Between global aspirations and local frameworks: creative incubation in 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. Despite 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. 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? 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. With qualities of openness, socio-economic diversity, and typological adaptability that make these neighbourhoods culturally and economically significant, their resilience in face of structural changes⎯from economic transitions to globalization’s acceleration of mobility and migrations⎯make their understanding and the urban resources they provide crucial in developing specific urban strategies for future sustainable developments.

[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.