Shapeshifting in Vietnam: Reuse and Repair as Matters of Urban Care

Dr. Schwenkel writes of her lecture: In the face of planetary breakdown, reuse and repair have emerged as vital practices of care, sustaining cities not through endless renewal, but through attention to what endures, decays, and transforms. This talk explores how weathering enables shapeshifting in Vietnam’s aging collective housing, where slow degradation of materials meets inventive adaptations of inhabitants who refuse to let buildings die. Here, decay is not simply a symptom of obsolescence but a condition of possibility: a material record of endurance, improvisation, and care. By questioning decay as abjection—the very matter and life that city keepers (planners, developers, policymakers) banish as unsightly—the talk asks what happens when we extend care to that which has been rejected. Practices of reuse and repair become radical acts of refusal, challenging disposability, speculative redevelopment, and the hierarchies that determine who and what holds value and belongs in the city. In attending to the weathering of buildings and their subsequent shapeshifting, the talk argues that reuse and repair are not merely material but ethical imperatives: matters of urban care that sustain cities as living, collaborative ecologies where value is constantly remade.

Christina Schwenkel is Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. She is author of The American War in Contemporary Vietnam (Indiana UP, 2009) and the award-winning Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (Duke UP, 2020), which together examine how people remember and rebuild from the wreckage of infrastructural warfare. Her latest book, Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi (UC Press, 2025), extends her work on urban disaster and decay to explore media infrastructures and the anthropology of sound.

This event is co-sponsored by Anthropology, the Class of 1902 Lecture Fund, International Studies, Sociology, East Asian Languages and Cultures, History, The Center for Sociology Sciences, Political Science, and Environmental Studies.