Transnational networks, cosmopolitan agents: a re-globalizing city center 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. In the centrally-located historic neighborhoods at the western end of the former French and International Concessions, socio-demographic, cultural, and economic changes is producing a new international trend quarter with a vibe and look echoing the likes of Berlin Prenzlauerberg or New York Williamsburg. What is the constellation of actors and agents who have activated the reuse of existing building typologies for the production and consumption of the new economy? And how do they relate a cosmopolitan history to the renaissance of Shanghai as a global city? And what could be learned from these specific and localized transformation processes for future developments?

This paper will try to unpack how Shanghai’s transnational networks, cosmopolitan agents, and diasporic linkages, helped expedite the re-globalization of the city after 1992, especially in the reconfiguration of the former concession areas, both physically and socio-economically. Transformations to Shanghai’s existing vibrant inner-city neighbourhoods is a specific example of how these until-now little-studied [1] and yet crucial ‘centralities’—one of many in the polycentric urban system serving whole regions—spatially manifest the recalibration of drivers, agents, networks, urban forms responding to globalization’s effects in local frameworks.

[1] Most researches and media reportage have focused on spectacular demolition and reconstruction of the 1990s, but little on the transformation processes in the vast swaths of the existing city has been studied relating the programmatic transformations re-formulating the role of the neighborhood as a centrality in the metropolitan area.