular religious expressions as struggles over the control of late socialist urban space take place in and through religious sites.

A long history of war and revolution in the industrial city of Vinh has perpetuated cycles of mass destruction followed by urban renewal. This paper examines citizen responses to the shift from post-war socialist urbanization that sought to eradicate inequality to post-reform city planning that advocates private property. It asks: how do urban residents at risk of relocation articulate their rights to the post-socialist city? Tracing the use and circulation of bureaucratic artefacts between citizens, developers and the state, it shows how government documents, far from being mere tools of state regulation, are productive of active, participatory subjectivities and a growing sense of moral–political agency. This agency manifests itself in the collective act of petitioning through which residents contest urban redevelopment and the withdrawal of the state by employing the language of tình cảm (sentiment) as an affective tool and logic of bureaucratic rationality.

Recent years have seen the diversification of knowledge, memory, and meaning at former battlefields and other social spaces that invoke the history of the \"American War\" in Vietnam. Popular icons of the war have been recycled, reproduced, and consumed in a rapidly growing international tourism industry. The commodification of sites, objects, and imaginaries associated with the war has engendered certain rearticulations of the past in the public sphere as the terrain of memory making becomes increasingly transnational. Diverse actors-including tourism authorities, returning U.S. veterans, international tourists, domestic visitors, and guides-engage in divergent practices of memory that complicate, expand, and often transcend dominant modes of historical representation in new and distinct ways.