Colonialization has never failed to provoke discussion and debate over its territorial, economic and political projects, and their ongoing consequences. This work argues that the state-based activity of planning was integral to these projects in conceptualizing, shaping and managing place in settler societies. Planning was used to appropriate and then produce territory for management by the state and in doing so, became central to the colonial invasion of settler states. Moreover, the book demonstrates how the colonial roots of planning endure in complex (post)colonial societies and how such roots, manifest in everyday planning practice, continue to shape land use contests between indigenous people and planning systems in contemporary (post)colonial states.

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Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning

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.

POST/SOCIALIST AFFECT: Ruination and Reconstruction of the Nation in Urban Vietnam

Addressing life in borders and refugee camps requires understanding the way these spaces are ruled, the kinds of problems rule poses for the people who live there, and the abilities of inhabitants to remake their own lives. Recent literature on such spaces has been influenced by Agamben's notion of sovereignty, which reduces these spaces and their residents to abstractions. We propose an alternate framework focused on what we call aleatory sovereignty, or rule by chance. This allows us to see camps and borders not only as the outcomes of humanitarian projects but also of anxieties about governance and rule; to see their inhabitants not only as abject recipients of aid, but also as individuals who make decisions and choices in complex conditions; and to show that while the outcome of projects within such spaces is often unpredictable, the assumptions that undergird such projects create regular cycles of implementation and failure. In the last decade, "sovereignty" has once again become a keyword of social science scholarship and political theory. Moving the focus away from sovereignty as an organizing principle of the international system, this new work asks questions about how the capacity to govern is founded and what the effects of an often draconian exercise of power are on vulnerable populations (Agnew 2005; Barnett 2010; Elden

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Aleatory Sovereignty and the Rule of Sensitive Spaces

In this introductory article, we call for a new anthropology of bureaucracy focused on ‘the public good’. We aim to recapture this concept from its classic setting within the discipline of economics. We argue that such a move is particularly important now because new public goods – of transparency, fiscal discipline and decentralization – are being pressed into the service of states and transnational organizations: it has therefore become critical to focus on their techniques, effects and affects through fine-grained ethnography that challenges the economization of the political. We demonstrate our approach through some ethnographic findings from different parts of India. These show how fiscal austerity leads to new limited social contracts and precarious intimacies with the post-liberalization Indian state. This relationship between new public goods and forms of precarious citizenship is then further illuminated by the six articles that follow in this special issue.

Introduction: remaking the public good: a new anthropology of bureaucracy

What happens to legacies that do not find any continuation? In Estonia, a new generation that does not remember the socialist era and is open to global influences has grown up. As a result, the impact of the Soviet memory in people’s conventional values is losing its effective power, opening new opportunities for repair and revaluation of the past.

Francisco Martinez brings together a number of sites of interest to explore the vanquishing of the Soviet legacy in Estonia: the railway bazaar in Tallinn where concepts such as ‘market’ and ‘employment’ take on distinctly different meanings from their Western use; Linnahall, a grandiose venue, whose Soviet heritage now poses diffi cult questions of how to present the building’s history; Tallinn’s cityscape, where the social, spatial and temporal co-evolution of the city can be viewed and debated; Narva, a city that marks the border between the Russian Federation, NATO and the European Union, and represents a place of continual negotiation of belonging; and the new Estonian National Museum in Raadi, an area on the outskirts of Tartu, that has been turned into a memory field.

The anthropological study of all these places shows that national identity and historical representations can be constructed in relation to waste and disrepair too, also demonstrating how we can understand generational change in a material sense.

George Henry Lewes

Papers

The affective states.