Traveling Architecture. East German Urban Designs in Vietnam

Abstract

Scholars have long been interested in architecture and urban planning as a cultural battleground during the Cold War. What is less known, however, is how the ideological conflict over urban practices played out beyond the frontlines of Europe on other battlefields abroad. This paper transcends entrenched East/West binaries to examine socialist architectural forms and principles of urban planning that traveled overseas to create experimental cities with new urban morphologies. Based on long-term research in Vietnam and Germany, I focus on the city of Vinh in north central Vietnam, rebuilt after its destruction by US air raids as a “model” socialist city with the assistance of East Germany. My goal is twofold: to examine how GDR utopian designs were applied transnationally to build new urban futures in other geographies, and to examine how local cultural understandings of the city served to reconfigure GDR housing typologies and ideas of “socialist modernity”.