Urban Loopholes: Creative Alliances of Spatial Production in Shanghai’s City Center 9783035608908, 9783035611045

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Urban Transformation in Diverse Inner-city Neighborhoods in Shanghai
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: The Residential Neighborhood
Chapter 3: The Cultural Street
Chapter 4: The Midtown of China
Chapter 5: The New Economies
Chapter 6: The Contemporary Art Ecologies
Chapter 7: Outlook
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Illustration Credits
Index of Persons, Institutions, and Firms

Citation preview

Urban Loopholes

Ying Zhou

Urban Loopholes Creative Alliances of Spatial Production in Shanghai’s City Center

Birkhäuser Basel

6 Preface 14

Urban Transformation in Diverse Inner-city Neighborhoods in Shanghai Foreword by Kees Christiaanse 17

Chapter 1: Introduction The Context of the Transition Economy and the Chinese City 30 Conceptual Framework: the Urban Loophole 37 Research Methods 48 Existing Studies on Urban China in Transition 54 Content and Structure 22

69 Chapter 2: The Residential Neighborhood

80 86 90 99 106 111 118 126 129

Seeds of Housing Marketization, Foreign Investment, and Reconnecting to the World State Institutions, Housing Marketization, and the Gap of Opportunity Expedited Know-How Import and the Dual Market Before the Tower: the Lilong Origins of the Residual Conditions Preservation of Ambiguous Property Rights Demographic Shift and Commercial Spatial Demand Incremental Conversions and Small Creative Entrepreneurs Changing Habitat

143

Chapter 3: The Cultural Street 150 162 170 177 185 198 206 210

From First Recognitions of Architectural Heritage to Implementation Setting the Context for Heritage Policy Implementation The Old House and the Club House—Changing Market Supply and Demand Localized Cosmopolitans and the Developing of Le Passage Fuxing and Ferguson Lane Conserving Heritage: Lane 1754 (Aka 1768) and Lane 117 The ‘Western’ District and Learning from the ‘Beautification Plan’ The World Primary School and Small Entrepreneurs Approximating Globalization and the State’s Appropriation

235 Chapter 4: The Midtown of China

243 254 261 272 281 287 296 313

The Paragon of Economic Liberalization: Jing’an District and the Development of West Nanjing Lu Evocation of Heritage—Redefining Jing’an Villas Jing’an Villas’ Commercialization and Creative Enterprises The Precedent of Tianzifang for Commercialization The Public Relations Wars and the Differing Visions of Jing’an Villas’ Future The Neighboring En-Bloc Development of Dazhongli Zhang Gardens: Jing’an Develops Its Heritage Value Gentrification with Chinese Characteristics

335 Chapter 5: The New Economies

339 Alternative Business Plan for Creative Incubation: Anken Green 350 New Local-Global Alliances: the Upgrade of Yongkang Lu 364 The New Economies 379

Chapter 6: The Contemporary Art Ecologies 384

394 400 404 408

From Contestation to Appropriation: the Transformation of M50 “Made in China”: New Museums and the Business of Art Uncertainty and Regeneration Art and Architecture Catalyze Development Contemporary Art Ecologies

423

Chapter 7: Outlook 425 Cases from Shanghai and Urban Loopholes 428 Shifts in the Urban Loopholes under Economic Transition 430 The Urban Loopholes as Equilibrators and Learning From the Urban Loophole 435

Acknowledgments 437 About the Author 438

Illustration Credits 441

Index of Persons, Institutions, and Firms

Preface “If we don’t know where we come from, we are standing nowhere.” Ai Weiwei, interview with Evan Osnos for the New Yorker Festival, 2014 When I want to describe what it was like to live under the strictures of a socialist planned economy, I usually start with a fond memory of ice cream in the early 1980s. In the sweltering summers of Shanghai back then, I would explain, there were two kinds of ice cream to which a child like myself could look forward. Both were cubic blocks wrapped in thin wax paper packed in blue cardboard boxes, and opened to the creamy white ‘iced bricks [冰砖]’ with the only flavor possible to ice cream a child of that place and that time could know. The choice between the ‘medium-sized brick [中砖]’ and the ‘large-sized brick [大砖]’ was an obvious one, although I had to weigh the melting speed of the larger piece against the infrequency of refrigerators in the city. Ice cream is something to which almost everyone reading this can relate. I use ice cream to explain because the abundance represented by the contemporary diversity of flavors, sizes, types, not to mention places where one could procure them, is something that we often take for granted. My limited scope of ice cream corresponded with a drawn-out era in Chinese history when central planning had also controlled every aspect of daily life, from consumer products and housing to education and jobs. It isolated the vast country of billions from the changing outside world. Central planning and the political ideologies of socialism are abstract concepts. But the availability and choice of ice cream is a concrete, lived experience. From our perspective of living in globally connected market economies, where having choices is a given, a fundamental reflection on the tremendous transformations that have taken place in China, bringing it from one of socialist planning to market capitalism, or more concretely from preciously limited to overwhelming choices for ice cream, is crucial to any further studies of the country, and other similarly managed places in the world today. I use ice cream to explain, also, because, as an architect, I am also interested in the place where I had lined up at the Dairy Factory [牛奶棚]. Today, it is where the white tiled mammoth of the Shanghai Library stands. Like many parts of the city of Shanghai that have undergone complete renewal since the early 1990s, the neighborhood—my memories of ice cream queues took place here—which had been a suburban edge of the 1980s city, has also become centrally located prime real estate in the expansive metropolis of Shanghai today. In the proliferation of consumer choices and the spatial expansion within the three decades since economic liberalization began, the transformations of Shanghai have been tremendous. The transformations in the municipal region of more than twenty-plus million are embodied in my memory of those ice cream blocks. From the humble and locally produced blue-packaged Guangming brand, the only one at the time, to today’s snazzy Häagen-Dazs parlors, fro-yo bars, iced mooncake fads, and whatnot, not only has consumerism, propelled by globally-circulated capitalism, returned and blossomed; but together with policies and developments that have made it all possible, it has resulted in locally specific urban spatial productions that have fundamentally reshaped the city. Both the changing urban society and its spatial transformations are important to the ensuing study. (Fig. 1) Through lenses spe6

Fig. 1 Photo collage of Deng Xiaoping from a large mural featuring the skyline of Shenzhen and representing China’s economic liberalization as propelled by the Deng-led central government, with the skyline of Shanghai’s Bund and Pudong, representing the central government’s decision to make Shanghai the ‘Dragon’s Head’ of the nation, initiating accelerated economic marketization and the rapid urban transition that took place (photo collage by author)

cific to the discipline of architecture and urban design, the following piece will try to unpack how the mechanisms of urban spatial production facilitated and manifested the rapid growth, transformations, and globalization in the contemporary Chinese city of Shanghai. It is from the empirically gathered physical and social-economic manifestations of the everyday that the study of urban spatial production reveals the broader development in the political economy of rapidly changing cities. I am of the urban generation born in the decade after the death of China’s great leader Mao, and my memories span from the ones before me who experienced the famines of the Great Leap Forward and the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution and

from overseas wires. I lived in a flat that, though crowded by Western standards, was not shared with two or three other families and was not short on modern infrastructure. The winters were cold, for all indoor heating appliances had been removed by the post-Liberation decree for cities south of the Yangtze River. Unscientific though it clearly was, the authorities had perhaps really believed that central planning could even overcome the weather and that the massive region south of Yangtze did not need

Preface

those who came after me knowing only the rapid growth and change of economic liberalization. I was a privileged child. I lived in a city, and a relatively well-off one for the then impoverished China. My family had a refrigerator in an era when appliances were limited and bought only through foreign currency exchange certificates procured

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heating. Nevertheless, with ice cream came summer, and then came the fridge, washing machine, television, and even television shows, on one single channel. Compared with when I was born, with my mother’s hukou still not returned to Shanghai after having been sent to the countryside like millions of other urban youths, and food was rationed and coupons for agricultural products were still the currency of exchange for the socialist planned economy, life was improving. I was fortunate to grow up in the times of change, change for the better nonetheless. With Disney’s Snow White and Romy Schneider’s Princess Sissi showing at the cinemas, and jeans and sneakers appearing in street markets, not only was China no longer tormented by political upheavals and ideological wars that took tremendous toll on the ordinary people’s everyday lives, but cities, particularly those like Shanghai, were using their cosmopolitan pasts to reconnect to the outside world. In the midst of the tremendous changes to come though, I left the country, with my parents. Like many in Shanghai who had pre-1949 familial links to the West, a transcontinental change boded life’s even better betterment. It was only when we watched the hopes that had united the idealistic students and pragmatic workers dashed, in the Tiananmen Square of 1989, from the safety in front of our tiny but colored CNN -looping television, that my parents, like many Chinese students who had only planned on a short sojourn in the U.S. before returning, decided indeed to remain away from their country. It was the clarity of that defining event—perhaps magnified by the commentaries so openly uttered—rather than the repeated uncertainties that they had suffered in the decades before, that convinced them of the choice. It was, as I would only realize later, also for my future. I was spared the trauma of the 1990s state-owned enterprise (SOE ) layoffs and the mad optimism of demolition and urban renewals. But after an East Coast liberal arts education and stints in cities like New York, Boston, Basel, I would arrive in Shanghai, realizing that I have an understanding of China’s inherent logic and an outsider’s eye that saw many things that most who remained could not. It was early one evening in Damascus, in the fall of 2009. I was teaching and had in tow twelve architecture students. I noted out loud that the street we were walking down reminded me of Shanghai. In daylight, the people, the signage, the buildings, surely would have given away that I was not on Huaihai Lu, or the former Avenue Joffre. But in the early dusk light, the proportion of spaces duped my ability to discern the city. When we continued onto other boulevards the next day, my visceral confusion of places was confirmed, by the realization that those trees were platanus. (Fig. 2) Their distance apart, their relations to the sidewalk, the setback of the buildings and the proportions of the road to the architecture, their role in the beautification of the city were part of the spatial vocabulary for urbanism of the French mandate in Damascus. The platanus were also the same ones in Shanghai. In the western-end of the former French concessions where I was born and grew up, the trees had lovingly canopied over the freshly tarmacked streets in the summers. The convergence of the images made me realize the planning ideologies that had shaped mine and many others’ memories of cities. Other things we learned in our two weeks in Damascus also made me realize that I could understand its urbanism. This was not only because I understand already its colonial legacies and planning ideologies; but also because I understand the logic of 8

Fig. 2 Photos of the platanus trees from Damascus, which triggered the theoretical framework for this study, 2009

another nation with a transitioning economy, China, whose city also manifested its encounter with modernity, Shanghai. It was another strangely confirming moment, when one of my students, a girl from Chongqing, burst into tears as the dean of Damascus University explained their urban transformation processes. She was distressed at how similarly the descriptions sounded to the ones we knew from China. Growing inequality deviating from the original tenets of socialism, the rampant commodification of architecture heritage, the development projects on extra-territorial lands by global capital. The processes of change that the country is undergoing following its economic liberalization, and specifically its urban spatial manifestations, echoed the ones

scent conceptual framework. As someone with intimate knowledge of the city’s palettes, memories, culture, as well as my undetectably local dialect, doors opened more readily and more easily for me than for transplanted scholars, even Chinese ones. I had gleaned enough to understand the ticking of the city. My empathies as an insider are

Preface

we knew. The concept of the ‘urban loophole,’ which will be the underlying red thread through the ensuing text, grew out of my observations from Damascus, but would become an important conceptual framework for deepening the understanding of how the urban spatial production processes informed and were impressed by a transitioning political economy. The first inklings of the urban loophole came out in an article in the issue themed “Resilient Cities” in the journal, Critical Planning, in 2010. Shanghai, thus, came easily as the chosen site for a deeper study using this na-

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also supplemented by a critical outsider’s insights, garnered from extensive exposure to many cities in the world. This double role of being both local and global, much in the vein of the modern era Shanghainese—this I will explain throughout the ensuing chapters—had motivated a fledgling undergraduate thesis about the city in the early 2000s, reconstructing the contemporary urgency for the city’s renaissance. In my ensuing trips, the city that I initially found coarse rapidly blossomed. Shanghai’s evolution in the 2000s was undeniably radical. Every year made me feel like a muttering old lady lamenting the disappearance of favorite haunts, especially the hole-in-thewall food places. At the same time, I was also impressed by the variety of new spots that flaunt ever more cutting-edge entrepreneurial experimentation. Clearly, the city is again taking on a role in shaping a global paradigm shift. After living in the early 2000s Williamsburg of New York, I sought out and easily found neighborhoods like Prenzlauer Berg, Bricklane, Nørrebro, Kreis 5, areas known as creative quartiers in the cities I traipsed through. I was aware I am very much one of these multilingual cosmopolites who gravitated toward places frequently by other multi-culturals, finding my habitus in the patina of diversity and vibe of creativity. I attributed my curiosity for the different and new also to my Shanghainese cosmopolitan legacy, although in the city it was, at the time, still buried underneath the rubble of its demolitions, but emerging. Aside from the ice cream anecdote, I am fond of telling Westerners, especially Europeans I meet when I explain Shanghai, of the mont blanc dessert that my mother grew up eating. The creamy vermicelli was supposed to be an import from the Borgia household to the French patisseries and was made during the fall harvest of chestnuts. But it was also the treat that little girls with grandparents who studied abroad ate in 1950s Shanghai, just as the tap dancing lessons and Holly­ wood cinema were what their mothers indulged in the 1930s. To a world that had belittled the poor, isolated, and backwards China in the 1990s, these stories spoke to a worldliness and cultural affluence that was embedded in the everyday life of a city which had rivaled New York and Paris in its former cosmopolitanism. After 1949 indeed, many emigrated from Shanghai: Yo-Yo Ma, I. M. Pei, and Vera Wang amongst the well-known of these, far more worldly than their hosts would have suspected. Even though this study initially set out to be contextualized largely in the two decades from 1992 to 2012, the impact of historic legacy plays a crucial role to understanding the specificities of Shanghai’s contemporary developments. Chinese scholarly research has largely kept mum about the proceedings of the post-Liberation era. Yet my own knowledge of the fates of many of the heritage buildings from my childhood neighborhood, for example, including the Palmer and Turner-designed building in which I was born and lived, made this unspoken past crucial to understanding and communicating the contemporary potentials for many of the neighborhoods being studied. My privileged position, both as an insider and also as an outsider, able to, at the very least, record this recent past, has compelled me to put in writing many things that may seem obvious to locals but will soon disappear with the country’s contemporary eagerness to forget. The fieldwork and interviews that carry the weight for the conceptualization of the study take the contemporary investigation as a lens through which the historic layers are collapsed, relating spatial legacies to contemporary urban spatial production. Taking place largely in the city center neighborhoods, where spatial complexities are multiplied by socio-political nuances, the surprising absence 10

of spatial specificities in the study of the socio-economic transition in the last decades was another motivation for what I feel is an urgent piece in the fleeting ‘moving target’ of a rapidly changing Chinese city. Writing as an architect, the frame for the study is spatial. I analyze the socio-economic, cultural, political transformations through their spatial impact. The city as an imprint of the multiple forces could be no better specimen from which to understand the fundamental transformations to society, which, in turn, also inform the city as spaces, people and forces itself. (Fig. 3) Fundamental questions like, why is this building where it is, why is it this kind of building, rather than that, and why is it this program, rather than that, often lead to questions that overlap with realms examined by other disciplines. Urban sociologists would ask, who and how many of these people are here. Urban economists would ask, how much does it cost to own or rent, and how long is the lease. Lawyers may ask for the tenure type and ownership contracts, posing questions that may traverse philosophy and morality. Historians may ask, how old is this building, and what is the story of its creation. This study is thus most indebted to the scholars who precede me in their detailed analyses of the transformation processes, procedures, and statistics, from the disciplines of sociology, economics, politics, law, real estate, and many more. The quantitative data analyses that are outside the scope of my research are important in grounding my grasp of the larger trends. My own fieldwork- and interview-based mappings and qualitative analyses hope to contribute to the larger body of knowledge on urban transformation. The newest proclamation for a China Dream magnifies the growing anxiety of a

Preface

world watching the rising economic and political clout of the largest country in the last decades. Despite the abstractness of the notion of a ‘China Dream’ itself and the vagueness of its goals and realizations, even as it suggests and rivals the promise of an ‘American Dream’, the pressing question seems what does this aspirational ‘Dream’ bode for the future, and what will it mean to the world. It is perhaps more than timely that an examination of the urban transformation of the largest city in China could yield insights to the global aspirations and their localizations since Shanghai was declared the ‘head of the Dragon’ in 1992. As a modern city built to ease China’s global integration and capital mobilization in the beginning of the 20th century, Shanghai’s re-emergence as a global city since economic liberalization accelerated in the 1990s marks it a specific case of the aspirations that motivate and are motivated by the speed and quantity of the city’s spatial transformations.

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Fig. 3 Commercial insertions into ground-floor street-front buildings taken in 2011 and 2012

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Urban Transformation in Diverse Inner-city Neighborhoods in Shanghai Kees Christiaanse Ying Zhou’s book Urban Loopholes focuses both on aspects of diversity in the specific urban environment of the early 20th century modern(ist) quarters in Shanghai, as well as on the more generic level of the Chinese, the Asian and even global city. It brings these scales together by embedding the urban transformation of the Shanghai neighborhoods into the economic development of China within the context of global urbanization. Ying Zhou is a native from Shanghai and was raised in the USA . She was born after Mao’s death in the wake of the allocation of Special Economic Zones by Deng Xiaoping, resulting in Shanghai’s designation as “The Dragon’s Head” in 1992. She grew up in a pre-war modern apartment in the former French Concession, and followed her parents who studied in the USA . Ying studied at Princeton and Harvard and worked in Studio Basel in Switzerland for Herzog & de Meuron before landing in the Future Cities Laboratory of the ETH Zürich in Singapore, in my research team on Urban Breeding Grounds. The timeline of the urban transformation processes described in her research runs parallel with her biography. Having both a local and a diaspora background makes her intimately related to the actors that drive urban transformation. Despite this relation, Ying Zhou was able to keep sufficient critical distance to the subject. Her deep knowledge of the local context was an advantage to her research. Shanghai’s central neighborhoods show an amazing diversity. They are popular with “localized cosmopolitans,” who are active in various forms of entrepreneurship and real estate development. Superficially, the areas remind one of cultural districts in Berlin or New York. But their urban transformation follows entirely different mechanisms. Their vibrant dynamic balance lies in the frictions caused by the parallel regimes of administration and economy on the one hand and the semi-controlled liberalization of the market on the other. The speed of economic change forced the government to test, adapt, and improvise with its economic policies. This step-by-step engagement in market economy mechanisms became known as “crossing the river while feeling the rocks.” The resulting ambiguity in policy, legislation, and enforcement offered windows of opportunity for private and governmental actors to engage in urban transformation. For these windows of opportunity, Ying Zhou introduced the term urban loophole to describe the transitional, fuzzy, and ambiguous moments between different administrative regimes, exploited by various actors in urban (re)development. She meticulously describes how, over a time span of only 20 years, from 1992–2012, the urban loopholes change from tolerating semi-legal small entrepreneurs to becoming a deliberate instrument of urban renewal by the government. She shows how both private and government parties are in a reciprocal “learning by doing” relationship, steadily adapting their strategies. 14

In the early phases of economic liberalization, the urban loophole consisted of active street fronts, caused by families moving out of houses originally designed for one household but, since the revolution, overcrowded by multiple families, freeing up the ground floor for retail and other commercial activities. The government deliberately tolerated this informal use in order to stimulate micro-economic activity and the procurement of daily amenities. Simultaneously, a “dual market” emerged, consisting of cheap state housing under plan economy, and commodified housing, of which use rights were sold to residents who engaged in the real estate market. The inertness of owner or user status regulated by the government created a certain resilience of neighborhoods against rapid gentrification and indirectly stimulated heritage consciousness, when trendsetters from outside discovered the potential value of the built substance (see the chapters on “Preservation by Inhabitation”). In more recent cases, district governments commercially exploit “administrativelyallocated land,” which in fact is not allowed to be marketized, by creating an “official” urban loophole, in the form of an exception for “creative clusters” to be allowed on this land in order to stimulate the economy. Ying Zhou carefully sketches the development of the urban loophole from an informal and bottom-up phenomenon into a deliberate policy instrument for local governments. For her case studies, she selected three squares of approximately one square kilometer in the specifically modern(-ist) and

author’s discipline of architecture, offers a level of detail over a time span that is unprecedented. A timeframe of more than two decades how past transformations have conditioned the present, an analysis that in turn can guide the instrumentality—or design agency—of future interventions in the city.” This work fills a gap and enriches current research and publications on the theme, as Chinese studies are often rather uncritical, academically immature, or superficially written for a non-academic audience. Western studies often tend to approach urban transformation from the Western perspective of social democratic market economy. This book convincingly mediates the quintessence of the history of Chinese economic development in relation to urbanization. Secondly, it is a history of the urban development of Shanghai, of the emergence of heritage policies, and of the upcoming creative industries. But foremost, it is a precise rendering of how agents and governments in complex urban conditions reciprocally react to changing circumstances and define and exploit development opportunities by creatively interpreting and applying legislation ambiguities.

Urban Transformation in Diverse Inner-city Neighborhoods in Shanghai

central lilong neighborhoods, where contrasting developments and diversity are significant. She describes urban transformation in detail. The level of detail and the nuances, the enormous amount of material she gathered, and the clear way in which she organized the material in a compelling narrative, leads to results that she describes herself: “The scalar specificity with which this study has been conducted, coming from the

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Chapter 1 Introduction The Context of the Transition Economy and the Chinese City Conceptual Framework: the Urban Loophole Research Methods Existing Studies on Urban China in Transition Content and Structure

“… serious analysis of nearly all of the important aspects of life in China must, eventually, confront Shanghai and its special place in the Chinese scheme of things.” Lucian Pye 1 “… if we find new words there is a hope of producing a framework of understanding. Without a framework any means of instrumentality are futile.” Rem Koolhaas 2 In old city center neighborhoods of Shanghai, socio-demographic, cultural, and economic changes have produced and are producing new trend quarters with a vibe echoing the likes of Berlin Prenzlauer Berg or New York Williamsburg, neighborhoods known as the harbingers of the creative class. Less eye-catching and more everyday than what has often been presented as the glossy “city on steroids,” 3 incremental developments inside the fine-grained urban morphology are creating unique mixedused neighborhoods. The transformations are not only sustaining the culturally rich and economically thriving neighborhoods; they are also attracting international talent to the city. In the rhetoric of the global competition of cities, it is by attracting the mobile, transnational creatives in whom the capital of knowledge industries is embedded, that these areas physically manifest the urban transition to a post-industrial phase of economic development. In light of the Chinese economy’s slowdown, these neighborhoods, better than the new towns and development zones, represent the potential of a more stabilizing shift from rapid progress to sustainable prosperity. The Chinese city’s enthusiasm for roaring highways, rising towers, gleaming shopping malls and more recently, the adverse effects of the rapid realization of their goals are still what allures Western media. Academic studies have also focused on the spectacular aspects of Chinese urbanism’s renewal processes, (Fig. 1) zooming in on the most prominent productions of new global spaces. The following study, in contrast, follows the several-decade-long transformation of Chinese city center neighborhoods. It reveals the intricacies and underlying mechanisms of China’s urban spatial production.4 Through the lens of urban spatial production, the study offers as yet unexamined explanations for the rapidness of Shanghai’s economic transition and global integration. What do the urban transformations in city center neighborhoods reveal about how the post-socialist city in a developing country, which had isolated itself from the world for three decades, so rapidly re-globalized? Scholars who have theorized China’s urban transformation have largely done so from a macro perspective, relying on existing, Western models of governance to explain the Chinese city’s rapid transition.5 In contrast, the scalar specificity with which this study has been conducted, coming from the author’s discipline of architecture, offers a level of detail over a time span that is unprecedented.6 Using detailed case studies to document and analyze aspects of Shanghai’s urban transformations over a timeframe of more than two decades—since China’s economic liberalization began—the study engages a ‘genealogical mode of inquiry.’ 7 The genealogical mode of inquiry is a critical analysis of how past transformations have conditioned the present, an analysis that in turn can guide the instrumentality—or design agency—of future interventions in the city. The cases unravel the localized nuances that confound Western presumptions of property rights, institutional stability and clarity. They disentangle the 18

2000

2010

Fig. 1 Aerial photographs of Shanghai’s city center area’s transformation between 2000, left, and 2010, right

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actors, processes, and drivers that have produced the physical environment visible today.8 They help explain how the pattern of processes has eased the rapidness of China’s urban transition and facilitated its global integration. In the specificity of spatial production processes the instrumentality crucial to the discipline of architecture also becomes possible.9 Motivated by the need for a fresh framework that can support instrumentality, the concept of the ‘urban loophole’ is proposed as a theoretical framework for understanding the processes and phenomena observed in the study. The term, as elabo­ rated in a following section, describes a mechanism for spatial production in a rapidly transforming political economy.10 The urban loophole mechanism is not a conventional or sanctioned pathway to urban development, but rather a means for creating urban spaces to meet market demands by exploiting gaps and oversight in the formal institutions and governance structures. The numerous small stores that have popped up informally in Shanghai’s residential neighborhoods are prominent products of the urban loophole. The subtler tactics in the commercial redevelopment of formerly industrial lands, under the guise of a developing creative industries cluster, for example, also shows use of the urban loophole. The urban loophole’s existence, in short, is a symptom of transition in the political economy. Its products in the physical environment manifest the mediation and facilitation processes that are enablers of a rapid economic transition. Other manifestations and enablers of China’s economic transition, including what theorists have termed its ‘adaptive governance’, 11 ‘institutional amphibiousness’, 12 ‘dual market’ 13 and more, help produce and are partly induced by the urban loophole. Understanding the spatial processes resulting from the urban loophole thus helps clarify China’s urban transformation in the context of its economic transition. The concept of the ‘urban loophole’ is relevant to understanding not only the transitioning political economy of China, but also other political economies under rapid transition. Especially at a time when the so-called ‘Chinese model’ 14—in which successful economic development does not preclude political autocracy—is becoming increasingly convincing, this study is a timely and necessary investigation of the spatial mechanisms of the ‘Chinese model.’ Despite the exponentially growing number of China analysts claiming to be de­ coding the so-called Middle Kingdom, the country remains largely a mystifying monolith to the outside world. In all its complexities, it is incompletely understood.15 The sheer size of China, as it remakes the world in its own image, from forays into subSaharan Africa to the suburbs of North America, has fueled a growing anxiety about the reach of its power.16 Shanghai’s rise exemplifies the simultaneous wariness and fascination of China’s outsider observers. In 1992, the city was deliberately chosen by the Chinese leadership to spearhead the country’s global conquest. Two decades later, the sci-fi film Her used Shanghai’s sleek state-of-the-art skyscrapers to play the backdrop of a future Los Angeles.17 It is thus surprising that few studies exist that explain the nuances of China’s urban developments and relate them to its global aspirations. This would not only diffuse the amalgamated anxieties but also clarify what makes the country tick. The city center neighborhoods of Shanghai, as a result of legacy conditions, exemplify the localized nuances that confound Western presumptions. They encompass the ‘wicked problems’ of Chinese urbanism:18 the production of global-looking spaces 20

through local procedures, the persistence of dual markets where market and planned economics continue to coexist, the perpetuation of ambiguous property rights, the adaptive and discretionary local state, and more. Few other locales in urban China show the coexistence of these wicked problems in such visible proximity. How these neighborhoods have transformed into what look like new trend quarters is a question, for which answers would be valuable to scholars of economic transition and urban planning. Firstly, how did these neighborhoods survive the urban restructuring and prevalent demolition-redevelopments that accompanied economic transition? Who are the actors, what are the building types and urban structures, and what are the urban spatial production processes, exogenous and endogenous, that enabled these neighborhoods to thrive? In the context of local institutional frameworks that con-

studies, and more. It also outlines the posited shifts in the urban loophole, reflecting changes in urban transition. The section “Research Methods” will elaborate the relationship between the conceptual framework and the case study method used in the research.19 The use of the case study method, with cases framed by a particular timespan and bounded by geographic location of a specific scale, shapes the ‘spatial cases’ of the research, which are specific to the discipline of architecture. Given that the subject and location of study is in China, where productive criticality is often stifled, the study’s alignment with the genealogical mode of inquiry, as one that problematizes the dominant historic narrative 20 and incites instrumentality, is deemed especially necessary. This aspect of the study’s relevance is elaborated in the section, “Existing Studies on Urban China in Transition,” where a review of existing literature on Chinese urbanism, on Shanghai, and on the different topics of research also follow. The section will show how the study fills an important gap in the lacuna of relevant studies on China’s urban transition. It will also show the necessity of traversing the local-non-local divide in any study on Chinese urbanism. Finally, an overview of the chapter will be outlined in the last section, “Content and Structure.”

Chapter 1 Introduction

tain vestiges of the planned economy, how was it possible that the market processes of globalized consumption and production are not only realized but also innovated? What are the urban loopholes, and why are they important to these urban transitions? How have they impeded or abetted the transformation processes? More broadly, what do these experiences and their take-aways offer to other emerging economies, transition economies, and their urban constituencies? How do the transformation processes observed in China help redefine existing frameworks and formulate new ones to instrumentalize agency? The first section of this chapter, “The Context of the Transition Economy and the Chinese City,” gives an overview of the impact of economic transition on the Chinese city. This background, elaborated in more detail in the chapters, is necessary for understanding the conceptual framework of the urban loophole, which serves as a red thread through the study. The second section, “Conceptual Framework: the Urban Loophole,” defines the concept of the urban loophole, explains its relationship to existing theories on China’s economic transition from the fields of political science, sociology, urban

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The Context of the Transition Economy and the Chinese City In 1992, the then paramount leader of China, Deng Xiaoping, declared Shanghai the “Dragon’s Head [龙头]” in the acceleration of the nation’s economic transition. Economic liberalization had already begun more than a decade prior, when the death of Mao Zedong wrought a fundamental reconceptualization of China’s political economy. From decades of ideologically fraught governing practices and economically isolating central planning that had devastated the once economically vibrant, albeit politically unstable nation, the pace shifted to incorporate market elements in the 1980s, bolstered long-stagnant productivity and sparked economic growth. From an insulated planned economy to a globally oriented ‘socialist market economy,’ 21 China’s economic transition at the time also seemed to resonate with the broader bent towards privatization and neoliberalism that was taking over the world at that moment.22 The first trial sites for market economics within Chinese jurisdiction were set up in the 1980s; they took the form of Special Economic Zones (SEZ s) in proximity to Hong Kong, a market economy British sovereignty that had often served as one of the only entry points of global flows into sealed-off Red China. With their success, the opening of fourteen coastal cities to foreign investments in the mid-1980s further tested the viability of economic opening within the confines of existing institutional structures. From a nation state based on a centrally planned economy, formed under the tenets of Communist ideology, with all resources centrally allocated and consumption centrally controlled, the transition to a market-oriented economy in the 1980s was aptly called ‘reform and opening [改革开放].’ Motivated by aspirations for a xiaokang [小康] society, one where the citizens lived comfortably and with above-basic living standards, the pursuit of economic growth directly reflected the scarcities of everyday life as a result of decades of failed five-year plans. Economic reform at first allowed the setup of a parallel market system that could coexist and interact with the planned resource conduits. The government instituted the parallel market to prod economic efficiency through limited competition.23 Farmers, the first to be encouraged to increase productivity by rural reforms in 1978, were able to sell their above-quota surplus agrarian products at the ‘free markets [自由市场]’ of the 1980s. (Fig. 2) In cities where demand existed, small street markets also began to supply household goods sourced from southern

Fig. 2 Deng Xiaoping visiting Shanghai’s “free markets” in the 1980 s

22

China. The proximity of southern China to free market Hong Kong created a small group of independent entrepreneurs. The central government also began to implement devolution of the highly centralized bureaucratic and fiscal structure in the 1980s, giving regional and local states increas-

ing autonomy in financial and urban management. For Shanghai, one of the largest industrial centers in the country, and which had overwhelmingly contributed to the national GDP since the foundation of the nation in 1949, growing fiscal autonomy brought welcome relief. Obligatory

LIAODONG PENINSULA

remittance to the central government had extracted nearly 87 percent of Shanghai’s total revenue in the three decades since 1949. This amounted to as much as one-sixth of the Chinese state’s total revenue.24 While Shanghai’s fiscal contribution bequeathed central government-selected inland cities with capital for their developments, it impeded the city’s urgent and growing need for infrastructure and housing developments. In 1985, the central government’s State Council approved expenditure increases for Shanghai. In 1988, it approved the capping of Shanghai’s annual revenue submission to the central gov-

Qinhuangdao Tianjin NORTH CHINA INDUSTRIAL ENERGY ZONE

Dalian Yantai SHANDONG PENINSULA Qingdao Lianyungang

HUAIHE ECONOMIC REGION

Xi’an

YANGTZE DELTA REGION Wuhan

Nantong Shanghai Ningbo

Chongqing

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Xiamen PEARL DELTA ZONE Guangzhou Shantou Shenzhen Zhuhai

Beihai

Zhanjiang Hainan

200

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Priority Development Areas Special Economic Zones 14 Open Coastal Cities

Fig. 3 Map of the Special Economic Zones and 14 Open Coastal Cities in the 1980 s

ernment. With these two approvals, the municipality was, at last, able to accumulate capital for reinvestment in its own development. At the same time, the central government approved the creation of new development zones in selected coastal cities, and set them up as the locales for the landing of the first foreign investment flows. (Fig. 3) These coastal cities had developed manufacturing bases from the modern era. They also had historic links to overseas capital through their diaspora connections, and thus were able to attract the first waves of needed available capital from abroad.25 Loans made, by the Asia Development Bank and the World Bank, to Shanghai in the 1980s also provided the first seed money for basic infrastructural construction, fundamental for further economic development.

Accelerated Economic Liberalization and the Political Status Quo Before 1989, China was already on its steady way to economic liberalization, although still “crossing the river while feeling the rocks [摸着石头过河],”26 as to whether market liberalization would also be accompanied by more political changes. In the aftermath of 1989, notably following the fall of Communism in the former Soviet-bloc countries, China’s own unanticipated civilian protests, and its ensuing political switch-ups, the nation’s course would be decisively chosen.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Incremental construction and renewal projects already began in the mid-1980s, constructing the first hotels, commercial housing and mixed-use typologies, in city center locations as well as new development zones in the urban periphery.

23

The unambiguous verdict and assertion for the party-state’s singular political control in the crackdown of protesters at Tian’anmen Square on 4 June 1989, shocked the developed world. Having just started to access and observe the long-closed China, the developed world had expected the country’s Open Door policy to lead to a softening of its political autocracy, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). More confounding was the course of continued marketization,27 which had seemed unsustainable in light of its hardline political stance. The Chinese leadership preferred to err on the side of caution, having witnessed the chaos that followed the IMF -compelled economic liberalization debacle in Russia and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In order to maintain what the leadership viewed as a necessary political stability for the exceptionally large and socio-economically diverse country as it economically transitioned, a post-socialist political change had to be avoided at all costs.28 For the demonstrators in Tian’anmen Square and other public spaces in Chinese cities in that summer of 1989, the ideological call for democracy and political change by the students had, indeed, also been accompanied by an overwhelming social unrest by the urban middle class, against rising unemployment, high inflation, growing corruption, as well as other economic woes of the incremental economic transition.29 The pragmatic road forward for the leadership thus showed a necessary push in urban prosperity to maintain the state’s grip on popular support.30 The choice of Shanghai as the “Dragon’s Head” in 1992, therefore, represented a crucial decision to simultaneously proceed with economic reform while at the same time asserting the validity and authority of the existing political system. Shanghai’s designated role as the site of accelerated marketization not only had to reaffirm the party-state’s essential role in sanctioning its economic and urban development, but the city’s ensuing economic success would serve to legitimize the decision taken to continue on the path of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.’ In this adage by the post-1989 leadership, “Chinese characteristics” denoted the continued opening up of the market and policy reforms that support market economics, while “socialism” offered continuity with the egalitarian tenets on which the party-state’s authority had been built since 1949, the year of China’s ‘Liberation’ from the tyrannies of imperialist capitalism.31 Aside from its ideological etymology, “socialism” was also an equivocal substitute to denote the continued legitimacy of the existing political order and the dominance of the party-state.32 The possibility of a successful economic liberalization without an accompanying political one, as had seemed the inevitable and prevalent order of things, was the enigma that China would put forward to the confounded developed world. This pairing of seeming contradictions that appeared to clash, would also most visibly manifest itself in the spaces that were rapidly being produced in its wake. And it is the continued reconciliation of these two ends that is fundamental to understanding the pervasive logic of Chinese urban transformation. The credo, of the Fourteenth Party Congress that took place in October 1992, of the “Dragon’s Head,” not only marked a crucial turning point for the direction of the development of a nation with a population of more than a billion people, but it more immediately had a profound impact on Shanghai. The municipality, one of only three provincial-level cities in the deep hierarchy of the Chinese bureaucratic pecking order, 24

was anointed to set the shining example of both accelerated economic liberalization and political continuity. After bloodlessly diffusing the citizens’ demonstrations and successfully convincing the workers to not stop production and not to join the demonstrations in the municipality in 1989,33 the rise of its municipal leadership to key central government positions was a validation of the chosen city’s economic prowess and political pragmatism.34 Conversely, the long exploited and suppressed city would greatly benefit from the political patronage bestowed by its coteries from the top. A decade after the creation of the SEZ s in the Pearl River Delta, Shanghai would “finally be re-awarded with the permission to attract foreign investment on a lavish scale” follow-

Fig. 4 Views towards the Lujiazui area of the Pudong in Shanghai, from the 1850 s, 1984 , 2000, and 2010, top to bottom

ing Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 tour of the Yangtze River Delta.35 Granted special status by the central government consenting to the continued experi-

mentation with marketization, Shanghai’s urban development in the ensuing decade would come to visibly showcase the performance of economic transition at the behest of

2000s announced the economic progress as represented by the city’s physical transformation: there were only 12 buildings over 80 stories in 1980; by 2000, there were 3,529; and in 2005 this numbers had already reached 10,045.36 (Fig. 4) The roaring highways, rising towers, gleaming shopping malls, and more recently the manicured golf courses and international schools, have served as contemporary indicators for Shanghai’s re-globalization. But more importantly, they have come to represent China’s rapid economic rise and its growing political clout in an increasingly interconnected contemporary world. Before 1989, large-scale spatial imprints had been made on tabula rasa sites, such as the newly built cities of the Pearl River Delta. But after 1992, production of city center commercial sites and commercial housing constructions, accompanying rapid expansions of development zones, would headily refine the spatial production processes in sites of complex urban value chains, necessary to rapidly materialize the nation’s global aspirations. And Shanghai was the chosen test bed. A return of the city that is re-globalizing required spaces for the economic impetus. For the first decade after 1992, the processes of land and housing marketization would lay the foundations for momentously transforming urban spatial production, which, together with the influx of foreign capital and local government spearheaded initiatives, would spatially restructure cities for the transition economy.

Chapter 1 Introduction

the central state. Statistics and metrics capture the momentous changes. GDP grew more than ten-fold in two decades, from less than 1,000 USD per person in 1990 to more than 13,000 USD per person in 2010. Books on the new urban age in the late

25

Institutional Mechanisms Mediating between Market and Planned Economies Give Rise to Spatial Opportunities In the context of China’s economic transition, specialists have used theories such as adaptive governance,37 and institutional amphibiousness,38 amongst others, to explain how China’s successful economic marketization could continue despite its continued single-party rule. To many political theorists and economists, the coexistence of market liberalization and political authoritarianism has defied existing expectation, and the success of the seemingly conflicting imperatives remains a conundrum, for which China has been posited as a ‘Black Swan’.39 Shanghai, in this sense, when it was chosen in the aftermath of 1989, could be seen also as the ‘head of the Black Swan.’ As political scientists and China specialists, Elizabeth Perry and Sebastian Heilmann, have assessed, “analysts have tended to dismiss potentially powerful innovations [of China’s economic transition] as irregularities, deviations, externalities, or simply deadends.”40 Heilmann and Perry, instead, found these political innovations crucial to the Chinese party-state’s aversion of social instability in the country’s rapid transition from planned to market economics. To explain the Chinese party-state’s political resilience,41 they ascribed it to the political system’s adaptive governance and its subset of ‘informal adaptive institutions,’42 as well as ‘guerrilla-style policy-making.’43 In the party-state’s acceptance and embracing of uncertainty, fed by and in turn enabling its guerrilla-style policy-making, Heilmann and Perry contended, they also benefit most from its opportunities.44 Theorists have also reconceptualized the prevalent understanding of discrete institutions to elucidate the processes that have facilitated China’s rapid economic development. As an alternative to a clear society versus state dichotomy, predicated on the Western presumptions of institutional clarity and determinacy,45 the scholar of contemporary China, Ding Xueliang, wrote of East Asia’s institutional amphibiousness: “the states are organizationally pervasive, without clear-cut boundaries. Their powers and functions are diffuse, and they pay little respect to due process. Consequently, the lines between public and private, political and personal, formal and informal, official and nonofficial, government and market, legal and customary, and between procedural and substantial are all blurred.” 46 The tradition of ‘guanxi,’ informal social networks,47 complementing amphibious institutions, uphold the ‘developmental state’ of China-in-transition, where the state directs and dominates economic development.48 As the country underwent rapid economic transition, it has been the malleability and porosity of its institutions that have helped the political system adjust to and absorb socio-economic instabilities. Institutional adaptability and innovative capacity for advanced economic growth, in turn reinforcing the party-state’s popular credibility and supporting its hegemony. Adaptive governance, reacting to rapid transition, perforated regulatory stringency with a necessary porosity and flexibility, to propel economic growth. Its capacity for testing out new solutions for institutions, processes, and actors, is not only visible in the reformulated public-private sector relationships and economic alliances. It is also visible in the urban developments that materially demonstrate the economic transition. The urban loophole, as the mechanism that gives rise to socio-spatial opportunities in the city, is the physical manifestation of adaptive governance and institutional amphibiousness. 26

Urban planning, a discipline relying on the logic of order and rules, similarly gained a necessary porosity and laxity in the context of China’s rapid economic transition. As planning scholar, Daniel B. Abramson, noted in his article “The Dialects of Urban Planning in China”, “other modes of urban planning that commonly protect public interests in advanced market economies—regulation, incentivization, advocacy, community enablement—have less obvious applicability in the developmentalist context. … pressures exist in China that tend to favor the emergence of … other planning modes.”49 Planning experts Michael Leaf and Hou Li also attributed transition in China’s institutional amphibiousness to the state’s adaptive governance in urban planning: “the lack of a clear distinction between public and private realms, or in other words, that the interpenetration between state and non-state structures creates ambiguity if not ‘amphibiousness’ in the institutional structures of governance,” which “underpins the regulatory flexibility that in other contexts has been interpreted as local state ‘in­ formality.’”50 The conditions of ‘informality’ and ‘ambiguities,’ which emerged as a result of the local state’s adaptive governance and amphibious institutions, created the urban loopholes for urban spatial production. In his book China’s Urban Transition, urban scholar John Friedmann confirmed the kind of potential that emerges from the gaps of China’s rapid urban transformation: “while this (unbounded social and economic relations) creates ambiguities, uncertainties, and confusion aplenty, it may also lead to the discovery of new opportunities for those who are willing to work within the shadow-land of unbounded practices that are largely devoid of state-made rules.”51 Those private and public sector entrepreneurs, especially in the first decade of rapid economic transition, not only capitalized on the new opportunities, but also set the precedent for ensuing spatial developments. Marketization has created spatial opportunities. The spatial opportunities, as Friedmann further assessed, manifested the devolution of control as a necessary consequence of marketization: “the central state is naturally nervous about the proliferation of these spaces, of practices it can no longer control. But in the contemporary world, boundlessness is a fundamental condition of the multiplex phenomenon of urbanization, the genie that no state knows how to push back into the bottle.”52 Elizabeth Perry, at the inception of the accelerated economic reforms, using the same metaphor of the market economy genie, had also foreseen: “the sheer expanse of mainland China, suggests that centralized market control will be extremely hard to maintain as the market genie is unbottled.”53 The scale of China and its deep bureaucratic hierarchy presents unparalleled challenges to the centralized state as it undergoes economic liberalization. The negotiations between top-down and bottom-up control—between the central and local state, between the local state and private sector entrepreneurs—have

The Dual Land and Housing Markets: Spatial Manifestations of Transition Economy Along with the institutional plasticity that resulted from China’s economic transition, a visible spatial consequence of transition is the coexistence of multiple systems of real estate markets. In both the housing and land markets, the establishment of a commodity housing and land market after transition has not entirely replaced housing and land allocated under a planned economy. Instead, transition has created dual

Chapter 1 Introduction

also created opportunities for spatial productions.

27

markets, in which ambiguous property rights have also created opportunities in spatial production. Under a planned economy, the erasure of the value of land, as a commodity, has resulted in inefficient allocation and chaotic land use.54 Similarly, the provision of housing as a welfare good under the planned economy, rather than it being defined as a tradable good, has resulted in severe housing shortages and dilapidation.55 Economic transition and growth required fundamental urban restructuring and development. The re-establishment of land as an urban commodity, ‘land marketization’,56 and the similar re-establishment of housing as a tradable good, ‘housing marketization’,57 were thus essential to urban development and economic growth. After economic transition, the local state marketized large portions of housing already in existence in cities, by selling them to existing residents. The central government also gave the local state authority to commodify all urban land, with the exception of ‘administratively-allocated land [划拨土地]’—land that had been allocated by the state to state enterprises and institutes.58 Portions of existing housing, largely historic buildings with ambiguous and disputed property rights, however, remained un-marketized and managed by the local state, especially in the city center neighborhoods. In the land market, administratively-allocated land also remained un-marketized as a vestige of the planned economy. Housing, which was left over from the planned economy era and under public management, coexisted with commercial housing, traded and exchanged in the commercial housing market. Together, they formed the ‘dual housing market.’ Similarly, administratively-allocated land, which remain banned from commercialization, coexisted with commercial leasehold land, forming the ‘dual land market.’ Land as urban resource takes on market and planned economy properties. In Shanghai, for example, as analysts Sun Sheng Han and Bo Qin assessed, “the emerging property market … shows signs similar to those in mature market economies, such as land price variations associated with the location of land parcels, and the mechanisms that filter land and property users. However, Shanghai is still unique in terms of the processes underlying the evolving property market.” 59 ‘Rent gap,’ 60 as the difference between realizable rents—usually at rates determined by market supply and demand—and the undervalued rents actually charged, resulted in land parcels and housing units left from the planned economy. The physical proximity of housing and land from the dual markets in the city center neighborhoods made the undervalued legacy land and housing units lucrative for development. Opportunistic private and public sector actors, who recognized their realizable value, participated in their redevelopments. Especially in the first decade of economic liberalization, when rapid transition left gaps in institutional structures and regulatory oversight, the development and commercialization of administratively-allocated land emerged from urban loopholes resulting from the dual land market. The central government, reacting to the local state’s adaptive governance and amphibious institutions, manifested in its discretionary planning systems that condoned the developments, would retrieve authority on the development of administratively-allocated land in the second decade of liberalization. The central government’s ‘loosening’ and then ‘tightening’ of control of administrativelyallocated land created a newer set of urban loopholes, which were necessary to enable 28

spatial production and to mediate top-down and bottom-up control between the central and local state.61 On the other hand, city center housing, due to incumbent residents and complex ownership, received little attention for development in the first decade of economic transition. It would not be until large-scale urban renewal depleted large parts of the city center buildings, that a growing interest in heritage architecture would make visible the realizable values of historic housing structures. The Developmental State, Its Urban Regimes and the Opportunities for Urban Diversity After the central government implemented ‘land marketization’ in the early 1980s, land became an important revenue source for the local state. The local state in China, financially autonomous since the economic devolution of the 1980s, has found itself pressured by the central government to sustain continued economic growth, while remaining economically responsible for social welfare, a legacy of the planned economy. The local state, as both landowner and land regulator, has used land as both market resource and political instrument in this framework. Urban analyst, Hsing You-tien, in her analysis of China’s urban transition, puts it explicitly, “in post-Mao China, urban land-use planning has replaced economic planning as the main vehicle of state intervention in the local political economy.”62 Theorists of China’s urban transition have coupled the theory of the ‘developmental state,’ which political scientists use for the phenomenon of state monopoly and control over economic development, to explain East Asian economic growth, with ‘urban regime theory,’ 63 which theorists use to describe state and private sector collusion in urban development. In the context of economic transition in China, analysts have used the two concepts to critique the simultaneous state domination of economic and urban development and the neoliberalization of spatial production. As a result of what the urban analyst, Zhu Jieming, refers to as ‘transition institutions’ of the dual land market, “China’s local governments have become an economic interest group with their own policy agenda and preferences.” 64 As a consequence, land-use planning’s “rigid control is discarded and replaced by flexible and responsive rules,” 65 corroborating the local developmental state’s adaptive governance in its own interest. On the selfinterested and growth-driven party-state-affiliated ‘Red Capitalists,’ Ding Xueliang

for informality, but rather the entrenchment of private interests in local power structures and the lack of checks on regulatory abuse.”68 In the socialist market economy, the developmental state that is driven by growth could easily become a ‘predatory state.’69 As a privileged player in the market and in the city as a ‘growth machine,’70 the local ‘entrepreneurial state,’71 its ‘bureaucrat entrepreneurs’72 and ‘local growth coalitions’73 have preferential access to state real estate assets. The local state, as both regulator and market participant, part of the ‘urban growth regimes,’ also determines urban development with little viable resistance. Progrowth and developmentalist, the local state’s visions for new developments are often mono-directional and homogenizing. These new developments also spatially polarize

Chapter 1 Introduction

also asserts that “the only reliability is that these guys aren’t reliable,”66 reiterating the party-state’s embracing of uncertainty to maximize its benefits. Leaf and Hou have also explained Chinese urban planning’s porosity:67 “it is not the weakness of the local state nor the lack of governance capacity per se that accounts

29

the growing social differentiation.74 As the central government implements curbs on local authority, the local state also increasingly deploys its own sets of urban loophole, via setting up regulatory exceptions, to retain its privileged position. Any leeway that could counter such developments is not only relevant to discover but could also be instrumental for the proponents of diversity as urban quality. Within this context, the urban loophole becomes one of the ways possible to counter the homogenizing effects of state developmentalism. Rather than overt contradiction of state vision and policies, the urban loophole allows a subtle and less confrontational means of resistance against the growth regimes and the predatory state. The resultant spatial productions undermine planned homogenization and foster socio-economic diversity, while simultaneously cultivating the local state to evolve beyond generic developments and value the inherent urban qualities of the city. This section summarizing the broader context for China’s urban transition briefly outlined the institutional mechanisms that are systemic to China’s transition political economy. The institutional mechanisms, including adaptive governance, institutional amphibiousness, and the dual markets, exist to reconcile what have been posited as incongruities of economic growth, based on the market economy and global integration, and political stability, based on single party-state rule. These local dimensions are crucial in understanding the urban spatial production in Chinese cities. Even as the built products physically resemble those in the developed West—taut glass-clad office towers, sleek shopping malls, boutiques and cafes with ambiances that could be found in global trend quarters—the system of their production is entrenched in the specificities of China’s political economy. Heilmann and Perry asked, referring to transition China’s adaptive governance and guerrilla-style policy-making, “what if China is in fact pursuing a unique path, and—due to its size, history, and surprising success—introducing important unconventional, non-Western techniques to the repertoire of governance in the twenty-first century?”75 Similarly, what if transition China is also showing a novel repertoire for urban spatial production, in its urban loopholes?

Conceptual Framework: the Urban Loophole Within the context of rapid change in the political economy, the concept of the urban loophole 76 is proposed as the mechanism in the urban spatial production system that has mediated the evolving institutions of the transitional economy. The concept is the red thread through the cases presented in the ensuing text. The main proposition of the study is that the spatial opportunities, which the urban loopholes have made possible, expedited the appropriation of global know-how and market economics in the local framework of Chinese urban transition, and this without forgoing political stability of the single party-state rule. The concept of the urban loophole in urban spatial production corroborates, and is impacted by, theories from neighboring disciplines, such as adaptive governance, institutional amphibiousness, amongst others, which are also used to explain how the seemingly conflicting imperatives of market and planned, global and local are reconciled. The urban loophole also exploits inefficiencies in the dual market in urban spatial production, a consequence of the transition economy creating spatial opportunities. 30

The following subsection first puts forward the proposed properties of the ‘urban loophole’ in relation to other aspects of the transition economy, and components in urban spatial production. The term is then posited as spatial opportunity in the Chinese context. Finally, different types of urban loopholes are outlined in relation to the transition economy’s progression and the increasingly active role of the local state. As will be elaborated in the section on methods, the theoretical proposition that the urban loophole has facilitated Shanghai’s rapid economic transition and global integration, is important in guiding the research in its data collection and analysis. The Urban Loophole Loopholes by definition, are a result of gaps, absences, or exceptions. Urban loopholes are mechanisms of urban spatial production,77 which result from gaps, absences, or exceptions in the larger urban system. These conditions of gaps, absences, or exceptions occur under conditions of rapid change or transition. (Fig. 5) The changes and transitions, for example, could include: industrialization, urbanization, global integration, transition from planned to market economies, transition from market to planned economics, or a combination of the above. In the case of Chinese cities, it is the rapid transition in the political economy, from a centrally-planned to a ‘socialist market economy,’ that causes changes in regulations, policies, plans, and other formal processes, leading to gaps, absences, or exceptions. These gaps, absences, or exceptions in turn cause the urban loopholes in China’s urban transition. (Fig. 6) The urban loopholes give rise to socio-spatial opportunities in the city and result in physical manifestations in the built environment. If created but unexploited, these socio-spatial opportunities would not manifest themselves spatially. These urban loopholes without spatial products are not readily detected. For example, in cities like Singapore, socio-spatial opportunities exist, but no one dares to exploit them. Exploiting the opportunities created by the urban loophole requires risk taking and innovation. Under ‘regularized’ governance, with institutional clarity, political accountability, and containment—rather than an embracing—of uncertainty, urban spatial production

urban loopholes may reap rewards worthy of the risk taken. Uncertainty, embraced by the Chinese party-state under rapid transition, for example, is risky. But uncertainty and its risks are also generators of rewards. The rewards may be financial. The rewards may also help with image building, allowing the risk-taker to accumulate power. Thus, it is when urban loopholes are exploited that they themselves become physically visible in the built environment. Their resultant spatial products are sometimes physically anomalous, other times physically conventional but procedurally anomalous. Because the conditions that create the urban loopholes rapidly change, the opportunities they create are also often limited in timeframe. Urban loopholes are windows of opportunity between the absence and ambiguity of the existing system for spatial production and the infill of a new system that is introduced. The opening and closure of the urban loopholes are contingent on policy changes in the political economy. In institutionally malleable contexts, urban loopholes are also dependent on key sets of actors,

Chapter 1 Introduction

would render the urban loophole redundant. (Fig. 7) In political economies that are stable, with ‘regularized’ governance, the rewards from exploiting opportunities created by the urban loophole are diminished. In political economies that are rapidly changing and thus destabilized, on the other hand, the exploiting of opportunities created by the

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TRANSITION IN POLITICAL ECONOMY

adaptations in political economy adaptations in political economy adaptations in political economy

gaps ambiguities exceptions

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in regulations and policies

ENTERPRISING ACTORS spatial opportunities

ECONOMIC TRANSITION WHILE MAINTAINING POLITICAL AUTHORITARIANISM

adaptive governance institutional amphibiousness dual market

gaps ambiguities exceptions

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in regulations and policies

ENTERPRISING ACTORS

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market demands

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Figs. 5, 6, 7 Diagrams of the urban loophole generated by transition in political economy, top; urban loopholes more specific to China’s economic transition, middle; spatial production without the urban loophole in an idealized stable political economy with institutional clarity, bottom

at whose discretion such urban loopholes are sanctioned. Like its neighboring concept of adaptive governance, the urban loophole is not replicable through a finite set of spatial or institutional variables. Rather, it follows a similarly “fluid, context-, situation-, and agency-based modus operandi.”78 And because the urban loophole, pliable and robust, does not conform to prescribed variables and emerge from change, one can only detect its mechanisms in the consequent new systems and from resulting changes. Just as rapid systemic transformation gives rise to urban loopholes, systemic complexity also enables their creation. The more complex an urban spatial production system is, with multiple contingencies, the more likely urban loopholes occur. China’s rapid urban transformations under a transitional economy, for example, have created a number of interdependent and time-dependent wicked problems, including, among others, ambiguities created by deep state hierarchies, discretionary authorities, amphibious institutions, and inefficiencies created by the dual markets. As long as systemic inconsistencies persist without transparency, urban loopholes will exist to compensate for a lack of institutional clarity and determinacy. The scale of China’s centralized but bureaucratically fragmented political hierarchy also compounds the complexity of its urban processes, eliciting the exploitation of urban loopholes. 32

The concept of the urban loophole is set against presumptions of urban rules for planning. Urban rules presume institutional stability, accountability and transparency. Few of these are prevalent in today’s rapidly developing and urbanizing world. At the same time, the wicked problems in urban planning, as described by Horst and Webber in 1973, are at once ill-defined, unique and “one shot operations.”79 The singularity of the problems is symptomatic of the complex interaction of other problems.80 The urban loophole offers a mode of explaining contemporary developments in cities undergoing rapid structural change in a way that rethinks the prevalent modes of understanding urban spatial production learned from the West. The unpacking of the mechanisms of the urban loophole, thus, is a means of translating the logic of China’s economic transition, viewed through its urban spatial production. Its explanation for China’s rapid marketization while retaining planned economy institutions, viewed through the nuances of its urban development, would be valuable to scholars of economic transition and urban planning. In the Context of China’s Urban Transition, Evolving Urban Loopholes From the initiation of accelerated economic liberalization in 1992 to the opening of the World Expo in 2010, the urban loopholes underwent a broader shift. In the first decade after liberalization, the urban loopholes resulting from gaps and ambiguities of existing policies most often fed endogenous, or bottom-up, processes. The urban loopholes created pragmatic opportunities, which also eased the influx of global resources, in capital and know-how, condoned by the acquiescent local state. As transition progressed and many of the initial changes stabilized, the urban loopholes also increasingly shifted to ones resulting from exceptions and ambiguities. They increasingly abetted the developmental local state and its affiliated pro-growth coalition,81 balancing social stability against economic efficiency in the transitioning economy. This change of urban loopholes reflects a maturing and stabilizing urban production system. It also shows the growing participation of the local state in both determining urban loopholes and controlling its spatial products. This shift, from bottom-up to top-down urban loopholes, has reinforced the party-state’s control in the second decade of economic transition. (Fig. 8)

with the financial burdens that came with fiscal devolution and liberalization. The local state had to shoulder the financial responsibilities for infrastructure development, public services, and social welfare, while also delivering growth targets to the central government. Rapid urban restructuring in designated role-model cities like Shanghai left many gaping policy voids. These policy voids, condoned by the local state, in turn fostered the bottom-up developments responding to changing market demands. Enterprising private entrepreneurs exploited urban loopholes formed from the local state’s adaptive governance. These private entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to fill in the gap created by the transition to a market economy and global integration. In dense urban centers, services and commerce proliferated as result, feeding demand that had been long suppressed under central planning.82 The informal networks of private entrepreneurs drew up innovative new business plans for the development

Chapter 1 Introduction

First Decade of Liberalization, Urban Loopholes Resulting from Gaps Caused by Rapid Transition In the first decade of accelerated economic transition, the local state was overwhelmed

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bottom-up adaptive governance

institutional amphibiousness

dual market

predatory state

gaps ambiguities gaps ambiguities exceptions

urban loophole

enterprising

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urban loophole

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ambiguities exceptions

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ambiguities

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state-affiliated entrepreneurs

developmental local state developmental local state

top-down Fig. 8 Diagram of different urban loopholes ranging from bottom-up to top-down

of undervalued and under-utilized spaces. The spatial opportunities thus catalyzed developments and spurred rapid transition. State-affiliated local agents, from former SOE leaders of newly privatized commercial entities to municipal or district government-backed enterprises, also actively capitalized on the urban loopholes created by policy gaps and ambiguities. State-affiliated local agents converted and redeveloped administratively-allocated land, capitalizing on the rent gap resulting from the dual land market.83 State enterprises, before structural reforms and privatization of the mid-1990s, also executed rapid construction of housing, as part of the housing market liberalization that the central government encouraged.84 For both state and non-state actors, pragmatism pervaded. The adaptive local state tacitly acquiesced to novel processes of spatial production, so long as they were not clearly defined, and neither the informal nor the formal was apparent. If the spatial products that resulted were profitable and beneficial, then the rapidly learning local state readily appropriated the processes of spatial production. The blurry boundaries of formal and informal were conveniently hazy as the private stakeholders, state-affiliated agents and the acquiescent local state adapted to changing regulations from the central government while accommodating necessary and pragmatic demands on the ground. The readiness of the local agents to experiment and learn, together with their agility in grasping unforeseen opportunities, pushed forward spatial productions that quickly grasped international expertise. Global capital, as well as know-how, rapidly filtered through the enterprising local actors, stimulating further development. As Transition Progressed, the Shift to Urban Loopholes of Exceptions As the rapid urban structuring of the first decade gives way to an emphasis on urban quality and post-industrialization,85 urban loopholes have also evolved. While the earlier urban loopholes, engaged by bottom-up processes, continued on a small scale, the local state and its local growth regimes formed new ones to counter central government constraints and to engage new priorities for urban development. The central 34

government, concerned with economic and social instability from rapid growth, has also been reasserting regulatory control over earlier decentralized local land politics. Initially acquiescent, local state authorities have grown increasingly interested in appropriating the earlier bottom-up processes and replicating their economic successes. Heritage architecture and historic neighborhoods, opportune developments by small-scale private entrepreneurs earlier, have also become part of the growth formula of the local state. New urban strategies for city branding and tourism attraction have replaced large-scale urban renewal in city center areas.86 To advance its interests, the engaged local state affiliates deploy urban loopholes of exceptions, including that for heritage conservation and public infrastructure development, to expedite developments. With the local state increasingly participating as a privileged market player, competing private actors have also been compelled to innovate entrepreneurially and to collaborate where possible. The pressure to innovate has seen new public-private coalitions established, based on mutual benefits, while private actors not actively engaging the local state and affiliates have been pushed out from the development processes. The local state that had tacitly condoned earlier urban loopholes, has also since closed them to reassert authority. The dual markets of both planned legacies and market commodities had privileged the local state players. Market distortions caused by the dual land market prompted the central government to recentralize authority over land, and to close the earlier urban loopholes for the commercialization of administratively-allocated land.87 In reaction, the local state formed new urban loopholes to ease inefficiencies caused by the persistence of the dual land market, facilitating continued development. The new urban loopholes based on the promotion of creative industries, 88 for example, circumvented central government authority while developing undervalued city center real estate.

loopholes is the only counterweight to top-down development. As Heilmann and Perry have asserted, despite Maoist-era centralization of ideological control, the Chinese legacy of a “decentralized initiative within the framework of centralized political authority,” has created “far greater bottom-up input than would be predicted from its formal structures.”89 The processes of commodification propelled by real estate demands and guided by the developmental local state and its pro-growth regimes are threatening the existing city center neighborhoods, where existing urban qualities of diversity and openness are being pushed out by developments, which in turn would deactivate the area’s creative potential. With the system increasingly determined by the self-interested local state, urban qualities and innovative urbanism could only be produced with the aid of the urban loophole. As a vehicle for pragmatic opportunism, it is the only possible counter to corruption, cronyism, discretionary policy, and the absence of transparency, without openly confronting the growing control of the local state. Paradoxically, the persistence of structures such as dual markets, for example, has partially buffered against the state-backed neoliberalization of the city center. But

Chapter 1 Introduction

The Neoliberalizing and Self-Interested State, Urban Loopholes as Counterweight In China, the resilient, adaptive, and self-interested party-state is omnipresent. With the hand of the local state as custodian of public good receding, while it increasingly participates in development, the private sector’s deployment of bottom-up urban

35

their discretionary institutions and ambiguities in property rights make the rent gap that may ease social polarization difficult to maintain. Rather, it is the multiplicity of stakeholders and bureaucratic hierarchies that create systemic complexity and so allows for urban loopholes. The multiple contingencies not only enable dormant urban loopholes to counter the too-rapid destruction of diverse and culturally rich habitats but also undermine the systemically predatory state. ‘Loophole’ as Paralegality and Opportunity, Towards Criticality and Agency The term loophole has its etymological origins in medieval fortifications: as “a narrow vertical opening, usually widening inwards, cut in a wall or other defense, to allow for the passage of missiles.”90 In this original usage, the loophole was a mode of flexibility in an otherwise solid and rigid physical structure. It also allows a both-and situation of advantageousness. In contemporary usage, the loophole denotes “an outlet or means of escape,” “often applied to an ambiguity or omission in a statute, etc., which affords opportunity for evading its intention.”91 Most prevalently used today in jurisprudence, a legal loophole, for example, denotes a fuzzy or grey area of ill definition, through ambiguity, omission, or exception that allows the bypassing of otherwise clearly defined, legally binding obligations.92 Whereas legal and moral loopholes often carry a pejorative connotation, the concept of a loophole in the physical sciences denotes possibilities and opportunities that open to new findings and definitions. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for example, “has loopholes—with sufficient ingenuity—(which) can be profitably exploited.”93 In physics, when creativity and resourcefulness adjust and revise given frameworks, the results of such loopholes become productive. In the context of developing economies, the use of the word loophole implies informality, corruption, rent-seeking, graft, and other unsavory yet flourishing forms of socio-economic rituals. Historian Samuel Huntington, however, points out the necessity of such “welcome lubricants” in developing economies: “in terms of economic growth, the only thing worse than a society with a rigid, over-centralized, dishonest bureaucracy is one with a rigid, over-centralized, honest bureaucracy.”94 The following study does not comment on the ethics of these ‘lubricants for political economy.’95 While the use of the term ‘loophole’ for urbanism implicitly suggests this aspect of para-legality, in the context of an opaque and partial system, the urban loophole is also the only opportunity to undermine the developmental and predatory state. More importantly, it is in analyzing the processes of urban spatial production, through the framework of the urban loophole, that insight into the developmental logic of rapidly growing and transitioning economies could be shown. The analysis through the urban loophole reveals the conflicts and contradictions between the coexistence of market and planned systems. Like adaptive governance, amphibious institutions, and dual markets, the urban loophole is also the necessary mechanism that mediates center-local divergences, institutional plasticity, ambiguous property rights, and discretionary governance in the spatial productions of China’s transition economy. Architects have used the term ‘loophole’ to compel design practitioners to agency: “the loophole is a model of opportunistic deviance. Like lawyers exploiting contract ambiguities, financiers engaging in arbitrage, or accountants practicing tax evasion, the loophole suggests an opening for the dexterous professional.”96 The understanding 36

of how urban loopholes are formed, in contexts outside those where urban rules function in stability, allows designers to rethink the infrastructures necessary to maintain the equilibrium of the rapidly changing urban spatial production system. This is relevant not only in Shanghai, but also in numerous industrializing cities in the developing world.

Research Methods Analyses of China’s urban transition have largely been done from a macro perspective.97 In contrast, this study uses detailed ‘spatial cases’ to document and analyze Shanghai’s urban transformations. The spatial cases, with the scalar specificity of a neighborhood area, span more than two decades since China’s economic liberalization began. Case examples, at the architectural scales, further unpack the actors and drivers of the urban spatial productions, clarifying the locally embedded processes for urban development. Through the genealogical mode of inquiry, they also show how the evolving urban loopholes have, in turn, the potential to inform the future design agency in the city. The following section will outline the relationship between the theoretical framework and the case study method used. It will elaborate on the choice of spatial cases and their siting, in relation to the theoretical framework as well as to existing studies. The methods of data collection, evidence type, and their analyses will be summarized. Finally, the relationship of the genealogical mode of inquiry with the construction of the larger case narratives will be explained.

priori theoretical framework in order to obtain close-up and detailed observation, the use of case study as method, engaged for this study, is dependent on a clear theoretical framework to guide research. “A comprehensive research strategy” for case studies, according to social scientist Robert Yin, in his book Case Study Research Design and Methods, requires a set of how or why questions to guide research cases.98 Social scientists Robert Sutton and Barry Staw summarize the why question as ‘theory’: “theory is about the connections among phenomena, a story about why acts, events, structure, and thoughts occur.”99 Theory, as social scientists Kaplan and Merton further explain, “delves into underlying processes so as to understand the systematic reasons for a particular occurrence or non-occurrence. It often burrows deeply into microprocesses, laterally into neighboring concepts, or in an upward direction, tying itself to broader social phenomena.”100 Through the framework of the urban loophole, the micro-processes of Shanghai’s urban spatial production are unpacked to reveal the actors and drivers that have

Chapter 1 Introduction

The Theoretical Framework and the Case Study Method The concept of the urban loophole, and its importance in facilitating China’s rapid urban transition, spatially manifesting economic liberalization and global integration, is the theoretical framework that guides the ensuing research. It is based on this initial a priori framework, which the author sets out at the beginning of the research process, that the selection of cases, and the ensuing data collection and analysis have followed. Whereas schools of ethnographic research, for example, deliberately reject an a

37

expedited the city’s rapid economic transition and global integration. The urban loophole’s relationship to the neighboring concepts of adaptive governance and institutional amphibiousness also reveals how urban spatial production manifests the changing institutions of the transition economy. The broader phenomenon of growing state control that has accompanied the progress of China’s transition is also shown through the shifts in the urban loopholes. The Choice of Spatial Cases The particular choices of the sites for closer study came from the premise that urban loopholes have expedited China’s rapid economic transition and global integration while preserving its political status quo. Shanghai, chosen by the central government as the test ground for the nation’s accelerated economic liberalization and ‘Dragon’s Head’ of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ made it the obvious choice for further study. Its economic growth in the two decades since 1992, visible in its built environment and reflecting its global capital flows, (Fig. 9) has also made it the ‘head of the Black Swan’ 101 for ‘neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics,’ worthy of closer examination. The new satellite towns, the Special Economic Zones of different political hierarchies and functions, the villages in the metropolitan hinterland, and more, in their unique representations of China’s global integration, could have also been interesting choices for further investigation. But the city center neighborhoods of Shanghai chosen for analyses are known for their vibrant and ‘global-looking’ spaces that manifest the country’s aspiration for the post-industrial knowledge-based economy. The historic neighborhoods, in the western end of the former Concessions, have been the preferred locales for the first wave of transnational capital, largely from overseas Chinese returnees. Their modern era architecture and urban form have also enabled their rapid transformation to accommodate the contemporary transnational creative class. In ambiance, they resemble international trend quarters like Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg or New York’s Williamsburg. Yet, despite the look and feel of being ‘global,’ aspects of their spatial production are distinctly local. It is in the juxtaposition of the global and local, manifesting the actors and value chains of advanced capitalism within spatial legacies unique to the socialist-market economy, that the city center neighborhoods were selected as the sites of this study. At the same time, their legacy socio-economic complexity, and, perhaps because of it, the simultaneous under-elaboration of their spatial productions made them relevant and important sites for closer analysis of China’s urban transition. Even though there is a boom in studies on Shanghai,102 closer spatial examination of the socio-economically diverse city center areas and their neighborhood-scale transformations continue to be lacking. What look like carefully cultivated global neighborhoods are in reality a result

Fig. 9 Shanghai’s global flows that expedited the city’s development

38

of the multiple forces that have converged serendipitously, utilized the existing resources, and sustained the resulting effect. Only with detailed and multi-scaled analyses of the selected areas’ developments since economic liberalization could the drivers, processes, and actors involved in their

25 km

5 km

500m

100m

Fig. 10 Diagram representing multiple scales of analysis for city center neighborhoods, zooming in from left to right: municipal boundary Shanghai, core urban area, neighborhood scale, and architectural scale. Colors represent functional uses at neighborhood and architectural scale, showing the diversity of the neighborhoods chosen for study

spatial production be unpacked. (Fig. 10) They would also clarify how the urban loopholes in spatial production have helped expedite the city’s global integration. Undemolished Areas Harboring Local Complexities The city center neighborhoods of Shanghai hold the wicked problems of Chinese urbanism in visible proximity. In these neighborhoods, the coexistence and persistence of dual land and housing markets and ambiguous property rights have magnified the already complex lingering social networks, left behind by post-Liberation events. The challenges of managing and controlling such complexities have also compelled the local state to be adaptive and amphibious. The rapidly executed demolition-and-redevelopment renewal efforts, in the first decade of economic liberalization, thus were not only making space for new programs and new structures at higher built densities. They were also imperative in ‘wiping the slate clean,’ clearing the complex challenges of vestige institutions, and creating other wicked problems of Chinese urbanism. Ur-

Historic Legacy and Modern Morphology Attract Overseas Capital and Transnational Creatives The legacy conditions embedded in the historic neighborhoods chosen as sites also laid the crucial foundations for China’s global integration. In contrast to early local developers who favored new towns and tabula rasa sites in the periphery, many of the first transnational investments, from overseas Chinese capital, preferred the city

Chapter 1 Introduction

ban spatial restructuring was the physical manifestation of economic transition from planned to market economics. It is the areas which have survived the renewal fervor, whether by virtue of location, architecture, occupancy, use, or other circumstances, that also retained planned economy institutions next to the market economy commodities. The adjacencies and interfaces between the planned and market elements, and the differential between their economic values, are the sources for urban loopholes and their spatial opportunities. It is in the fragmented ownerships and transition ownership rights, both at the architecture and urban scale, where enterprising private and state-affiliated actors could execute innovative spatial production. Resolutions by local stakeholders, taking on the circumstantial constraints, speak to their creativity. They also attest to the opportunistic and discretionary accommodation by local state actors. The urban vibrancy of these areas, with their openness to global trends while retaining a unique socio-economic heterogeneity, is visible in the spaces in these remaining and un-demolished neighborhoods.

39

center neighborhoods. This preference for the city center came partly from nostalgia for Shanghai’s modern era historic legacy, especially by the Chinese diaspora, who had pre-Liberation economic and social links to the city.103 The preference for the city center was also motivated by the value of its real estate, which in the inception of economic liberalization, was under-appreciated. Early overseas investments catalyzed the rapid transformation of the former Concession areas. Through such developments, knowledge transfers also played a significant role in the re-globalization of Shanghai. The pioneering role that many of the early ‘localized cosmopolitans’ played in developing the spatial opportunities, bridged the gap between market and planned economics.104 In the mediation of international know-how within local institutional frameworks, these early spatial productions also capitalized on the urban loopholes created by the absence of regulatory or procedural protocols. Not only were the neighborhoods attractive to overseas Chinese capital, but their inherent architectural and urban qualities were also appealing to the influx of transnational knowledge workers who increasingly came to Shanghai in the second decade of economic liberalization. Partly because of their modern era architecture, unlike in older historical areas in the city, the modern era neighborhoods survived the demolition projects of the first decade of rapid transition. Because of their modern era urban morphology and building types, these neighborhoods were also able to adapt to contemporary uses for the creative and service economy. The neighborhoods’ built environment has, since the last decade, been transformed into diverse neighborhoods known for their range of both global and local commercial functions, as well as both high-end and low-end residences. The reuse of their physical structures for ‘new economies’ today shows a viable alternative to the demolitionreconstruction cycles that pervades the developmental urbanism of not only Chinese cities but of many East Asian cities in the pursuit of global aspirations. Distinct from the quantitative measured by performance statistics and premised on economic growth, as manifested in newly built neighborhoods, the immeasurable urban qualities of the historic neighborhood are also especially important in Shanghai’s shift from ‘progress to prosperity.’105 Neighborhoods of Socio-Economic Diversity The historic urban neighborhoods could be seen as not being ‘representative’ of many neighborhoods in the vast metropolitan territory of the provincial-level municipality of Shanghai.106 A Sino-sized Shanghai, with its large-scale generic new urban-scape found all over Chinese cities, is indeed much more prevalent and visible beyond the city core’s first ring. There, outside of the city core, unencumbered by the complexity of fragmented ownership legacies that remain in the city center of Shanghai, most developments are taking place in the large swaths of new developments. Land leases, in larger quantities on the periphery, are expedited by the financial needs of the local governments to fund infrastructure modernization, which would promote further economic growth. The vast majority of the municipality’s spatial productions represent the transition economy’s place-independent development strategy, which has since multiplied in other Chinese cities, from the coast to inland. From incumbent local residents, who have been in the area since before transition, to the transnational knowledge worker, the city center neighborhoods manifest 40

the socio-economic diversity that is a consequence of economic transition. The wide range of housing types, and broad choices of local with international consumer fare, all coexisting within the same neighborhood, has made the neighborhood vibrant and attractive, especially to the influx of international knowledge workers. Exploiting the inefficiencies in the dual housing market in the city center, local and transnational stakeholders, with the support of local bureaucrats, have actively converted and reused depreciated spaces. These early opportune urban loopholes have diversified since the early 2000s, when the first wave of transnational entrepreneurs entered the market and specialized in roles that quickly globalized the spatial products. The introduction of new programs and experimenting with new development models took place in the second decade of urban development, and in turn also set the pace and tone for ensuing projects. Different Districts, Differing Development Pathways Different neighborhoods were also chosen for closer study because of their locations in Shanghai’s different districts. The semi-autonomy of districts in Shanghai have made their aspirations and policy implementations unique. The legacy conditions and district authority personnel have also contributed to how each district has positioned itself in the intense inter-district competition for economic growth. Jing’an [静安] District’s large-scale and aggressive urban developments are compelled by its small size and legacy resources. Its historic legacy of industrial-residential mixed neighborhoods to its north and more high-end modern era housing to its south has also made it one of the most eager districts to execute rapid urban renewal through

large-scale urban development along West Nanjing Lu to maximize economic growth. Its surrounding residential neighborhood, formerly in the western end of the International Settlement, contains both earlier and later modern era housing types that are multifunctional and socio-economically diverse. The transformations in the neighborhood, making one residential block an un-official but renowned—within certain circles—creative cluster, makes its closer study compelling. Compared to the rapid changes executed in Jing’an, Xuhui [徐汇] District, on the other hand, has undergone paced change. It is a well-endowed central district whose sizable hinterland includes several manufacturing zones, acquired in the 1980s expansion and consolidation of municipal central districts. Located at the western end of the former French Concession, it also is home to some of newest modern era housing built under the strict planning of the former Concession authorities. Not only could the district afford large-scale conservation of heritage neighborhoods, but its elite occupants, both affiliated with the state as well as those with transnational connections, have also made its transformation exceptional. The localized conditions make the study of the differing processes for urban development under economic transition in the same city relevant and intriguing. It also shows how the conceptual framework of the urban loophole, in the context of differences in agents and drivers, is still a productive tool for understanding urban spatial production under the flexible, volatile, and developmental state.

Chapter 1 Introduction

the demolition of vast older neighborhoods. The area around the West Nanjing Lu corridor, which has historically been an important commercial area, has undergone rapid transformation since the 1980s. Jing’an’s leaders have prioritized program-specific and

41

Fig. 11 Map of Shanghai city center, with one-square-kilometer areas chosen for closer analyses outlined in red. Places of creative economy are shown in colored dots

Urban Analysis and ‘Spatial Cases’ The construction of several case studies, which are at the scale of neighborhoods around one square kilometer in area, incorporates both historic evidence as well as contemporary socio-spatial findings, to deliver narratives that show the trajectory and potential of each of the study areas. Especially for an urban spatial production system that is rapidly changing within a society that is demographically mobile, institutionally fluid, and growing economically, quantitative analysis, even if attainable with a limited number of variables, would be unable to account for depth of the changing conditions. A number of quantitative analyses that the author has encountered in existing studies on Shanghai, for example, often draw conclusions that seem of little pertinence to both the broader research community and discipline-specific specialists.107 Despite exhaustive data collection and correlations, the limited range of variables that are correlated often renders the conclusions rather inept in explaining phenomena that are more process-driven and time-specific.108 Political pressures, in addition to the scale of the country, make the published quantitative data only reliable as a point of reference. It is only through the aggregation of large quantities of data that they become useful for giving an approximate overview. At smaller sample sizes, the variance between locations, even within the same municipality, would become inadequate to describe a particular circumstance. This project specifically sets out to go beyond the findings of these kinds of necessary quantitative analyses to detect the complex, nuanced, and confounding ‘margins of errors,’ through in-depth case studies via a mix of methods. The trends and developments that are otherwise unexplained by the big data methods, increasingly preva­ lent in urban research, need to be correlated to close-up investigations and zoom-ins to qualify the unique instances over spans of time. Selective information provided by the overlapping agents, from users, developers, investors, owners to academics, policy makers, bureaucrats, and often permutations of their combination, have made many of the spatial specificities possible. Knowingly difficult and time-consuming, firsthand feedback on the developments, as well as physical experience of the spaces is of utmost importance in clarifying the drivers, actors, procedures, pathways, and mechanisms that make the different spatial products witnessed today possible. Following initial site research, involving site documentation and mapping, three one-square-kilometer areas were chosen for more extensive fieldwork. (Fig. 11) Although the research extents exceeded the areas outlined, the areas were chosen as bounded limits for in-depth fieldwork, since it would be nearly impossible to cover the large area of Shanghai’s entire city center. Extensive urban analysis, including detailed mapping and photographic documentation from fieldwork, was conducted. Semi-structured interviews with selected stakeholders were also held. They complemented and grounded the empirical research. Published sources, including government publications, statistical annals, policy reports, legal issuances, and news reports, as well as discipline-specific research analyses, are also included. Fieldwork in Shanghai was conducted between 2011 and 2013. Extensive visits to the three neighborhood areas were carried out. Selected interviews with stakeholders, including users, developers, bureaucrats, and designers were held during the fieldwork period. Detailed processes of development for particular sites and certain spatial production mechanisms in particular were gathered through the interviews. In-depth 44

Second Exodus of know-how; also forcible “selling” of properties

First Exodus of capital and know-how

1949

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First housing cutoff for working period commodification for RETURNEES 华侨

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Policies that settled contested real estate assets as result of the Cultural Revolution

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residential atelier commercial utility

Fig. 12 Diagram of changes in demographics, ownership, and program in different residential types through time

trends, often influenced by high-level policies, decisions and visions for development, and their implementation on the ground. In addition to analyzing the actors, drivers, and the processes of transformation, built spaces are at the center of the analyses. Unique to the author’s discipline of architecture, the role of building types and urban form are regarded as equal contributors, if not foundational resources, that need to be attributed to the specific patterns of urban transformations that have taken place. (Fig. 12) By not only incorporating these architectural specificities, but also their locational particularities in time, the mechanisms for these changing processes were elucidated. Evidence from parallel events, comparable cases, as well as important precedents is included to contextualize the kinds of developments that take place in the diversity of conditions that co-exist in the contemporary Chinese city. In each episode, agents, spaces, functions, locations, and the processes involved in urban spatial production

Chapter 1 Introduction

background research, including document collection, archival research, and site documentation were also conducted in parallel. Notable development projects were also collected. Their roles as ‘critical case example,’ ‘unique case example,’ or ‘representative case example’ were assessed.109 Selective quantitative analyses, including cash flow analyses, were done to understand the economic drivers and financial collaborations for certain developments. Significant shifts in policy and their effects on development implementation were further investigated, and assessments of whether ‘longitudinal case examples’ could be established were also considered. Conversations with local academics, planners, and policy makers were carried out at the same time to understand the broader developments in the city and the interrelation between larger

45

1840

1949

1965

Concession port cities created as result of Opium War, expediting international trade.

