Dartmouth Events

Balcony extensions—commonly referred to as “cơi nới”—are ubiquitous features of Vietnamese urban landscapes. Based on multisensory ethnography of mass housing, this talk investigates how evolving styles, designs, and materials of balconies reflect broader cultural and economic transformations in Vietnamese society. It asks: what insights might these seemingly improvised modifications offer into people’s aspirations for their living spaces, their urban futures, and the future of socialist architecture intended to promote equality? Tracing spatial renovations to balcony extensions in deteriorating housing complexes—from utilitarian “tiger cages” to upscale cơi nới as markers of social status—the talk analyzes how socialist urban spaces are creatively repurposed through intersecting class and gender dynamics. From architectural decay emerges a distinctive “balcony culture” that symbolizes both the precarity and the ingenuity of urban life and its architectural inheritance in postsocialist cities today. 

Christina Schwenkel is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside (USA). She is the author of The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation (Indiana UP, 2009) and the award-winning Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (Duke UP, 2020), which together address the future-making, material practices central to how people remember and rebuild after human-made catastrophes of empire. Her forthcoming sensory autoethnography, Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi, to be published by UC Press, extends her work on the multisensory dimensions of urban disaster and decay to encompass the anthropology of sound.