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 utopic 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.

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. [materiality, infrastructure, socialist modernity, urbanization, decay, maintenance and repair, water, Vietnam]

The recent global economic crisis has called into question triumphalist narratives of neoliberal capitalism and its global uniformity. In this introduction to the special issue on Vietnam, we examine Vietnamese “market socialism” as a fertile site for considering how transnational neoliberalism and state socialism have intersected to shape knowledge, governmentality, and everyday cultural practices. We ask, how does the endurance of socialist interpretive frameworks and logics of morality contest or rework neoliberalism and its global modes of regulation? Conversely, how might socialist continuities work in conjunction with neoliberalism to affirm its basic tenets? We argue for an understanding of transnational neoliberalism as a globally diverse set of technical practices, institutions, modes of power, and governing strategies informed by cultural and historical particularities. We caution against addressing “neoliberalism” as a uniform project that signifies the retreat of government or the triumph of a global market economy that fetishizes the “free”; instead we call for more attention to the ways in which socialism is deeply, though unevenly, woven into particular cultural forms, political practices, and historical legacies to ask, What if anything is unique about “neoliberalism” in socialist Vietnam, and to what extent is neoliberalism a useful lens for thinking through contemporary socioeconomic change in Vietnam?

In the early dawn hours of April 30, 2000, I quickly made my way through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, still commonly known and referred to as Saigon. The city was beginning to stir as street vendors heated large pots of pho broth and residents slowly jogged through the nearly empty streets. I hurried past the neighborhood park, already filled with badminton players, on my way to the official commemoration about to take place at the Reunification Palace, formerly the Presidential Palace during the Saigon regime. This is also the site where tanks from the People's Army of Vietnam came crashing through the gates on April 30, 1975, signaling the liberation or, as many would have it, the fall of Saigon. The roads were barricaded, but I managed to convince a policeman to let me through to join the various onlookers gathering outside the palace. At 7 a.m., the gates opened and the parade began. Although thousands of participants had been bussed in from neighboring provinces and outlying city districts, there were only about 200 bystanders in attendance-mostly journalists, photographers, and curious tourists who had come to Vietnam for the 25th anniversary of the end of the war. The armed forces led the procession, with men and women segregated into different military units. Army troops first marched past in unison, followed by the air force, the navy, and then a women's militia unit dressed in conventional "guerilla" uniforms of loose-fitting black garments, checkered scarves, and widerimmed, floppy green hats. A group of young male cadets carrying the flag of the National Liberation Front of Southern Vietnam (NLF) followed in step. 1 After this display of the nation's military might, the parade moved into a more jovial "civil society" phase represented by members of various organizations, such as the Fatherland Front. The Farmer's Association, the Women's Union, youth pioneers, gymnasts, postal workers, Buddhist and Catholic organizations, and even children dressed as bumblebees marched past waving and smiling to the crowd. Marchers

The shift to “market socialism” has brought rapid and profound changes to urban landscapes in Vietnam. Focusing on the fate of socialist architecture and urban design under contemporary urban redevelopment and renewal plans, this essay explores the transformation of Vinh City, capital of the province of Nghệ An, from a center of socialist utopian modernity and postwar urban recovery to a symbol of urban blight and late socialist decay. Destroyed by aerial bombing during the war with the United States, Vinh City was redesigned and rebuilt in the postwar years with East German aid, technology, and urban planning expertise. A primary focus of urban reconstruction was Quang Trung communal housing, consisting of eighteen hundred apartments and dormitories in five-story buildings that housed more than eight thousand residents, mainly workers and veterans in need of housing after the war. Since 2004, sections of Quang Trung have been demolished and replaced with a trade center and high rise condominiums. Based on ethnographic and historical research in Vietnam and Germany, the essay traces new strategies of urban governance that endeavor to reorder and redesign city space through acts of architectural destruction and reconstruction that likewise infuse capitalist logics and values, such as privatization and self-actualization, into the cityscape. Emerging geographies of neoliberalism in Vietnam are shown to be contingent upon the pathologization of socialist “ruins” and urban practices, and their eradication from the landscape of urban memory. Visual spectacles of demolition thus signify new aesthetic and economic regimes that link capitalist redevelopment and redesign to the formation of modern, prosperous, and “civilized” cities and citizens.