Flight of wealth and elites from Concessions to safer havens as result of the Communist Liberation of China.

Coastal cities subsidized development of inland cities as industrial hubs.

Shanghai Taipei Hong Kong Concession City

inland industrial urban centers

1840

1949

1965

Population: 500,000

Population: 5,000,000 GDPP: 43 RMB Shanghai comes under Communist rule as the financial and economic generator of China.

Population: 10,000,000 GDPP: --Even though half of national GDP is generated by Shanghai, little of it returns to the city to invest in its infrastrucutre or housing.

Shanghai founded as result of designation as a Concession port city.

25 km

Fig. 13 Diagram relating the nation’s development in time to the urban development of Shanghai

are identified, to show the mechanisms that have made the urban adaptability under rapid transformation possible. ‘Genealogy,’ Spatial Cases Developing in Time Set out with the intention of instrumentalizing design agency, the research itself is indebted to the framework of genealogical mode of inquiry, as articulated by philosopher Michel Foucault. In contrast to the historian’s history, which leaves the past behind as the past, Foucault’s concept of genealogy makes the awareness of the present a crucial part of the tracing of a historic trajectory leading up to this present. Foucault refers to this as ‘effective’ or ‘living history.’110 This ‘living history,’ crucially, includes the moving target of the present moment. The positioning of the present in the selection of 46

1978

1992

2005

Following the death of Mao, Deng Xiaoping took over as national leader and created the first SEZs in proximity to market economy of British Hong Kong. The first wave of emigration also began.

Following inflation-induced protests of 1989 and their successful quelching, Shanghai became the “Dragon’s Head,” accelerating the transition to market economy and influx of FDI.

A maturing of the socialist market system and urban develompent prepares for the city’s showcasing at the World Expo, both to inland cities and to international visitors/investors.

Shanghai

Shanghai

Shenzhen (Special Economic Zones)

sources of investment capital

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2005

Population: 10,000,000 GDPP: 2000 RMB Shanghai built only 22.8mio square meters of hosuing from 1950-1980, accounting for less than 0.5%GDP.

Population: 12,900,000 GDPP: 9380 RMB Shanghai began urban restructuring accompanying accelerated economic liberalization.

Population: 18,000,000 (4300000 floating) GDPP: 67492 RMB

events leading up to the present forms the genealogy. It is also in this inclusion of the present in the genealogy that a criticality of the present is possible. This criticality of the present is fundamental to future interventions in the city. Foucault noted, “genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary.”111 In the following research, the relationship of spatial developments, requiring meticulous documentation of events over time, is crucial to understanding their relationships to the broader shifts in the political economy. This method of investigation shows how the evolution of developmental thinking and the effects of changing policies are transforming the way in which space is produced in the city. (Fig. 13) A deeply layered timeline for each case is used to relate event to event, place to place, as well as policy to execution. Land leases, development construction, evolution of certain entrepreneurs

Chapter 1 Introduction

SEZs

47

are included also to reveal the changes in processes and realization. As one of the most prolific and prominent scholars of Chinese urbanism, Wu Fulong, once intimated, the politics of scale is crucial to understanding the rapid development of the cities of transitioning economies. Key events or sets of events at the larger scale trigger or introduce certain effects at the local scale, influencing decisions, reactions, and coinciding opportunities. The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and the 2008 Financial Crisis, for example, each had an explicit impact on the flows of global capital. Their repercussions at the local scale, in turn, prompted policy responses, which changed the urban spatial production system. At the scale of country, which is, again to be emphasized, by far the largest in the world, central government decisions such as the granting of the World Expo site to Shanghai, had bearing on the ensuing projects and procedures. “Genealogy, consequently, requires patience and a knowledge of details, and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material. Its ‘cyclopean monuments’ are constructed from discrete and apparently insignificant truths and according to a rigorous method.”112 On a larger scale, a timeline of the policies of the central government and the municipality are chronicled as are significant local and global events. (Fig. 14) International events such as the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, national episodes such as central government leadership changes and CCP Congresses, and municipal occasions like the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai as well as local incidents, come together to show the interactions of specific spatial productions with larger events in the world. The zoomins show the effect of globalization on everyday life, revealing, for example, the effect that high returns from North American private equity investment funds have on, and that are, in turn, impacted by the land market in Shanghai’s historic neighborhoods. The timeline is crucial to the understanding of the urban loopholes’ contextual evolution. In the transition from an urban spatial production system under a centrally planned economy to one under a partial market economy with vestiges of central planning, the urban loopholes generated by gaps and absences in the first phase of transition have increasingly become urban loopholes resulting from ambiguities and exceptions. Shaped by the changing policies of China’s deep bureaucratic hierarchy and their transforming relationship with the omnipresent adaptive and developmental local state, the urban loopholes’ evolution also reflects the growing involvement of the state. These evolutions of both the urban loopholes and growing state involvement become apparent when mapped onto the timeline, showing the maturing of the transition economy. Although the identification of urban potential could have led to projective scenarios, the author has chosen to refrain from detailed projections, limited by the scope of the study. Aware of the perpetual uncertainty embedded in the transition economy and the inherent adaptability of the urban spatial production system, the analysis could be a precursor to potential proposals.

Existing Studies on Urban China in Transition The literature on China’s accelerated economic liberalization has burgeoned over the decades, ranging from academic to popular, all analyzing and explaining the multiple aspects of China’s expedient transformation and rise. China experts such as Perry Link,113 Roderick MacFarquhar,114 Geremie Barmé,115 Elizabeth Perry,116 and many 48

more, in the fields of Chinese studies, international studies, political science, economics, law, have produced insightful and incisive volumes on the country’s developments. Scholars like David Harvey and Manuel Castells have included China as exemplary cases in chronicles of broader global phenomena.117 More recently journalists, such as Evan Osnos and Peter Hessler, have also produced insightful volumes that try to make the rapid transformation to China and the drivers and agents behind change accessible to an educated Western public.118 From the disciplines of geography and urban economy, the highly respected and prolific Wu Fulong and Zhu Jieming, for example, were some of the earliest scholars of China’s marketization and urban development. Their edited volumes have formed the basis of much later scholarship on contemporary Chinese urbanism.119 Research into spatial production, initially confined to a handful of Chinese experts in Western high academia, entered architecture discourse in the late 1990s. Based on studio research conducted from 1996 to 1997, Great Leap Forward was published in 2001. Seizing on the moment of China’s distinct economic transition, the study examined the opening sites of the country’s marketization.120 The volume not only put China and its transitional political economy on the radar for designers, but conversely, its spatial probes highlighted the conceptual framework specific to architecture as a discipline. The research dissected socio-economic and political transformations through the processes of spatial production, in which maps, plans, diagrams, and visual documentation were not only illustrative but serve as instruments as much as, and complementary to, the more normative quantitative and qualitative analyses. Even though a flurry of international architecture publications specializing in China followed, highlighting the chance with which the foreign architects could build at a scale and speed not encountered before, only few provided insight into what Great Leap Forward called the “relentless building” and “maelstrom of modernization” that “seems to be least understood at the very moment of its apotheosis.”121 Most of the books that are published have also often covered Chinese cities as a singular phenomenon, where cities offer a range of developments.122 Only a few have been incisive while being able to account for the scale of China and the significance of its transition on the world.123 Many collated volumes have tried to bring together diverse topics, where only a handful of individual essays actually bring to the table new viewpoints and new content.124 Specifically themed research was most often the most lucid and synthetic, bringing together rich content with illuminating concepts.125

have appeared markedly philosophical in summarizing the experience of encountering the Chinese cities from the perspective of the West,126 with attempts to either distill the logic of the phenomena,127 or summarize the most exotic and striking of their parts.128 A few that do denote the specificities of context from the framework of space, have been successful in their access to the complexities of China’s diverse but rapid urbanization.129 Given the scale of China, the blanket pronouncements on a singularity of ‘Chinese cities’ either reveal the urgency for fundamental research, or an inanity on the part of the global intellectual community that continues to fail to grasp the magnitude of diversities within a country that could be a continent. The serious and oftentimes

Chapter 1 Introduction

Many of the others seemed still to be struggling to handle the enormity of both the site, of China as a whole, and its transformation, as a singular phenomenon. A few

49

1992

APEC in Shanghai

Pudong Airport opens

Jinmao Tower opens

Deng Xiaoping passes away

Asia Economic Crisis Hong Kong Handover

SOE restructuring

1996

Jiang Zeming becomes General Secretary of the CCP

Rising Inflation

Tian’anmen Incident

Shanghai becomes Dragon’s Head

1989

Shenzhen as SEZ

Mao Zedong passes away

1976

“Changes Every Year, Transformations Every Three Years” 1982 Article 10 of the Constitution states "urban land is owned by the state only" and "not allowed to be bought, sold or transferred"

1979 Ministry of Urban and Rural Construction and Environment Protection formed Bureau of Urban Planning formed to organize and approve masterplans

People’s Congress Standing Committee issues (1987/1/1) N.27 土地管理法 [Land

Administration Act]

LAND REFORM AND DEVOLUTION OF AUTHORITY

1994 State Council issues (1991) 中华 State Council 人民共和国城镇国有土地使用权出 (1993) 城市房地产管理法 Urban Real 让和转让暂行条例 [Provisional Provisional Land Estate Admin Law control

Standing Commit tee issues (1989) N.23 中华人 民共和国城市规划法 [City Planning Law of the PRC] gives the local state the power to issue land use

State Council issues (1984) N.

[Regarding the Pilot Sites for the broadening of sale of housing subsidies in Large Cities]]

public housing at discounted prices

Shanghai issues (1984) 上海市出售

商品住宅管理办法( 试行）[Measures for the management of Commodity Housing Sales] 3

[Provisional Regulations Regarding using Overseas Chinese Remittance to purchase and construct housing]

关于棚户简屋改造规划和实施情况的 报告 [Report Regarding Slum

Housing Upgrade Plan and Implementation]

Shanghai issues (1996/4/22) N. 18 关 Shanghai issues (1998/8/2) N. 33关于 365 Plan 于加快本市中心城区危棚简屋改造若干 加快本市中心城区危棚简屋改造实施办 completed 意见 [Some Views Regarding 法 [Accelerating of City Center 365 Ha

Accelerating of City Center Slum Slum Upgrade Implementation] Upgrade] authorizes district governments reduces land leasing fee, subsidies to the approval right for applications of redevelopment proposals from private developers

State Council issues (1994) N.43 关于深化城镇住房制度改革的决定

State Council issues (1998/7/3) N.23 关于进一步深 化城镇住房制度改革加快住房建设的通知 [Notice regarding the deepening of the Urban Housing System Reform and the acceleration of Residential Construction] prohibits danwei from building or buying

[Decision regarding Deepening of Urban Housing Reform] supply and demand side programs

new housing units for employees danwei has to convert housing fund into monetary subsidies so employees can buy homes on market

National HPF 公积金

Shanghai issues (1998) Doc N. 19 关于促进本市住宅产 业的健康发展的若干意见 [Some views regarding promoting the healthy development of the residential industry in Shanghai]

Shanghai issues (1994) Doc N. 19

Shanghai issues (1999/1/19) Doc N. 4 上海市公有住房差价交换试行办法 [Pilot measures for the exchange of Shanghai public housing with pricing difference] city center units allowed to be

Shanghai issues (1994) Doc N. 34

关于出售公有住房的实施细则 [Regulations Regarding Implementation of Sale of Publicly-owned housing]

purchased with ownership rights

Cheap Rental Housing (CRH) require small units

starts district level developments

OVERSEAS CHINESE AND FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT Shanghai issues (1993/12/28) 上海 Shanghai issues (1995/8/28) 上 市利用外资开发经营内销商品住宅暂海市利用外资开发经营内销商品 住宅规定 [Regulation regarding 行规定 [Provisional Regulation regarding using Foreign Investmentusing Foreign Investment for the development and management for the development and of commodity housing sold to management of commodity the national market] housing sold to the national market] landlease for 70 years to

Procedures of Shanghai Municipality on the Intake of Experts From Abroad]

1997 上海市历史文化名城保护 规划 [Shanghai Historic Cultural City Protection Plan]

GDP 121.1bio RMB

43RMB GDPP 5,000,000inhab

State Counc 管理条例 [R Housing De

than residents

Shanghai iss 111 上海市城 [Detailed Re Managemen Demolition Implementa

Shanghai iss 184 上海市房 除直管公房等 [Some Regu Compensatio Directly Man the like]

25% increa 70% increa

Foreigners

Shanghai is (implement 外销商品住 [Some Com consolidati housing ma

[Provisions on the Employment of Foreigners in China]

Shanghai (1993) Shanghai (1994) N.8 N.47 amend +2 +175 Locations declared (became 61) 优秀 优秀历史建筑 近代历史建筑

State National 建设部、文 Council 化部 issues (1986/12/ (1988/11/10) 关于重 08) 关于请 点调查保护优秀近代 Shanghai issues (1991/12/05) 公布第二 建筑物的通知 上海市优秀近代建筑保护管理 批国家历 [Notice regarding State Council issues 史文化名 Key Investigations 办法 [Measures for the conservation and management (1982/11/19) 城名单报 into Protecting of Shanghai’s Excellent 中华人民共和国文物 告的通知 Excellent Modern-era Architecture] 保护法 [PRC Law for [Notice Modern-era the Protection of regarding Building] Shanghai City Planning Cultural Relics] the Bureau, Tongji University, announce-1988 publication of Shanghai Museum produce ment of 上海近代建筑史稿 (1991/7) 上海历史文化名城保 the [History Of 护规划 [Conservation Plan for second list Shanghai Shanghai Historic Cultural of Modern-Era Renowned City] proposes 11 National Architecture areas for conservation Historic Manuscript] Cultural by Chen Congzhou Renowned Cities] lists Shanghai as one of 38

轮旧区改造的 Encouraging Move back, round of pilo

(2001/9/1) erased from 卖的合同文

Shanghai issues (1994) N.43 上海 State Council issues (1996) N.152 市引进国外专家暂行办法 [Interim 外国人在中国就业管理规定

MONUMENT PROTECTION

Shanghai (1989) N.62 issues 59 locations declared 优秀近代建筑

Shanghai issues (1999/12/01) N.42 关于内销商品住房种类归并 的若干规定 [Some Regulations Regarding the consolidation of the Types Commodity Housing for Local Market]

foreign developers in the city center

Shanghai issues (1990/3) 关于发展本市侨汇，外汇商 品房的意见 [Thoughts regarding development of commodity housing for overseas remittances] forbids selling of commodity housing for overseas Chinese to local enterprises

Shanghai is N. 68 关于鼓

HOUSING MARKETIZATION

[Provisional Measures Regarding Sale of Publicly-owned housing]

Cutoff for working period counting towards housing

Amending Rights in S

reduces landle who qualify

[Regarding accelerating city center Slum Upgrade-related Tax Issues]

1987 Shanghai pilots sale of 2000sm of housing

1986 上海市沿街 公有营业用房管理 暂行办法 [Provisional measures regarding the management of street-front publicly owned commercial units]

demolished

private developers $40-$110/sm demolished

Shanghai issues (1997/3/17) N. 20 关

关于出售公房的暂行办法

1987/9 侨汇商品住宅建设回忆 State Council issues opened 19 sites, 450000sm, 5000units (1983) N.152 关于引进国 1988/3 上海市外商投资房产企业商品 外人才工作的暂行规定 住宅出售管理办法 [Administrative [Provisional regulations re Measures of Shanghai Municipality the importation of Foreign Governing the Sale of Commercial Talent for work] Housing by Foreign Investment Real State Enterprises] accelerates 1979 Law of Joint Ventures of overseas investment the PRC begins FDI

State Council lists (1982/2/8) 24 cities as 国家历史文化名 城 National Historic Cultural Renowned Cities

Tax sharing reform deprives local government of revenue

Shanghai issues (1998/9/4) N. 53 关于加快 本市中心城区危棚简屋改造的有关财税问题

encourages home purchase, financing and restructure rents

Shanghai i 修改《上海市

rights for com

于执行〈加快本市中心城区危棚简屋改造若 干意见〉中有关问题的实施意见

1992 Shanghai establishes Housing Reform Office 房改办

10 Year Reform Strategy to

Property Right Administration of Allocated Land in

the Reform of State Owned Enterprises] allows SOEs to use state-allocated land occupied for real estate development, with

SLUM CLEARANCE AND REDEVELOPMENT

Shanghai issues (1993/12） 365 Plan - demolition of 365 Ha aimed

State Council issues 1991 Shanghai pilots 公积金 (1988) N.11 关于在 Housing Provident Fund 全国城镇分期分批准 (HPF) 行住房制度改革实施 方案[Implementation 8th Five Year Plan (1991-1995) Plan for a Gradual 关于全面进行城镇住房制度改革的意见 Housing System Reform in Cities and [Urban Housing Reform Resolution] Towns] begins sale of

140 关于扩大城 市住宅补贴出售 试点的通知

types of funding for housing: 1. state, 2. SOE, 3. developer

1992 first land lease to foreigner in Shanghai Shanghai issues（1992/3/13）

State Council issues (1991) N.78 城市房屋拆迁管理条例 [Regulations for the Management of Urban Housing Demolition and Relocation]

[Shanghai Old District Seven Year Housing Renovation Site Layout Plan] demolition of 540 Ha, 161000 families displaced

of urban land to local government, but central government takes small percent of land leasing premium

Land Admin Bureau issues (1998) N. 8 国有企业改革中划拨土 地使用权管理暂行规定 [Provisional Regulations on the

classes corresp to 3 use types (mixed, residential and industrial), but largely reflects 外销商品房

for 2000

Shanghai issues（1982）

购买和建设住宅的暂行办法

Land Administration Law of the PRC] grants property right

profits generated to compensate laid-off workers Shanghai implements (1996/6/2) 上海市基准地价 [Basic prices of Urban Land in Shanghai] rates defined for 12 land

and building permits, and enforce development control through the urban plan

Shanghai issues (1987/11/27) N.42 上海市土地使用有偿转让办法 [Measures of Shanghai Municipality on the Compensatory Transfer of Land Use Rights] Shanghai issues (1986/10/30) N.113 上海市中外合资经营企业土地使用管理办法 [Measures Concerning Land Use Administration for Sino-Foreign Joint Equity Enterprises in Shanghai]

State Council issues (1980/3/5) N.61 关于用侨汇

State Council issues (1998) N. 256 中华人民共和国土地管理法 实施条例 [Regulations for the Implementation of the

Regulation on Granting and Value Increment land speculation state owns all urban land and Transferring Land-use Rights Tax on collectives own rural land on State-owned Land in Cities State-owned Land Act and Towns] 1988 Constitution amended to separate land 土地增值税 Sh government promotes ownership from land use rights; the non-gratuitous 两级政府三级管理 transfer of land use rights came into effect

上海旧区七年住宅改建基地布局规划

“Build Preser

Shanghai (1999) N.57 +162 Locations declared 优秀历史建筑 1999.03 Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau publishes 上海市 历史文化名城保护规划[Conservation Plan for Shanghai Historic Cultural Renowned City]

1999.03 上海市历史文化名城保护

Shanghai issues (1994/10/08) N.1101上海市房产管理局关于重申 加强对本市优秀近代建筑保护管理 的通知 1997 publication of 上 海百年建筑史 1840-1949［A history of Shanghai’s hundred years of architecture 1840-1949] by Wu Jiang

31,100mio RMB GDP 2,500RMB GDPP 10,000,000inhab

与发展关系基础研究 [The Basic Research on the Relationship of Conservation and Development in Shanghai Historic Cultural Prominent City] Shanghai issues (1999/9/8) N.0678 关于本市历史建筑与街区保护改造 试点的实施意见的通知 [Notice regarding the recommendations for the implementation of the historic architecture and neighborhood conservation and upgrade pilot projects]

121,100mio 9,380RM

1999 publication of 上 海近代建筑风格 [Shanghai Modern-era Architecture Style] by Zheng Shiling

12,900,00

business purposes (commercial, tourism, entertainment, commodity housing) to transfer publically after 1 July 2002 either through tender, auction or quotation

鼓励动迁居民回搬推进新一 的试行办法 [Regarding g Displaced Residents to pushing forward new lot for urban upgrade]

Central Government Land and Resource Administration (2012) Doc. N. 53 闲置土地处置办 法 [Regulation to handle unused Shanghai Municipal land] Development and Reform Commission issues (2014/4/11) N.37 关于推进上海市轨道 交通场站及周边土地 综合开发利用的实施 意见（暂行） []

deadline for all cities to ban negotiated conveyance for commercial development

State Council issues N. 28 (2004) 关于深化改革严格土 地管理的决定 [Decision on Deepening Reform and Strengthening Land Administration] strictest land policy

GDP 1’690bio RMB

Regulations on the Planning Control of Change in Land-use in the Central City (Shanghai)] any

redevelopment and expansion projects on the land of existing public facilities, including culture, education, health, sports etc, and the land of secondary industry like factories, warehouses etc., should be strictly controlled accordance with the approved plans

ssues (2001/02/09) Doc

Xi Jinping becomes General Secretary of the CCP

36000 RMB/sm hsg

Land Admin Bureau issues N. 71 (2004) 关于继续开 2007 城市房地产管理法 [Urban 展经营性土地使用权招标拍卖挂牌出让情况执法检查工作的 Real Estate Admin Law] 通知 [Notice on continuing on Inspection of and Supervision over law enforcement for the Lease of prohibits SOEs from real estate Market-allocated Land-use Right by Bidding, Auction and Listing-for-Sale] sets 31 August 2004 as development

issues Doc N. 101 (2001) ever to reiterate the orders of n. 11 and n. 71 decrees 市土地使用权出让办法》的决定 [Decision on Shanghai Planning Dept issues N. 355 (2004) 加强中 the Methods of Granting Land Use 心城内改变土地使用性质规划管理的暂行规定[Provisional Shanghai]ensures that the granting of land-use

mmercial land is acquired via public bidding

World Expo in Shanghai

Policy to tighten control over land

Hongqiao T2 opens

“Better City Better Life”

ding New is Development, rving Old is also Development” Land Admin Bureau issues N. 11 (2002) 招标拍卖挂牌出让国有建设土 地使用权规定[Regulations on Lease of State-owned Land by Bidding, Auction and Listing-for-Sale] requires all land for

2010

2008 Beijing hosts Olympics World Financial Crisis

2004 Macroeconomic measures to cool rising prices

Hu Jintao becomes General Secretary of the CCP

China joins WTO

( 11 Dec 2001)

2002

State Council issues N. 17 (2008/10) 上海市人民政府机 构改革方案 [Plan for the organizational reform of the Shanghai Municipal Government] forms 上海市规划与国 土资源管理局 Shanghai Municipal Planning and Land Resources Administration as result of municipal reform and consolidated land resource management with urban planning

ease for selected developers

AFFORDABLE HOUSING Central Government issues Cheap Rental Housing Guarantee Plan 2009-2011

cil re-issues (2001) Doc N.305 城市房屋拆迁 (2004) [Ways to provide cheap rental Regulations for the Management of Urban housing for the poorest urban emolition and Relocation] based on area rather residents]

Ministry of Housing issues (2011) [Push Forward Social Security Housing Construction in a Large Scale] raises the ratio of urban

State Council issues (2013/9) N. 35 关于加快发展养老服务业的若干意见

households covered by affordable housing [Some views regarding accelerating to about 20 per cent by 2015 elderly care service industries]

s

State Council issues (2003/8/12) N. 18 State Council issues (2005/5/9) N. 26 关于做好稳定住房价格工作意见的通知 State Council issues (2010/4/17) N. 10 关于坚决遏制部分 关于促进房地产市场持续健康发展的通 [Opinion on Doing a Good Job of Stabilizing House Prices] imposes a tax on 城市房价过快上涨的通知 [Circular on Steadfastly Preventing Rapid Housing Price Inflation in Some Cities] 知 [On Promoting the Continuous and housing transactions at 5.5% of sale price on non-ordinary housing to curb housing speculation a ban on mortgages for third home purchase Healthy Development of the Real State Council issues (2006/6/30) N.37 关于调整住房供应 Estate Markets] stipulates ordinary 结构稳定住房价格意见 [Opinions on Adjusting House State Council issues (2008/12/20) N.131 关于促进房地产 market housing should dominate housing Supply Structure and Stabilizing House Price] 市场健康发展的若干意见 [Several Opinions on Promoting supply ‘for the majority of households to Ministry of Construction issues (2006/11/27) N.171 关于规the Healthy Development of the Real Estate Market] sues (2001/11/09) Doc N. buy or to rent’ 范房地产市场外资准入和管理的意见 [Opinions on 房屋土地资源管理局关于拆 Regulating Access of Foreign Capital into the Real Estate 等房屋补偿款的若干规定 State Council issues (2011/1/27) N. 1 Market] stricter regulations for real estsate operations ulations Regarding 关于进一步做好房地产市场调控工作有 Ministry of Commerce issues (2007/5/23) N.50 关于进一 ion for the Demolition of 关问题的通知 [Circular on Relevant 步加强、规范外商直接投资房地产业审批和监管的通知 naged Public Housing and Issues to Further the Control of the [Notice on Further Strengthening and Regulating the Real Estate Market] purchase restrictions Examination, Approval and Supervision of Foreign Direct were imposed for units beyond first home Investment in Real Estate Industry] requires local

sues (2001/10/29) Doc N. 城市房屋拆迁管理实施细则 egulations for the nt of Urban Housing and Displacement ation]

Shanghai issues (2014/6/17) N. 关于 开展老年人住房反向抵押养老保险试点 的指导意见 [Views regarding pilot and steering elderly housing reverse mortage]

governments to have better supervision of foreign investment in real estate market

TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION

ase in housing price in Chinese cities ase in Shanghai (2001-2004)

Shanghai Urban Planning Dept issues (2008) Doc N. 866 关于促进节约集约利用工业用地加快发展现代服 务业的若干意见 [The Directives on Accelerating the Development of Modern Service Industry and the Promotion of Intensive Utilization of Industrial Land] Foreigners no longer allowed to buy 2008 Shanghai establishes 上海市外国专家局 Shanghai Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs Ministry of Commerce issues (2007/3/6) N.25 关于 2007年吸收外商投资工作指导性意见 [Guidance on Absorption of Foreign Investment in China 2007]

allowed to buy

ssues (2001/6/15) N.22 tation 8/1) 关于本市内 住房并轨的若干意见 mments regarding the ion of commodity arkets]

‘W’, ‘N’ m 商品房买 文本

o RMB GDP

MB GDPP

00inhab

encourace investments in inland markets as well as in high-tech industries, strict limitations on foreign investment in real estate market

State Council establishes (2012/09/05) N.53 外国人在中国永 久居留享有相关待遇的办法 [Foreigners’ Permanent Residence in China]

CREATIVE ECONOMIES 2004/11/6 上海创意产业中 心 Shanghai Creative Industries Center (SCIC) founded

75 sites given Creative Center plaque

Sh Economic Council issues (2008/6/13) N. 452 上海 Sh Economic Council issues (2011/9/2 市加快创意产业发展的指导意见 [Guiding advice on 8) N. 51 关于推进上海规划产业区块外产业结构调整 accelerating Creative Industries Development] 转型的指导意见 [Guiding advice on promoting industrial structure reform and transition of 上海市创意产业集聚区认定管理办法（试行） industrial districts outside of planning in Shanghai] [Confirmation and Management of Shanghai Creative Industries Clusters (pilot)]

HERITAGE CONSERVATION

Shanghai approves (2003/11) 12 历+282 Locations declared 史文化风貌区 Historical Cultural 优秀历史建筑 Features and Styles Areas Pudong included in Historical declared = 27 sq km and Cultural Area +12 sq km Shanghai issues (2005/11) 中心城 Shanghai implements (2003/01)上 风貌保护道路规划管理办法 海市历史文化风貌区和优秀历史建 determines (2006) 144 风貌保护道 筑保护条例 [Regulations of Shanghai 路 Historical Cultural Features and Municipality on the Conservation of Styles Streets and 64 永不拓宽的道路 the Districts with Historical Cultural Never-to-be-widened streets （一类 Features and Styles And The Excellent 风貌保护道路） Historical Buildings]

(2004)上海市衡山路复兴路历史文 化风貌区保护规划[Hengshan Lu

Fuxing Lu Historic Cultural Features and Styles District Conservation Plan]

Shanghai issues (2004/9/11) N.31 关于进一步加强本市历史文化风貌 区和优秀历史建筑保护的通知 National 建设部 issues (2004/03/06) 关于加强对 城市优秀近现代建筑规划 保护工作的指导意见

Shanghai issues (2007/9/17) N.30 关于本市风貌保护道路（街巷）规 划管理若干意见的通知 [Notice of Some Suggestions on the Administration of Planning Work for Preservation-of-Historical-Look Streets (Alleys/Lanes)]

477,100mio RMB GDP 36,217RMB GDPP

[Views and directions for strengthening of thePlanning and Protection of Excellent Modern-era Building in the City]

Fig. 14 Timeline of the policies implementations by the central government and Shanghai’s municipal government in relation to the different broader urban development issues under economic transition

915,400mio RMB GDP 67,492RMB GDPP

4,300,000floating population 13,000,000inhab registered

laborious academic tomes that are precise and focused on specific locations or topics seem outnumbered by the shallow and sometimes glossy ‘narrative lites’ on Chinese cities. Many more seem to be jumping on a popular bandwagon of increasingly fashionable ‘tabloid urbanism’ than finding a new route to an interesting destination. Books on the urban development of Shanghai especially are surprisingly lacking, given the sheer number of international architecture firms and designers who have settled there since the early 2000s. Even comprehensive volumes on the history of Shanghai remain scarce.130 Studies in the style of the Endless Cities series, ask the question of how exactly data matters in enlightening the understanding of a city.131 Volumes that have focused on topics like public spaces seemed able only to superficially explain a Western concept in the documentation of local phenomena.132 More specific studies, like the one on the development of Shanghai’s new towns, still showed, especially in the selection of contributing essays, a marked distance from context; a shortcoming that much of the Western language research on Chinese cities still largely suffers.133 A few volumes have been able to give in-depth looks at particular topics. An academic inquiry into the history of the lilong houses begins to offer a broader picture of the city and its historic context, from the perspective of understanding a very specific and local architecture type and their urban aggregation.134 But few bring together the different layers of urbanism that have made a city like Shanghai unique and gripping, despite its inherent draw. One most recent volume, in English by a Chinese academic, gave an overview of the vastly different parts of the Shanghai metropolitan area,135 but due to its coverage ambitions, could hardly get into each of the developments in any detail. Whereas most English-language research on Chinese cities and Shanghai has been deliberate in framing its content in a synthetic way, Chinese-language research, with much more access to first-hand material, has largely been disappointing in its lack of conceptual synthesis.136 Despite their privileged and often monopolistic access to urban archives, local academics have yet to bring together much of their studies beyond cataloguing.137 In its nascent stages still, this first-hand collection and cataloguing from recently opened archives is necessary, especially given the richness of content drawn from material that is often difficult to procure. But it remains disappointing that the analysis and assessments, that could complement the rich content, have been either restricted or self-restrained. The context of the Chinese political system perhaps makes this understandable. What history is allowed to be dissected and published is confined to the era before the Liberation of 1949. The lack of published research on Shanghai that clarifies the recent past, of the post-1949 era, makes it impossible to make valid projections to the future while overlooking the most legacy-influential era. The inability to relate history to the present reflects the cautious self-censorship to which China’s academic community have yielded, a “cult of transgression without risk.”138 The systemic aversion of the complex layers of recent history and their legacies on contemporary developments have relegated local academic productions to a continuing incompleteness that would be detrimental to the long-term intellectual growth of an increasingly powerful nation. In following the changes in Chinese research development, one seems to be following also the most cutting-edge of global developments. Just as the rapid reproduction of the likes of Apple gadgets has shown the shanzhai capabilities and economic prow52

ess of the Chinese value chain, so the swift and immediate learning and usurping of the latest ideas shows how adept the Chinese are at localizing global concepts. Books that do take on the interesting forms of creative templates on urban analysis from precedent volumes disappoint in their clear lack of understanding of how the form related to content in the original version.139 The increasing slickness of bureaucratic publications still continues the often meaning-devoid sloganeering that has sustained many verbose official publications since post-Liberation.140 If the Chinese language publications often fail to clarify complex phenomena, many English language ones miss the point while analyzing Chinese changes. Between post-socialism and East Asian developmentalism, the framing of the Chinese city’s radical transition has been confined to the established frameworks borrowed from geography or economics. Scholars who look, for example, at the creativity of the Chinese ‘creative industries clusters,’ without understanding the dual land or the vestige of SOE hierarchies, in assessing the growth of the tertiary industries and eval­ uating their creativity capacities, often completely miss the relevance of creativity as an alibi rather than as actual content.141 On the one hand, the actual ‘creatives’ often evade official classification, dodging the systematic institutional appropriation of what they consider artistic freedom. The rapid shifts in sub-cultures often make their presence deliberately undetectable, especially to scholars. On the other hand, the central government policies that have limited the commercialization of administratively-allocated land, for example, have also created numerous gaps in the central areas of cities and these necessitate a reconceptualization of legal conversion.142 The urban loophole, in such cases, becomes even more relevant to the understanding of

came the front for a viable and, more importantly, legal, thus taxable, business plan that has benefited the various stakeholders involved. For the SOE landlords, the developments gave them additional revenue without any effort made by the bureaucracy. For the local government, the image-ability of redevelopments made the cityscape cleaner, gave them more tax income, and also, importantly, scored them political performance indicator points for service industry growth and innovation incubation. For commercial tenants, the developments offered different spaces from the standard office buildings, nominally cheaper rents, and first-year incentives in the form of tax rebates and business registration priorities. The caveat is that the new spaces may not be affordable to creative startups. After the first few years of pageantry and rapid growth in the number of creative clusters, few new ones have been created. But the point here is not that the development of these clusters is not interesting. Rather, the crux of the matter is that the mantle of ‘creativity,’ as a globally circulated and fashionable policy extraction, has been used, under local circumstances, to make the best of the existing legal constraints. Creativity, thus, is of less importance than its deployment as an urban alibi that exploits the circumstantial loophole that has formed. It is not intentionally ill-meaning but rather a pragmatic resolution to the ambiguities and incoherencies within the existing urban production system. Many concepts, derived from the West, often North American or European, experiences, become difficult to apply to the unique situation in a distinct context with its

Chapter 1 Introduction

developments. Combined with rising interest in heritage architecture and conservation movements, the catch-all jingles for creative industries clusters and industrial reuse be-

53

own specificities deriving from its historic legacies and cultural lineages. China, after all, as emphasized already, is a sprawling country with a socio-cultural diversity that spans the spectrum of theories. In-depth explorations of whether, for example, Shanghai’s socio-economic restructuring fits the broader narrative of globalization, neoliberalization, social polarization, and spatial segregation could only fail to account for the range of drivers that interact in the complexity of the urban spaces. More specifically, little attention has been paid to the socio-spatial and physical transformations to city center neighborhoods at the neighborhood scale. This is especially so in areas that have not undergone wholesale demolition and renewal, and where the complexities left over from the post-1949 era of the planned economy remain most visible; their impact on everyday life most palpable. Whether too challenging to tackle because of the cultural nuances involved with investigation by non-Chinese or dialect speaking scholars, or whether the political sensitivities embedded in unresolved and illicit distant and recent pasts have rendered clarity unworthy of local inquiry, it remains surprising that these culturally rich but rapidly eroding bastions of the city’s identity have been largely overlooked, indeed at their moments of “apotheosis.”143 This volume hopes to fill a visible gap in the current roster of research on the urban spatial production of Chinese cities. It tries to give accounts, from a scale of analyses that is much smaller than the territorial abstractions of geography and sociology, and larger than the single-object analyses of architecture history. The study also reacts directly to the very fact that little could be openly written about, especially with too much clarity, for the period following 1949, despite ample excavated resources today that would explain their relationship to contemporary development. From the position of a foreign scholar who also happens to be born to the city and has access to many of the places under examination in the volume, the author would like to introduce, at the very least, the pertinent relationships between the past, present, and future, as well as well their spatial manifestations.

Content and Structure The chapters to follow will examine the urban loopholes of transition economy China through closer analyses of urban spatial production in Shanghai’s city center. The empirical analyses are broadly structured in two larger sections, each framed by a key concept that characterizes the specific mechanisms and drivers for urban development. The sections “Preservation via Inhabitation,”144 comprising Chapters 2 and 3, and “Gentrification with Chinese Characteristics,”145 comprising Chapters 4, 5, and 6, present specific case narratives that describe the development history, drivers and agents of spatial productions in specific neighborhoods in Shanghai. In the first section, the first and second chapters come together to tell the story of transformation at the neighborhood scale. The second section’s third and fourth chapters take on a smaller scale, and describe commercial transformations at the block scale. The urban loophole serves as a red thread through the cases to corroborate the institutional vestiges, ambiguous property rights and adaptive governance that have expedited the appropriation of global know-how. 54

Preservation via Inhabitation Accounts of China’s housing marketization often fail to acknowledge cultural and geographic specificities and legacy conditions, both from the pre-Liberation era as well as post-Liberation periods, in considering how historic areas have remained part of a persistent dual market in the transition economy. Similarly, accounts of the rising importance of heritage overlook their intersection with existing occupants. The first section, entitled “Preservation via Inhabitation,” brings together the effects of selective housing marketization (Chapter 2) and heritage conservation (Chapter 3). The two chapters cover the same area, a mixed-use residential neighborhood in the western end of the former French Concession in Shanghai that has largely evaded the large-scale redevelopment process. The section deals with two processes that have thus far been studied separately. The legacies of recent history, largely ignored due to sensitivities, are also contextualized for the first time to allow for better solutions for possible projections. Chapter 2, “The Residential Neighborhood,“ looks at the transformations of the Wuyuan [五原路] and Anfu Lu [安福路] areas since housing marketization began in the 1980s. Commodity housing construction as the instrument for foreign capital attraction, especially in an area with legacy linkages, is juxtaposed against legacies of the lilong housing, with an introduction of their history and transformation. But despite what seems to be an overarching neoliberalization agenda in housing production and provision, and the prevalence of demolition in the Chinese city for development, the area still includes a majority of publicly managed housing that is a legacy of recent history. For the small entrepreneurs, the preservation of the legacy housing in the dual housing market offers the bottom-up urban loophole for their redevelopment. The spatial opportunities offered by the dual housing market could well also be the means for slowing the erosion of social diversity. Chapter 3, “The Cultural Street,” is approached from the perspective of conservation implementation. The chapter traces the development of heritage projects as part of the re-globalization of Shanghai in both concept and implementation. The chapter examines the interaction between planning ideas and the pragmatic interests of the local state, as well as those of the diverse entrepreneurs. It traces the relationships of heritage conservation as concept and the market demands of real estate, consumer

Gentrification with Chinese Characteristics The term used in the second section, ‘gentrification with Chinese characteristics,’ references both the terms ‘neoliberalization with Chinese characteristics’146 and ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.’ The term ‘gentrification’ was chosen both because of its popular accessibility and broad connotation.147 It characterizes the urban transformations in the context of China’s transition economy, where market economy practices take place within the political status quo of the party-state. The Chinese characteristics of ‘gentrification’ thus come from the adaptive governance of the local state and its

Chapter 1 Introduction

spaces, tourism, and shows how the heritage ‘project’ has resulted in a selective commercialization of the residential neighborhood. Wukang Lu [武康路], one of the designated ‘Cultural Streets,’ is the culmination of this heritage ‘project.’ In contrast to the bottom-up urban loopholes created from the dual housing market and ambiguous ownerships, the top-down urban loopholes, using heritage conservation as alibi, show the growing participation of the developmental local state.

55

increasing participation as the privileged player in the urban regime. And through unpacking the processes of gentrification, urban governance structures, planning organization, in relation to shifts in land marketization, will also be elaborated. The section includes three chapters of different scales. Chapter 4, “The Midtown of China,” presents a neighborhood-scale case along the West Nanjing Lu [南京西路] corridor in the Jing’an District. The shutdown of the bottom-up creative reuse within the historic residential buildings of the compound, Jing’an Villas [静安别墅], is contextualized within the broader visions of the district for developments along the West Nanjing Lu corridor. The shutdown seemed on the surface to be resolving the conflicts between new commerce and incumbent residents. But a closer look reveals the developmental local state’s long-term aspiration for a “global Jing’an” and a “Midtown of China,” in which non-state-affiliated actors are pushed out in favor of state-affiliated growth coalitions. The closing of the urban loopholes, made possible earlier by the local state’s adaptive governance and exploited by the enterprising non-state actors, also shows the local urban regime’s recentralization of authority. Chapter 5, “The New Economies,” brings together two cases, Yongkang Lu [永康路] and Anken Green [安垦], recent developments where public-private alliances were formed to exploit the urban loopholes produced by the dual market. In both developments, processes, and procedures learned from the Xintiandi [新天地], Tianzifang [田子坊], M50 , and Bridge 8 [八号桥] projects were updated. These four are regarded as the projects that created new paradigms for urban renewal and heritage conservation in Chinese cities. Collectively, these recent cultural-led urban regeneration projects demonstrate that the Chinese characteristics of gentrification lie primarily in their embedding within the local institutional framework. Chapter 6, “The Contemporary Art Ecologies,” outlines the spatial impact of contemporary art development, zooming out to the scale of the metropolis to show how the shift to cultural diplomacy has also affirmed the dominance of both the local and central states. Together, the sections show the ways in which the urban loopholes have formed, developed and eased the embedded development contradictions in the transition economy. From the specificities demonstrated in the transformation of the city center neighborhoods in Shanghai, the designer’s singular anxiety about the rise of omnipresent generic cities, produced and proliferated by the flows of globalization and eroded of unique qualities,148 is clearly unfounded. This is more so in the presence of the ever-changing urban loopholes and their resultant spaces. Especially in some of the now ‘emerging economies’ that predate the teleologically defined globalization of the mercantilism to industrialization account,149 the inevitability of their inflections of globalization’s accelerated flows should be even more self-evident with the ensuing chronicle.

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scenarios. The practice of design and projection thus responds to existing conditions as well as projected future demands. Especially in the modern era, with rapid indus­ trialization and urbanization in Europe and North America (what are today developed or advanced economies), the discipline took a proactive turn to rethink spatial conditions and to use spatial design to improve existing socio-economic challenges. This element of design agency is what the author intends as ‘instrumentality’ in the text. The word ‘instrumentality’ is also used by Rem Koolhaas to mean this capacity for design to fulfill its agency. See Koolhaas, “In Search of Authenticity.” 10 ‘Political economy’ is the field of studies that emerged in the 19 th century, as the study of social relations, particularly the power relations between the state and the governed—politics—that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources—economics. In more general usage, as intended here, the term ‘political economy’ refers to the political system of a nation-state that is linked to its selection of a dominant economic system. 11 The concept of ‘adaptive governance’ is used to explain the resilience of the Chinese state and its success in implementing rapid economic transition (from planned to market economics) while maintaining an authoritarian state. Previously, political theory posited that economic liberalization necessitates political liberalization. See Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adaptive Governance in China,” in Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, ed. Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard Contemporary China Series 17 (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2011), 1 – 27. 12 The concept of ‘institutional amphibiousness’ is used to explain how China’s transition from planned to market economy is different from that of Eastern Europe. It provides an alternative concept to the dichotomous model of ‘civil society versus the state.’ See Xueliang Ding, “Institutional Amphibiousness and the Transition from Communism: The Case of China,” British Journal of Political Science 24 , no. 3 (July 1, 1994): 293 – 318 . 13 The ‘dual market’ is the coexistence of market and planned elements at the same moment in time and in the same space. It is a by-product of the transition economy. See, for example, Anthony Gar-On Yeh, “Dual Land Market and Internal Spatial Structure of Chinese Cities,” in Restructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space, ed. Laurence J. C. Ma and Fulong Wu (New York: Routledge, 2005), 52 – 70. 14 This Chinese model’s adeptness at mediating the market and planned, formal and informal, global and local has made possible what political economists have termed ‘market socialism’ and ‘neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics.’ 15 Since it began its economic opening to the world in the late 1970 s, the largest country in the world has increasingly become a regular feature of international news magazines as well as of the bourgeoisie dinner party conversation. The Economist has its own China section, separated from its other sections structured on each of the continents, to dissect the trends and logic of the country’s evolution. The New York Times has been so inquisitive and precise in its investigative journalism of China that it has been shut out

Chapter 1 Introduction

1 Lucian W. Pye, “Foreword,” in Shanghai, Revolution and Development in an Asian Metropolis, ed. Christopher Howe, Contemporary China Institute Publications (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), xi–xvi. 2 Rem Koolhaas, “In Search of Authenticity,” in The Endless City: The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society, ed. Richard Burdett and Deyan Sudjic (London: Phaidon, 2007 ), 320 – 23. 3 Howard W. French, “Searching for Scenes From Shanghai’s Lost Past,” The New York Times, November 28 , 2004 , sec. Movies / Movies News and Features, http://www.nytimes.com/2004 /11/28 /movies/MoviesFeatures/28 fren.html. 4 The author uses the term ‘spatial production’ to denote the processes and mechanisms that form the physical, often built, environment. Although the term has affinities to sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s concept of ‘production of social space,’ it differs in that the author, as an architect, emphasizes also the importance of the physicality of space. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge, MA : Blackwell, 1991). 5 Many of the foremost scholars of Chinese urban transition have used concepts developed from the Western examples, like ‘urban regime theory,’ ‘gentrification,’ etc. They also use selected cases to support theories, largely at the macro scale. The following study zooms in on the processes of urban spatial production, and, more, into their implementations. This, in turn, gives the study instrumentality. 6 Some of the cases observe transformations at the neighborhood scale of approximately one square kilometer over the span of more than two decades, and include case examples at the architecture scale. The scale and time span are chosen as representative of the transformations in other parts of Shanghai and other neighborhoods in Chinese cities. Other cases are smaller in scale, at the architectural or block scale of the neighborhood, and are chosen as representative of certain urban spatial production mechanisms. The choice of the cases presented will be elaborated in the methods section of this chapter. 7 The ‘genealogical mode of inquiry,’ in brief, comes from Michel Foucault, and is an analytical mode of historical research that deals with complex processes. In contrast to history ‘for history’s sake,’ the genealogical mode grasps the present through the dissection of the past in relation to this present. In this sense, it diagnoses the present, and bears a degree of criticality that traditional historic analysis precludes. The genealogical mode will be elaborated on in the section, “Research Methods.” See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 76 – 100; Michel Foucault, “Introduction,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, World of Man (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 3 – 17. 8 This disentanglement of actors, processes, and drivers responds to Foucault’s assertion that “genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments,” and “the world we know … is a profusion of entangled events.” See Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 76, 89. 9 Architecture as a discipline and practice is engaged with projecting and designing future buildings, urban spaces and

57

from the country, but persists nevertheless in churning out provocative scoops from the inside. The awarding of a Nobel Prize to a Chinese author has been taken as a given, despite reservations from well-known Chinese linguists. Even far-flung architecture awards have come to feature the token architect with projects from the post-reform China. After all, “China’s economy has been the story of the century!” See Scott Cendrowski, “Ten Must-Read Books That Explain Modern China,” Fortune, April 4 , 2015, http://fortune.com/ 2015 /04 /04 /china-modern-economy-10 -books/. 16 Notable recent studies of China’s influence have included the research of how knowledge transfers from Chinese urbanism are impacting spatial developments in African countries, where Chinese economic interests are extracting natural resources. Similarly, Chinese investment in American real estate after the 2008 economic crisis is also impacting the tenuous political and economic relationship between the countries. See for example, Holland Cotter, “Review: ‘Facing East’ Examines Chinese Influence on African Cities,” The New York Times, July 16, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/arts/ design/review-facing-east-examines-chinese-influenceon-african-cities.html; Jamil Anderlini, “Chinese Property Groups Look Abroad as Local Market Turns Frothy,” Financial Times, October 7, 2014 , http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ f 0 ff 80 fe- 4 4 6 a- 11 e 4 - 8 abd- 0014 4 feabdc 0 .html#axzz3 NuWI0 yxY. 17 Christopher Hawthorne, “Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’ a Refreshingly Original Take on a Future L.A. ,” Los Angeles Times, January 18 , 2014 , http://articles.latimes. com/2014 /jan/18 /entertainment/la-et-cm-her-architecture-notebook. 18 Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4 , no. 2 (June 1, 1973): 155 – 69, doi:10.1007/ BF01405730. 19 The ‘case study method’ is one that is based on an a priori theoretical framework, which in turn guides the research. The relevance of the theoretical framework, the case study method and the criteria for the cases will be further elaborated in the following sections. 20 The ‘genealogical mode of inquiry’ is one based on philosopher Michel Foucault’s re-positioning of historic research as one that holds also relevance to the present. The concept and its attitude will be elaborated on in the section “Research Methods.” 21 The term ‘socialist market economy [社会主义市场经济]’ is used by the Chinese party-state of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP ) for the establishment of a market economy while still maintaining its ideological grounding in Marxist-Leninism. The term is related to “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” For the ideological evolution of the term, see Sukhan Jackson, “Reform of State Enterprise Management in China,” The China Quarterly, no. 107 (September 1, 1986): 405 – 32; Stuart R. Schram, “China after the 13 th Congress,” The China Quarterly, no. 114 (June 1, 1988): 177– 97. 22 David Harvey, “Chapter 5 Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics,’” in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 120 – 51. 23 Lan Cao, “Chinese Privatization: Between Plan and Market,” Law and Contemporary Problems 63 (Autumn 2000): 13 – 62 . 24 Yue-man Yeung, Yun Wing Sung, and Enrong Song, eds., Shanghai: Transformation and Modernization under China’s Open Policy (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press,

58

1996). 25 Laurence J. C. Ma and Carolyn L. Cartier, eds., The Chinese Diaspora: Space, Place, Mobility, and Identity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), http://linc.nus.edu.sg/ record=b2359406. 26 Peter Nolan, “The China Puzzle: ‘Touching Stones to Cross the River,’” Challenge 37, no. 1 (January 1, 1994): 25 – 31. 27 The term ‘marketization’ refers to the transition of planned economics to market economics. More specific processes, such as ‘land marketization’ and ‘housing marketization’ refer to the specific product that undergoes transition, such as land and housing. 28 Notable differences from the Eastern European economic transition from planned economy have been dissected. A largely agrarian basis for the economy made economic growth via urbanization—the supply of cheap labor for industrialization via rural-urban migration—a possibility that largely urban former Soviet-bloc countries did not have. Locationally, the growing market of East Asia, as well as the entrepreneurial linkages of the Chinese diaspora, also made investment and economic development dynamic. See, for example, Andrew G. Walder, “China’s Transitional Economy: Interpreting Its Significance,” The China Quarterly, no. 144 (December 1, 1995): 963 – 79. 29 Andrew G. Walder, “Workers, Managers and the State: The Reform Era and the Political Crisis of 1989,” The China Quarterly, no. 127 (September 1, 1991): 467 – 92 . 30 Ibid. 31 The year 1949, which saw the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC ) under the leadership of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP ) is, in China’s periodization, the year of ‘Liberation [解放].’ Because the ideology-laden term has become commonly used, the author uses the term ‘Liberation’ to denote this time periodization, which corresponds with the rule of the CCP . Thus, contemporary history that occurred after 1949, despite structural changes, is institutionally continuous, and is referred to as ‘post-Liberation,’ and the period prior, ‘pre-Liberation.’ 32 The 1992 New York Times article had no qualms about clarifying the use of ‘socialism’ in the adage ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’: “a term that they have shorn of most economic meaning, … today “socialism” seems to signify little more than that they (the CCP /state) retain power.” It added that the government was “willing to free prices but not the press, to loosen controls over companies but not citizens.” See Nicholas D. Kristof, “The New China—A Special Report.; Chinese Communism’s Secret Aim: Capitalism,” The New York Times, October 19, 1992, sec. World, http://www.nytimes.com/1992 /10/19/world/the-new-china-a-specialreport-chinese-communism-s-secret-aim-capitalism. html. 33 Shelley Warner, “Shanghai’s Response to the Deluge,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 24 (July 1, 1990): 299 – 314 , doi:10.2307/2158900. 34 Tony Saich, “The Fourteenth Party Congress: A Programme for Authoritarian Rule,” The China Quarterly, no. 132 (December 1, 1992): 1136 – 60. 35 Rana Mitter, Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions 176 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 36 Richard Burdett, Deyan Sudjic, and School of Economics and Political Science London, eds., The Endless City: The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society (London: Phaidon, 2007 ). 37 Heilmann and Perry, “Embracing Un-

Transition from Communism,” 317. 47 ‘Guanxi [关系]’ is a word of social connections and personal relationships in Chinese. The term denotes the particular way personal networks and other informal connections facilitate business and other dealings in the East Asian context. Manuel Castells includes a section entitled, “Guanxi capitalism? China in the global economy”, in his book. See Manuel Castells, “Chinese Developmental Nationalism with Socialist Characteristics,” in End of Millennium, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume III , vol. 3 (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 311 – 28 . 48 The term ‘developmental state’ describes state dominance in steering economic development. The term has been used to describe East Asian economic development, as controlled by their strong states. The term was notably used for the ‘tiger states’ before the opening of China. See Gordon White and Jack Gray, eds., Developmental States in East Asia (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1988); Adrian Leftwich, “Bringing Politics Back in: Towards a Model of the Developmental State,” The Journal of Development Studies 31, no. 3 (February 1, 1995): 400 – 427, doi:10.1080/00220389508422370. 49 Daniel B. Abramson, “The Dialectics of Urban Planning in China,” in China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Urbanism, ed. Fulong Wu, Routledge Contemporary China Series 26 (New York: Routledge, 2007 ), 70. 50 Michael Leaf and Li Hou, “The ‘Third Spring’ of Urban Planning in China: The Resurrection of Professional Planning in the Post-Mao Era,” China Information 20, no. 3 (November 1, 2006): 568 , doi: 10.1177/0920203X06070043 . 51 John Friedmann, China’s Urban Transition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xv. 52 Ibid. See Elizabeth J. Perry, “China in 1992: An Experiment in Neo-Authoritarianism,” Asian Survey 33 , no. 1 (January 1, 1993): 12 – 21, doi: 10.2307/2645282. 53 Perry, “China in 1992.” 54 Anthony Gar-On Yeh and Fulong Wu, “The New Land Development Process and Urban Development in Chinese Cities*,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 20, no. 2 (1996): 330–353, doi:10.1111/j.1468 -2427. 1996.tb00319.x. 55 Christopher Howe, “The Supply and Administration of Urban Housing in Mainland China: The Case of Shanghai,” The China Quarterly, no. 33 (January 1, 1968): 73 – 97; D. J. Dwyer, “Urban Housing and Planning in China,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 11, no. 4 (January 1, 1986): 479 – 89, doi: 10.2307/621942 . 56 The term ‘land marketization’ refers to the establishment of a market for land sales and exchange. After land marketization, land would become an exchangeable and tradable commodity, and it would be traded on the commercial land market. The Chinese government adapted the practices of leasehold land for its land market: the ‘commercial leasehold land.’ However, due to the legacies of the planned economy, when all land was ‘administratively allocated’ to institutional work units belonging to the state, there existed also a parallel land market with ‘administratively-allocated land.’ The next chapter will elaborate on the background of land marketization. 57 The term ‘housing marketization’ refers to the commercialization of the housing system, from production to exchange, after economic liberalization. The next chapter will elaborate on the background to housing

Chapter 1 Introduction

certainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adaptive Governance in China.” 38 Ding, “Institutional Amphibiousness and the Transition from Communism.” 39 Scholar, statistician and risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb used the term ‘Black Swan’ to describe high-profile events that confound scientific and theoretical expectation until they occur. They are ‘outlier’ events in statistical terms, but because of the weight of their impact, become the center of studies for explanations. Because of the rapidness of China’s economic transition and the success of its economic growth, despite what would be predicted as requisite political liberalization to accompany the transition, China’s rise has been considered a ‘Black Swan’ event. See Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007 ). 40 Heilmann and Perry, “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adaptive Governance in China,” 4. 41 Resilience denotes the systemic ability to adjust to disturbances and changes to a system. It has become an increasingly important condition as the physical environment undergoes rapid physical and climatic change, and societies undergo rapid economic and political transition. In light of impending effects to the natural environment, including global climate change and the depletion of energy resources compounded by humanity’s exponential demographic growth, system resilience is studied for how human intervention can reinforce system robustness, and avert system instabilities leading to chaos. In the social sciences, political resilience describes the robustness of a political system when it undergoes structural change. See C S Holling, “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 , no. 1 (1973): 1 – 23 , doi:10.1146 /annurev.es.04 .110173 .000245. 42 Political scientist Kellee Tsai analyzes what she names as ‘informal adaptive institutions’ of private sector entrepreneurs co-opting state institutions to legitimize their enterprises, in the process reinforcing the power of the state. See Kellee S. Tsai, Capitalism without Democracy: The Private Sector in Contemporary China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007 ). 43 Political scientist Roderick MacFarquhar used the term ‘guerrilla-style policy-making’ in 2008. Heil­ mann and Perry attribute ‘guerrilla-style policy-making’s flexibility and volatility to revolutionary-era stratagems that are “fundamentally dictatorial, opportunistic, and merciless.” See Heilmann and Perry, “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adaptive Governance in China,” 13. 44 Heilmann and Perry wrote, “the rationale behind guerrilla policy-making is precisely to embrace uncertainty in order to benefit from it.” Ibid., 22. 45 The reconceptualization of the ‘state versus society’ dichotomy arose to explain the different paths between China and the Eastern European countries in their economic transition from planned to market economy. The prevalent explanation of economic transition to market economy emerging from civil society’s demands against the oppressive Communist state was inefficient to explain the economic transition in China that took place without social democratization. See also Philip C. C. Huang, “‘Public Sphere’ / ‘Civil Society’ in China?: The Third Realm between State and Society,” Modern China 19, no. 2 (April 1, 1993): 199. 46 Ding, “Institutional Amphibiousness and the

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marketization, and the city center historic housing stock that remained unmarketized. 58 The term ‘administratively-allocated land’ refers to land that has been allocated by the state to institutional users, usually for free or for a nominal price. Under the planned economy and prior to economic liberalization, all land was ‘administrativelyallocated’ as there was no commercial land market. With the introduction of the commercial land market, the co-existence of administratively-allocated land and commercial leased land would create the dual land market. Although the central government prohibits ‘administratively-allocated land’ from being commercialized, in the early eras of economic transition, state-owned enterprises (SOE s) along with private sector entrepreneurs informally commercialized some of the existing ‘administratively-allocated land.’ See Yeh, “Dual Land Market and Internal Spatial Structure of Chinese Cities.” 59 Sun Sheng Han and Bo Qin, “The Spatial Distribution of Producer Services in Shanghai,” Urban Studies 46, no. 4 (April 1, 2009): 893 , doi:10.1177/0042098009102133 . 60 The term ‘rent gap’ has been made prominent by the theorist Neil Smith in his explanation of the ‘supply side theory’ of ‘gentrification.’ See, for example, Neil Smith, “Gentrification and the Rent Gap,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77, no. 3 (September 1, 1987 ): 462 – 65. The use of the term in the Chinese context does not necessarily suggest consequent gentrification, but points out the systemic construct of the ‘rent gap’ as result of economic transition from planned to market economics. In most post-socialist economies, the transition to market economy meant that the entire city would be under rent gap. This, in turn, challenges the way theories developed in the capitalist and developed societies could be applied to other forms of political economies. 61 The central government’s ‘loosening’ and ‘tightening’ of regulations for developing on administratively-allocated land will be elaborated in the next chapters. 62 You-tien Hsing, The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9. 63 Theorists have developed the ‘urban regime theory’ in the field of urban politics and urban policy. It originated to explain public-private relationships in North American cities in the 1980 s. According to political scientist Clarence Stone, whose analysis of Atlanta in 1987 first made the concept prominent, the ‘regime’ is the “an informal yet relatively stable group with access to institutional resources that enable it to have a sustained role in making governing decisions.” See Clarence N. Stone, “Summing up: Urban Regimes, Development Policy, and Political Arrangements,” in The Politics of Urban Development, ed. Clarence N. Stone and Heywood T. Sanders, Studies in Government and Public Policy (Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 1987 ), 269 – 90. See also Susan S. Fainstein and Norman I. Fainstein, “Regime Strategies, Communal Resistance, and Economic Forces,” in Restructuring the City: The Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment, ed. Susan S. Fainstein and Norman I. Fainstein (New York: Longman, 1983), 245 – 82. 64 Jieming Zhu, “A Transitional Institution for the Emerging Land Market in Urban China,” Urban Studies 42, no. 8 (July 1, 2005): 1378, doi: 10 . 1080 / 00420980500150714 . 65 Ibid. 66 Xue-

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liang Ding, “‘The Only Reliability Is That These Guys Aren’t Reliable!’ The Business Culture of Red Capitalism,” in Restless China, ed. E. Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2013), 37– 57. 67 Historian on East Asia, Prasenjit Duara, has termed ‘political involution’ for the phenomenon of political incapacity of the local state despite the expansion of state institutions. 68 Leaf and Hou, “The ‘Third Spring’ of Urban Planning in China: The Resurrection of Professional Planning in the Post-Mao Era,” 568. 69 Gabriella Montinolla and her co-authors wrote, “… without political reform, economic returns remain at the mercy of political predation.” See Gabriella Montinola, Yingyi Qian, and Barry R. Weingast, “Federalism, Chinese Style: The Political Basis for Economic Success in China,” World Politics 48 , no. 1 (October 1, 1995): 50 – 81. Political scientist Pei Minxin also discusses ‘decentralized predation’ as a consequence of economic transition. He posits that the decentralization of property rights from central to local governments, and the lack of clarity of property rights have led to asset erosion by state agents. See Minxin Pei, China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2006), 35 – 40. 70 The city as ‘growth machine’ is a concept developed by sociologist Harvey Molotch. This concept shifted the understanding of agents and drivers for economic growth in urban development. It counters the previous assumption of city as mere receptacle of social interaction, and locates the local business elite as crucial stakeholders in urban politics to promote their interests. See Harvey Molotch, “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 2 (September 1, 1976): 309 – 32. 71 Political scientists Jean Oi and Jane Duckett described the phenomenon of ‘local state corporatism’ and ‘entrepreneurial state,’ respectively, where the local state participates in the market as a privileged player in transition China. Jean C. Oi, “Fiscal Reform and the Economic Foundations of Local State Corporatism in China,” World Politics 45, no. 1 (October 1, 1992): 99 – 126, doi:10.2307/ 2010520; Jane Duckett, “Bureaucrats in Business, Chinese-Style: The Lessons of Market Reform and State Entrepreneurialism in the People’s Republic of China,” World Development 29, no. 1 (January 2001): 23 – 37, doi:10.1016/ S0305 -750X(00)00083 -8 . 72 Urban scholar Hsing Youtien, in her analysis of overseas Chinese business networks, termed the local and provincial government intermediaries as ‘bureaucratic entrepreneurs.’ See You-tien Hsing, Making Capitalism in China: The Taiwan Connection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 73 Urban scholar Zhu Jieming brought together the concepts of ‘urban regimes’ and ‘developmental state’ to depict the collusion of the local state with private resources in pursuit of economic growth, which he terms ‘local growth coalitions.’ See, for example, Jieming Zhu, “Local Growth Coalition: The Context and Implications of China’s Gradualist Urban Land Reforms,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23 , no. 3 (1999): 534 – 548 , doi:10.1111/1468 -2427.00211. 74 Urban scholar He Shenjing called the displacement of residents from city center areas, as a result of the urban renewal process, ‘state-spon-

ment of the whole to reassert the equilibrium of complementary extremes”. It also reflects an already global city sensibility which had been cultivated since its inception in modernity. See Project on the City Harvard, Great Leap Forward, Project on the City 1 (Cambridge, MA : Taschen, 2001). 82 Deborah S. Davis, “Self-Employment in Shanghai: A Research Note,” The China Quarterly, no. 157 (March 1, 1999): 22 – 43. 83 Yeh and Wu, “The New Land Development Process and Urban Development in Chinese Cities”; Jieming Zhu, The Transition of China’s Urban Development: From Plan-Controlled to Market-Led (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1999); Chengri Ding, “Land Policy Reform in China: Assessment and Prospects,” Land Use Policy 20, no. 2 (April 2003): 109 – 20, doi:10.1016/ S0264 -8377(02)00073 -X. 84 Jieming Zhu, “The Changing Mode of Housing Provision in Transitional China,” Urban Affairs Review 35, no. 4 (March 1, 2000): 502 – 19, doi:10.1177/10780870022184507. 85 China has been emphasizing the need to shift from a developing and manufacturing-based economy to an innovation-driven knowledge-based service economy. 86 The local state’s shift, from large-scale urban renewal to heritage conservation in city center areas, has been incompletely analyzed. See, for example, Tianshu Pan, “Historical Memory, Community-Building and Place-Making in Neighborhood Shanghai,” in Restructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space, ed. Laurence J. C Ma and Fulong Wu (New York: Routledge, 2005), 122 – 37; Xuefei Ren, “Forward to the Past: Historical Preservation in Globalizing Shanghai,” in The Right to the City and the Politics of Space (University of California, Berkeley, 2006), http://escholarship.org/uc/item/84 z0 j8 tv; Xuefei Ren, “The Political Economy of Urban Ruins: Redeveloping Shanghai,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 , no. 3 (May 1, 2014): 1081 – 91, doi:10.1111/ 1468 -2427.12119. 87 The central government’s recentralization of power, in reaction to the growing property market bubble and social differentiation, has been studied in its changing land policies. See for example, Jiang Xu and A. Yeh, “Decoding Urban Land Governance: State Reconstruction in Contemporary Chinese Cities,” Urban Studies 46 , no. 3 (March 1, 2009): 559 – 81, doi:10.1177/00420 98008100995; Jiang Xu, Anthony Yeh, and Fulong Wu, “Land Commodification: New Land Development and Politics in China since the Late 1990 s,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33, no. 4 (2009): 890 – 913, doi: 10.1111/j.1468 -2427.2009.00892 .x; Daniel B. Abramson, “Transitional Property Rights and Local Developmental History in China,” Urban Studies 48 , no. 3 (February 1, 2011): 553 – 68 , doi:10.1177/004209801039 0237. 88 The promotion of ‘creative industries’ and the spatial production of ‘creative industries clusters’, will be elaborated in later chapters. China has been emphasizing the need to shift from the developing and manufacturing-based economy to an innovation-driven knowledge-based service economy. As part of this broader ambition, the promotion of ‘creative industries cluster’ became part of the formula for legitimizing the, otherwise prohibited, commercialization of administratively-allocated land. See, for example, Zilai Tang, “The Renewal of Allocated Industrial Land in the Perspective of Property

Chapter 1 Introduction

sored gentrification.’ Although the use of ‘gentrification’ is imprecise, as it would fit all demolition-relocation-reconstruction processes of urban renewal, she showed how the changing priorities of the local state affected the socio-spatial restructuring that magnified social differentiation. Scholars Tian Yingying and Cecilia Wong also used cases from two new developments to show the displacement process, while Huang Yi used survey data at the neighborhood scale to show the intra-neighborhood spatial differentiations resulting from state-backed developments. See Yi Huang 黄怡, “大都市核心区的社会空间隔 离—以上海市静安区南京西路街道为例 [Socio-spatial segregation in Metropolitan Nuclei Areas: a case study of Nanjing Xilu Street, Shanghai],” 城市规划学刊 [Urban Planning Forum], no. 03 (2006): 76 – 84; Yingying Tian and Cecilia Wong, “Large Urban Redevelopment Projects and Sociospatial Stratification in Shanghai,” in China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Urbanism, ed. Fulong Wu, Routledge Contemporary China Series 26 (New York: Routledge, 2007 ), 210–31; Shenjing He, “State-Sponsored Gentrification Under Market Transition: The Case of Shanghai,” Urban Affairs Review 43, no. 2 (November 1, 2007 ): 171 – 98 , doi:10.1177/1078087407305175 . 75 Heilmann and Perry, “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adaptive Governance in China,” 4. 76 The author first defined the term ‘urban loophole’ in 2010 in research on an economically liberalizing Damascus under transitional institutions. The author’s ability to understand the physical transformations in the Damascus of 2009 came from her prior understanding of the logic of China’s economic transitions, where the processes of urban transformation and the changing institutional frameworks, if not the exact spatial products, are similar. The urban loophole is a concept that could be used to understand spatial productions in transitioning economies. In the following study, the urban loophole and how it has been deployed is localized in the specificities of Shanghai’s urban spatial production and mediates between globalization’s physical manifestation and local institutional changes. See Ying Zhou, “Urban Loopholes: Tactics of Survival and Manifestations of Desires in Damascus,” Critical Planning 17, no. “Resilient Cities” (October 2010): 88 – 107. 77 The concept of ‘mechanism’ comes from its definition by the social scientist, Jon Elster, as “frequent occurring and easily recognizable causal patterns that are triggered under generally unknown conditions or with indeterminate consequences.” See Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007 ). 78 Heilmann and Perry, “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adaptive Governance in China,” 22. 79 Rittel and Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” 80 Ibid. 81 The maturing urban production processes in Shanghai contrast the “opportunistic exploitation of flukes, accidents, and imperfections,” as mentioned by Rem Koolhaas, in his study of the developments of the Pearl River Delta in the 1990 s which sustained the most extreme version of Chinese urbanism, when the country first plugged into the global market economy in the hinterland location, in proximity to market economy Hong Kong, where “the slightest modification of any detail requires the readjust-

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Right System: The Case of Hongkou District, Shanghai,” in political structure. See note 36. The economic growth Institutions of Land Rights and Sustainable Asian Urban- within the authoritarian political system has been called ization (National University of Singapore, 2013). 89 Heil­ ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ by the Chinese govmann and Perry, “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy ernment and ‘neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics’ Style and Adaptive Governance in China,” 8 . 90 In this by Western analysts. Shanghai’s rise, following the CCP original definition for ‘loophole,’ the distinction between decision to proceed with economic liberalization while the inside and outside and the widening inwards of the preserving the political status quo, thus leads this develcut or gap in the defense system—the physical wall—al- opment of the ‘Black Swan.’ 102 Joshua A. Fogel, “The lows the inside to conceal a dual advantage: the inside is Recent Boom in Shanghai Studies,” Journal of the Histoboth able to defend through the barricade enclosure, ry of Ideas 71, no. 2 (April 1, 2010): 313 – 33. 103 Nostalgia while the loophole also allows the inside the possibility plays an important role in the re-globalization of Shangof offense through its cut and gap, without making vul- hai. Nostalgia for the pre-Liberation cosmopolitanism of nerable the integrity of the defense system—the wall—it- modern era Shanghai has been important both to attract self. See “Loop-Hole | Loophole, n. 1,” OED Online (Oxford the first waves of overseas investment as well as the emUniversity Press), accessed November 8 , 2013 , http:// brace of economic transition. The role played by the overwww.oed.com/view/Entry/110180. 91 Ibid. 92 A specific seas Chinese returnees who have pre-Liberation links to and well-known form of the legal loophole, the tax loop- Shanghai has been important in the rapid developments hole, is one where omissions and ambiguities make of the city. This will be further elaborated in the following possible the evasion of an otherwise well-defined legal chapters. See, for example, Hanchao Lu, “Nostalgia for the obligation of tax contribution. Extreme cases of the ex- Future: The Resurgence of an Alienated Culture in China,” ploitation of legal loopholes, through an ambiguity in a Pacific Affairs 75 , no. 2 (July 1, 2002): 169 – 86 , doi: legal delineation, or unique unanticipated and exception- 10.2307/4127181; Jieming Zhu, Loo-Lee Sim, and Xingal circumstances that were not fully covered by legal defi- Quan Zhang, “Global Real Estate Investments and Local nition, result in unexpected but sometimes remarkable Cultural Capital in the Making of Shanghai’s New Office outcomes. 93 Gary Taubes, “Heisenberg’s Heirs Exploit Locations,” Habitat International 30, no. 3 (September Loopholes in His Law,” Science, New Series, 263, no. 5152 2006): 462 – 81, doi:10.1016 /j.habitatint.2004 .12 .003 . (March 11, 1994): 1376 – 77. 94 Samuel P. Huntington and 104 The term ‘localized cosmopolitans’ refers to the University Harvard, Political Order in Changing Societies stakeholders in the urban development process in Shang(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). 95 Nor does hai, who have an international background while at the the author wish to expand on the sensational aspects of same time have access to local decision-makers and development that are more readily covered by investiga- knowledge of the local processes and mechanisms. The tive journalists. 96 From the abstract of a conference en- ‘localized cosmopolitans’ are more adept at detecting and titled “Loopholes Conference” held at the Harvard Grad- exploiting the urban loopholes created by the state’s uate School of Design in April 2005. 97 Many of the adaptive governance. The concept of the ‘localized cosforemost scholars of Chinese urban transition have used mopolitan’ will be elaborated in the following chapselected cases to support their theories, largely at the ters. 105 The adage ‘progress to prosperity’ refers to macro scale. The following study zooms in on the process- Shanghai’s shift from the first decade of rapid modernes of urban spatial production and looks into their imple- ization and economic transition, focused on quantitative mentations. This, in turn, gives the study instrumentality. growth, to the second decade of moderate but more qual98 Yin writes: “the case study inquiry copes with the itatively-driven development. 106 Some of the researchtechnically distinctive situation in which there will be ers at Tongji University have looked at the neighborhoods many more variables of interest than data points, and as selected as sites in this study for very different reasons one result relies on multiple sources of evidence, with from the author. One of the researchers has also contenddata needing to converge in a triangulating fashion, and ed that the areas are not the most representative of the as another result benefits from the prior development of development of Shanghai. But for the large area of Shangtheoretical propositions to guide data collection and anal- hai, there would be numerous kinds of representative ysis.” Robert K. Yin, Case Study Research: Design and neighborhoods for studying the changes that have hapMethods, 4th ed, Applied Social Research Methods Series pened in the city. The author’s choice of these sites comes 5 (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2009), 13 – 14 . Accord- from the premise set forth by the conceptual framework ing to social scientists Abraham Kaplan and Robert Mer- of urban loopholes, and their facilitation of global inteton, who wrote about methodology and theory in social gration. The choice also comes from the author’s knowlscience research, theory is the crucial research framework edge and access to the particular kind of overwritten ‘local’ that answers fundamental queries of how and why. See history that explains the rapidness of global integration, also Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodol- which is crucial to the development of these urban ogy for Behavioral Science (New Brunswick, N. J : Trans- loopholes. 107 Numerous data-heavy studies, sampling action Publishers, 1998). 99 Robert I. Sutton and Barry households seem neither entirely representative of the M. Staw, “What Theory Is Not,” Administrative Science diversity of social structures that coexist in complex urban Quarterly 40, no. 3 (September 1, 1995): 371–84 , doi: environments like Shanghai, nor do their correlations pro10.2307/2393788 . 100 Ibid. 101 China’s rise has been duce new previously unexpected knowledge. Rather, the considered a ‘Black Swan’ event, because of its unexpect- conclusions often confirm known expectations that seem edly successful economic growth despite its authoritarian rather inept. And the exhaustive data procurement only

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and Fulong Wu, eds., Restructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space (New York: Routledge, 2005); Fulong Wu, ed., Globalization and the Chinese City, vol. 7, Routledge Contemporary China Series (New York: Routledge, 2006); Fulong Wu, ed., China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Urbanism, Routledge Contemporary China Series 26 (New York: Routledge, 2007 ); Zhu, The Transition of China’s Urban Development. 120 Harvard, Great Leap Forward. 121 This quote from the introduction to Great Leap Forward acknowledged the gravity of its task in formulating the first set of conceptual frameworks for a yet-untouched topic. But few have followed. See Ibid., 27. 122 Thomas J. Campanella, The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World, 1st ed (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008). 123 Friedmann, China’s Urban Transition. 124 John Logan, ed., Urban China in Transition, Studies in Urban and Social Change (Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub. Ltd, 2008). 125 Robin Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Post-Socialist China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Yomi Braester, Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract, Asia-Pacific : Culture, Politics, and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 126 Carl Fingerhuth, Learning from China: The Tao of the City (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2004). 127 Dieter Hassenpflug, The Urban Code of China (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2010). 128 Frédéric Edelmann, ed., In the Chinese City: Perspectives on the Transmutations of an Empire (Barcelona: Actar, 2008). 129 Michiel Hulshof and Daan Roggeveen, How the City Moved to Mr. Sun: China’s New Megacities (Amsterdam: SUN , 2011). 130 Marie-Claire Bergère, Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Global Shanghai, 1850–2010: A History in Fragments, Asia’s Transformations. Asia’s Great Cities (New York: Routledge, 2009). 131 Iker Gil, ed., Shanghai Transforming: The Changing Physical, Economic, Social and Environmental Conditions of a Global Metropolis, 1st ed (Barcelona: Actar, 2008). 132 Anke Haarmann, ed., Shanghai Urban Public Space (Berlin: Jovis, 2009). 133 Harry den Hartog, ed., Shanghai New Towns: Searching for Community and Identity in a Sprawling Metropolis (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010). 134 Gregory Byrne Bracken, The Shanghai Alleyway House, Routledge Contemporary China Series 95 (New York: Routledge, 2013). 135 Yongjie Sha et al., Shanghai Urbanism at the Medium Scale, Springer Geography (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2014), http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978 -3 -642-542 03 -9. 136 There are thorough volumes that catalogue historic building types, but few books deliver a verdict in the manner that many Western-language histories of architecture could. See the content-rich early publications like Congzhou Chen 陈从周 and Ming Zhang 章明, 上海近 代建筑史稿 [History of Shanghai Modern Era Architecture Manuscript] (Shanghai 上海: 三联书店上海分店 Sanlian Press, 1988). Hua Shen 沈华, 上海里弄民居 [Shanghai Lilong Residences] (Beijing 北京: 中国建筑工业出版社 China Architecture Industry Press, 1993). 137 The list of master’s theses and doctoral dissertations from the Departments of Architecture and Urban Planning of Tongji Uni-

Chapter 1 Introduction

serves to show the top-down directed access available to the researcher. For example, the correlation between household registration and the ability to purchase luxury housing, seem to show the inadequacy of data-based methods to understand the complexity of the drivers and agents in rapidly transforming urban conditions. See, for example, Xiangming Chen and Jiaming Sun, “Untangling a Global—Local Nexus: Sorting out Residential Sorting in Shanghai,” Environment and Planning A 39, no. 10 (2007 ): 2324 – 2345 , doi:10.1068 /a38446 . 108 It is also well known in China that the annual numbers gathered by the statistics agency in the world change, even in how they are measured. 109 ‘Unique case examples,’ ‘extreme case examples’ and ‘representative’ or ‘typical case examples’ are different categories for case studies that Robert Yin elaborates in his book Case Study Research, Design and Methods. See Yin, Case Study Research, 41. 110 The original term Foucault uses is ‘wirkliche Historie,’ which has been translated as ‘effective history’ or ‘living history.’ See Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” 111 Ibid., 76. 112 Ibid., 76 – 77. 113 E. Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz, eds., Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People’s Republic (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989); E. Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz, Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); E. Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz, eds., Restless China (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2013). 114 Merle Goldman and Roderick MacFarquhar, eds., The Paradox of China’s Post-Mao Reforms, Harvard Contemporary China Series 12 (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1999). 115 Geremie Barmé, Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (Armonk, NY : M. E. Sharpe, 1996). 116 Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds., Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China, 2nd ed, Politics in Asia and the Pacific (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994); Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden, eds., Chinese Society: Change, Conflict, and Resistance, Routledge Studies in Asia’s Transformations (London ; New York: Routledge, 2000); in Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, 3 rd ed, Asia’s Transformations (London ; New York: Routledge, 2010); Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds., Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, Harvard Contemporary China Series 17 (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2011). 117 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume III, vol. 3 (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1998); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 118 Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, 1st ed (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001); Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey between China’s Past and Present, 1st ed (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey through China from Farm to Factory, 1st ed (New York: Harper, 2010); Peter Hessler, Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West, 1st ed (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013); Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). 119 Laurence J. C. Ma

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versity, the foremost academic institution in the discipline in Shanghai, show the increasing analyses of historic documents as well as close collaboration with local authorities. But many are not publically accessible. And few clearly synthesize their rich content in a way that offers potential for future developments, even though it is wellknown that many top students graduate into important positions in practice, hence influencing developments directly, rather than merely leaving a record of built-up of knowledge that could benefit future analysts and prac­ titioners. 138 Barmé’s excellent and succinct piece summarizing the transition of resistance in Chinese and questioning the nature of critique within the intellectual-cultural urban elites, with a carefully protocolled “cult of transgression without risk” that permeates Chinese intelligentsia. See Geremie R. Barmé, “The Revolution of Resistance,” in Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, ed. Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden, 3 rd ed, Asia’s Transformations (London ; New York: Routledge, 2010), 288 – 317. 139 Xiangning Li 李翔宁, Danfeng Li 李 丹锋, and Jiawei Jiang 江嘉伟, 上海制造 Made in Shanghai (Shanghai 上海: 同济大学出版社 Tongji University Press, 2014). 140 Shanghai Urban Planning and Land Resources Administration 上海市规划和国土资源管理局 and Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Institute 上海市 城市规划设计研究院 Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Institute, eds., 转型上海 规划战略 [Shanghai in Transition, Urban Planning Strategy] (Shanghai 上海: 同济大学出版社 Tongji University Press, 2012). 141 From the most established scholars to fresh graduates, this failure to look behind the façade of globally generated concepts such as creativity and heritage conservation, not to mention sustainability and socially integrated cities, is easy, in face of the rapid learning of official rhetoric in China. For two studies that embrace creativity without assessing the land policies that have made the use of creativity as business plan for development possible, see He, Jinliao. 2014 . Creative Industries Districts, an analysis of dynamics, networks and implications on creative clusters in Shanghai. London: Springer, and Kong, Lily, Ching Chia-ho, and Chou Tsu-Lung. 2015. Arts, Culture and the Making of Global Cities: Creating New Urban Landscapes in Asia. Northampton, MA : Edward Elgar Pub. 142 Depending on the entrepreneurial interests and capacity of their sitting management structures, often regional SOE s that depended on real estate assets for their pension and social security responsibilities, the commercialization of their vacant real estate could be made possible by the changing and time-bound government priorities. Thus, bequeathing the title ‘creative industries cluster,’ as a well-known example of one such government priority, incentivized the conversion of former industrial real estate, abandoned and derelict, into viable commercial entities. 143 This quote from the introduction to Great Leap Forward acknowledged the gravity of its task of formulating the first set of conceptual framework for a yet-untouched topic. But few have followed. See Harvard, Great Leap Forward, 27. 144 The topic of ‘preservation via inhabitation’ was first presented at the American Geographers (AAG ) annual meeting in 2013 in a panel on the dilemmas of housing in East Asian cities, organized by Wang Jun. See Ying

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Zhou, “Between Development and Heritage Protection: Cases of High-Density Low-Income Housing in City Center Shanghai,” in Defining the Housing Question in East Asia’s Post-Crisis Housing Boom (Association of American Geographers, Los Angeles, 2013), http://meridian.aag.org/ callforpapers/program/AbstractDetail.cfm?AbstractID = 48723.”plainCitation”:”Ying Zhou, “Between Development and Heritage Protection: Cases of High-Density Low-Income Housing in City Center Shanghai,” in Defining the Housing Question in East Asia’s Post-Crisis Housing Boom (Association of American Geographers, Los Angeles, 2013 145 This topic of ‘gentrification with Chinese characteristics’ was first presented at a public lecture of the University of Hong Kong Shanghai Study Center in 2012, as part of a series called “From Progress to Prosperity” organized by Daan Roggeveen. See Ying Zhou, “Gentrification with Chinese Characteristics? On Shanghai’s City Center Transformations” (Public Lecture, HKUSSC Spring Lecture series 2013, HKU Shanghai Study Center, March 4 , 2013), http://ash.arch.hku.hk/2013 /02 /28 /4 -march-lecture-ying-zhou-future-cities-lab/. 146 David Harvey, in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, had notably titled his chapter ‘neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics.’ See Harvey, “Chapter 5 Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics.’” 147 The term ‘gentrification’ is a term that was first coined by the sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964 when she witnessed the phenomenon of socio-economic and physical transformation to the neighborhood of Islington, East London, where middle-class residents replaced working-class residents, changing the social character of the neighborhood. It has, since this first usage been, expanded on by urban social scientists to include a range of urban renewal phenomena. The term gentrification has extended to take place in existing residential areas and vacant industrial sites, in the city center and in peri-urban areas, and in commercially active globally connected cities and provincial towns. The term nevertheless has continuously been used critically as a specific socio-economic and spatial process and manifestation of neoliberal urban policy. See, for example, Ruth Glass and Centre for Urban Studies, London; Aspects of Change (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1964); Neil Smith, “Toward a Theory of Gentrification A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People,” Journal of the American Planning Association 45, no. 4 (1979): 538 – 48, doi:10.1080/019443 67908977002; David Ley, “Liberal Ideology and the Postindustrial City,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70, no. 2 (June 1, 1980): 238 – 58; Sharon Zukin, “Gentrification: Culture and Capital in the Urban Core,” Annual Review of Sociology 13 (January 1, 1987 ): 129 – 47; Loretta Lees, “The Weaving of Gentrification Discourse and the Boundaries of the Gentrification Community,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17, no. 2 (1999): 127 – 132 , doi:10.1068 /d170127; Zoltán Kovács, “Ghettoization or Gentrification? Post-Socialist Scenarios for Budapest,” Netherlands Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 13, no. 1 (March 1, 1998): 63 – 81, doi:10.1007/BF02496934; Matthew W. Rofe, “‘I Want to Be Global’: Theorising the Gentrifying Class as an Emergent Elite Global Community,” Urban Studies 40, no. 12 (November 1, 2003): 2511 – 26, doi:10.1080/0042098032

before modernity. Many of the countries and cities that are today catalogued as ‘developing’ or ‘emerging’ economies, were important hubs in the pre-modern and globally connected world. Legacy conditions, from cultural to socio-economic, affect their current modes of developments and how contemporary globalization’s circulation of capital lands in each of their local contexts. For an important account of the pre-modern internationalization of the world, see Janet L Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A. D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Chapter 1 Introduction

000136183 .1964 148 The concept of the ‘generic city,’ first proposed by Rem Koolhaas, has generated much anxiety. See Rem Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” in SMLXL , by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, ed. Jennifer Sigler (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 1239 – 64 . Treatises declaring the ‘specificities’ of our contemporary urban condition reacted to the perceived threat of the ‘generic city.’ 149 The author contends that contemporary presumptions of globalization’s blanket effects, namely the account of knowledge transfers and transplants from the developed West to the developing East, or from ‘global North’ to the ‘global South’ overlook the contributions by legacy conditions

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Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood Seeds of Housing Marketization, Foreign Investment, and Reconnecting to the World State Institutions, Housing Marketization, and the Gap of Opportunity Expedited Know-How Import and the Dual Market Before the Tower: the Lilong Origins of the Residual Conditions Preservation of Ambiguous Property Rights Demographic Shift and Commercial Spatial Demand Incremental Conversions and Small Creative Entrepreneurs Changing Habitat

Fig. 1 Demolished site between Anfu, Wulumuqi, and Wuyuan Lu, with several remaining houses still occupied, and Chevalier Place, The Summit, and The Plaza in the background, 2009

For the years since 2005, a large site in city center Shanghai, bound by Wulumuqi Lu, Anfu Lu, and Wuyuan Lu, remained fenced and vacant, with the exception of a few crumbling houses perched atop decrepit bases.1 (Fig. 1) Dim fluorescent light emitted from their broken windows at night, imparting an eerie ambiance to the otherwise well-groomed and increasingly upscale neighborhood. The vacant site, identified as Plot 15, is in the “Western District [西区]” of Shanghai’s former French Concession, 2 an area known for its elegant streets lined with platanus trees 3 and Western-style buildings. The streets, which many today prefer because of their comfortable pedestrian scale, somehow escaped urban renewal’s frenzy of street-widenings in the 1990s. Overseas Chinese, local yuppies, and expats have flocked to this neighborhood, while many local residents have moved out to the suburbs.4 Since the mid-2000s, the area has become a quartier popular for its charming heritage architecture and cosmopolitan vibe. While ever more cafés, fashion boutiques, yoga studios, and the like were inserted into existing neighboring structures, the 29,428-square-meter Plot 15 remained an urban void in their bustling midst. Speculations abounded for the future of this empty plot. Proposals for a central park and novel architecture types for mixed-use living and working have been tabled. Little, if decided, has been publicized. This chapter unpacks the urban development processes and institutional frame-

were some of the main instruments for economic development. As all urban land prior to China’s economic liberalization belonged to the state, the local state authorized, oversaw, and profited from land marketization through land leases and real estate development.5 Residents initially welcomed the District’s plans for Plot 15, which was dubbed a “project to capture the people’s hearts [民心工程].” Local residents were told that there would be upgraded housing for them, and that they would be able to return to their neighborhood after the project was completed.6 A municipal decree, Regarding Encouraging Displaced Residents to Move Back Pushing Forward New Round of Pilot for Urban Upgrade [关于鼓励动迁居民回搬推进新一轮旧区改造的试行办法], proposed further urban upgrades in February 2001.7 This decree incentivized developers by lowering land lease fees and absolving additional fees, on the stipulation that the approved development would improve existing residents’ living conditions. However, once the municipality granted the district-backed developer the land acquisition rights for Plot 15 based on this stipulation, the developer changed the terms.

