Between development and heritage protection: cases of high-density low-income housing in city center Shanghai

Abstract

Enclosed by street-facing boutiques, cafés, trattorias and creative studios that represent Shanghai's accelerated marketization and globalization since the early 1990s, the persistence of the '72家房客/residents' phenomenon, denoting the overcrowded living conditions often accompanied by inadequate infrastructural facilities, in the center of the blocks of the conservation area in the former French Concession, reveals a seemingly contemporary dilemma facing historic city centers in developing economies: that of residents caught between the ambitions for development and the claims of heritage protection. The specificities of China's shifting institutional frameworks and ambiguous property rights accompanying economic transition, and the localized institutional hold on fragmented ownership in city center Shanghai, however, exacerbate the simultaneous gentrification on the surface and the harboring of dilapidating high-density low-income housing inside, mixing market aspirations and institutional structures residual from the era of planned economy.

This paper will focus on cases of residential housing in city center Shanghai that have evaded the more representative en-bloc relocation-demolition (??) process since economic transition began in the early 1990s to reexamine the conflict between aspirations for globalization, represented by the convergence of two outwardly conflicting desires of development and heritage protection, and a residual institutional framework. How historic processes—social, economic and political—produced the current conditions of involuntary high-density communal living, what institutional shifts underpin the currency of fragmented ownerships, the changing means of spatial production since economic transition began, will serve as bases for addressing the nuances of city center housing caught in between global aspirations and local urban production systems.