Cities under change: cases of creative production in Shanghai 1992-2012

Abstract

Shanghai’s urban development has come to represent China’s rapid economic growth and global integration following the country’s accelerated transition to a state-controlled market economy since the 1990s. Shanghai’s growing skylines, roaring highways and then its glitzy malls, manicured golf courses and new themed satellite towns, are touted by the western media as physical manifestations of the pace and quantity of the city’s urban developments. But it is in the centrally-located historic neighborhoods where little study on the existing fabric has been done, that socio-demographic, cultural, and economic changes influencing processes of urban transformation at the everyday scale is producing the new international trend quarter with a vibe and look echoing the likes of Berlin Prenzlauerberg or New York Williamsburg. Next to the old ladies gathered in gossip while tipping off the tails of bean sprouts in the lanes connecting the typical lilong housing, young free-lancers “tweet” their way into their new co-working studios in a lanehouse equipped with airbooks and Illy coffees. Across from the Uyghur restaurant inserted into the terrace of another lane-house opened by inland-migrants promising authentic halal beef noodles the newly renovated boutique on the ground floor of a garden house with a smartly chosen French and Chinese name is having its bubbly serving apero as it showcases the international collection from a range of Danish-Chinese, UK-Taiwanese, French-Singaporean duos. Despite the vibes and looks of being neighborhoods that are becoming extremely global, the localized nuances confounding western presumptions of property rights, institutional stability and clarity ask the components of its urban spatial production to be investigated.

The transformation in the city center is most visible in the return of commerce to the city center as the strictures of socialism are slowly eroded by the re-entry of market economy. Street-front ground floor spaces of apartment buildings, converted terraces of lanehouses, and insertions into and constructions from garden walls became everything from small restaurants, hardware stores, hair salons, convenience stores. And former neighborhood factories, closed or relocated with onset of economic liberalization, similarly became new cafes, florists and studios. What is today a ground floor commercial space, for example, was mostly likely once a garage or boiler room for the apartment building or the terrace for a lane house pre-revolution before 1949. The depletion of market commerce after 1949 removed and contained all commercial exchange into limited numbers of designated spaces. And with demographic increase and the lack of investment into infrastructure and housing construction, these ground floor spaces became, by the 1960s allocated as residences.

As is in most post-socialist cities, the return of capital and consumer demand generated commercial and spatial opportunity. Unique to Shanghai as a former global city is the extremely rapid usurping of international trends in the grasping of these opportunities. The constellation of returning diaspora compelled by both nostalgia and pragmatism, expats attracted by the city’s historic global connections, and expediently learning and commercial-minded local stakeholders not only facilitate the re-plugging of Shanghai into the global market but are becoming the active residents and users of the city center area that has been shirked by the local residents reminded by the it of the pre-reform memories of decades of forced socialization and privacy deprivation.

How have the emerging new economies come to locate themselves in the historic urban fabric of Shanghai? What is the constellation of actors and agents who activated the reuse of existing building typologies for the new economies? And how do they relate to the historic cosmopolitan history and the renaissance of Shanghai as a global city? How do the characteristics of the urban morphology⎯modern architectural typologies and street networks⎯contribute to the processes of reuse and activation? And what could be learned from the localized transformation processes for future developments?