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

works unique to China’s transition economy that made these seemingly inefficient and illogical urban voids not only possible, but also not uncommon. The chapter analyzes the neighborhood-scaled transformation of the area around Plot 15, in the residential constructions and commercial upgrades that have proliferated since economic liberalization began in the 1990s. This case study of the neighborhood transformation reveals how, behind what appears to be a conflict between demolition and preservation, many conundrums are systemically entrenched in China’s transition economy, where market and planned economies coexist. Bottom-up exploitations of the dual housing market formed urban loopholes for the unplanned and incremental conservation of historic housing and their possible redevelopment. Ironically, the economic inefficiencies of a transition economy have also buffered against the rapid erosion of social diversity caused by state-backed neoliberalization and homogenization. In 2001, the Xuhui [徐汇] District government put forward development plans for Plot 15. Under China’s economic transition, land leases and real estate development

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The unveiling of a joint-investment by a District-owned developer with a Hong Kong real estate conglomerate and the announcement of luxury housing as the end product visibly diverged from the original publicized terms. Not only would the new housing be unaffordable to original residents, but the minimal compensation offered to residents to acquire their units would also prevent them from returning to their neighborhood. The fact that the land lease had been procured through and facilitated by the alibi of upgrading residential units exacerbated the residents’ antagonism against the state. The earlier optimism for urban renewal and the better life it promised quickly gave way to skepticism and opposition. It is not coincidental that in 2003 the new high-rise north of Plot 15 sold its penthouse unit for over 6,500 USD per square meter, breaking that year’s real estate records.8 The unit is located atop the then newly opened residential compound called The Summit. The real estate company of the Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, Hutchinson Whampoa, developed The Summit, or Huixianju [汇贤居], its Chinese name meaning the “gathering of the worthy.” 9 To the east of The Summit stands a 40-story office tower by the same developers named The Center, or the Century Commerce and Trade Plaza [世纪商贸广场]. Multinational companies such as Baxter, FedEx, and Estée Lauder and the like have become the tower’s tenants. Hong Kong was the source of many early real estate developers for China in the early 1990s following economic liberalization. The arrival of market economics in planned economy China, shaping its transition economy, was instrumentally introduced and propagated by capitalist developers groomed under the laissez-faire political economy of Hong Kong. Hong Kong investors, who were foreign direct investors with capital, were also overseas Chinese with the cultural affinities that made them the emulated role models for the then newly opening China. It is both their early financial support of and institutional cooperation with local states that underlined their successful localization in Chinese cities like Shanghai. Hong Kong developers were crucial in transforming vast swaths of urban China, propelling the rapid restructuring necessary for economic development and global re-integration. By examining the transformations of Shanghai’s city center neighborhood, this chapter thus also analyzes the early impact of the overseas Chinese investments, which proved fundamental to subsequent developments. Before its development by Hutchinson Whampoa, the block north of Anfu Lu was similar to Plot 15 in its urban form, composed of ‘lilong [里弄]’ housing, which is the vernacular residential type built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Shanghai.10 The block’s development and successful opening in 2003 exhibited the lucrative potentials for developing large urban plots in the well-located central neighborhood. It was thus in 2005, half a year after The Summit and The Center opened, and in the rush to push out the existing residents for new development, that an elderly couple died on Plot 15, in a fire set by the District-owned eviction company.11 Although not uncommon in the kinds of tactics used to coerce resistant residents to leave development sites that had already been leased to developers,12 the incident nevertheless became nationally controversial. With abundant reportage by the media, Plot 15 became untouchable, blighted by its scandalous circumstances. The small number of ‘nail house residents [钉子户],’ those who refused to be displaced in the demolition, relocation, and redevelopment process, remained.13 The handful of families who refused to leave their homes 74

Fig. 2 The demolished plot on the corner of Wulumuqi Lu and Anfu Lu, 2013

on Plot 15 came to represent the sole resistance to marketization and exploding real estate prices in the centrally located and rapidly changing neighborhood, especially to neighboring lilongs that were also warned of impending development.14 For several years the peril of eviction lingered, even after the management company changed hands within the District.15 Ongoing negotiations remained heavy-handed with little consolation for the remaining residents.16 It went thus largely unnoticed that on a clear September day in 2013 eight years after the site came into limbo, the last houses on Plot 15 were bulldozed to the ground. (Fig. 2) From the balconies of the adjacent three-story houses and the high-rise resi-

ing nail house residents from their homes. When they were released in the evening, the handful of houses that had withstood demolition on Plot 15, as well as the residents’ possessions, had been destroyed. Aside from a perceptible increase in security personnel around the block after the incident, the only consequent media coverage, in contrast to eight years earlier, was by a correspondent for an online English publication, an American who lived in the tower across the street overlooking the empty site.18 To the limited audience who could access and read the reportages in English, the story seemed incredible, given the location and time. Anywhere else in China, such proceedings would not have been surprising. Nor would it have been had it taken place in Shanghai a decade earlier. But in the post-Expo euphoria for heritage appreciation in the standard-bearer city of economical liberalized China,19 the events boded a shift in the political economy of urban development.

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

dential towers across the street, neighbors heard and watched the commotion.17 What passed quietly but not inconspicuously was the early morning abduction of the remain-

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Fig. 3 The one-square-kilometer area under study in the context of the city, 2013

It is perhaps timely that a few weeks after the demolition of Plot 15, the West Bund Biennale for Art and Architecture opened on the riverbanks of the same Xuhui District. The months-long cultural event, subtitled “Progress [进程],” was organized by the who’s who of Shanghai’s architecture world and included prominent proponents of heritage conservation. As the next chapter will elaborate, heritage conservation has become the rallying cry for Chinese urbanists beginning in the mid-2000s. The event and many more were also catalysts for the new eight-kilometer development in the periphery of the district, also described in Chapter 6. The juxtaposition of the mumming of the eviction and Plot 15’s demolition against the showcase of progressive and globally oriented cultural projects, inaugurating a new development district, may seem jarring. Yet, the concurrent events represent the simultaneous dominance and growing sophistication of the local state. The events are merely two sides of the same coin for the evolving spatial production processes of China’s transition economy.20 In tracing the developments of the neighborhood around Plot 15, this chapter analyzes the urban transformations that took place as a result of economic liberalization. What is unprecedented is the chapter’s examination of both the physical and socio-economic changes at the neighborhood scale. The chapter lays the groundwork for the ensuing chapters by outlining the processes of housing and land marketization that were fundamental instruments of economic liberalization, and how these were manifested in the residential neighborhood around Plot 15. Detailed mapping accompanies the tracing of the neighborhood’s developments over time. (Figs. 3, 4) The neces76

Fig. 4 Aerial photograph of the square-kilometer area around Plot 15

place in Shanghai. Selective developments by the local state in the neighborhood began in the 1980s, the early days of economic liberalization, in the effort to bring in foreign capital through production of elite ‘commodity housing.’ It must be noted that in market economies, housing does not require the label of ‘commodity housing’ to distinguish it from types of housing that have been allocated by central plan-

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

sity of clarifying and dissecting the historic legacies, which have made the present-day challenges complex and confounding, also compelled the inclusion of the sections that give historic background for the urban and architectural forms of the neighborhood and their socio-economic composition.21 Together, historic legacy and contemporary development shed new light on the coexistence of market economy developments and planned economy legacy housing. The chapter’s first section, “Seeds of Housing Marketization, Foreign Investment, and Reconnecting to the World,” introduces how housing marketization first took

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ning. But in transition economies such as China’s, the term is necessary to distinguish housing, ownership of which can be exchanged in the market, from that that is constrained by planned economy legacies. Even though commodity housing and ‘allocated housing’ may share physical characteristics, the differences in property right make their spatial productions distinct. Tracing the development of commodity housing in the neighborhood that tapped into attraction of the area’s historic legacy to diaspora networks, the section documents the first privatized housing and the effect of its developments on the ensuing neighborhood transformations. In the existing literature on China’s housing marketization, these projects and their impact have notably been overlooked. The few agents of development in this early era of economic transition, often ‘localized cosmopolitans’22 from the diaspora, would pave the way for the ensuing developments. It is in examining these developments that their influence, both on subsequent development processes as well as the physical form of the housing developments, become visible. Sections two and three, “State Institutions, Housing Marketization, and the Gap of Opportunity” and “Expedited Know-how Import,” introduce how the coexistence of market and planned economy institutions in housing provision formed the dual housing market under transition economy. With the acceleration of economic liberalization in the early 1990s, en-bloc real estate developments took place on sites large enough to be deemed profitable investments for developers, before the implementation of heritage conservation restricted development. Both state institutions, which were compelled to evolve under economic transition, and overseas Chinese developers exploited these development opportunities in the neighborhood around Plot 15. As elaborated in section three, one high-end residential development, built on top of an old urban village, reveals the link between new development sites and historic legacies, manifested in selective demolition. The first three sections, which show the spatial manifestation of economic liberalization and the mechanisms for consequent real estate developments, are followed by sections four and five, which introduce the architecture types and their occupants, which became the object and casualties of these very developments.23 These sections, although largely historical, are important in showing the very sources of the conflict between demolition and development, and how the spatial proximity between the planned economy legacy conditions and market economics exacerbate the intransigent conflicts. Today, behind the façade of chic shops and transnational foodand-beverage joints that lend Shanghai’s central neighborhoods a cosmopolitan vibe approximating developed country trend quartiers, overcrowded and ill-maintained housing remains. Many of these lilong houses, in addition to the modern era apartment towers, harbor multiple tenants with complex origins. They live in conditions cre­ ated and exacerbated by historic legacies. Despite the housing and land marketization, which have transformed the lives of many others since the 1990s, many of these residents are unable to improve their living conditions, constrained by residual planned economy frameworks that restrict development. Section four, “Before the Tower: the Lilong,” introduces and contextualizes the lilong, the predominant architectural type for housing in Shanghai, the modern form of which was shaped from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. The typological and morphological distinctions between lilongs built in different time periods and in differ78

ent locations are important to understanding their contemporary developments. The historic conditions that have created the fragmented ownerships in lilongs and other modern era residences are further elaborated in section five, “Origins of the Residual Conditions.” To many of the locals left behind in the residual conditions of these neighborhoods undergoing gentrification, there are indeed reasons for their willingness to forego the historic architecture in which they live and wipe away the memories of a past imprinted in the built environment. The ambiguity of ownership rights and the fragmented dwelling units in historic buildings epitomize the unspoken stigma that the city center is also the very harbinger of recent history’s traumas and its physical remnants. Existing studies often have difficulty clarifying, not to mention problematizing, the causes for contemporary conundrums, from those of fragmented ownerships to that of dual housing market’s repercussions on development. This very inclusion of historical legacies as the source of many contemporary predicaments distinguishes this study from existing ones. Until these legacy issues are confronted, no planning or urban design can take on a vision for the future. “Preservation of Ambiguous Property Rights,” section six, contextualizes the transformations of the historic residential buildings against the backdrop of China’s economic liberalization, and shows how the preservation of planned economy frameworks in historic buildings created the spatial coexistence of the dual housing market in the neighborhood. The ambiguity of property rights as consequence is not only visible in the urban environment, but is also symptomatic of the protraction of China’s economic transition. Despite the urban complexities caused by the transition economy and its resultant dual markets, economic liberalization did re-establish global networks, which in turn reshaped the socio-economic compositions of urban sites in residual frameworks. Sections seven and eight, “Demographic Shift and Commercial Spatial Demand,“ and “Incremental Conversions and Small Creative Entrepreneurs,” trace how residential developments coupled with the neighborhood’s central location within the rapidly

neighborhood’s ambiance, but they are also closely tied to the burgeoning interest in heritage conservation, to be elaborated in Chapter 3. At the time of this writing, The Summit stands at the northeast of the Anfu and Wulumuqi Lu intersection, enclosed by a latticed steel fence through which passersby can only glimpse the manicured green of the compound’s park-like grounds. On the other side of Wulumuqi Lu, northwest of the intersection, are high-rise residential towers built slightly earlier. In contrast to the gated setback of The Summit,25 the residential compounds of Kingsville [金苑], built in 1997, and Chevalier Place [亦园], built in 2002, have a more urban relationship to the existing neighborhood, landing in the street with their public accessibility and urbanity. Their ground floors are slightly set back to give space to bicycle parking and other street amenities, which are often crowded on the sides of the narrow historical streets. These ground spaces have opportunely become internationally branded cafés, Western grocers, and other commercial amenities, catering to the growing number of new residents. Many living upstairs in the towers,

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

expanding metropolitan area in turn changed the consumption demands of the urban centrality around Plot 15.24 The pioneering role that a growing population of localized cosmopolitans played as both consumers and producers not only helped revise the

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part of the inflow of expats to Shanghai, who prefer the neighborhood, have triggered the commercialization and transformation of the neighborhood. At the southeastern corner two-story low-rises from before 1949 have also been converted into small stores as the street developed. The four corners of the Wuyuan-Wulumuqi intersection thus represent the different built forms of the city center neighborhood that emerged as the city transformed. (Fig. 5) On the northeastern corner, Plot 15, cleared, but still vacant, remains in limbo. The neighborhood around Plot 15 is the spatial embodiment of China’s dual market under transition economy. Its social and spatial diversity is contingent on a precarious balance, that between market forces that are re-shaping the “Western District” as the particular type of high-end residential and mixed-use centrality and the remnants of the planned economy that is mediated to also profit from transformation. The urban loophole conditions created both by the dual housing market and by the exceptionalism of the area’s modern era architecture, resulting spatially proximate differences, could forge the way for rethinking a less homogeneous ‘preservation via inhabitation.’

Seeds of Housing Marketization, Foreign Investment, and Reconnecting to the World In 1980, as China’s urban centers were recovering from the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the nation’s leader Deng Xiaoping began to speak about housing ownership as part of the state’s new vision for economically revitalizing the physically impoverished and spiritually demoralized country.26 Before 1949, housing and land were market goods, their values based on demand and exchange, as in other market economies. After 1949, when the Communist Party took charge and founded the People’s Republic of China (PRC), urban housing, as well as urban land, became a public good belonging to the nation and its people under central planning. The abolition of the land and housing markets rendered the use of urban housing, as well as urban land under planned economy, inefficient. Housing design and land-use planning were also based on ideology rather than function. Thus, urban housing reform that would once again incrementally enable housing ownership, along with the establishment of a land market, became increasingly important to the central government’s decision for starting economic liberalization in the 1980s and its consequent urban developments.27 A series of pilots were tested on the cities of Zhengzhou, Changzhou, Siping, and Shashi from 1982 to 1985 and in Yantai from 1986 to 1988. It was clear from the unsuccessful housing reform implementations in these cities, unused to capitalist market economics and having little financial resources, that these cities were not ready for such reforms.28 Shanghai, in contrast to the central government-selected pilot cities for housing reforms, was a city with historic experience in market economics and access to financial resources. Shanghai was a city known as the capital of capitalism in pre-1949 China and was punished for its savvy market economics after 1949. The first steps toward housing reform for Shanghai went hand in hand with the attraction of financial investment, namely from overseas Chinese with connections to the city. Prior to 1949, 80

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Fig. 5 The four corners of the intersection of Wuyuan and Wulumuqi Lu, 2012

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

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Figs. 6, 7 The arrival of American president Richard Nixon at Hongqiao Airport and shaking hands with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1972, left, and the housing built on the occasion of his visit, right

Shanghai was a hub of international trade. After 1949, the city became the source of massive exodus. Many who fled the impending Communist takeover in 1949 settled in the proximity of Hong Kong, a British colony, and Taiwan, the Republic of China (R.O.C.) ruled by the exiled Republican government.29 After two decades of receiving intermittent news from family left behind in a sequestered China, many of these overseas Chinese, known as huaqiao [华侨], returned to Mainland China for the first time in the 1970s. Despite its visible dilapidation and destitution, endured under decades of upheavals and sequestration, Shanghai was ready to welcome the overseas Chinese as returnees, along with the resources they could bring. In March 1980, the central government’s State Council issued a notice from the National Urban Construction Ministry [国家城市建设总局] and the Overseas Chinese Office [华侨办]: Provisional Regulations Regarding using Overseas Chinese Remittance to Purchase and Construct Housing [关于用侨汇购买和建设住宅的暂行办法].30 The policy encouraged huaqiao and their relatives, known as qiaojuan [侨眷], to contribute to residential construction. It was also part of the national strategy to project an outward-looking China to the world, spearheaded by the engagement of the overseas Chinese diaspora. The policy affirmed what was already being offered as investment channels in Shanghai’s city center, a small number of ‘old houses [老房子]’ up for sale to attract foreign currency.31 It was no surprise that the seedlings of capitalism left behind were encouraged again to flower in the soil of the former Concession city. Residential construction had already resumed in the 1970s to accommodate the urgent spatial needs of the overpopulated city. The constructions were just as important in showing the tentatively approaching outside world a Potemkin urban front. In 1972, Richard Nixon’s visit to China would give the American president and his entourage a first rare glimpse of the sequestered nation. (Fig. 6) Landing in Shanghai’s Hongqiao Airport [虹桥机场] at the western end of the city—the only airport amenable to foreign visitors in the nation—his official motorcade passed along the east-west thoroughfare of Huaihai Lu [淮海路] to the center of the city, where the visitors were accommodated. Prompted by the presidential visit, several six-story slab buildings were quickly thrown up along Huaihai Lu, which still looked largely agrarian at its western end, to present a socialist face of urbanism as the visitors passed through. (Fig. 7) The Shanghai Communiqué,32 announced during Nixon’s state visit and fine-tuned in the former Cathay Mansions off Huaihai Lu a mile down the road from those then new constructions, seminally resumed ties between America and China, during what 82

Nixon called the “week that changed the world.”33 In the year prior, a series of US policy changes had eased the long-held travel bans and trade restrictions to China,34 and these also prompted the first overseas Chinese to return to China. The self-consciousness of the Chinese authorities, reflected in their rapid constructions to project an image of normalcy and to conceal the reality of a battered city, was visible in their ushering of the relatives of overseas Chinese, returning in the 1970s, into better, less crowded accommodation where possible.35 The authorities wanted to show the overseas visitors that their relatives in China had a comfort of living and provisions of privacy, which the residents had in fact been deprived of in the meantime. Despite the quickly erected structures and assurances to the outside world of China’s resumption of normality, few relatives of the many bourgeoisie Shanghainese who left and returned in that first decade of official opening, dared to purchase property that authorities offered in exchange for needed foreign currency. Fear of future reprisal of the confiscation cycles, which have been ongoing since the 1950s, held sway. What little the foreign press had gathered of class persecution, particularly attacks on those whose relatives were abroad,36 could not compare to the stories of trauma retold in person. Nevertheless, for the few who invested—a few thousand US dollars for a house with a garden in the “Western District”—their returns would grow exponentially in the next two decades. In 1979, the central government was also drawing up plans for the area of Hong­ qiao [虹桥].37 Designated as a “Development Zone [开发区]” for the inflow of capital from abroad, it was one of a handful of sites selected for the country to resume and accelerate economic development. The Development Zone’s proximity to the Hongqiao Airport was deliberate for facilitating capital and resource flow. The creation of an enclave away from the existing city also served to insulate the incoming investors from the decrepit and complex conditions of the inner city. In 1983, construction began on the Hongqiao Economic and Technological Development Zone [经济技术开发区], one of fourteen such Zones in the nation. This was followed by the State Council’s approval in 1986. Central planning saw these designated areas as the sole location of foreign investments, in industrial and commercial functions, as well as residential accommo-

municipal Overseas Chinese Affairs Offices [市侨务办公室], Real Estate Ministry [市房产 管理局], Overseas Remittance Ministry [市外汇管理局], and the Peoples Bank’s Shanghai branch [人民银行上海分行] issued the policy document Administrative Measures of Shanghai Municipality Governing the Sale of Commercial Housing by Foreign Investment Real State Enterprises [上海市外商投资房产企业商品住宅出售管理办法] to accelerate overseas investment in September 1987.39 Two months later, on 29 November 1987, the municipality issued the policy document Measures of Shanghai Municipality on the Compensatory Transfer of Land Use Rights [上海市土地使用有偿转让办法], which went into effect in 1988.40 The two documents created the policy framework for the marketization of urban land in Shanghai and the means for securing the initial financial capital for the production of a housing market, via Shanghai’s overseas connections. It became the first important turning point for the reform and development of the housing market. The right to use the 12,900-square-meter Lot 26 in Hongqiao for 50 years success­ fully sold at the price of 28 million USD in Hongqiao in 1988. This became the first

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

dations.38 While the development of Hongqiao was underway, the meeting of Shanghai’s

83

example of official land lease in Shanghai following the central government’s policies for land marketization.41 Commodity housing sold to non-Chinese nationals, or waixiao commodity housing [外销房]—products unique to the transitioning economy of post-socialist China— emerged in Hongqiao as a result. In contrast to the nascent neixiao commodity housing [内销房], which were restricted in their sales only to the Chinese nationals, waixiao commodity housing units were developed on land that was required to have higher land lease fees and could only be sold to non-Chinese nationals. With more expensive units containing amenities and fixtures often not included in the more crudely constructed neixiao commodity housing, waixiao housing was targeted higher-end markets of overseas Chinese and non-Chinese buyers to encourage foreign investment. Even though the government allocated the designated Development Zones as the sites for foreign investment, many overseas investors preferred the inner city to these new and remote Zones under construction. Shanghai’s city center districts that were recovering from the two-decade economic misfortune were also ready to resume localized developments after being given more autonomy to manage their own finances in 1978.42 While Jing’an District [静安区] aimed for office and hotel developments in the form of joint ventures with foreign capital along its commercial spine of West Nanjing Lu [南京西路], as elaborated in Chapter 4, peripheral areas bordering the Xuhui and Changning [长宁] Districts pursued an early initiative of elite housing targeted to the overseas Chinese, many of whose relations already lived within these districts’ jurisdictions. In the 1980s, Xuhui District was still located along the western edge of the city, with rural functions like dairy production and semi-agricultural land still interspersed.43 Its abundance of greenery and historic houses, which were constructed under the strict zoning laws of the French Concession as high-end residences at the city’s periphery, as elaborated in Chapter 3, provided excellent resources for further residential development. The district promoted waixiao commodity housing to raise funds. A municipality-wide meeting in 1987 opened up nineteen sites for 450,000 square meters of residential development in Shanghai. Between 1987 and 1991, a total of approximately 2,053 units of commodity housing for overseas Chinese investment opened. The municipal-issued Survey of Shanghai Residential Development [上海住宅建设志] touted this as far exceeding the numbers of the previous decades.44 Xuhui District announced that one of the first commodity housing initiatives, which began construction in early 1987 and was located in the District’s newly incorporated suburban Longhua [龙华] area, sold all its units in one day.45 Even as the commodity housing development was successfully taking place in the periphery, small developments in the central district were already underway. In 1988, a six-story apartment tower called Huicheng Gardens [汇成花园] opened on the prestigious Gao’an Lu [高安路] as one of the earliest forms of waixiao commodity housing sold in the city. The precursor to what would be one of many spinoff development companies of the district, the Huicheng Group [汇成集团], was its developer. The Huicheng Group and other District-owned development companies, including the Xuhui Real Estate Group [徐房集团] and the Shanghai Urban Development Group [上海城开集团], continued producing waixiao commodity housing, inserting at a small scale into the area’s large blocks. Another project, the Xingguo Gardens [兴国花园] 84

by Xuhui Real Estate, was a small residential compound of six four-story apartment complexes, tucked in a lane off of Wukang Lu [武康路], another prestigious residential street in the district. The Xingguo Gardens development opened in 1992 and hosted many prominent huaqiao returnees. It was a proud open secret in the neighborhood as the residence of the famous painter and filmmaker Chen Yifei [陈逸飞],46 who returned to Shanghai in 1992 Fig. 8 The Huiyi Gardens, 1995

after a 12-year stay in New York. It is not coincidental that his paintings and films, depicting the women of 1930s against sumptuous

Republican-era interiors, would be important in reviving nostalgia for the modern era Shanghai. Another compound, Huiyi Gardens [汇益花园], constructed by the Shanghai Real Estate Group [上房集团], also opened the same year, a block away at Fuxing Lu [复兴路] and Gaoyou Lu [高邮路]. The development rebuilt a group of existing two-story ‘garden houses [花园洋房].’ (Fig. 8) A book published by Tongji University Press only two years later, which reviewed the architectural accomplishments in Shanghai following the economic liberalizations of the 1980s boasted: “covering a site of 20,000 square meters and a total floor area of 10,000 square meters, Huiyi Gardens consist of 30 houses with gardens in English, French, and Spanish styles, grouped into three clusters, namely the Yuelai Villa [悦来别墅], Tianle Villa [天乐别墅], and Yijing Villa [怡静别墅]. An apartment building named Jewel Apartments [寶石公寓] was also built in Huiyi Gardens.”47 The municipality-issued Survey of Shanghai Residential Development also further described Huiyi Gardens, noting that the eastern portion was heavy with “Western European modernism,” the southern part “French,” and the northern part “English.”48 With

kindergarten as its shared amenities.49 Even though the new development, even in its neighborhood of former upper-class residences, contrasted drastically with the state of housing in the rest of Shanghai at the time, it nevertheless outlined the aspirations for Shanghai’s future housing developments.50 The following year, four eight-story towers in the President Mansions [总统公寓] opened, with all units sold in US dollars. At Zhonghui Gardens [中汇花园], the municipal-level development company of the Shanghai Real Estate Group presented a much larger complex consisting of two ten- and two eight-story buildings, four villas and a clubhouse, which also targeted the waixiao market of expat-returnees. Its location on Wuxing Lu [吴兴路], in close proximity to the seat of the municipal government just to the south, also meant that many high-level bureaucrats of the municipality became residents in the newly finished building that was outfitted with many amenities unavailable to the local market. The Huicheng Wukang [汇成武康], another five-story apartment building constructed by the Huicheng Group, also opened in 1995.

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

9 million R MB of investment, each villa had a private garden, as well as garage, contemporary facilities, infrastructure, and modern electronics. The entire development also included a shopping center, currency exchange station, dining room, bar, and

85

The use of the word “hui [汇],” which in Chinese could denote both “confluence” and “remittance,” is notably repeated in the naming of these early compounds. The word is also part of the designation of ‘qiaohui housing [侨汇房]’, which is a term synonymous with the waixiao housing but also refers in its Chinese form to non-Chinese national buyers. Although few of the early names for developments had English translations, the extensive use of the word “garden [花园]” and the choice of characters in naming also announced that these residential compounds no longer belonged to the austere lingo of the planned economy era. In parallel to the stylistic evolution of the buildings, the nomenclature for developments would evolve elaborately in the following decades.51 Although they are hardly noticeable today in the midst of more conspicuous behemoths, these early residential developments executed by a reforming and experimenting local state, planted the first seeds of capital revival. Intended to reap the benefits of foreign, namely overseas Chinese, investment in the city center, these projects infilled gaps in the existing urban fabric. They also introduced new residential types for urban densification and pilot processes for their spatial production, often without deliberately intending to. The insertion of these early commodity housing projects in the urban fabric of legacy conditions also created early urban loopholes for ensuing developments. They laid the foundation for a demographic change to the neighborhood, which would also trigger an ensuing commercial demand, leading to the changing role of the centrality in the metropolis.

State Institutions, Housing Marketization, and the Gap of Opportunity As the number of policies encouraging overseas Chinese investment by way of waixiao housing increased, economic restructuring to resolve the grave insufficiencies of central planning in Shanghai created new opportunities for housing production, especially for state-owned enterprises (SOE s). Nationwide restructuring of the SOE s in the 1980s would create urban loopholes for the SOE s to develop housing. Before economic liberalization and under planned economy, central planning directed all value chains and almost all units of production belonged to the state under SOE s. Housing provision, along with labor organization, was the responsibility of SOE s. Almost all employment also belonged to the state. The basic unit for labor orga-

nization, called the danwei [单位], or ‘work unit,’ fulfilled its role for social provision, including provisioning housing, childcare and education, for all its workers. As the danwei was the means by which the party-state exerted social control, housing provision was also a crucial instrument for social structuring. It was the danwei, in lieu of developers, which was responsible for housing construction. The danwei also managed urban housing and allocated it to employees, in accordance to their rank, employment duration and other measures of social hierarchy, at nominal rent. Over time, the inefficiencies of central planning resulted in too little housing construction given the demographic demand. Lack of resources also resulted in mismanagement and insufficient maintenance of the existing housing supply. 86

Under planned economy, all surpluses were centralized and redistributed to each SOE and their danwei. After economic reform in the 1980s, fiscal autonomy gave SOE s more control of their own surpluses, and the return to economic stability also meant increased surpluses.52 Under the more centralized command of each SOE , more funds were redirected into assets that are more secure in property rights. The property rights of state assets are, as expert Zhu Jieming writes, “tactically lax, neither defined nor legally secured, subject to circumstantial interpretation and competition.”53 Practically, SOE managers had the de facto right to use, and collect income from the state assets, but the state representing the people is the abstractly circumscribed “owner” of the SOE . A collusion of interests of the SOE managers and workers to transform state assets, which had ambiguous property rights, into forms like housing, which had more secure tenure, and, under liberalization, could be exchanged for value. Housing construction and allocation became one of many forms of state asset dissipation in the early stages of economic transition. The proportion of commodity housing danweis purchased rose from 47.5 % during the period 1979–1987 to 79 % in 1988–1993,54 following the central directive to accelerate housing marketization. Despite the central government’s aim to liberalize the housing market, the purchase of commodity housing by SOE s from state developers and given to their employees at discounts, protracted rather than severed the last of the ties between the state and housing. Between 1991 and 1995, 80 % of commodity housing was estimated to have been allocated with danwei subsidies. It was through housing that those remaining and surviving danweis consolidated their claims to access and privilege in the transition economy. Even as incomes rose with economic liberalization, rental costs as a percentage of household expenditure declined from 2.61 % in 1964 to 0.73 % in 1992.55 In 1998, the central government’s issuing of the policy document Implementation Plan for a Gradual Housing System Reform in Cities and Towns [关于在全国城镇分期分批 推行住房制度改革实施方案] extended the impetus for housing purchase to nationals. Three years later, the State Council presented the urban housing reform resolution,

dress the severe housing shortage, congestion, and dilapidation that urban residents had suffered in China for decades.57 It was this early gradualism of the transition economy that inhibited full maturation of the housing market. On the one hand, a high price-to-rent ratio due to low rents and low incomes, which were not compatible with the commodity housing prices, hindered market accessibility.58 On the other hand, planned economy institutions such as the SOE s and their danweis impeded full housing reform through their continuous and even expanded provision of subsidized housing during the transition period, which ultimately distorted the market.59 Continued housing allocation disincentivized danwei employees from accessing the commodity housing market, as housing purchase would have deprived them of the employment benefit of allocated housing. Especially in Shanghai’s city center, where the SOE s have since the 1950s been allocated valuable and strategically located plots, the redevelopment of property, either as offices and housing, became a way to upgrade and diversify the functions of the SOE to meet market demands. Whereas commodity housing developers were required

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

the Advice Regarding Comprehensively Advancing Reform for Urban Housing Institutions [关于全面进行城镇住房制度改革的意见],56 in the 8th Five Year Plan (1991–1995) to ad-

87

Central Government surplus

PLANNED ECONOMY CCI for construction

SOE

TRANSITION ECONOMY

surplus

SOE

wages Employee

Central Government

land rent

Local Government

wages Employee

land rent

Local Government

Fig. 9 Diagram of housing production from planned to transition economy

to pay what was called the “8-point price,” or “commodity price [商品房价]” for housing construction, SOE and state-institution-sponsored developments paid the “5-point” version of the standard price, or “price at cost [成本房价].”60 SOE s were not only able to access urban land at lower than market price, but they were also exempted from city taxes and other fees required of commodity housing developers. (Fig. 9) In the neighborhood around Plot 15, the built results of this early phase of economic liberalization are visible. In 1992, the district developer of the Xuhui Real Estate Group opened the Xingsheng Apartments [兴盛公寓], an 8-story and a 13-story tower. Developed for the party cadres of the Xuhui District, apartment towers like it and Xingguo Yuan [兴国苑], the set of two five-story buildings, one 11-story tower, and three villas, opened a few years later on the corner of Hunan Lu [湖南路] and Gaoyou Lu half a block down. Alongside housing developed for foreign investment, these buildings represented the kind of opportunities for development that the transition economy presented for the institutions that had vested interest in maintaining the status quo of privilege. Many of the early development companies owned by Shanghai’s district governments were first opened offshore in the 1980s, where special economic zone status allowed greater business freedom to facilitate their entrepreneurial activities. The Changning District [长宁区] of Shanghai, for example, established the Shenya Development Company [申亚实业开发总公司] in 1988, which was registered in the Special Economic Zone of Hainan [海南]. When liberalization returned to Shanghai after 1992, Shenya moved back to the city to establish the Shenya Real Estate Company, where it became one of the first “pilot businesses for policy testing [制度试点企业].”61 Its 26-floor tower of the Xingguo Apartments [兴国公寓], which was launched as a waixiao residence at the corner of Huaihai and Wukang Lu, opened in 1995. Shenya would continue to develop housing and offices in both Hainan and Shanghai, while diversifying its investments into sectors including building management, tourism, education, agriculture, and forestry. The role of the SOE as developer, contractor, and designer increasingly took shape in the decade preceding the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. As economic liberalization was rapidly accelerated, real estate development was the means by which the stronger and more agile SOE s were able to survive in the increasingly competitive market economy. In 1996, the Shanghai Construction Bureau issued a policy empowering Shanghai’s district governments, at the level of local state, as the authority of approval for real estate redevelopment applications from private developers.62 This decentralization of power 88

from the municipal to the district level also signified opportunities for the astute and connected leaders of the SOE s who had access to local state authorities. The 1998 massive layoffs by the outdated and no-longer competitive industries that went bankrupt ensured that the survivors would emerge more powerful and privileged. The termination of the danwei’s subsidized housing allocation system, declared in 1998, also freed the SOE s of their obligations to provide housing for their employees and enabled their residential developments to be part of the commodity housing market. A former state institute for energy in Shanghai in the wake of SOE reforms and downsizing, for example, nimbly transformed itself into a designer-cum-developer in the mid-1990s and quickly took on contract work in the construction industry.63 Many other forms of institutional adaptations took place, keeping beneficial state-affiliated networks and assets, while discarding outdated functions and personnel. The former state energy institute would, amongst other developments, acquire land behind a handkerchief factory in the city center and erect a ten-story commodity housing on the site, with top units reserved for key leadership positions and sold to friends.64 Interestingly, two decades later, the same company saw the end of urban real estate growth, in 2012, as reason for returning to the now more lucrative venue of energy development, its originally designated function. On Anfu Lu and Wulumuqi Lu near Plot 15, a number of towers arose in the 1990s, built by companies now named after their former SOE selves. The real estate developer Shanghai Port Real Estate [上港房产], which finished three residential towers in 1991 on Wulumuqi Lu called Wuzhong Apartments [乌中大楼], belonged to the Shanghai Port Authority, a national-level SOE . Nearby, the development arm of the Shanghai Bureau for Quality Assurance [上海市质量监督局建设], a municipal-level state institution, erected the Changle Apartment tower [长乐公寓] in 1998. Down the block, the two residential towers, Yiping Yuanin [一品苑], were also erected in 1999 on the land of the Shanghai Drama Arts Center [上海话剧院]. Housing remained tenuously linked to the planned economy institutions, and perpetuated the inequalities in housing distribution created under state socialism.65 Housing also continued to privilege those with connections under the pre-reform system.66 Cadres and administrators of SOE s would be the first to access the increasing supply of new housing, perpetuating the existing inequality of housing access that

and rank, both important in housing allocation under planned economy, continued to determine the quantity of subsidy in the marketization of allocated housing.67 Housing construction and developing a residential market dominated development policy, especially in the boom preceding the 1997 Asia Financial Crisis. It would not be until after 1998 that commercial and shopping venues would also become a more normative form of real estate development. In these early years of economic transition, state enterprises capitalized on the urban loopholes created by ambiguities regarding state assets and the weakness of non-state consumers to produce commodity housing. Although also incremental and small-scaled like the waixiao housing developments, these developments would add to the physical and socio-economic diversity enriching city center neighborhoods.

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

had been increasingly distorted towards upper-ranked state affiliates. When the sale of public housing started at the end of 1993, the benefactors’ employment duration

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Expedited Know-How Import and the Dual Market When 1992 brought the “Dragon’s Head” title to Shanghai, the central government sanctioned an accelerated marketization to be implemented in Shanghai. The first land lease directly to foreign investors was signed in 1992 in the newly created administrative district of Pudong [浦东]. Foreign capital was thereafter allowed to develop land in the inner city as well as in the designated zones of the suburbs. 1993 and 1994 saw the influx of capital by foreign investors pouring into the real estate market.68 Many overseas Chinese invested in Pudong, with its plans for the new financial district of Lujiazui [陆家嘴], the high-tech park of Zhangjiang [张江], the export-processing zone of Jinqiao [金桥], and the free-trade zones of Waigaoqiao [外高桥]. But many also chose to invest in residences given the changing demand in the 1990s.69 In 1992, the establishment of a Housing Reform Office [房改办] in almost every city in the nation took over the responsibility of overseeing the transition of housing as a welfare. The Shanghai Municipal Government issued a report in March of the same year, Plans and Implementation Regarding Slum Housing Upgrade [关于棚户简屋改造规划 和实施情况的报告], which identified 365 hectares of inadequate housing in the city and urgently required the upgrading of 3,300 sites. At the end of the same year, the 6th Communist Party Congress of Shanghai announced plans to demolish these 365 hectares by 2000. Shanghai had been one of the cities with the most severe shortage in housing space, with 3.6 square meters of living space per capita in 1979, the national average being 6.8 square meters. Shanghai was also a producer city that contributed continuously to the national GDP while receiving little of its tribute to the central government back to invest in its overloaded infrastructure and to construct housing for its growing population. The city hardly grew in physical size as its population multiplied. Therefore, a comprehensive housing reform program in the city was introduced in 1991, implementing a compulsory housing savings program through establishing a Housing Provident Fund (HPF ) [公积金]. With this Shanghai became the first city in the nation to provide an economic basis for housing consumption, based on Hong Kong and Singapore’s mandatory savings fund models. The lack of funds for housing purchase in China’s first pilot cities for housing reform had led to their failures. In contrast, the mandatory savings fund was a pragmatic measure that anticipated the future. In 1996, Shanghai municipal government issued the policy document Number 18, which gave district governments the authority of approving applications for land lease and development.70 In 1998, the Shanghai Bureau of Construction issued the policy document Number 33, which reduced land leasing fees and further incentivized urban renewal through subsidies to private developers for demolition in the urgency to complete the clearance of 365 hectares of inadequate housing.71 The State Council issued a second most important policy document, Number 23,72 which expanded on document Number 43, issued in 1994, which established the comprehensive framework for housing provision and housing finance.73 This was intended to stimulate the privatization of housing development at the national level. 90

1980

1990

2000

2010

SOE developments Commodity housing Overseas Chinese investments 1978 十一届 三中全会

1992 Shanghai Dragon’s Head

1997 Asian Financial Crisis

2001 China joins WTO

Fig. 10 Diagram for the multiple tracks of housing markets under transition

Two commodity housing markets coexisted from early on under transition economy. (Fig. 10) The 1992 permission for foreign investment within the city was followed by the 1994 permission for foreign capital to develop housing that is sold to the nationals, slowly closing the gap between waixiao housing, sold to foreigners, and neixiao commodity housing, sold to nationals. With the rising incomes accompanying economic growth, and the marketization of public housing—many cashed out on their existing units to purchase new commodity housing, owning marketized housing through the purchase of their publicly owned housing—neixiao housing also rose in demand. Neixiao housing steadily improved in quality. Nevertheless, in 1994, the average price for waixiao commodity housing was still three to four times that of the neixiao, even though building costs had only increased by 20 to 30 %.74 The discrepancy in price was on account of the differential in land lease fees for waixiao housing. It was in 1997 that the Asian Economic Crisis caused a vacuum in the influx of foreign capital, reducing both supply and demand for waixiao commodity housing. It was not until August 2001 that the differentials of commodity housing for non-nationals would be eliminated and integrated within the commodity housing market in Shanghai.75 Application for accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO ) catalyzed a re-examination of the dual market for commodity housing, which had been considered a barrier to global integration. The WTO accession also encouraged procedural streamlining, increased transparency, and

Shanghai’s modern era affinity with the West and its historic cosmopolitanism. The names alluded to a new cosmopolitanism to which the city was again aspiring. The early waixiao housing developments would be the realization of overseas Chinese developers and their architects at scales and speeds unrivaled in the new market. For decision-makers in the until-then sequestered mainland China, these overseas Chinese experts in real estate had the desired know-how for achieving international standards. (Fig. 12) The resultant developments, insertions into existing neighborhoods, ranged from modern-style low-rises to the more representative high-rise towers with amenities. They often included Western restaurants, swimming pools, and fitness studios on the premises. Often larger in development area than earlier developments, they were also the main participants in the 365 Plan’s expedited clearance of old blocks.

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

promoted a single housing market. Nevertheless, the waixiao housing of the late 1990s provided a model for housing development, both in form and procedure. Many of these early housing developments for the waixiao market had names like “Ambassy Courts” and “Joffre Gardens” to evoke

91

The Ambassy Courts residential compound completed in 2000, for example, was developed by a subsidiary of the global conglomerate founded by Macanese tycoon Stanley Ho, a man known for his casinos in Macau and his portfolio of property and infrastructural investments. Ambassy Courts was one of the most prominent enclaves built with international standards for expats in the neighborhood near Plot 15, its three towers dwarfing the surrounding neighborhoods. (Fig. 11) The compound is gated, as was the protocol of exclusive developments in Hong Kong and Macau. Parking, greenery, and amenities such as tennis courts and a swimming pool, further distinguish the compound from its surroundings. The structures themselves are a pastiche of GrecoRoman embellishments pasted on towers that came from the standard template for Hong Kong luxury housing developments of the time.76 Its Chinese name, Hongyi Haoyuan [鸿艺豪苑], is composed of the character, ‘hong [鸿],’ from Ho’s name and the characters, ‘haoyuan [豪苑],’ which means ‘luxury garden.’ The Ambassy Courts‘ Chinese name evokes the kind of opulence that had been shunned and suppressed since 1949 under the austere socialism of the People’s Republic. Ho’s other investment projects, which entered the market in the 1980s, include Central Plaza [上海中区广场] near Huaihai Lu, from 1998, and Shanghai Town [上海城] in Hongqiao, finished in 2001. Ho had expressed his optimism regarding Shanghai’s future: “Shanghai’s economic development is extremely fast; its investment environment is getting better and better.” He said, “we are confident in the investment in Shanghai. We are confident in the investment in the mainland.”77 This confidence in the growing Chinese market was shared by many who have arrived in China in the first decade of economic liberalization. One of the earliest revivals of the ‘huiguan [会馆],’ or clubhouse, in post-reform China would also appear on the grounds of Ambassy Courts. The likes of Sun Yat-sen’s granddaughter, Asia’s wealthiest woman, Nina Wong, and other overseas Chinese tycoons could mingle here with expats and local members of the club who were ushering in the new era of China’s

Figs. 11, 12 View of the Ambassy Court from lilong across Huaihai Lu, left, and unit types, right

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German Embassy

American Embassy

Yicun [逸村]

Japanese Embassy

Shanghai Xincun [上海新村]

growing prosperity. Called the Ambassy Club, or, in Chinese, Hongyi Club [鸿艺会], it was an important part of the business model for real estate development. The Ambassy Club also became a role model for how to program amenities in residential developments.78 The latest exclusive clubhouse by the Ho empire is in Chongqing.79 Despite its exclusive high walls that abut the small-scale buildings next to it, the neighborhood nevertheless lends Ambassy Courts not only its name—the compound is located across from the American embassy and behind the German embassy—but also its claim to class, privilege, and culture. (Figs. 13, 14) On the other side of Huaihai Lu is the upper-class lilong of Shanghai Xincun [上海新村], where many intellectuals were housed and continue to live. A few doors down is Yicun [逸村], which coffee table history books from the mid-2000s claim to be the original home of Chiang Kai-shek’s son Chiang Ching-kuo, later to be the Nationalist leader in Taiwan. Farther down Huaihai Lu the protected former house of Madame Soong, wife of Sun Yat-sen, remains in pristine condition, with its 1950s American fixtures and furnishings. It is not too far a stretch to imagine the Ambassy Club as a contemporary extension of the Republicanera glamour, but with updated and evolved participants from the new aristocracy. The optimism towards the marketization process was understandable. The overall effect of housing marketization in the first decade of accelerated reform was clearly felt in the improvement of daily life for many Shanghai residents. With construction of much needed residential buildings and simultaneous urban renewal through the demolition and reconstruction plans, the average density quotients of 4 square meters per person increased. From the 1979 3.6 square meter per capita, housing size impressively increased to 9.3 square meters by 1998 in Shanghai, and to 16.5 square meters in 2007. The number of housing units wholly occupied by a single household increased from

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

Fig. 13 The Ambassy Court development (highlighted in blue and red) in the context of the neighborhood, and a map from the French Concession 1938 plan showing the gap in planning in which it is today located, inset

93

Fig. 14 Ambassy Courts, 2011

1

15

8 乌中大楼

2

Xingguo Garden

一品苑

Year: 1995/6 Price:42122RMB/sm (2014/7) Units: 208, 26 floors Parking: 80 Green: 10% FAR: Built Area: 25000sm Developer: 申亚房产

Year: 1999/8 Price: 48079RMB/sm (2013/1) 2 towers 17 and 15 storeys Units: 120, Parking: 64 Green: 25% FAR: 2 Built Area: 17000sm Developer: 上海意安置业

安福路298弄

淮海中路1950号

乌鲁木齐中路255弄7-12号

Year: 1991-1993 Price:40032RMB/sm (2013/1) 3 towers, 2 6 story Units: 560 Parking: 85 Green: 45% FAR: 1.9 Total Area: 15620sm Developer: 上港房产

兴国大厦

9

兴国花园

Clove Apartments

武康路280弄

鸿艺豪苑

20

10 兴国苑

汇益花园

Year: 1996/12 Price: 55364RMB/sm Units: 75 Parking: 15 Green: 35% FAR: 2.8 Built Area: 7840sm Developer: 住乐建设

Year: 1992 Price: RMB/sm (2013/1) 26 villas rebuilt Parking: Green: % FAR: Built Area: sm Total Area: sm Developer: 城开集团

4

武康路101号

Year: 1996/12 Price: 49685RMB/sm Units: 288 Parking: 35 Green: 60% FAR: -Built Area: -Developer: 政府改造

13 President Mansion

淮海中路1768弄

(2014/7)

Kingsville 安福路198号

华山路868弄1-6号

Year: 1993/6 Price: 46066 RMB/sm 4 8-Story Towers Units: 128 Parking: 150 Green: 30% FAR: 2.1 Built Area: 52000sm Developer: 总统房产

Year: 1997/10 Price: 54507RMB/sm (2013/1) Units: 102 Parking: 99 Green: 35% FAR: Built Area: 43180000sm Developer: 上海金裕房地产有

(2014/7)

6 Zhong Hui Garden

限公司有限公司

13 长乐公寓

中汇花园

长乐路1225号

吴兴路25号

Year: 1994/12 Price: 58797RMB/sm (2014/7) 4 towers, 4 villas, 1 clubhouse Units: 486 Parking: 150 Green: 30% FAR: 2.1 Total Area: 52000sm Developer: 上房集团

7

Year: 1998/1 Price: 48079RMB/sm (2013/1) Units: Parking: 64 Green: 25% FAR: 0.88 Built Area: 10476sm Developer: 上海市质量监 督局建设

14 康兴公寓

汇成武康

淮海中路1768弄

武康路280弄

Year: 1995

(2014/7)

Year: 1998/4 Price: -Units: 21 Parking: -Green: -FAR: 3 Built Area: -Developer: 东方国际

Joffre Mansion 霞飞别墅

金苑

总统公寓

Price: 51724RMB/sm Units: 80 Parking:60 Green: 35% FAR: 2.0 Built Area: -Developer: 汇成集团

21 丁香大楼

华山路894弄 (2013/1)

Year: 2000, renov 2005/6 Price: ~63115RMB/sm (2013/1) Units: 21 Parking: 40 Green: 25% FAR: 1.5 Built Area: 3540sm Developer: 上海世杰

(2014/7)

11 兴盛公寓

高邮路3号

Beverly Court 嘉惠园

湖南路308弄1～6号

高邮路16号

5

Year: 2000/1 Price: 59207RMB/sm (2013/1) Units: 387 Parking: 200 Green: 20% FAR: 4.5 Total Area: 40000sm Developer: 鸿日房产

Year: 1996/6 Price:56451RMB/sm (2014/7) Units: 360 Parking:28 Green: 35% FAR: 4.3 Built Area: 168000sm Developer: 鑫安房产

3 Huiyi Garden

Ambassy Court 淮海中路1500弄

华山路800弄 6号 8号 16号

Year: 1992 Price: RMB/sm (2013/1) Units: Parking: Green: % FAR: 0.88 Built Area: sm Developer: 徐房集团

Year: 1992-6 Price: 47551RMB/sm Units: 72 Parking: -Green: 23% FAR: -Built Area: -Developer: 徐房集团

19

丁香公寓

Year: 2001/1 Price: 180788RMB/sm (2013/1) Units: 27 Parking: 28 Green: 45% FAR: 2 Built Area: 9113sm Developer: 上海元汇房地产

24 Chevalier Place 亦园

安福路168号

Year: 2001/5 Price: 55377RMB/sm (2013/1) 33 storeys, Units: 113 Parking: 200 Green: 10% FAR: Built Area: 41297sm Developer: 上海创名房地产发 展有限公司

26 The Summit 汇贤居

乌鲁木齐中路99弄

Year: 2004/6 Price: 74089RMB/sm (2013/1) Units: 359 Parking: 341 Green: 50% FAR: 4 Built Area: 80000sm Total Area: 120000sm Developer: 长江实业(集团)

28 Chanter 鸿丰香缇花园 湖南路555号

Year: 2006/1 Price: 106062RMB/sm Units: 35 Parking: 57 Green: 50% FAR: 2 Built Area: 10515sm Developer: 鸿丰房地产

(2013/1)

31.6 % in 1980 to 74 % in 2000. By 2007, nearly all housing units were wholly occupied by a single household at 94.7 %.80 High-end residences and grade-A offices were an important part of the range of products demanded in China’s liberalizing market. High land lease fees that funded infrastructure development and other outlays by the local state, and the need for maximum rapid returns increasingly required commercially profitable spatial products for elites rather than ones that could accommodate the social welfare of more ordinary people. At the same time, overseas Chinese developers in particular chose well96

26 16

12

13

11

24

15 5 10 1

14 3

4

20 19

8 24 15 *6

2 7

17

21 6

8

High-rise Residential Multistory Residential

Figs. 15, 16 Residential developments in the neighborhood, left, and the corresponding map of the post-1980 s developments around Plot 15, with the different types indicated by color, right

positioned city center locations for the depositing of a contemporary lifestyle catering to global demand. In doing so, they were anticipating a growing market of consumers with cosmopolitan tastes, who would prefer the ambiance of the historic neighborhoods. These consumers would have the proximity of the local neighborhoods and the contemporary facilities and amenities of new residential towers. (Figs. 15, 16) More than its prime location in proximity to historic sites and heritage buildings, the existing architecture type that was on the site of Ambassy Court is the key to understanding the development itself. The area was a Chinese settlement before the

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

Low-rise Residential

97

expansion of the French Concession in 1914. In a plan that would be translated as the “French Concession Beautification Plan,” the area was marked out like a hole in the middle of a donut: a gap of existing Chinese housing surrounded by the new residential district dictated by strictly-zoned modern building types and planned road networks of the Conseil d’Administration Municipale.81 (Fig. 13 inset) The architecture types and urban form of this original “urban village,”82 with its low-rise Chinese houses and network of narrow lanes remained throughout the Concession-era and the PRC period, even as the surrounding neighborhood developed under French Concession governance. Informal additions compelled by demographic pressures further densified the settlement. In the 1960s, on the empty plots adjacent, housing slabs were in-

Fig. 17 Plots within the gaps of French planning from 1938 , with the largest being that of the contemporary Plot 15

serted. It was not until the 1990s, in the urgent effort to upgrade Shanghai’s dilapidated and overcrowded urban housing, that the architecture types lacking infrastructure and facilities, and with coal stoves and no plumbing, would be the first to be leased to foreign investors and cleared for development. Despite the fact that what eventually became the shantytown by the 1980s was in fact the oldest of its neighborhood, the area’s pre-modern conditions epitomized the squalor of inadequate housing, and became the visible reason for removal and renewal. It was also convenient in the newly implemented land leases that the plot of the pre-modern village was large and profitable enough for real estate development by contemporary standards, as deployed by the overseas Chinese developers. The locational importance of such plots in the city center, as well as the threshold size, often took priority in the demolition deliberations over the actual state of housing conditions. If the dilapidated and over-crowded housing was located on too small or fragmented of a plot, it would not have been worthy of investment, leaving the improvement of residents’ living conditions very much an afterthought. In addition to the Ambassy Court site, another of the “donut holes” of the French plan was a larger area east of the Wulumuqi and Wuyuan Lu crossing. (Fig. 17) Wulumuqi Lu, formerly called Route Alfred Magy, was a key north-south connector, around which the second of the pre-Concession settlements was already located.83 Plot 15, on the southeast corner of Wulumuqi and Anfu Lu, and the block north of it made up most of this pre-modern “urban village.” In 1995, when housing prices were low, the site of Wulumuqi Lu Lane 99 was acquired by the Hong Kong development giant Hutchinson Whampoa. By the end of 2002 the development for the residential units of The Summit went up for sale at the price of 195,00 R MB per square meter (equivalent to 2,380 USD per square meter); a penthouse unit cost an astounding 6,500 USD per square meter.84 The 98

Fig. 18 Plot 15 in context, and map from the French Concession 1938 plan, showing the gap in planning in which it is today located, inset

same year the office units of The Center were available to rent, even though it was not until two years later that the residences and offices were officially opened to occupation. The Ambassy Court and The Summit, across the street from Plot 15, clearly represent the opportunities offered by the urban loopholes of a different kind of ambiguity; namely, the ambiguity marked out by historic developments and the contemporary reading of heritage, (Fig. 18) which would quickly change within the following decade. The economic feasibility of upgrading and the appeal of improved living conditions drove much of the rapid developments of the 1990s, which would begin to unravel with rising real estate prices and the recognition of new values for city center locations.

At the end of 1992, Shanghai’s municipal government tabled the goal of demolishing 365 hectares of inadequate and congested housing by the year 2000, naming it the “365 Plan.” The urban renewal effort, which had halted since 1949, targeted the 300,000 some families living less than 2.5 square meter per capita in Shanghai. To catch up on the 32 years of less than an average 870,000 square meters per year of demolition and renewal per year, the urgency to start from scratch and to clear the ground in the city center became the impetus for the next decade’s development planning. By 2000, the municipal government was largely satisfied that the goal of the 365 Plan was achieved. New constructions in the city center replaced the most dilapidated of housing conditions, including most shanty areas and older lilong areas. This section outlines the typological and morphological differences between lilongs that were built in different time periods, which often corresponded with their loca-

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

Before the Tower: the Lilong

99

斯文里

20m

Fig. 19 Lilong developments of Siwenli [斯文里], Jing’an Villas [静安别墅], Dasheng Hutong [大胜胡同], and Shangfang Gardens [上方花园], left to right

tions in the city. Although lilong are already much researched by scholars, 85 a brief outline of the lilong types is important to understanding their contemporary developments, which is the central concern of this and the following chapters. The dire urban living conditions that the demolition and redevelopment plan was trying to address were found mainly in the predominant urban residential type in Shanghai, the lilong. A network hierarchy of lanes, or long [弄], circulating and traversing a neighborhood of predominantly residential buildings form the lilong, literally a “compound,” li [里], of longs [弄], “lanes”. The lanes themselves are also called longtang [弄堂], which refers to the spatial quality of the lanes. The term ‘longtang’ is also used to describe the lane house compound or neighborhood, interchangeable with lilong. From the end of the 19th century to the 1950s, at least 70 to 80 % of Shanghai residents lived in lilongs. Lilongs shape a morphology specific to Shanghai’s modern era urban formation. In the early 1900s, as Shanghai became the dominant financial and cultural center in China,86 rapid population influx resulting from cultural and economic opportunities as well as for the security offered by the Concessions’ extraterritorial status, compelled the production of the architecture type of the lilong house. From a simplification and scalar reduction of the courtyard houses from the Jiangnan [江南] region of the Yangtze River Delta, to their aggregation into row-houses that was attributable to the form of the European city, the hybrid type of the lilong house took shape beginning in the 1870s and continued to evolve until the 1930s. At the urban scale, internal lanes within the block traversed the high-density low-rise housing of the lilong houses, structuring their urban form. (Fig. 19) 100

大胜胡同

上方花园

Usually two or three rooms wide, the earlier lilong houses had a stone doorframe with black wooden gates, which were called the ‘shikumen [石库门]’, or literally “stonerimmed door,” opening onto a courtyard. By the third expansion of the French concessions in 1914, newer shikumen housing, with a reduction in size to one or two rooms in width would also include a roof terrace called the shaitai [晒台] and densified versions of the vernacular courtyard into light wells called the tianjing [天井], or “sky well.” These elements, spatial consequences of the regional cultural habits and climate, would evolve in the lilong’s later iterations. Because of the time of their construction, the shikumen lilong housing lacked amenities such as plumbing and electricity that accompanied modernity and industrialization. Contemporary demand for infrastructural conveniences, such as indoor flushing toilets and the shift to nuclear families as the basic social units, replacing extended families staffed by servants, rendered these ‘old-style lilong’ types [老式里弄]—inter­ changeable with shikumen—outdated and economically infeasible to renew under contemporary conditions. But because the shikumen’s stylistic hybridity and tectonic appearance had increasingly become representative of a contemporary memory of old Shanghai, heritage efforts have increasingly preserved their façade structures in commercial developments, piloted by the seminal Xintiandi [新天地] project in 2002. This re-narration of historic buildings for contemporary consumption will be further dissected in the following chapter. Nevertheless, the prominent architectural feature of the “stone-rimmed door” would bestow the lilong with its name: the term shikumen is increasingly used interchangeably by the lay public with lilong, even though the lilong also includes newer architecture types and urban forms.

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

静安别墅

101

斯文里

大胜胡同

2m

2m

Fig. 20 Plans of old-styled lilong type Siwenli, left; and new-styled lilong Dasheng Hutong, right

The architecture type of the lilong buildings changed in the 1920s, when modernization and densification required buildings to be smaller and taller and to incorporate more modern infrastructure such as electricity, modern plumbing, and space to accommodate the automobile. The term ‘new-style lilong [新式里弄]’ is used to describe these lilong buildings and lilong compounds that were produced in response to these modern requirements.87 The new-style lilong buildings have a smaller footprint, eliminating the Chinese-style courtyard of the old-style lilong houses, although the light wells were retained as a feature in many. (Fig. 20) The new-style lilong buildings have a higher number of stories, sometimes up to four floors in total. Often, in lieu of the Chinese-style courtyard, the new-style lilong buildings may also include a modern-style front garden and roof terrace. The primary and secondary lanes, which also doubled as public space for the residents, would continue in the new-style lilong types that also extended to what are called huayuanshi lilong [花园式里弄] or ‘garden-style lilong,’ and gongyushi lilong [公寓式 里弄] or ‘apartment-style lilong’ types.88 The garden-style lilongs have more spacious layouts with semi-detached houses, often abutted by a small garden. Similarly, apartment-style lilongs are made up of a cluster of apartment buildings, from three to seven stories high, which are accessible via a system of lanes. From their architecture type, the apartment-style lilong buildings were different from all the other lilongs in that they were designed for multiple families in each building. All the other types were originally designed for one family, even if for an extended one in the older lilong types. In their addressing of the compact city as a modern commercial center with rising demographic density, these new lilong types infilling Shanghai’s modern street grids contrasted with the low-rise low-density types of the more traditionally Chinese cities.89 The new-style lilongs, especially, were no longer one- or two-story buildings. The long or lanes of the new-style lilongs were wider, with the primary lane wide enough to support automobile entry. In contrast to the three-meter width of the old-style lilongs, new-style lilongs had five- to six-meter-wide lanes, designed for the automobiles rather than the rickshaw. The secondary arteries also were much wider at four to six meters with deeper private courtyards of three meters, which also allowed the buildings to be 102

Old-styled lilong New-styled lilong Garden-styled lilong Apartment-styled lilong

Fig. 21 Distribution of lilong types in Shanghai, with the modern types more in the west, 1993

higher.90 Thus the density, network of open space, and building quality updated their contemporary usage. The lanes that traversed both the garden-style lilong and apart-

ern housing type and its circulation networks, manifestations of the paradigm shift in the city’s industrialization, had already prepared for the automobile as an important component of the city. Modern amenities, deemed luxurious by Chinese standards at the time, included indoor plumbing, the modern kitchen, heating appliances, and fireplaces. These infrastructural provisions as well as spatial configurations of many of the new-style lilongs have facilitated their continued use by contemporary demands. Today’s real estate demand for a certain type of the old house will also be further unpacked in the next chapter in relation to the heritage narrative.91 In terms of development area at the urban scale, the new-style lilong decreased in size. The development area for old-style lilong compounds could sometimes cover a street block, such as at the old-style lilong of Siwenli [斯文里]. Often, several new-style lilong compounds came together to cover a street block, and a block could be interspersed with many different types of lilong houses. Especially towards the western part of the former Concession areas, where block sizes became larger, the fragmenta-

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

ment-style lilong were similar to those of new-style lilongs in that parking garages were often built into the developments, either on the ground floor of the houses or built as a separate structure on the side of the compound. In contrast to inner city housing in most Chinese cities, where the dominance of one-story structures without indoor plumbing and amenities made their rejuvenation after economic liberalization financially unfeasible, the standards of Shanghai’s modern era housing as implemented under the strict Concession-era building regulations made their survival under contemporary development pressures possible. The mod-

103

Fig. 22 1949 map of the neighborhood around Plot 15

tion of lilong compound developments would impact the redevelopment of the sites under contemporary pressures. The element of time is important in understanding the diversity of lilongs and their spatial distribution in the city. Old-style lilongs made up much of the fabric of the older part of the former Concession areas, closer to the River Huangpu to the east. New-style lilongs were built later and dominate the expanded territories to the west, interspersed with old-style lilongs also built there. (Fig. 21) Thus, the diversity of types was greater in these newer parts of the city. The westward expansions of both the International Settlement and French Concessions created larger network grids. The diversity of types in each block was also more varied, which is visible in the neighborhood around Plot 15. (Figs. 22, 23) Because of the differences in architecture types and built-in amenities, the lilongs’ urban spatial distribution also reflected a class-based residential spatial distribution. Even though older wealthier locals may still maintain their old-style lilong homes, which are larger if less modern in the old city or in areas, for example, behind the Bund, 92 more Western-educated and white-collar Chinese in the 1920s onwards would be found in the new-style lilongs, while more blue-collar Chinese would be living in the old-style lilongs. Even up until the 1980s, for example, one’s address in Shanghai revealed one’s family standing, background, and social position. Districts like Xuhui 104

Fig. 23 The buildings and network of lanes in the neighborhood around Plot 15 from before 1949

networks.93 The role of small commerce embedded in crucial corners of the lilong compound, as provider of essential amenities, has also been essential in the formation of social networks within the dense residential neighborhoods.94 The effect of Shanghai’s influence on China’s cultural development as manifested by its architecture was epitomized by the ‘tingzijian literature [亭子间文学]’ and ‘tingzijian writers [亭子间作家]’ that emerged in the early 1900s.95 Many of these sometimes vagabond intellectuals sought out the modern life of the metropolis and settled in the ‘tingzijian [亭子间],’ a room entered from the stair landing in between the main floors, where the larger and southern-facing rooms were placed. Because of its small size and less-preferred north-facing location this room was often sublet by the primary tenants to singles who sought lower rent and ease of life in the lilong community of the city. It is thus in the tingzijian that many of the representative works of Chinese modernity were formed: it was the

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

and parts of Jing’an were considered “upper corners” in Shanghai’s social hierarchy, which also corresponded to the areas’ architectural modernity and later urban development, as reflected in their lilong typology. Because of the prevalence of the lilong as residential type, its influence on Shanghai’s cultural development has also been formative. The semi-public space of the longtang has been the subject of many analyses regarding the formation of community

105

productive space out of which many of the most famous modern era concepts and critiques emerged. As the site of cultural production, it is at the same time extremely specific to the architecture type of Shanghai’s modernity, that of the lilong. From the 20th century onwards, insertion of factories as well as other functions into the lilong compounds also took place. The term ‘lilong factories,’ for example, denoted these factories’ smaller size. Soviet-style slab buildings from the 1950s and 1960s were inserted into empty spaces in lilong neighborhoods, even though many of these buildings were typologically not lilong houses. Thus, the term lilong denotes more the urban morphology, or the traversal of the lanes, than the architecture type. Lilong also implies the density- and spatially-driven residential social network that is representative of Shanghai’s modern era development. But since Shanghai expedited urban renewal in the city center in the 1990s, the terminology for lilong has been used as a blanket term that often omits and overlooks the diversity and nuances of Shanghai’s historic urban fabric in popular usage. After the advent of commercial destinations like Xintiandi and Tianzifang [田子坊] in the 2000s, to be elaborated in an ensuing chapter, the popular media often throws out the term shikumen to refer to Shanghai’s modern era, even if the actual neighborhoods or architecture referred to may be neither.

Origins of the Residual Conditions Historic housing in Shanghai’s city center areas has made them unique exceptions in the process of housing marketization following economic liberalization. “72 residents [家房客]” is a phenomenon where numerous tenants share the limited facilities and infrastructure of largely old houses in overcrowded and dilapidated living conditions. It is a remnant of the misallocations and inefficiencies of the planned economy era. Its persistence in Shanghai’s city center, notably in the remaining lilong neighborhoods, however, has resulted both from the cumulative historic processes and how the buildings’ survival of urban renewals has entrenched them as planned economy legacies in the transition economy. The following section briefly outlines the historic processes that have created the “72 residents” phenomenon in old houses. To understand the urban loopholes that emerged from the neighborhoods like that around Plot 15, in which the architecture type of the lilong in form, function, and governance makes up an important element, the previous and this section’s clarification of the historic origins of the “72 residents” phenomenon is crucial. During the first decades of the 20th century, when the country was politically unstable, relative security within the Concessions as exceptional zones of territoriality led to a growing population density,96 requiring the subdivision of residential units designed to house single families to host multiple families. With its growing demand, housing became exploited for financial gains. A system of deposits called ding fei [顶费] was initially required of leasees to secure a unit. The ding fei, in addition to paying rent, became the prevalent system of housing procurement. Many contracts were made with second landlords, who made good profit from collecting rents for their sublet units. The Republican-era government tried to issue subletting licenses in 1942 to monitor the practice. Under the existing laws, primary landlords who raised rents were legally restricted, but second landlords were not controlled. Even after revisions 106

to rental laws in 1942, where a ceiling was set on percentage of profits for second and third landlords, profit margins still far exceeded the set limit.97 Under the circumstances of impending war, most refugees accepted the exorbitant fees in order to secure a place to live in the safety of the Concession city. A survey of selected residences in 1953 showed that almost 80 % of the rental units, including lilong housing and apartment buildings, were still rented out by second landlords.98 The CCP would regard the practice as especially exploitative. They regarded the high rents charged by second landlords as a capitalist abuse victimizing the proletariats. Housing shortage in Shanghai was chronic.99 Even though lilongs made up a quarter of total residential architecture in 1949, with 53 % being old-style lilongs and 20 percent new-style lilongs, almost three quarters of the population of the city lived in them.100 A detailed account of the Siming Mansions [四明别墅], a new-style lilong in the western end of the former International Concession, describes the 1946 resident outlines [规范 户籍] of the 40 buildings, 21 of which were occupied by a single family while the others were occupied by multiple families. Of the buildings with multiple families, most housed one-to-three families but some as many five to nine families.101 Lu Hanchao, a historian of Shanghai, estimated an average of 24 residents per lilong house.102 The 1949 film, Crows and the Sparrows [乌鸦与麻雀], which critiques the corruption of the Nationalist-controlled China through a narrative of its crooked antagonists and their domestic connivances, is set amidst crowded lilong housing of Shanghai.103 When the CCP takeover arrived in 1949, mass exodus took place from Shanghai.

elites were expelled to make room for the new since the departure of the Japanese in 1945 and then the Nationalists in 1949. But in the early days of the PRC , even as redistribution of prime real estate to party elites took place, the central government largely left the properties of the remaining enterprises alone, especially those belonging to local industrialists, in order to harness their productivity in the centrally planned economy.105 Private properties were still bought and sold in the early 1950s to the ranks of private owners who decided to stay on in the city rather than fleeing to Hong Kong or Taiwan. The buying of houses in the early 1950s signaled that there was, similar to in the early 1990s, the need to increase cash flow for the local government via the selling of abandoned or confiscated real estate assets. Privately owned property constituted

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

Two to three million Chinese citizens left mainland China for Hong Kong and Taiwan, and in the 1950s, 40,000 per year left for Hong Kong.104 The foreign population also fled. Between 1948 and 1954, Siming Mansions, for example, saw the exodus of 20 % of its population. Depending on the resources and affiliations of the neighborhood, high percentages departed, especially in the elite areas in the western ends of the city. Confiscation of properties belonging to the Nationalist escapees, expat capitalists, and other counter-revolutionaries gave the state control of a number of villas and apartment buildings in the city center. These were allocated to state institutions or to individuals deemed valuable to the new government. Better quality housing was allotted to party-endorsed intellectuals and cultural figures. Selected units were also distributed to high-ranking cadres. The “proud family [光荣家庭]” signs, which indicate that the occupants were part of the prestigious Long March that qualified them as members of the select pantheon of party elites, are still visibly tacked to the front doors of units. This revolution of property exchange was nothing novel, as each generation of

107

66 % of residences in Shanghai at the time, made up of both owner-occupied residences as well as privately owned rental units, which constituted the majority of private housing. These were largely managed by the dozen or so private management companies. Many of the villas that were fortunate to have fallen into the hands of state institutions had some chance of being returned intact in the 1990s. Today’s headquarter building for the Shanghai Automobile Group (SAG ) [上汽集团], for example, was a house once occupied by the Italian consulate. It had been the seat of the Shanghai Tractor Factory [拖拉机厂], before it was consolidated into the larger SAG . Another villa nearby, once occupied by the Shanghai Computer Research Institute [计算机研究所] on Hunan Lu, also has been returned to its owner, who in turn sold it to a private equity firm. Under socialist central planning, the city as a place for production replaced the city as a place for consumption. Urban planning itself was largely an instrument of political ideology that the central government directed, over the entire nation, rather than rational development based on resources and anticipated potentials.106 Like other Chinese cities, housing built in the 1950s responded to the socialist tenets of equality, amenity, and proximity to work. Social provision by danweis spatially linked work to residence. Shanghai, however, due to its legacy of bourgeoisie occupancy and redirection of its surplus for national redistribution, had fewer danwei-based housing than other cities in China, where central government money was channeled to build new housing.107 As the central government channeled Shanghai’s industrialization output to invest in the growth of inland cities, Shanghai itself almost froze in physical development even while its population swelled.108 Shanghai built only 22.8 million square meters of housing from 1950–1980, for example, accounting for less than 0.5 % GDP, even though half of the national GDP was generated by Shanghai.109 Concession

era zoning that prohibited industrial functions in residential areas was thrown to the winds in the nation’s rush to industrialize. Factories were inserted into residential lilong neighborhoods as units of production. The encouragement of a high fertility rate in the initial decade of the PRC , with the motto of “more people, more strength” and issuance of “Glorious Mother [光荣妈 妈]” commendations for women who had more than four children, compounded urban congestion.110 The first Five Year Plan (1951–56) also added to population growth with promotion of in-migration to drive the industrialization of Shanghai.111 With demographic increase and the lack of investment in infrastructure and housing construction, lilong housing, as a type designed for single-family use, became even more subdivided. In the meantime, all other available spaces, from gatehouses, boiler rooms, and garages, became allocated or overtaken as residences to accommodate overflows in population. Additions and insertions that had been a means of space acquisition since the pre-1949 era continued at this time to house, in any form, to accommodate the growing urban population. Shanghai largely relied on the existing urban fabric to accommodate the redistribution of labor and the increasing influx of workers. Nevertheless, empty plots in city center neighborhoods also became infilled with a number of six-story slab buildings. They were built for party cadres and high-level administrators. Often designed with templates from Soviet-trained engineers, these concrete walkup structures were generous in plan, fitted with quality installations. They are also visibly different from the apartment buildings built before 1949. 108

1949

Flight of wealth and elites from concessions to safer havens as result of Communist liberation of China.

