Ambiguous property rights and the rise of the creative class: cases from Shanghai

Abstract

Since China accelerated its economic liberalization in the early 1990s, Shanghai’s urban development has come to symbolize the country’s economic global re-integration. In the city center, the western end of the former French and International concessions is transforming to resemble the likes of Berlin’s Prenzlauerberg or New York’s Williamsburg in its proliferation of boutique cafes, designer showrooms and ateliers that are spatial markers for the “rise of the creative class.” Despite the increasingly international trend quarter vibe, the procedural ‘informalities’ of its spatial productions confound western presumptions of property rights, institutional stability and clarity represented by the outward appearance of a globalizing and modernizing physical environment, compelling an interrogation of the agents, drivers and the local frameworks for its urban spatial production. This paper will unpack the processes through which creative entrepreneurs with cosmopolitan knowhow and transnational linkages are innovating spatial reuse, exploiting the vestiges of the planned economyambiguous property rights, fragmented ownerships, institutional immunities in property procurement. Through case studies from the city center area, how these agents evade institutional appropriation, while seeming to develop mechanisms for heritage preservation will be analyzed. The persistance of adaptive governance abetting the unplanned yet distinctive realization of a creative quarter is conceptualized through the framework of “gentrification with Chinese characteristics,” where the constellation of expat, returnee Chinese and local stakeholders, from designers to developers to residents, often themselves performing multiple roles, are growing increasingly adept at adapting to the discretionary decision-making by the different levels of the state and ad-hoc adjustments to policies, realizing the global aspirations of an international quarters within the local frameworks.