1965

Coastal cities subsidize development of inland cities as industrial hubs.

1949

New order established with repossession of a number of buildings by the state and first redistribution as well as re-selling.

花园洋房

1965

With demographic growth and little housing construction, housing became further subdivided. Chaos ensuing during the Cultural Revolution compounds the confusion.

garden house

Ownership

Residential

新式里弄

SOE posession

Taipei Hong Kong inland industrial urban centers

new-style lilong

1949

Population: 5,000,000 GDPP: 43 RMB Shanghai comes under Communist rule as the financial and economic generator of China.

1965

Population: 10,000,000 GDPP: --Even though half of national GDP is generated by Shanghai, little of it returns to the city to invest in its infrastrucutre or housing. Shanghai built only 22.8mio square meters of housing from 1950-1980, accounting for less than 0.5%GDP.

Rental Multifamily

Rental Single Family

Ownership

公寓

apartment building

25 km

residential atelier commercial utility

Fig. 24 Diagram showing the disinvestment in Shanghai after 1949 and the resulting overcrowding in the existing built fabric

of their properties. The fragmentation of the ownership tenure structure was largely in place by the 1960s, as the different forms of ownership and rental were further divided by the layering of policy changes. (Fig. 24) In the same lilong, one house may be occupied by a family who owns the house. Another may house a family who paid the initial ding fei deposit to live in a house, and who subleased to another family with whom they are on friendly relations. Another may have been formerly managed by a private management company that has since nationalized, and as consequence the former second landlord has moved to a smaller unit to accommodate more unknown families.

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

Under the directive of ‘public-private collectivization [公私合营],’ landlords of larger quantities of property briefly saw an increase in revenues due to policies of 1954. It was not until a central government directive for the state to directly manage rental housing, that the majority of rental housing came under the jurisdiction of the state real estate bureaus. By 1958, the tenant whose family occupied one of the multiple floors of the residential building and subleased other rooms and floors to other families and tenants came to share the residence on equal terms with the other tenants in a contract to the state. The system of subleases and intermediate landlords was eliminated. Rent was maintained through central planning at, on average, 1 % of cash income, reinforcing the nature of welfare provision of housing and the infeasibility for maintenance and upgrade. It was also during this time that many former landlords clamored for their rental properties to be nationalized and actively applied for state management

109

The political campaign of “Sending Down to the Countryside [下放]” started in 1955. It was one of the central government’s means of alleviating urban congestion by forcibly expelling urbanites from cities. The mass expulsion of urban youths to the countryside for rural education and integration through the “up the mountain and down to the countryside [上山下乡]” movement also resulted in the departure of 1.29 million some students from Shanghai between 1968 and 1977.112 During the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, only 1,500,000 square meters of living space were built in Shanghai.113 Without infrastructural development, urban congestion remained unresolved. Squatting of all forms compounded the housing problems even more. Enforced social mixing reached its climax by the Cultural Revolution, as the re-shuffling of households enabled by social disorder magnified the housing predicament. Cultural Revolution, begun as a purging of political enemies within the highest levels of the central government, turned into a decade-long calamity that turned Chinese society upside-down. As families of the right “stripe”—those with proletarian family backgrounds—displaced original occupants, in oftentimes violent manners, ownership claims, which would rise in dispute later, came into form. Unwelcomed relatives as well as party-affiliated strangers sought out better housing in the chaos and partitioned subdivided units. A house in one of the prominent garden-style lilong compounds, Shangfang Gardens [上方花园], attests to how the protracted agony of the period still continues unresolved.114 The patriarch of the household was a Burmese overseas-Chinese returnee of Hokkien descent who returned to Shanghai in the 1940s and was an engineering director at a local research institute. At the time of the Cultural Revolution, the lilong house belonged to his wife’s father, who had left Mainland China before 1949 for Taiwan. The family also shared the lilong house with the family of the wife’s sister. On the ground floor an old lady rented two rooms, the dining room and the library. The family lived on the second floor in four rooms ranging from 8 to 15 square meters. During the Cultural Revolution, the old lady on the ground floor left and the rooms were empty for several months. In an attempt to make a grab for the house, the wife’s sister declared a “distinction of boundaries [划清界限]” against her sister, which was a typical means of class warfare. The main family was banished from their master bedroom to a small north-facing room. At the same time, more families moved into the three-story house. A co-worker from the engineer’s danwei, who was of the proletariat class, moved to a room above the garage, with his wife and two children. On the third floor, where there were also two bedrooms, a “family of a martyr [烈士家庭]”—one of the daughters had died during the Korean War—settled. On the first floor, three generations of a drama actor’s family, a total of six people, moved into the living room, where they used a curtain to partition the space into two parts. Another two families of four moved into the other rooms, the former dining room and study where the old lady had lived. On the second floor, where the wife’s sister had taken over one of the two larger rooms, two families of four and two others moved into the smaller rooms. A total of 22 people moved into a house belonging to an extended family of six people who had rented the ground floor out to one additional tenant. It was not until the patriarch cleared his name in 1966 through the redressal of mishandled cases [平反] that his danwei reassigned housing to those who had moved into the house. But given that the leadership of each danwei was different, the redressal could have happened very differently. In addition to suffering the ‘search someone’s 110

Shanghai. Many returned to Shanghai but were not able to get their household registration, or ‘hukou [户口],’ back.117 Because housing allowance was dependent on the number of hukou registered under one residence, the overcrowding worsened. In 1979 Shanghai’s per capita 3.6 square meters of living space could only quantitatively represent the appallingly degraded conditions of housing in a city that had gone through three decades of internal upheaval. Even with the movement of the population from the city center to new housing in the periphery following economic liberalization, city center areas remained dense. According to a 2007 survey of one of Shanghai’s historic areas, 20 old Western-style houses totaling 10,331 square meter in area were occupied by 239 families, with an average of five people per family; this equates to 1,195 people with an average dwelling space of 8.6 square meters of living space per person, including shared kitchens and bathrooms.118 These conditions could still be observed today in a house that has ten electricity meters and mailboxes. They attest to the larger socio-economic shifts that compelled typological reuse: rooftop terraces and ample stairway landings became kitchens. Places where water piping could be directed became basins and washtubs. Living rooms, dining rooms, receptions, balconies, and roof terraces all inevitably became multifunctional rooms that accommodated sleeping, working, eating and more. Partitions and doors became important insertions to safeguard the minimal privacy needs that could be tolerated in the years when privacy was a privilege. Padlocks, however dwarfed given the extensive security apparatuses available today within gated towers, were the small symbols of ownership in an era in which ownership was castigated. Additions on top of the attic, infilling balconies and enclosing porches, and constructions in the yard and on top of the garages where they were available became the means through which one house became an extended interface to multiple occupants. A villa, imagined to have housed a family surrounded by service personnel attending to different functions varying from cooking to gardening, is today often unrecognizable in the clutter of accumulated possessions and internal partitions that reconfigured the different occupants who have settled in the house.

Preservation of Ambiguous Property Rights Starting in 1976, the year that officially saw the end of the Cultural Revolution, a policy meant to rectify the wrongs of the previous decade with the “implementation of policy [落实政策]” began and continued into the early 1980s. Slowly, the families who moved into other people’s homes were moved out, as the urgency of rehousing the tenants in Shanghai compelled the increasingly fiscally autonomous local government to begin to invest in new housing structures.

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

home and confiscate all property [抄家],’ many families were driven out of their own homes.115 On the other hand, some of the residents who moved into the modern era housing were also not used to the facilities. They often brought old habits that in turn further denigrated the already overloaded buildings.116 At the end of the 1970s, the return of nearly half of the youths sent to the countryside exacerbated the already overcrowded housing conditions of urban centers like

111

Many of the families who suffered the most, born of the wrong class and with the wrong connections, often with links to family overseas, would be the first wave to leave when China reopened to the world in the 1980s. Their departure marked a continuity from the exodus of 1949 to a new albeit smaller one in the 1980s. The gap left by emigration, especially in the upper-middle-class areas, spatially accommodated the in-flow of new settlers.119 When land and housing marketization took place in the 1990s, large swaths of old urban fabric were obliterated in Chinese cities. The demolition and construction process eliminated the complex and fragmented ownership embedded in historic structures. Housing marketization restructured housing production and provision. It also established clearer rights for property ownership of commodity housing. Purchasers of commodity housing that was constructed after economic liberalization obtained green-covered certificates of ownership, specific to Shanghai by color, with which they could sell their residential units on the real estate market. The procedures for purchase came with financing mechanisms that included bank loans for housing mortgage and the Housing Provident Fund. Financial means rather than work-unit affiliation, household registration, and other planned economy hierarchies determined housing access.120 As new units were increasingly being built and sold on the market as commodity housing with ownership titles, marketization also necessitated a system of exchange for the old houses, which included the residential types built before 1949: mostly lilong houses, some garden houses, and apartment buildings. In the mid-1990s, marketization of existing housing finalized the dissolution of planned economy obligation by the state to residents in the form of housing. Between October of 1993 and the end of 2004, the local state sold 1,630,000 units of what had been publicly owned housing in Shanghai. The marketization converted 80 % of the city’s existing housing stock, which had been a planned economy public good, to a commodity for market exchange under transition economy.121 A system of marketization with a selling price that took into account the seniority, rank and working age of the housing occupant allowed a number of units from the old house stock to attain ownership title starting in the mid-1990s.122 These cases took place in apartment units and lilong houses that had not been subdivided or were considered “intact [成套].”123 The spatial configuration of the residential units, which had been important in determining the fate of both the spaces themselves as well as that of its occupants during the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, were again crucial factors in the throes of the housing marketization. Units with bathrooms and kitchens located in sharable locations would be subdivided, and squatters would be stuffed into these sharable units. Units that had bathrooms and kitchens in awkward or non-sharable places—bathrooms located inside bedrooms—saved families from having to be forced to share their homes with squatters.124 These units, in which bathrooms and kitchens that could not be shared due to unit type, remained occupied by one family; they would again form the basis for housing ownership. In 1999, intact units of old houses were sold to private owners. The lilong residences or garden-style houses that had been spared subdivision and retained their ownership title retained from pre-1949, rare cases, were also sold on the market.125 The sale of publicly owned housing drove up residential real estate prices exponentially by the early 2000s. The residents who were transferred the ownership of their 112

Fig. 25 Photo documentation of the public space of a house that had informally constructed kitchens installed and multiple electric lines that indicate how many families had occupied the house, which originally had been designed for a single family, 2012

residences through marketization benefited from their old residences, which could be cashed in to upgrade to newer units with better amenities. This in turn drove the production of residential real estate and facilitated a maturing commodity market.126 The enormous wealth transfer to local residents through housing sales also transferred the planned economy social hierarchies, which had been manifested in housing allocation,

in a large apartment unit. Kitchen additions were almost consistently inserted in the rooftop terrace by the families living on the top floors of lilong houses, who have also enclosed the top floors as a single independent unit in function. Cooking facilities and washbasins were also installed in other available public spaces, including corridors, stairwells, and terraces, so that families could minimize the sharing of spaces that would potentially cause additional conflicts. (Fig. 25) Additions on the ground floor also privatized parts of the house that could be sealed off. But, by virtue of being originally designed for a single family with a single publicly shared kitchen and rooftop terrace, the lilong house could not be traded in its parts with separated ‘ownership rights’ because these public facilities were considered shared according to the architecture type.127 Furthermore, even though the different families had lived in the same building for a long time and had privatized spaces for their own use, the definition of

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

into the commodity housing market. With housing marketization, the state bestowed ‘ownership right [产权]’ on the old houses that were considered intact, and on commodity housing, which, by virtue of being new, was a tradable good. For many old houses, however, property ownership remained ambiguous and their usage became fragmented amongst numerous residents. Much of the residential housing stock remained entangled in complex ownership contestation, with several families living in a single lilong house or multiple occupants

113

Fig. 26 Ownership certificate for real estate, left; and the certificate for the usage of publicly managed housing, right

the original type as one for a single family rendered the spaces by legal definition subdivided, and, hence, not intact. The building type that had been so resilient in the face of numerous socio-economic transitions is entrenched in the bureaucratic inflexibility by the definition of private ownership and shared amenities. The possibility of disputing claims for shared space and also the fear of the return of a previous owner, displaced pre-1949, to claim the property with his original title deed prompted the district bureaus responsible for housing management to retain large parts of the residential fabric of the city center. The district real estate bureau manages a majority of old houses built before 1949 in the area around Plot 15. Thus, in addition to the marketization of the residential units in old houses that remained intact, another ownership type emerged. A unique instrument of transition economy, that of the ‘usage right [使用权],’ designated a form of property right for residences, largely old houses, which were not intact, and facilitated their exchange on the real estate market. In 1999, the same year that intact old houses started to sell to private owners, a policy that established the system of exchange of divided units of publicly owned old houses in the real estate market also came into being.128 The usage right simulated the terms of buying, selling, and exchanging residential units in old houses that were not “intact” on the newly established real estate market starting in the mid-1990s without the state giving up the ownership of these units. With usage right properties, ownership belongs to the state, either in the form of the danwei or that of the district.129 The usage right owner nominally pays the local real estate bureau or the danwei rents.130 Because ownership right does not belong to the usage right owner, such owners have only the right to use the residential spaces and to “transfer [转让]” their usage right on the real estate market. The white cover for usage right certificates distinguishes it from the green cover of the ‘ownership right’ certificates. (Fig. 26) Usage right are ‘transferred,’ not “bought or sold [买卖],’ as would be for housing with ownership right. The contract drawn up for the transfer of usage rights, called the “white covered contract [白皮合同],” is subject to the approval of the respective district-level bureau of oversight that agrees to the “transfer” of usage rights for the given unit.131 The procedures by the existing usage right owner must be fully executed in order for a transfer to proceed. Additionally, approval from neighboring inhabitants who also technically “share” the same old house that 114

is not intact is required for the transfer to be permitted.132 The process of transfer requires up to three months, much longer than for the purchase of ownership housing. More crucially, the transfer of usage rights for property in Shanghai can only occur between those who have the Shanghai hukou.133 This is a significant difference from the purchase of commodity housing. Financial resource is not enough to secure a housing unit if it is a usage right housing. The transfer of the hukou of the incoming resident must also precede the transfer of usage right. Financially, the payment for the transfer of usage right cannot be funded by housing mortgages from the bank, nor by the Housing Provident Fund, which only support the purchase of commodity housing. The payment for the transfer of usage right is required to be a one-time lump sum. Following the transfer of usage right, a nominal leasing fee continues to be paid by the new owner of the usage right for the housing unit to the state real estate bureau or the danwei who owns the unit. These measures and constraints are meant to preserve a certain degree of housing provision, but the existence of this part market, part planned economy system of usage rights is very much a product of the economic transition,

maintained the state’s ownership of the majority of old houses, while accommodating the market mechanisms for residents on the ground. It is an urban loophole formed by ambiguity and exceptions in the historic and central areas of the city, where urban renewal has not taken place. Even though usage right limits transfer only to those with Shanghai hukou, it does not bar these privileged locals from letting their compactly sized units at prices that are growing exponentially with market demand for centrally located residences in historic neighborhoods. The price differential between what the original tenant would nominally pay for publicly managed usage right housing and the price of its subleased, often renovated, version, is large. For an enclosed unit in the top two floors of a new-style lilong house in the compound Dasheng Hutong [大胜胡同], a ten-minute walk from Plot 15, the monthly rental is around 100 R MB .134 When a similar unit, around 80 square meters, was renovated, with a new kitchen installed on the enclosed rooftop terrace in the same lilong compound, monthly rent could be as high as 10,000 R MB in 2012. The residents who paid to rent such a unit preferred the charm of the old house and the ambiance of the lilong neighborhood. With the bronze door handles, molding, and old steel windows, all from the 1930s, the house in Dasheng Hutong reminded one young overseas Chinese white-collar transplant who settled in Shanghai of the historic houses of the Bay area where she had previously lived.135 It is precisely this kind of character that made the lilong housing more attractive than the standard new apartments, even though it required more effort to find. Units in the middle of the houses, not entirely assured of privacy because of the neighbors who have to pass through the corridor, could be rented out as offices to writers, events companies, and other freelancers, who mind less the interruptions and shared facilities. At the same time, due to a limited supply of ownership titled units on the market, increasingly high demand for the old houses has driven their prices even higher. Even usage right ownership, for units that are smaller, more fragmented and at lower price than ownership right units, have grown in price due to the demand for centrally locat-

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

when the state wants to marketize its public housing but does not want to give up its ownership. Usage right thus became the property right unique to the transition economy. It

115

Pathway Overcrowded housing New Economy New construction

Fig. 27 Mapping documentation of the mix of overcrowded housing located next to new economies that have converted old houses and led to new constructions, 2012

ed real estate.136 Patient consolidation of usage rights to convert to ownership rights does takes place, sometimes over durations as long as a decade because of the dozen occupants in a house that has the potential for upgrade. Interestingly it is these vast holdings by the state in the city center that also serve as the last bulwark against a growing social differentiation wrought by marketization and ensuing gentrification.137 (Fig. 27) The cultural diversity activates the neighborhood even as it riles some stalwarts of heritage protection. To conserve the historic buildings with fragmented ownership is extremely difficult, as the residents may not 116

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

have capacity nor be willing to be stakeholders in the heritage efforts enlisted by the state. The efforts that exist are organically taken on by the small entrepreneurs and individual owners who have renovated their dwellings to varying degrees. Incremental upgrade in the bottom-up form may appear uneven as adjacent buildings or units reveal entirely differing outcomes. Yet the seemingly incorrigible, slow alternative to the expedited en-bloc redevelopments of the most dilapidated shantytowns in the first days of urban redevelopment allows for a learning process that is perhaps a gentler version of renewal.

117

Demographic Shift and Commercial Spatial Demand Despite the run-down conditions of many of the buildings, the modern urban structures of the western end of the former Concessions in particular, with open street networks lined by the platanus trees, semi-permeable block hierarchy convenient for strolls, and a central location in the metropolis, are increasingly attractive to many transnational and Chinese knowledge workers who arrived in Shanghai. By the mid2000s, the commodity housing developments, prolific since the mid-1990s, were no longer the only options for high-end living. As conversions to lilong housing became increasingly viable in the mid-2000s, investors and realtors quickly pedaled off the limited supply of historic old houses to meet a growing demand. The housing marketization of the 1990s that had pushed ahead the construction of much needed residential structures, quickly expanding the urban area into the former periphery, also accelerated the outflow of residents from city center areas. The local residents, whose original neighborhoods underwent demolition and redevelopments, eagerly moved into bigger, newer commodity housing outside of the old city center, which provided better amenities and more privacy. The former urban periphery, where many of the local residents moved to, was also quickly becoming part of the growing city.138 At the same time, emigration from more affluent city center neighborhoods to North America or Europe, facilitated by pre-1949 international linkages that had been dormant and further motivated by post-1949 persecutions in these older neighborhoods, also further left many of the central areas empty and aging. While locals have associated the historic city center with decades of privacy depriva­ tion, complex social hierarchies, and a deficient physical environment that represented a fundamental regression since the modern era, newcomers saw the charm of history, the convenience of amenities, and a kind of authenticity of local immersion that affirmed a preferred metropolitan habitus.139 Living in the historic city center became increasingly attractive to the growing number of in-comers, including the first waves of overseas Chinese and expats140 who came to do business in the newly opened country. These in-comers also included a growing number of non-Shanghainese Chinese white-collars workers and entrepreneurs who flocked to Shanghai to live and work. By the mid-2000s, a growing number of Europeans and Americans also hopped on the bandwagon of moving to Shanghai, as an increasing number of multinationals also settled in the city and opportunities opened to younger, more mobile internationals. With the changing demographics, residential neighborhoods like those around Anfu and Wuyuan Lu rapidly adapted to cater to the changing consumer demands of the new residents. As the strictures of planned economy were eroded by the re-entry of market economy, the transformation in the city center was the most visible in the return of commerce. Converted terraces of lilong houses, street-front ground-floor spaces of apartment buildings, and insertions into and constructions from garden walls became small restaurants, hardware stores, hair salons, and convenience stores as economic liberalization accelerated. (Fig. 28) Economic liberalization needed space to accommodate the changing and growing consumer demand. Some of these spaces remained, oper118

ated by local, small entrepreneurs initially forced into surviving the SOE reforms of the late 1990s through commercial enterprise.141 They served the local community by providing amenities and conveniences. Other spaces evolved into cafés, boutiques, design ateliers, and event spaces, catering to the growing demand by consumers with global tastes. Many of these spaces were run by a younger generation Fig. 28 Conversion of an entranceway into a small store, 2011 of creative entrepreneurs, a constellation of locals, returnees as well as expats, linking the international value chain to locally situated spaces and producers. Already in the 1980s a number of early Sino-philes settled in Shanghai, often becoming fluent in the language and immersed in the local culture.142 In September 1983, the State Council’s issuance of Provisional Regulations Re the Importation of Foreign Talent for Work143 allowed, as the Annals of the Shanghai Municipal Government described, the city to enter a new period of labor transfer.144 Before 1982, Shanghai had engaged 1,353 experts from abroad since the beginning of economic liberalization.145 From 1983 until 1998, the city engaged more than 73,000 experts from abroad, increasing the talent flow by more than tenfold.146 In 1994, the Shanghai municipal government issued the Interim Procedures of Shanghai Municipality on the Intake of Experts From Abroad that streamlined the bureaucratic processes for the engagement of foreign labor, especially in areas considered for expertise.147 Two years later the State Council would issue the Provisions on the Employment of Foreigners in China,148 which would affect nationwide employment of workers from abroad. In the early 2000s, the number of expats living in Shanghai was reported to be

of largely high-level management and experts arriving in China, accompanying the opening of local branches by multinationals, the dotcom bubble’s bursting in the late 1990s made Shanghai also attractive to younger, more independent creatives. The earlier “old foreigner [老外]” executives were transplanted with special employment packages and housing allowances, and many with families lived in suburban enclaves like Jinqiao that were detached from local interaction.151 In contrast, the internationals in the mid-2000s were over 60 % under 40 years old.152 Many of these younger and more mobile workers found it more convenient to evade the cumbersome bureaucratic formalities of being an expat by enjoying the low living cost of the increasingly cosmopolitan city. The “gold rush”153 of the influx of expats in the mid-2000s triggered further socio-spatial transformations in the city center. In 2008, the formation of the Municipal Administration for Labor Resources and Social Security Bureau [人力资源和社会保障局], with the special unit of Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs [外国专家局], showed the important role of expat labor in the city. By the late 2000s, a number of hubs that were the preferred gathering places for expats became increasingly visible and targeted for investment and speculation.

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

nearing 100,000, with most working for the 20,000-some foreign and joint-ventured companies.149 Between 1996 and 2009, employment pass issuance increased by 13-fold and the estimated expat population grew even more.150 Following the early wave

119

The Summit

Chevalier Place Kingsville Yipingyuan ANF

Anfu 308

U LU

Anfu 195–201

Lolo Love WU

Atelier

Spicy Moment

LUM UQI

U GL AN

LU

K WU WUY

UA N L

Avocado Lady

LU

Yongfu 47

WEST FUXING LU

Ambassy Court

HU

AI

HA

U IL

Ferguson Lane

Parks

Road

Green that is accessible

Lanes that are accessible

Closed Public Buildings Public Buildings

Green that is inaccessible

Lanes that are inaccesible

Commercial

Public spaces Fig. 29 Mapping documentation of the commercialization along the street-front ground floor spaces, 2012

With the increasing number of in-comers living in the residential towers of Kingsville, Chevalier Place, and The Summit at the corner of Anfu and Wulumuqi Lu, it was clear that a niche market for commercial amenities was ripe for tapping into. (Fig. 29) Small commerce opened and evolved to supply the consumption demands of the new residents. With two cafes, two wine stores, two salons, a bank, an import foods shop, a children’s boutique, and an exhibition space, the 11 units of ground floor commercial space at the Chevalier Place, completed in 2002, seemed to set the tone for Anfu Lu. These amenities, supplemental beyond the requisite grocer, tailor, and hardware store that could be found on Wulumuqi Lu, showed the location’s accessibility and profitability. 120

privately owned housing housing with units that are privately owned

Fig. 30 Mapping of ownership distribution in the area, 2012

In the late 1990s, SOE s also underwent a fundamental restructuring. Large production sites moved from the city center to the periphery, or fell into disuse during the marketization process of the late 1990s. Small industrial hubs tucked between the residential fabric of the city center ceased their production functions. The central government imposed restrictions on the land-use changes and the full marketization of ‘administratively-allocated land,’154 which state-owned enterprises and institutions occupied. (Fig. 30) Nevertheless, institutional real estate, emptied of its original function, was compelled to commercialize and fulfill market demand. By the early 1990s, housing towers were already built on institutional land. Of greater import was the

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

institutional plots

121

Fig. 31 Photo documentation of the developments along the north side of Anfu Lu, 2012

leasing out of institutional buildings for new commercial hubs. Reacting to the overcommodification of state assets, legislation in the 2000s required administrativelyallocated land to be retained by allotted state enterprises, restricting their land sales. Thus, unable to offload city center real estate as exchangeable assets, the only possibility for redevelopment was through leasing to new tenants, often at below market prices.155 One of the largest institutional landlords on Anfu Lu is the Shanghai Drama Arts Center [上海话剧艺术中心]. In January 1995, with the opening of the 18-story high Drama Center Tower, it consolidated the Shanghai People’s Art Theater [上海人民艺术剧院], founded in 1950 on the current site at Number 288, and the Shanghai Youth Drama Group [上海青年话剧团], founded in 1957, occupying a site down the street on Anfu Lu at Number 201.156 Two residential towers, called Yipingyuan [一品苑], translated to “Superb Garden,” and completed in 1999, were well timed within the trajectory of institutional housing development. In 2007, the historic house that was occupied by the Youth Drama Group was leased to the English as Second Language (ESL ) Education Center [美语教育中心], which immersed primary and secondary school children in intensive English programs so that they could apply to schools abroad in America and England. The renovation and upgrade of the street-facing buildings fronting the historic house, followed first by the opening of the café Amoka, the restaurant Mr. Willis, and the bakery Baker and Spice, sealed the deal for Anfu Lu to become an important hub for expat consumption. The Wagas group, started by Danish entrepreneur John Christiensen in 1999,157 and joined by the Australian-Chinese businesswoman Jackie Yun two years later,158 is one of the early success stories of Western-style food and beverage empires that has made it in Shanghai in the mid-2000s. Its first branch locations were in places already frequented by the kind of clientele with the financial means and the international palate to patronize a restaurant selling salads, smoothies, and wraps. The enterprise took off in the mid-2000s as more expats moved to Shanghai in waves. By 2005, a total of five 122

more specifically targeted.161 Anfu Lu’s increasing traffic and its positioning as a hub was confirmed with the opening of another Wagas venture in the same year: Mr. Willis, with the namesake of former chief chef Craig Willis. Curation by the small-scale developers with the acumen for locational potentials became pivotal to developmental trends of neighborhoods like those around Anfu Lu. (Fig. 31) Design, gastronomical, and fitness ventures opened by localized cosmopolitans, a mix of expat and overseas Chinese entrepreneurs, found their way to these sites. Their timing was crucial: with little in the way of competition, as well as the comparatively low costs of starting a business, including cheap rents and flexible tenancy contracts, many met with success. The combination of well-selected sites and growing demand, by both expats and the changing tastes of the local middle class, made these ‘anchor tenants’ the catalysts for commercializing trendy streets. Similarly, further west on the other end of Anfu Lu at the corner of Wukang Lu, adjacent to the Drama Arts Center, renovation of former institutional buildings be-

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

stores made the chain a rare find in the market, as few casual Western dining places existed in Shanghai at the time. At the time, the relational nature of discretionary decision-making in getting business decisions approved by the district government, an asset but also liability of the adaptive governance of China’s transition economy, was noted by the entrepreneurs: “you might be waiting for something important to be approved but it is impossible to predict which way it will go, it all comes down to which official you happen to get on the day.”159 Because of the specificities of relationship networks embedded in the local context, the group’s familiarity with Shanghai was not useful even when they tried to enter the market in other Chinese cities in the late 2000s.160 In 2010, the selection of a location on Anfu Lu to open the latest venture of a bakery called Sugar and Spice showed the importance of the street in the market development in Shanghai. Just as the bread, first made soft and sweet to adapt to the Chinese market, has since been returned to its robust, original form, so the shift of location from more mainstream places like malls and food streets has also become

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longing to the Yongle Group, a subsidiary of the Shanghai Film Group, has also turned the complex into a site of high-end commerce, triggering a flurry of small boutiques, salons, and other food and beverage joints to open around it. In the early 1990s, the Yongle Court [永乐宫] was one of the first new cinemas built and was known as one of the few places where one could go to escape the heat of the summer in its air-conditioned theater. After the upgrade of Wukang Lu as the exemplary ‘Cultural Street’ in time for the opening of the World Expo in 2010,162 the converted former cinema was transformed into the Anfu Court complex, with an imported food supermarket, bakery, yoga studio, spa, and serviced co-working spaces, all catering to a growing localized cosmopolitan clientele. The term ‘cosmopolitan,’ according to the Oxford English Dictionary is someone who “belongs to all parts of the world,” “having characteristics which arise from, or are suited to a range over many different countries.”163 Ulf Hannerz, cultural anthropologist of globalization, has posited that increasing interconnection of the world is reorganizing cultural diversity, and notes specifically that cosmopolitanism is an “intellectual and aesthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences, and an ability to make one’s way into other cultures.”164 It is not only the physical circumstances of being in another’s culture but the ability to adapt to and master other cultures in addition to one’s own. As Hannerz proclaimed, “exiles can be cosmopolitans, but most are not.”165 Shanghai’s beginnings as a Concession city cultivated a bevy of locals from the region whose openness and adoption of foreign, largely Western tastes, mannerisms, and lifestyles were first the envy and later the scourge for the city. Whether they had hailed from Ningbo or Yangzhou, their mastery of the ‘modern’—the term ‘modern’, according to a 1920 letter to the French Concession Municipal Council of Shanghai from the archive, synonymous with ‘European’166—and their ability to adapt the ‘modern’ in the local Chinese context would become the outlook and skill of many who came to call the then early 20th century special economic zone home. Inherent to the cosmopolitan is the receptivity to that which is not of one’s self, the comprehension of that which is unfamiliar and foreign. The Chinese elites who arrived in Shanghai, questioning traditions’ obstruction to progress and articulating a Chinese modernity modeled on the Western nation-state were such cosmopolitans. Additionally, the merchants of differing Chinese ethnicities who flocked to the Westernized entrepôt for commercial opportunities were also the cosmopolitans. Just as Shanghai’s beginnings as a modern era metropolis in the 19th century were shaped by foreign direct investments (FDI )—both in the capital and human resources that also became stakeholders for the development of the nascent city—so was the re-opening of the city in the 1990s initially shaped by the influx of FDI that took on local frameworks and brought in international expertise. Investments, especially from the diaspora of Taiwan-, Macao- and Hong-Kong-based overseas Chinese, many of whose families left China in 1949, not only brought the capital but also, more importantly, the know-how to ease economic transition in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Chinese exodus picked up again in the early 1980s, especially from the former Concession cities like Shanghai where many families had overseas connections from before 1949. When China opened in the 1990s, the initial wave of haigui [海归], or those ‘returning from across the sea,’ also came back.167 The haigui’s second generation in returning also contributed to the human capital for rapid economic development. 124

Fig. 32 The shop of the ‘avocado lady’ on Wulumuqi Lu, 2013

Against this backdrop, the contemporary constellation of small international design entrepreneurs and local stall owners constitute the localized cosmopolitans who are rapidly changing the city center neighborhoods. It was these commercially savvy localized cosmopolitans who quickly recognized and followed the shifting demand in key areas like those around Anfu and Wuyuan Lu. New boutiques for fashion, furnishings and accessories continue to open on the ground floors of more residential buildings.

ceries to home repair services, underwent bottom-up adaptation to the changing demand. One of the most patronized grocery stores is that belonging to a local entrepreneur known endearingly as the “avocado lady” by many expats. (Fig. 32) Avocado is a fruit that few locals traditionally eat, and was absent from the traditional Chinese wet market up until the mid-2000s. Yet it is a fruit that many international residents, particularly globally inclined yuppies, are fond of eating.168 In the early 2000s, avocados could only be found in the few high-end supermarkets specializing in imported foods. For consumers of the avocado, who were foreigners and those multicultural locals who had lived abroad, the fruit was a rarity in mid-2000s Shanghai, like good coffee. When more expats started to live in the neighborhood around Anfu and Wuyuan Lu, a lady from the hinterlands of Shanghai picked up enough English to understand the desire for this fruit, which in Chinese is called the “buttery fruit.” As the first local grocer to stock the precious fruit, this pioneer entrepreneur gained immediate fame and popularity amongst her patrons, who bestowed on her the name of “the avocado lady.” Her pioneering act highlighted the business savvy of localized cosmopolitan entrepreneurs, who had the acumen to identify untapped market niches and changing demands in the rapidly transforming transition economy. Since her first success, many other grocery kiosks also began to stock what were once rare Western goods that have since become increasingly normalized in neighborhoods around Wulumuqi Lu. The avocado itself can be found in other kiosks, and locals also consume the fruit. Patrons still flock to the avocado lady’s store because she has since learned to stock everything from sauerkraut to chorizo alongside local seasonal specialties at accessible prices.

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

Even the commercial thoroughfare of Wulumuqi Lu, which has historically been a busy north-south connector lined by low-end stores selling everything from gro-

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The creative reuse of former industrial buildings took place in many post-industrial cities in the West. But against the institutional constraints and tenure rights in the dual land market of China’s transition economy, they also created opportunities for small and creative entrepreneurs who catered to the mobilities and migrations repopulating of valuable city-center real estate. These localized cosmopolitans, local and global creative entrepreneurs, played pioneering roles in the bottom-up development of many parts of the city center. At the same time, the legacy of ambiguous ownership in fragmented residential buildings resulted in the local state’s retention of a majority of properties in historic neighborhoods. This has ensured a slow process of consolidation and privatization and the persistence of high-density, subsidized living amidst rising prices and up-scaled services.169 Sociologist Neil Smith, in his postulations for gentrification in Western cities, suggests that the initiative of the large-scale developments catalyze small stakeholders.170 In Shanghai’s city center, the commodity housing constructions that rapidly changed the social composition of the neighborhood, and the leasing out of properties by state-owned institutions shaping the demands of the service and commercial sectors were the pivotal developments that triggered the small entrepreneurs to continue incremental upgrades in the neighborhood. What is different from the commercial progression of gentrification in the West, however, is the high degree with which the state facilitates or inhibits developments. A lack of clear zoning guidelines and procedural clarity for function changes meant that market transformations responding to changing consumption create bottom-up urban loopholes for the redevelopments of existing street-front ground floor spaces. At the same time, beholden to the local institutional framework of the transition economy and adaptive governance, the uncertainty and temporality of urban loopholes also bodes their imminent closures.

Incremental Conversions and Small Creative Entrepreneurs Since the early 2010s, street-front ground-floor space conversions expanded from Anfu Lu, where commodity housing development and institutional real estates’ reuse have triggered bottom-up upgrades, also to Wuyuan Lu. Walking through the neighboring lanes that traverse the interior of large blocks bound by the main arterials—characteristic of urban morphology of the western end of the former French Concession—groundfloor conversions into architecture, furniture design, graphic design, and advertising studios are visible from the renovated facades and signage. Lilong houses that only a decade ago were home to multiple families have transformed into studios where young designers, photographers, and architects share work, event, and exhibition spaces. Ground floors of garden-style lilong houses also showcase goods sourced from the likes of Berlin and Paris alongside locally-crafted products. Street-facing gardens host photo shoots, film screenings, and salons. Garden vestibules have also become charming sun-roofed cafés, and front parlors are now shop windows, offering glimpses of the creative enterprises within. 126

1978

Following the death of Mao, Deng Xiaoping took over as national leader and created the first SEZs in proximity to market economy of British Hong Kong. The first wave of emigration also began.

2005

1992 accelerated Shanghai’s economic liberalization, with FDI supporting growth. A maturing of the socialist market system and urban develompent prepares for the city’s showcasing at the World Expo.

1978

Overcrowding, shared infrastructure, and the lack of housing maintenance in existing buildings would be the motivation for upcoming housing marketization.

With demographic growth and little housing construction, housing became further subdivided. Chaos ensuing during the Cultural Revolution compounds the confusion.

花园洋房

Rental Multifamily

garden house

Residential

Shanghai

atelier commercial utility

2005

Ownership

Rental Multifunctional

Taipei Shenzhen SEZs

Hong Kong sources of investment capital

(Special Economic Zones)

1978

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新式里弄

Multifunctional

2005

Population: 18,000,000 (4,300,000 floating) GDPP: 67,492 RMB

Population: 10,000,000 GDPP: 2,000 RMB Shanghai built only 22.8mio square meters of hosuing from 1950-1980, accounting for less than 0.5%GDP.

SOE

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Function Change

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Ownership

公寓

apartment building

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Fig. 33 Diagram showing Shanghai’s physical growth since economic liberalization began and the demographic, programmatic, and ownership changes to former housing

The initial startups are usually informal, drawn by the cheap rent of old houses and the convenience of location. Part of the residential fabric, many are not yet commercially registered. But some have expanded from their ground-floor spaces into upper levels and adjacent new structures. Others have shifted from hidden spaces catering to the creatives and become more commercial. Wuyuan Lu was once the location of the neighborhood open-air wet market that has since been dismantled after the street market sanitation of the 2000s. Like for

tate agents and small boutique owners have shifted their gaze toward the under-recognized former market street. Along with minor commerce, small agile firms producing knowledge-based design services and products prefer to grow in these city center locations. In the process, they are transforming existing structures via innovative reuse and programming. It was not only in the historic modern era old houses that adaptive reuse took place. (Fig. 33) Post-war slab buildings and lilong factories also became host to conversions and upgrades. Architectural diversity of the neighborhood is nurturing the creative sectors. Upgrades and consolidations converted Anfu and then Wuyuan Lu such that they are now part of the Shanghai’s streets known for their boutiques, cafés, and trendy ambiance.

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

other trendy streets of Jinxian Lu [进贤路], Xinle Lu [新乐路], Fumin Lu [富民路], and Julu Lu [巨鹿路], which have been rapidly upgraded by small entrepreneurs, real es-

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In 2011, on the ground floor of a house with a large garden on Wuyuan Lu, the atelier and showroom of the Xinlelu platform for young local and international designers took over the space from their former partners Lolo Love, an events space and shop that specialized in imported European vintage fashion, accessories, and furnishings. Unlike most commercial spaces facing the street, the showroom was entered via a small lane leading from Wuyuan Lu through its spacious garden, presenting the proximate, accessible, but sequestered ambiance of the place. Although inward-facing, the garden allowed the small creative entrepreneurs to host movie screenings by local film-makers, organize exhibition openings by local and international artists, and convene community clothing drives with young hipsters of the city. Among the co-owners is a Chinese-American designer from California whose store, William the Beekeeper, was the first vintage clothing shop in Shanghai; the other was a Shanghainese designer who did a stint in the UK and lived and had a showroom in another of the trendy bottom-up developments of the Jing’an Villas [静安别墅].171 As with many of the groundfloor commercial conversions, the house was originally one residence that has since been subdivided for many families. The fragmented ownership of the house itself was inviting small investors who speculated on the future of the neighborhood to start buying up the usage rights from elderly residents living upstairs. These small investors would pay the elderly residents a lump sum for their usage rights with the prospect of converting the consolidated usage rights into ownership rights in two to three years.172 The elderly residents, often with children abroad who therefore would not contest the ownership relinquishment, benefit from the immediate cash flow. At the same time the small investors, often locals themselves, also did not force the elderly residents to relocate, so as to facilitate the eventual process of ownership right consolidation without conflict. Interestingly, in July 2014, the municipal government issued a new policy to formalize this system of rental for elderly care.173 It is precisely the fragmentation of ownership and the informality of the commercial spaces that have kept the rents low and made it affordable and created the opportune urban loopholes to nurture the creatives. But as many small entrepreneurs expressed during the rapid transformations of 2011 and 2012, their certainty in the uncertainty of the street’s longer-term future has also meant that a readiness to shift to the next location is ever present. Their premonition would be confirmed in 2016 when authorities shut down a number of small enterprises on Wuyuan Lu. One bunker, at the corner of Wuyuan and Yongfu Lu, has long by transition economy standards become a live music venue that hosts some of the best underground music in Shanghai. The building above the venue has also been converted into restaurants and bars, which are part of Shanghai’s nightlife scene. Another underground bunker tucked deep in a lane on Wuyuan Lu was recently turned into a wine cellar specializing in imported Portuguese wine. It has since its inception in 2012 also expanded into a street-front restaurant serving Western fare. Around these new spaces, lilong houses are becoming intimate settings for young galleries, private kitchens, and event spaces. The urban fabric exemplary of a Chinese modernity that is hybrid and cosmopolitan—art-deco new-style lilong houses, garden-style houses, and apartment-style towers reminiscent of nineteenth century Paris or London, with 1960s slab housing, 1990s towers, and other buildings between set along boulevards lined with 128

Figs. 34 , 35 A popular small restaurant on Wuyuan Lu in 2011, left; and the same street-facing location following the restaurant’s closure in 2016, right

the iconic platanus trees—seems to be nurturing microcosms of globalized entrepreneurial experimentation and innovation. A diversity of overseas Chinese returnees, expats, and the new Chinese middle class, the localized cosmopolitans, has rapidly changed spatial demand and produced spaces of consumption and leisure, as well as production and residence, in the city center neighborhoods like the one around Plot 15. At the same time, the older generation of locals staying behind in the city center find themselves hosting grandchildren sent back from the suburbs to attend the more prestigious schools which still remain in the center. Some of the locals have become the enterprising landlords, with the privilege of their local hukou, capitalizing on the prime real estate locations of their old homes; others of the younger generation with transnational connections and know-how have opened up the cafés, trattorias, and boutiques that oblige the globalized palate of the latest batch of new locals.174 It is thus surprising that the bottom-up urban loophole facilitating the adaptive reuse of old houses in the historic residential neighborhood and creating a locale not unlike the creative hubs of other global cities would be suddenly shut down in summer 2016.175 (Figs. 34, 35) Like that of the swift removal of the remaining nail-house

loopholes formed under the transition economy’s adaptive governance and institutional amphibiousness.

Changing Habitat This chapter sets the background for the ‘inhabitation’ part of the concept of ‘preservation via inhabitation,’ which frames this and the following chapter through the case study of the residential neighborhood’s transformation around Plot 15. Amidst the prosperity of the neighborhood, some of the less-resourceful remaining residents still subsist on the meager retirement allowances that reflect the planned economy of the previous era. Despite their desire to move to newer, bigger homes that housing

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

residents from Plot 15, the rash closure of small boutiques, the construction of walls to block street-facing cafés, and even the eviction of a popular small restaurant were executed in the name of heritage conservation. The same stroke would sweep away another street, Yongkang Lu, whose development under the auspices of the same district government as elaborated in Chapter 5, reveals the precarious nature of urban

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Fig. 36 Conversion of the ground floor space and terrace on Anfu Lu, 2013

marketization has brought to the majority of residents in the inner city, the low rents have confined these remaining residents to the neighborhood. Well before the central government’s endorsed acceleration of Shanghai’s marketization, the local governments, especially in areas with overseas connections, began the process of foreign capital attraction through housing construction. The high-end commodity housing built to bring in overseas-Chinese investment and expat residents, together with the exodus of original residents to the expanding periphery and also abroad, manifested the fundamental social restructuring that accompanied the first decades of accelerated economic liberalization. With the changing demographic, a commercialization of the street front spaces also took place, catering to the new demands on streets like Anfu and Wuyuan Lu. At the same time the locational periphery of the neighborhood, at the edge of the city in the 1980s, would rapidly, with the expansion of the city in the 1990s, become centrally located, making the spaces on Anfu and Wuyuan Lu unique in the city and attracting a broad spectrum of clientele throughout the metropolitan area. Despite the prevalence of marketization, residents in the middle of the blocks remain unable to benefit from what they imagined would come with marketization. The dual housing market that remained, notably in city center areas 130

with large numbers of old houses, has since been set in place by the conservation policies of the mid-2000s and harbors a seemingly irresolute conundrum for the residents as well as for the local state. Yet at the same time, the halt in sweeping en-bloc developments that have been so prevalent in other central districts offered a potential to rethink the process for development. With the new decade of CCP leadership calling for the increased provision of social housing in its effort to stabilize the growing economic disparity between its citizens, a spatial rethinking at the neighborhood scale, especially where the dual market in the transition economy is palpably manifested, is necessary. After a few rounds of changing leadership within the District government and bids by small developers for the redevelopment of Wulumuqi Lu, long-rumored plans for the upgrade of the last stretch of chaotic yet vibrant local commerce was confirmed through the grapevine. What with the impending development of Plot 15 between Wuyuan and Anfu Lu, it remains to be seen what the future of the neighborhood looks like. The resultant social diversity that is a product of bottom-up transformation, rather than of deliberate top-down planning, asks what lessons the neighborhood brings to other areas that are planned as socially homogeneous and functionally singular. The small-scale conversions have been able to tap into both the urban loopholes formed by the dual housing market from the first phase of accelerated economic liberalization and those formed from the heritage conservation of the second and more mature era of economic transition, incrementally upgrading the neighborhood. (Fig. 36) The dy-

1 In this and the following chapters, the Chinese term ‘lu [路]’ for ‘road,’ or ‘street’ is used. The street Wuyuan Lu, for example, could be written as Wuyuan Road or Wuyuan Street. Huaihai Lu could be written as Huaihai Boulevard or Huaihai Avenue, because it is a wider thoroughfare. But because in the Chinese language there is not the same kind of distinction used for the different types of streets, the author has chosen to use the phonetic transcription. Similarly, Chinese characters are also included for ease of ensuing research. 2 Following China’s 1842 defeat in the First Opium War, coastal ports were conceded to the victors as ‘treaty ports.’ The ‘treaty ports,’ including Shanghai, compelled China to open trade with foreign powers. Because the areas were conceded to foreign powers extraterritorially and the Chinese gave up sovereignty, the term ‘Concessions’ is used to denote them. The two main areas of Concessions were the International Concession and the French Concession. The French Concession was developed later than the International Concession and was to its west, with French-mandated modern era planning, which will be elaborated in this and the next chapters.

3 The name ‘platanus’ is used by the author for the trees that were planted in the former French Concessions. In English, they are also known as plane trees, of the family Platanaceae. In Chinese, the trees are popularly known as wutong [梧桐]. According to Chinese translations the tree wutong is actually the phoenix tree in English, which is of a different species. 4 Tingting Zhu 褚婷婷, “沪上怀旧 [Shanghai Nostalgia],” 人民日报 People’s Daily, August 4 , 2004 , Overseas Edition edition, sec. 5 世界華人周刊 Overseas Chinese Weekly, http://www.people.com.cn/GB /paper39/12617/1133776.html. 5 In Shanghai, the district governments, rather than the municipality, was the level of the local state authorizing and profiting from land leases. The municipality, however, issued the final approvals. 6 Lailai He 贺来来, “民心工程变身土地储备 沪麦其里拆 迁之惑 [Project to Gain People’s Hearts Becomes Land Bank, Confusion of Shanghai’s Magie Lane Demolition and Displacement],” 21世纪经济报道 [21st Century Economic Report], October 27, 2004 , http://home.163 .com/04 / 1027/ 16 / 13NA S 89 L 0010174 S.html. 7 上海市人民政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, “关于鼓励动迁居民回搬

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

namic equilibrium that seemed to have survived in the tenuous relationships between planned and market also awaits the development decision for Plot 15. When the alliance of the local state and privileged elites is ready, it will be disclosed.

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推进新一轮旧区改造的试行办法 [Regarding Encouraging Displaced Residents to Move Back, Pushing Forward New Round of Pilot for Urban Upgrade],” 沪建城（2001）第 0068号 § (2001), http://www.shucm.sh.cn/gb/jsjt2009/ node1290/node1294 /node1376 /userobject7ai417.html. 8 Tianshu Hu 胡天舒, “和黄创上海房产天价 ‘汇贤居’6500美 元/m2 [Hutchinson Whampoa Breaks Record for Shanghai Real estate ‘The Summit’ at 6500 USD per Square Meter],” 国际金融报 International Finance Daily, January 15, 2003 , http://finance.sina.com.cn/x/20030115 /075230 2582.shtml. 9 It is an urban myth in Hong Kong that of every 10 dollars spent by Hong Kong’ers, 1 of those dollars goes to Li Ka-Shing. He and his conglomerates own telecoms, utilities, supermarkets, drugstores, in addition to real estate development and shipping. The urban legend is thus telling of the extent of the handful of Hong Kong tycoon’s economic clout in everyday lives under the laissez-faire political economy of Hong Kong. 10 The name lilong confusingly refers both to the urban morphology of the lane house compound as well as to the buildings inside them. The lilong, as architecture type and as urban morphology, will be elaborated later in the chapter. 11 Hongqing Duan 段宏庆, “上海纵火逼迁案黑幕：开发 商为牟利烧死两老人 [Case of Fire Used to Force Eviction in Shanghai: Developer Seek Profit and Kill Two Elderly People],” 财经 [Finance and Economics], September 22 , 2005, http://news.163.com/05/0922 /16 /1U93 Q7B8000 1124 S.html. 12 In the development of the lilong compound of Jianyeli [建业里], a French researcher documented the various methods, including coercion and violence, used to force out residents who were unwilling to leave their homes. See Valérie Laurans, “Shanghai: Modern Conveniences as an Argument for Displacing Residents,” China Perspectives, no. 58 (April 1, 2005), http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/459. 13 The name ‘nail house residents’ itself refers to both the nail-like profiles of the last-building-standing on excavated development sites as well as the metaphoric quality of the nail, the effort and difficulty needed for a nail’s removal from a surface in which it’s been attached. 14 “刁民， 好官， 政绩和和谐 [Difficult Masses, Good Bureaucrats, Political Performance and Harmonious Society],” June 8 , 2010, http://www.caogen.com/blog/infor_detail/20855.html. 15 Zhong Chen 陈中, “强拆阴影再现麦琪里？ [Shadows of Forcible Displacement Reappearing at Magie Lane?],” 南方周末 South­ ern Weekend, April 1, 2011, http://www.infzm.com/content/57121. 16 Yuan Gao 高原, “拆迁新政并未终结暴力拆 迁 [New Policies for Demolition and Displacement Haven’t Stopped Violence],” 法治周末 Legal Weekly, April 6, 2011, http://www.legaldaily.com.cn/zmbm/content/ 2011 04 /06/content_2572737.htm?node=7570. 17 Interviews 2013. 18 Rob Schmitz, “The Anatomy of a Shanghai Land Grab: Residents Kidnapped, Their Homes Destroyed,” Marketplace.org, October 16, 2013 , http://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/chinas-hangover/anatomy-shanghai-land-grab-residents-kidnapped-their-homes-destroyed. 19 The World Expo took place in Shanghai in the summer of 2010. The Shanghai municipal government used the opportunity to upgrade and showcase the city as a role model for other Chinese cities, as most of the visitors were from the vast inland provinces of China, who saw Shang-

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hai as exemplary of China’s economic development and global integration. As will be examined and elaborated in the next chapter, heritage recognition and conservation became one way that Shanghai became the role model for other Chinese cities. The years following the Expo was also a time of optimism and euphoria. 20 As noted in the introduction, the term ‘spatial production’ is used by the author to denote the processes and mechanisms that form the physical, often built, environment. It references Henri Lefebvre’s concept of ‘production of social space,’ but emphasizes also the importance of the physicality of space. 21 Under party-state rule, historic background leading to the conditions inherited from historic legacies are largely not discussed. When they are, their relationship to contemporary development are also bypassed. Because of this deliberate oversight, the author feels compelled to offer a thorough account of the historic lead up to the contemporary conditions, and to contextualize historic legacy’s contribution to the contemporary complexities for planning. To local residents, the account may seem self-evident. But the mere documentation of the relationship between historic legacy and contemporary developments seems especially relevant, given the rapid erasure of recent past under the pressures of both development and the developmental state. 22 The author uses the term ‘localized cosmopolitans’ to refer to the stakeholders in the urban development process in Shanghai, who have an international background while at the same time have access to local decision-makers and knowledge of the local processes and mechanisms. The localized cosmopolitans are adept at detecting and making use of the urban loopholes created by the transition economy. The localized cosmopolitan also suggests a lineage with the modern era Shanghainese sensibility of being open and global in outlook. 23 The term ‘architecture type’ is a discipline-specific term that architects use to denote the combination of form and use of a building. Buildings since historic types have taken on forms that accommodate their use or uses. For example, the bath, the market, the temple had specific forms that accommodated their uses in Roman cities, and conversely the recognizability of these architecture forms also reveals their use. The architecture type of the bath, or the temple, thus denote both their form and their function. Also of note, the terms ‘function’ and ‘program’ are also discipline-specific terms that architects, including the author, use for ‘use’ or ‘uses’ for spaces, and are used interchangeably with the term ‘use.’ 24 An ‘urban centrality’ is where a high concentration of human interaction and resource interchange takes place in a city. It is a concept that emerged from the re-conceptualization of Walter Christaller’s 1933 theory of ‘central places [zentralen Orte],’ which was a seminal work on economic relationships in space, in the contemporary context of a ‘networked society.’ See Walter Christaller, Die Zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland: Eine Ökonomisch-Geographische Untersuchung Über Die Gesetzmässigkeit Der Verbreitung Und Entwicklung Der Siedlungen Mit Städtischen Funktionen (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1933); Edwin von Böventer, “Walter Christaller’s Central Places and Peripheral Areas: The Central Place Theory in Retrospect,” Journal of Regional

1972 “the week that changed the world.” 34 Following the October 20, 1971 visit by Henry Kissinger to China, the U.S. lifted the 22-year-old ban on travel to China in November 1971. Overseas Chinese living in the U.S. would return for the first time since travel bans to China were implemented. 35 Relatives of prominent returnees were forcibly moved into accommodations that were more spacious and private to give the visitors the impression of China’s progress. For the early advent of the image project see also the recount of Perry Link’s stay in China in 1973, in Perry Link, “My Disillusionment: China, 1973,” NYRblog, June 22, 2011, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/ 2011 /jun/ 22 /my-disillusionment-peoples-republic-1973/. 36 It is clear from the research and reportage of the 1960 s and 1970 s that little was known about what was actually happening inside China. See, for example, Stephen Fitzgerald, “Overseas Chinese Affairs and the Cultural Revolution,” The China Quarterly, no. 40 (October 1, 1969): 103 – 26. The class-based persecutions in particular targeted relatives of overseas Chinese, who were often of the bourgeoisie and land-owning class. 37 To contextualize, in the same year, the southern town of Shekou, which is now part of Shenzhen, was already established as Industrial Zone as approved by the central government. This followed Deng’s visit to Japan and Singapore, where he saw the necessity to develop industry on par with what he saw in these two developed Asian economies, and also to attract foreign capital to initiate their development. 38 The 1983 国务院关于加强利用外资工作的指示 [Directive by the State Council on Strengthening the Work to take advantage of Foreign Capital] also granted special privileges to overseas Chinese investment. See “关于贯彻《中 共中央、国务院关于加强利用外资工作的指示》的通知 [Directive by the State Council on Strengthening the Work to Take Advantage of Foreign Capital],” 32 § (1983), http:// china.findlaw.cn/fagui/p_1/227171.html. http://china.findlaw.cn/fagui/p_1/227171.html. 39 上海市人民政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, “上海市外商投资房产企业商品 住宅出售管理办法 [Administrative Measures of Shanghai Municipality Governing the Sale of Commercial Housing by Foreign Investment Real State Enterprises]” (1988), http://www.lawinfochina.com/display.aspx?lib=law& id=754 . 40 上海市人民政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, “上海市土地使用权有偿转让办法 [Measures of Shang­ hai Municipality on the Compensatory Transfer of Land Use Rights],” 沪府发[1987 ]42号 § (1987 ), http://www.lawinfochina.com/display.aspx?lib=law&id= 726 & CG id=. 41 “Shanghai Hongqiao Economic and Technological Development Zone,” accessed May 10, 2014 , http://www. shanghai.gov.cn/shanghai/node 27118 /node 2787 3 / node27997/n31510 /n31511 /u22 ai73220 .html. 42 The 1978 Third Plenary of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CPC [十一届三中全会], announced the new system of governing through what was referred to as “two levels of management, one and half levels of government [一级半 政府, 两级管理]” that devolved fiscal autonomy to the local state. 43 For example, Shanghai’s Number Two Dairy Factory [上海乳品二厂] which is also called colloquially the “milk dairy [牛奶棚],” remained in its place until 1993. The production of milk and other dairy products continued well into the 1990 s. Following its closure in 1993, the site

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

Science 9, no. 1 (April 1, 1969): 117–24 , doi:10.1111/j.14679787.1969.tb01447.x. In urban theory, it is posited that poly-centric metropolises or agglomerations with different complementary functions facilitate creativity and knowledge-based activities. See Michael D. Irwin and Holly L. Hughes, “Centrality and the Structure of Urban Interaction: Measures, Concepts, and Applications,” Social Forces 71, no. 1 (September 1, 1992): 17 – 51, doi:10.2307/ 2579964; David F. Batten, “Network Cities: Creative Urban Agglomerations for the 21st Century,” Urban Studies 32, no. 2 (March 1, 1995): 313 – 27, doi:10.1080/0042098955 0013103. 25 The ‘setback’ is an architecture and urban design term to depict the distance that a building is set back from the road and from other buildings. Higher buildings usually have a bigger setback than smaller and shorter buildings. Roads built after the automobile became popularly used also have larger setbacks for buildings. 26 Deng Xiaoping famously gave a speech on housing reform in April 1980. James Lee, “From Welfare Housing to Home Ownership: The Dilemma of China’s Housing Reform,” Housing Studies 15, no. 1 (January 1, 2000): 61 – 76, doi:10.1080/02673030082478 . 27 Anthony Gar-On Yeh and Fulong Wu, “The Transformation of the Urban Planning System in China from a Centrally-Planned to Transitional Economy,” Progress in Planning 51, no. 3 (April 1999): 167 – 252 , doi:10.1016/S0305 -9006(98)00029 -4 . 28 Xiangming Chen and Xiaoyuan Gao, “Urban Economic Reform and Public-Housing Investment in China,” Urban Affairs Review 29, no. 1 (September 1, 1993): 117–45 , doi:10.1177/004208169302900105 . 29 Approximately two to three million people fled China in 1949 to Taiwan and Hong Kong. See Ronald Skeldon, “The Last Half Century of Chinese Overseas (1945–1994): Comparative Perspectives,” International Migration Review 29, no. 2 (July 1, 1995): 576 – 79, doi:10.2307/2546795. 30 国务院 State Council, 关于用侨汇购买和建设住宅的暂行办法的通知 [Provisional Regulations Regarding Using Overseas Chinese Remittance to Purchase and Construct Housing], vol. 国发 (1980) 61号, 1980, http://www.chinaacc.com/new/63/73/ 129/2006/4 /yi6825027313146 31 The term ‘old houses [老房子],’ is specifically used in Shanghai to denote buildings built before 1949. This term, highlighted throughout the chapter in italics, will be expanded on later in the chapter in relation to the residual ownerships and in the next chapter in the state’s construction of a heritage conservation project. The knowledge of this early selling of old houses comes from interviews conducted by the author in 2011 and 2012. 32 The Shanghai Communiqué is also known as “The Joint Communiqué of the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C. ),” issued on 27 February 1972 . The document normalized U.S. -China relations. The document was important for the U.S. shift from a tentative two-China policy to a one-China policy. The U.S. two-China policy had recognized both the until then U.S. -backed government of the Republic of China (R.O.C. ) based in Taiwan and the until then unrecognized-by-the-U.S. People’s Republic of China (P.R.C. ). It is the first official gesture of what would be a significant geopolitical shift, following the October 25, 1971 official replacement of the R.O.C. by the P.R.C. in the UN Security Council. 33 Nixon would later call the visit to China in

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was converted into the Shanghai Library, which opened com.cn/2009/10/01/70297.html. 52 A detailed breakin 1996. See also http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_6281c- down of the increase in the proportion of extra-budgetary 1d70100ogxy.html 44 Annals of Shanghai Office 上海市地 funds, and the overall increase in total funds from 1949 方志办公室, “第二章高标准商品住宅建设 第一节侨汇商品住 until 1991 for China’s SOE s, together with the fiscal auton宅 [Chapter 2 High Standard Commodity Housing Devel- omy that came with the 1980 s reforms, which allowed opment, Section 1 Commodity Housing for Overseas Chi- the SOE s to control of higher percentage of their own nese Remittance],” in 上海住宅建设志 [Survey of Shanghai surpluses, explains the background of the asset dissipaResidential Development], vol. 4 Commodity Housing De- tion that is exemplified by SOE housing provision, via convelopment [第四篇商品住宅建设], 6 vols. (Shanghai 上海: struction or purchase and redistribution, under the early 上海社会科学院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Scienc- phases of China’s transition economy. See Jieming Zhu, es Press, 1998), http://shtong.gov.cn/node2 /node2245/ “The Changing Mode of Housing Provision in Transitional node75091/node75098 /node75150/node75154 /userob- China,” Urban Affairs Review 35, no. 4 (March 1, 2000): ject1ai90911.html. 45 徐汇区档案局 Xuhui District Ministry 510, doi:10.1177/10780870022184507. 53 Ibid., 505 . of Archiving, “第一节 商品房经营 Section 1 Commodity 54 Ibid., 513. 55 Fulong Wu, “Changes in the Structure Housing Exchange,” 徐汇区档案局(馆)档案信息网, accessed of Public Housing Provision in Urban China,” Urban StudJune 15, 2014 , http://daj.xh.sh.cn:8082 /xhdainfoplat/plat- ies 33 , no. 9 (November 1, 1996): 1601 – 27, doi:10.10 formData/infoplat/pub/xhda_152 /docs/200510/d_21829. 80/0042098966529. 56 国务院 住房制度改革领导小组 html. 46 Interviews, 2014 . 47 跨世纪的上海建筑 [New State Council Leadership Group on Housing Institution Reand Trans-Century Architecture in Shanghai], vol. 1 form. 1991. 关于全面推进城镇住房制度改革的意见 [Advice (Shanghai 上海: 同济大学出版社 Tongji University Press, Regarding Comprehensively Advancing Reform for Urban 1995), 137. It is also notable that the Chinese characters Housing Institutions]. http://www.law110.com/law/guo in the book are in the complex form of written Chinese wuyuan/2082 .htm. 57 D. J. Dwyer, “Urban Housing and that is used only in Taiwan and Hong Kong, rather than Planning in China,” Transactions of the Institute of British the simplified form of written Chinese that is used in main- Geographers, New Series, 11, no. 4 (January 1, 1986): land China. Proposals for a simplified form of written Chi- 479 – 89, doi:10.2307/621942; Yok-shiu F. Lee, “The Urban nese have been submitted since the 1900 s by Chinese Housing Problem in China,” The China Quarterly, no. 115 intellectuals who are proponents of modernization, who (September 1, 1988): 387 – 407. 58 Aimin Chen, “China’s viewed the complexity of the written language as an ob- Urban Housing Reform: Price-Rent Ratio and Market stacle to universal literacy in the country. But it was not Equilibrium,” Urban Studies 33 , no. 7 (August 1, 1996): until the 1960 s that simplification of the written form of 1077 – 92 , doi:10.1080/00420989650011519. 59 Zhu, the language was implemented in the education system “The Changing Mode of Housing Provision in Transition of the PRC . 48 The description of the Huiyi Gardens [汇 China.” 60 See Chen, “China’s Urban Housing Reform. 益花园] read: ”东块别墅的造型具有西欧现代派气息，外墙由 61 http://www.sy-group.com. 62 上海市人民政府 Shang直线和圆弧吻接组成，白色的外墙面，黑色的台阶踏步，铝合 hai Municipal Government, “关于加快本市中心城区危棚简 金门窗，灰色的堑假石装饰柱。南块富有法国风情，白色墙 屋改造若干意见 [Some Views Regarding Accelerating of 面，绛红色小挂瓦屋顶，花岗石门窗装饰线、台阶和勒脚，黑 City Center Slum Upgrade],” 沪府发 (1996)18号 § (1996), 色铝合金门窗和玻璃幕墙。北块是英国古典式建筑，黄色喷砂 http://wenku.baidu.com/view/953 cc76 d7e21af45 b307 墙面，绛红色的呈十字形哥德式大屋盖， 花岗石台阶和勒脚。 a884 .html. 63 Interviews with a former SOE leader in [The eastern villas are shaped in the style of western Eu- 2012 showed how state institutions became the earliest ropean modernism, with the formation of exterior walls developers in the transition period. 64 Ibid. 65 Min by straight lines and arcs, white walls, black steps, alumi- Zhou and John R. Logan, “Market Transition and the Comnum windows, grey stone columns. The southern section modification of Housing in Urban China,” International is rich in the French style, white walls, deep red overhang- Journal of Urban and Regional Research 20, no. 3 (Seping roof, granite fenestration lines, steps, black aluminum tember 1, 1996): 400 – 421, doi:10.1111/j.1468 -2427.1996. windows. The northern section is classic English architec- tb00325.x. 66 Ya Ping Wang and Alan Murie, “Social and ture, yellow sand-blasted walls, deep red gothic styled Spatial Implications of Housing Reform in China,” Internaoverhanging roof, granite steps and plinth].” See Annals tional Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24 , no. 2 of Shanghai Office 上海市地方志办公室, “第二章高标准商 (June 1, 2000): 397 – 417, doi:10.1111/1468 -2427.00254; 品住宅建设 第 一节侨汇商品住宅 [Chapter 2 High Standard Si-ming Li and Zheng Yi, “The Road to Homeownership Commodity Housing Development, Section 1 Commodity Under Market Transition Beijing, 1980–2001,” Urban Housing for Overseas Chinese Remittance].” 49 Ibid. Affairs Review 42, no. 3 (January 1, 2007 ): 342 – 68, doi:10. 50 Interestingly, the appropriation of Western-style res- 1177/1078087406292523 . 67 上海市人民政府 Shanghai idences would continue into the implementations for the Municipal Government, “关于出售公有住房的暂行办法 “One City, Nine Towns” vision, where the new towns were [Provisional Measures Regarding the Sale of Publicly themed with English, German, Italian, etc. styles. See Har- Owned Housing],” 沪府发[1994]19号 § (1994), http:// ry den Hartog, ed., Shanghai New Towns: Searching for www.shanghai.gov.cn/shanghai/node 2314 /node3124 / Community and Identity in a Sprawling Metropolis node3177/node3180/userobject6 ai619.html; 上海市人民 (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010). 51 “巅峰时刻回望当年 政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, “关于出售公有住房 外销房 [Looking Back during Today’s Peak Period On 的实施细则 [Detailed Regulations Regarding the Sale of ‘waixiao’ commodity Housing for Foreigners],” 新浪地产网 Publicly Owned Housing],” Pub. L. No. 沪房改办发[1994]第 Sina Real Estate, October 1, 2009, http://news.dichan.sina. 34号 (1994), http://www.shanghai.gov.cn/shanghai/node­

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of Planning on the Redevelopment of Urban Old Areas in Shanghai］,” 城市发展研究 [Urban Studies], no. 11 (2009): 97 – 101 + 52; Si-ming Li and Yu-ling Song, “Redevelopment, Displacement, Housing Conditions, and Residential Satisfaction: A Study of Shanghai,” Environment and Planning A 41, no. 5 (2009): 1090–1108, doi:10.1068/a4168. 81 See the next chapter for the detailed description of this plan. 82 The term ‘urban village’ is used in contemporary studies of China’s urban developments to denote the areas of rapid densification and development as result of urban encroachment on rural land. The change in land type from rural to urban, which are distinct under Chinese regulations, has made these locations lucrative for development. In the term’s usage here, the physical characteristic of urban development surrounding what were rural, and pre-industrial spaces, is similar. Similarly, urban growth, both in the early 20 th century and since the 1990 s in Shanghai, has created the spatial adjacency of developing and developed built environments. 83 Meng Hu 胡锰, “‘上海居，不大易’：和黄地产为何受挫 [Living in Shanghai, Not so easy” Why Is Hutchinson Whampoa Humbled],” 21世纪经济报道 [21st Century Economic Report], November 23 , 2002 , http://it.sohu.com/75 /63 / article204526375 .shtml. 84 Ibid. 85 A number of researchers have studied the lilong, its etymological origins, architecture type and urban form. The author is indebted to them. See, for example, Lynn T. White III , “Low Power: Small Enterprises in Shanghai, 1949–67,” The China Quarterly, no. 73 (March 1, 1978): 45 – 76; Hua Shen 沈华, 上海 里弄民居 [Shanghai Lilong Residences] (Beijing 北京: 中 国建筑工业出版社 China Architecture Industry Press, 1993); Hanchao Lu, “Away from Nanking Road: Small Stores and Neighborhood Life in Modern Shanghai,” The Journal of Asian Studies 54 , no. 1 (February 1, 1995): 93 – 123 , doi:10.2307/2058952; Samuel Y. Liang, “Where the Courtyard Meets the Street: Spatial Culture of the Li Neighborhoods, Shanghai, 1870 – 1900,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 67, no. 4 (December 1, 2008): 482 – 503; Gregory Byrne Bracken, The Shanghai Alleyway House, Routledge Contemporary China Series 95 (New York: Routledge, 2013); Renee Chow, “In a Field of Party Walls: Drawing Shanghai’s Lilong,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73, no. 1 (March 2014): 16 – 27, doi:10.1525 /jsah.2014 .73 .1.16. 86 Xiangming Chen, ed., Shanghai Rising: State Power and Local Transformations in a Global Megacity, Globalization and Community 15 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 87 Shen 沈华, 上海里弄民居 [Shanghai Lilong Residences]. 88 The terms ‘laoshi lilong [老式里弄],’ or ‘old-style lilong,’ ‘xinshi lilong [新式里弄],’ or ‘new-style lilong,’ ‘huayuanshi lilong [花园式里弄],’ or “garden-style lilong,’ and ‘gongyushi lilong [公寓式里弄],’ or ‘apartment-style lilong,’ are used to specify the architecture type as well as the lilong compound itself. 89 The hutongs of Beijing for example, are also a vernacular type that aggregate at the urban scale. 90 Yanning 李燕宁 Li and Yongyi Lv 卢永毅, “晚期 石库门里弄—步高里 [Late Shikumen Lilong—Bugaoli],” 上海城市规划 [Shanghai Urban Planning Review], no. 03 (2005): 35 – 39. 91 The term ‘old houses,’ as mentioned in an earlier note, is significant in denoting buildings built before 1949 in Shanghai. Many of the old houses have a

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2314 /node3124 /node3177/node3180/userobject6 ai619. html. 68 “上海内外销房并轨谁受益 [Who Benefits When Shanghai Consolidates Housing Market for Foreigners and Nationals],” August 3, 2001, http://house.enorth.com.cn/ system/2001/08 /03 /000107562 .shtml; Li and Yi, “The Road to Homeownership Under Market Transition Beijing, 1980–2001.” 69 In an interview, one of the architecture offices in Hong Kong that worked on the earliest parcel in Lujiazui, the special economic district set up in Pudong, told of progressing to projects in the city center, 2012 . 70 上海市人民政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, 关于加快本市中心城区危棚简屋改造若干意见 [Some Views Regarding Accelerating of City Center Slum Upgrade]. 71 上海市人民政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, “关于加快本市中心城区危棚简屋改造实施办法 [Regarding Accelerating of City Center Slum Upgrade Implementation],” 沪府发〔1998〕33号 § (1998), http:// www.shucm.sh.cn/gb/jsjt 2009 /node 1290 /node 1470 / node1472 /userobject7ai705.html. 72 国务院 State Council, “关于进一步深化城镇住房制度改革加快住房建设的通知 [Notice Regarding the Deepening of the Urban Housing System Reform and the Acceleration of Residential Construction],” 国发〔1998〕23号 § (1998), http://www. chinabaike.com/law/zy/xz/gwy/ 1333347.html. 73 The 1994 document by the State Council, The Decision regarding the Deepening Urban Housing Reform [关于深化城镇 住房制度改革的决定], announced the fundamental changes to the housing investment, management, and distribution systems, and the establishment of public and private housing savings systems, housing insurance, finance and loans, and a market for housing management. Significantly, the document formalized the considerations for a dual housing provision system, where social housing supply and commodity housing supply coexist to mitigate the housing access for the different social groups. The central directive included a provision of 20 % social housing, rental and owned, by private developers required in private development. See Ya Ping Wang and Alan Murie, “The Process of Commercialisation of Urban Housing in China,” Urban Studies 33, no. 6 (June 1, 1996): 971–89, doi:10.10 80/00420989650011690. 74 Yi Huang 黄怡, “大都市核 心区的社会空间隔离—以上海市静安区南京西路街道为例 [Socio-spatial segregation in Metropolitan Nuclei Areas: a case study of Nanjing Xilu Street, Shanghai],” 城市规划学 刊 [Urban Planning Forum], no. 03 (2006): 76 – 84 . 75 Ibid. 76 A scan of residences built in Hong Kong in the 1990 s and 2000 s would reveal numerous affinities between the developments in Shanghai and Hong Kong. 77 Weicheng Guo 郭伟成, “上海前景更美好 [Shanghai’s Future More Beautiful],” 人民日报 People’s Daily, August 13, 2001, sec. 3 华东新闻, http://www.people.com.cn/GB /paper40/3985/473959.html. 78 易居：南京万科, “上海典型 会所运营商考察报告 [Report of Study of the Business Operations in the Typical Clubhouses in Shanghai],” April 25, 2008 , http://doc.mbalib.com/view/b6 a2270 ff8 a3 c96 ce8 cf813 ad488 edf5.html. 79 “赌王何鸿燊创办的私人会所— 鸿艺会入驻融创玖玺台 [Casino King Stanley Ho Found Private Club House—Ambassy Club],” April 3 , 2013 , http://news.cq.soufun.com/2013 -04 -03 /9837300.htm. 80 Yong Wan 万勇, “上海旧区改造的历史演进, 主要探索和 发展导向 [Historical Evolution, Main Study and Orientation

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peculiar and exceptional ownership status because of the planned era legacies that have left them with ambiguous and fragmented ownership and their typological definition under transition economy. 92 The Bund is a prominent area along the river in Shanghai where civic and commercial buildings built in the modern era largely in the Western style made it symbolic of Shanghai’s Concession status. The Bund’s changing status in the Shanghai imaginary will be further elaborated in the next chapater. 93 See, for example, Jie Li, Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life, Global Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 94 Though its documentation and description were so much about everyday life that any older Shanghainese who lived before the 1980 s would find its contents common knowledge, few Chinese language pieces could match the clarity and poignancy of Lynn White’s piece that describes the life and commerce inside the Shanghai lilong. See White III , “Low Power.” 95 See for example, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1999). 96 During the Sino-Japanese War, Shanghai became an enclave because of its unique jurisdictional status. From 1945’s 3.37 million the city grew to 5.45 million by 1948 , driving housing scarcity and overcrowding. See Wenda Lu 陆文达, 上海房地产志 ［Survey of Shanghai Real Estate], 上海市专志系列丛刊 (Shanghai 上海: 上海社 会科学院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1999). 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 In 1949 per capita dwelling size was only 3.9 square meters. Ibid. 100 Due to population growth, informal self-built housing would be distributed throughout the city and dominated the residential type. 101 Weiqun Zhang 张伟群, 上海弄堂元气 根据壹仟零壹件档册与文书复现的四明别墅历史 [Shanghai Longtang Vitality, According to One Thousand and One Archival Documents on History Siming Villas] (Shanghai 上海: 上海人民出版社 Shanghai People’s Press, 2007 ). 102 Lu, “Away from Nanking Road.” 103 Junli Zheng 郑 君里, 乌鸦与麻雀 [Crows and Sparrows] (Kunlun, 1949). 104 Skeldon, “The Last Half Century of Chinese Overseas (1945–1994).” 105 Toby Ho, “Managing Risk: The Suppression of Private Entrepreneurs in China in the 1950 s,” Risk Management 2, no. 2 (April 1, 2000): 29 – 38 , doi:10. 1057/palgrave.rm.8240047; Dorothy J. Solinger, “Socialist Goals and Capitalist Tendencies in Chinese Commerce, 1949 – 1952 ,” Modern China 6 , no. 2 (April 1, 1980): 197 – 224 . 106 Laurence J. C. Ma, “The Chinese Approach to City Planning: Policy, Administration, and Action,” Asian Survey 19, no. 9 (September 1, 1979): 838 – 55 , doi:10.2307/2643807. 107 It is well known in Shanghai that the locals often grumble of contributing and deferring to the central bureaucracy but getting little in return in the support of infrastructure, especially before economic liberalization began. 108 Zhou and Logan, “Market Transition and the Commodification of Housing in Urban China.” 109 Detailed accounts of the selection of locales for industrial investment by the CCP shifted capital away from the cities that were the most prosperous prior to 1949. Central planning also redirected resources that had more to do with against political ideology against cities that were shaped by capital under the previous regime.

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See Jieming Zhu, The Transition of China’s Urban Development: From Plan-Controlled to Market-Led (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1999). 110 Yilin Nie and Robert J. Wyman, “The One-Child Policy in Shanghai: Acceptance and Internalization,” Population and Development Review 31, no. 2 (June 1, 2005): 313 – 36 . 111 Shixun Gui and Xian Liu, “Urban Migration in Shanghai, 1950 – 88: Trends and Characteristics,” Population and Development Review 18, no. 3 (September 1, 1992): 533 – 48 , doi:10.2307/1973657. 112 From 1967 to 1978 , over 17 million urban “educated youths [知青],” who are largely graduates from junior and senior high school, were sent to live and work in the rural areas. This consists of one third of urban youths who were of eligible age and many stayed there for more than a decade. See R. J. R. Kirkby, Urbanisation in China: Town and Country in a Developing Economy, 1949–2000 AD (London: Croom Helm, 1985); Xueguang Zhou and Liren Hou, “Children of the Cultural Revolution: The State and the Life Course in the People’s Republic of China,” American Sociological Review 64 , no. 1 (February 1, 1999): 12 – 36, doi:10.2307/2657275. 113 Lu 陆文达, 上海房地产 志 [Survey of Shanghai Real Estate]. 114 Interviews, 2013. 115 Those who were “swept out [扫地出门]” were left with nothing but the clothes on their backs and had to search for short-term accommodation. Often the new abodes would be tiny leftover spaces without facilities. The next chapter will elaborate on one such case. 116 Interview, 2013. The habits also included the use of coal burning stoves or squatting toilets. One of the tenants who moved into the Shangfang Garden house, for example, wondered at the use of toothpaste when they saw it being used for the first time by their unwilling hosts, with whom they had to share the bathroom facilities. 117 ‘Hukou’ is a system of household registration in China which has historic origins. Its restrictions on labor movements under planned economy have loosened under economic transition’s reforms, due to the need of labor for economic development in urban regions. But the social inequalities created by the system call into question possibilities of further reform. See, for example, Hein Mallee, “China’s Household Registration System under Reform,” Development and Change 26, no. 1 (January 1, 1995): 1 – 29, doi:10. 1111/j.1467-7660.1995.tb00541.x; Kam Wing Chan and Will Buckingham, “Is China Abolishing the Hukou System?,” China Quarterly, no. 195 (2008): 582 – 606, doi:0.1017/ S0305741008000787. 118 “上海老洋房历经风雨身价不减 租售其实不容易 [Value of Shanghai’s Old Western-Style Houses Does Not Diminish despite Going through Thick and Thin, as a Matter of Fact Renting and Selling Are Not Easy],” 中国新闻网, April 13, 2007, http://www.atrain. c n / n e w s / 2 0 0 7 - 0 4 - 1 3 / S h a n g H a i L a oX i a n g Fa n g L i JingFengYuJuanJiaBuJian-JuShouJiShiBuRongYi-ttjq 03775.html. 119 Interviews, 2011, 2012. 120 Eventhough political ideology alone no longer governs resource access, numerous studies have correlated privileges inherited from planned economy era hierarchies to both eco­ nomic capacity as well as continued resource access. See, for example, Deborah Davis, “‘Skidding’: Downward Mobility among Children of the Maoist Middle Class,” Modern China 18 , no. 4 (October 1, 1992): 410 – 37. 121 Initial offerings for the sale of publicly owned hous-

寓、花园住宅等成套房屋].“ See “不可售公房 [Non-Sellable Public Housing],” 互动百科, accessed July 29, 2014, http:// www.baike.com/wiki/%E4%B8 %8 D%E5%8 F%AF %E5%9 4%AE %E5 %85 %AC %E6 %88 %BF . 128 上海市人民政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, “上海市公有住房差价交换 试行办法 [Pilot Measures for the Exchange of Shanghai Public Housing with Pricing Difference],” Pub. L. No. 沪府 发 [1999] 4号 (1999), http://www.lawtime.cn/info/fangdichan/gongfangmaimai/2008101338359.html. 129 “使用 权房转让有别产权房 [Transfer of Use Right Housing Differs from Ownership Right Housing],” Cnforex 环球外汇, March 21, 2011, http://www.cnforex.com/comment/html/2011/3 /21/11d2144 d235f39630 e1c45ff677c9 cc0.html. 130 ‘Usage rights’ apply, technically, to public housing that was built by danweis or the state for its citizens under planned economy. In Shanghai, where very little investment in housing was made, ‘usage rights’ also came to cover ‘old houses’ that are either allocated to danweis and state institutions since the 1950 s or those directly managed by the district real estate bureaus. 131 The “Contract for the Transfer of Public Housing in Shanghai [上海市公有住房转 让合同]” has to be drawn up to for the usage right of the unit to be purchased by the buyer. This is different from the “Contract for the Sales of Real Estate in Shanghai [上海市房地产买卖合同],” which is drawn up for the transfer of ownership rights for housing. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid. 134 Interviews, 2013. 135 Interviews, 2013. 136 Guilan Chen 陈桂兰, “沪上使用权房成新热点 不到20 平‘老房子’10 个 月涨15万 [Shanghai’s Usage Right Housing Becoming New Hot Spot, ‘old Houses’ not Even 20 Square Meters Grows 150000CNY in 10 Months],” 文汇报 Wenhui News, December 20, 2012, http://sh.eastday.com/m/20121220/u1a70 75428 .html. 137 The concept of ‘gentrification’ will be further elaborated on in the second section of the book. But it is a phenomenon intimately connected with the urban transformations and commercial upgrades that rapid economic liberalization and development have wrought. 138 Studies show the shifts in demography that accompanied economic liberalization and urban spatial restructuring. See, for example, Li and Song, “Redevelopment, Displacement, Housing Conditions, and Residential Satisfaction.” 139 The term ‘habitus’ here refers to the socialized norms that structure human interaction and social hierarchy. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). 140 The term ‘expat’ is a shortened version for ‘expatriates,’ which denotes someone who lives outside of their country of origin. The term is used largely for a middle to upper social class and does not denote, for example, ‘migrant workers,’ who are lowclass workers often laboring in a wealthier foreign country in order to earn remittances to send back to their poorer home country. The ‘expat’ has been used pejoratively for upper-middle class foreigners, who come from developed economy countries to developing economy countries. A presumed cultural homogeneity of the ‘expat’ suggests also cultural superiority and condescension, and suggests knowledge transfer both for employment but also for lifestyle from the more economically developed culture to the developing one. On the other hand, younger, more independent and more multicultural mobile workers avoid

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

ing stipulated that residents must wait 5 years after purchase to sell the units on the secondary housing market. But to stimulate cash flows for both the primary and secondary housing markets, pilots in the Changning, Pudong and Qingpu districts, all more peripheral districts, allowed the resale of privatized former public housing in August of 1996. Purchase of new housing units also absolved the seller of fees associated with the sales. The policies were implemented in city center districts in the following years. See Guanfu 殷关福 Yan and Yongyue Zhang 张永岳, 上海 房地产业发展史记 [Shanghai Real Estate Development History] (Shanghai 上海: 上海人民出版社 Shanghai People’s Press, 2007 ). 122 上海市人民政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, 关于出售公有住房的暂行办法 ［Provisional measures regarding the sale of publicly owned housing]. The document is issued by the Shanghai Government in accordance to the State Council’s issuance of the Decision regarding the Deepening of Urban Housing Reform, issued the same year. 123 Ibid. Units for sale are the publicly owned housing that “form a complete set [成 套]. The four kinds of publicly owned housing barred from sales are: 1] those included in urban renewal areas, 2] those with ambiguous ownership rights, 3] those with historic value for preservation, and 4) other deemed not salable by the government. In 1994 the per square meter price was 902 RMB , with unit location [地段], orientation [朝向]—south-facing apartments are preferred in Shanghai, story height [层次], and other factors taken into pricing consideration. 124 Interviews, 2011, 2012. Some families even sought out such units in the 1970 s to protect themselves from further denigration through imposed communal living. 125 Interviews, 2011, 2012 . A small number of lilong houses remained intact and recovered following the Cultural Revolution. But circumstances largely dictated the tenure, in no specific pattern, when economic liberalization arrived in the 1990 s. The status of occupants as well as spatial configuration affect the diversity of housing tenure. 126 Interview 2012. A Hong Kong architect who had worked in Shanghai in the first decade of accelerated economic liberalization, on the kinds of projects bringing the expert know-how to expedite the city’s re-globalization—including the earliest parcel to be developed in Lujiazui in 1991, the City Hotel and the Joffre Gardens near Xiangyang Lu in the mid1990 s—deemed the effects of marketization, especially that of public housing sales, as impressive in their effectiveness and foresight. Compared to the rapid development of Hong Kong, not only are the housing units provided in Shanghai sizable, but the marketization of public housing also gave Shanghai citizens the financial basis from which to economically transition. 127 “Non-sellable public housing refers to housing that belongs to the state that cannot be sold to the residents who are renting from them since housing reform policies, they consist mainly of old-style lilong, new styled lilong, workers housing, where the kitchen and WC are shared and each unit cannot be regarded as whole. They also consist of some apartments and garden houses that have what seem to be whole units [不可售公房是指根据本市现行房改政策还不 能出售给承租居民的公有住房，它主要包括旧式里弄、新式里 弄、职工住房等厨房、卫生合用的不成套房屋，也包括部分公

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being defined by the term. See, for example, C. M. Patha, Roaming: Living and Working Abroad in the 21st Century (Either/Or Press, 2016). 141 Deborah S. Davis, “SelfEmployment in Shanghai: A Research Note,” The China Quarterly, no. 157 (March 1, 1999): 22 – 43. 142 Zhili 张智 丽 Zhang and Sili Zhou 周思立, “这些老外在上海干什么 [What are these expats doing in Shanghai?],” 新上海人 New Shanghainese, February 22, 2002, http://old.jfdaily. com/epublish/gb/paper110/3 /class011000003 /hwz542 982.htm. 143 国务院 State Council, “关于引进国外人才工 作的暂行规定 [Provisional Regulations Re the Importation of Foreign Talent for Work],” Pub. L. No. 国发〔1983〕152 号 (1983), http://www.xmrs.gov.cn:81/dyna/ds.jsp?Id=2573. 144 Kaiya 李开亚 Li, “第九章人事管理, 第五节 引进与交流 [Chapter 9 Human Resources Section 5 Import and Exchange],” in 上海人民政府志 [Annals of the Shanghai Municipal Government], vol. 1, 第一篇政权、政务 [Authority and Administration], 6 vols. (Shanghai 上海: Li, Kaiya 李开 亚. 2004 . 上海人民政府志 [Annals of Shanghai Municipal Government]. 上海市专志系列丛刊. Shanghai 上海: 上海社 会科学院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press., 2004), http://www.shtong.gov.cn/node2 /node 2245 /node72907/node72912 /node72932 /node72952 / userobject1ai85686.html. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid. 147 上海 市人民政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, “上海市引进 国外专家暂行办法 [Interim Procedures of Shanghai Municipality on the Intake of Experts From Abroad],” Pub. L. No. 沪府发 [1994] 43号 (1994), http://www.lawinfochina.com/ display.aspx?lib=law&id=964 &CG id=. 148 劳动部 Department of Labor et al., “外国人在中国就业管理规定 [Pro­ visions on the Employment of Foreigners in China],” Pub. L. No. 劳动部、公安部、外交部、外经贸部以劳部发 [1996]29号公布 (1996), http://www.people.com.cn/zixun/ flfgk/item/dwjjf/falv/2 /2-1-51.html. 149 “老外在沪抢‘饭碗’ [Expats in Shanghai to Compete For ‘rice Bowl’],” 新上海人 New Shanghainese, February 22, 2002, http://old.jfdaily. com/epublish/gb/paper110/3 /class011000003 /hwz542 980.htm. 150 Wenmin 戴闻名 Dai and Dan Qiu 邱丹, “究 竟有多少老外在上海淘金 [How Many Expats Are in Shanghai Digging for Gold],” 瞭望东方周刊 Oriental Outlook Weekly, June 4 , 2009, http://epaper.yangtse.com/yzwb/ 2009 -06/04 /content_12742999.htm. 151 Studies of leisure hubs and mating rituals, namely that of Western men picking up Asian women, have been a visible part of the discourse of contemporary expats in developing countries like China. See, for example, James Farrer, “‘New Shanghailanders’ or ‘New Shanghainese’: Western Expatriates—Narratives of Emplacement in Shanghai,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36, no. 8 (2010): 1211 – 28 , doi:10.1080/13691831003687675; James Farrer, “Foreigner Street: Urban Citizenship in Multicultural Shanghai,” in Multicultural Challenges and Redefining Identity in East Asia, ed. Nam-Kook Kim (Ashgate, 2014), 17 – 43 , https://www.academia.edu/3646925 /Foreigner_Street_ Urban_Citizenship_in_Multicultural_Shanghai. 152 “The Gold Rush Is on in Shanghai—MarketWatch,” CBS Marketwatch.com, December 28, 2003, http://www.marketwatch. com/story/the-gold-rush-is-on-in-shanghai. 153 Ibid. 154 The implications of ‘administratively-allocated land’ have been elaborated in the introduction chapter. The co-existence of administratively-allocated land, which re-

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mained under economic transition, with that of commercial leased land would create the dual land market. 155 The spatial impacts of this dual land market will be further elaborated in Chapter 6. 156 上海市商用地图 册 [Shanghai Commercial Atlas] (Shanghai 上海: 上海 翻译出版公司 Shanghai Translation Publishers, 1989). 157 Matthew Fulco, “Danish Businesses Thriving in China,” China Daily, November 1, 2011, http://www.chinadaily. com.cn/regional/ 2011 - 11 / 01 /content_ 14017692 .htm. 158 “Cafe Queen,” Shanghai Family, April 1, 2013, http:// www.shfamily.com/articles/ 2013 / 04 / 01 /cafe-queen/. 159 Yun also mentioned in the interview, that “It literally is one law in one district, something different in another. You have to know people in government bureaus or you will not get anywhere.” See Ardyn Bernoth, “Orient Express,” July 19, 2005 , http://www.smh.com.au/news/ good-living/orient-express/2005 /07/18 /1121538913891. html. 160 “Why It’s So Difficult for Successful Shanghai F & B Businesses to Move to Beijing,” City Weekend, March 9, 2012, http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/ blog/why-its-so-difficult-for-successful-shanghai-fb-businesses-to-move-to-beijing/. 161 “Location has been very important to us,” Jackie Yun said. “In Shanghai, location has been very much the key.” See “Wagas: It’s All in the Name,” Australia China Connections, June 2012, http:// www.chinaconnections.com.au/en/magazine/back-issues/107-may-june-2012 /1444 -wagas-its-all-in-the-name. 162 See the following chapter on the development of Wukang Lu as a ‘Cultural Street.’ 163 “Cosmopolitan, Adj. and N.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press), accessed May 28 , 2015, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/42259. 164 Ulf Hannerz, “Two Faces of Cosmopolitanism: Culture and Politics,” Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift 107, no. 3 (2005): 200. 165 Ulf Hannerz, “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” Theory, Culture, Society 7, no. 237 (1990): 243 . 166 Letter from the Shanghai Municipal Archives. 167 The term ‘haigui [海归],’ meaning ‘returning from across the sea,’ is homonymous with the term ‘haigui [海龟],’ which means ‘sea turtles.’ So, sometimes these overseas returnees are also referred to as ‘sea turtles.’ The impact of haigui’s impact on China’s development is still understudied. See for example, Yedan Huang 黃曄丹, “Return Migration: A Case Study Of ‘sea Turtles’ in Shanghai” (Master’s Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2008), http://hub.hku.hk/handle/10722 / 52665; Cheng Li, “Shaping China’s Foreign Policy: The Paradoxical Role of Foreign-Educated Returnees,” Asia Policy 10, no. 1 (2010): 65 – 85 , doi:10.1353 /asp.2010.0038 ; “Plight of the Sea Turtles,” The Economist, July 6, 2013 , http://www.economist.com/node/ 21580470 /print. 168 ‘Yuppies’ is a popularly used term to denote the largely upper middle class residents of large metropolitan areas in the West who have been characterized with a lifestyle that is also sometimes pejoratively associated with gentrification. See, for example, Neil Smith, “Of Yuppies and Housing: Gentrification, Social Restructuring, and the Urban Dream,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 5, no. 2 (1987 ): 151 – 172, doi:10.1068 /d050151; Matthew W. Rofe, “‘I Want to Be Global’: Theorising the Gentrifying Class as an Emergent Elite Global Community,” Urban Studies 40, no. 12 (November 1, 2003): 2511 – 26,

不愿以房养老 房子给儿女才安心 [Over Nine out of Ten Elderly Not Willing to Use Reverse Mortage for Elderly Care, Passing on Home to Children Eases Mind],” July 2, 2014 , http://finance.sina.com.cn/china/dfjj/ 20140702 / 1643 19587531.shtml. 174 The term ‘new Shangainese [新上 海人]’ was coined by Shanghai’s party secretary to promote in-migration in the early 2000 s to meet the demands of the metropolis’ rapid economic development. See, for example, Xiaoxin Lu 卢晓欣, “‘新上海人’ 需要正名吗? [Does ‘the New Shanghainese’ need Official Endorsement?],” 上海壹周 Shanghai Weekly, January 26, 2010, http://sh. eastday.com/qtmt/20100126 /u1a687190.html. 175 For news of the “adjustments” that were to be implemented for what has been named as Cultural Heritage Streets, which will be elaborated on in the next chapter, see Xiaojun Chen 晨小君, “五原路扰民老洋楼餐馆关门了 [Wuyuan Lu’s Restaurant in Old Western House That Disturbs the Residents Is Closed],” 新闻晨报 Shanghai Morning Post, May 21, 2016, http://www.shxwcb.com/107141.html; Minyi Jin 金旻矣, “徐汇区区长鲍炳章: 永康路酒吧街将调整业态 [Xuhui District Mayor Bao: Yongkang Lu Bar Street Will Be Programmatically Adjusted],” 新民晚报 New Citizen Evening News, July 11, 2016, http://sh.eastday.com/m/2016 0711/u1ai9519022.html; Wenjie Xiao 肖文杰 et al., “最上海” 的街区面临整改，发生了什么？[The Most Shanghainese Neighborhood Is Facing Adjustment, What Happened?],” 第一财经周刊 CBN Weekly, August 13, 2016, http://www. wxrw123.com/cf/20160813/2293010_2.html.

Chapter 2 The Residential Neighborhood

doi:10.1080/0042098032000136183 . In the context of the foreign population of Shanghai, they represent the younger, more mobile workers who are employed in the service sectors and knowledge industries, who could be contrasted to the more traditional ‘expats’ working for corporate multinationals. The definition is of course fuzzy and imprecise. The term connotes more a lifestyle affiliation that places like Shanghai and other large metropolises in developing countries can afford. 169 See Ying Zhou, “上海中心城区: 在全球愿景和本土构架之间 [Between global aspirations and local frameworks: city center Shanghai],” Urban China 城市中国 56 (2013): 68 – 73 . 170 Neil Smith noted in his 1979 article on the processes of gentrification that “the fragmented structure of property ownership has made the occupier developer, who is generally an inefficient operator in the construction industry, into an appropriate vehicle for recycling revalued neighborhoods.” See Neil Smith, “Toward a Theory of Gentrification A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People,” Journal of the American Planning Association 45, no. 4 (1979): 546, doi:10.1080/01944367908977002. 171 The author’s interviews with the designer-entrepreneurs in 2011 and 2012 also led her to the research of the Jing’an Villas transformations and ensuing shutdown, elaborated in Chapter 4 . 172 A successful example of the consolidation of ‘usage rights’ into ‘ownership right’ will be elaborated on in the following chapter. 173 Juntian Zheng 郑钧天 and Zhendong Wu 吴振东, “上海超九成老人

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Chapter 3 The Cultural Street From First Recognitions of Architectural Heritage to Implementation Setting the Context for Heritage Policy Implementation The Old House and the Club House—Changing Market Supply and Demand Localized Cosmopolitans and the Developing of Le Passage Fuxing and Ferguson Lane Conserving Heritage: Lane 1754 (Aka 1768) and Lane 117 The ‘Western’ District and Learning from the ‘Beautification Plan’ The World Primary School and Small Entrepreneurs Approximating Globalization and the State’s Appropriation

Fig. 1 A popular spot for photographers on Wukang Lu under the platanus trees and in front of a renovated modern era garden house, 2012

In the summer of 2007, four municipal ministries descended on the kilometer-long Wukang Lu [武康路] in Shanghai. In preparation for the World Expo’s opening in 2010, the street was unofficially dubbed a new “Cultural Street [文化街].” 1 The number of researchers who arrived on the scene seemed to confirm the street’s growing importance.2 The municipal Ministry for Culture organized door-to-door visits, documenting the oral history of a distinct Shanghai intellectual heritage embedded in the neighborhood since the 1930s. The Ministry of Tourism attached heritage placards to buildings, detailing the architectural features of Shanghai’s prestigious historic past. The Ministry of Infrastructure repaved the street with picturesque patterned stones and added more platanus trees.3 The Ministry of Housing and Real Estate upgraded the fences and walls that line the street with Art Deco motifs and added painted-to-match boxes to hide the electric conduits and AC units. Buildings from the 1980s were retrofitted to blend in with the 1930s ambiance of their surroundings. A cinema building, which the officials deemed aesthetically inappropriate due to too much tinted glass, turned into a brick-covered commercial hub, with patisseries, an international grocer, yoga studios, and a rooftop café. Another upgrading project transformed a ceramic tile-covered former danwei building from

ed an ice cream store, a café, and a burger joint: all opening onto the street, which instantly became an Instagram sensation. The renovation itself was done with a design confidence that would have been timid and hurried only a decade before. Conversions of former garden houses into ‘club houses [会馆],’ a reference to modern era establishments originally catering to people of elite backgrounds, also sped up since the heritage designation. Eclectic furniture, paintings, and collectibles from the 1930s were sold to line renovated historic houses. Shops also opened, marketing these antiques, some old and many newly produced. It was not only commercial upgrades that accompanied the heritage recognition. A memorial hall for the history of the World Primary School [世界小学]—reincarnated from its Communist-era name of Huaihai Lu N.2 School [淮海路第二小学] in 2008—was installed in 2011 to honor its alumni. The memorial to the coterie of cultural and business luminaries who graduated from the school, many of whom had emigrated in the 1950s, could be visited by their grandchildren returning from overseas, many of whom were also arriving to invest in the rapidly liberalizing China.5 On the site of the original World Primary School, the tourism ministry inserted the Wukang Lu Tourism Information Center [武康路旅游咨询中心] and the Xuhui District Old Houses Art Center [徐汇老房子艺术中心], finished in time to welcome the expected throng of tourists visit­ ing Shanghai for the Expo.6 Further down the street, the famous modern era Chinese writer Ba Jin [巴金]’s former home opened as a museum in 2011, 7 adding to the clique of exclusive residences on display in the vicinity. (Fig. 1) On a given weekend, local photography clubs could be found on Wukang Lu, its members capturing the ambiance of the platanus-lined street and the patina of the plaqued heritage buildings. Mandarin and English language tour groups stroll along, with guides pointing out the historic figures who once lived on the street. (Figs. 2, 3) Compared to the heavy-handed upgrade of the Duolun Lu Cultural Street [多伦路 文化街], an earlier Cultural Street established in the early 2000s, the conservation of

Chapter 3 The Cultural Street

the 1980s into an office building with a white stucco facade and black metal railings to recall the detailing of modern era buildings.4 The ground floor renovations creat-

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Figs. 2, 3 Visitors posing for photographs in front of one of the restored houses on Wukang Lu, left, 2013; and tour group gathered in front of a historic house on Wukang Lu, right, 2013

Wukang Lu bore a much lighter and subtler touch. It is the sense of authenticity that has also drawn the visitors and tourists to Wukang Lu.8 Whereas the previous chapter clarified the complexities of the ‘inhabitation’ part of the concept of ‘preservation via inhabitation,’ this chapter dissects, in the same historic neighborhood, the motivations for ‘preservation’ and the rise of the subsequent heritage projects. Together, the two chapters unpack the two sides of ‘preservation via inhabitation.’ Through the lens of heritage projects, this chapter also reveals the changing relationship between power and money under transition economy. In the shift from the market economy of pre-1949 to the planned economy of 1949–1980s, the ideological shift from market to planned economics also translated to a power shift from elites with capital to elites affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In the shift from the planned economy of 1949–1980s to the state-controlled market economy in the 1990s, even though ideologically continuous—the CCP remains the source of privilege and the state steers the market—new elites with capital, through access to power, join the old CCP elites. This revival of capital, with access to power, is manifested in the spatial productions described in this chapter. The heritage projects, deploying an ideology of identity and cultural preservation, not only shape niche markets for development. The heritage projects also form urban loopholes of alibis, giving the local state privileged access to real estate in the name of public good. The opportunities of the urban loopholes, however, also benefit the endogenous, or bottom-up, processes by entrepreneurs. The dynamic mechanisms have preserved a social diversity, albeit a shifting one, under rapid economic transition. Structured as a series of case examples, which unfold over time from the early 1980s, the following chapter traces the development of heritage as a concept and heritage as pragmatic implementation in relation to the commercialization of the city center’s historic architecture to meet a growing demand for heritage as commodity. Using the approximately one square kilometer area around Wukang Lu as a neighborhood-scaled 146

frame, the multiple cases of the chapter interrelate the complexity of agents and processes that have participated in the heritage preservation projects of the last two decades, culminating in the Cultural Street of Wukang Lu. In the changing equilibrium of the different agents—academics, planners, entrepreneurs, the state as arbiter of policy, and the state as privileged occupant—and their interests, the ‘preservation’ side of the concept, ‘preservation with inhabitation,’ (the overarching theme of this and the preceding chapter) has sustained the area’s socio-economic diversity. The first two sections of the chapter, “From First Recognitions of Architectural Heritage to Implementation” and “Setting the Context for Heritage Policy Implementation,” follow how the concepts of heritage recognition initially developed. The conceptual foundations for today’s conservation policies, 9 which culminate in the Cultural Street designation highlighting the state’s treatment of modern era heritage, only began taking form in the first decade after the Cultural Revolution in the early 1980s.10 Initial policies to safeguard modern era architecture and urban form could only be included under the rubric of CCP commemorations. Beginning in the late 1980s, a shift in the conceptualization of historic architecture emancipated academics from the prohibi-

interest in how the vestiges of city’s capitalist heyday remain embedded in daily life, despite decades of socialist suppression.11 Films by directors like Chen Kaige and Ang Lee, who were growing in international renown from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, fed the nostalgia for China’s modern era urban life. The growing acceptance of modern era heritage as important compelled conservation implementation, especially in the face of accelerating economic liberalization and development imperatives. Modern era relics, as well as the cultural habits they embodied, increasingly seemed to warrant conservation. Reacting to the massive demolition of Shanghai’s inner city fabric at the same time, scholars and planners lobbied for protecting the embedded cultural value of historic neighborhoods, citing Western cities as models to emulate in the conservation of these areas. In the midst of rapid urban renewal, a precipitous grasping of cultural capital’s currency also took place. As projects like Xintiandi [新天地] and Tianzifang [田子坊] began to gain recognition for their adaptive reuse of historic architecture,12 the commercial success, especially of Xintiandi, buoyed the heritage movement. Scholars and designers argued in the early 2000s that the protection of historic buildings not only safeguarded the loss of local identity in the face of rapid transformations, but also had the added benefit of attracting transnational talents, the human side of foreign direct investment. The imageability of conservation projects convinced the local governments of the broader financial returns reaped by such projects. The third and fourth sections unpack the endogenous, or bottom-up, processes of commercialization—initiated by the small entrepreneurs in the neighborhood around Wukang Lu—that took place around the same time as the Xintiandi and Tianzifang projects. The third section, “The Old House, and the Club house—Changing Market

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tive political ideologies that had reached their zenith during the Cultural Revolution with the fervor of destruction. Only then, a fundamental research of modern era architecture and urbanism as the physical manifestations of China’s modernity began. At the same time, economic liberalization and the opening of the country also brought a revival of public interest in the recent past. Books by local authors in the 1990s, recounting everyday lives in Shanghai from before 1949, fanned the growing popular

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Fig. 4 Newly constructed ‘club house’ in Lane 1754 off Wukang Lu, 2012

Supply and Demand,” sets the scene for how changing consumer demand reshaped the real estate market for ‘old houses [老房子]’ in the mid-2000s.13 The influx of overseas Chinese and expats who preferred the atmosphere of the historic neighborhood and its central location triggered a value chain of small entrepreneurs in the 2000s. As already described also in the previous chapter, the localized cosmopolitan entrepreneurs, with the optimal mix of local and expat know-how, but otherwise inefficient operators for large-scale developments, were the agile and flexible agents in the commercialization of the area. They capitalized on the growing heritage value of the buildings and tapped into their upgrade potentials. (Fig. 4) The section “Localized Cosmopolitans and the Developing of Le Passage Fuxing and Ferguson Lane” elaborates on how the localized cosmopolitans, expat and overseas Chinese entrepreneurs, took on opportunities offered by the existing urban loopholes, ranging from undervalued institutionally owned heritage architecture to historic buildings with fragmented ownerships. Despite setting out with little ideological grounding and being largely market-motivated, the bottom-up processes helped resolve the challenges of city center legacy conditions and conserve otherwise decaying historic buildings. Whereas bottom-up processes incrementally upgraded the neighborhood’s built environment, top-down developments, premised on heritage conservation, have, in effect, catalyzed and expedited commercialization. The fifth section “Conserving Heritage: Lane 1754 (aka 1768) and Lane 117” offers two cases of top-down heritage conservation projects, which partially answer the question of whose heritage is conserved and for whose benefits are the conservation efforts. The earlier case, the former Lane 1754, was rebuilt in the early 2000 as a conservation pilot project atop demolished historic homes. The compound houses some of the most important overseas Chinese returnee investors as well as some prominent members of China’s leadership. In Lane 117, a 148

rewriting of history since 1949 reinforces the amnesia deemed necessary for contemporary progress. Heritage conservation became the urban loophole that enabled, in the first case, land acquisition and residents’ relocation, resulting in the physical erasure of a historic compound, and in the second, the virtual erasure of the compound’s history. Both cases are entwined with the role of the state not only as arbiter of policy but also as privileged occupant. As a non-Shanghainese real estate agent promoting Wukang Lu enthused, “this was where the foreigners, the wealthy merchants and intellectuals once lived,” ascribing the street’s contemporary real estate value to the popular understanding of history today.14 Even though the prestigious cultural history of the street seems to have garnered its recognition and protection, what has preserved the street over the decades are the number of important party leaders who lived and live in the vicinity. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), high-ranking CCP elites lived next to the notable intellectuals in the neighborhood. One of Mao’s ex-wives, whose name the young real estate agent had difficulty recalling, lived in the house whose large

Plan’,” returns to the conservation plan’s development in the late 2000s, showing the increasingly fluid role academia as bureaucracy played in conservation implementation. The academics-cum-bureaucrats pushed heritage conservation to extend beyond the building to the scale of the neighborhood in the mid-2000s. The municipality designated approximately one-third of pre-1980s Shanghai, around 27 square kilometers, for conservation.16 Shanghai’s new motto, “building new is development, conserving and upgrading the old is also development [开发新建是发展，保护改造也是发展],” asserted the city’s rediscovered worldly sophistication in its recognition of cultural heritage.17 It was a marked departure from the heralding of “changes every year, transformations every three years [一年一个样，三年大变样],” imparted by Deng’s Southern Tour, only a decade earlier. The 1990s slogan had encouraged the fundamental urban restructuring in the first decade of accelerated economic liberalization, devoted to economic progress through sheer destruction and reconstruction. In contrast, the city’s 2000s slogan proclaimed the shift from hardnosed economic growth to an increasing emphasis on harnessing the city’s unique cultural appeal, part of a strategic turn to the value-added knowledge-based sectors. The opening of the World Expo in 2010 further compelled Shanghai to showcase itself as China’s trailblazer for heritage conservation. Shanghai’s 27 square kilometers of conserved city center area, compared to Beijing’s 13 square kilometers and Tianjin’s 9.5 square kilometers,18 demonstrated the city’s “historical approach to urban regeneration”19 to the world. Areas especially in the former French Concession’s ‘Western District [西区]’ that were largely spared developmental destruction, partly because the modernity of their architecture could still accommodate contemporary functions, and largely because of their occupation by old and new elites, became especially prized for their cultur-

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black gates hardly opened.15 Since economic liberalization, Wukang Lu is again where the new elites of today live, preferring the neighborhood’s modern era buildings and pedestrian-friendly streetscape. With soaring real estate prices, the state still retains half the street. It is, as the types of occupants in Lanes 1754 and 117 attest, the alliance between power and money converging on the heritage value of the neighborhood that sustains the mutual long-term benefits of both. The sixth section, “The “Western’ District and Learning from the ‘Beautification

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al value. It was on Wukang Lu that municipal-level planning policies for conservation were piloted, colliding with the entrepreneurial developments already underway. Academics, earlier critics of rash demolition and advocats for heritage conservation, would over time become increasingly enfolded into the bureaucratic structures of implementation. Their conceptual basis for heritage conservation, based on the historic research of urban planning administration, justified the demographic upgrade that conservation implementation inherently promotes. Policies drawn up create conditions for urban loopholes of exceptions, in favor of top-down interventions, should the need arise. The aftermath of the implementation of the Cultural Street is shown in the seventh section, “The World Primary School and the Small Entrepreneurs.” Since becoming a designated heritage area, the neighborhood around Wukang Lu has accelerated its commercialization. The coincidence of programmatic upgrade, specifically a commercialization catering to elite and transnational consumers, with the growing authority of the state in the conservation project, seems at once to be deliberate and choreographed. The local state has been increasingly interested in participating in the heritage reproduction-cum-commercialization industry by appropriating the instruments originally deployed by small entrepreneurs. Yet rifts between interest groups highlight the ad hoc nature of the changing urban spatial production, and the possibilities for countering the threat of homogenization under state hegemony.

From First Recognitions of Architectural Heritage to Implementation Since the founding of the PRC in 1949, the notion of heritage was antithetical to the Chinese political ideology, culminating in the Cultural Revolution’s fervor for the abolition of all reminders of the old, traditional, and capitalist ways. The consequences of this were particularly felt in Shanghai. For a city that had distilled imported ideas and forms from the West, reminders of Shanghai’s Concession era past, which dominated both the skyline and everyday life, were demonstrably detested after China’s ‘Liberation [解放]’ in 1949 by the CCP.20 Western-style buildings, stylistically ranging from neoclassical to Tudor, represented the lingering habits of a city that rose to prominence as a global special economic zone of its time, its commercial growth having fed on the frailties of a declining China.21 The buildings along the Bund [外滩], in particular, the riverfront financial district that had been the Asian base for numerous multinational banks, trading houses, insurance companies, and press clubs, were especially considered the scourge of China’s foreign domination. (Fig. 5) It did not help that the locational proximity to the wharf carried memories of the opium trade, which first propelled the city to flourish while its products were attributed to the fall of the weakening nation. After 1949, the central government funneled revenues to Beijing, redistributing the bulk of Shanghai’s earnings for inland development, while deliberately neglecting infrastructural investment and housing construction in Shanghai.22 After the foreign owners and tenants of the Bund were purged from the country in 1949, plans for the demolition of the buildings were tabled by the early 1950s. Had it 150

Fig. 5 Elevation of the Bund

not been for the lack of capital to finance new construction, the representative architecture of the Bund would have been destroyed in its entirety. It was only because of post-war shortages in resources and space, which made new construction unfeasible, that the Bund buildings remained. The reuse of the old buildings was unavoidable, if ideologically defective. The municipal bureaucracy, state institutions, and state-owned enterprises divvied up some of the buildings. The former HSBC building, for example, became home to the Shanghai municipal government and the CCP committee. Commercial use, for which the buildings were designed, dwindled under the implementation of the centrally planned economy. Buildings originally built for non-residential purposes also were used to house the overcrowded urban population. While commercial buildings were filled with residents in Shanghai’s modern era business district, government institutions took over and transformed selected residential buildings in the western end of the former Concessions to serve as their office spaces. The takeovers were interspersed between largely residential neighborhoods, often in buildings abandoned by former residents in the mass exodus before 1949. The turmoil of the 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, rendered further chaos to these and surrounding residential buildings, degrading much of the already overcrowded and over-strained existing structures.23 It was only at the end of the 1970s, with the death of China’s political leader Mao Zedong and the end of the Cultural Revolution, that a resumption of construction brought relief to Shanghai families who had the

tecture and urban fabric was made, and if there were private sentiments valuing the large number of modern era buildings, none were or could be publicly expressed. For one, in the decades of political purges and exiles, no one had the time to think about architecture and its representations. When normality resumed, no one dared yet to mention artifacts that remained from Shanghai’s tainted past. A tourist map from the early 1980s highlighted places like the traditional Yu Garden at the center of the Chinese walled city, the zoo, and the parks, but no mention of the Bund or the residential architecture of the former Concessions was made.24 Only slowly would the cultural relevance of Shanghai’s historic legacy, represented by its modern era building stock, return to the forefront. In 1982, the Chinese government’s chief administrative body State Council [国务院] listed the first 24 cities in China to be considered Renowned National Historic Cultural Cities [国家历史文化名城].25 The motivation behind the creation of this list came from the im-

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privilege of moving to what little new housing was being erected. Until the 1970s, little if any public acknowledgment of the Concession-era archi-

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mense destruction to irreplaceable historic artifacts that took place during the Cultural Revolution, which ravaged the country between 1967 and 1976. Most of the first batch of cities to be chosen have been important in China’s long pre-modern histories. Shanghai, which became important only since the mid-1800s, was not included in this list. When, in 1984, the municipal Department for Culture [文化部] together with the Department of Urban and Rural Development and Environment Protection [城乡建设环境保护部] applied to the State Council for Shanghai to be included in the second batch of cities to be chosen, the applicants argued that the city bore great meaning for the proletarian revolution. Not only was the CCP founded in Shanghai, both the second and fourth CCP summits were held in the city. Shanghai also gave rise to other revolutionary events such as the Small Swords Society Uprisings [小刀会起义] of 1853 and the May Fourth Movement [五四运动] of 1919, all of which were crucial precursors to the great proletariat revolution that brought ‘Liberation’ to the nation.26 Even though Shanghai was historically insignificant before the mid-1800s, Shanghai’s claim for its modern era contributions to the nation’s grand narrative succeeded. In 1986, the State Council approved the listing of the municipality of Shanghai as one of the Renowned National Historic Cultural Cities, including it in the roster of the 38 new cities approved for the second batch.27 The year before, in 1985, when a new thoroughfare along the Bund was under construction, the effort made to preserve a former guild hall built by Fuzhou merchants, physically shifting the Sanshan Guild Hall [三山会馆] 30 meters to make space for the new road, was remarkable for its time.28 The building was the location of one of the first proletarian uprisings against capitalist oppressors. Its bloody putdown represented the proletarian values’ struggle against imperial oppression.29 Because the 1909 constructed traditional house held a sacred place in the history of CCP, it was inducted as one of Shanghai’s municipal-level ’protected cultural relics [文物保护单位]’ in May 1959 for being a monument from China’s revolutionary history.30 In 1989, it became listed as a site of revolutionary significance. It was clear that, not too distant from the Cultural Revolution and still nascent in the transition to market economics, the ideological basis for sites chosen as worthy of protection remained strongly linked to politics. Sites of political significance remained protected, even in the face of infrastructure construction that would form the basis of economic development. In October 1986, a conference on the research of Chinese modern era architectural history was held in Beijing, initiating an annual meeting of architectural historians from all over the country.31 A report written the year before by academics to the leadership at Qinghua University [清华大学], the nation’s premiere academic institution, known also as the training ground for party leadership, had implored that, “for the development of Chinese modern architecture today, for Chinese architecture’s future [为了中国现代建筑今天的发展，为了中国建筑的未来]” further research must be done to “correctly know and value the history of Chinese modern era architecture [正确认识和评 价中国近代建筑的历史].”32 With these proclamations, a resurgence of intellectual attention to the recent historic legacies of the built environment was gaining momentum. Beyond academia, a revived interest in the legacy of pre-1949 Chinese history was also starting to take shape. In the mid-1980s, media from Hong Kong, which was a British colony, had an important impact on turning the popular gaze back onto pre-Liberation history, particularly in places like Shanghai that represented the heyday of the 152

Figs. 6, 7 TV show Shanghai Tan [上海滩], left; and the historic image of Bund, right

mainland China: the first television sets were imported in the early 1980s. For the until-then insulated Chinese audience, the then still single channel television programming opened up to a new way to look at the world.33 Those who first had access to this new medium, who were often coastal urbanites with overseas Chinese relatives who could use their foreign currency to buy amenities—televisions, washing machines, refrigerators, and the like—were presented television dramas and historic soap operas that showed a decadent and entertaining side to the past that had been censured since the inception of the nation.34 In 1983, the first imported television serial to China, Huo Yuanjia [霍元甲], produced in Hong Kong and centering on the story of the patriotic martial arts hero from the turn of the 20th century, screened and became wildly popular. Two years later, another period drama Shanghai Tan [上海滩], starring the Hong Kong star Chow Yun-fat, took place in the action-filled and decadent gangster world of pre-1949 Shanghai. (Figs. 6, 7) Even though the setting was unrecognizable to those from the city itself, and the story line had less to do with the specificities of Shanghai than the diaspora’s projections of the city’s past, the serial nevertheless caused a stir. In contrast to the CCP depictions of the pre-1949 capitalist metropolis that needed sanitizing, these dramatized narratives of ‘old Shanghai [老上海]’—a term often used synonymously for pre-1949s Shanghai—carried a different moral, showing the city again as a space of consumption and source of local identity.35 Whether influenced by the return of pop culture or not, on 10 November 1988, nevertheless, the Department of National Development [国家建设部] and the Ministry of National Cultural Relics [国家文物局] jointly issued a document the Notice regarding Key Investigations into Protecting Excellent Modern Era Building [关于重点调查保护 优秀近代建筑物的通知] that crucially defined buildings built between 1840 and 1949 as heritage.36 Under this national directive, cities all over the country began to look into their modern era buildings to recommend them to be listed as national-level cultural relics [文物].37 Shanghai would lead in the research. In December of the same year, the prominent architecture and literary historian Chen Congzhou [陈从周] published the book History Of Shanghai Modern Era Architecture Manuscript [上海近代建筑史稿].38 The project of

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modern era. The effect of mass media also needs to be contextualized in the socio-economic transformations taking place at the beginning of economic liberalization in

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researching Shanghai’s modern era architecture had begun three decades earlier, in 1958, at the request of the central government’s Construction Ministry [建筑工程部] and the Institute for Architecture Research [建筑科学研究院]. The original purpose for the research was to contribute to a comprehensive compendium of Chinese architectural history consisting of three parts, including pre-modern history [古代史], modern era history [近代史], and the outcomes of the decade since the founding of the PRC [建筑十年成就]. The compendium would have been completed, had it not been disrupted by the Cultural Revolution.39 Organized by architectural type and largely a catalogue of modern era buildings, Chen’s book was the first documentation of built works from Shanghai. The book was clearly the product of much effort over numerous years, in its gathering of historical photos and building plans, some of which had already been demolished by the time the book was published. The importance of such a project seems self-evident today. But at the time of its publication, the author only made a brief comment about the reason for the research and the book’s relevance in the book’s preface, by giving an anecdote about the 1985 visit of the world-famous Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei [贝聿铭].40 Chen recalled Pei’s arrival, with four French cameramen in tow, in the city where he grew up, visiting many places that had already changed or disappeared since his time.41 On finding out that Chen was putting together this book on Shanghai’s modern era architecture, Pei applauded the endeavor as “infilling a big void in the history of Chinese architecture [为中国建筑史不上了大空白].”42 The exchange, as Chen recounted, “motivated us to have the courage to bring this volume to the readers [促使我们有了勇气将它与读者见面].”43 It is imaginable and understandable that older scholars such as Chen, emerging out of the academic purging of the decades before, would have been very careful in their pronouncements of the relevance of their works. Especially given the pejorative representation of Shanghai’s modern era and Western-influenced architectural repertoire in the ideological narration of China’s modern history, the subtlety and indirectness of the preface, together with the absence of a broader contextualization of the typologies as emerging out of Shanghai’s industrialization, was astute. Content-wise though, the building types used to organize the book: public, industrial, and residential architecture, and their subcategories—public architecture, administrative offices, banks, department stores, hotels, churches, schools, museums, hospitals, sports buildings, and transportation and communications buildings—showcase modernity’s architectural manifestations. On the one hand, the editors had to be careful to be not too candid about presenting the modern, and thus Western-influenced, architecture. On the other hand, the very organization of building types for the book reflected a functional organization that came from the history of modern architecture. Compared to the modest subtlety of the renowned Chinese senior scholar’s carefully written preface, an article written by a young PhD student by the name of Wu Jiang [伍江] articulated more clearly and ambitiously the study of Shanghai’s modern era architecture’s contemporary significance and relevance. The article, entitled “Looking at Shanghai Bund’s Architecture through Context and Identity [从关联性与可识别性 看上海外滩建筑],” written under the supervision of the architecture historian Luo Xiaowei [罗小未], also from Tongji University [同济大学], declared the importance of the study of Shanghai’s modern era architecture: “studying the architecture of the Bund, regardless if it is for research of China’s modern history, for the excavation and 154

protection of Shanghai’s modern era architectural heritage, or for the formulation of Shanghai’s urban development strategies, holds a certain significance.”44 A summary of his master’s thesis, the article intimated a growing framework for the research of historic buildings, the assessment of their contemporary values and their potentials for future urban developments. The clarity of the relationship between the past and the future could not be missed, even if the consequential link was yet to be clearly established. It would be a decade later that Wu’s work as a bureaucrat, administrator, and academic would put the nascent conceptual framework for the historic study of modern era architecture into practice. After a vacuum of nearly three decades, the revival of research and documentation of the city’s modern era architecture was also complemented by increasing cultural and academic exchange, especially with scholars from Japan starting in the early 1980s, and then with those from Western Europe and North America. In the 1980s, Japanese scholars, such as Shin Muramatsu [村松伸] from Tokyo University, introduced, for the first time to China, the outside world’s interest in China’s modern era architecture. His dissertation, originally entitled History of Chinese Modern Era Architecture [中国近代建筑史], brought him as visiting scholar to Qinghua University for more than two years between 1981 and 1983.45 His and other Japanese scholars’ participation in the ongoing discourse on the growing importance of research on modern era architecture in China also brought first-hand experience about how to conceptualize the influence of Western architecture and hybrid architecture in the national discourses of East Asian identity.46 From 1987 to 1988, Jeffrey W. Cody from Cornell University came to Shanghai for his fieldwork research on the architecture of American architect Henry K. Murphy, who worked extensively in Shanghai between 1914 and 1935.47 Ensuing scholars from the West—often the small number of foreigners fluent in Mandarin at the time— researched foreign architects’ influence on the building of Shanghai in the early 1900s.48 The exchanges, especially with scholars addressing similar ideological issues including whether the ‘modern’ is necessarily ‘Western’ in the cities of East Asia and the effects of hybridization of Western and East Asian elements in architecture and culture,49 introduced conceptual frameworks and a cultural sensibility to the eager

ern Era Architecture [优秀近代建筑]’ requiring protection and conservation was made in 1988. The selection list was influenced by the combination of the central government-issued Notice Regarding Key Investigations into Protecting Excellent Modern Era Building for modern era architecture research in 1988, the growing number of academic publications concerning modern era architecture, and an expert panel convened at the beginning of 1989, including the well-respected Western-trained architect Ben Chen [陈植] and Professor Luo of Tongji.51 At the urban scale, the Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau, together with the Urban Planning Department at Tongji University and the Cultural Relics Department at the Shanghai Museum, initiated the Conservation Plan for Shanghai Historic Cultural

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local scholars of an opening China. The small academic network also provided important feedback to the work of the Shanghai researchers, especially in the context of the economic liberalization that was reviving the interest in old commercial as well cultural linkages.50 At the architectural scale, a proposal for a first selection list of ‘Excellent Mod-

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Fig. 8 The Conservation Plan for Shanghai Historic Cultural Renowned City [上海市历史文化名城保护规划], 1991

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Renowned City [上海市历史文化名城保护规划] in 1991. The drawings of the Conservation Plan set forth eleven areas deemed important for further conservation efforts. These were submitted to the municipal government in the beginning of 1992. (Fig. 8) The areas around the Bund and the old Chinese city were further given to Tongji University to be developed into detailed control plans. In December 1991, the Shanghai municipal government issued the Measures for the Conservation and Management of Shanghai’s Excellent Modern Era Architecture [上海市 优秀近代建筑保护管理办法], China’s first decree by a local government on the conservation of modern era architecture.52 Defining what qualified as ‘Excellent Modern Era Architecture’ included the basic criteria of the building’s architectural historical value, its artistic value, or its scientific and technical value. The capacity for reflecting Shanghai’s character was also important for the valuation.53 The Measures of Conservation and Management also defined the shared responsibility of the planning, the real estate and the cultural management agencies of the municipality to implement conservation. The Cultural Management Bureau would be responsible for the two classes of architecture: the national-level Cultural Relics [国家重点文物], and the municipal-level Cultural Relics [市级文物]. The Real Estate Bureau would be responsible for the third class of architecture considered “Conserved Architecture [保护建筑].” The Planning Bureau would be responsible for the planning of the conservation.54 In addition to restricting physical changes to façades as well as the interior of the buildings, the regulation also stipulated that changes in building function must undergo approval by the respective responsible bureau.55 In 1991, 61 units were named Excellent Modern Era Architecture. On 1 January 1992, the Measures were implemented. In 1999, 176 more units were named as Excellent Modern Era Architecture, and 162 in 2000. Despite the growing number of buildings undergoing gazetting, rapid economic

many old buildings in Shanghai, gone through the tribulations of Japanese occupation, the Chinese Civil War as well as the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.57 More than a dozen families subdivided the bays of the house with three courtyards, which was originally built for one multi-generation family. The hybridity of the architectural elements, a mix of Western and local motifs in the residence, nevertheless, had impressed the scholars who were studying the building as part of their fieldwork on modern era architectural heritage.58 The building, despite its unique representation of Shanghai’s cultural fusion, was not on the gazetted list. Located in the middle of Lujiazui’s financial district, the area around the Chen Residence was planned for development, and demolition was already underway when the academics arrived on the scene in response to the residents’ call for help.59 Authorities

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development was propelling urban restructuring. Shanghai’s designation as the ‘Dragon’s Head’ in 1992 was followed by the accelerated development of Pudong’s Lujiazui [陆家嘴] Financial District. As the push came to complete the first subway line, relocation of existing residents took place on a massive scale in Pudong to clear land for development.56 At the time Wu Jiang, under Luo Xiaowei, was continuing his research of Shanghai’s modern era architecture for his dissertation. Local residents contacted the lecturers at Tongji and told them of the impending demolition of a large multi-courtyard house that was known as the former Chen Residence [陈宅], named after its former owner, a merchant by the name of Chen Guichun [陈桂春]. With red and grey brick construction, the compound was finished in the late 1910s, and by the 1990s, it had, like

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in the early 1990s were eager to jump on the bandwagon of economic development, pronounced at last for the long economically suppressed Shanghai. The old residences, falling apart, represented precisely the kind of backwardness that came with the imposed poverty of an isolated economy. Few had an inkling of the kind of cultural and ideological value that would, only half a decade later, come to be attached to historic buildings. Even fewer in the position of authority could halt the advancement of developmental progress, which was represented by the impending new construction. With little to resort to except personal connections, the academics at the university contacted friends in the media in the effort to stop the Chen Residence’s demolition. One of the senior academics in the group, known for his studies of vernacular architecture, Lu Bingjie [路秉杰], voiced his concerns about the destruction to the local newspapers. But it was coverage on the evening program News Perspective [新闻透视], a popular and influential television show that combined culturally oriented newscast with local commentary, which left an impression.60 The show put on view Wu and colleagues confronting an advancing bulldozer, dramatically halting its onslaught in the midst of crumbling rubble from the one-third of the compound around one courtyard already demolished.61 The activism of the academics in reaching the public through the media worked. The destruction of the former Chen Residence stopped. The remaining bays of the courtyard house were saved. In 1994, the Oriental Pearl Radio & TV Tower, regarded today as the icon for Shanghai, was completed. It is situated a block northwest from the remaining parts of the former Chen residence. The Residence, also poetically named the “Little House of Yingchuan [颖川小筑],” after the origin of one of the largest of the Chen clans, was also renovated, at the cost of more than one million R MB .62 Three years later, in 1997, the Little House of Yingchuan officially re-opened as the Lujiazui Development Exhibition Hall [陆家嘴开发陈列室]. In 2010, the structure became the memorial to the modern era artist Wu Changshuo [吳昌碩]. The one-story house nestled amidst the growing stock of commercial high-rises is today displayed as an exemplary of the hybrid-style vernacular architecture of the region around Shanghai.63 Through the dramatic event of saving the historic building, the academics stood out as members of intelligentsia resisting the economic imperatives for development. As poster children for the conservation cause, the success of their antics not only became the stuff of urban legends, but also showed a way that pragmatic alternatives, rather than protest alone, affected success. The boycotting of the demolition site in Lujiazui and the public outcry it generated brought the Administration for Cultural Relics to the academics. The Administration asked the scholars for proposals for conservation.64 From two scenarios offered by the academics, one of which required the integration of the historic building in the ensuing building development, the Pudong district authorities made the decision to convert the historic buildings into a memorial,65 marking a significant turning point for the confrontation between development and conservation. The plot occupied by the Chen Residence would also, by 1998, be designated as a green space according to the masterplan for the Lujiazui Financial District.66 The saving of the Chen Residence is often referenced as the pioneer moment in the tussle to affect change in both the understanding of architectural heritage and the implementation of conservation in Shanghai.67 It was the first move towards reconciling 158

what Alois Riegl, the art and architecture historian who first dissected the modern “cult of the monument,” set out as the contradictory values of “use value [Gebrauchswert]” and “historical value [historisches Wert] in heritage conservation.”68 The recouping of the Chen Residence’s ‘historical value’ through its reuse as a public building generated the building’s contemporary ‘use value,’ and made possible its survival under developmentalist pressures. In 1997, Wu Jiang’s dissertation, entitled A History of Shanghai’s Century of Architecture 1840–1949 [上海百年建筑史 1840–1949], would be published as a book. Chen Congzhou’s earlier History of Shanghai Modern Era Architecture Manuscript catalogued Shanghai’s buildings. In contrast, Wu’s book, in “trying to enter from political, economic, social and cultural aspects of the city [试图从政治，经济，社会，文化等方面入手],”69 located the architecture and urban development in the context of the larger development of Shanghai’s urban culture. With economic and demographic statistics, as well as historical narratives integrated to form a more holistic image of Shanghai’s spatial formation, it was not a neutral study of styles and materials, as previous volumes had largely and timidly been. The book posited that cultural exchanges and socio-economic flows also informed the resultant spatial products. Through analysis of the city’s spatial formation, the book also analyzed and clarified China’s modernization process and cultural evolution.70 The role of design and space thus were thrust into the limelight in order to better understand the historic and contemporary developments of the city, and, on a larger scale, of the country at large. In 1997, the Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau would also, after six years of development, publish the Conservation Plan for Renowned Historic Cultural City Shanghai [上海市历史文化名城保护规划]. Even though the small contingent of academics managed to save the remnants of one small residential compound in Pudong, and helped draw up plans for Shanghai’s modern era architectural heritage, larger swaths of city center districts continued undergoing rapid demolition and redevelopment. Fueled by fiscal decentralization and the marketization of land and housing, and to expedite the clearance of what was determined in 1992 to be the 365 hectares of inadequate housing,

projects that were antithetical to the heritage conservation efforts. Already, when the Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau was drawing up the 1991 Conservation Measures, the State Council issued a Document 78,72 which according to one scathing critique, “inaugurated China’s era of demolition and relocation [自此开创了中国的拆迁时代].”73 Land leases signed in the mid-1990s, when prices were deemed low, were further encouraged with policy incentives for the district governments.74 The seeming incongruence of policies issued simultaneously showed the inadvertent inconsistencies and internal contradictions resulting from rapid transition. Only the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis slowed the until-then growing foreign investment, halting the cash inflow that had largely come from diaspora business networks, which invested in real estate

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the “365 Plan,” as the project was colloquially known,71 would execute demolition, relocation and construction on an unprecedented scale, and with unprecedented speed. The same municipality overseeing the rolling out of the 1997 Conservation Plan was simultaneously incentivizing demolition and redevelopment projects en masse. The devolution of authority to the district governments had forced them to grapple with their new fiscal autonomy. Land leases for large-scale real estate development, as means to secure fiscal autonomy, encouraged the demolition and redevelopment

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developments. The economic slowdown only allowed the larger developers, who had already procured themselves land leases, to bide their time until the market picked up again. Nevertheless, protecting modern era architecture was also taking on increasingly developmentalist approaches. Saving the former Chen Residence in order to reuse it as an exhibition space served as a lesson. Ensuing projects tried to test how historic architecture could also take on contemporary uses, reconciling the Rieglian ‘use value’ and ‘historic value,’ and making their preservation economically feasible. In 1998, under the auspices of the then deputy secretary of the Shanghai CCP, Duolun Lu in the Hongkou District, with its more than two dozen homes that once belonged to renowned Shanghailanders between the 1930s and 1940s, was established as the first pilot for a ‘Street of Cultural Prominents [文化名人街].’75 As the surrounding areas were being swiftly razed, Duolun Lu’s upgrade only further disassociated the street from the kind of authenticity that the restoration project was trying to evoke. The Shanghai municipal party secretary intended for the ‘Street of Cultural Prominents’ to enhance urban tourism.76 The resurfacing of the pedestrian street with cobblestone and the installation of bronze sculptures of famous former residents dressed in 1930s robes transformed the residential neighborhood into a leisure destination. The commercialization of the ground floor spaces catered to impending tourists, selling knickknacks and souvenirs. The insertion of calligraphy shops, antique stores and a cinema specializing in modern era films, starkly contrasted to and alienated the residents who remained in the overcrowded historic lilong housing that served as the backdrop to this Cultural Street. A study of the area by a Tongji University team under Luo made recommendations for the area’s conservation, and proposed a zone of intensified new developments that integrated with the neighborhood’s historic character.77 During the study, issues arose regarding how to define buildings as worthy of conservation.78 The discrepancy between new built volumes that the academics proposed and what the District officials saw as needed, together with the difficulty of relocating residents, resulted in a new detailed plan that largely overrode the more incremental and smaller-scaled developments proposed by the academic team.79 (Figs. 9, 10) As an article from 2011 continued to lament, limited funding could only be spent on a street-front upgrade and could not intervene in the multi-tenanted lilong structures that were also part of the heritage ensemble, causing the high-end cultural heritage to be mixed with slum dwellings.80 Despite additional investments by a private developer a few years later, the legacy conditions where slum dwellings existed precisely inside the cultural objects to be protected persisted in hindering the planned success of the enterprise.81 The committee commissioned to research the upgrade of Duolun Lu also included Zheng Shiling [郑时龄], the architectural historian, and then Vice President of Tongji University. One year after the implementation of Duolun Lu Cultural Street, he published the 400-some page tome, Shanghai Modern Era Architecture Style [上海近代建筑风格], in 1999.82 The book further reinforced the growing prominence of modern era historic architecture, as well as the nascent understanding of heritage’s value to tourism. With a foreword by Luo and a chapter written by Wu Jiang, the book was an expansive volume with plans and photos of Shanghai’s modern era architecture contextualized in the historic development of the city. 160

Figs. 9, 10 Proposed concept plan by the Tongji researchers for Duolun Lu, left; and concept plan by the District authorities, right

menting conservation measures. At the end of 1999, the municipality approved the The Shanghai City Center Historic Style and Features Conservation Plan (for Historic Architecture and Neighborhoods) [上海市 中心区历史风貌保护规划（历史建筑与街区）], drawn up by the Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau. The plan determined 234 sub-neighborhoods, 440 historic architectural ensembles and some 10 million square meters of protected architecture. It was the first time that the word, pronounced fengmao [风貌], was presented. Fengmao is a difficult to translate word that is a shortened form of the two words ‘fengge [风格],’ or ‘fengcai [风采],’ meaning ‘style,’ and ‘mianmao [面貌],’ or ‘rongmao [容貌],’ meaning ‘feature.’84 Literally translated, ‘fengmao’ means ‘stylistic form.’85 It is a word used in historic literature from the earlier dynasties describing the essence or vibe given off by the appearance of a person. More recently, it is used also to describe the ambiance given off by the built environment. The physicality of a building, in its materiality and massing, lends itself to the kind of character of a space. Together with the word ‘history [历史],’

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In March 1999, the research branch of the Shanghai Municipal Planning Institute completed the document The Basic Research on the Relationship of Conservation and Development in Shanghai Historic Cultural Prominent City [上海市历史文化名城保护与发展关 系基础研究].83 This document set forth the conflicts between developmental impulse and that for conservation planning, and outlined the institutional means for imple-

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‘historic fengmao [历史风貌],’ would become the object of pursuit for conservation proponents.86 More than anything, it is the appearance that is prioritized in the quest for this historical fengmao. With the ensuing developments, the importance of emphasizing the outward appearance of the historic fengmao, rather than the often messy and difficult interior contents would prevail. Especially in the impending conflict between development— urban restructuring was fundamental to successful economic liberalization—and conservation, between new and old, the economic viability and profitability of heritage conservation would be relegated to that of the fengmao. Not only would fengmao be essential to the contemporary reconstruction and re-narration of the selected ideals of history, but its conservation would create urban loopholes of exceptions, feeding well into niche new development projects.

Setting the Context for Heritage Policy Implementation When the “365 Plan” was completed in 2000, vast swaths of Shanghai’s urban center, totaling 365 hectares, were cleared. Twenty-seven million square meters of old housing—graded two or below for being substandard according to the “365 Plan”—was demolished and 640,000 households were relocated.87 One billion square meters of new housing was constructed. As the clearance of old urban fabric accelerated, heritage advocates also became more vocal. The very notion of heritage as important to Shanghai’s cultural identity was also gaining traction through the popular media. In 1998, a book Shanghai Memorabilia, which would be literally translated into “Shanghai’s Wind, Flowers, Snow, and Moon [上海的风花雪月],” by the author Chen Danyan [陈丹燕], came out.88 The collection of essays reimagined the lives of Shanghai’s famous cultural personalities from the modern era, and intertwined their stories with the author’s personal memories of the places they frequented, set to the ambiance of the decaying modern era architecture. Through the lens of the city’s re-opening in the 1990s, they reflected on Shanghai’s modern era heyday.89 Two years later another book by Chen, Shanghai Beauty [上海的红颜遗事], also came out.90 The book was set in the few blocks within walking radius of Wukang Lu and was centered on the disintegration of life during the Cultural Revolution for its title character, an unfortunate progeny of the pre-1949 elite. Although largely fictional, Chen described a pre-1949 life of freedom and glamour that contrasted to a punishingly ascetic one from the late 1960s, magnifying the story’s tragic ending. In both books, transformations of the city and its spaces were as much part of the narrative as the socio-economic changes that took place. Set against the urban demolitions that were rapidly erasing the places in the city, Chen’s writings in the ensuing years would come to mark her as a “pursuer of Shanghai’s memories [上海记忆的追寻者],”91 leading a trend of nostalgia literature that began to pour out of Shanghai in the early 2000s. Writers like Wang Anyi [王安忆] and Cheng Naishan [程乃姗], who conjured up stories set in the historic city center neighborhoods, became extremely popular.92 The role of the built environment, in the intricacies of 162

Fig. 11 Iconic shot of the commercial success of Xintiandi as development, 2013

the spaces and the finesse of details, not only served as the backdrop to reminisces of a bygone past, but also reminded their contemporary audience of the possibilities of a renaissance. A growing popular awareness of the rapidly disappearing historic built fabric’s cultural value and the appreciation for its modern era identity coincided with the realization of a project called Xintiandi [新天地] that opened in 2001. Its name literally translated to ‘New Heaven and Earth,’ Xintiandi is a redevelopment of a shikumen lilong housing area into a high-end commercial and entertainment hub.93 It is part of the larger Taipingqiao [太平桥] Area development that the Hong Kong development

tion of designers and tenants, and the capital investment made, both to design and curation, made the Xintiandi development fundamentally different from that of the resource-poor and curation-inexperienced project of the Duolun Lu project. In Xintiandi, fashion stores like Shanghai Tang peddled revivalist looks that not only drew on the fashion of old Shanghai, but amplified its evocation of an exotic Orient.95 Shanghai Tang has the same name as the 1980s Hong Kong T V serial, which was set in 1920s Shanghai and disseminated in the diaspora Chinese communities of Southeast Asia, showcasing the decadence of Shanghai’s historic modern era. The first Starbucks and Paulaner Brewhouses also clustered into Xintiandi’s grey brick shikumen houses, which had been gutted of their interiors and their facades reconstructed. (Fig. 11) Spatial provision met the growing demands of an increasingly internationalizing Shanghai. Transnational workers and increasingly affluent locals, who demanded spaces of

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company Shui On [瑞安] undertook. Its financial and popular success made it a prominent precedent for ensuing developments that reused historical residential buildings for commercial programming.94 Xintiandi’s development model not only ensured the physical survival of historic architecture that was otherwise outdated in its contemporary use. The project also repackaged just the kinds of ambiances, which authors like Chen, Wang, and their fellow “pursuers of Shanghai’s memories” touted in their outpours on Shanghai’s cosmopolitan past. The Xintiandi project refurbished precisely the vernacular buildings, whose red and grey brick patina set the tone for Shanghai’s “Wind, Flower, Snow, and Moon,” and which would yield their still under-evaluated commercial value. The international know-how that the Xintiandi developer engaged, in the selec-

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consumption that did not exist before, saw, in the charm of the newly conserved historic architecture, a kind of redemption for economic transition and modernization’s rapid destruction of large parts of the city. As sociologist Ren Xuefei wrote in her analysis of Xintiandi: “when cities become more homogeneous with global flows, local cultural differences become rare commodities sought after by mobile global consumerist elites.”96 Before the Xintiandi project by the then little-known Hong Kong developer Shui On, most local investors chose to capitalize in new districts, where enviably large tabula rasa sites were slated for exponential growth. With the slowdown of international investment in the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, Shui On’s development strategy for its large area of leased land shifted from developing high-end housing to developing a first-phase showcase project. Redeveloping historic buildings with commercial programs became this showcase project.97 The vision of the American architect engaged, Ben Wood, who had worked on the Faneuil Hall project in Boston, was attributed to the innovation of rethinking existing development modes and capitalizing on the yet untapped commercial potential of shikumen houses.98 But it was the enterprising foresight of the developer Shui On, and the openness of the Luwan [卢湾] district government that leased the land for development, which came together to realize the conversion project. Xintiandi brought the limelight back to the former Concession territories in Shanghai’s city center, and drew attention to the run-down, over-crowded, and to-be-demolished historic urban fabric. The Xintiandi success in Shanghai soon spurred on a Xintiandi trend in cities in the nation. City governments in China continue to request the conversion of historic buildings into elite commercial districts in the Xintiandi mode. A 2001 article by Wu Jiang, by then deputy dean at the school of architecture at Tongji University for three years, commended the development of Xintiandi as an example for modernization without the loss of historic context and identity.99 Linking the use of historic architecture in Xintiandi to the acclaim garnered for the saving of the Chen Residence, the injection of new functions into old architecture as a new mode of development for old neighborhoods was praised as a successful realization of reuse of historic buildings.100 Luo Xiaowei’s book, Shanghai Xintiandi: a Study of the Architectural History, Socio-cultural History and Development Mode of an Urban Upgrade [上海新天地 旧区改造的建筑历史、人文历史与开发模式的研究 ], published in 2002 would hail the Xintiandi development as the model for heritage conservation.101 As the authoritative voice of Luo concluded, “from the perspective of conserving fengmao, Xintiandi is successful [从风貌保护来说，新天地广场是成功的].”102 Fengmao, exemplified by the Xintiandi conservation, was confirmed by an expert to be the exterior form. Fengmao thus also became a concept that could be used to displace the original occupants in order to save valued architectural form. The expert lauding of Xintiandi solidified the academic stance that successful conservation projects had to be economically viable as well as aesthetically appropriate. The conservation of physical structures, even if at the cost of socio-economic content, was the priority in the era of rapid demolition. A prominent proponent of conservation and also professor at Tongji University, Ruan Yisan [阮仪三], reinforced this framework for heritage conservation.103 He emphasized heritage conservation’s significance to the Shanghai’s rising international status, and made explicit that the investment cap164

Figs. 12, 13, 14 Plaques for heritage recognition, as given by the municipality, left; the District’s cultural bureau, center and right

ital, which the conserved area could generate, was an embedded resource in the context of rapid economic development.104 In the Xintiandi development, it is notable that Tongji University’s Design Institute was a key partner. Through the process from design to construction the participants from the university-affiliated practice would gain a lot of the know-how for the execution of conservation from the foreign partners involved.105 The exchange, between academia and practice, between concept and implementation, would continue to evolve. A book by Beijing journalist Wang Jun [王军], Beijing Record, which has the title of “City Record [城记]” in Chinese, further intoned a necessary intervention in the built environment for economic development of the early 2000s in China.106 The New York Review of Books critic, Ian Johnson, compared Beijing Record’s depiction of the violence caused by the destruction and renewal of the Chinese cities since 1949, to America urbanist Jane Jacobs’ seminal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities,107 in critiquing the prevalent mode of development. Beijing Record was extremely popular with Chinese urbanites who were, at the moment of publication, encountering the very demolition-and-reconstruction projects described by the book, expedited by economic liberalization. The book’s extensive interviews with experts, who offered commentary on and evidence of the demolition processes, interspersed within a collation of his-

October 2002, the central government issued a law protecting ‘Untouchable Cultural Relics [不可移动文物].’109 Of these, 635 were from Shanghai. (Figs. 12, 13, 14) In February 2003, Professor Wu became the deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Urban Planning Bureau. It would be under Wu, whose earlier research surveyed and recorded much of the city’s modern era architecture, that the Shanghai municipal government approved the Regulations of the Shanghai Municipality on the Conservation of the Districts with Historical Cultural Fengmao and Excellent Historical Architecture [上海市历史文化风 貌区和优秀历史建筑保护条例] and implemented it beginning of 2003.110 Before the 2003 Regulations, preservation of what was deemed to be valuable and important historic architecture and spaces lacked legal basis.111 The 2003 Regulations,

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toric documents from the archives, formed an accessible narrative of the historic and contemporary conflicts for “Preservation versus Demolition,” the English title of the first chapter.108 The political symbolism of its spatial production through destruction, at unprecedented scales and speeds, hit a timely nerve in the public consciousness. The quick-learning authorities seemed to readily grasp the book’s arguments. In

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crucially, established the legal framework for defining ‘Excellent Historic Architecture [优秀历史建筑],’ and also, beyond the architecture scale, that of the ‘Historic Cultural Fengmao Districts [历史文化风貌区].’ Since the saving of the Chen Residence, this was seen by the conservation proponents as a milestone for heritage development, not only for Shanghai, but also setting the example for the country. The seriousness for conservation implementation was confirmed through the level of authorities involved: the municipal government established the Committee for Conservation [上海市保护委员会], which is chaired by a deputy mayor and co-managed by the Ministry of Land Resource [市规土局], the Housing Ministry [市房管局] and the Committee for Cultural Management [市文管委] to oversee the execution of the conservation plans.112 Prior to the 2003 Regulations district-level planning bureau approval sufficed in decisions regarding land leases, often leading to demolitions and reconstructions. In 1994, for example, a building in the Historic Architecture register was demolished. Under the 2003 Regulations, demolition was forbidden in the Historic and Cultural Fengmao Districts. Every new construction is required to pass through the municipal Urban Planning Bureau and undergo review by a panel of experts. For the conservation of Excellent Historic Architecture, the 2003 Regulations assigned the duty of maintenance to the district department under which the buildings were managed, while tenants and owners were also held accountable for abiding by the decrees of conservation.113 The required authorities must approve all function as well as interior changes. According to the 2003 Regulations, buildings categorized as Excellent Historic Architecture were part of a municipal dossier, set up to archive their use and upkeep.114 Notably, the term ‘Excellent Modern Era Architecture [优秀近代建筑]’ also changed to ‘Excellent Historic Architecture [优秀历史建筑]’ in the 2003 Regulations. The change in terminology seemed to put an end to doubts whether ‘modern era architecture,’ which constitutes most of Shanghai’s historic architecture, should be included as China’s ‘historic architecture.’ The change in terminology, in effect, wrote into law that modern era buildings are part of China’s repertoire of historic architecture, which needed to be valued and conserved. Almost as if to emphasize the city’s modern era contribution to the triumph of the CCP, Shanghai municipality produced a book called Red Traces, a Hundred Historic Sites in Shanghai [红色印痕 上海遗址百处] in 2004,115 highlighting many ‘untouchable cultural relics,’ and Excellent Historic Architecture. The preservation of selected buildings as monuments has been recognized since the 1988 Notice Regarding Key Investigations into Protecting Excellent Modern Era Building. Prior to this, neighborhood scale conservation had been tabled already in 1979, when the Municipal Urban Planning Bureau suggested the area around Sinan Lu [思南路], where a congregation of ‘China’s modern era revolutionary legacies [中国近 代历史革命史迹]’ made their preservation conceivable, for tourism development.116 In 1983, the Cultural Management Bureau had suggested two areas in the old Chinese city for protection and tourist development. The Urban Planning Bureau had also proposed outlines for conservation areas in 1984. But it was not until the 2003 Regulations that heritage conservation also targeted the neighborhood, as an urban ensemble of architecture, streets, and public spaces, and at a scale larger than individual monuments, outlined by the ‘Historic Cultural Fengmao Districts.’ 166

In September 2003, the Shanghai municipal government approved of the document Statutory Scope for Shanghai City Center Historic Cultural Fengmao District [上海市 中心城历史文化风貌区范围法定本文] after multiple adjustments to the areas included for conservation, which engaged more than 300 experts. In November, the municipal government approved and confirmed the 12 Historical Cultural Fengmao Districts [历史

Fig. 15 Plan of the Districts with Historical and Cultural Fengmao, 2003

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文化风貌区], which totaled 27 square kilometers and made up approximately one-third of Shanghai’s urban area from before 1949. (Fig. 15) Because many of the Historic Cultural Fengmao Districts cross the administrative boundaries of Shanghai’s districts, in themselves powerful entities under the umbrella of the municipality,117 responsibilities for the designated districts under conservation were put under the jurisdiction of Municipal Urban Planning Bureau, with the approval of the municipal ministries for real estate and culture. The Hengshan Lu Fuxing Lu Historic Cultural Fengmao District [衡山路-复兴路历史 文化风貌区], the largest of the 12 designated districts, became the pilot site, where a Historical Cultural Fengmao District Control Plan for Hengshan Lu-Fuxing Lu was prepared for

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Fig. 16 Plan of the Hengshan Lu-Fuxing Lu Historical and Cultural Fengmao District

implementing its conservation. (Fig. 16) Characterized by lower density, greenery and elegant streetscape lined by platanus trees, the district in which Wukang Lu is located hosts a high number of important government institutions as well as modern era residential buildings. The authors of the Historical Cultural Fengmao District Control Plan for Hengshan Lu-Fuxing Lu declared the pilot plan to be at the intermediate scale, in between the large-scale land use plans that are prevalent for Chinese cities and the smallscale detailed guidelines for architecture construction.118 The Hengshan Lu-Fuxing Lu Control Plan integrated elements of a detailed control plan, where land use, building density, traffic networks, greenery, and urban infrastructures follow guidelines. Additionally, the Hengshan Lu-Fuxing Lu Control Plan paid attention to the conservation types, architecture, public spaces, greens, and other non-material components, as well as morphologies of conservation, block sizes, plot scale, and network structures.119 Buildings in the district were catalogued according to a scale of conservation values ranging from those regarded as “protected architecture [保护建筑]” to those “recommended for demolition [应当拆除建筑].” 120 In the classification of conservation value for buildings, those that were built after 1949 were categorized as “other architecture [其他建筑],” in an admission of the inability to regulate contemporary buildings that have already been erected. These were often taller buildings that do not necessarily fit in well to a neighborhood of modern era architectural scale, had the plan been implemented earlier. But because many buildings were constructed only recently, and therefore not derelict enough to warrant demolition, this “other architecture” remains. The Hengshan Lu-Fuxing Lu Control Plan also implemented density limitations implemented to protect the fengmao of the historic districts. As a result, large-scale develop168

ments, as in many other neighborhoods of Shanghai, are limited. Despite not being able to demolish and redevelop, reprogramming of the existing structures, according to the Plan’s authors, could “stimulate the vitality of the historic neighborhood, through the discovery and redevelopment of the area’s programming [通过对这一地区功能对挖掘与 再开发，重新激发起历史地区的活力].”121 More importantly, programmatic changes would lead to the “valorization of the cultural value [提升文化价值]” that also could raise the “economic and social benefits [经济与社会效益].”122 Specifically, the authors regarded the valorization of cultural value and the “cultural quality [文化品质]” as also able to improve and expand the commerce and services, as well as tourism and leisure programs.123 In accordance to the Hengshan Lu-Fuxing Lu Control Plan, experts from the municipality, including those from the bureaus for planning and cultural management, had final say on planning permissions for development. As is customary for policy implementation, consultations of local stakeholders were absent.124 Not only are most experts, including the Plan’s authors, not from the neighborhoods in which implementations take place, but an increasing number of them do not originate from Shanghai. The projected “cultural qualities” that the Plan’s authors mapped onto the selected historic cultural neighborhoods, the reference to which their conservation plan targets, remains ambiguous. At the same time, the reality of institutional frameworks, as well as the endogenous and bottom-up processes on the ground, also remain difficult to integrate into the conservation plan. Background research done on the social structure and development modes of the Fuxing-Hengshan area was thorough.125 The research clearly revealed a demographic hollowing out of the city center residential neighborhoods.126 While original residents have left, lower-class residents and migrant workers have moved in.127 The researchers articulated a clear desire to protect the existing social diversity.128 Yet proposals in regards to functional changes in the Plan remained vague. The crucial influence that property ownership and residential tenures have on the neighborhood’s transformation was largely overlooked. Somehow, the ambition set out by the planning guides fell short in the final stretch. Starting in 2003, Tongji opened the specialization for “preservation of historic architecture,” and research into the city’s modern era architecture and urban design

thoritative research institution for the city’s urbanism and as the main consultant for the city’s planning policies gave its researchers privileged access to archival materials and contemporary planning documents. Their findings not only grew to support the policy developments in the municipality, with many researchers going on to become important figures in the municipal- or district-level planning. Shanghai being the nation’s pioneer for urban development, the city’s policies also served as templates of emulation for other cities in the country. On the impending piloting of the conservation plan, scheduled in 2004 to be finished by 30 June 2005, Wu had publicly encouraged local and overseas investors to participate in the business opportunity of historic architecture conservation.129 Several other insiders, working between academia and implementation, shared the insight that the best time to invest in the historic buildings had arrived: “once the implementation of the

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flourished. Many of the dissertations on modern era architecture and urban developments, emerging in the mid-2000s, were the first to use first-hand archival materials to analyze Concession-era planning structures. Tongji’s dual role as Shanghai’s au-

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conservation plan is announced, the value of garden-style old house inside the Historic Cultural Fengmao Districts will grow exponentially [规划一旦公布，历史文化风貌保护区内 花园老房的价值将水涨船高].”130 Whether deliberate or not, the statements reveal the academics-cum-bureaucrats’ consciousness of an inevitable convergence of the Rieglian ‘use value’ with ‘historic value’ in the conservation project. The urban loophole of exception for Shanghai’s old houses became a byproduct of top-down fengmao conservation.

The Old House and the Club House— Changing Market Supply and Demand In the mid-2000s, with the vocal support of Shanghai’s municipal party secretary, the slogan for Shanghai shifted from one that emphasized development, in which demolition was inevitable, to one about the newly founded regard for heritage: “Building new is development, preserving and renovating is also development.”131 One of the representative building types targeted for conservation was that of the ‘Western-style garden house [花园洋房].’ Sometimes used interchangeably with ‘garden residence [花 园住宅],’ it is a detached single-house accompanied by its green space surrounding the building. In 2002, a book called Old Shanghai’s Western-style Garden Houses [老上海花 园洋房] was published, authored by a former employee of the Shanghai Housing Bureau, Xue Shunsheng [薛顺生] and Shanghai Xiandai Architecture Design Group’s director of archives, Lou Chenghao [娄承浩].132 The book described the ‘Western-style garden house’ as the “epitome of its times [时代的缩影]“ and a “record of history [历史 的年鉴].”133 Despite the contemporary re-appearance of similar architecture types, the term refers only to those houses that were built during the Concession era. Largely distributed in the western end of the former Concessions, many of the garden houses were built in the 1930s and 1940s, a product of both demographic-driven demand of the war years,134 and of the repercussions from the crises of the global economic system. Interestingly, Xue and Lou noted in the introduction to their book, the Great Depression of the late 1920s induced a redirection of building supply to Shanghai that, together with the cheap labor on the ground, catalyzed the production of the Western-style garden houses. In the mid-1940s, inflation induced a second wave of construction activity that expanded the number of Western-style garden houses. The recognition of the value of the so-called ‘old houses [老房子]’—used to denote dwellings from before 1949—was gaining traction by the early 2000s, not only in academic circles.135 Real estate investors and private entrepreneurs were also increasingly discovering the value of these remaining old houses. In an article entitled “The New Values of Western-style Garden Houses [花园洋房的新价值],” the newspaper People’s Daily [人民日报], Overseas Edition, showcased the growing real estate value of such properties, especially to the segment of diaspora Chinese with both resources and also sentimental ties to old Shanghai.136 Early in the 1980s a limited number of houses had already been pawned off to some of the overseas Chinese returnees. An entire house, albeit quite rundown and requiring much upgrading, merely cost a few tens of thousands of US dollars.137 In the mid-1990s, housing marketization policies first opened the market for city center residences.138 Notable, however, was the clause limiting the 170

RMB/sqm 8000

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Figs. 17, 18 Growing price of real estate in Shanghai, left; and image of one of the old houses near Huashan Lu, right

units that were “of historic value for preservation [具有历史保护价值],” which were not permitted to be sold.139 It was only in 1998 when Shanghai opened the real estate market to the city center’s historic housing.140 For many who had been watching the evolving market, including international real estate professionals such as the global property management conglomerates Jones Lasalle and DTZ , the opportunity seemed to have arrived for these limited-edition historic old houses. Despite the small number of available

drop of rapid urban transformation, the old houses evoked the city’s rapidly disappearing past and served as the remaining vessels of a historically derived cultural identity. In this role, they also linked the overseas Chinese returnee, whose memories of Shanghai were from before Liberation, to its rapidly changing future. The old houses not only made the overseas Chinese returnees feel at home again. They also generated good returns for the investor who rented units out, especially to the increasing number of foreign expats also arriving in Shanghai who preferred the authenticity of living in the city’s historic quartiers. For units under 100 square meters, rentals could already go for around 1,000 USD in 2004, and entire intact houses would rent for 5,000 to 10,000 USD per month.144 But compared to the 8 % returns earned through rental, the returns for resale, at 15 %, was higher. Many investors bought to sell within a short timeframe for a high turnover.

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units for sale—around less than fifty according to later reports141—the more than six thousand old houses that could one day be on the market suggested great potential, especially given the unit cost at the time. The price defined by the marketization policy of 1994 was 902 R MB (equivalent to 120 USD ) per square meter.142 (Figs. 17, 18) In the late 1990s, the available supply of old houses still exceeded demand. Even if the properties were cleared of the complex ownership entanglements, most locals saw the dilapidation of the buildings as a nuisance. The buyers who did purchase the old houses as residences were largely overseas Chinese returnees, many returning to their family homes, or settling for longer-term business opportunity in the rapidly opening China. The Overseas Edition of People’s Daily article reflected: “with long tilting roofs, delicate attics, and well-weathered black steel railings, the revival of the historic buildings tucked amidst the modern and bustling Shanghai, no doubt allows the people to find a kind of historical and cultural feeling in the increasingly globalized city [尖翘的 屋顶，小巧的阁楼，饱经风雨的黑色铁栅栏，这些隐匿于现代化繁华大上海的复古建筑，无疑 使人们能从这个越来越国际化的城市中寻找出一种历史感和文化感]”143 Against the back-

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Whether buying to turn over at a higher price or renting out for profit, more than 60 % of the buyers were investors, of which locals made up only 40 %, the others equally divided between overseas Chinese and foreign individuals and companies. Of those who purchased the houses for living in, they were also divided between the expats who have settled in China and locals, including both Shanghainese and other Chinese entrepreneurs.145 Some of the occupier owners also turned the premises into commercial uses that could capitalize on the ambiance of the place. Entrepreneurs also started to invest in properties that seemed worthy of time-investment and upgrading for future expansions and developments. Small real estate companies, not working at the demolition and reconstruction scale, but working with housing exchange, came to streets like Wukang Lu to ‘sweep the street [扫街],’ looking for old houses deemed salvageable for conversions and resale. The limited market supply, together with the irreproducible uniqueness of the historic housing stock, made the old houses precious “real estate ‘antiques’ [房地产’古董’].”146 By 2003, the per square meter price for old houses on the market was 38,000 R MB (equivalent to 4,500 USD ).147 As one article recommended, “after buying an old Western-style house, upgrade and renovate it, and then buy some furniture from the Ming and Qing dynasties [一些人买入老洋房后，将其修缮加固，再买一些明清时期的家具].”148 With average returns of 15 % in the early 2000s, the flipping of property to resell at higher value dominated the market.149 An old house, which was sold in 2002 for 3.7 million R MB , would, after upgrades and renovations, be sold again for more than double its previous price at 7.5 million R MB in a year.150 In 2004 another exchange would push its price to 10 million R MB .151 Accompanying the inclusion of 398 old houses in the register as Excellent Historic Architecture in late February 2005, the Municipal Bureau for Housing and Land Resource Management [上海市房屋土地资源管理局] announced the curbing of ownership right exchange on the market for these “Western-style buildings,” especially in the newly announced Historical Cultural Fengmao Districts. In May 2006, in order to cool the foaming real estate market, the central government issued the Six Policies [国六条], the colloquial name for the Opinions on Adjusting House Supply Structure and Stabilizing House Price [关于调整住房供应结构稳定住房价格意见],152 which increased transaction taxes for the sale of housing. Because of the high price of investment and the small change, percentage-wise, in taxation, the policy had little actual impact on the rising demand and rising price of the old houses.153 In 2005, one of the top seventy most affluent Chinese entrepreneurs included a young developer in his mid-thirties,154 who dramatically compared his rise to that of Hong Kong real estate tycoon Li Ka-shing [李嘉诚].155 After studying economics at Shanghai’s Fudan University, Chen Zaochun [陈早春] started his first job at a Hong Kong real estate office based in Shanghai that catered to foreign professionals in the mid-1990s. After a few years, he opened his own agency mediating real estate investments.156 Rather than working in real estate development at a large scale, he focused on old Western-style houses, sensing a market niche. His most prestigious acquisition was in 2001, when he signed an eight-year lease with the Xuhui District’s housing and real estate bureau on a garden house plot at the end of Wukang Lu, and spent more than 10 million R MB (equivalent to about 1.1 million USD ) to build four new villas next to an original one on the 1,000 square meter site.157 Renting mostly to expat profession172

als who chose the historic neighborhood for 60,000 R MB per year, the returns were good.158 In addition to leasing or purchasing old houses and upgrading their facilities into luxury rentals, he also mediated the sales of garden houses. The commission for each sale far exceeded the rental profits of the small business.159 The timing was good for such business opportunities, especially given the local conditions that were only starting to formulate the market economy games rules for urban spatial production. For entrepreneurs who had the

Fig. 19 Yongfoo Elite, 2016

early edge to sense the occasion and access the local property supply, the urban loopholes offered by economic transition—with gaps formed by the yet undetermined market prices, ambiguity in property rights, and institutional ownership—could not have been more lucrative. That these yet undetermined and changing conditions were also able to cater to the changing market demand would be opportunities to be seized on by the shrewd entrepreneurs. On a quiet street adjacent to Yongfu Lu [永福路], around the corner from Wukang Lu, a Shanghainese man by the name of Wang Xingzheng [汪兴政] leased and started renovations to a house with a large garden in 2001.160 Two and half years later he opened a restaurant and lounge on the property, calling it Yongfoo Elite [雍福会].161 The house, like many of its neighbors in the western-end of the former French concession, had retained its garden interspersed by old trees.162 Initially an exclusive, membership-only club, Wang wanted the place to “revive the luxurious, romantic,

developed by the Macanese casino tycoon Stanley Ho in 2002. Built as part of the highrise residential compound Ambassy Courts,164 the Ambassy Club implanted amidst old garden houses that have become embassies since the PRC , conjuring up the distinction of being in a quartier of global connections. The evocation of the heyday of Shanghai cosmopolitanism and commerce, shunned by decades of austerity under planned economy, took form in new developments such as this one.165 Claiming to be the first private ‘club house’ in China post-reform, the Ambassy Club hosted the then wealthiest woman in Asia as well as Vincent Lo, the head of Shui On and the developer of Xintiandi, in its enclave of facilities shielded from the plebeian surroundings. Yongfoo Elite, in contrast to the polished modern amenities of the Ambassy Club that could be found in contemporary developments, offered a distinctive setting in its historic building. As Wang—styled to have descended from one of the many pre-1949 Shanghai bourgeois families—insinuated, cash alone could not procure the kind of taste for which old Shanghai was known. The old house, its garden, along with the collection of antique pieces he assembled, and the neighborhood in which it was situated, were crucial to his recapturing of a historic ambiance that set Yongfoo Elite apart from other developments. (Fig. 19) The rapidly changing market was, at the same time, also increasingly demanding this limited supply.

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mysterious, legendary Oriental atmosphere that had once disappeared from Shanghai [复活在上海曾遗失的奢侈的、浪漫的、神秘的、传说中的东方情调].”163 Yongfoo Elite was only a stone’s throw away from another exclusive club house

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Built in 1948, the house where Yongfoo Elite was, was reported to be the former home to the family of a well-known French-educated Chinese endocrinologist.166 During the Cultural Revolution, the house, like many neighboring structures underwent reshuffling. A walled compound at Yongfu Lu Number 244 was for a time the headquarters to a secret service unit, a unit that reported directly to the leaders of the Shanghai Commune, which became the Revolutionary Committee in the Shanghai municipality during the Cultural Revolution.167 When China opened to the world in the 1970s following Nixon’s visit, Sino-British relations also thawed. Diplomatic relations between China and the UK elevated from that of chargé d’affaires to the ambassadorial level. The house was leased to the British, with Number 244 becoming the Consulate. After the Portman-designed Shanghai Center on West Nanjing Lu [南京西路] eventually opened in 1990, 168 the Consulate moved there in 1996. With the move the residence also vacated, leaving the Yongfu Lu house and its premises empty. The house’s location as well as its spacious lawn had already caught Wang Xinzheng’s eye. In 2001, Wang was able to sign a ten-year lease on the property with the Xingguo Hotel—known for being the Shanghai accommodation of the highest central government officials—which was in charge of the property.169 In the 1980s, when planned economy still dominated everyday life, Wang was one of the few who dared to become a private entrepreneur. He started out by sourcing and producing clothes for the opening consumer market in the 1980s, and eventually became the designer and owner of one of the few locally-produced fashion brands to supply the newly opened department stores on Huaihai Lu [淮海路] in the 1990s. Despite the years of drabness and suppression under planned economy’s grey and black fashion homogeneity, it was clear then that the Shanghainese never completely forgot their historic embrasure of capitalism and their flair for style. To the rest of China, the city remained the defender of what little style was allowed under central planning.170 Wang’s family, who he claimed were silk traders, represented the kind of Shanghainese petite bourgeoisie whom the rest of China at once detested and envied. At a time when imports from Hong Kong and knockoffs from the Pearl River Delta flooded the market, in the 1980s, the higher-end products sold by Wang found a niche. In 1996, sensing the decline of the pioneer advantages with the maturing of the local apparels market and the growing competition from increasingly sophisticated and competitive value chains, Wang closed his fashion enterprise and ventured into the food and beverage business with the opening of small restaurants specializing in classic Shanghai fare. The growing local middle class found his restaurants appealing. Again, his business instinct of being early in market produced success. All the while city hopping from New York, London, and Paris, Wang became a collector of antiques, amassing a menagerie of eclectic items.171 In the mid-1990s, Wang began to call himself an interior designer, styling eye-catching backdrops out of furniture pieces he was starting to collect in his shop windows. The property on Yongfu Lu, a business opportunity that arose in 2001, thus became the perfect vessel for his growing collection of antique pieces, including Ming dynasty chairs, a Qing dynasty corridor from Zhejiang, a piece of a wall and door from Shanxi, and some 1950s Gucci leather sofas. After spending three years on the renovation and upgrade of the Yongfu Lu house, costing several million R MB , the house opened as a private club catering to selective members. Antique furniture pieces were carefully strewn about the garden 174

Figs. 20, 21 Dining room in Yongfoo Elite, left; and an eclectic collection of antique elements set in the garden, right, 2016

with its old magnolia tree and fishpond. (Figs. 20, 21, 22, 23) Together with the view from the open veranda of the house, the experience created was that of the lavish colonial-era residences from the stories of Chen Danyan. One local report gushed about the ambiance of the place: “what Shanghai of those years was actually like, we have no way of recovering, but at least we can experience it, in the master’s exquisite design [当年的上海到底什么样，我们无法追回，但是至少能够体会，主人这份设计的精巧].”172 Yongfoo Elite became known as the spot to be, especially for the international celebrities and politicians who came to visit Shanghai. For the first batch of Westerners who came to China expecting to encounter a unique and authentic atmosphere, what most locals tried to offer was the opposite.

ed by wide boulevards, fast cars, and with shiny escalators and elevators, rather than the fragile garden houses surrounded by narrow streets, were what the locals, including the district and municipal leaders, thought would impress the outside world. China wanted so badly to catch up. In fact, what the small entrepreneurs like Wang knew was that the visitors who came delighted in exactly the kind of rare commodity that he was packaging and selling, the rare commodity of history, cultural uniqueness, and identity. Moreover, prices at venues like Yongfoo Elite were still a drop in the bucket to foreign guests, but considered extravagant for the average local.173 In 2004, the average annual income of a local employee was still 22,164 R MB (approximately 2,682 USD ), while that of the average expat was 380,000 R MB (approximately 46,000 USD ).174 The former first lady of France Madame Chirac’s choice of the Yongfoo Elite as her venue, as well as numerous Hong Kong celebrities’ appearances confirmed his hunch for the demand. As a businessman from Wall Street remarked when visiting Yongfoo Elite, “this is what I imagined I would find in Shanghai!”175 Even before there was any coverage in the local media, the Wallpaper Design Awards named Yongfoo Elite number two in the best club section of 2004, introducing the place with an establishing shot of sorts: “Since we are all going to be spending a lot more time in Shanghai over the next few years—who isn’t currently setting up a manufacturing business, magazine, retail outlet or TV channel there at the moment?”176

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In the first decade of development, the new, the modern, and the technological were what the locals aspired to, not the existing, the old, the small, and the backwards. Portman’s Shanghai Center, and later Lujiazui’s SOM -designed Jinmao Tower, surround-

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Figs. 22, 23 Garden of Yongfoo Elite, left; and veranda, right, 2016

The piece went on to point out the two most important features of the area in which Yongfoo Elite is set: “amid some of the finest properties in Shanghai’s former French Concession and the homes of retired Communist officials,” concluding, “this is a corner of Shanghai that exudes class rather than cliché.”177 Not flinching at its juxtaposition of capitalism and command economy, the passing observation hit the nail on the head. Especially in light of the political campaigns ten years later to clamp down on highlevel corruption, the cozy spatial adjacencies of market and planned economy elites, exemplified by Yongfoo Elite’s audience, was a fundamental driver to development.178 Yongfu Lu Number 200 did not get on the roster for Excellent Historic Architecture in any of its four selections. Whether the authorities considered the conversion already far too altered for the house’s inclusion, or whether because the original house was really never important enough to warrant inclusion, Wang nevertheless considers his efforts on Yongfoo Elite a self-fulfilling conservation effort, giving back to the Shanghai that is globalizing. Yongfoo Elite certainly did not cater only to the growing expat market, even though its success came from its early attraction of prominent visitors, catalyzing a growing demand. In anticipation of a market niche in high-end local cuisine, Yongfoo Elite brought in a head chef who had trained with famous masters and specialized in classic Shanghainese cuisine. The kind of vernacular cuisine served seemed to be extravagant in the mid-2000s, given that similar dishes could easily be found in neighboring restaurants at that time. With the city changing rapidly, however accompanied by the influx of non-Shanghainese population eroding the local palate, Yongfoo Elite also appealed to a burgeoning domestic demand for immaterial heritage.179 Along with its space and its cuisine, Yongfoo Elite’s personnel were also part of the “Republican-era style trend [民国风]” that swept through China of the late 2000s. In the 1990s, China’s coastal nouveau riche was known and derided for bad taste, having preferred an overabundance of Baroque bling-bling to show off their newly accumulated wealth. In the late 2000s, they increasingly asked architects for the ‘Republican-era style’—the modern era is also known as the Republican era—to prove their evolving taste.180 Along the value chain, eclectic furniture, paintings and collectibles from the Republican era were also produced to fill renovated old houses. China’s local television stations, rather than importing from Hong Kong as was done earlier, fed this 176

Republican-era style trend and paraded the modern era glamour of Shanghai as the former “Paris of the East” in their TV serials. Spy dramas, wartime romances and patriotic resistances, mostly all mixed together, were set against the reimagined old Shanghai, produced by the stations of all the nation’s provinces. The Shanghainese-speaking manager of Yongfoo Elite, who wore a mandarin-buttoned Chinese robe that could have come from Shanghai Tang, and who could have easily emerged from the television dramas, personified the growing trend of popular nostalgia. As historian of Shanghai Xu Jilin [许纪霖] summarized in 2003, “A wind of nostalgia, for the 1920s and 1930s, has been blowing in Shanghai over the last few years [上海这几年 一直在刮’怀旧风’.. 所谓’怀旧’, 怀的就是二三十年代所代表的那个传统].”181 For Xu, “The nostalgia implies a certain critique and reflections on the new traditions that emerged under planned economy after 1949 [之所以怀旧，隐含着对1949年后计划经济传统批判和反思 的意味].”182 The nostalgia is not a mere sentimental harking to the past. The nostalgia is also reviving the pre-Liberation capitalist past for the contemporary development. In the mid-2000s, savvy entrepreneurs capitalized on the reviving demand for Shanghai’s old houses and ‘club houses [会馆],’ such as that of Yongfoo Elite. They chose locations in Shanghai’s Fengmao Districts that supplied the historic and cultural ambiance for the desired spaces for elite occupation and gathering. The commodity of old houses fed a growing consumer demand, by new elites, for the dwindling supply of old Shanghai in the context of the rapidly developing and re-globalizing city. The popularity and profitability of the limited supply of old houses also reveal an inadvertent return to the pre-Liberation consumption patterns. What made these spatial productions based on nostalgia possible, however, were the institutionally embedded ownerships of many of the historic garden houses. The ten-year lease that was signed with the Xingguo Hotel group, under whose jurisdiction the Yongfoo Elite building was, meant that the transaction not only warranted high-level connections. It also meant that the lease terms were favorable enough, because of stability of the institutional backing, to allow investment and renovations to take place.183 It is through the urban loophole resulting from transition economy’s gaps and ambiguities that entrepreneurs, with not only business acumen but also guanxi connections, could realize bottom-up conservation of an old house like Yongfoo Elite. Conservation of historical and cultural heritage, under transition economy, thus, partly hinged on vestige and institutional ownership of the historic properties.

If Wang and Yongfoo Elite forged the way for a re-positioning of the neighborhood that capitalized on its historic assets for contemporary market demands, then the establishment of the multi-building compounds of Le Passage Fuxing and Ferguson Lane continued this trend of small-scaled conversions by innovative localized cosmopolitan entrepreneurs.184 The time and investment efforts of such small entrepreneurs to upgrade have helped realize the upgrade of the neighborhood around Wukang Lu that planning policies could only decree. It is the clustering of the endogenous processes,

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Localized Cosmopolitans and the Developing of Le Passage Fuxing and Ferguson Lane

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rather than a clear top-down vision, that has positioned the neighborhood as a unique centrality in Shanghai. Le Passage Fuxing is a three-building complex located on the western end of Fuxing Lu [复兴路], which also intersects both Yongfu Lu and Wukang Lu a few blocks away. The developer for Le Passage Fuxing is a French entrepreneur who had partly grown up in Tahiti, and lived in Japan for more than a decade before he came on a oneyear stint to Beijing.185 On the invitation of the Chinese government, he came to the western end of the former French concessions in Shanghai. Staying at the Xingguo Hotel at first, he was introduced to the neighborhood around Wukang Lu.186 An adventurer-entrepreneur with the globalized taste to match Shanghai’s growing aspirations, he immediately saw potential in the historic buildings, the modern street networks and the urban neighborhood, which at the time of his arrival in the early 1990s, was much overlooked in the then rush for basic development. Moving to Shanghai following intensive Mandarin classes in Beijing for a year, he lived in the local neighborhoods and embedded himself in the local procedures that were rapidly changing.187 This patient acquisition and understanding of the logic of local habits, combined with global tastes that were just starting to return to Shanghai, was crucial to the realization of his first developments in Shanghai. It was not until the 2000s, when old houses could be marketized, that the developer began to negotiate for and acquire the residential units in Fuxing Lu buildings. The process of negotiation and acquisition would culminate, nine years later, in the consolidated ownership rights for the three-building complex in 2011 and the commercial development visible today, Le Passage Fuxing. When the initial purchase of the Fuxing Lu units began, the developer lived on site on the second floor of one of the three houses. (Fig. 24) What he encountered was the representative narrative for most housing in the city at the time. A silk and tea merchant originally built the three houses in the 1930s, with one house intended for his family and the two others for rental. By the 1980s, each floor of the three-story houses, each a little more than 60 square meters in area, was subdivided by families of three generations.188 With twelve families sharing three bathrooms and kitchens, the condition was not as extreme as the many other ‘72 residents [72家房客]” situations in Shanghai. Most of the other houses lacked infrastructure and were in far worse condition. As elaborated in the previous chapter, by virtue of being originally designed for a single family, the ownership of an old house could not be traded in its parts, which according to its building type were not divisible.189 In the 2000s, the units in houses such as those found on Fuxing Lu could only obtain tradable ‘usage right [使用权].’ ‘Usage right’ is different from the ‘ownership right [拥有权],’ which comes with newly built commodity housing and with “intact” old houses, including apartments, houses or lilong houses that have not been subdivided.190 Usage right, a form of property ownership unique to transition economy China, however, still permits the marketization—the selling, buying, and exchange on the housing market—of residential units, limited to those with the local hukou, or household registration.191 The limited supply of ownership right units, coupled with the recognition of cultural heritage since the mid-2000s, translated into a growing high demand for old houses in the city center, rendering their ownership lucrative.192 For an old house that was not “intact” and thus lacking “ownership right,” once the usage rights of all residential units 178

Fig. 24 Facade of Le Passage Fuxing, 2012

had been slowly bought up, the possibility of converting the subdivided usage rights into a consolidated ownership right was possible. This occurred despite the municipal-level conservation policies issued in the mid-2000s that limited the conversion of usage right to ownership right in order to curb the high speculative real estate turnovers that were deemed damaging to historic buildings.193 The actual conversion of ownership from usage right to ownership right remained possible and varied in procedure depending on the local jurisdiction.194 It was clear that the gap between prescribed procedures and actual practice remained contingent on the bureaucratic personnel and the kind of guanxi, or relationship, network cultivated to smooth over impediments. The discretionary decision making that is prevalent under transition economy’s adaptive governance and amphibious institutions create the urban loopholes that have facilitated much of the endogenous processes in Shanghai’s city center transformations. As the French entrepreneur foresaw in the early 2000s, the time taken to negotiate with the individual families of a subdivided house in order to finally consolidate the usage rights to ownership rights would turn out to be the eight-year span for the project. At the same time, incremental development of the initial units which first became commercial successfully raised the needed capital for the compensation of the relocated residents. The developer’s approach to compensating the residents also distinguished the

Xincun [上海新村] and Zhongnan Xincun [中南新村] nearby. These units, like other residences in the area, were slowly emptying out as locals moved from old housing in the central areas to newly built commodity housing in the periphery. The developer’s familiarity with the locations, where he had stayed when he first arrived in Shanghai, also made access to their purchases easier. The proximity of the replacement units also facilitated the convincing of older residents in the Fuxing units to move. The offered replacement units were comparable if not more adequate than the ones in the Fuxing building. Knowing that the extra expense and effort would be worth the rising real estate price, especially for the neighborhood in which the Fuxing building was located, the developer’s negotiation and compensation carefully accounted for each of the resident’s needs. This was only possible at the small scale of the development. This slower but more individualized compensation procedure for the development of the Fuxing project differed fundamentally from the often coercive and top-down tactics in fast-paced and large-scale demolition and redevelopment projects that were

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Fuxing project. In addition to market rate compensation for usage rights, which afforded the residents new commodity housing flats not too far from the center, the developer also bought relocation units for residents, who preferred housing in lieu of cash. These relocation units were in the well-reputed lilong compounds such as Shanghai

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Fig. 25 Top-floor office at Le Passage Fuxing, an entrepreneur who also has a space in Jing’an Villas, 2012

prevalent at the time. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, in the relocation of residents from plots under redevelopment, cash payment or the exchange of newly built commodity housing a bit further out of the city center sufficed as compensation for their old residences. The residents often welcomed demolition and new compensation housing, since the new units would provide more space, better amenities and privacy. With the steep rise of real estate prices in the mid-2000s and the fast expansion of Shanghai’s metropolitan area, the compensation units are much farther away from the city center and also more expensive. Also, in response to the increased number of families who would register additional hukou in units that will undergo demolition to try to get more compensation, new municipal policy changed so that compensation is no longer based on the number of dwellers but on the floor area of the existing unit. This has rendered the negotiation process for relocation increasingly difficult. The high compensation cost and difficulty of relocating residents, especially for large-scale schemes in the city center, asks for alternatives in scale and timing to be examined. Housing plays a role in filial relations and familial entanglements, something already embedded in the fragmentation of housing occupation in the pre-reform era.195 These issues also question the prevalent mechanisms for relocation compensation that is much too standardized for the nuances of residential restructuring. 180

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In the mid-2000s, few places in Shanghai accommodated changing consumer demand accompanying the city’s re-globalization. The French developer had initially renovated the second floor of the Fuxing project as an expanded residential unit. When the then startup yoga studio Y+, one of the first yoga studios in Shanghai, stumbled on the building undergoing renovation, Y+ decided to occupy the second floor as the development’s first tenants. Y+’s occupancy would change the complex’s development direction from residential to commercial.196 The floor-through yoga spaces designed by Neri and Hu Architects, known today as the pioneers of adaptive reuse in Shanghai, initiated continued curation for commercial programs. The shops and cafés, which followed subtly, contrasted to the big box glitz of places like Plaza 66, the large-scale retail paradise that opened in 2001 on West Nanjing Lu, 197 or even Xintiandi. The selective curation brought in creative studios to the fourth-floor addition, designed as a loft-living space and with an adjacent rooftop terrace for events and openings. (Fig. 25) The lack of coordination of the numerous district bureaus, from hygiene and housing to the local street office,198 gave rise to the legal grey zone for the conversion of residentially zoned buildings to commercial.199 The grey zone of tacit acquiescence by the local state is an opportunity, which the small entrepreneurs exploit. At the same time, the local bureaucracy also sees the opportunity to benefit from these developments,

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Figs. 26, 27 Logo of Le Passage Fuxing, left; and location in context, right

which emerge from the legal ambiguity. Self-organized negotiation of potential conflicts between neighbors, such as in the relocation process or renovation process, also absolved the local state from the responsibility of arbitration.200 Exploitation of the urban loophole created by the fragmented residential ownership and legal oversight not only resolved otherwise touchy and challenging interactions, but also inadvertently conserved and upgraded the old houses that would have otherwise continued to decay. For the neighborhood that is becoming visibly the preferred area for many new elites, including those from Hong Kong and Taiwan since the late 1990s, and also Europeans and North Americans since the mid-2000s, the revival of the old houses manifested the linkage to Shanghai’s pre-war cosmopolitan legacy. Le Passage Fuxing, as the complex came to be called, alludes to the developer’s French origin as well as the colonial vestiges of the neighborhood, with the French platanus trees, cadastral structure and building ordinance that determined the material, scale and style of the buildings. In the complex, a passage indeed divides the original houses and leads from Fuxing Lu to the back of the buildings, which had been the location of one of the numerous canals that had existed in Shanghai prior to its 19th century urbanization. Even the development’s Chinese name West Fuxing Li [复兴西里], took on history, using the character ‘li [里],’ from lilong, indicating a linkage to the vernacular. (Figs. 26, 27) One of the ground floor spaces at Le Passage Fuxing is run by a New-York-born Flemish art gallerist. Her family had settled in Shanghai in 1908 and then relocated to Bangkok in 1949.201 The gallerist’s return to Shanghai with her family in the mid-2000s, and the relocation of her gallery to Le Passage Fuxing in the former French Concession—from its initial location in the creative cluster called 1933202—confirms the nostalgia that the neighborhood brings. Her return, as a cosmopolitan whose family had lived in Shanghai’s heyday, also encapsulates the flows of Shanghai’s re-globalization. This sense of return characterizes the project that would follow on the heels of Le Passage Fuxing’s development. On seeing the emerging success of the Fuxing project in the mid-2000s, a Hong Kong investor who had leased a neighborhood factory building on Wukang Lu at a low price, but did not know what to do with it in the five years since its acquisition, approached the Le Passage developer.203 Formerly housing a local neighborhood work unit [生产组], the reforms of the late 1990s had rendered the real estate asset consolidated by the Housing Management Bureau.204 182

Figs. 28 , 29 A photo of the former factory building of Ferguson Lane before renovation, left, which hangs in its lobby; and its current facade, right

The Hong Kong investor had intimate ties with Shanghai. She is part of a prominent entrepreneurial family who left Shanghai in 1949 for Hong Kong. Her father, the family patron, like many prominent entrepreneurs from Shanghai, originated from Ningbo. Since economic liberalization, the family’s donation of a library to Shanghai’s Jiaotong University and the establishment of an international school were amongst the phil-

cial buildings, called Ferguson Lane in English and Wukang Ting [武康庭] in Chinese, meaning “courtyard of Wukang.” Ferguson Lane was the original name of Wukang Lu during the Concession era. Despite being inside of the area of French Concession’s expansion in 1914, the road had originally been built by a British gentleman by the name of Ferguson. The road was an important link between Xujiahui [徐家汇] to the southeast and the International Settlement to the north.206 The striking Art Deco branding for Ferguson Lane, which was also used to highlight the Le Passage project, and the English name itself seemed to evoke the modern era of cosmopolitan Shanghai. The earliest tenants were the French restaurant Franck’s, a small florist shop, an art gallery and the first branch of the café Coffee Tree. Spaces on the second and third floor of the former factory building were rented to international offices. In 2013, the Danish architecture firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen moved into a space formerly occupied by an investment firm. (Fig. 29) The tenants were attracted by the low rental costs that the investor initially maintained in order to draw the right crowd.207 Regardless of whether the project was a deliberate case of a vanity project for the returnee Hong

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anthropic enterprises realizing the family patron’s love of his hometown. The investor acquired a number of old houses in the neighborhood around Wukang Lu, and several became well-known food and beverage hubs. Despite restrictions on the acquisition and reuse of historic buildings, capital and guanxi connections nurtured with the local street office have made the developments possible.205 Initiated with the experienced help of the Le Passage developer, the cluster of buildings acquired by the Hong Kong developer, including the former industrial production site and the garden house in front, (Fig. 28) became a small compound of commer-

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Figs. 30, 31 Ferguson Lane in context and the new tower of Ferguson Lane, 2012

Kong developer’s image-building, or whether there was indeed a longer-term vision to activate the neighborhood through the initial period of subsidization, the below-market rents helped incubate the selective atmosphere of the development’s commercial composition in the five years since the development’s opening in 2007. Indeed, since 2012, the compound has grown. (Fig. 30) An adjacent tower, which was built as a guesthouse of the District’s real state bureau in the mid-1990s, underwent renovation and became part of the expanded Ferguson Lane compound. The inclusion of the building in the Ferguson Lane development indicates the developer’s access to institutional ownership in the dual land market. (Fig. 31) The renovation not only upgraded the interiors but also returned the building to a fengmao more suited to the historical neighborhood that has since been dubbed Shanghai’s Cultural Street. The renovation imparted on the 1980s construction a flavor of history, with a pitched roof and red brick-trimmed façade. On the other hand, the two garden-style old houses facing Wukang Lu, on whose grounds the former neighborhood production unit sat, remained until 2014 still partially occupied by residents. Multiple tenants have been slowly bought out to consolidate the ownership.208 Small design boutiques such as Dutch Items Shanghai, run by a Dutch-raised Asian entrepreneur, would grow with the expanding market in the neighborhood for the low-key but globally oriented consumption spaces. The newly opened ground floor restaurant Pistachio is also a venture by overseas Chinese affiliates, like many of the new economies in the area. These localized cosmopolitans, with access to the local culture and understanding of the institutions through their diasporic origins or their returnee positions, facilitate the introduction of products and services from international know-how and adapting them in situ. Amongst the owners of food and beverage chains like Wagas and Element Fresh that are known to produce fusion foods as contextualization of global values, there is a notable number of Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Singaporean, and returnee Chinese entrepreneurs. In terms of scale and pace, the localized cosmopolitan entrepreneurs incrementally implemented small-scaled upgrades to old houses to accommodate market demand. Through their international know-how they were also able to respond with program184

matic curation that accommodated Shanghai’s rapid re-globalization. At the same time, their grasp of local procedures and access to local networks facilitated property procurement and spatial production within institutional structures. Seizing on opportunities offered by urban loopholes of fragmented ownership rights and institutional ownership in the dual land market, both Le Passage Fuxing and Ferguson Lane, like Yongfoo Elite, in the form of their development as well as the curation of the functional changes, matched a growing consumer demand to the existing spatial supply. The inadvertent product of heritage conservation, through reuse and creative incubation, offered a new mode of development for former administratively-allocated real estate sites, and also gave old houses with complex and fragmented tenure the opportunity to upgrade in the Fengmao District.

Conserving Heritage: Lane 1754 (Aka 1768) and Lane 117 Bottom-up processes tapped into undersupplied market demands and exploited the urban loopholes of gaps and absences in the transition economy, resulting in upgraded historic buildings. In contrast, top-down projects that set out to conserve cultural heritage also catalyzed and expedited commercialization. As this section will show, topdown developments deploy heritage conservation itself as the alibi by which urban loopholes of exceptions could be discretionarily created. Directly across from the entrance to Ferguson Lane is a small residential compound without any signage. Known as Joffre Mansions [霞飞别墅], the compound along Wukang Lu is visibly new and gated. Guarded by a changing sentinel of gatekeepers, passers-bys could peek through the filigree fencing and bushes, to see a well-main-

tions for the Implementation of the Historic architecture and Neighborhood Conservation and Upgrade Pilot Projects [关于本市历史建筑与街区保护改造试点的实施意见的通知], the Shanghai municipal government approved Xuhui and Changning Districts’ proposal for four residential areas to become conservation pilot projects in the city center.209 The Sinan Lu Garden Garden Residences District [思南路花园住宅区], which had been tabled in 1979 as a conservation target because of its prominent revolutionary era buildings, was one of these areas. This is where the conservation development, Sinan Mansions [思南公馆], is located today, as a product of the pilot project.210 The other three pilots sites included Lane 1754 [1754 弄] of Huaihai Lu, the Taiyuan Residential Area [太原小区], both in Xuhui District, and a residential lane in Changning District.211 The houses in Lane 1754, which connected Huaihai Lu and Wukang Lu, thus became part of a first test area for heritage conservation. Built in 1919, Lane 1754 was made up of two-story attached new-style lilong houses,212 which ranged from two to six per row. The site covered approximately 12,000 square meters and the built area totaled approximately 6,300 square meters. The low built density was characteristic of the neighborhood in the Western District of the former French Concession. Built originally for the employees of one of the British trading

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tained but not extraordinary-looking low-rise row house compound. In September 1999, following the issuance of Notice Regarding the Recommenda-

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Figs. 32, 33 The houses of Lane 1754 before upgrade, left; the guarded entry of the new Lane 1768 facing Ferguson Lane, 2012, right

houses, the houses were also later home to many Shanghainese families left behind by the exodus of 1949, who survived the ensuing era thanks to remittances from family members abroad.213 Because of their red-tiled roofing and stuccoed façade covered partially by ivy, as well as the simplicity of their geometric massing, the houses were also called the “Spanish-style old houses [西班牙式老房子]”. (Fig. 32) In 1994, the compound was listed in the second roster of municipal-decreed Excellent Modern Era Architecture. In 1999, 142 families lived in the 28 houses of the original plan, along with seven danweis in additional structures that were added after 1949. Because of the comparatively small number of families that had to be relocated—en-bloc relocation of all occupants was presumed the only option for upgrade—and the compound’s location, Lane 1754 was selected as one of the pilot projects for conservation. Negotiations for moving the residents began in 2000. Offers of resettlement and compensation were resolved, and some residents moved to new commodity housing, while others were given compensation housing in the same neighborhood.214 The developer was a joint-venture between the District development company Xuhui Real Estate Group [徐房集团] and a company called West Samoa Southern Investment [西萨摩亚南国投资有限公司] that formed the Shanghai Yuanhui Real Estate Company [上海元汇房地产有限公司]. At the same time, the municipal planning bureau convened a panel of experts who made suggestions for the pilot conservation project. Their recommendations included keeping intact the stucco façade, a distinct characteristic of the historic buildings, during repair of the walls; preserving the original spatial configuration, allowing only limited changes to interior partitions; not allowing the addition of basements for parking spaces directly under the historic structures but proposing to meet contemporary residential demands for parking on parts of the site; and emphasizing the protection of the existing greenery on site.215 Despite this list of recommendations by the panel of experts, which included professors from Tongji University who had initially recommended Lane 1754 to be included in the Excellent Architecture roster, the developer leveled the compound without demolition permission from the municipality. Construction work began in January 2002 on what was touted in the local daily as “Shanghai’s first high-end conserved historic architectural fengmao residential area [上海第一个高品位的历史建筑风貌保护 186

住宅区].”216 (Fig. 33) The fact that the development would remain residential contrasted it with the other prominent project of its time, Xintiandi, which turned former residences into boutiques, restaurants, and cafés. Nevertheless, the residents of Lane 1754 were resigned to the knowledge that they would have no access to the new houses in their old lane, and these houses would be sold through limited channels to overseas capital.217 News coverage of Lane 1754 justified its development imperative and reported that, despite the ambiance of the historic buildings, the aging structures required major repairs, and dilapidation and leakage necessitated the demographic overhaul. The news coverage also outlined that residential overcrowding made living in Lane 1754 inconvenient. Scholars expressed misgivings about the salvageability of the original buildings.218 Representatives from the municipal administrations responsible for the oversight of conservation pilot projects, however, defended reconstruction as the only method of saving Lane 1754’s historic buildings.219 After all, the defenders of the development emphasized, the street-facing facades as well as those facing the main lane of the compound were reconstructed according to the original structures’ features, in accordance to conservation requirements. Moreover, they added, original built density and open spaces were maintained; the trees on site were also painstakingly preserved and designs were made around them, just as experts’ recommendations suggested.220 The defenders of the development also underlined that the changes made helped the buildings fit the contemporary market. Each house was widened from 9 to 12 meters to provide more living area, and the total number of units was reduced.221 The original new-style lilong houses, which in some instances had included as many as six joined units per row, were restructured to each comprise a maximum of three adjoining units. If anything, the new buildings seem closer to the garden-style house type than the lilong type.222 Compared to the more prevalent lilong type, the garden-style house was in higher demand because of its limited supply. The garden-style house type also commanded a higher unit price on the commodity housing market. The largest change to the original buildings was the addition of basements to each house. The project thus transformed the old houses to better suit contemporary demands. The change to building type and the installation of the basement for car parking showed that the project was clearly a planned venture to appeal to an affluent and overseas market, attracting buyers to live in Shanghai’s city center. The project was more like the other qiaohui and waixiao residential compounds developed in the area—residences sold for overseas

its boldness and innovation in preparation for the impending WTO meeting in 2001. News coverage also applauded the state’s strategy of “guided by the market, funded by the enterprise, and supported by the government [市场导向，企业运作，政府扶植]” as innovative.224 Lane 1754’s demolition did not only enable a more market-aligned product. As interviews with the Xuhui Real Estate Group revealed, the original “architectural quality” of the old houses was not very high anyway.225 In its view, the development, therefore, only upgraded the old houses’ value. Despite what the Group saw as low-quality old

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currency223 —than the few projects implemented to conserve heritage architecture. Newspapers, mouthpieces of the government, heaped praise on the District for

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houses, the developers nevertheless still applied for municipal-supported special permission to develop the prime location on the grounds of heritage conservation. That the District-aligned developer applied for building permission on the premise of conserving heritage while executing

Fig. 34 The heritage plaque, still intact at the entrance of the renumbered Lane 1768

demolition and redevelopment confirmed the scathing critique leveled by scholars, who called the project “hanging sheep’s head, but selling dog’s meat [挂羊头，卖 狗肉],”226 an idiom for the false advertis-

ing of a product. The permission for evicting residents, acquired on account of the heritage initiative, facilitated the high-end development. If anything, limited supply of low-rise luxury commodity housing in the Western District has made the per-squaremeter price of the Joffre Mansions, as the Lane 1754 development was renamed, among the highest in the neighborhood.227 In 2003, Joffre Mansions opened with an official ribbon cutting ceremony. Lane

1754 was erased from Shanghai’s streetscape. The lane was renumbered as Huaihai Lu Lane 1768. (Fig. 34) The former shortcut between the residential street of Wukang Lu and the main thoroughfare Huaihai Lu has now been closed to through-traffic. Only the eliteness of Joffre Mansions’ local and expat residents makes Lane 1754’s demolition and reconstruction, in the era of growing heritage appreciation, comprehensible. The compound is rumored to house a former premier as well as other high-ranking cadres and politically connected entrepreneurs.228 Facing the Ferguson Lane compound, parts of the Hong Kong developer’s family also live in the Joffre Mansions. Eleven units of the compound are not for sale. The well-guarded gate, next to the visible entrance to the underground parking, reminds passers-by that the elite occupants of the compound require a closed neighborhood. The exclusivity of Joffre Mansions seems to be in keeping with the historic fengmao of the area. The reconstruction of the old gardenstyle house fits in, in a very timely manner, with the new trend of collecting real estate antiques. Even though the area was demolished and rebuilt with a different architecture type, it is still dotted in the 2004 conservation plan as part of the core conservation area.229 In the plan that grades the architecture by type of conservation, the newly developed buildings are listed as “other,” a designation assigned to buildings built after 1949. Lane 1754 was not the only one to be first listed as Excellent Historic Architecture and then demolished. Scholars counted four other listed sites that were demolished in the economic development-driven late 1990s and early 2000s.230 Even though the original buildings of Lane 1754 were demolished and new ones replaced them, the myth of the lane continued to be perpetuated. The overseas-Chinese newspaper Sing Tao Daily [新島日報], while lamenting the loss of historic buildings in rapidly changing Chinese cities, also continued to direct visitors to Lane 1754, highlighting that it had been the home of the rich and famous of old Shanghai.231 One article emphasized history, and yet overlooked the erasure of the original buildings. The year 188

after the completion of Joffre Mansions, a book called Dreaming Back on Shanghai’s Old Western-style Houses [回梦上海老洋房] was published. Part of a “series for finding roots [寻根系列],” the book devotes a section to the romance of the American writer and correspondent for the New Yorker magazine, Emily Hahn, and Chinese poet and publisher Sinmay Zau [邵洵美] in one of Lane 1754’s old houses.232 Even though the actual Lane 1754 disappeared, legends of the old Shanghai it embodied lived on. Vignettes about the historic personas who occupied 76 historic buildings make up the book Dreaming Back on Shanghai’s Old Western-style Houses. The author Song Luxia [宋路霞] was the former editor of a university newspaper. From a Red background, Song was a prolific author of modern era heritage, with 21 books listed under her name in the catalogue of the Shanghai Library and published between 1999 and 2014. Song’s books focus on the family histories of prominent people set in modern era buildings. In addition to Lane 1754, two of the houses selected were also on Wukang Lu, in Lane 117. (Fig. 35) According to Song, the houses of Lane 117 originally belonged to banker Zhou Zuomin [周作民], and since Liberation belonged to the municipal government and CCP leadership.233 When the former owners of one of the houses in Lane 117 were asked about the history of their home on Wukang Lu, it became clear that the plaques on the street today are not to be trusted entirely. The house in the back, Number 1 in Lane 117, was indeed built in 1944 and designed by the architect Robert Fan, in accordance with the plaque. It is important that Fan, a Western-trained Chinese architect, is featured because his name lends the buildings a sense of hybridity.234 What is not mentioned is that Fan was commissioned by He Guoyun, who made his fortune during the Japanese occupation.235 Not as famous as the Zhou Zuomin whom Song wrote about, He was able to obtain the property at Lane 117 when the Vichy government, expelled from the French Concession in 1943, handed over its land to the China Industrial Bank for management under the Japanese-controlled collaborationist government. In Lane 117 He began to build house Number 1. When the Japanese were ousted from China at the close of World War II , He was exiled because of his collaborationist affiliations. His house was then occupied by police commissioner Li Jilan for a time. It was only after Li was transferred to Guangzhou, in 1951, that

er of the China Knit and Textiles Factory [中国毛绒纺织厂], which was founded by Chen’s father in 1936. After Communists took over China in 1949, Chen’s brothers emigrated to Hong Kong, like many oth-

Fig. 35 Municipal heritage plaques for Lane 117 on Wukang Lu, with minimal description of the architecture, shown at the Wukang Lu Tourism Information Center and Xuhui District Old Houses Art Center, 2012

ers from similar social backgrounds. Chen remained in the PRC , however. The house Number 1 was purchased under the name of Chen’s wife in December 1953, and the family moved in.236 The other house in the front facing Wukang Lu, Number 2, was

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He requested the return of his property at Lane 117. He sold his house Number 1 for 140,000 R MB to Chen Yuanqin, the own-

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built at the same time as Number 1, commissioned by the owner of the Butterf­ly brand sewing machine factory. It was then sold to one of the three prominent papermaking tycoons of the time, by the last name of Liu.237 When CCP took over China and founded the PRC in 1949, many entrepreneurs and industrialists fled with their capital and factories to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and abroad. The CCP dubbed the local industrialists who remained and continued to contribute to the private sector as ‘national capitalists [民族资本家],’ because they produced patriotically for the new nation in the 1950s. For many of the local industrialists, including Chen, the CCP indeed brought order to replace the corruption and disarray that Nationalist rulers had left behind. The CCP also initially regarded the local industrialists’ contributions as important for the building of the new nation’s self-sufficiency.238 The enterprises of the local industrialists like Chen and Liu were absorbed into the economic system of the CCP. The euphoria of the first decade of nation founding wore away as progressive nationalization of private property and enterprises turned the tide against the local industrialists.239 The increasingly centralized planned economy, based on the Soviet model, forced many of the residents in the neighborhood around Wukang Lu—many whose enterprises could no longer survive central planning’s determination of value chains or were nationalized—to rely increasingly on their savings and remittances to survive.240 The remittances came from Hong Kong or from further abroad via Hong Kong. Some of the industrialists, whom the state engaged, inevitably spoke out against the hand that was feeding them. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), purges and ‘search and confiscation [抄家]’ became daily events, especially in neighborhoods like that around Wukang Lu, which had been a bastion of bourgeois habits and capitalist sympathies. Even though frugality as style dominated, visible in the drab grey and navy outfits that became universal, the two daughters of the Liu family in house Number 2 still dressed fashionably, their narrow-legged pants and perms disclosing their bourgeois habits. These cultural indiscretions met with harsh consequences at the height of the Cultural Revolution.241 The sisters’ hairstyles, clothing, and accoutrements were rendered counterrevolutionary. As a consequence, they were physically attacked. Shoes from the household were carted out and set afire in a pyre in the middle of Wukang Lu. The sisters were forcibly subjected to the haircut known as the ‘yin-yang,’ with one side of the head shaved and the other not. They, like other ‘counter-revolutionaries,’ were paraded on the street as harbingers of privilege. As ‘enemies of the proletariat class,’ they were publicly denounced. For days on end, the sisters were tortured to remain awake, enduring the dousing of water whenever they inevitably drifted off to sleep.242 Between 23 August and 8 September 1967, in Shanghai alone, 84,222 families were stripped of all their valuables by the rampages of ‘search and confiscation.’ The families of house Numbers 1 and 2 in Lane 117 were kicked out of their spacious homes. Forced to move to tiny, often amenity-less quarters nearby, they were considered lucky to have been spared their lives.243 The eight-story Normandie Apartments down the street became known at the time as the “diving board” for the number of suicides that took place from its heights. The families of the leaders of the Shanghai municipality replaced the residents at Lane 117. The tide of Cultural Revolution even turned against the Shanghai government. After the January Revolution of 1967, the municipal leaders 190

Fig. 36 The District-awarded heritage plaques that describe Lane 117 ‘s former residents, 2011

property and valuables to the numerous unjustly dispossessed families. Even though ‘the implementation of policy [落实政策]’ started in the 1970s to restore losses incurred during the upheavals, the Chen family was forced to sell its house Number 1 at Lane 117 for 110,000 R MB (equivalent to 50,000 USD at the time) to the government in 1981.245 For the future of his adult children, who needed the state’s approval to leave the country, the patron of the family did not wish to incur possible further obstacles and agreed to the terms of the sale.246 In return, the family members were settled in three apartment units, which were no longer located in the neighborhood. In the 1980s, members of the Chen family would emigrate abroad.247 The Liu family managed to hold onto its house Number 2 at Lane 117. The family also sold it for one million USD , after accelerated liberalization began in the 1990s. The two houses became the property of the state. In 1999, the municipality conferred the title Excellent Historic Architecture on the two buildings of Lane 117, as indicated by the two plaques on the wall. The two plaques conferred by the Xuhui District government in 2011 for the Xuhui District Registered Untouchable Cultural Relic [徐汇区登记不可移动文物] repeated the description written by Song. The plaques indicate that the residences belonged to Shanghai’s high-level leaders, including the “former mayor of Shanghai,” the “former vice chair of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress,” and the “former Secretary of East China Bureau of the CCP Central Committee.”248 No mention is made of its more ordinary but no less important real former residents. (Fig. 36) It is noticeably not the first time that a doubtful text of history was disseminated.249 According to municipal

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had also been booted from their homes, which were situated near the Shanghai CCP headquarters on Kangping Lu, a few blocks south of Wukang Lu.244 After the Cultural Revolution, the government attempted to redress the loss of

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Fig. 37 Context of Lane 117, next to the Shanghai Nuclear Power Office, 2013

archives for housing and real estate, house Number 1 in Lane 117 was acquired by the government on 24 October 1966. Its neighbors perhaps give away the status of importance of Lane 117. The white tiled tower directly to the north of Lane 117 was built in the mid-1980s, housing the Shanghai Nuclear Power Office. (Fig. 37) The approval for the plot at the corner of Hunan Lu and Wukang Lu plot is said to be the last personally signed by Premiere Zhou Enlai in the 1970s.250 The forerunner of the Shanghai Nuclear Power Office was founded in 1970 to develop nuclear facilities in a Project 728. The Office, in the CCP hierarchy, is equivalent to a municipal-level bureau. To the south of the site is another compound enclosed by large black gates. It has belonged to an elite division of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA ) since the 1950s. During Lane 117’s renovations, it was visible that 192

the wall between the plots was opened to upgrade the grounds. As nightly rumbles of construction trucks opened the rarely parted front gates of the neighboring plot, rumors in the neighborhood swirled that the two renovated buildings would turn into a club house for the central government CCP elites.251 (Fig. 38) Even if officially unconfirmed, the slow vacating of the PLA from the neighboring premises behind the black metal gates seemed to corroborate neighborhood suspicions. The adjacencies of the two plots could only hint at the high-leveled directives that would determine the future of the compounds. In 2012 the two buildings in Lane 117 underwent conservation. Windows were returned to their historic proportions and the grounds were repaved. Compared to the opening of author Ba Jin [巴金]’s former residence a few doors down on Wukang Lu, supported by the Shanghai Writers’ Association, it was clear that the renovated houses of Lane 117 were of a differing stature. Lane 1754 and Lane 117 demonstrate two episodes in the development of heritage conservation in Shanghai. Lane 1754 showed the use of conservation for real estate development in the early 2000s. The project not only made conservation an urban loophole of exception, destroying the original houses and swiftly expelling the residents. Lane 1754, which became Joffre Mansions, was blatantly redesigned in the form of historic garden-style houses to reclaim its heritage value. Lane 117, on the other hand, showed a conservation project for cultural heritage in the late 2000s. Behind the façade is also an account of erasure. As an erasure of the actual events and experiences that took place in the buildings and in the neighborhood, it is reflective of the overarching amnesia deemed necessary for economic development to continue. Lane 117, though subtler in the deployment of conservation as an urban loophole, exemplifies the state as privileged agent in its authority over history, both in the control of its artifacts and in the re-narration of its own role in relation to culture. (Fig. 40) For a country whose citizens have little input in top-down decisions that have impact on their everyday lives, curiosity for and speculations about the leadership re-

1990s, with his son installed in the Hunan Villa, he wanted to turn the area around it into tennis courts.252 The city was in the throes of massive demolition and reconstruction as part of the urban restructuring required by marketization and globalization. Only with the counterweight of other powerful residents in the area, allegedly, were the plans thwarted. In the context of the larger political shift that has been in play since 2013, ownership of the garden houses of the area seems to have changed accordingly. Another former party secretary of Shanghai is now said to be using the Hunan Villa.253

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veal more about the citizens’ suspicions toward the prevalent system than its possible transgressions. Urban rumors that are unable to be confirmed hover over the ownership of properties around Wukang Lu. The Hunan Villa [湖南别墅], at the intersection of Hunan Lu and Wukang Lu and diagonally across from the Nuclear Office, was once the residence of Mao’s second wife. Its ownership clearly with the state, it has been said to have been passed on to Jiang Zemin, the former party secretary of Shanghai and General Party Secretary of the CCP from 1989 to 2002. His rise to power as a result of the 1989 Tian’anmen Incident and the ensuing ascendance of the Shanghai Gang in the central government expedited the decision to make Shanghai the pilot site for accelerated economic liberalization. It is said that on his return to Shanghai in the

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Fig. 38 Renovation of Lane 117 Number 1 and 2, 2013

Conservation policies reacted directly to the swaths of urban fabric ruthlessly destroyed and redeveloped in the 1990s. But since the feat of their implementation conservation has been able to merely polish the patina of history. True to fengmao, in its emphasis on “features and styles,” conservation projects hover superficially over the façade of old houses to showcase history and culture. Heritage conservation is absolved of the responsibility to address the ambiguities and complexities left by circumstances of history. Memories such as those endured on Wukang Lu are at the same time scrubbed from history. Since the mid-2000s, the street has been increasingly dressed up as the crucible of old Shanghai’s cultured history. (Fig. 39) 194

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Fig. 40 Visitors reading the plaque for Lane 117, 2011

The ‘Western’ District and Learning from the ‘Beautification Plan’ In 2007, the film Lust, Caution [色戒], by the acclaimed Taiwanese director Ang Lee, made Wukang Lu famous. Following the film’s denouement, the protagonist asks to be taken to the street called Ferguson Lane.254 The location was changed in the film from Yuyuan Lu [愚园路], the setting in the original book by the modern era writer Eileen Chang, because of Wukang Lu’s growing contemporary renown. The establishment of “144 conservation streets” two years before, 64 of which would be graded as Grade 1 Protected Fengmao Streets, or ‘Streets never to be widened [永不拓宽地道路],’ highlighted Wukang Lu as one of the most valuable Fengmao Streets. Wukang Lu’s upgrades, starting in the summer 2007, also confirmed the importance of the street to the upcoming 2010 World Expo held in Shanghai. The heritage implementers commended the development of Shanghai’s conservation approach as being from ‘point [点]’ to ‘plane [面]’ to the ‘line [线].’ Heritage conservation of the ‘point’ referred to the architecture-focused gazetting of Excellent Historic Buildings that began in the early 1990s. Heritage conservation of the ‘plane’ denoted the district-scaled conservation plan approved in the mid-2000s, following the 2003 implementation of the Regulations on the Conservation of the Districts with Historical Cultural Fengmao and Excellent Historical Buildings. The broadening of the conservation scope reflected a scalar shift from the object-based approach of selecting buildings as cultural relics to an emphasis on spatial qualities, for which the urban neighborhood was also deemed important to heritage conservation. The progression from the ‘point’ to the ’plane’ further culminated in the heritage conservation of the ’line,’ which were the selected Fengmao Streets. The streetscapes embodied by the ’lines’ were, in the words of one heritage proponent, the “model representation of the Shanghai culture [海派文化的典型代表],” because the ’lines’ “recorded the splendor and elegance of the city’s past [记载了城市曾经的辉煌与优雅].”255 Popular media endorsed the academic shift from the historic monument to the authentic experience. The authentic experience of walking through a city’s historic neighborhoods was the selling point not only for heritage conservation advocates but also for tourism development. The convergence of popular interest in the touristic experience of the authentic and heritage practice of conserving the authentic thus needed to find a new testing ground. The development of one of the Fengmao Streets as the ’line’ became this realization of authentic experience. With 14 Excellent Historic Architecture sites, 37 conserved architecture [保留建筑] and 30 former residence of famous people [名人故居] along its 1,183-meter length, the pilot project found a good ’line’ in Wukang Lu. Rapid urban restructuring, which accompanied economic liberalization starting in the 1990s, led to the severe loss of city center neighborhoods’ authentic character. Especially in neighborhoods that were spared demolition-and-reconstruction, conservation experts saw neighborhood transformations—the exodus of local residents, the influx of both high-income expats and low-income migrant workers, and the proliferation of small commerce—as threats to the city center neighborhoods’ historic feng198

mao.256 Popular media and experts, including academics and bureaucrats, started to use the term of ‘original juice original flavor [原汁原味]’ to represent the authentic ambiance and character they saw as in danger of eroding.257 The experts sought to stem the loss ‘original juice original flavor’ through conservation. In contrast to the objective term ‘historic fengmao,’ the much more tactile metaphor of ‘original juice’ denoted the vernacular and everyday urban contents—both the physical environment and its occupants—that gave the neighborhoods their sought after ‘original flavor.’ By using the term ‘original juice original flavor’ with the more high-minded term of ‘historic fengmao,’ the conservation experts added socio-economics back into the physical shell of modern era built environment, which heritage policy sought to conserve. In an interview, the renowned writer of old Shanghai, Chen Danyan, affirmed the importance of the ’line:’ “only conserving the houses is not enough; if the road is destroyed, the historic ambiance will be on gone as well [光保护房子是不够的，如果街道 被破坏了，历史气氛就没了].”258 In 2008, Chen published a book called Roads that Will Never be Widened [永不拓宽的街道], taking its title from the conservation policy’s designation for the ‘lines’ of the Fengmao Streets. The book focuses on 16 selected streets, each dedicated a chapter. The last chapter, “Wukang Lu, Road that Will Never Be Widened [武康路 永不拓宽的街道],”259 features Wu Jiang’s role in Shanghai’s heritage crusade. It starts with his participation in the saving of the former Chen Residence in the early 1990s, and continues through the implementation of conservation policies for the

large-scale projects, the pair commended each other’s heritage efforts.261 Both pledged their expertise to help conserve their adopted city’s historic identity.262 Even though contemporary best practices from international examples were foregrounded in Wu’s book in 2007,263 historic documents from the city’s modern history were especially important for the development of contemporary planning policies. Historic research would describe to academics and policy makers how Shanghai was planned during the modern era and how conservation districts were given their urban form and historic fengmao. It would also clarify the conceptual frameworks and pragmatic motivations that realized areas like the former French Concession’s Western District, which makes up a large part of the contemporary conservation area in Shanghai. A number of dissertations that studied the Concession-era urban administration in Shanghai came out in the mid-2000s, indirectly influencing contemporary policy implementation. Many dissected the organization systems of urban management under the International Settlement’s Municipal Council [工部局] and French Concession’s Conseil d’Administration Municipale [公董局], translating and reorganizing materials from the archives. A 2005 dissertation examined the urban planning administration and infrastructural implementation of the International Settlement and its impact on the development of urban form,264 while another one from 2006 related the urban administration’s role in the International Settlement to its public spaces, contrasting

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Historic Fengmao Districts in the late 2000s. Chen and Wu’s friendship complemented each other’s work at a moment when the search for a new narrative for the rapidly developing Shanghai was taking form. Both are Shanghainese transplants who took root in the city, and both became active in the city’s transformation, openly taking on the responsibility for influencing and rebuilding the historical imaginary for the city.260 On a panel where Chen and Wu discussed plans by the owner of one of the largest private developers in China known for its

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Fig. 41 Historic photo of Wukang Lu from 1910

both to that of the French Concession in concept and form.265 Others include an analysis of the building laws of the International Settlement266 and a study of the planning processes governing the Bund area, showing the process of planning implementation.267 It was not only scholars in architecture and urban planning who researched historic planning. A law faculty’s study of Concession-era planning laws and their implementations,268 a historian’s study of the development of the French Concession,269 and a study of memory and modernity in Shanghai and Berlin from a faculty of comparative literature,270 amongst more, scoured the municipal archives, which only recently became accessible and organized. (Fig. 41) These studies created a basis from which to understand the formation of the Concession-era city, and set the example for collating, outlining and translating historic planning practices. They also informed the ongoing planning processes under rapid development. The relationship between historic knowledge and contemporary application would oftentimes be direct. Practitioners gleaned from the historic policies and plans to apply to contemporary urban administration.271 A dissertation studying Sinan Lu’s historical district 272 coincided with Sinan Lu’s selection as one of four heritage conservation pilot projects in 2001. The research served as the groundwork to the area’s upgrade and redevelopment launched in 2011. Many academics who also had roles in government bureaucracies supervised research and analyses that fed implementation.273 An analysis of the historic development of the French Concessions in relation to the original urban settlements and hydrology and a study of historic streetscapes and their formation would inform contemporary upgrades on the same sites.274 Both authors took part in the development of the Hengshan Lu Fuxing Lu Historical Cultural Fengmao District. The outline of the Hengshan Lu Fuxing Lu Historical Cultural Fengmao District, the largest of the Fengmao Districts and the first for which a detailed conservation plan 200

was drawn up, overlaps with the outlines of a 1938 plan. Called The Plan for the Reorganization and Beautification of the French Concession [整顿及美化法租界计划], as directly translated from Chinese, it was a plan many contemporary researchers cited. Although there was no citation for the original French name, it was publicly announced in the Chinese language Annual Report of the French Concession Conseil d’Administration Municipale [上海法租界公董局年报] in 1938.275 The plan followed the Conseil’s 1903 outline of what was described as an “area reserved for European constructions [quartier réservé aux constructions européenes],” which set precise regulations for building standards in the designated residential district located in the new territory acquired by the French Concession after its westward expansion in 1914. Together with the 1928 delineation of a zone for industrial use [分类营业章程], shown in a map of area reserved for classified establishments [carte de la zone réservé aux établissements classés], the plans outlined what the Chinese scholars would refer to as the “Western District.”276 (Fig. 42) The series of regulations for the Western District explicitly formulated construction guidelines for building permits, assigned functional zones, and dictated population density, height regulations, building setbacks, road width, and streetscape views. Plans for the hierarchy of road networks from 1914, planting of trees from 1932, noise control and hawker location and permission from 1933, dictation of automobile parking, sidewalk cleaning, and advertising signage regulation, from 1938, would shape the district known today for its platanus-lined boulevards and “Western-style houses [洋房].”277 The area is still much admired by the contemporary public and urban specialists alike for its urban form, and is often referred to as a representative area of old Shanghai. Parts of the 1934 Règlement de Construction [Regulation for Construction] are reflected in the parameters of the detailed control plan after 2003’s conservation regulations.278 In the 1938 Plan for the Reorganization and Beautification of the French Concession, several areas in the larger designated area under regulation were marked as exceptions

Even though these pre-existing buildings were exempted from the regulations, installation of heating and sanitation were still required. When economic liberalization propelled large-scale redevelopment in the 1990s, these two older areas around which the strictly regulated buildings would be built were the first areas to be demolished. Despite having survived the strictness of the Concession-era planning regulations, these older areas expired under the pressures of contemporary development.281 Even in the 2000s, when historic buildings gained importance with heritage recognition, it was clear that the authorities regarded these older areas as both physically and socially “inadequate”282 because they did not fit in with the other Western-style old houses of the historic Western District. In the contemporary choice of sites to be demolished and reconstructed, the tone for a selective historic conservation was already in place.

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to the planning regulation: the hatched areas largely showed settlements that pre-existed the regulations.279 Because they had already been built, buildings in the hatched areas did not follow the regulation standards and were areas of exception from the regulation. In the 1939 update to the Plan for the Reorganization and Beautification of the French Concession, the six areas of exception were reduced to two.280 (Fig. 43) These two areas with lilong-style buildings were allowed to remain on the condition that there were no dark grey-bricked facades visible from the street. At the time, grey-bricked buildings were Chinese, and red-bricked ones were Western, which were preferred.

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Fig. 42 Map of French Concession plan of 1938 , with Chinese labels for the different zones

One of the Tongji dissertations published contrasts the authorities’ top-down planning in the expansion of the French Concession to the much more laissez-faire mode of development control in the International Settlement.283 The scholar regards the planned open spaces of the Western District under French planning spacious and organized, in contrast to the disorder of the partially privatized public spaces of denser lilong areas largely in the older parts of the French Concession and in the International Settlement to the east. According to the research, because of the strict urban rules in the Western District, with each private residence having its own greenery, the class of residents who lived there also had less need for shared spaces, thus resulting in less disorderly public spaces.284 The scholar reads the aesthetic and atmospheric streetscapes that resulted as the urban quality of the Western District’s neighborhood.285 Not only did French Concession planning shape urban quality, the scholar also attributes regulated architecture to the occupants’ social class: “European architecture’s building cost exceeded that of Chinese buildings, the more spacious residential areas, etc., determined the class of the residents [欧式建筑造价较中式建筑高，宽松的居住空间 等等决定了居民的阶层].”286 This valuation of physical form and its influence on social selectivity, supported by historic research, was important conceptual grounding for the contemporary heritage conservation project. To conservation experts, groomed from academia, restoring the authenticity of the modern era neighborhood and its urban quality through social selectivity was the target of conservation. In a book entitled Shanghai Wukang Lu [上海武康路], published in 2009, the authors reiterate that the modern era residents’ “social status [身份]” was befitting of the Western District’s urban “quality [品质].”287 One of the authors, Sha Yongjie [沙永杰], also a professor at Tongji, was part of the central circle of heritage experts. He had contributed a section in Zheng Shiling’s 1999 book on Shanghai’s modern architecture, as well as to Luo Xiaowei’s 2002 book on Xintiandi.288 Sha was also part of the development of the 2003 Regulations on the Conservation of the Districts with Historical Cultural Fengmao and Excellent Historic Architecture under Wu Jiang. Most importantly, Sha served as the lead in the renovation and upgrade project for the conservation of Wukang Lu 202

Fig. 43 Overlap of the French Concession plan of 1939 and the contemporary heritage conservation area, in red

itself. The book’s articulation of the relationship between urban qualities and their appropriate residential social class was not only used to verify necessary physical enhancements of the conservation project. It also implied a parallel call for the upgrade of contemporary occupants as recipients of the effort. Sha not so subtly hints that Wukang Lu, a road highlighted as the exemplary realization of the beautified and highend Western District, deserved more elite occupants.289 The comment that “the French Concession’s Western District was the only instance of a carefully designed residential district in Shanghai [法租界西区是上海唯一经过精心 设计的住宅区]” reinforces the authors’ high regard for the urban administration system as well as policy implementations under the Conseil and its subordinate body of the Service des Travaux Publics [Public Works Department/公共工程处].290 The authors attribute the urban qualities of the Western District’s residential neighborhoods to their proximity to commerce on the main axes, but also, within the neighborhoods, the insulation from commercial intrusions. More importantly, the authors emphasize the

qualities exemplary. “These are, in today’s cities of the developed countries, still the basic features for an excellent quartier [在今天的发达国家城市中，这些特点依然是优秀社 区的基本特征].”291 They view the historic relationship between the form of the modern era buildings and the social status of their occupants as important to the contemporary implementation of heritage conservation. The aspirations for this excellent quartier were partially underway in implementation. Teams working on upgrade plans for Wukang Lu began in 2007. Between 2007 and 2009, the upgrade project of Wukang Lu became Xuhui District’s pilot project at the scale of the ‘line’ to welcome the 2010 World Expo.292 After a year of site documentation by Sha’s team, including detailed cataloguing of street- and architecture-scale elevations and coordination between the different municipal- and district-level departments for further renovation, the District authorized and implemented the Wukang Lu Fengmao Street Conservation Plan [武康路风貌保护道路保护规划].293 In the Wukang Lu

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fact that “the residents’ ‘status’ and cultural backgrounds were largely similar in the neighborhood [区域内居民的‘身份’和文化背景基本相似]” and this has made the urban

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Figs. 44 , 45 Regulations for house number 107 along Wukang Lu as part of the conservation plan, left; and the reality of multiple families that live in the house in 2012, right

Fengmao Street Conservation Plan, each historic building was accompanied by a list of control elements that would need to be engaged to upgrade the façade and thereby improve the quality of the street.294 (Fig. 44) Largely focusing on the physical improvements that could be made to fengmao, the documentation could only allude to the fragmented and ambiguous ownership of some of the historic residences listed as conserved architecture, which remains an obstacle to the implementation of conservation inside historic buildings. (Fig. 45) A second phase of upgrades followed the Expo. Organized under the lead of the Office of the Committee for Xuhui District’s Historic Cultural Fengmao District and Conservation of Excellent Historic Architecture, Sha was appointed the masterplanner to oversee the upgrade project for the conservation of Wukang Lu. The official term for Wukang Lu’s upgrade is “conservational restoration [保护性整治],” which means “restoration and realignment [整治]” for “conservation [保护].”295 As part of the conservational restoration of Wukang Lu, small projects passed to colleagues as well as on to Sha’s own office, with redesigns to street-facing interfaces such as the walls and the entrances to the lanes and compounds. (Fig. 46) The principle of “repair the old to be the original and preserve its authenticity [修旧 如故存其真]” to achieve the “restoration of the original historic fengmao [力求恢复原有 的历史风貌]” prevailed in the conservational restoration of Wukang Lu.296 Most of the street-facing facades were redesigned with elements from historic documents.297 It was clear that the desired fengmao of the street, which the authorities and the planners deemed authentic to the ‘original flavor’ and which they saw as reviving the neighborhood’s former “quality,”298 were particular ones from before 1949. Materials that belonged to other eras, either before or after the desired ‘original,’ were replaced. A glass-clad building at the corner of Anfu Lu [安福路], built in the 1990s, was immediately defined as an example of inappropriateness. (Fig. 47) The building would be re-clad from the palette of “materials that must fit the historical material characteristics of the neighborhood [材质上必须服从街区历史材质的特点].”299 (Fig. 48) Tiled facades, widely used in the 1980s and 1990s, were replaced with red brick or white stucco. Lanes and sidewalks were repaved with patterned stones, edged by pebbles reminiscent of the vernacular style from the region. The characteristic walls that enclosed each plot were upgraded with Art Deco motifs taken from historic references.300 204

Challenges to conservation behind the fengmao, from dilapidating interiors, an aging population, population decline, and ownership complexities to the entrenchment of central government institutions, were daubed over with a fresh layer of paint. In 2009, news coverage proudly announced that a total of 26,242 square meters of fengmao in 11 longtangs, 21,968 square meters of façade, 1,400 meters

Fig. 46 Designed and upgraded gateways on Wukang Lu, 2011

of walls, 69 entryways, and 8,240 square meters of sidewalk paving were conservationally restored.301 Additionally, 14 street-front com-

mercial programs were also upgraded. The former elegance of Wukang Lu re-debuted. The Wukang Lu conservational restoration was not only an exemplary success, opened in time for the Expo’s influx of largely Chinese tourists who flocked to the

Fengmao Street. The processes of planning and concerted conservational restoration, involving the various district and municipal departments, also set a precedent. Starting in January 2008, the municipal Planning Administration organized the production of the Historic Cultural Fengmao District and Excellent Historic Architecture Conservation Plan [历史文化风貌区和优秀历史建筑保护地图]. The processes of documentation, planning, and renovation of Wukang Lu were compiled as part of the Study of Methods for the Compilation of Plans for Shanghai’s Fengmao Conservation Streets [上海市风貌保护 道路规划编织方法研究], to be used for all ensuing conservation projects.302 Between 2011 and 2013, a set of in-depth plans were drawn up for the fengmao streets of the Hengshan Lu-Fuxing Lu Historic District, with Wu and Sha designated as the master planners.303 To promote the conservation efforts, the second national Cultural Heritage Day

Figs. 47, 48 A building from the 1990 s on the corner of Wukang and Anfu Lu, left; and the same buildings after its upgrade, right, 2013

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[文化遗产日], held over the first weekend of June in 2007, promoted the event “Getting Closer to the Old Houses [走近老房子]”, 304 with series of open houses to the garden-style

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old houses under the municipality or district’s institutional jurisdiction that were normally closed to the public. The popularity of the Heritage Day confirmed the success of the public outreach. In August, a reproduction of the Old Commercial Atlas of Shanghai [老上海百业指南] was also published,305 rapidly selling out. To the growing middle class audience who increasingly had expendable resources as well as time to appreciate history and heritage, the “historic approach” was gaining esteem. As a “historical approach to urban regeneration,”306 the Shanghai Wukang Lu book continues in the vein of the earlier book on Xintiandi by providing a historic context and social analyses of the area as background for the contemporary implementations for upgrade. Rather than an accolade bestowed after the development by a senior historian, the Wukang Lu book constitutes at once historic research, documentation of the policy implementation, and public outreach project. Curiously, Wukang Lu’s Lane 1754’s displacement and heritage reconstruction are not included. Cases such as the history of Lane 117 are also not mentioned. Even though in the preface to the book, Zheng Shiling emphasizes that “people are the history [人就是历史],”307 the selected vignettes of the street’s residents are those of renown.308 History and the ‘historic approach’ are only timely instruments to justify and validate plans for the street’s upgrade. The fluidity between research and practice continued, conferring on the scholars-cum-designers a privileged input on the future of the street. Coming from earlier positions of autonomy and resistance, the academics have grown increasingly complicit in the planning bureaucracy. In order to restore the heritage area’s authenticity and return the neighborhood to its ‘original juice original flavor,’ historic research is used to substantiate the necessity for demographic upgrade as part of conservation implementation. The conservation policies not only create exceptional opportunities for urban loopholes, based on the premise of heritage conservation, but also facilitate top-down processes for upgrade. In October 2010, the municipal Housing Administration opened a Center for the Conservation of Shanghai’s Historic Architecture [上海市历史建筑保护事务中心].309 On 11 June 2011, Wukang Lu was selected as a Renowned Chinese Historic and Cultural Street [中国历史文化名街], with approval granted by the central government’s Administration for National Cultural Relics and Cultural Bureau [文化部], 18 months after the publication of the Wukang Lu book. A few days later, on 23 June 2011, the municipal administration for Cultural Relics and the Xuhui District government held the inauguration ceremony for Wukang Lu, the Cultural Street.

The World Primary School and Small Entrepreneurs In June 2010, Professor Sha shared with the pupils of World Primary School, located on Wukang Lu, the importance of their neighborhood’s history.310 In his conclusion to the Wukang Lu book, a photo of the red-scarfed [红领巾] Young Pioneers [少先队员],311 holding elevations of the former school at Number 393, showed the potential and hope for the conservation project. The book concludes that awareness raised with the next generation is the key to the future of the conservation of a city’s heritage.312 206

In 1956, the primary school changed its name to the less bourgeois name of Huaihai Lu N. 2 Primary School when the consolidation of all education facilities under the state as part of the nationalization that took place. With the rising tide of heritage conservation in the mid-2000s, the school reverted to calling itself by its pre-Liberation name of the World Primary School in 2008. A convenience store that had been inserted into the sidewall facing Wukang Lu in the 1990s313 also closed. In its place a memorial hall introducing the history of the World Primary School was installed to highlight the cultural luminaries who were alumnae of the school, many of whom had emigrated in the 1950s. (Fig. 49) The World Primary School Memorial [世界小校史纪念馆] was given a name of elegance meaning “building for the seeking of wisdom and virtuousness [思贤楼],”

Fig. 49 The World Primary School’s Memorial on Wukang Lu across from Lane 117, 2012

from a classic Chinese proverb originating from the Three Kingdoms.314 Like the name change for the school, the naming convention showed the post-liberalization mode of harking to pre-Liberation Republican-era references.315 The donor whose name was etched in front of the small building, Henry Leung [梁焯铿], comes from the Leungs of the Leighton Textiles, one of the many family businesses that had made Shanghai known before the war. It was his widow, who came from another one of the largest Shanghai-based textile families, known today as Hong Kong Textiles, who donated the memorial to their hometown of Shanghai.316 The connection of Shanghai to the Chinese diaspora, especially to the Hong Kong industrialists, remained close, even after the three decades of China’s closure to the outside.317 Addressing the inevitability of market economy’s pressure on the city center neighborhood, in the context of the rapidly transitioning economy of Shanghai, the plan-

their upgrades to the neighborhood’s urban quality and social composition.318 The Wukang Lu Tourism Information Center [武康路旅游咨询中心] and the Xuhui District Old Houses Art Center [徐汇老房子艺术中心] also opened in the former auditorium space of the original location of World Primary School. In the few years following the Wukang Lu’s conservational restoration, the street has seen both the large-scale commercial building of Ferguson Lane as well numerous small-scaled commercial additions that have evolved to become part of the creative economy.319 The overall trend remained as the planners had wished: Wukang Lu is becoming a street that looks increasingly global, with a vibe and fengmao that rekindles what popular media, bureaucrats, planners, and small entrepreneurs, harked as its high-ended cosmopolitan past. Conservationally restoring Wukang Lu’s urban quality also meant pushing out businesses that planners and authorities deemed inappropriate for its fengmao. New

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ners who conservationally restored Wukang Lu saw the only “bright spots [亮点]” in this “memorial and exhibition type of cultural touristic projects [纪念或展示类的文化 旅游性项目]” and the “high-end fashionable spots [中高端时尚场所]” that supported

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Figs. 50, 51 Facade of the Catie Lo store, left; and the Ipluso’s shop’s old location in front of the tiled building, constructed in the 1990 s, right

commercial programs more appropriate to the street replaced repair shops and hardware stores. The Wukang Lu Fengmao Street Conservation Plan’s detailed elevation drawings were explicit: their curt comments called out the “prohibition of street-facing storefronts [禁止出现沿街店面],”320 even where they already existed. Despite the planners’ disparagements towards small entrepreneurs on the street and their desire to keep the street residential,321 the upgrade project that was implemented nevertheless seemed to expedite, rather than hinder, Wukang Lu’s commercialization. In the late 2000s, as the conservational restorations were underway, small enterprises also caught wind of Wukang Lu’s growing prestige. Ipluso, a cultural products enterprise which began in 2004, opened a shop in a storefront space at Number 202, a property which was part of the state enterprise Shanghai Flower and Trees Company that had its offices in a white-tiled building behind. (Fig. 51) CNN touted that its large shop window showcased glasses and stationery products as what one needed to “get noticed.”322 The store also featured design in action, with local designers visibly clicking away on their silver iMacs behind the shop window. Across the street, another designer entrepreneur, originally from Beijing and who had studied in the UK , opened a fashion and accessories boutique called Catie Lo on the ground floor of an old apartment building at Number 105. (Fig. 50) Strolling on Wukang Lu had given the designer entrepreneur the motivation to open up the store, which featured a mix of vintage and contemporary items, inspired by the ambiance of the street.323 With a small open space converted to a garden at its entrance, a street-facing façade also was painted with a perspective of an interior hallway, framed by an antique car. The stores grasped the heritage value that the Fengmao Street bestowed on their businesses, and whether these boutiques’ openings abided by the Wukang Lu Fengmao Street Conservation Plan did not seem so have much impact. Although it would seem that any conservation plan would take into account the contents of the urban fabric, the relationship of the Wukang Lu Fengmao Street Conservation Plan to program and ownership seemed tenuous at best. Academics in the mid-2000s crafted the well-meaning analyses to support conservation. Nevertheless, conservation implementations come off as naive in their engagement of changes on the ground. In meetings with the district authorities, even some of the planning team expressed frustration regarding the Wukang Lu Fengmao Street Conservation Plan’s ability to steer programmatic development inside the shells of conserved buildings.324 208

Figs. 52, 53 Converted facade of a tiled building on Wukang Lu, left; and the addition of a burger joint as part of its development, right

This frustration revealed a fundamental discrepancy between the concepts for conservation policy as a set of urban rules, which maintained what the academics saw as the heritage value of the historic urban structures, and their implementation under the institutional frameworks of transition economy.325 Most of the changes to the façades as well as the interiors of the buildings in the neighborhood proved the Conservation Plan to be either ineffective or deliberately

who had already opened a few other cafés nearby, opened Petite Jasmine in a small space inset from the wall, at Number 214. Like Catie Lo, an accumulation of antique accessories lent the place a Mediterranean ambiance that fit the Cultural Street. Wine bars, specialist boutiques, and juice bars replaced repair shops, fruit stalls, and realtor shops. Since 2013, the white-tiled building behind Ipluso was upgraded, with a more Deco façade fronted by a burger joint and ice cream shop that is famous for its queues. (Figs. 52, 53) Conservation of the spatial legacies of Shanghai’s modernity was not overlooked by the watching world, especially in light of the city’s role in China’s re-globalization.

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ignored. The commercialization of the ground floor units contradicted the stipulation that no functional changes could happen to the buildings without municipal approval. Similarly, interior changes that occupants made, would, according to the Conservation Plan, be informal. Given that most of the buildings are already in the grey zone of programmatic reuse or physical transformations, the law, crucially, defines the deployable parameters for pushing out residents and tenants, in the name of conservation. Although untested yet in this capacity, the possibility of legal penalty makes the uncertainty that conversions and upgrades face the only sure thing. If nothing more, the state implemented the Conservation Plan so that the authorities could use their parameters should the need arise. In 2010, as tourists flocked to Wukang Lu, led on jaunts to rediscover the old houses of the conservationally restored Cultural Street, more commercial spaces opened on the street. At the northern end of Wukang Lu, at the intersection of Anfu Lu, the upgrade of an “unharmonious” glass-clad building gave way to a commercial hub with a Western supermarket, bakery, yoga studio, spa, work-share offices.326 At the southern end of Wukang Lu, Ferguson Lane expanded into the adjacent tower building. Small conversions of ground floor spaces continued, while older existing commerce were replaced by newer businesses commanding higher rents. A Taiwanese restaurateur,

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As the gateway to the vast market of the country in the 19th century, Shanghai’s modern era image was formed by its global commercial connections. When the long-closed Communist nation accelerated its re-opening to the world in the 1990s, Shanghai again became a hub of both financial as well as cultural interaction between China and the world. Since the late 1990s, articles in Western media described the influx of creative globe-trotters as attracted to the former Concessions in particular because their modern era buildings along platanus-lined streets serve as “a reminder of home.”327 It was implied that a contemporary rekindling of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan past, manifested by its built environment, could again make the city a node in the global flows of capital and talent, affirming the narrative of legacy’s contribution to the city’s’ re-globalization. While the district continued to welcome the visitors that conservational restoration generated for the street,328 the protection of historic relics inside remained ambiguous. At Wukang Lu’s south end stands the former Normandie Apartments, also known as Wukang Apartments [武康大楼], considered the Flatiron of the former French Concession because of its triangular plot facing an étoile intersection. Its ground floor had one of the earliest cold storage facilities designed for the 1930s apartment tower, now a gazetted Excellent Historic Architecture. The ground floor gallery had also famously included a deli, salon, and dry cleaning, since before Liberation. Until the 1980s, the salon at the base of the towers was well known for its steady flow of well-known clientele, who endured the calamities under planned economy and visited their coiffeur. Since the 2000s, bank ATM s, new shops, and beauty salons replaced some of the original stores in the revived market economy. With the new functions, one resident, whose father recalled the construction of the buildings during his university days, lamented that the cold storage facility was removed. It was replaced with a spa that needed the space.329 In contrast to the tacit interests of the planners for the conservational restoration, the district government’s interest in heritage was direct. They sought to activate the links between history and future investments, especially from the diaspora, and between heritage and the attraction of overseas resources to enhance the cultural capital of the district. To the District authorities, the memorials, tourist centers featuring old houses, and old houses of prominent people increased the renown of the street, which in turn facilitated further access to resources. Heritage created the urban loophole of exception that would give the state the privilege of intervention, in the name of cultural conservation.

Approximating Globalization and the State’s Appropriation Re-narration of history is the habit of those in power. David Harvey, who famously coined ‘neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics,’ 330 emphasizes that ‘heritage­ isation,’ the development of heritage as a process, is tied to “the production of identity, power, and authority,” “a selective portrayal contingent on present-day requirements.” 331 This is manifested in the development of the heritage project and its prototype of Wukang Lu in Shanghai. 210

In the West, the conceptualization of ‘heritage,’ with elaborations on the ‘monument,’ ‘preservation’ and ‘conservation,’ developed under modernity.332 This resulted from the pressures of economic transition during the Industrial Revolution, which compelled a growing ‘nostalgia’ for the rapidly depleting past as a consequence of development. The formation of the nation state under modernity, for which the relics of the past became bearers of a collective cultural identity, also facilitated and were propelled by the concepts and processes for ‘heritage.’ China’s encounter with modernity brought these notions of ‘heritage’ to the country in the early 1900s. But, it is in face of China’s economic transition, which began in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s, that ‘heritage,’ as concept and as process, developed. As Harvey emphasized, heritagei­ sation is symptomatic of the development of political economy in the West since industrialization. Heritageisation, evolving in a developmental autocracy, 333 such as that of China’s transition economy, is also symptomatic of its institutional frameworks. As this chapter has shown, economic development and urban restructuring induced a popular ‘nostalgia’ for a disappearing past, as propagated by popular media. At the same time, academics appropriated heritage concepts learned from developed economies of the West and adapted these ‘heritage’ practices to the rapidly transforming city of Shanghai. This and the previous chapter have shown that the urban loopholes of gaps and absences, emerging from economic transition, which bottom-up actors exploited, conserved historic buildings through their reuse. This chapter also has shown the urban loopholes of exceptions and alibis, which top-down actors utilized to pursue agendas for development and heritageisation, which go hand in hand. The CCP and its institutions, from the central government to the municipality, has since Liberation carved up the properties abandoned by capitalists and elites who fled the country, and occupied the best real estate in the former French Concession’s Western District when it took over Shanghai in 1949. A diversity of occupants—industrialists, intellectuals, Party elites, and ordinary citizens—coexisted in the neighborhood. Under planned economy, the lack of development exacerbated existing densi-

much socially as politically motivated by the proximity of economic and cultural differentials, waves of emigration of pre-Liberation elites from the area, first in 1949 and then in the 1980s, inevitably served the purposes of the party-state in facilitating its territorial expansion. When economic transition began in the 1980s, the priorities of the CCP shifted to that of capital accumulation. With the development of real estate as commodity and the marketization of housing, it was inevitable that economic efficiency and private ownership would infringe on state control unless the state also participated as a privileged determinant of development. It was thus not only the enlightened concepts brought by the know-how exchanges of globalization that elevated the neighborhood around Wukang Lu to heritage status. The political elites’ hold on the most valuable real estate acquired since Liberation was also what saved an area like the Western District from the demolitions that rapidly cleared large parts of Shanghai in the early 1990s. The foresight of the Concession-era planners, in their creation of a district that by virtue of its regulated urbanism first attracted the capitalist, then the Communist, and today the socialist-market-economy elites, is not precluded from the physical resilience of the neighborhood.

Chapter 3 The Cultural Street

ty and magnified the spatial juxtaposition of socio-economic differences. With social frictions exploding in the political pogroms of the Cultural Revolution that were as

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What Shanghai’s heritageisation and Wukang Lu’s conservational restoration have also shown is the evolving double role played by academics under economic transition. The academics helped reconceptualize Shanghai’s modern era buildings and urban fabric as invaluable heritage. The academics also became the executors of state-directed conservational restorations for the same valued heritage. From their support of the Xintiandi model, validating its legitimacy as a viable historic conservation project, to their engagement in the Wukang Lu conservaFig. 54 A sign that says “Regulate the ‘Five Illegals,’ Restore tional restoration, the double role the acthe Fengmao, Preserve the Nostalgia” on Wuyuan Lu, where ademics have taken on has inhibited an shutdowns and upgrades were implemented in 2016 earlier criticality, swapping it for a pragmatic complicity with the interests of the local government. The academics, many becoming planning bureaucrats, promote the “selective borrowing from ‘advanced’ foreign organizational and regulatory practices,” which political theorists Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry point to as crucial to the state’s institutional plasticity.334 The academics-bureaucrats extract theories from international best practices and Concession-era planning procedures to justify and affirm the state’s claims to historic territory. Explaining the unique advantages of being in the Chinese context, lead academic, pioneer conservationist, and planning bureaucrat Wu Jiang put forth that “because of the limits from land rights, property rights and other private rights, many Western developed countries are limited in their capacity to realize many of their advanced planning concepts [由于地权，产权，和私权等各方面的限制，不少西方发达国家在规划理论上的 很多先进理念在他们的实际规划实施中受阻碍]; but because our land rights belong to the state, it is more advantageous to our reprogramming of land resources [但由于我国地 权国有，更加有利于调整土地资源]” 335 He attributes the singular authority of the state to the planner’s ability to realize the West’s most advanced planning concepts, such as that for heritageisation, which faces critiques and obstacles in the West. Working closely with the local state, the academics-bureaucrats have, since the finish of the Cultural Street project and the ensuing commercialization of the street, made recommendations for the local state to mimic the methods of the small entrepreneurs. Much in the same way that the small entrepreneurs profited from market demands, some of the academics-bureaucrats have recommended the reversion of the ground-level commercial spaces to local state ownership.336 In the name of reclaiming what is considered “eroded” assets to the local state and facilitating heritageisation, this recommendation of an incremental and spatially dispersed development would allow the privileged player in the market, the local state authorities, rather than the independent players in the market, the small entrepreneurs, to profit from the city’s real estate assets. Much as Lane 1754 and Lane 117 have been reclaimed by the state, heritageisation and conservation have become the urban loophole of exceptions and 212

alibis to implement top-down upgrades. (Fig. 54) The closure of small enterprises on Wuyuan Lu, noted in the previous chapter, and the shutdown of Jing’an Villas and Yongkang Lu, elaborated in the following chapters, all claim heritage as justification. Fengmao, as the unique characteristics to be conserved for Shanghai’s historic and cultural identity, has evolved from a principled symbol of resistance against demolition-driven development to a branding marker for the limited supply and hence highly demanded modern era buildings. A summary of the development of the Lane 1754 compound, that “fengmao can also command high prices [风貌也能卖高价],” 337 confirms this flimsy yet utilitarian alibi. The value of built heritage, manifested by fengmao, and the special authority that the state can claim for conserving history and culture—in the name of public good—transfers to the state the market privileges solidified by the conservation codes written into law that can be turned into invaluable claims to territory. A New York Times article from 2010 is especially scathing in connecting Shanghai’s heritageisation to commercial returns: “in 2004, the Shanghai government created 12 preservation zones, giving historic neighborhoods at least some protection. The government’s motive for such moves is often profit; it has recognized that the city’s extraordinary mix of architecture contributes to its tourist appeal.” 338 Without contradicting voices, the planner’s belief of returning the former Western District to its historic quality of being an upper-class residential area, coupled with the faith in top-down planning as a necessity for Chinese urbanism, would have turned the area into a sanitized if not historically embellished neighborhood erased of its cumulated history. Luckily for the city, the appearance of rigid control conceals a persistent and deliberate porosity of state control and a practiced adaptive governance.

Fig. 55 Renovations along Wukang Lu, 2016

Chapter 3 The Cultural Street

Urban loopholes of absences and gaps persist, facilitating bottom-up engagement, countering top-down deployment of urban loopholes of exceptions, and buffering against

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Fig. 56 Locations highlighted in this chapter in the neighborhood around Wukang Lu

implementable dogmatism. On Wukang Lu, because of the pragmatic interests of the district government, prioritized by larger and more lucrative projects in the district’s periphery, and the lack of a single authority to dominate the area that is divided between private, district, municipal, and central government jurisdictions, these endogenous processes have made possible a social diversity under transition. (Fig. 55) Within this constellation dominated by state-directed image-production and economic growth, the only opportunity for the entrepreneurs to work within institutional structures are the urban loopholes that the state’s lax control permitted. To the local state especially, the tacit allowance of these conditions of exceptions bequeaths on them the power to close the urban loopholes at will, all the while benefiting from possible gains, financial or political, that the innovation reaps. Conversely, to the non-state-affiliated private sector players, the necessity of being just one step ahead 214

compels innovations in enterprise. Swift adjustments to demographic shifts and market demands in turn also pushes the quickly shifting market trends. Singing the same tunes, sometimes even more enthusiastically than the government slogans, clever private entrepreneurs not only exploited the gaps and exceptions in the system but also edified the authorities in sharing in the benefits of market growth. ‘Preservation with inhabitation,’ as the overarching theme of this and the previous chapter, asks these fundamental questions about preservation’s targets and their relationship to the inhabitants who already occupy the same spaces. (Fig. 56) The

1 In the summer of 2007 the author encountered the and liberalization. 6 “武康路旅游咨询中心、徐汇老房子艺 bevy of researchers and bureaucrats busy with the street’s 术中心 ［Wukang Road Tourism Information Center, Xuhui upgrade. Although little about the Cultural Street was Old House Art Center],” 上海市徐汇区人民政府门户网站, acpublicized at the time, as is usual in the procedural orders cessed September 1, 2014, http://www.qjtrip.com/wukanof Chinese projects, the development of the street as wit- groad/XHWKI nformation.aspx. 7 Wei Yuan 袁玮, “巴金故 nessed by the author in her fieldwork in 2011 – 2014 has 居修缮竣工 ‘修旧如旧’展示生活写作环境 [Renovation of Ba confirmed her hunches about the heritage project. 2 In- Jin’s Former Residence ‘Repair the Old to Be the Old’ disterviews, 2007. 3 The name ‘platanus’ tree is of signifi- plays the Environment for His Life and Writing],” 新民晚报 cance as they are the trees planted in the former French New Citizen Evening News, October 19, 2011, http:// Concessions. In English, they are also known as plane www.chinanews.com/cul/ 2011 / 10 - 19 / 3400372 .shtml. trees, of the family Platanaceae. In Chinese, the trees are 8 Authenticity, in the perception of it and its relationship popularly known as wutong [梧桐]. 4 The use of the term to physical and material origins, is a contested concept ‘modern era’ is used throughout the text by the author to that scholars sometimes use to distinguish between denote a period in China’s socio-political history that cor- Western and East Asian definitions. The scholars distinresponded with industrialization, beginning around 1850 guish between the Western attachment to material conwith the end of the Opium War and the opening of the tinuity, as exemplified by reverence of historic monuments Chinese Treaty Ports, the most prominent of which was such as the Parthenon and the Pyramids, to the East Asian Shanghai, reaching its industrial and economic apogee in privileging of the immaterial, as exemplified by disregard the flourishing 1930 s. The term is also used to represent of physical continuity and emphasis on a spiritual one. See, the stylistic manifestations for architecture and design of for example, Auguste Berque, “Transmitting the Past to the period. Although the author is aware of the simplifi- the Future : An Ontological Consideration on Tradition and cation that is embedded in the use of the term, it is Modernity,” in Historical Architecture Heritage Preser­ nevertheless one of the most accessible and easy to un- vation and Sustainable Development, International derstand terms to describe the visual as well as socio-po- Symposium (Tianjin University, 2007 ). 9 Even though the litical attributes of the time, prior to the end of World War terms ‘preservation’ and ‘conservation’ are used interII and China’s nationhood following Liberation. 5 Zhen- changeably, the term ‘preservation’ embodies broader gli Huang 黄震丽, “焯铿教育基金捐赠暨梁焯铿世界小学校史 aims for the ‘protection’ of an artifact or building from 馆揭牌仪式日前举行 [Henry Leung Education Foundation change. ‘Conservation,’ on the other hand, suggests the Donates Henry Leung World Primary School Historic Me- process to ‘preserve,’ whether through reparation, restomorial Hall, Plaque Unveiling Ceremony Being Held],” Sep- ration, rehabilitation, or management of actions leading tember 29, 2010, http://www.xhedu.sh.cn/cms/data/ to ‘preservation’ of the artifact or building. The author html/doc/2010 -09/29/236055 /index.html. The change uses the term ‘conservation’ to denote the means, includback to the pre-Communist Republican era name for the ing management and policies, that have made ‘preservaschool and the opening of the commemorative space tion’ as a concept possible. The historian of heritage manboth are significant in the context of the larger change to agement Gregory Ashworth has put forth that there is a the street and neighborhood in which the institution is paradigm shift from ‘preservation,’ to ‘conservation,’ to situated. They are both part of the increasing valuation of ‘heritage.’ ‘Preservation,’ as “protection from change,” modern era heritage that is crucial to the re-globalization namely at the scale of buildings, has shifted to ‘conservaand resource attraction to Shanghai’s economic growth tion,’ as a process that deals with “ensembles” of buildings

Chapter 3 The Cultural Street

persistence of both urban loopholes for bottom-up and top-down use helps maintain a precarious equilibrium under economic transition, allowing the agenda of top-down preservation to coexist with bottom-up inhabitation.

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in the city. Ashworth notes that “the critical difference between preservation and conservation, however, was not so much in the actions themselves as in the methods, attitudes and goals of those who were performing them.” Gregory Ashworth, “Preservation, Conservation and Heritage: Approaches to the Past in the Present through the Built Environment,” Asian Anthropology 10, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 10, doi:10.1080/1683478X.2011.10552601. Ashworth puts the shift to ‘heritage’ in the context of broader consumption demands as well as the forces of globalization. In the West, the conceptualization of ‘preservation’ is a consequence of modernity, both a result of the rapid developments of Industrial Revolution that compelled a public nostalgia for the then rapidly depleting past, including its physical relics, and the conception of the nation-state, for which the relics of the past became the bearers of a collective cultural identity. See, for example, Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument [L’Allégorie Du Patrimoine], trans. Lauren M. O’Connell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). In the developing and transition economy of China, ‘preservation’ and ‘conservation’ are both translated as ‘baohu [保护].’ The rise of ‘preservation,’ as outlined in the chapter, certainly reacts to the rapid economic development and ensuing physical transformations to the built environment that have wiped out large swaths of older structures. Like economic transition, the paradigm shift to ‘conservation’ and ‘heritage’ was also simultaneous in the developing economy. At the same time, ‘preservation,’ at the end of the 19 th century, had faced conflicts as to the means of protecting the past. The historic clash between the French architect Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and the English art and architecture historian John Ruskin toward what best ‘preserves’ the historic authenticity of cultural monuments reveals fundamental differences in the understanding of the object of the act of ‘conservation.’ Ruskin attacked Viollet-le-Duc’s alteration of ruins of historic monuments in his restorations of them, whereas Viollet-le-Duc viewed his act to fulfill the monuments’ ‘authenticity.’ See Nikolaus Pevsner, Ruskin and ViolletLe-Duc: Englishness and Frenchness in the Appreciation of Gothic Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969); John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, ed. Andrew Saint, National Trust Classics (London: Century, 1988); Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, The Foundations of Architecture: Selections from the Dictionnaire Raisonné, trans. Kenneth D. Whitehead, 1st ed (New York: G. Braziller, 1990). It could be said that the same kinds of positioning of ‘conservation’ and ‘heritage’ is yet to take place in discourse, to which this chapter hopes to contribute. 10 The Cultural Revolution, or the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, lasting from 1966 to 1976, was a political movement wrought by high-level conflicts in the CCP , which resulted in economic devastation, social disintegration, and spiritual depletion. Its proximity in time means that its legacies impact contemporary developments. The massive physical destruction of the decade-long Cultural Revolution erased unrecoverable quantities of historic artifacts. The repercussions of cultural destruction, however, continue to be mummed, due to the sensitive nature of responsibility-assignation. See Lucian W. Pye, “Reassess-

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ing the Cultural Revolution,” The China Quarterly, no. 108 (December 1, 1986): 597– 612 . 11 Authors like Chen Danyan and Wang Anyi of the 1990 s recounted with minute detail and specificity the streets and spaces in which their stories took place, bringing ever more awareness to the physical environment of Shanghai’s modern era culture. 12 The projects Tianzifang and Xintiandi are two development projects that began in the 1990 s that reused the form of Shanghai’s vernacular residential lilong typology to accommodate non-residential functions. Before their commercial successes, urban development had emphasized the demolition and reconstruction mode of urban development. The two projects helped launch a growing awareness of the value of heritage architecture and became exemplary in China for protection of historic buildings, even though neither is technically regarded as preservation projects. The two projects and their processes of development will be detailed in the next section. 13 As elaborated in the previous chapter, the term ‘old houses [老房子],’ is specific in denoting modern era Western-style buildings built before 1949 in Shanghai’s Concessions. The distinction between ‘historic architecture [历史建筑]’ and the ‘old house’ is a fuzzy one. 14 In August 2012, the author was accosted by the eager young real estate agent on a walk along Wukang Lu and was struck by his curious mix of enthusiasm with blatant misinformation that seemed to represent the contemporary conception of the street. The author also points out that the young man was non-Shanghainese, because much of what is represented as being Shanghainese has been propagated by those largely unfamiliar with the city. This account is of course an extreme example of the misappropriation of local identity, since almost half of Shanghai’s population is now from outside of the city. But it is also a prelude to the policies defined by the many academics and policy makers, whose evocation of local history in their call for heritage preservation contrasts from their detachedness from everyday life of the neighborhoods. 15 The author, jokingly, asked the young real estate agent the name of Mao’s ex-wife, and when he indicated he did not know, purposely threw in the name Jiang Qing, who was Mao’s wife held accountable for the Cultural Revolution, to whom his response also indicated clear confusion. He Zizheng was the former wife of Mao who was one of the few women fighters on the Long March and who later lived in the house with a large black gate on Hunan Lu until her death. The incident remains memorable to the author, for the use of history to peddle the “cultural goods” of the street, while there remains a blatant misrepresentation of that very history. 16 Jian Zhou 周俭, Hui Xi 奚慧, and Fei Chen 陈飞, “上海历史文化 风貌区规划与建筑管理方法的探索 [The Probe into the Planning and Construction Management Method for Shanghai Historical Cultural Features and Styles Areas],” 上海城市管 理职业技术学院学报 [Journal of Shanghai Polytechnical College of Urban Management], no. 02 (2006): 39–42. 17 Shanghai’s mayor Han Zheng first uttered the slogan and then different versions echoing the sentiment followed. See Wei Zheng 郑蔚, “韩正要求牢固树立‘开发新建是 发展，保护改造也是发展’观念 全力保护上海历史文化风貌 [Han Zheng Requests Solidly establishing ‘Building New

facts People’s Republic of China],” Pub. L. No. 11 (1982), http://www.law-lib.com/law/law_view.asp?id=95139. The first batch of cities to be included in the protection list included the cities of Beijing, Chengde, Datong, Nanjing, Suzhou, Yangzhou, Shaoxing, Quanzhou, Jingdezheng, Qufu, Luoyang, Kaifeng, Jiangling, Changsha, Guangzhou, Guilin, Chengdu, Zunyi, Kunming, Dali, Lhasa, Xi’an and Yan’an. All are sites of significant historic artifacts from China’s dynastic empires. The motivation, although not publicly stated for the listing, came from the immense amount of irreplaceable destruction to historic artifacts that took place during the Cultural Revolution. 26 Ping Sun 孙平, ed., “第二章历史文化名城保护规划 [Chapter 2 Historic Cultural Prominent City Conservation Plan],” in 上海 城市规划志 [Annal of Shanghai Urban Planning], vol. 8 第 八篇城市绿化系统和历史文化名城保护规划 [Urban Green System and Historic Cultural Prominent City Conservation Plan], 12 vols. (Shanghai 上海: 上海社会科学院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1999), http:// shtong.gov.cn/node 2 /node 2245 /node 64620 /node 64632 /node64720/index.html. Both the Small Swords Society Uprisings of 1853 and the May Fourth Movement of 1919 are acknowledged by the CCP as precursors to the great proletariat revolution that brought the party into power in China. Their sitings in Shanghai thus gives the city significance as supporter and host of the Communist ideology, which is enhanced by the founding of the CCP itself. 27 国务院 State Council, “国务院批转城乡建设环境保 护部、文化部关于请公布第二批国家历史文化名城名单报告的 通知 [State Council Approves and Transmits to the Department of Urban and Rural Development and Environment Protection and Department for Culture Regarding the Announcement of the Second List of Renowned National Historic Cultural Cities]” (1986), http://www.chinabaike. com/law/zy/xz/gwy/1332417.html. 28 Yingsong Ling 凌 颖松, “上海近现代历史建筑保护的历程与思考 [Chronicle and Thoughts on the conservation of Shanghai’s modern era historic architecture” (硕士 Master’s Thesis, Tongji University [同济大学], 2007 ). 29 Qiguo Lu 陆其国, “老上海的三山 会馆 [Old Shanghai’s Sanshan Guild House],” Shanghai Archives, December 10, 2012 , http://www.archives.sh. cn/shjy/shzg/201212 /t20121210_37469.html. 30 In the 1930 s, a series of legal frameworks were established for heritage conservation and management. They would serve as foundations for the approach to heritage after 1949. See Zhu Qian, “Historic District Conservation in China: Assessment and Prospects,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 19, no. 1 (2007 ): 59–76 . 31 The “Symposium on the research of Chinese modern era architectural history [中国近代建筑史研究讨论会]” was held under the auspices of the Department of Architecture at Qinghua University and the Technology Bureau of the Development Ministry [建设部科技局]. It would be the first of a series that would bring international scholars together and would be productive for the knowledge exchange necessary to the long-insulated Chinese academic community. See Fuhe Zhang 张复合, “中国近代建筑史研究之回 顾与展望 [Looking back and looking forward for the study of Chinese modern era architectural history],” 南方建筑 Southern Architecture, no. 02 (1994): 3–12. 32 The beseeching for the return of research was in reaction to the

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Is Development, Preserving Renovating Is Also Development’ Concept, Wholly Protecting Shanghai Historic Cultural Style”,” 文汇报 Wenhui News, August 3, 2004, http:// news.sina.com.cn/c/2004 -08 -03 /07193276588 s.shtml. 18 Song Zhang 张松, “上海城市遗产的保护策略 [Conservation Strategy of Urban Heritage in Shanghai],” 城市规划 [City Planning Review], no. 2 (2006): 49–54 . 19 “A historical approach to urban regeneration” was the English subtitle to a 2009 on Wukang Lu book, which academics who also were the masterplanners for the street’s upgrade published. The linkage between history and urban regeneration is probed in this chapter. Yongjie Sha 沙永 杰, Yan Ji 纪雁, and Zonghao Qian 钱宗灏, 上海武康路 风貌 保护道路的历史研究与保护规划探索 [Shanghai Wukang Lu, Explorations in Historic Research and Conservation Planning for a Conserved Fengmao Street] (Shanghai 上海: 同 济大学出版社 Tongji University Press, 2009). 20 The terminology of ‘Liberation [解放], denoting the time period following 1949 ’s founding of the nation under the CCP , is significant. It is used to denote a periodization of the historic era, as in ‘before Liberation [解放前]’ and ‘after Liberation [解放后]’—implying at the same time the emancipation and freedom that is delivered to the oppressed and shackled Chinese society prior to Liberation. The rhetoric is part of the narrative constructed on the progress of history and the CCP ’s role in it for the Chinese people. 21 Comparative literature professor Yomi Braester recounts the central government’s image construction of Shanghai as a decadent and depraved legacy of its Concession-era commerce in the early 1960 s propaganda campaigns. It is interesting that at the moment of the article’s publication, the representation of Shanghai as also the birthplace of the CCP was being highlighted in the growing international awareness of Xintiandi, a project that will be elaborated further in this and the following chapters. See Yomi Braester, “‘A Big Dying Vat’: The Vilifying of Shanghai during the Good Eighth Company Campaign,” Modern China 31, no. 4 (October 1, 2005): 411–47. 22 It was well known to Shanghainese citizens that the central government in Beijing usurped large portions of Shanghai’s revenues and redistributed them in the development of inland Chinese cities. That Shanghai had been the most revenue generating city in China, with its openness, modernity and commercial aptitude, did little to ease the locals’ resentment of this redistribution. 23 See the previous chapter for a detailed account of housing fragmentation and overcrowding. 24 Urban historian Christian Henriot examined historic documents up to the 1980 s to unpack the changing representation of the Bund in both international as well as Chinese depictions. See Christian Henriot, “The Shanghai Bund in Myth and History: An Essay through Textual and Visual Sources,” Journal of Modern Chinese History 4 , no. 1 (2010): 1–27, doi:10.1 080/17535651003779400. 25 The author translated many of the policies into English directly from Chinese to show the sometimes awkward juxtaposition of terms that constitute the basis from which heritage and conservation policy arose. For the policy on the “Renowned National Historic Cultural Cities [国家历史文化名城],” see 全国人大 常委会 People’s Congress Standing Committee, “中华人民 共和国文物保护法 [Law for the Protection of Cultural Arti-

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immense destruction to the cultural relics as well as to the academic communities that occurred in the decades before the beginnings of economic liberalization in the 1980 s. The fact that many scholars from abroad are interested in Chinese modern era architectural history was used as an argument for the development of expertise in the country itself. See Tan Wang 汪坦 and Fuhe Zhang 张 复合, “关于进行中国近代建筑史研究的报告 [Report Regarding Conducting Research Chinese Modern Era Architectural History]” (北京 Beijing: 清华大学 Qinghua University, April 1, 1985). 33 Prior to the 1970 s, China, under embargo from the West and economically and insulated from the world, had few amenities that were already prevalent in other developing countries as well as the media forms accessible in the West. Television sets as well as the value chain that produced the programs shown would be first introduced to China through places like Hong Kong, which was a funnel for the know-how and resources of capitalism. 34 The author remembers distinctly the first television sets in the neighborhood in Shanghai, in the early 1980 s. The single channel set was the center of family and neighborly gatherings, especially during the nightly hour of imported drama. The fact that there was only one channel magnified the effects of the media program even more. 35 Lili Wang 王利丽 and Shuang Liu 刘爽, “电视剧 中的上海空间与文化意义—以表现三四十年代上海的电视剧为 例 ［Shanghai’s spatial and cultural significance in television shows: examples of shows featuring 1930 s and 1940 s Shanghai],” 中国电视 [China Television], no. 08 (2012): 35–37. 36 Chengyuan Ma 马承源, “第三编管理, 第 二章文物保护, 第二节文物调查 [Volume 3 Administration Chapter 2 Conservation of Cultural Relic Section 2 Research of Cultural Relic],” in 上海文物博物馆志 [Annals of the Shanghai Cultural Relic Museum] (Shanghai 上海: 上 海社会科学院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1997 ), http://shtong.gov.cn/node2 /node2245 / node4467/node20561/node20571/node63799/userobject1ai16103.html. 37 Yanli Ding 丁艳丽, “优秀历史建筑挂 牌保护效果不一 责任分工需明确 [The Preservation Effects from the Plaquing of Excellent Historical Architecture Differ, Assignment of Responsibilities Must Be Clear],” 中国 文化报 China Cultural Post, August 2, 2012, http://culture. people.com.cn/n/2012 /0802 /c172318 -18658547.html. 38 Congzhou Chen 陈从周 and Ming Zhang 章明, 上海近 代建筑史稿 [History of Shanghai Modern Era Architecture Manuscript] (Shanghai 上海: 三联书店上海分店 Sanlian Press, 1988). 39 The preface of the volume describes the volume’s origin taking place almost ten years after nation-founding, and alludes to the social upheavals of the Cultural Revolution that resulted in the almost three-decade delay since the beginning of the project in 1958 to its fortunate publication in 1987. 40 Usually in a book resulting from a research project, the introduction clearly states the relevance of the project and importance of the contribution to the discipline. In this case, because of the sensitivity of the time period, right after the Cultural Revolution, such clarity could not be open. Therefore, only a cursory mention through an anecdote could be made to show the importance of the work itself. By allowing someone else—the famous I. M. Pei in this case—do the talking, the author carefully avoided the risk that comes with taking

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responsibility for work that could provoke ideological and therefore political stances. 41 Chen 陈从周 and Zhang 章明, 上海近代建筑史稿 [History of Shanghai Modern Era Architecture Manuscript]. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 The original Chinese text read: “研究外滩建筑，无论是对与中国近 代史的研究，对于上海近代建筑遗产的发掘与保护，还是对上 海城市发展战略对制定，都有一定意义. “ See Jiang Wu 伍江, “从关联性与可识别性看上海外滩建筑 [Looking at Shanghai Bund’s architecture through context and identity],” 华中 建筑 [Huazhong Architecture], no. 02 (1987 ): 64–67. 45 Shin Muramatsu 村松伸, “中国における建築生産システ ムの変容と建築意匠の「伝統化」に関する研究-1840–1977年 [Study on the ‘tradition’ of transformation and architectural design of the building production system in China: 1840–1977 ]” (工学博士 PhD Thesis, 东京大学 University of Tokyo, 1988). 46 Zhang 张复合, “中国近代建筑史研究之回 顾与展望 [Looking back and looking forward for the study of Chinese modern era architectural history].” 47 Jeffrey William Cody, “Henry K. Murphy, an American Architect in China, 1914–1935” (PhD Thesis, Cornell University, 1989). 48 See, for example, Torsten Warner, “Die Planung und Entwicklung der deutschen Stadtgründung Qingdao (Tsingtau) in China: der Umgang mit dem Fremden” (Doctoral Thesis, Technischen Universität Hamburg-Harburg, 1996). Warner’s dissertation also came out as a book. Torsten Warner, Deutsche Architektur in China: Architekturtransfer [German architecture in China: Architecture Transfer] (Ernst & Sohn, 1994). 49 Many of the questions grappled with still carry on today. If one looks at the contemporary discussions, in the 2010 s, on whether an Asian contemporary art exists today, such as at the M+ museum talks in Hong Kong or at the Gilman Barracks talk in Singapore, the issues of the possibility of maintaining an Asian identity while importing and adapting foreign, largely Western, concepts and practices still lingers incessantly. At the time, in the 1980 s, the conceptualization of the issues of whether modern architecture is Chinese when it appears to have hybrid elements imported during an era regarded as dominated by foreign powers, as referred to even by Liang Sicheng’s history of Chinese architecture, were still in formation. 50 In the postscript to his book that came out from his dissertation, Wu would thank the group of international scholars, including Shin Matsumura, Jeffrey W. Cody, Torsten Warner and Natalie Delande, for their support and research also of Shanghai’s modern era architecture. 51 Ma 马承源, “第三编管理, 第二章文物保护, 第二节文物调查 [Volume 3 Administration Chapter 2 Conservation of Cultural Relic Section 2 Research of Cultural Relic].” 52 上海市人民政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, “上海市优秀近代建筑保护管理办法 [Measures for the Conservation and Management of Shanghai’s Excellent Modern Era Architecture],” 136710 § (1991), http://code. fabao 365 .com/law_ 136710 .html. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 It was reported that 200,000 people were displaced from Lujiazui area for the construction of the new financial district. 57 Under Japanese occupation, the house became used as a military headquarter and jail as well. In 1958 , ownership transferred to the state. During the Cultural Revolution, more than 80 families lived on the premises of the compound. See “颖川小筑（又名：陈 桂春住宅) [The Little House of Yingchuan, Otherwise

derne Denkmalkultus, Sein Wesen, Seine Entstehung], 1903,” in Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, ed. Nicholas Stanley Price, Mansfield Kirby Talley, and Alessandra Melucco Vaccaro, trans. Karin Bruckner and Karin Williams (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 1996), 69–83; Thordis Arrhenius, “The Cult of Age in Mass-Society: Alois Riegl’s Theory of Conservation,” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism 1, no. 1 (2004): 75–81. 69 Jiang Wu 伍江, 上海百年建筑史 1840–1949 [A History of Shanghai’s Century of Architecture 1840–1949] (Shanghai 上海: 同济大学出版社 Tongji University Press, 1997 ). 70 Wu’s advisor and mentor Luo affirmed the study’s importance again: “上海是一个极为独特的城市，在 中国近代化的过程中扮演了一个非常重要等角色。国内外许多 学者都把上海看作是研究近代中国都一把‘钥匙’ [Shanghai is a very unique city, playing an extremely important role in China’s modernization process. Many researchers both in China and abroad regard Shanghai as the “key” to researching modern era China].” See Xiaowei Luo 罗小未, “Preface,” in 上海百年建筑史 1840–1949 [A history of Shanghai’s hundred years of architecture 1840–1949], by Jiang 伍江 Wu (Shanghai 上海: 同济大学出版社 Tongji University Press, 1997 ), 1–2. 71 上海市人民政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, “关于加快本市中心城区危棚简屋改 造若干意见 [Some Views Regarding Accelerating of City Center Slum Upgrade],” 沪府发 (1996)18号 § (1996), http://wenku.baidu.com/view/953 cc76 d7e21af45 b307a 884 .html. 72 国务院 State Council, “城市房屋拆迁管理条例 [Regulations for the Management of Urban Housing Demolition and Relocation],” 国务院令第78号 § (1991), http:// www.jincao.com/fa/law19.04.htm. 73 Yuan Gao 高原, “拆 迁新政并未终结暴力拆迁 [New Policies for Demolition and Displacement Haven’t Stopped Violence],” 法治周末 Legal Weekly, April 6 , 2011, http://www.legaldaily.com.cn/ zmbm/content/2011 -04 /06 /content_2572737.htm?no de=7570. 74 上海市人民政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, 关于加快本市中心城区危棚简屋改造若干意见 [Some Views Regarding Accelerating of City Center Slum Upgrade]. 75 The term ‘‘Cultural Prominents Street [文化名 人街]’ is a direct translation by the author of the Chinese name. Even though a more appropriate term for the “mingren [名人]” would be “celebrity,” the author knows that the connotation of the term ‘celebrity’ is too pop culture for the highbrowed intentions of its Chinese equivalent. Thus, the word ‘prominents’ is chosen to mean the prominent people who once lived on the street, and for which the street, Duolun Lu, is honored. 76 Shanghai’s municipal party secretary Huang Ju [黃菊] issued the slogan, “大力发展都市旅游 [powerfully develop urban tourism],” at the beginning of 1997. 77 Xiaowei Luo 罗小未 et al., 上海 老虹口北部昨天今天明天 : 保护、更新与发展规划研究 [The Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow of Shanghai Northern Old Hongkou: Planning Study for Conservation, Renewal and Development] (Shanghai 上海: 同济大学出版社 Tongji University Press, 2003). 78 One controversy in the plan concerned a building that had been the headquarters for Japanese occupation during the war. Because of what has been assessed as lack of aesthetic value, it has not been gazetted as a monument worth protection. But the academic team put forth the Japanese occupied building be-

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Known as the Chen Guichun Residence],” 上海市杨浦区图 书馆 [Shanghai Yangpu District Library], March 26, 2009, http://www.yplib.org.cn/structure/jdsh/bnsz/dg_74944_1. htm. 58 The team of surveyors, under the direction of Professor Luo, surveyed and drew up the plan for the Chen residence, as presented in a 1991 article that also included a description of the Eastern and Western architectural elements coming together in the building, yielding “形成了这样一种中西建筑融合对特殊效果， 这在当时市 一种很有代表意义的现象 [a unique effect of the blending of Eastern and Western architecture, that was, for its time, a phenomenon of representative significance].” See Jiang Wu 伍江, “东西方建筑文化的交融—上海浦东地区部分近代建 筑调查 [Blend of Eastern and Western Architectural Culture: Investigations of Some Modern Era Architecture from Shanghai’s Pudong Area],” 时代建筑 Time + Architecture, no. 03 (1991): 26–30. 59 Jiang Wu 伍江, “‘立新’不必 ‘破旧’—浦东一座老房子的保存 [Old Existing within the New—Preservation of Chen’s House in Pudong New Area],” 时代建筑 Time + Architecture, no. 3 (2000): 36–37, doi: 10.3969/j.issn.1005 -684X.2000.03 .010. 60 “都市文脉守 护者—访阮仪三教授等 [Protector of Urban Context—Interview with Professor Ruan Yisan and Others],” Tongji News, September 2, 2003, http://news.tongji.edu.cn/classid-6 newsid-2749 -t-show.html. 61 Yujia Zhang 张予佳, “义气 千秋 [Honor through the Ages],” 青年报 Youth Daily, April 24 , 2010, http://news.163 .com/10/0424 /13 /651QNIQ0 00014AED .html. 62 Under Japanese occupation, the house became used as a military headquarter and jail as well. In 1958 , ownership transferred to the state. During the Cultural Revolution, more than 80 families lived on the premises of the compound. See “颖川小筑（又名： 陈桂春住宅) [The Little House of Yingchuan, Otherwise Known as the Chen Guichun Residence].” 2009. 上海市杨 浦区图书馆 [Shanghai Yangpu District Library]. March 26. http://www.yplib.org.cn/structure/jdsh/bnsz/dg_74944_1. htm. 63 Linfang Meng 孟琳芳, “隐于高楼间的‘历史见证’ [‘Historic Evidence’ hidden between High-Rises],” 城市导 报 City News, June 26 , 2013 , http://history.eastday. com/h/20130626/u1a7479732.html. 64 Ling 凌颖松, “上 海近现代历史建筑保护的历程与思考 [Chronicle and Thoughts on the conservation of Shanghai’s modern era historic architecture.” 65 Ibid. 66 At the time of demolition and land clearance, the masterplan for the Lujiazui Financial District was still evolving. Plans from 1993 show the area designated for buildings for the financial sector. Only by the 1997 plans did the plot become designated as a green space. In the 2000 masterplan for Shanghai, the green space is officially part of the masterplan. See maps from Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Institute 上海市城市规划设计研究院 Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Institute, ed., 循迹启新–上海城市规划演进 [Follow the tracks and initiate the new: Evolution of Shanghai’s Urban Planning] (Shanghai 上海: 同济大学出版社 Tongji University Press, 2007 ). 67 “永不拓宽的街道 之起点 [The Roads That Will Never Be Widened: Their Beginning],” HH . Pih HH .Pih的日记, October 28 , 2008, http://www.douban. com/note/20562333 /. 68 Alois Riegl, Moderne Denkmalkultus: Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung (W. Braumüller, 1903); Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and Its Developments [Der Mo­

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cause of its historic significance, or in Riegl’s terms, its Ye 晔波, and Yi Zhang 张奕, “解读在调整中逐步规范的上海 ‘historic value,’ despite representing what’s been regarded 旧区改造政策 [Reading Incrementally Standardizing Polias China’s “national shame.” The academics regarded the cies to Adjust for Shanghai’s Urban Renewal],” 解放日报 building as important to protect because it represented Liberation Daily, July 19, 2003, http://law.eastday.com/ part of the multi-layered history of a city that should not epublish/gb/paper4 /10 /class000400001 /hwz631569. be selectively erased. The building has survived because htm. 88 The Chinese title for the book translates literally of the recommendation. See Feng Luan and Yiyun Wang, into “The wind, flowers, snow and moon of Shanghai,” “Debates and Compromises: Conservation and Develop- connoting an ambiance of nostalgia and romance. Danyan ment of the Northern Old Hongkou in Shanghai,” Planning Chen 陈丹燕, 上海的风花雪月 [Shanghai Memorabilia] Theory and Practice 10, no. 2 (2009): 271–81, doi:10.1080/ (Beijing 北京: 作家出版社 Writer’s Press, 1998). 89 One 14649350902884854 . 79 上海市城市规划管理局 Shang- piece, for example, in reimagining the mood of the Peace hai Municipal Planning Bureau, “虹口区多伦路保护与整治 Hotel and the international luminaries who would have 社区修建性详细规划 [Detailed Conservation and Commu- gathered in its lobby, muses on the jazz band that still nity Rehabilitation Plan of Duolun Lu, Hongkou District],” played there in the 1990 s. 90 Danyan Chen 陈丹燕, 上海 沪规景2004（329）号 § (2004), http://218 .242.36.250/ 的红颜遗事 [Shanghai Beauty] (Beijing 北京: 作家出版社 News_Show.aspx?id=2939 &type=1. 80 “由于首期保护开 Writer’s Press, 2001). 91 “上海女作家：那些风花雪月的事 发投入资金有限，多伦路的保护和开发主要局限在沿街地带， [Women Writers of Shanghai: Those Episodes of Nostal致使优秀历史建筑与旧区棚户混为一体，高档经营与摊贩相互 gia],” 北京周报 Beijing Weekly, July 13, 2010, http://www. 混杂 [due to the limits to the financing of the first phase beijingreview.com.cn/Expo 2010 /txt/ 2010 - 07/ 13 /conof preservation and development, Duolun Lu’s preserva- tent_284614_5.htm. 92 See, for example, Lena Scheen, tion and development is mainly limited to the area along Shanghai Literary Imaginings (Amsterdam: Amsterdam the street, leading to the mix of Excellent Historic Archi- University Press, 2015), http://en.aup.nl/books/9789089 tecture with old area slums, the confusion of high-end 645876 -shanghai-literary-imaginings.html. 93 The shicommerce with low-end vendors.” See Yonglin Zhang 张 kumen lilong is an architecture type and urban form that 永林, “上海多伦路历史风貌区的分类保护和综合开发 [Shang- is specific to the modern era urban development of hai Duolun Road Historic Cultural Features and Styles Dis- Shanghai. The shikumen lilong, which is also called oldtrict’s Conservation by Type and Integrated Develop- style lilong, differed from the new-style lilong in its lack ment],” 中国文化报 China Cultural Post, February 23, 2011, of modern infrastructure and smaller scale, which made http://www.chinanews.com/cul/ 2011 / 02 - 23 / 2863572 . its contemporary reuse more difficult without renovation. shtml. 81 As the academics put aptly, after addressing The formation of the lilong and its contemporary adaptathe problem of taking best practices from the West to tions are elaborated in the previous chapter. 94 See, for apply in the post-socialist context of the Chinese city, example, the coverage in the New Yorker about Xintiandi. where the legacies of the likes of the Cultural Revolution Paul Goldberger, “Shanghai Surprise. The Radical Quainthas left unprecedented chaos in the city, “同在现代化的理 ness of the Xintiandi District.,” The New Yorker, December 解上犯的毛病一样，在如何在保护中生财的问题上，我们再次 26, 2005, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005 / 陷入肤浅的表象里 [like the other problems of moderniza- 12 /26/shanghai-surprise. 95 Shanghai Tang was founded tion, on the question of how to generate economic feasi- in 1994 by Hong Kong businessman David Tang. It focusbility within preservation, we are again fallen to superficial es on recreating fashion from the era of 1920 s and 1930 s solutions].” See Dongli Li 李冬莉, “城市孤本 [City’s Unique in China, which is also the Republican era. For an analysis Copy],” 新周刊 New Weekly, December 11, 2005, http:// of the revival of the Republican-era dress, see Matthew news.qq.com/a/20051211/000649.htm. 82 Shiling Zheng Chew, “Contemporary Re-Emergence of the Qipao: Politi郑时龄, 上海近代建筑风格 [The evolution of Shanghai ar- cal Nationalism, Cultural Production and Popular Conchitecture in modern times] (Shanghai 上海: 上海教育出 sumption of a Traditional Chinese Dress,” The China Quar版社 Shanghai Education Press, 1999). 83 Shanquan He terly, no. 189 (March 1, 2007 ): 144–61. 96 Xuefei Ren, 何善权 et al., “上海历史文化名城保护与发展关系基础研究 “Forward to the Past: Historical Preservation in Globalizing [The Basic Research on the Relationship of Conservation Shanghai,” in The Right to the City and the Politics of and Development in Shanghai Historic Cultural Prominent Space (University of California, Berkeley, 2006), http:// City],” March 1999, http://www.pthink.com.cn/web/detail. escholarship.org/uc/item/84z0 j8 tv. 97 “先实施历史保护 asp?show=cgjl&ID =99. 84 The shortening of two longer 区建设，一方面是为了规避市场风险，另一方面是期望通过历 words into one is usual in Chinese. 85 The term ‘feng- 史保护区的建设提升太平桥地区的知名度 [Realizing the demao’ is translated by the historian of Chinese architectur- velopments in the historic conservation area first, on the al heritage development, Zhang Liang, as “physionomie one hand the commercial development lowered risk; on stylistique” in French. He explains the use of the word as the other hand, the commercial development would help emphasizing the form and ambiance of the architecture raise the image and status of the neighborhood” See and form. See, Liang Zhang, La Naissance du Concept de Yongjie Sha 沙永杰, 中国城市的新天地:瑞安天地项目城市设 Patrimoine en Chine (Paris: Recherches éditions, 2003), 计理念研究 [Towards a new Chinese urbanity: Urban 158–62. 86 The author has chosen to translate the term Design Concept of Shui On Land Developments], 第1版 ‘historic fengmao’ literally, despite its awkwardness in the (Beijing: 中国建筑工业出版社, 2010). 98 Julie V. Iovine, English language, because of the importance of the “Our Man in Shanghai: Ben Wood Takes On History,” The meaning of the terms in its curation of history, which will New York Times, August 13, 2006, sec. Arts / Art & Design, be elaborated through the chapter. 87 Mu Duan 端木, Bo http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08 /13/arts/design/13 iovi.

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html. 99 Jiang Wu 伍江, “‘新天地’引起的联想─‘新天地’ Shanghai Municipality People’s Congress Standing Com专辑代序 [Association of ideas from the preface of ‘Xin- mittee, 上海市历史文化风貌区和优秀历史建筑保护条例 [Reg­ tiandi Square’],” 室内设计与装修 [Interior Design and Con- ulations of the Shanghai Municipality on the Conservation struction], no. 11 (2001): 33–34 . 100 In the article, even of the Districts with Historical Cultural Fengmao and though Wu opined that ’reuse [再利用]’ was not deemed Excellent Historical Architecture]. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid. fit for buildings defined as cultural relics, the practice was 115 Communist Party of Shanghai Party History Research thought suitable for less prestigious architecture of a cer- Unit 中共上海市委党史研究室 and Modern Era Shanghai tain age that should also not be demolished. Ibid. 101 Xi- Research Center 上海市现代上海研究中心, eds., 红色印痕 上 aowei Luo 罗小未 et al., 上海新天地 旧区改造的建筑历史、 海遗址百处 [Red traces-a hundred historic sites in Shang人文历史与开发模式的研究 [Shanghai Xintiandi: a Study of hai], 《走向2010 世博文化》丛书 (上海 Shanghai: 上海人民 the Architectural History, Socio-cultural History, and De- 出版社 Shanghai People’s Press, 2004). 116 Min Wei 魏 velopment Mode of an Urban Upgrade] (Nanjing 南京: 东 闽, “思南路47–48号街坊的整体性保护研究 在城市化进程中 南大学出版社 Southeast University Press, 2002). 102 Xi- 的历史中心区 [Research on the Integrated Conservation of aowei 罗小未 Luo, “上海新天地广场—旧城改造的一种模式 the Sinan Road Plot 47–48 , Shanghai’s historical center [Shanghai Xintiandi Plaza—a model for the revitalization under urbanization’s drive]” (博士 PhD Thesis, 同济大学 of the old city],” 时代建筑 Time + Architecture, no. 04 Tongji University, 2006). 117 The political pecking order (2001): 24 – 29. 103 Ruan Yisan invoked an anecdote of of Shanghai’s administrative districts ranks high on the the visit of a ninety-year old former Jewish refugee, who national hierarchy, making their leadership units power was once delivered safe passage via Shanghai during the entities that compete with each other for resources and Second World War to her former home in the Tilanqiao opportunities both from the municipality and from the [提篮桥] neighborhood, to reinforce the importance of central government. 118 Wu and Wang, “探索与突破— conservation of the heritage neighborhood. See, Jialiang 上海市衡山路— 复兴路历史文化风貌区保护规划综述 [ExploMao 毛佳樑 et al., “重视城市设计,保护历史风貌 [City Design ration and Innovation—Shanghai Hengshan Road-Fuxing to Retain Historical Faces],” 上海城市规划 [Shanghai Ur- Road Historic Cultural Styles District Protection Plan and ban Planning Review], no. 02 (2006): 21–30. 104 Ibid. Summary].” 119 Ibid. 120 As listed on the legend of the 105 Discussion following the 2013 conference “Mobilities Control Plan for the Hengshan Lu-Fuxing Lu Historical and of Design: Transnational Transfers in Asian Architecture Cultural Fengmao District, the categories of “conservation and Urban Planning, 1960 -present” with the then part- requirements [保护要求]” include: “protected architecture ner-in-charge of the Xintiandi project at Nikken Sekkei, [保护建筑],” “conserved historic architecture [保留历史建 who was crucial in bringing in Ben Wood into the project. 筑],”normal historic architecture [一般历史建筑],” “those He described the learning curve of the Chinese institutes that should be demolished[应当拆除建筑],” and “other was astonishing: “At the time the Tongji practitioners had architecture [其他建筑].” 121 Wu and Wang, “探索与突 to learn everything, from fire regulations to other technol- 破 — 上海市衡山路 — 复兴路历史文化风貌区保护规划综述 ogies. But now they are even innovating better technology. [Exploration and Innovation—Shanghai Hengshan RoadThey don’t need us [foreign experts] anymore.” 106 Jun Fuxing Road Historic Cultural Styles District Protection Wang 王军, 城记 [Beijing Records] (Beijing 北京: 三联书店 Plan and Summary].” 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 The sheer Sanlian, 2003). 107 Ian Johnson, “The High Price of the size of Chinese cities, not to mention the metropolis of New Beijing,” The New York Review of Books, June 23, Shanghai, and the depth of administrative hierarchy as 2011 , http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011 / result of the scale, renders what consultative expertise jun/23/high-price-new-beijing/. 108 Chapter one in the that does exist detached from the occupants on the Chinese version of the book, published in 2003, is entitled ground. 125 Because the background research for the “ancient capital seeks balance [古都求衡].” In the 2011 En- Conservation Plan was conducted by Tongji University glish translation, the chapter took from the subtitle of with the backing of the Urban Planning Bureau, the re“context between demolition and preservation [拆与保 searchers were able to access demographic and econom的交锋]” and became “demolition versus preservation.” ic data. This would otherwise be very difficult in the Chi109 全国人大常委会 People’s Congress Standing Commit- nese institutional context. 126 Jiang Wu 伍江 and Lin tee, 中华人民共和国文物保护法 [Law for the Protection of Wang 王林, 历史文化风貌区保护规划编制与管理：上海城市 Cultural Artifacts People’s Republic of China]. 110 上海市 保护的实践 [The establishment and management of the 人民代表大会常务委员会 Shanghai Municipality People’s Historic Cultural Features and Styles Districts ConservaCongress Standing Committee, “上海市历史文化风貌区和优 tion Plan: Cases from Shanghai’s Conservation] (Shang秀历史建筑保护条例 [Regulations of the Shanghai Munici- hai 上海: 同济大学出版社 Tongji University Press, 2007 ), pality on the Conservation of the Districts with Historical 62–73. 127 Ibid., 66. 128 Ibid., 67. 129 Shu Wang 王舒 Cultural Fengmao and Excellent Historical Architecture]” and Fangyan Wang 王芳艳, “上海将试点成套改造历史建筑 (2002), http://www.shanghai.gov.cn/shanghai/node2314 / 520 亿老洋房提价 [Shanghai Will Pilot Renovation of node3124 /node3177/node3181 /userobject6 ai1126 .html. Whole Units of Historic Architecture Old Western-Style 111 Jiang 伍江 Wu and Lin 王林 Wang, “探索与突破—上海 Houses Worth 52 Million RMB ],” 每日经济新闻 Daily Eco市衡山路—复兴路历史文化风貌区保护规划综述 [Exploration nomic News, November 7, 2004, http://bj.house.sina.com. and Innovation—Shanghai Hengshan Road-Fuxing Road cn/2004 -11-07/52105.html. 130 Ibid. 131 Zheng 郑蔚, “ Historic Cultural Styles District Protection Plan and Sum- 韩正要求牢固树立‘开发新建是发展，保护改造也是发展’观念 mary],” 上海城市规划 [Shanghai Urban Planning Review], 全力保护上海历史文化风貌 [Han Zheng Requests Solidly no. 06 (2004): 4–6. 112 上海市人民代表大会常务委员会 establishing ‘Building New Is Development, Preserving

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Renovating Is Also Development’ Concept, Wholly Protecting Shanghai Historic Cultural Style”. 132 Shunsheng Xue 薛顺生 and Chenghao Lou 娄承浩, 老上海花园洋房 [Old Shanghai’s Western-Style Garden Houses] (Shanghai 上海: 同济大学出版社 Tongji University Press, 2002). 133 Ibid., 2. 134 The Concessions of Shanghai were extraterritorial areas that were safe havens for both the local and foreign populations, leading to tremendous population growth and building boom. 135 Interchangeable terms, ”old Western-style house [老洋房]”, and sometimes ”Western-style house [洋房],” including new-style lilong and apartment buildings, usually denotes buildings built before 1949, hence the term “old [老].” 136 “花园洋房的 新价值 -探秘上海花园洋房（一 [New Values of the Garden Houses, Part 1],” 人民日报 People’s Daily, August 23, 2003, Overseas Edition, sec. 6 中国房产 Chinese Real Estate, http://www.people.com.cn/GB /paper39/9985 /916449. html. 137 A house in one of the lanes between Wukang Lu and Huaihai Lu was on sale for overseas Chinese returnees, and cost 30,000 RMB (equivalent to 15,000 USD at the time) in 1981. But due to the recentness of the Cultural Revolution, a fundamental distrust persisted and many of the relatives of returnees advised against the purchase of properties. Interviews, 2012–2013. 138 上海 市人民政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, “关于出售公 有住房的暂行办法 ［Provisional Measures Regarding the Sale of Publicly Owned Housing],” 沪府发[1994]19 号 § (1994), http://www.shanghai.gov.cn/shanghai/node2314 / node3124 /node3177/node3180/userobject6 ai619.html. 139 Ibid. 140 上海市人民政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, “上海市公有住房差价交换试行办法 [Pilot Measures for the Exchange of Shanghai Public Housing with Pricing Difference],” Pub. L. No. 沪府发 [1999] 4号 (1999), http://www.lawtime.cn/info/fangdichan/gongfangmaimai/2008101338359.html. 141 Hua Shi 施华, “手头没有千 万元千万别碰老洋房 ［Without millions of RMB don’t try to touch the old Western-style houses],” 理财周刊 Money Weekly, October 1, 2001, http://www.moneyweekly.com. cn/FrontPage/MoneyWeekly/Detail.aspx? ATID = 9996 . 142 上海市人民政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, 关于出售公有住房的暂行办法 ［Provisional measures regarding the sale of publicly owned housing]. 143 “上海 喊停老洋房转让 30 年代‘上海滩’旧梦难寻 [Shanghai Calls Stop to the Exchange of Old Western-Style Houses: Old Dreams of 1930 s ‘Shanghai Tan’ Difficult],” 人民日报 People’s Daily, February 9, 2004 , 海外版 Overseas Edition, http://news.xinhuanet.com/newscenter/ 2004 - 02 / 09 /content_ 1304062 .htm. 144 “老洋房价格仍将缓升 [Prices of the Old Western-Style House Still Rising],” 理财 周刊 Money Weekly, 2003 , http://www.spph.com.cn/ qikan/bkview.asp?bkid= 78901&cid=185899. 145 Ibid. 146 Hua Teng 滕华, “老洋房投资攻略 [Investment Strategy for Old Western-Style Houses],” 理财周刊 Money Weekly, January 24, 2003, http://www.spph.com.cn/qikan/bkview. asp?bkid=25426 &cid=43088 . 147 Ibid. 148 “老洋房价 格仍将缓升 [Prices of the Old Western-Style House Still Rising].” 149 Jia Qin 秦佳, “市场出现供不应求迹象，明 年—本地人买卖‘老房子’多 [Next Year, Market Will Show Supply Not Meeting Demand—More Locals Buy and Sell ‘old Houses’],” 新闻晨报 Morning News, December 16, 2004 , http://old.jfdaily.com/gb/node2 /node4085 /node

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4141 /node42952 /userobject1ai733088 .html. 150 Yinghao Tang 唐颖豪, “老洋房身价倍增 租售行情连连走高 [Old Western-Style Houses Multiply in Value, Rental and Sales Quotations Repeatedly Rise],” 房地产时报 Real Estate Times, 2004 , http://old.jfdaily.com/gb/node2 /node17/ node163 /node22490/node22493 /userobject1ai330335. html. 151 Ibid. 152 国务院办公厅 State Council General Office, “关于调整住房供应结构稳定住房价格意见 [Opinions on Adjusting House Supply Structure and Stabilizing House Price],” 国办发(2006)37号 § (2006), http://www. gov.cn/ztzl/2006 -06 /30/content_323678 .htm. 153 Yizheng Feng 馮亦珍, “上海：老洋房市場平穩回升 [Shanghai: Market for Old Western-Style Houses Steadily Returns],” 新華網 Xinhua, July 10, 2006, http://big5.xinhuanet.com/ gate/big5/news.xinhuanet.com/newscenter/2006 -07/10/ content_4814752.htm. 154 Qing Zhan 詹青, “陈早春：从 出租‘李鸿章的房子’开始 ［Chen Zaochun: Starting from the Leasing of Li’s House],” 羊城晚报 Guanzhou Evening News, June 10, 2008 , http://www.ycwb.com/epaper/ycwb/ html/2008 -06/10/content_228861.htm. 155 “内地富豪陈 早春: 以前觉得李嘉诚也不过如此 [Inland Tycoon Chen Zaochun: Had Felt That Lee Kah-Hsing Also Not More than This],” 外滩画报 Bund Pictorial, September 1, 2006, http:// news.qq.com/a/20060901/001612 .htm. 156 “花园洋房 的新价值 -探秘上海花园洋房（一 [New Values of the Garden Houses, Part 1].” 157 Kai Ding 丁凯 and Peng Peng 彭朋, “废墟‘隔壁’的奢侈品—面向洋人的洋房市场 [The Luxury Items next to the Ruins, Western-Style House Market Oriented to the Westerners],” 经济观察报 Economic Observer, February 22, 2005, http://sz.house.sina.com.cn/ sznews/2005 -02-22 /1047961.html. 158 Ibid. 159 Ibid. 160 “上海时尚权力100人—第一会所主人汪兴政 [Shanghai Fashion Powerful 100 —First Club House Owner Wang Xingzheng],” 外滩画报 Bund Pictorial, September 27, 2005, http://eladies.sina.com.cn/nx/2005 / 0927/ 1933195772 . html. 161 That the English name for Yongfu Hui [雍福会] is “Yongfoo Elite” rather than “Yongfu Elite” is interesting also. Romanization of Chinese, which is not a phonetically based language, is conventionally either through the pinyin system, which is the phonetically-based transliteration system developed in the 1950 s and used in the PRC since the 1980 s (also in Singapore), or the Wade-Gile system, which is a system from the 19 th century that is also still used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In pinyin, the name would have been spelled “Yongfu.” The use of “Yongfoo” comes from neither system, but rather simulates the “foo” of “egg foo young,” or “Ruby Foo’s,” both Western inventions of Chinese dishes and names. 162 “不受拘束的丰富 美学—雍福会董事长汪兴政 [Not Confined by Rich Aestheticism— Yongfu Elite Chair Wang Xingzheng],” 移居上海 Moving to Shanghai, May 18 , 2010, http://www.yiju.cc/dlg/ alshr/msj/2010/0518 /362.html. 163 “揭中外官贵私人会所 让人嫉妒恨 [Revealing Chinese and Foreign Private Luxury Club Houses Arouse Jealousy and Resentment],” 新华网, May 16, 2013, http://news.eastday.com/whyauto/2013 -05 16 /242450.html. 164 The previous chapter had elaborated on the gated residential complex of Ambassy Courts, which catered to elite expats. The complex was implanted amidst old garden houses, which have become embassies since the founding of the PRC , on Huaihai Lu, the former Avenue Joffre. 165 As with many early develop-

2008). 175 “雍福会：贵得一蹋糊涂 《红楼梦》般精致的会 所 [Yongfoo Elite: A Club That Is Prohibitively Expensive and Refined like in the ‘Dream of Red Chamber’],” 中国日 报 China Daily, July 6, 2009, http://www.chinadaily.com. cn/china/2009 -07/06/content_8392759.htm. 176 “Wallpaper* Design Awards 2004 , Best Club,” Wallpaper, December 9, 2004 , http://www.wallpaper.com/lifestyle/ best-club/926. 177 Ibid. 178 Yongfoo Elite was known for the kind of banquets that the Chinese leadership since 2012 attacked in their anti-corruption campaign. The physical proximity of elites, as manifested by the kinds of developments described in the chapter is what has made this collusion of power and wealth possible. 179 Yongfoo Elite marketed its local cultural production, for example, by touting that its dark soy sauce, which is a key ingredient to Shanghainese cuisine, is produced in-house. 180 Interview with architects who have increasingly encountered requests of this time, 2011. The changed preference distinguishes the more sophisticated urban elites of the new decade from the previous one, when preferences for gilded cherubs prevailed. The changed preference also distinguishes them from their provincial contemporaries in less cosmopolitan parts of China. See also K. Sizheng Fan, “Culture for Sale: Western Classical Architecture in China’s Recent Building Boom,” Journal of Architectural Education 63, no. 1 (October 1, 2009): 64–74 , doi:10.1111/ j.1531 -314 X.2009.01029.x; Zhang Qiang and Robert Weatherley, “The Rise of ‘Republican Fever’ in the PRC and the Implications for CCP Legitimacy,” China Information 27, no. 3 (November 1, 2013): 277–300, doi:10.1177/ 0920203X13500458 . 181 Jilin Xu 许纪霖, “上海文化的反 思 [Reflecting on Shanghai Culture],” 中国青年报 China Youth Daily, November 12, 2003, http://zqb.cyol.com/content/2003 -11/12 /content_768042.htm. 182 Ibid. 183 To understand the approximate price for the lease on a historic old house like the one of Yongfoo Elite, a house that had been the former residence of the Kuomingtang elite Zhang Xueliang was rented for 20,000 RMB /sm/month (equivalent to 4 ,000 USD /sm/month) on a ten-year lease in the early 2000 s. The municipality renovated the house, located on Gaolan Lu Number 1, in the early 1990 s, but then was leased out by the District’s street office, which is an administration unit at the local level. The house was already listed by the municipal government in 1999 as an Excellent Historic Architecture. Interview, 2012. 184 The term ‘localized cosmopolitans’ refers to the actors who have an international background while at the same time have access and knowledge of the local processes and mechanisms in Shanghai’s urban development process. As elaborated in the previous chapter, the localized cosmopolitans are adept at detecting and exploiting of the urban loopholes under transition economy. 185 Interview, 2012. 186 Ibid. 187 Ibid. 188 Ibid. 189 See elaboration of housing marketization in the previous chapter. 190 The policy for the marketization of public housing stipulated that only units that are “intact [成套],” or not subdivided by different families, could be sold on the real estate market with ‘ownership right.’ 191 ‘Hukou’ is a system of household registration in China. See, for example, Hein Mallee, “China’s Household Registration System under Reform,” Develop-

Chapter 3 The Cultural Street

ments, developers from Hong Kong and Macao brought with them international standards but also their capitalist know-how to build the tower residences for those expats who first came to Shanghai in the late 1990 s and required special housing separate from the local conditions consciously recognized as being behind standards. 166 “雍 福会 旧上海豪门奢华地标 [Yongfoo Elite, Landmark for Old Shanghai’s Aristocratic and Luxurious],” March 3, 2008 , http://luxury.qq.com/a/ 20 0 8 0303 / 0 0 0 013 _ 1 .htm. 167 The number of 244 on Yongfu Lu no longer exists. It is however recorded that the former British Consul did move into 244 . And according to the reports of Yongfoo Elite, which is now numbered 200, it occupied the former British Consul’s building. For the reportage on Number 244 during the Cultural Revolution, see “揭秘：张春桥的‘ 文革’别动队 [Revealing the Secrets: Zhang Chunqiao’s ‘Revolution’ Task Force],” July 8 , 2008 , http://news.ifeng. com/history/ 1 /midang/ 200807/ 0708_ 2664_ 640206 . shtml. 168 The following chapter will elaborate on the developments of West Nanjing Lu in the Jing’an District and the John Portman designed Shanghai Center, where it is located. 169 Xingguo Hotel was also an important site for meetings during the Cultural Revolution. See also “揭秘：张春桥的‘文革’别动队 [Revealing the Secrets: Zhang Chunqiao’s ‘Revolution’ Task Force].” 170 The fact that Shanghai had somehow retained its legacy of consumer culture was proven by the flocking of “country bumpkins,” as all non-Shanghainese were regarded by the Shanghainese, to the material capital of the country, Shanghai, even under planned economy. It was known, even into the 1990 s, that the visitors would buy goods to bring back to their provinces. Even today, the economic discrepancy and access to consumer goods between coastal cities and inland cities, continues to result in inland Chinese visiting cities like Shanghai to buy goods that are unavailable in their hometowns. The author has witnessed colleagues and friends who visited the Ikea in Shanghai to buy furnishings for inland cities. 171 The eclecticism of Western modern era furniture and accessories seems to revive the hybridity of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan past. Small entrepreneurs who brought back vintage chic both in furniture and fashion in the 2000s, like Lolo Love located down the street, continued the scavenging in Western capitals for pieces of Shanghai’s past. 172 “雍福会 旧上海豪门奢华地 标 [Yongfoo Elite, Landmark for Old Shanghai’s Aristocratic and Luxurious].” 173 In 2004 , a glass of wine in Shanghai would have costed around 65 RMB (almost 8 USD ), and a cappuccino 15 RMB (almost 2 USD ). But one has to remember that an average meal would have costed 30 RMB , which means overall living expenses were low. Even though to the local wage earner the 65 RMB would have seemed extravagant, to the foreigner working in Shanghai on a expat package, it would have been affordable, given that other costs were lower. Even though Western-style drinks and food were still not as easy to find as they are today, at the quality expected of international metropolitan areas, to the average visitor from the west, what could be found is also still relatively affordable. 174 Youmei Li 李友梅, 上海社会结构变迁十五年 [Fifteen Years of Shanghai Social Structure Transformation] (Shanghai 上海: 上海大学出版社 Shanghai University Press,

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ment and Change 26 , no. 1 (January 1, 1995): 1–29, doi:10.1111/j.1467-7660.1995.tb00541.x; Kam Wing Chan and Will Buckingham, “Is China Abolishing the Hukou System?,” China Quarterly, no. 195 (2008): 582–606, doi: 0.1017/S0305741008000787. 192 Teng 滕华, “老洋房投 资攻略 [Investment Strategy for Old Western-Style Houses].” 193 Yun Xu 徐運 and Yizheng Feng 馮亦珍, “上海 第一個‘老洋房指數’史丹福指數日前問世 [Shanghai’s first ‘Old Western-Style House Index’, the Stanford Index],” 新華網 Xinhua, September 5, 2004, http://big5.xinhuanet. com/gate/big 5 /news.xinhuanet.com/fortune/2004 -09/05/content_1946237.htm. 194 Interview, 2012. 195 The intricacies of interacting with residents to secure their relocation also meant an inevitable involvement in family relations that could often become complicated and challenging. The negotiations, because they are between private individuals, rather than between statebacked displacement agents and residents, were compelled to take on a much more camaraderie characteristic that also shed a lot of light on the property and social structures. Interview, 2012. 196 Ibid. 197 The following chapter will elaborate on the commercial developments of West Nanjing Lu. 198 The ‘street office [街道办]’ is a local unit of administration that is below the district level in cities like Shanghai. See Fulong Wu, “China’s Changing Urban Governance in the Transition Towards a More Market-Oriented Economy,” Urban Studies 39, no. 7 (June 1, 2002): 1083, doi:10.1080/00420980220135491. 199 Interview, 2012 . 200 Ibid. 201 Ibid. 202 The creative cluster called 1933, which had been a former abattoir and converted by the municipal economic council into an exemplary reuse project for creative industries, is located in a peripheral location in the Hongkou District. The contrast of both the location as well as the building type for the gallery’s location emphasized the ambiance of the old Shanghai that Le Passage was successful in evoking. The development of 1933 will be further elaborated on in Chapter 6. 203 Interview, 2012. 204 Because the neighborhood work unit was a planned economy production site, it is situated on administratively-allocated land. Redevelopment of administratively-allocated land is only possible by upgrading. Thus, the land leased to the investor was awaiting a new function to fill the former production site. 205 Interviews, 2012 , 2013 . 206 Sha 沙永 杰, Ji 纪雁, and Qian 钱宗灏, 上海武康路 风貌保护道路的历 史研究与保护规划探索 [Shanghai Wukang Lu, Explorations in Historic Research and Conservation Planning for a Conserved Fengmao Street]. 207 Interviews, 2012, 2013. 208 Interview, 2012. 209 上海市人民政府 Shanghai Municipal Government, “《关于本市历史建筑与街区保护改造 试点的实施意见》的通知 [Notice Regarding the Recommendations for the Implementation of the Historic Architecture and Neighborhood Conservation and Upgrade Pilot Projects],” Pub. L. No. 沪建房 [1999] 0678号 (1999), http://www.mohurd.gov.cn/zcfg/dfwj/200611/t20 061101_154292 .html. 210 “上海思南公馆：百年洋房‘复活’ [Shanghai Sinan Mansions: Century-Old European Houses ‘Revived’],” 人民日报 People’s Daily, July 14 , 2011, http:// www.chinanews.com/cul/ 2011 / 07- 14 / 3182551 .shtml. 211 Even though the call was issued to the four city center districts also of Jing’an, Xuhui’s win of two out of the

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four pilot sites also show the target competition between the districts in the positioning of their locational advantages. 212 ‘New-style lilong [新式里弄]’ is used to describe both the lilong type and the lilong architecture types that were built with modern infrastructure and were designed to accommodate automobile traffic and parking. For an elaboration of the urban form of the lilong, and the lilong architecture type, see the previous chapter. 213 Interviews, 2012 . 214 Interviews, 2012 . 215 Songmao Ge 葛頌茂, “上海近代歷史街區保護改造拉開 帷幕 [Lifting the Weighty Curtains on a Shanghai Modern Era Historic Neighborhood Conservation and Upgrade],” 解放日报 Liberation Daily, January 10, 2002, http://qnlt. eastday.com/epublish/big5 /paper148 /20020110/class 014800006/hwz576046.htm. 216 Hui Zhong 鐘暉, “淮 海中路‘西班牙式’老房將保護改造 [Huaihai Road ‘Spanish Style’ Old Houses Will Be Protected and Renovated],” 新 聞晨報 Morning Post, January 9, 2002, http://chat.eastday. com/epublish/big5 /paper148 /20020109/class014800 006 /hwz575439.htm. 217 Interviews, 2012 . 218 Ibid. 219 “Quote from Wang Anshi, Department of Renovations, Shanghai Administration for Housing and Real Estate Resources,” 房地大家谈－都市家园 ［Everyone Discusses Real Estate, Our Home Our City] (上海电视台 Shanghai Television Station, October 29, 2005). 220 Qing Liu 柳青, “拆了重建?众说纷纭共话保护历史建筑模式 ［Demolished and Rebuilt? Talking about the Model for Protecting Historic Architecture],” 城市导报 City News, January 16, 2003 , http://law.eastday.com/epublish/gb/ paper75 /20030116 /class007500009/hwz598431.htm. 221 Ibid. 222 Ibid. 223 These two types are elaborated on in the previous chapter. 224 Ge 葛頌茂, “上海近代歷史 街區保護改造拉開帷幕 [Lifting the Weighty Curtains on a Shanghai Modern Era Historic Neighborhood Conservation and Upgrade].” 225 Ibid. 226 “北京 上海 城市文化这十年 [Beijing, Shanghai, Urban Culture in These Decades],” 文 汇读书周报 Wenhui Reading Weekly, February 3, 2006, http://www.china.com.cn/chinese/feature/1118273 .htm. 227 See the previous chapter on the prices of the commodity housing developments in the neighborhood. 228 The residents of the compound are part of the un-confirmable urban rumors that circulate in the neighborhood. The grain of truth remains that the buildings of the former lane are home to the power and wealth of the city. Interviews, 2012. 229 The conservation type designation of the buildings and the conservation area designations are shown in the set of maps for the conservation area. See Wu 伍江 and Wang 王林, 历史文化风貌区保护规 划编制与管理：上海城市保护的实践 [The establishment and management of the Historic Cultural Features and Styles Districts Conservation Plan: Cases from Shanghai’s Conservation]. 230 Ling 凌颖松, “上海近现代历史建筑保护 的历程与思考 [Chronicle and Thoughts on the conservation of Shanghai’s modern era historic architecture.” 231 “上海弄堂-傳統小社區見證大時代 [Shanghai Longtang, Traditional Small Residential Neighborhoods Witness Big Times],” 星島日報 Singtao Daily, July 4 , 2005, http://std. stheadline.com/archive/fullstory.asp?andor=or&year1 = 2005 &month1=7&day1=4 &year2=2005 &month2=7&day 2=4 &category=all&id=20050704 m02&keyword1=&keyword2=. 232 Luxia Song 宋路霞, 回梦上海老洋房 [Dream-

Zhang 张海峰, “武康路‘活化’街区力求原汁原味 [Wukang Lu’s Activation of Neighborhood Seeks Original Juice Original Flavor],” 解放日报 Liberation Daily, June 8 , 2009, http:// news.163 .com/09/0608 /11/5B9JA26 D000120GR .html; Jianqun Zhang 张建群 and Junlan Zhang 张骏斓, “思南路 等‘原汁原味’永不拓宽 [Sinan Lu and the ‘Original Juice Original Flavor’ will Never Be Widened],” 新闻晚报 Evening News, August 11, 2010, http://zt.jfdaily.com/newspaper/ xwwb/page_ 37/ 20 10 0 8 /t 20 10 0 8 12 _ 95 4 574 .html. 258 Ying Xu 徐颖, “上海题材 花开不败 [Shanghai as Subject, Blooming Flowers Not Withering],” 新闻晨报 Morning News, August 17, 2008 , http://trs.jfdaily.com/xwcb/page_ 8 /200808 /t20080817_347341.html. 259 Danyan Chen 陈丹燕, “武康路：永不拓宽的街道 [Wukang Lu: The Road That Will Never Be Widened],” 文汇报 Wenhui News, June 13, 2008 , 笔会·夜光杯 edition, http://www.news365.com. cn/wxpd/bhygb/mwlt/200806/t20080613_1909230.htm. 260 Ying Jin 金莹, “陈丹燕：作家要为城市心灵成长史负责 [Chen Danyan: A Writer Must Be Responsible for the City’s Spiritual Growth],” 文学报 Literature News, August 26, 2008, http://book.sohu.com/20080826/n259207727.shtml. 261 Jianfeng Shi 石剑峰, “潘石屹要怎么改建复兴路？[How Would Pan Shiyi Change Fuxing Lu?],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, March 11, 2011, http://www.dfdaily.com/ html/150/2011/3 /11 /578565 .shtml. 262 Ibid. 263 Wu 伍江 and Wang 王林, 历史文化风貌区保护规划编制与管理： 上海城市保护的实践 [The establishment and management of the Historic Cultural Features and Styles Districts Conservation Plan: Cases from Shanghai’s Conservation]. 264 Peng Zhang 张鹏, “都市形态的历史根基—上海公共租 界都市空间与市政建设变迁研究 [Historic origins of Urban Form-Study of the development of the urban space and city administration for construction in Shanghai’s International Concession]” (博士 PhD Thesis, 同济大学 Tongji University, 2005). 265 Qian Sun 孙倩, “上海近代城市建设管理 制度及其对公共空间的影响 [Urban Construction Administration System and its Impact on Public Space in Modern Shanghai]” (博士 PhD Thesis, 同济大学 Tongji University, 2006). 266 Fang Tang 唐方, “都市建筑控制 近代上海公共 租界建筑法规研究（1845–1943）[Development control of Architecture in the City: Study of International Concession Building Laws in Modern Shanghai (1845–1943)]” (博士 PhD Thesis, 同济大学 Tongji University, 2006). 267 Fang 王方 Wang, “外滩原英领馆街区及其建筑的时空变迁研究 (1843–1937 ) [Study of the area around the former British Embassy on the Bund and the evolution of the Architecture (1843–1937 )]” (博士 PhD Thesis, 同济大学 Tongji University, 2007 ). 268 Yuqiang Lian 练育强, “近代上海城市规 划法制研究 [Study of Urban Planning Law in Modern Shanghai]” (博士 PhD Thesis, 华东政法大学 East China University of Politics and Law, 2009). 269 Zhengyu Mou 牟 振宇, “近代上海法租界城市化空间过程研究（1849–1930） [Study of the urbanization process’s spatial manifestation in the modern era Shanghai’s French Concession (1849–1930)]” (博士 PhD Thesis, 复旦大学 Fudan University, 2010). 270 Lü Pan 潘律, “In-Visible Palimpsest: Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai” (PhD Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2011), http://hub.hku.hk/handle/10722 /134808 . 271 Kai Yao 姚凯, 寻求变革之道—基于上海城市演进过程的 规划管理创新探索 [Searching for the Way for Transforma-

Chapter 3 The Cultural Street

ing of Shanghai’s Old Western-style Houses], 回 梦百年 上海系列 (上海 Shanghai: 上海科学技术文献出版社 Shanghai Science and Technology Press, 2004). 233 Ibid. The book in which Lanes 1754 and 117 were highlighted was given a foreword by the prominent historian of Shanghai and chair at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences’s Institute of History, Xiong Yuezhi [熊月之]. In the tradition of history writing in China, repetition of aforementioned histories is unquestioningly propagated. 234 It is notable that the value of modern era architectural heritage in Shanghai comes from the building’s hybridity. 235 Interviews 2012 , 2013 . 236 Ibid. 237 Ibid. 238 Dorothy J. Solinger, “Socialist Goals and Capitalist Tendencies in Chinese Commerce, 1949–1952 ,” Modern China 6 , no. 2 (April 1, 1980): 197–224 . 239 Public-private collectivization [公私合营] would nationalize many remaining private sector enterprises in the 1950 s. Toby Ho, “Managing Risk: The Suppression of Private Entrepreneurs in China in the 1950 s,” Risk Management 2, no. 2 (April 1, 2000): 29–38 , doi:10.1057/palgrave.rm.8240047. 240 Interviews 2012, 2013 . 241 Ibid. 242 Ibid. 243 Ibid. 244 The January Revolution installed Beijing-assigned leaders to Shanghai and had pushed out the municipal leaders. While the municipal leaders were detained separately, the Revolution committee relocated their families to Lane 117 in 1967. 245 Interviews 2012 , 2013. 246 Ibid. 247 The patron of the family who bought the house number 1 in 1952 turned 100 in California in 2013. With a daughter who is a professor of physics at Cal-Tech and a son-in-law a professor of mathematics at Columbia University, the legacy of elites’ flight is clear in the outflow of human capital in the 1980 s. The exodus of human capital before 1949 has supported the boom of recipient cities like Hong Kong in particular, in the clustering of industrial know-how as well as assets. And since the 1980 s the outflow of population, particularly from neighborhoods around Wukang Lu, has facilitated the arrival of many new expat residents. 248 Text from the plaques issued by the District that hang on the wall of the compound. 249 Fukang Chen 陈福康, “令人摇头的‘郑振铎寓所’介绍 ［A Doubtful Presentation of the Residence of Zheng Zhenduo],” 博览群书 [Reading Extensively], November 7, 2008 , http://www. gmw.cn/ 02 blqs/ 2008 - 11 / 07/content_ 89827 3 .htm. 250 Interviews, 2013 . 251 Ibid 252 Online comments, 2013. It is notable that commentaries often attribute the building of Beijing’s National Center for Performing Arts, designed by architect Paul Andreu, often cited as unsuitable for the capital city’s historic context as well as being excessively expensive to build as well as to maintain, as Jiang’s gift to his mistress, a singer from the Miao ethnic minority group. The building began construction in 2001 and finished only in 2007. 253 Interviews, 2013. 254 Ang 李安 Lee, Lust, caution 色戒, videorecording (Universal, 2008). 255 Jian Guo 郭鉴, “上海历史风貌道路规划实践与 探索 [Planning practice and exploration of historic roads in Shanghai],” 上海城市规划 [Shanghai Urban Planning Review], no. 03 (2012): 43–48 . 256 Ibid. 257 Dailei 张代蕾 Zhang, “上海‘原汁原味’保护144条历史风貌道路 [Shang­ hai’s ‘Original Juice Original Flavor’ Conserving 144 Historic Fengmao Roads],” December 12 , 2007, http://news. 163.com/07/1212 /09/3VGIMQE7000120GU .html; Haifeng

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tion—Exploration of Urban Planning and Governance Innovation in Shanghai’s Urban Evolution] (Shanghai 上海: 上海科学技术出版社 Shanghai Science and Technology Press, 2005). 272 Wei 魏闽, “思南路47–48号街坊的整体 性保护研究 在城市化进程中的历史中心区 [Research on the Integrated Conservation of the Sinan Road Plot 47–48 , Shanghai’s historical center under urbanization’s drive].” 273 Interviews, 2012, 2013. 274 Gang Liu 刘刚, “上海前 法新租界的城市形式 [Urban morphology of Shanghai’s former French Concession]” (博士 PhD Thesis, 同济大学 Tongji University, 2010); Bingchao Hou 侯斌超, “上海历史街 道风貌研究（1843–1945)—历史沿革、城市结构和制度内因 [Study of Shanghai Historic Street’s Fengmao (1843–1945)— Historic Development, Urban Structure and Institutional Basis]” (博士 PhD Thesis, 同济大学 Tongji University, 2011). 275 All the researchers cited the documents from the Chinese language Annual Reports of 29 December 1938 (U38 -4 -2847 ) and the addendum from 27 March 1939 (U38 -4 -2848). Mou and Wei called the document 法租界 市容管理图, which would literally translate to “French Concession Administration Plan for Urban Appearances.” The word 市容is another difficult to translate word that means the appearance of the city. In some translations the map is called a preservation map. The map appears reprinted in the Shanghai Map Survey Annal, cited as from 1938 . The legend is a Chinese version superimposed but no citation of the original source could be found. See Zhenglin Chen 陈征琳, 上海测绘志 [Shanghai Map Survey Annal], 上海市专志系列丛刊 (上海 Shanghai: 上海社会科学院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1999). The map has been cited in numerous books, including Luo’s 2002 book as well as in the other dissertations that associated with the 1938 plan, although no original name for this plan could be confirmed. 276 The designation would refer to the area of expansion of the French concession after 1914 and would be more specifically used for the area that was planned as a high-end residential area as defined by the strict planning laws, which with the exception of the patches denoted in the planning maps, were Western-style buildings with modern amenities of water, electricity, heating. The overlap of this Western District with the contemporary planning boundaries of the conservation district Fuxing-Hengshan is significant in the reinforcing of the area’s historic legacies as highly valuable culturally. 277 Zu ’an Zheng 郑祖安, “近代上海‘花 园洋房区’的形成及其历史特色 [Formation of the the Modern Era Shanghai’s ‘Western-Style Garden Residences’ District and Its Historic Distinctiveness],” 社会科学 Social Sciences, no. 10 (2004): 92–100. 278 The document Projet Règlement de Construction from 9 October 1934 issued by the Service des Travaux Publics of the Administration Municipale was kindly shared with the author by a friend and fellow researcher of Shanghai, the historian and associate professor of architecture Dr. Cole Roskam, whose dissertation provides an excellent grounding for the modern era development of Shanghai. See William Cole Roskam, “Civic Architecture in a Liminal City: Shanghai, 1842–1936” (Doctoral Thesis, Harvard University, 2010). 279 See the map that is associated with the 1938 issued Beautification Plan, although the author has yet to find the plan’s title or actual association. 280 See the

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map that is associated with the 1939 issued amendment to the Plan, although, similarly, the author has yet to find the plan’s title or actual association. 281 The site of the high-rise luxury residential compound Ambassy Courts built in 2000 corresponds with one of the two pre-French Concession urban settlements. The other pre-Concession settlement has become today’s The Summit and The Center, which stand alongside the controversial plot along Wuyuan and Wulumuqi Lu that has been cleared but remains unbuilt. The previous chapter elaborated on the two sites of exceptions in the neighborhood. 282 See the previous chapter for the elaboration of “inadequate” urban areas, which were urgently demolished in the 1990 s. 283 Sun 孙倩, “上海近代城市建设管理制度及其对公 共空间的影响 [Urban Construction Administration System and its Impact on Public Space in Modern Shanghai].” 284 Ibid., 48 . 285 Ibid., 49. It is notable the repeated mention of the differences from interruptions from “today’s planning.” It is clear that the implementation of the conservation plans led by Wu, Sun’s supervisor, emphasizing the spatial qualities of the streetscape, would be foregrounded in the study. The dissertation would be published as a book in 2009 as well. Qian Sun 孙倩, Jiang Wu 伍江, and Hesheng Zhao 赵和生, 上海近代城市公共管理制 度与空间建设 [Shanghai’s Modern Era Urban Construction Administration System and Spatial Development], 第1版 (Nanjing 南京: 东南大学出版社 Southeast University Press, 2009). 286 Ibid., 45. Even though the comment is embedded in the footnote, relating the significance of the urban administration on urban form to social composition, it reveals an understanding of the potentials for planning processes for contemporary implementation. 287 Sha 沙 永杰, Ji 纪雁, and Qian 钱宗灏, 上海武康路 风貌保护道路的 历史研究与保护规划探索 [Shanghai Wukang Lu, Explorations in Historic Research and Conservation Planning for a Conserved Fengmao Street]. 288 Zheng 郑时龄, 上海 近代建筑风格 [The evolution of Shanghai architecture in modern times]; Luo 罗小未 et al., 上海新天地 旧区改造的建 筑历史、人文历史与开发模式的研究 [Shanghai Xintiandi: a Study of the Architectural History, Socio-cultural History, and Development Mode of an Urban Upgrade]. 289 In Sha’s description of the Wukang Lu neighborhood, there is a not so subtle disdain for the small-scale commerce that has seeped into the high-end area, which as he expressed, had been full of high-level intellectuals. Even though he does not originate from Shanghai, and is one of the many non-local researchers and planners overseeing the conceptualization of the area’s conservation project, his intonation for the area to return the high-end neighborhood to its original form, representative of many other researchers and planners, bore a self-righteousness that would have been expected of the very longtime local residents, the very “high-level intellectuals,” who actually were from the neighborhood. Interview, 2011. 290 Sha 沙永杰, Ji 纪雁, and Qian 钱宗灏, 上海武康路 风貌保护道路 的历史研究与保护规划探索 [Shanghai Wukang Lu, Explorations in Historic Research and Conservation Planning for a Conserved Fengmao Street], 23 . 291 Ibid., 26 . 292 徐汇区人民政府 [Xuhui District Government], “徐汇区 历史文化风貌区和优秀历史建筑保护利用迎‘世博’三年行动计 划 ［On the Occasion of welcoming ‘World Expo’ the Three

424 .html. 302 Sha 沙永杰 and Wu 伍江, “上海市徐汇区历 史街道保护规划探索 [Exploratory plans for the conservation of historic streets in Shanghai’s Xuhui district].” 303 Ibid. 304 徐汇区人民政府 [Xuhui District Government], “关于第二个中国‘文化遗产日’组织开放徐汇区若干历 史建筑的通知 [Notice Regarding the Organization and Opening Some of Xuhui District’s Historic Architecture on Second ‘Cultural Relic Day’ in China],” 徐府发(2007 )11号 § (2007 ), http://www.xuhui.gov.cn/H/xhxxml/zfwj_qzfwj/ Info/Detail_1747.htm. 305 老上海百业指南 : 道路机构厂商 住宅分布图 [Old Shanghai Commercial Atlas: Maps of Roads, Institutions, Factories, Commerce, Residential Distribution] (Shanghai 上海: 上海社会科学院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2008). 306 “A historical approach to urban regeneration” was the English subtitle to the Wukang Lu book, although the translation from the Chinese subtitle 风貌保护道路点历史研究与保护规划探索 has a slightly different meaning, translated to “Explorations in historic research and conservation planning for a conserved fengmao street.” 307 Sha 沙永杰, Ji 纪雁, and Qian 钱宗灏, 上海武康路 风貌保护道路的历史研究与保护规 划探索 [Shanghai Wukang Lu, Explorations in Historic Research and Conservation Planning for a Conserved Fengmao Street], i–ii. 308 Ibid., 105–6. Chinese contemporary historians still are unable to open up the can of worms wrought by the recent past since 1949. The events of the Cultural Revolution remain sensitive and largely avoided. The book’s inclusion of the Cultural Revolution remains abstract but admirable in its mention of it. The key vignettes can only remain on the famous writer Ba Jin and others like him. And references made to the memoirs of a few of the CPC leaders who also suffered under the Cultural Revolution attribute again Number 117 without mention of the expelled families. 309 “上海市历史建筑保护事 务中心正式挂牌成立 [Shanghai Conservation of Historic Architecture General Affairs Center Officially Founded and Open for Business],” July 28 , 2010, http://www.aibaohu. com/2010/07/20100730161130 -19624 .html. 310 Zhengli Huang 黄震丽, “历史是延续的：小记同济大学副教授沙永 杰博士莅临世界小学作专题讲座 [History Is Continuous: A Documentation of Tongji Assistant Professor Doctor Sha Yongjie’s Honorable Presence at World Primary School for Seminar on Special Topic],” Xuhui Education, June 21, 2010, http://www.xhedu.sh.cn/cms/data/html/doc/2010 06/21/229010/index.html. 311 Young Pioneers [少先队] is the Communist organization for school-aged children. It existed in the Soviet Union, the former Eastern-bloc countries of Europe and other Communist-ruled countries. It exists in the PRC , Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea. In the PRC , the Young Pioneers wear red scarves [红领巾], which emblematic of a corner of the flag stained red by the blood of revolutionaries. 312 Sha 沙永杰, Ji 纪雁, and Qian 钱宗灏, 上海武康路 风貌保护道路的历史研究与保护规 划探索 [Shanghai Wukang Lu, Explorations in Historic Research and Conservation Planning for a Conserved Fengmao Street], 147. 313 For a neighborhood area that was on the far western end of the former French concession at the beginning of the PRC , a semi-rural fringe that until the 1980 s was quietly suburban despite dramatic demographic increases since the 1950 s, the convenience store, and other small amenities that popped up around, from

Chapter 3 The Cultural Street

Year Action Plan for Xuhui District’s Historic Cultural Fengmao District and Excellent Historic Architecture Conservation],” 徐府发〔2008〕6号 § (2008), http://xxgk.xuhui.gov. cn/WebSite/HTML/xhxxml/zfwj_qzfwj/Info/Detail_1694.htm. 293 Yongjie Sha 沙永杰 and Jiang Wu 伍江, “上海市徐汇区 历史街道保护规划探索 [Exploratory plans for the conservation of historic streets in Shanghai’s Xuhui district],” 时代 建筑 Time+Architecture, no. 03 (2013): 34–39. 294 Although the author was not able to procure the original documents for the Wukang Lu Plan submitted and approved in 2008, the plans for the Hengshan Lu area which were made in 2011, and for which the Wukang Lu Plan set the precedence, showed in detail the categories of importance to the planners and the range of information included. The categories catalogued were: architecture type [建筑类别], function [建筑功能], occupancy [使用模式], main street-facing elevation(s) [主控立面], façade control and commercial program control [立面构图／商业店面控 制], architecture material and color [建筑材质与色彩], façade conservation key points [主控立面保护重点], façade additions control (ie AC , planters, clothing hangers, sun protection elements) [主控立面附加物控制], wall and entry control [围墙和入口控制], and greening related to the street [与街道相关的绿化]. 295 The term “restoration [整治],”means “regulation” in the sense of “putting under control,” or “restoration and alignment,” both implying active intervention. The term “conservational restoration [保护性整治]” is used by the planners and bureaucrats for the Wukang Lu Restoration Project. Yi Zhang 张奕, “武康 路‘活化’街区力求原汁原味 [Wukang Lu “activates’ Power of the Neighborhood Strives for Original Flavor],” 解放日报 Liberation Daily, June 8 , 2009, http://finance.sina.com.cn/ roll/20090608 /07152880817.shtml; Yongjie Sha 沙永杰, “ 以武康路项目为例谈城市更新 [The Wukang Lu Project as Case to Discuss Urban Renewal],” Urban China 城市中国, September 24 , 2015 , http://chuansong.me/n/1737176 . 296 Weiping Ding 丁卫平, “Chapter 43 区县 [Districts] Section 2 徐汇区 [Xuhui District],” in 上海年鉴2012 [Shanghai Almanac 2012], 2012, 450, http://www.shanghai.gov. cn/shanghai/node2314 /node24651/n31071/n31119/u21 ai734123.html. 297 Four architecture firms commission­ ed by the Wukang Lu masterplanner made proposals for the redesign of the entrances and periphery walls of many of the plots on Wukang Lu and the renovations were implemented. The designs were based on historic documents. Sha, Ji and Qian, 2009, p. 241. 298 Zhang 张奕, “ 武康路‘活化’街区力求原汁原味 [Wukang Lu “activates’ Power of the Neighborhood Strives for Original Flavor].” 299 Sha 沙永杰, Ji 纪雁, and Qian 钱宗灏, 上海武康路 风貌 保护道路的历史研究与保护规划探索 [Shanghai Wukang Lu, Explorations in Historic Research and Conservation Planning for a Conserved Fengmao Street], 140. 300 Wei Yuan 袁玮 and Huasheng Zhao 赵华生, “徐汇历史风貌区围 墙改造尽显海派风韵 [Xuhui District Historic Cultural Fengmao District’s Wall Renovations, Fully Realizes Haipai Style],” 新民晚报 New Citizen Evening News, June 2, 2009, http://bbs.sjtu.edu.cn/bbscon,board,Shanghai,file,M.1244297702.A.html. 301 Liyuan Liu 刘力源, “‘升级’武康路 即将优雅登场 [‘Upgrade’ Wukang Road Will Elegantly Debute],” 文汇报 Wenhui News, June 16, 2009, http://www. news365.com.cn/sh_2044 /xh/200906/t20090616_104

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bicycle repair shops to newspaper kiosks that also sold phone cards and lotto tickets, were welcome amenities for the nearby residents, who had longer than usual distances to go to fetch goods and services that would, in other parts of Shanghai, be only a stone’s throw away. 314 The original proverb “思贤若渴” means “the desire for virtuousness like an unquenchable thirst.” Three Kingdoms is a historic period in China from AD 220 to 280. 315 When one types in the name “思贤楼”into an internet search engine, most of the results show in complex Chinese characters indicating the frequency of their use in Hong Kong or Taiwan, where complex characters are used. 316 Huang 黄震丽, “焯铿教育基金捐赠暨梁焯铿 世界小学校史馆揭牌仪式日前举行 [Henry Leung Education Foundation Donates Henry Leung World Primary School Historic Memorial Hall, Plaque Unveiling Ceremony Being Held].” 317 Carles Brasó Broggi, “Shanghai Spinners: Pioneers of Hong Kong’s Industrialization, 1947–1955 —The Industrial History of Hong Kong,” Industrial History of Hong Kong Group Newsletter, November 9, 2013, http:// industrialhistoryhk.org/shanghai-spinners-pioneers-hongkongs-industrialization-1947-1955/. As noted by Paul Tsui in his commentary to the economic historian Carles Brasó Broggi’s article, “Shanghainese industrialists, taking refuge from the political upheavals in the Mainland, turned Hong Kong, a place lacking in all resources and conditions in terms of space, water or raw materials, …, into an industrial city. The flood of hardworking refugees from the Mainland provided the labor. … Until mid-1970 s, the Chinese Manager of the HK Bank was always a Shanghainese, indicating the important roles played by the industrialists from Shanghai in the 1950 s and 1960 s. ‘Localisation’ of both the public and private sectors of Hong Kong commenced in the 1970 s.” 318 Sha 沙永杰 and Wu 伍江, “上 海市徐汇区历史街道保护规划探索 [Exploratory plans for the conservation of historic streets in Shanghai’s Xuhui District].” 319 Minhua Wang 汪敏华, “武康路，不经意和设计 撞怀 [Wukang Lu, Not Mindfully Colliding into Design],” 解 放日报 Liberation Daily, March 31, 2014 , sec. 新思 创意 New Concepts, Innovation. 320 Sha 沙永杰, Ji 纪雁, and Qian 钱宗灏, 上海武康路 风貌保护道路的历史研究与保护规 划探索 [Shanghai Wukang Lu, Explorations in Historic Research and Conservation Planning for a Conserved Fengmao Street]. 321 Interviews, 2011, 2012 . 322 “Ipluso Shanghai | CNN Travel,” accessed December 8 , 2014 , http://travel.cnn.com/shanghai/shop/ipluso- 638410 . 323 Interviews, 2012. 324 Interviews, 2012. 325 Meeting minutes of district meeting, 2004 . 326 The development is also elaborated in the previous chapter. A rela-

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tively long-term lease taken on by a private developer, with a state institutions as landlord, is a development model for many of the planned economy legacy buildings. The private developer’s investment into building renovation and tenancy curation makes use of otherwise undervalued and under-utilized buildings under the jurisdictions of state institutions. 327 Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, “New Style in Old Shanghai,” Financial Times, April 5, 2013 , http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ 2 / 03 a 3 d 1 f 4 - 8 fe 2 - 11 e 2 ae9 e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3 G6FPIC qe. 328 “Cycle to a Gilded Past in Wukang Road,” Xuhui News 徐汇报, September 26 , 2011, http://www.xuhuibao.com/html/ 2011 -09/26 /content_19_1 .htm. 329 Interview, 2012 . 330 David Harvey, “Chapter 5 Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics,’” in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 120–51. 331 David C. Harvey, “Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 7, no. 4 (January 1, 2001): 337, doi:10.1080/13581650120105534 . 332 For elaboration, see, for example, Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument [L’Allégorie Du Patrimoine]; Ashworth, “Preservation, Conservation and Heritage.” 333 The term ‘developmental autocracy’ denotes political economies that are the opposite of ‘liberal democracies,’ which denote political economies, notably of the West, with market economies, often developed, and democratic political systems. See Minxin Pei, China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2006). 334 Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adaptive Governance in China,” in Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, ed. Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard Contemporary China Series 17 (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2011), 3 . 335 Wu and Wang, “探索与突破—上海市衡山路—复兴路历 史文化风貌区保护规划综述 [Exploration and Innovation— Shanghai Hengshan Road-Fuxing Road Historic Cultural Styles District Protection Plan and Summary],” 6. 336 Interview, 2014 . 337 Yi Yi 一依, “留住经典风貌 [Preserving Classic Features and Styles],” 申江服务导报 Shanghai Times, June 16, 2003 , http://old.jfdaily.com/gb/node2 / node17/node160/node13898 /node13901/userobject1ai1 93269.html. 338 Dan Levin, “In Shanghai, Preserving Buildings Takes Work,” The New York Times, April 30, 2010, sec. Arts / Art & Design, http://www.nytimes.com/ 2010/05/02 /arts/design/02 shanghai.html.

Chapter 4 The Midtown of China The Paragon of Economic Liberalization: Jing’an District and the Development of West Nanjing Lu Evocation of Heritage—Redefining Jing’an Villas Jing’an Villas’ Commercialization and Creative Enterprises The Precedent of Tianzifang for Commercialization The Public Relations Wars and the Differing Visions of Jing’an Villas’ Future The Neighboring En-Bloc Development of Dazhongli Zhang Gardens: Jing’an Develops Its Heritage Value Gentrification with Chinese Characteristics

Fig. 1 Dismantling of informal additions in Jing’an Villas, 2013

In early September 2013, an electronic card entry system was installed at the entrance of a lilong compound on West Nanjing Lu [南京西路], one of the busiest and most wellknown commercial thoroughfares in Shanghai. The entry system barred non-residents from entering the largely residential neighborhood. The installation of the system did not come without warning. District government officials had, for a few years, already cautioned the growing number of small eateries and boutiques that had popped up in the lilong houses that they would be shut down. A few months before the installation of the entry system, a blue banner appeared. Its slogan, in white writing, warned: “Abide by the law to strengthen the secure management of the quartier, abide by the law to ban operations without permission and certificate [依法加强小区安全管理，依法取缔无 证无照经营].” The banner was hung prominently so passers-by could see it. The shutdown became real when officials from the various District departments swarmed the neighborhood that month, united in their efforts to dismantle the bottom-up marketeconomy businesses that had crept into the residential neighborhood. Blue-uniformed officials watched as their henchmen sledge-hammered the signage and additions installed by small entrepreneurs. (Fig. 1) Residents bemoaned as especially harsh the shutdown of the neighborhood’s local convenience shop, which offered some of the cheapest bottled beers in the District. The authorities confiscated all of its goods.1 Officials were required to do daily sweeps to dismantle reportedly more than 80 illegal commercial enterprises. Media coverage supporting the shutdown also reported that residents lauded the cleanup efforts and condemned their neighboring enterprises, “pointing their fingers and yelling at the store owners for wrongdoing.” 2 Some store owners kept away to avoid direct run-ins with the officials whose duty it was to force them to agree to leave. Posters were plastered on their doors to publicly announce their evictions.3 Inevitably, comparisons were made between these posters and the 1960s dazibao [大字报], the ‘big-lettered posters’ with slogans from the Cultural Revolution that were used to denounce class enemies. While these post-1960s bureaucratic postings by no means rivaled the fanatical extremism of the 1960s, one local who ran a popular wonton and noodle shop for two decades out of the ground floor living room of a house at the end of one of the secondary lanes, compared the whole debacle to that of a Nazi takeover.4 He exclaimed with an angry futility, “… with surveillance cameras everywhere … there is nothing we can do against them, but leave.” 5 Another resident, known as the ‘hawk man’ for his fondness of birds, had a mental breakdown after the protracted bout of shutdowns.6 The shutdown of Jing’an Villas [静安别墅] was not an isolated incident resulting

dor. Several of the cases analyzed in this volume also have been shut down since the time of their writing. The following chapter traces the development of the approximately one-square-kilometer area around Jing’an Villas between the 1980s and 2010s, and shows how the different actors exploited urban loopholes resulting from the state’s adaptive governance, 7 to pursue their interests, thus transforming the area. The Jing’an Villas’ shutdown, in the context of the area’s rapid transformation, was an attempt at resolving the diverging interests of the state and non-state sectors. This and the later shutdowns reveal the discretionary and increasingly draconian measures of the local developmental state.

Chapter 4 The Midtown of China

from small-scale skirmishes on the ground. This becomes apparent when set within the context of the development trajectory of its surrounding West Nanjing Lu corri-

237

Fig. 2 The main lane of Jing’an Villas looking towards Weihai Lu, 2012

The lilong compound of Jing’an Villas is a middle class residential neighborhood with a central axis that connects the busy commercial thoroughfare of West Nanjing Lu to the parallel Weihai Lu [威海路]. (Fig. 2) Like many city center residential areas, the neighborhood underwent partial commercialization on its ground floor units from the mid-2000s. What distinguishes the changes in Jing’an Villas from the usual process visible throughout the city, where the local government gives tacit approval to local residents to rent out ground floor spaces for commercial use, were the unusual types of commercial functions and the heritage value of the historic buildings. A range of transnational and local creative entrepreneurs established a cluster of creative functions in the historic red-bricked houses. These functions included a café called Chabrol that hosted weekly film screenings, small boutiques, designer showrooms, exhibition-cum-atelier spaces, a library, and services like the spa that specialized in Israeli olive soap. The transformation of Jing’an Villas resisted what the international media read as the hasty wholesale obliteration of local culture through massive demolition and renewal projects: projects that represented the mode of growth-driven development in China in the decades since accelerated liberalization began.8 The likes of CNN and The Guardian touted the transformations as a new form of heritage conservation.9 They described how the small entrepreneurs had upgraded undervalued heritage buildings, motivated by nostalgia for ‘old Shanghai.’10 Local media also heralded the developments as cultural and artistic, appropriate to the cosmopolitan ambiance of the historic neighborhood in which they were situated.11 Young, open, multicultural, and modern, the creative entrepreneurs of Jing’an Villas were characterized as being driven not only by profit, but also by a renewed sense of local identity and urban quality. Compared to Tianzifang [田子坊], a prominent and earlier bottom-up commercial reuse of a lilong neighborhood that has been largely commercialized, popular commendations for the slower and more refined transformation of Jing’an Villas applauded it as a better model for a mixed-use development. The district government’s tolerance and even tacit encouragement of the entrepreneurs’ execution of small-scale bottom-up adaptive reuse, for a few years, affirmed the local state’s shrewd adaptive governance at its most pliant. Jing’an Villas’ transformation seemed to suggest that the state was shifting from prioritizing economic growth by sheer quantity in the first decade of China’s accelerated marketization to a growing emphasis on urban quality in the second. 238

As strains arose between residents and the growing number of small shops, however, the district authorities repeatedly, but rather half-heartedly, implemented measures to stem the growth of commerce in the residential neighborhood. On the surface, the conflicts appeared to be the typical kind of friction between the older and longtime residents pitted against the younger and in-coming entrepreneurs. The conflicts seem to suggest a classic narrative of gentrification,12 where increasing affluence, expedited by marketization and globalization, pushed out the less privileged original occupants. However, behind the spectacle of disputes and expulsions, there is a much more complex network of interests. The Jing’an [静安] District government has had largescale development plans that remain ambiguous. These plans contrast with the more apparent and immediate interests of both residents and small entrepreneurs. While the District bided its time in the disclosure and implementation of these plans, the lack of programmatic certainty formed an opportune urban loophole, which small entrepreneurs exploited.13 While the adaptive state enables the grey zone for the urban loophole, it also controls its closure. With the eviction of the small entrepreneurs and the shutdown of Jing’an Villas itself, the closing of the urban loophole also verified the reactive state’s ultimate authority. While attention has been drawn to the visible skirmishes between old and new neighbors, the pervasive tension lies between the non-stateaffiliated actors, who face an uncertain future, and the state, which holds all the cards. Analysis of the development of the West Nanjing Lu area also exposes how the district government and its agents have cultivated exclusive public-private partnerships with large investors. These public-private alliances for development preclude the small-scale bottom-up developments, especially when the small-scale developments contradict the District’s visions for profitability and imageability. In the realization of its visions, the District also increasingly deploys its own urban loopholes of exceptions. In Jing’an, these urban loopholes of exceptions, profiting from heritage conservation and infrastructure upgrades, advance the District’s economic aspirations. In the process, heritage conservation and infrastructure upgrades are used to justify both the District’s agenda for neoliberalization and to sustain its dominance as a privileged

trict and the Development of West Nanjing Lu,” sets the context for Jing’an District’s rapid urban restructuring in the first two decades of economic liberalization and global integration. In the inter-district competition for economic growth, Jing’an’s ambitious repositioning of its West Nanjing Lu area has shaped it as a new CBD in the Puxi [浦西]—the historic areas of Shanghai located to the ‘west of the Bund’ and west of the Huangpu River. The specificities of each of Shanghai’s central districts within the metropolis’ political hierarchy come to the fore in Jing’an’s urgency in seeking economic growth. Compared to the more paced developments in the neighboring Xuhui [徐汇] District, for example, in which the previous two chapters were set, Jing’an’s more hurried, large-scale and aggressive urban developments are compelled by its small size and legacy resources. Xuhui, as a well-endowed central district, whose sizable hinter-

Chapter 4 The Midtown of China

market participant. The state’s participation as a privileged market player is one of the key Chinese characteristics of the neoliberalization that has been on-going since economic transition began. Jing’an Villas’ shutdown, thus, is only a watershed moment for the consolidation of the state’s authority in urban spatial production and economic development. The chapter’s first section, “The Paragon of Economic Liberalization: Jing’an Dis-

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land includes several manufacturing zones, could afford large-scale conservation of heritage neighborhoods in its central areas, while developing its periphery. Jing’an’s scarcity of land resources, on the other hand, compelled its leaders to prioritize program-specific and large-scale urban development in the center to maximize economic growth. The District’s facilitation of private investment for urban restructuring began early when China initiated land marketization. With the engagement of foreign investment for urban development since the 1980s, the development of the West Nanjing Lu corridor as a high-end commercial hub, and the securing of a key subway station stop on West Nanjing Lu, Jing’an was able to quickly out-compete its neighboring central districts. Huangpu [黄浦] District, for example, despite its legacy advantages of being the modern era CBD located along the Bund, was not able to resume its CBD role in Shanghai’s Puxi.14 It is only the Huaihai Lu development in the central Luwan [卢湾] District in the mid-1990s, with its mix of high-end office towers, commercial and residential developments including the Xintiandi project, that was the main contender against Jing’an’s West Nanjing Lu corridor development in Puxi. Thus, unlike the Xuhui District, the economic imperatives of Jing’an’s district authorities never really saw cultural heritage as more than an ornamental part of the District’s image-building capacity. The second section, “Evocation of Heritage—Redefining Jing’an Villas,” traces its ‘heritageisation’15 as a popularly endorsed image project. The rapidness of developments in the District far outpaced the conservation projects, so much so that the municipal conservation plan, as implemented in the mid-2000s, easily looks like an afterthought to confirm what has survived development, rather than a careful evaluation of historic architecture. It was only in the lead-up to the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, when heritage as public relations instrument for tourism promotion necessitated investment. This engagement of popular sentiments is notable in the District’s savvy deployment of popular media, an underlying theme of this chapter. The relationship between heritage and commercialization is a continued theme in the historic city center areas. But unlike in the last chapter, which used heritage conservation as a framework to analyze the collusion of power and money in the urban transformation processes, this chapter includes heritage conservation as one of many instruments with which the local state and non-state-affiliated actors vie for an upper hand in the urban spatial production process. The third section, “Jing’an Villas’ Commercialization and Creative Enterprises,” charts the course taken by a subset of small entrepreneurs who quickly seized the opportunity to occupy the ground floor of Jing’an Villas in the mid-2000s. The urban loophole, which emerged from the District’s planning indecision, and coincided with 2010 World Expo-expedited image upgrades, gave an opportunity to small commerce. Whereas the large developers favored by, and affiliated with, the district governments, largely overlook the diversification of consumer demands in their pursuit of economic profitability, small entrepreneurs tap into emerging markets, exploiting the under-utilized and unique spatial supply in places like Jing’an Villas. The outlook of the globally connected creative entrepreneurs in Jing’an Villas contrasts also with the profit-driven priorities of the big box retail spaces on West Nanjing Lu. The organically formed creative cluster seemed to offer an alternative to the District’s single-minded and selective commercialization that has guided the area’s homogenization, and to maintain the neighborhood’s socio-economic diversity. 240

Tianzifang, an earlier cluster of creative enterprises that reused historic buildings, is often cited as Jing’an Villas’ precedent. In the shutdown of Jing’an Villas, both sides of the conflict used Tianzifang’s development to extol and condemn Jing’an Villas’ small entrepreneurs and their adaptive reuse. The fourth section, “The Precedent of Tianzifang for Commercialization,” moves away from Jing’an and unpacks Tianzifang’s development to clarify the agents, drivers and processes that unfolded in its development. Heritage conservation, creative reuse, gentrification and the relationship of top-down and bottom-up agents are addressed in this section. Tianzifang and Xintiandi [新天地], both well known in Shanghai today, are cited as the two most important cases for the conservation of heritage architecture. As bottom-up and topdown reuse developments respectively, they have become commercially successful and conceptually influential.16 However, while there are a number of well-written and detailed articles that describe the different actors involved and the processes of Xintiandi’s development,17 Tianzifang’s development, surprisingly, lacks a clear chronicle of its actors and processes.18 The inclusion of this interlude on Tianzifang’s development process and its actors is therefore relevant to understanding its comparison to Jing’an Villas, and the drivers and actors of its spatial production processes. The section on Tianzifang challenges its popular presentation as a bottom-up development. It was the neighborhood street office, engaging affiliated entrepreneurs,

hoods’ futures been more certain, incumbent residents would have taken ownership of their spaces and impeded the changes to their homes. It is precisely in the context of impending change that opportunistic entrepreneurs can reap commercial success by exploiting the urban loophole. Despite the differing concerns of the different districts, the trajectory of Tianzifang’s development gives important clues to the priorities and key issues in the development of Jing’an Villas. With the clamor of Jing’an Villas’ development increasingly resembling that of Tianzifang, the fifth section, “Public Relations Wars and the Differing Visions of Jing’an Villas’ Future,” looks specifically at the mediated rhetoric leading up to Jing’an Villas’ final shutdown. In the contest to win public opinion, both the local state authorities and their allies, and the small entrepreneurs and their supporters, invoked heritage conservation as the hallowed alibi to defend their diverging modes for conservation. Active deployment of media instruments for public relations in the protracted Jing’an Villas conflict shows the continued importance of public support for both the local

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which initiated the first developments that catalyzed the ensuing bottom-up developments. The small-scale public-private alliance’s reuse of abandoned production facilities during SOE reforms of the 1990s, notably, would set the precedent for the using of creative industries clustering as an urban loophole for the permissible commercialization of administratively-allocated sites.19 Finally, although there existed a period when community initiative formed a non-state organization for the administration of the small enterprises in Tianzifang, the District’s appropriation of the group in the late 2000s reinforced again the state’s authority. In both Tianzifang and Jing’an Villas, ambiguity and uncertainty, resulting from adaptive governance, provided opportunity to risk-taking small entrepreneurs. In the face of imminent change, impending demolition in the former, and impending commercialization in the latter, the agile and mobile entrepreneurs ‘gambled,’ taking advantage of the interim and time-limited spatial opportunities. Had their neighbor-

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Fig. 3 Aerial photograph showing the high-rises along West Nanjing Lu, 2012

state and the entrepreneurs. The local state’s competition with the private sector to win mass appeal also corroborates its growing entrepreneurial role as a player in the market.20 The last two sections, “The Neighboring En-bloc Development of Dazhongli,” and “Zhang Gardens: Jing’an Develops its Heritage Value,” zoom out to developments in the adjacent blocks. (Fig. 3) It is in light of their developments that the shutdown of Jing’an Villas fits the narrative of the development vision for the West Nanjing Lu corridor. The two developments, Dazhongli [大中里] and Zhang Gardens [张家花园], show the changing approaches to heritage in the Jing’an District. Together with the growing value of depleted historic buildings, the increasing scarcity of large-scale city center plots for densification and redevelopment have also compelled a shift away from large en-bloc developments. Projects that engage large-scale private capital, as is the case in the Dazhongli development, are facing challenges posed by a combination of increasing local state imposition and non-state-affiliated actors’ demands. For conserved areas like Zhang Gardens, heritage requirements have also obliged new ways of reconciling conservation with development pressures and harnessing the value of historic architecture. In both the Dazhongli and Zhang Gardens sites, vestiges of the planned economy and the dual land market also exacerbate challenges to planning.

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The Paragon of Economic Liberalization: Jing’an District and the Development of West Nanjing Lu When economic liberalization began under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, the Shanghai government, emerging out of the post-Mao era with more autonomy, experimented with early forms of marketization. The 1978 Third Plenary of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CPC [十一届三中全会] announced the new system of governing through ‘two levels of management, one and a half levels of government [一级半政府，两级管理],’ giving the local state more independence. The high status of Jing’an District in the political hierarchy, the District being one of the central districts directly under the control of the Shanghai Municipal Government, gave it autonomy and resources. Jing’an District became one of the active sites of early transformations. Infrastructure upgrades produced a number of pedestrian overpasses and underpasses to anticipate traffic congestions that would accompany development.21 Tapping into legacy connections to overseas investors, largely from the diaspora networks in Hong Kong, but also Taiwan and Singapore, joint ventures for real estate development of housing for expatriates, hotels, and commercial offices were put into place. Buildings were erected to accommodate functions that had been barred under planned economy but were much in demand as China began its economic liberalization. In addition to hotels and commercial office spaces, a ‘cooperative mode to develop residential architecture

gent. In 1988 in Hongqiao [虹桥], an Economic and Technological Development Zone that was incorporated in 1983 by a directive from the central government’s State Council, was set up as a new business district.23 The first transfer of land use rights to foreign investors in joint ventures through termed leasing at Hongqiao also set the precedent for urban real estate development.24 Even though the establishment of Hongqiao was dictated from the highest level of China’s centralized state, its location in the metropolitan area of Shanghai was peripheral. It was located close to the Hongqiao Airport, which was rapidly growing following China’s opening. Jing’an, on the other hand, was centrally located. As a municipal district, it also pursued economic growth through joint-venture developments. In essence, Jing’an District’s pursuit of economic growth competed with that of the central government-approved Hongqiao Business

Chapter 4 The Midtown of China

[联建公助]’ increased much-needed housing production for local residents in the historic districts. While districts like Xuhui, which encompassed the western end of the former French Concession known as a low-density high-end residential area, concentrated on developing housing construction as a means of foreign currency attraction, Jing’an District’s mix of commercial and industrial legacy prompted it to position itself as a modernizing business-oriented hub in the city. In 1986, the Moganshan Meetings authorized a ‘double track system [双轨制]’ that allowed partial market determination of pricing to occur while price controls still continued under the planned economy. As a result of market demand, 1.7 million square meters of new construction took place in the Jing’an District in the 1980s alone.22 The necessity for the construction of spaces to accommodate businesses was ur-

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Fig. 4 Aerial photograph of the Jing’an District from the 1990 s, with the Shanghai Center and J. C. Mandarin to the right of the iconic Shanghai Exhibition Center, 1995

District. (Fig. 4) In 1987, the 43-story Hilton Tower was completed in Jing’an, and two years later, in 1989, the 30-story J. C. Mandarin was also finished.25 But it was with the 1990 opening of the ‘Shanghai Commerce City [上海商城],’ a direct translation of its Chinese name, that Jing’an asserted its commercial centrality in the rapidly transforming metropolitan area of Shanghai. With Grade-A office spaces, a shopping center, a five-star Ritz Carlton hotel, a theater, and a conference center, the complex showcased the necessary functions for accommodating the impending influx of capital and resources for a China that was again starting to integrate into the global market economy. The ‘Shanghai Center,’ as it would be called, significantly, dwarfed in height, but not in girth, the 1950s-built Shanghai Exhibition Center across West Nanjing Lu. The Shanghai Exhibition Center, originally called the Sino-Soviet Friendship Complex [中苏友好大厦], was a gift from the former USSR , and there were tacit orders that it should not to be exceeded in height by any new buildings.26 If the Shanghai Exhibition Center represented the old alliances and ideologies under a planned economy, then the Shanghai Center represented the new aspirations under the transitioning and liberalizing economy. Filled with stores peddling luxury international brands, a supermarket for imported foods, and a hotel lobby for hosting the pioneer crop of international businessmen stepping into a reopened China, the 185,000-square-meter complex of three towers atop an eight-story podium was designed by the architecture firm John Portman and Associates. (Fig. 5) The Atlanta-based architecture firm has been known for its atrium-dominated commercial complexes; complexes famously hailed by the cultural critic Fredric Jameson for epitomizing the ‘cultural logic of late 244

capitalism’ in the developed economies of the West.27 For a country that had been isolated from the outside world for almost four decades, the Portman-designed spaces heralded the acceleration of economic liberalization. The Tian’anmen Protests, leading to the June 4th Incident in 1989, prompted the central government to adjust the country’s pathway for economic reforms, with tighter control by the central government and the temporary barring of foreign investments. With their successFig. 5 The Shanghai Center, 1995

ful quelling of protests and maintenance of stability in Shanghai in 1989, the lead-

ership from the city, namely Jiang Zeming and Zhu Rongji, rose quickly and were promoted to leading positions in the central government. The southern tour by Deng Xiaoping in early 1992 culminated with the naming of Shanghai as the “Dragon’s Head.”28 This bestowment was significant in the context of the re-centralization of authority following the 1989 protests: it propelled Shanghai to an important political and thus also economic position in the national hierarchy. The declaration of the Special Economic Zone in Pudong was not only a municipal development but also a strategic decision on the national level, with the rapid implementation of the Lujiazui [陆家嘴] Financial District in Pudong as the financial hub of China’s global integration.29 As

West Nanjing Lu [静安南京西路现代化国际研讨会], the CCP Shanghai Committee reaffirmed the decision to make West Nanjing Lu the ‘gravity center [重头]’ of its modernization project.31 In the context of the country’s rush for economic development and global integration, the planning strategy pragmatically aimed to seed an area for the attraction of foreign investment to develop commerce. An ensuing masterplan from 1993 by the municipal planning bureau showed the almost three-kilometer stretch of West Nanjing Lu as a hub for commerce, shopping and entertainment, with half of the area in-filled by newly built structures replacing the existing fabric.32 (Fig. 6) Together with the commercial development, the plan again targeted a reduction of one-third of the residential population for the year 2000.33 The first blueprints for turning this

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Pudong took over the nation’s lead role in testing out how to transition to a market economy, Jing’an, as a municipal-level district, resumed the task of realizing Shanghai’s own economic ambitions. With a certain degree of financial autonomy remaining since the fiscal decentralization of the 1980s, Jing’an District carried on with its radical urban renewal. Jing’an spearheaded the demolition of outdated and overcrowded housing following the municipal ‘365 plan,’ led the dismantling and moving of industries to the periphery, and developed a new centrality for commerce along the West Nanjing Lu corridor. A masterplan drawn up by the municipal planning bureau in 1990, the West Nanjing Lu Corridor Master Plan [南京西路沿线地区规划] proposed the relocation of 30,000 people from the area to reduce the residential population from the then existing 98,000.30 In October 1992, at the International Conference on the Modernization of Jing’an’s

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Fig. 6 Plan for West Nanjing Lu, 1993

centrally located area in Shanghai from one of mixed-use residential neighborhoods to one that is predominantly commercial, were in place. The fervor of commercial development was already underway. In 1992 alone, the District invested 126.7 million R MB to upgrade some ten enterprises, deemed key commercial projects, along West Nanjing Lu, adding 10,280 square meters of built volume. The total volume in that year alone was more than the total of the previous five years.34 In the following year, together with the large-scale urban renewal through demolition and redevelopment, ten district-initiated key projects began, totaling 91 hectares in plot area and with 406,300 square meters of built area. Total investments, from overseas as well as municipal-level and district-level developers, came to 4.7 billion R MB .35 In May 1995, the State Council approved plans for the construction of Shanghai’s subway Line 2. The infrastructure corridor along the new metro line would become a spine for real estate developments and the immediate vicinity of the metro stations would become the sites of commercial densification. In line with the larger plan to alleviate residential congestion and upgrade the city center area through function change, the subway station at West Nanjing Lu further expedited the area’s development. The Jing’an District government proceeded to relocate 1,000 families and 16 businesses. At the inauguration of the subway’s construction two years later in June 1997, the success of the relocation process was announced.36 A parallel street south of West Nanjing Lu that had been the site of a wet market and edged by commercial as well as smallscale manufacturing spaces, Wujiang Lu [吴江路], was also part of the subway-catalyzed modernization plan. Small manufacturing spaces that had been important in the post-Liberation era, contributing to Shanghai’s crucial industrial role in the nation, and again in the 1980s to the national strategic plan for developing domestic appliance production, had, by the 1990s, lost their relevance in the face of market competition. These manufacturing spaces were further dismantled in the ensuing state-owned enterprise (SOE ) reforms.37 Their centrally located sites became readily developed. Redevelopment to replace the fine-grained Wujiang Lu, elaborated in a 1998 masterplan for the area, showed large new commercial complexes.38 Along with the already-realized pedestrian bridges flying across heavily trafficked West Nanjing Lu, the renderings of the shiny new buildings represented a glowing future city of speed and flows. 246

In mid-1996, the glass and steel office-commercial tower complexes of Zhong­ chuang Building [中创大厦] and Jing’an New Times Building [静安新时代大厦], initiated by district-affiliated local developers three years prior, opened. These projects were part of the mission to turn West Nanjing Lu into what the Jing’an District increasingly promoted as its ‘double high standards [双高],’ of ‘high-end in taste and high standards [高品位，高标准].’ In 2001, the Jing’an District issued the official document The Strategy for Jing’an’s Double High Standards [静安区双高战略指标体系], after being tabled initially at the Sixth Meeting of the Jing’an District CCP Committee [静安区委六届六次全会] in 1999.39 Following the success of the Shanghai Center as its central node, commercial developments along West Nanjing Lu continued with land leases to large foreign investors. As an overview, compiled by the District Bureau for Land Resources, for all developments since 1992 showed, a total of 36 plots in the District were leased to overseas developers, mostly along the West Nanjing Lu corridor, totaling 306,548 square meters in plot area and with a planned built area of 1,849,043 square meters.40 Even as the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis impacted projects that were just starting, projects already underway continued. In 1998, the commercial complex of the Westgate Mall [梅龙镇广场], developed by Hong Kong’s Hutchinson Whampoa [和记 黄埔地产有限公司] in a joint venture with the local Westgate Corporation [梅龙镇集团], opened its 37-story grade-A office tower atop a 10-story commercial podium.41 The 12,000-square-meter site was leased on a 50-year term, as was the established term for commercial functions. Its first tenants in the office tower included Dow Jones and the Spanish Consulate among others. The shopping mall was anchored by the deparment store Isetan.42 The completion of Citic Square [中信泰富广场] followed in 2000. It was developed in a joint investment by Swire Properties [太古集团], the Citic Group [中信集团公司] and the Jing’an City Commercial and Trade Corporation [静安城商贸总 公司].43 Swire Properties is the Hong Kong-based real estate development arm of the Swire Group, a diversified international conglomerate that had its beginnings in the late 19th century China trade. The Hong Kong-registered Citic Group, founded in 1979, is one of China’s first state-owned investment companies, and it had overseen much of the initial Western investments into the country. The Jing’an City Commercial and Trade Corporation is a Jing’an District government-formed corporation. At 48 stories with a six-story shopping podium, the complex, totaling more than 101,000 square

mall was most known for its high-end stores bringing global luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Gucci for the first time to the Chinese public. The triumvirate of commercial complexes of Mei-Tai-Heng [梅泰恒] would form the ’Golden Triangle [金三角]’ of Jing’an District. Their land leases generated the first flush of cash for the District. When the buildings were completed, their multinational corporation tenants continued to contribute to a growing tax base for the Jing’an District government. With fiscal decentralization, land leases became the primary source of revenue for local governments that were often responsible for infrastructural investments and had social welfare responsibilities. After the initial cash inflow from the leasing of the

Chapter 4 The Midtown of China

meters in built area, gave space to even more specialty international fashion brands as well as food and beverage (F & B ) outlets. The following year, Plaza 66 [恒隆广场], developed by Hang Lung Properties of Hong Kong and designed by the American corporate firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF ) Architects, opened. At 288 meters and 66 stories, the office tower was the tallest tower in Puxi when it was finished.44 Its

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land, the density and function of the developments, if successful, would generate a continuing and more sustainable source of income for the local government through their tax contributions. In interviews with representatives from the Economic Council of the Jing’an District, the early developments of Mei-Tai-Heng [梅泰恒] not only marked West Nanjing Lu as a key commercial centrality within a rapidly transforming Shanghai, but they were also crucial in generating continuous growth for the District. “With only one-third of the population of the privileged and high-end districts like Xuhui, Jing’an nevertheless generates only a few hundred million dollars less,” officials proudly spouted off the numbers, including the highest per capita GDP in Shanghai’s districts.45 They attributed the economic prowess of the Jing’an District to the acumen of its leaders. To attract foreign investments, the ensuing implementations tapped into Shanghai’s historic legacies as an internationally networked metropolis. And despite the paucity of developable land in the smallest district in the metropolitan area, shrewd positioning of the commercial developments and Jing’an’s central location helped ensure the District’s sustained economic growth.46 The development of office towers and mall complexes on West Nanjing Lu played a crucial role in the Jing’an District’s economic growth. The office buildings of the Golden Triangle were also fondly referred to as the ‘hundred-million dollar towers [亿元楼],’ in their ability to raise revenues for the otherwise land-scarce and thus resource-poor District. By the late 2000s, the District already had more than 300 towers higher than thirty stories. In 2008, the District reaped annual taxes of more than 15 billion R MB (approximately 2.18 billion USD ), most of which came from the West Nanjing Lu corridor. The Kerry Center, further down West Nanjing Lu to the west of the Golden Triangle, was the first complex to generate 100 million USD in tax revenue in 2001. It would be upgraded and expanded again in 2011. In 2010 the completion of Wheelock Square extended the Golden Triangle, making it part of the ‘Five Golden Stars [金五星]’ of Jing’an. The early ambitions of Jing’an District, reflected in the prompt land leases to foreign investors for commercial development, also showed a keen awareness of commercial and political competition at the metropolitan and national levels. While the then newly vested and nationally designated zones in Lujiazui and Hongqiao proceeded with central government-prioritized undertakings, Jing’an courted investors from the Chinese diaspora and signed off on land leases for its own commercial developments. Jing-an’s ambitions reflected the Shanghai municipality’s awareness and assertion of its legacy-based advantages in competing against the new economic zones inserted into its territory by the national hierarchy. As the strategically chosen locations of the stations along the subway Line 2, connecting Hongqiao to Lujiazui, showed, the choice of West Nanjing Lu did not just make it a key node along the new transit-oriented development corridor. The consequent development around the catchment area of West Nanjing Lu station also positioned the city center district of Jing’an as a centrality,47 competing with the outlying but nationally chosen development hubs of Lujiazui and Hongqiao.48 In positioning itself as a centrality competitive with national level hubs, Jing’an’s initiatives also put the District forward as the new commercial hub within the Shanghai metropolitan area itself. Inter-district competition in Shanghai has always been intense, and the municipal government incites it to garner outcomes for its rising sta248

tus at the national level. Shanghai’s vast municipal administration is broken down into semi-autonomous authorities resting in the urban districts. Even though there has been a gradual consolidation of smaller districts since 1949, the remaining districts, especially those in the city center, remain powerful institutions in the vast Chinese administrative hierar-

Fig. 7 The concentration of commercial services in the inner ring of Shanghai, with West Nanjing Lu indicated by the red line, 2009

chy.49 Shanghai’s urban districts are comparable to city level governments in other provinces because of the city’s special status. Shanghai, along with Beijing, Tianjin and Chongqing, is administratively a ‘directly-controlled municipality [直辖市],’

the highest classification for cities in the country. This high status in the administrative hierarchy imparts Jing’an with the coveted ability to play the role of a vanguard to test out economic innovations. Neighboring inner-city districts like Xuhui and Changning Districts acquired their hinterland in the mid-1980s, making it possible for them to develop income-earning Special Economic Zones within their jurisdictions.

In order to compete with them, Jing’an was compelled to develop urban strategies for extracting the most value out of its limited land resources.50 (Fig. 7) By the early 2000s, a shift in Shanghai’s development strategy was also taking shape. From the first decade of economic transition that relied on sheer economic progress, there was now an increasing emphasis on the kind of prosperity to be developed. The term ‘transition [转型]’ is used in Chinese to imply structural changes that are linked to the city’s post-industrialization and the development of a knowledge-based service economy. In the enthusiasm for Shanghai’s ‘transition,’ it is not

elaborating its financial ambitions in the Nanjing Lu corridor. In early 2002, the District unveiled, through the newspaper Liberation Daily [解放日报 ]—well recognized as the CCP mouthpiece—its Jing’an Nanjing Lu Development Plan [静安南京路发展规划 ].52 This mode of announcement would set a pattern for the District’s savvy publicity feeds to its affiliated media preceding the official announcement of planning policies. In late 2002, the completion of the Nanjing Lu Development Plan by the Jing’an District’s Planning Bureau, in consultation with international experts including the global property management conglomerate DTZ and corporate designer Gensler Architects, showed the District’s plans to position the West Nanjing Lu corridor as the Midtown—not only of Shanghai—but of China.53 (Fig. 8) From precedent studies of

Chapter 4 The Midtown of China

surprising that the discourse around the tertiary economies would also be the first to be tested out in Jing’an. In the northern part of the District, the removing of industries from valuable city center locations opened up potential spaces for creative industry incubators, while commodity high-rise housing developments replaced dilapidated old housing neighborhoods.51 With the full-fledged reprogramming of the District’s northern area underway, the post-socialist reinstitution of the city as the place for consumption, rather than of production only, focused on the southern part of the Jing’an District,

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Asian Square

Citic Square Westgate Plaza

Plaza 66

Jing’an Villas “modern-era lilong area”

Plot 111-09 redevelopment

Zhang Gardens “modern-era shikumen lilong area”

Fig. 8 Developments along West Nanjing Lu, 2002

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Four Seasons

Dazhongli redevelopment

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commercial districts in New York, London, Paris and Tokyo, supported by citations of the theorists of globalization, Saskia Sassen and John Friedmann,54 the conceptual elaborations of the District’s aspirations for a ‘Midtown of China [中国的中城]’ were declared in its proposed vision. Interestingly, for New Yorkers and those familiar with the origin of the reference, Midtown is a rather non-descript part of Manhattan that physically manifests the city’s financial and business efficiency in its high-rises, some of which of course include the iconic turn-of-the-century skyscrapers. Unlike the West Village or Chelsea, New York neighborhoods that are colorful in character with their charming brownstones or warehouse-turned-galleries, Midtown’s skyline is often the representative image for the global city. Competing with what would be the equivalent of New York’s Wall Street in Shanghai’s newly developed Lujiazui,55 prominent office locations in proximity to historic residential quartiers became the new pitch for the Jing’an District. Because the attraction of international talent has been posited by economists as being fundamental to economic competitiveness and crucial to the transition from being predominantly manufacturing to knowledge-based service industries,56 the campaign for a ‘Global Jing’an [国际静安]’ became increasingly important. This campaign promoted the creation of an enticing built urban environment that would attract transnational elites, important to the cultivation of a growing services sector. The changing rhetoric and the relentless search for best practices by the Jing’an District’s pragmatic and facile bureaucrats were also accompanied by a strategy shift from urban renewal through wholesale demolition and reconstruction processes, to an emphasis on the economic and cultural potential of the existing and historic urban fabric.57 The appeal of heritage neighborhoods to international talent, as posited by analysts of globalization,58 was increasingly recognized in Shanghai. In 2002, nevertheless, one of the largest land leases in the city center took place with the acquisition of the 63,000 square-meter Dazhongli block by the HKR Development Group. Thus, despite a growing emphasis on historic neighborhoods as part of the broader shift to the quality of the built environment, the underlying economic motivations for development still remained for the resource-scarce city center district. To reconcile the continued need for economic growth and the burgeoning imperative for historic structures, new and creative solutions that could mediate the two seemingly conflicting goals were urgently needed. Tax and real estate incentives by the Jing’an District complemented the 2005 conferment of Creative Industries Clusters by the Shanghai Creative Industries Center, created at the end of the previous year as a subsidiary of the municipal Economic Council.59 Through the reuse of former industrial buildings, largely concentrated in the northern part of Jing’an, the policies gave rise to a process for producing creative incubation spaces for what were considered lucrative cultural industries. The combination of district-implemented incentives and municipal recognition for creativity was precisely the kind of new and creative solution to mediate the seemingly conflicting conditions of economic productivity and heritage conservation. The production of creative industries clusters, with its attraction of internationally connected tertiary industries, fitted well into the aspiration for a ‘Global Jing’an.’ In August 2006, the fourth Harvard Business Review China Case Contest took place in Shanghai and was organized by the municipal Economic Council, the Jing’an 252

District government and the magazine, Harvard Business Review China. The theme was “How to Build Jing’an Nanjing Lu into One of the International Symbolic Shopping Districts [南京西路如何成为国际购物标志性地区之一].”60 Jing’an’s selection as part of the Harvard Business School case studies was much in line with the District’s pursuit of international input. Soliciting ideas on how to enhance a ‘Global Jing’an’ from young business talent, the contest engaged teams from ten Asia Pacific business schools on improvement concepts for its key commercial corridor. Of all the proposals tabled, the concept of the winning team from the University of Hong Kong would go on to be incorporated by the District authorities. The student team’s proposal for Shanghai’s West Nanjing Lu to emulate Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue took hold in the District, as the District mayor reiterated the need to continue the pursuit and attraction of world-class brands to ensure the competitiveness of the city’s smallest district.61 Also organized by the Jing’an District government with the municipal Economic Council and the magazine, Forbes China, was the launching of the annual Forbes Jing’an Nanjing Lu Forum which brought in international expertise. New York’s Fifth Avenue business community leadership, the Président du Comité Champs-Elysées and the leadership of the business community in Tokyo’s Ginza District were all invited guests. Their knowledge and experience in their jurisdictions served as role models for Jing’an.62 The choice of targets for Jing’an’s aspiration made its course of development clear: a high-end business district with headquarters for international corporations. Following the forum, the District government announced that another 1.3 million square meters of land would be allotted for further development in time for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.63 From large-scale urban renewals in the north of Jing’an, the District authorities

ber of newspaper publishers already established along the street since Liberation in 1949,66 economic transition has further transformed the street with the demolition of old lilongs and the closure or relocation of small manufacturing. In line with the development of a ‘Midtown of China,’ the 2008 campaign rendered Weihai Lu the next ‘Madison Avenue of Shanghai,’ promoting media clustering along the street.67 The initiative also was the first to give programmatic emphasis to the Jing’an Villas. Jing’an Villas had an entry and address from both West Nanjing Lu and also Weihai Lu.68 While the Jing’an District government was concocting plans for the ‘Midtown of China’ and the ‘Madison Avenue of Shanghai’ in a ‘Global Jing’an,’ endogenous, or bottom-up, developments were also taking place in the undemolished and socio-econom­ ically diverse urban fabric in the area. In 2006, when an old warehouse building numbered 696 on Weihai Lu emptied out, an informal clustering of artists took shape, bringing together international galleries and young artists. With the spillover effect of the creative community that congregated at 696 for events such as Weekend Open Studios every July,69 the adjacent lilong quartier of Jing’an Villas also began transforming. At the same time, municipal implementation of heritage conservation policies in the mid-2000s reinforced the growing popularity of Shanghai’s modern era building

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turned also to the more residential and commercial neighborhoods south of West Nanjing Lu. (Fig. 9) In early 2008, the District government announced the establishment of the Weihai Lu Culture and Media Street [威海路文化传媒街].64 Weihai Lu is a small east-west street parallel to West Nanjing Lu and was known for the clustering of small automobile-related industries.65 With the Shanghai Television Station and a num-

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Fig. 9 Map of the Jing’an District with leased land plots for development, 2000

stock. The combination of heritage appropriation and diversifying consumer demand for small commerce was creating alternatives to the Jing’an District’s singular vision of a ‘Midtown of China’ on the ground.

Evocation of Heritage—Redefining Jing’an Villas At the end of 2009, the Jing’an District began to give the Jing’an Villas a facelift. Along with upgrades to other recognized heritage architecture in Jing’an, including the Sun Apartments [太阳公寓], and the Zhang Gardens [张家花园], all nearby, the renovations were just in time for the expected visitors of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. Bricks were taken from Dazhongli [大中里], a nearby lilong compound just one block east that was undergoing demolition. Dazhongli’s site was acquired by the Swire Group to be redeveloped as a high-end commercial project. According to experts, because construction had taken place at a similar time, the red bricks were judged appropriate for reuse 254

in the renovation of Jing’an Villas.70 Jing’an Villas’ management company, the Jing’an Real Estate Group [静安置业集团], which belongs to the District’s Department of Housing Management, invested 40 million R MB on the upgrade.71 Since economic liberalization accelerated in the 1990s, there has been a growing awareness of the value of architecture heritage. In 1994, Jing’an Villas, along with other prominent buildings, were designated preservation-level architecture [保护级建筑] as part of a core conservation area [保护核心区域]. But it wasn’t until the mid-2000s with the municipality’s establishment of Fengmao Districts that entire neighborhoods, and not only selected buildings deemed valuable, became less susceptible to the rampant and rapid demolition and redevelopment that had prevailed in the 1990s. In 2002, Professor Zheng Shiling of Tongji University, who had earlier authored a book on Shanghai’s modern era architecture,72 and who was also a member of the Expert Consultants’ Commission to the Jing’an District, had already produced the Jing’an District Jing’an Villas Neighborhood Conservation and Renewal Plan and Design [静安区静安别墅地区保护 更新规划设计].73 The 2003 deliverance of the 12 Historic Cultural Fengmao Districts by the Municipal Planning Bureau would outline a 1.15 square kilometer West Nanjing Lu Historic Cultural Fengmao District centered around the historic thoroughfare of West Nanjing Lu, including the Jing’an Villas. (Fig. 10) It is one of the three designated Fengmao Districts, which includes Jing’an District, and is the only one that is entirely within the jurisdiction of Jing’an. Fengmao, as elaborated in the previous chapter, is a term for the styles and features that are deemed valuable in heritage architecture and worth conserving. Simply, Fengmao Districts are Shanghai’s conservation areas. The other

Fig. 10 Plan for the West Nanjing Lu Historic and Cultural Fengmao District, 2003

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two Fengmao Districts, which are partly in Jing’an, cross administrative boundaries shared with the adjacent Xuhui, Changning and Luwan Districts.74 Even though the north side of most of West Nanjing Lu had, by the early 2000s, already been replaced

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by large-scale commercial podiums, topped by the ‘hundred-million dollar towers,’ the Fengmao plan nevertheless still also called out the Fengmao Streets, including parts of West Nanjing Lu, which were prohibited from being widened and were conserved for their historic streetscapes. The core of municipal-level conservation policy regarded road widening as damaging to Fengmao Districts as the destruction of buildings was.75 The road widening that accompanied rapid urban upgrades in the 1990s not only often expedited the destruction of historic buildings along the widened road, but also destroyed what would later be highly regarded as historic streetscapes. The prohibition of road widening was thus implemented by the municipal Fengmao plan as the first line of defense against any development-propelled transformation of historic neighborhoods.76 In the Jing’an District, iconic modern era shopfronts that were often replicated as film backdrops—the part of West Nanjing Lu between Shimen Lu [石门路] and Tongren Lu [同仁路]—became the target of streetscape conservation.77 To the south and north of the ridge of high-rises along the Fengmao part of West Nanjing Lu, Excellent Historic Architecture as well as buildings deemed worthy of conserving were outlined, in a patchwork of Fengmao areas. The Jing’an District turned its ongoing and aggressive residential developments in the northern parts of the District, the continued densification and enhancement of its West Nanjing Lu commercial spine, and the plans for the patchwork of historic areas deemed valuable, into a strategy of ‘one axis two flanks, keeping the south and changing the north [一轴两翼、南留北改].’ In February 2004, the Jing’an District Planning Bureau announced the Plan for the Conservation and Renewal of Jing’an District Conservation Neighborhoods [静安区保护街坊保护与更新规划].78 The plan articulated a reconciliation of the development and conservation maintenance of their spatial adjacency. How to “both keep intact the neighborhoods’ historic fengmao in the 19 plots, and also satisfy the needs of contemporary life [既保持这19个街坊完整的历史风貌，又能 满足现代生活需要],”79 as announced in local media, was central to the plan. Before the District publicized the official conservation plan, selected public media previewed the plan to the public.80 The coverage broadcast that road widening and reconstruction were off-limits in the Fengmao areas. But it also prefaced that when historic buildings conflicted with infrastructural development needs, the repositioning of these historic buildings, even in their entirety, might be necessitated.81 This outright statement of infrastructure-necessitated circumstances for heritage relocation was in direct contradiction to the central tenets of the municipal planners’ conservation policy. In hindsight, with knowledge of the Shimen Lu reconstruction to be developed later, with its dramatic road widening and straightening, and the relocation of historic buildings for new construction, the divergence of approach to conservation by the Jing’an District from the municipality’s heritage concepts would only seem to make sense. The discrepancy between practice and policy also highlights the developmental priorities and growth imperatives of the globally aspiring Jing’an. Nevertheless, in 2007, Jing’an Villas and West Nanjing Lu became even more iconic when they were featured as one of the key backdrops in director Ang Lee [李安]’s 2007 film Lust, Caution [色戒]. Set against a Republican-era narrative by writer Eileen Chang [张爱玲], known for her novels evoking the cultural sensibility and atmosphere of Shanghai’s pre-Liberation cosmopolitan heyday, the denouement of the story took 256

place in a well-known Indian-owned jewelry shop of the 1930s on West Nanjing Lu, located along the street-facing part of the Jing’an Villas.82 Even though, like many other films of Shanghai, it was filmed off location at the large film set built in Chedun Film Park in the suburbs of Shanghai— the Cinecittà of China—the set’s location highlighted West Nanjing Lu’s historic importance. The stores that were featured in the film, including the Kaisiling Cake Shop, known still for its mont blanc—a chestnut-cream pastry—and the Siberian Furrier, can still be found on West Nanjing Lu. Following the film, stills were used to advertise the cultural and commercial value of real estate locales along West Nanjing Lu.83 (Fig. 11) That same year, a young SingaporeanHong Kong developer and entrepreneur, Yenn Wong, opened Jia, a boutique ho-

Fig. 11 Historic photo of Jing’an Villas, 1930 s

tel set in the historic Central Apartments building that was built in 1926 and located at the corner of West Nanjing Lu and Taixing Lu [泰兴路]. Though tucked between the 1990s new developments, the former Central Apartments nevertheless resonated with other modern era apartments along West Nanjing Lu. Across the street is the former Medhurst Apartments from 1934, now the Taixing Apartments [泰兴大楼], and further east are the former Dennis Apartments from 1928, now the Deyi Apartments [德义公寓], and the former Yates Apartments from 1936, now the Tongfu Apartments [同孚公寓]. All were inducted into the register for Excellent Historic Architecture in the mid-1990s, together with Jing’an Villas. Steps away from the shop-fronts made famous by Lust, Caution, the Hong Kong-based designer that Wong hired for Jia repackaged the former apartment building’s historic

of vintage commercial hubs. In Shanghai, the Jia project showed that in the midst of the high-rises of the ‘Midtown of China’, the West Nanjing Lu corridor also harbored valuable historic buildings that could be lucratively mined to attract an increasingly sophisticated market. As contemporary interest in the recent past of cosmopolitan glamour grew, documentation of Jing’an’s past was also increasingly disseminated. Academic and archival research resumed in the 1990s, with an interest in urban development and management from the pre-Liberation era. As economic liberalization and ensuing marketization expedited, land resource allocation, civic construction, zoning, and the instru-

Chapter 4 The Midtown of China

ambiance, giving it a “shabby chic residential look of haute heritage.”84 The character ‘Jia [家],’ meaning ’home’ in Mandarin, was part of a small international franchise of projects that Wong pursued, where heritage architecture was reused and developed into new commercial spaces. In Singapore, Wong redeveloped a number of pre-war colonial-style ‘Black and White’ houses.85 In Hong Kong, Wong launched a number

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Fig. 12 Historic development of the neighborhood around Jing’an Villas

ments of urban governance from the Concession-era’s market economy, also became increasingly of interest to the contemporary generation of bureaucrats and planners dealing with market economic processes.86 Archival materials, accessible to a wider public, became sources of analysis, interpretation and adaptation.87 One of the most cited dissertations, later published as a book, analyzed the structure and products of the International Concession’s Public Works Commission. This work also included a key section that traced the straightening and development of the former Bubbling Well Road as an important project by the Public Works Commission.88 Bubbling Well Road was also known as Jing’an Temple Lu [静安寺路] in Chinese during the Concession-era because it led to Jing’an Temple [静安寺]. It became an important connector between the then central business district, located around the Bund, and the expanding western end of the International Settlement and the French Concession.89 The thoroughfare quickly became a commercial spine for the expanding Shanghai. Just as the expansion of the then Bubbling Well Road, now West Nanjing Lu, had been crucial to the Concession-era’s urban growth, Jing’an Villas’ development was part of Shanghai’s rapid socio-economic expansion and modernization at the beginning of the 20th century. (Fig. 12) The stretch of land on which Jing’an Villas was developed had previously been the site of a Teochew clan cemetery before it became a horse stable under the British in the International Settlements.90 In 1924, a wealthy merchant, Zhang Tanru [张潭如], whose kin was known as the teacher to Republican China leader Chiang Kai-shek [蒋介石],91 purchased the 2.25-hectare site and, in 1928, began developing it into a new-style lilong compound. (Fig. 13) Compared to the grey-bricked old-style lilong houses of nearby Zhang Gardens, also an upper-class development, the red-bricked new-style lilong houses in Jing’an Villas, completed in 1932, with bathtubs, flushing toilets, and garages for the automobile, were more modern. The houses also catered to a westernized clientele. Many of the compound’s residents worked for international firms, and included known politicians, doctors, and intellectuals. Lu Hanchao, historian of Shanghai, posited that the surge in interest in stories of Shanghai’s modern era links the capitalist heyday of the city’s past to the economic transition of the present.92 In the same vein, stories of Jing’an Villas’ historic origins publicize an illustrious past for a re-globalizing Shanghai, reconnecting the in-coming diaspora investments to their historic legacy. Famous modern era Chinese intellectuals such as Cai Yuanpei [蔡元培] and Yu Youren [于右任] were reported to have lived in the houses in Jing’an Villas. One particular romance of the Republican-era art connoisseur and collector Zhang Boju [张伯驹], one of the four ‘noble sons of Republican China’ [民国四公子], with the impoverished beauty Pan Su [潘素], who would later grow to be 258

a famous painter under his patronage, evoked the cultured ambiance of the spaces. The story of their hideout in the Jing’an Villas, to escape Pan Su’s abductor, a powerful and ranked officer of the Kuomintang, and how it rekindled their forbidden love, is used to recall Shanghai’s cultural history.93 In 1942, Kong Xiangxi [孔祥熙], the husband of the eldest of the Western-educated English-speaking Song sisters, purchased much of Jing’an Villas and asked the American firm, China Realty Company [中国营业公司], to manage the properties. The Song-Kong clan epitomized the Republican-era alliance of money and power, particularly through the brokered marriage of the youngest of the Song sisters to Chiang Kai-shek. The appointment of family members to key posts in the Kuomingtang (KMT )-ruled Republican government, such as the finance ministry, gave the clan privileged access to crucial economic information. Severe inflation and stock market crashes in the 1930s became opportunities for the Song-Kong clan and their cronies to accumulate and conFig. 13 Layout of Jing’an Villas

solidate their expanding wealth. The Jing’an Villas was just one such acquisition, procured at a moment of crisis. When the CCP won the Chinese Civil War and drove out fleeing

KMT from Mainland China in 1949, the number of gold bars leaving on ships to New

York, where many members of the Song-Kong clan also settled, was reported to be outrageously disproportionate, given the national impoverishment at the time.94 Under Communist rule, such corrupt excesses were depicted as the blight responsible for weakening the nation. Public sentiment generally supported the Communist confiscation of KMT- and foreign-owned assets in the early 1950s, along with the elimination of the decadence of the former era. Under the strictures of Red indoctrination, bourgeoisie sentiments were frowned upon and artifacts tucked away. During the height of the Cultural Revolution, for-

and confiscated. In families with any of the wrong associations, the past was hidden, especially from the fervor of one’s own children, who were often the first to denounce their parentage. Jing’an Villas was not spared either and coerced spatial redistribution was as prevalent in the lilong compound as it was everywhere else in the city’s residential neighborhoods. However, with economic liberalization, a dramatic shift in relation to history took place. Embracing the market and its logic, as had been fostered under the Republican era of the KMT, grew rapidly. Intellectuals and the bourgeoisie are again commended for embodying the Shanghai cultural lineage. Television period pieces, with stories that took place during the Republican-era and were styled in its accoutrements, became all the rage in the 2000s. Heritage has become the tool for enhancing the commercial positioning of the West Nanjing Lu corridor and of the Jing’an District as a paragon of economic liberalization.

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eign connections, KMT links, along with the status of being born of the wrong class— land-owning, industrialist, or educated—were grave circumstances and perilous for life. Spaces manifesting the past and their occupants were invaded, attacked, occupied,

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Responding to the success of neighboring Luwan District’s commercial developments of historic lilong buildings in the Xintiandi [新天地] and Sinan Mansions [思南公馆] projects, both favored by the municipal government, Jing’an’s leaders felt compelled to stay ahead in the inter-district competition.95 Since the mid-2000s, the District has harbored ambitions to turn the nearby old-style lilong compound of the Zhang Gardens into Jing’an’s own Fig. 14 The ground floor of one of the Jing’an Villa houses, ‘repair the old to be old [修旧如旧],’ 2012

version of Xintiandi.96 The seemingly boundless demand for new F & B nodes situated in fine-grained and small-scale historic build-

ings, preferred by tourists, expats, and the increasingly affluent local middle class, seemed to the district to be the business plan for development. Neighboring city center districts like Xuhui or Luwan, both part of the former French Concession’s 1914 expansions, have many high-end modern era residential compounds, which could be used for redevelopment. In Jing’an, where there are fewer of the high-end modern era residential compounds, industrial heritage in the northern part of the district south of the Suzhou River, and institutional buildings of the former International Settlement were more often chosen as conversion sites. The 2012 conversion of a former Concession-era police station by the architecture firm, Neri and Hu, who are considered the trailblazers of heritage reuse in Shanghai, for example, testifies to the Jing’an District’s changing engagement of historic architecture to augment the service sector and creative incubator developments. It was thus important, in the 2009 upgrade of Jing’an Villas, that the buildings were ‘repair the old to be old [修旧如旧],’ a sentiment acknowledging the kind of irreparable damage done to many buildings with less-prominent heritage architecture in their repair and upgrade. (Fig. 14) As one official spokesperson for the upgrading project described it, a serious search was made for the original looks for the gate, doors, and windows, through multiple trips to the library and the archives.97 One news program even claimed, albeit wrongly, that the upgrade changed the bricks of the Jing’an Villas from grey brick to red, to show the effort put into the improvement.98 The use of grey brick was prevalent for Chinese-built architecture in early 20th century Shanghai, whereas red brick was used for European-style buildings. The representation was so distinct in the 1900s such that the French Concession authorities banned the use of grey bricks for its residential quarters in order to promote a modern image of the city. This misleading report was not, however, uncommon in the attempts to magnify the city’s return to an earlier worldly elegance, which the historic quartier had physically embodied. Following the 2009 renovation, one of the ground floor units at the end of a lane, a living room that had previously been occupied by a tailor, was turned into an exhibition space for the history of the Jing’an Villas. The creation of this gallery space affirmed the growing interest in the neighborhood’s architecture heritage and an awareness of its cultural as well as economic value. When a Thai princess visited Shanghai in 2014, she was taken to see the galleries of this very room, filled with plans and sections and 260

other historic documents of the Jing’an Villas.99 The pride with which the neighborhood was showcased to the visitors, revealing an appreciation of Shanghai’s modern era legacies, contrasts to its accessibility to the locals. The exhibition hall, ironically, is little known to the general public.

Jing’an Villas’ Commercialization and Creative Enterprises Whether or not it coincided with the upgrading, many small entrepreneurs began opening shops in the mid-2010s in the Jing’an Villas. In early 2010, the District Planning Bureau issued a notice that the heritage architecture of Jing’an Villas would undergo ‘exchange [置换],’ as part of the programmatic upgrade of the West Nanjing Lu corridor. The visit of Yu Zhensheng [俞振声], Shanghai’s CCP Party Secretary, who served between 2007 and 2012, to Jing’an Villas, supported the speculation of an en-bloc relocation plan.100 Urban rumors of the impending commercial conversion of Jing’an Villas cast a web of uncertainty over the future of the lilong compound. Many of the small businesses seized the opportunity offered by the urban loophole of ambiguity. Within just the month of May in 2010, three stores had vernissages to celebrate their openings. Since the mid-2000s, small commerce establishments, ranging from milk tea sellers to painting studios, expanded into the ground floor spaces in the Jing’an Villas. Lao Wu, the owner of a café-cum-living room called Gezi Café, was dubbed by media pieces and by the young entrepreneurs in the lane as the grandee of the Jing’an Villas new economies.101 He moved into a ground floor unit with a small terrace in the summer of 2007. His café, initially a gathering place for friends, became a kind of public living room for the incoming creative types.102 Indeed, when the district-sponsored renovations finished in time for the visitors of the 2010 World Expo—largely Chinese tourists coming to Shanghai as China’s windows on the world—some dozen ‘cultural abodes 文化小屋]’ opened in the Jing’an Villas.103 (Fig. 15) A Taiwanese curator for a Taiwanese production company opened an art gallery. Local designers ran

phasized the leisurely pastime of ‘dropping in [窜门],’ a Chinese term for the kind of spontaneous visits to friends’ and relatives’ homes in local neighborhoods.104 Visitors and friends come and go to ‘play [玩],’ connoting a leisurely rite for rapport-building in communities. Once inside spaces such as the café Chabrol, anyone who habitually frequented such spaces would instantly be reminded of places in other international trendy quarters such as in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg or New York’s Williamsburg. With antique leather sofas and film posters of À bout de souffle and other obscure art house flicks, the space was started by a group of film buff friends. They sought a place where friends could gather to share their hobby of film watching. A joint venture between designers

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small boutiques selling unique wares they crafted. The small entrepreneurs converted the ground floor living rooms into galleries, boutiques, painting studios, crafts workshops, and cafés, tearooms and bars. Rather than retail spaces for efficient consumption of goods and services, these small entrepreneurs strived to create experiences of neighborliness in the ambiance of the red-bricked lilong houses. Many of them em-

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and bankers, the commercial success of the film café was less important than the ambiance of the space. As the first generation who no longer grew up under the shadows of a rigidly planned economy, the patrons and visitors could value a place like Jing’an Villas, where ‘accent [腔调],‘ a Shanghainese word that connoted everything from ‘atmosphere,’ ‘style,’ to ‘carriage,’ was more important to the small entrepreneurs than the profit-generating and quantitative measure of ‘consumer flow [人流].’105 Neighboring enterprises echo the laidback attitude to revenue turnovers. Some of the small entrepreneurs still had full-time jobs at multinationals like Nike and inter262

national ad agencies like Wieden+Kennedy.106 Others worked for extensive periods in multinationals and creative firms before taking the plunge to open up their own enterprises.107 Many of the small entrepreneurs returned from stints abroad. Some were locals, helped by their retired parents in the running of the spaces. Others have hired younger cohorts to man the studios while they were out in their other enterprises. The decision to start up, by the young creative entrepreneurs, came both from the desire to express individual design aspirations and from the interest to fill a market supply they themselves often felt was undersupplied by the existing choices. Connections and experiences forged and garnered in multicultural settings were complemented by the necessity of being able to negotiate with the local resident committees and street offices for real estate procurement and commercial approval. To many, “the goal of life is just different [生活的目的不一样]” from those in the rat race of urban living outside of Jing’an Villas’ seemingly self-organized enclave.108 Standardization and limited consumer choice had been the way of life under central planning for decades. In the first decade of economic liberalization, marketization brought the aspired global brands, embodied in the kinds of buildings that house these out-of-reach elite products just a few steps across from Jing’an Villas on West Nanjing Lu. As state enterprises collapsed and urban renewal sped ahead, privatization and housing marketization raised average living standards while everyone strove to keep up with the accompanying economic growth. In the second decade of economic liberalization, residents in coastal cities like Shanghai have settled into lives with growing disposable incomes. For the internet-savvy younger generation, as well as for the increasingly well-travelled older ones, the expansion of consumer choices is accompanied also by an emphasis on uniqueness of products and services. Children of the rising

the inner circles of the trendy parts of Shanghai, popup events and social media blitz hype up new samples of the latest products before the rollout of the next fad. A mention in passing by a well-followed ‘cultural youth [文艺青年]’ on Douban, a Chinese social-network service, is much better publicity than any normative means of advertising, because it bestowed on the mentioned product or event potent street credibility. As many design shops had web showrooms before their ability to offer physical showrooms, online publicity through channels such as Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, or Douban, easily link like-minded vanguards beyond place-based locality. Outside visitors who manage to find the grazing sites of these cultural youths were often those who have access to the selected networks of Japanese and European design magazines or were in the particular type of expat circles whose patronage of such areas emphasized the hidden factor. The under-the-radar feel of Jing’an Villas’s transformation, the young small entrepreneurs’ shirking of official designation, and their deliberate embedment deep inside a residential neighborhood, contrasted it to the broader accessibility of the development and publicity of authorized creative clusters.

Chapter 4 The Midtown of China

middle class prefer a more varied selection of goods that stands against generic mass production. In contrast to the initial warm welcome to the multinational brands that entered the Chinese consumer market en masse in the initial decade of the economic liberalization, the growing demand for distinctive products by more discerning consumers also reflects the desire for differentiation. Large conglomerates, lavishing on advertising campaigns to shape taste and entice spending on their products, find China’s coastal urban consumer no longer enamored with only big brands.109 Especially in

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Fig. 16 Map of the conversions in Jing’an Villas, as of 2012

In multiple interviews, the small entrepreneurs of Jing’an Villas described their products and services as “unique”, “different from the masses,” and “cultural.”110 They distinguished the services and goods they offered as being different from the mainstream brands, both high-end and low-end, that were peddled in the luxury malls and small shops in the surrounding streets. They especially emphasized that what they offered was unlike the products on offer in places like Tianzifang, the officially designated creative cluster that was often referred to as Jing’an Villas’ predecessor. The historic setting of the neighborhood added to the creative entrepreneurs’ desire for distinction from typical commercial enterprises. Ground floor units for commerce, as well upper-floor residences in the heritage-designated quartier, harbored ambiances which many of the young entrepreneurs preferred as the habitat for their own design productions. (Fig. 16) The ground floor spaces of Jing’an Villas’ lilong hous264

es, which were originally designed for use as rooms for welcoming visitors and as public spaces in the private home, have, since Shanghai’s demographic densification and housing shortage after Liberation, become multifunctional spaces that served as bedroom, living room, washroom, and even kitchen in one.111 For the houses that had been crammed with up to eight families, the return of these spaces, to their originally designed functions by the small entrepreneurs, seem at once nostalgic and forward-looking. In emphasizing the modern era ambiance of the lilong neighborhood, the small entrepreneurs seemed also to hark to the cosmopolitan cultural habits of domesticity formed before Liberation. At the same time, the revival of old cultural habits was taking form in new commercial spaces, their reuse responding to contemporary market demands. (Fig. 17) Stories abound of encounters with Jing’an Villas’ elderly neighbors, whose illustrious cosmopolitan pasts spoke to a sensibility that is closer to the current generation, both in their modernity and their international outlook. One elderly lady had addressed a small gathering of internationals at her neighbor’s café in fluent English, asking if they were holding a Christmas party, much to the youngsters’ surprise.112 These elderly coffee-drinking bourgeois residents remaining from Shanghai’s modern era were as much part of the patina of the modern era lilong neighborhood. If anything, the contemporary concoction of trendy Western-style habits seemed to pale against the living history of the elderly bourgeoisie and the younger urbanites could only try to emulate their modernity. Nicole, a young Taiwanese gallerist, who was smitten with the spaces of Jing’an Villas in 2010, proclaimed of the neighborhood, “this is the real Shanghai.”113 The projection of a cultural past onto an imagined Chinese modernity, represented by places like Jing’an Villas, holds a special relevance for the Chinese diaspora, including the Taiwanese, who often choose to settle back in Mainland, coming for both economically motivated and culturally inspired reasons.114 For the Shanghainese of the generation of Lao Wu, the quiet and character of Jing’an Villas was also a main draw.115 The small entrepreneurs cited the atmosphere of the built environment from the 1930s as what was suitable for the appreciation of his personally roasted coffee from different parts of the world. The historian Lu Hanchao wrote that the revival of coffee culture in the

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Fig. 17 Front of a house at Jing’an Villas, 2012

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Fig. 18 Entrances through the terraces of Jing’an Villas, featuring small entrepreneurial establishments, 2012

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Fig. 19 Local amenities in Jing’an Villas, rooted in the practicalities of everyday life for locals, 2012

context of economic liberalization, “is not just about coffee drinking per se, but about the city’s presumably Westernized culture as many Chinese understand it.” At Jing’an Villas, the coffee culture is indeed represented by the “children of reform (who) wish they had lived in their grandparents’ age.”116 Stories propagated by the popular media affirm and accentuate the cultural rejuvenation of Jing’an Villas by the young entrepreneurs, and highlight how the neighborhood projected an aura of continuity with the lineage of modern era cosmopolitan Shanghai. The network of small entrepreneurs compensated for the lack of a singular development group. The self-formulated affiliations between the cafés, boutiques, spas, and galleries created an urban ecology that thrived on the perpetuation of progressive resourcefulness and deliberate exclusivity. (Fig. 18) The exclusive and under-the-radar feel of the neighborhood that the small entrepreneurs cultivated at Jing’an Villas also has pragmatic reasons. The District made it increasingly difficult to formalize commercial conversions, and the small entrepreneurs preferred to operate informally. Signage advertising the small businesses appeared only when the ateliers, boutiques, and cafes were open. Although the small businesses existed often without the necessary commercial licensing that is obligatory for formalized enterprises, the small penalties, if any, seemed to be worth the low rent and flexibility of leases that being off-the-record afforded.117 With often irregular opening hours, the small businesses disappeared easily back into Jing’an Villas’ residential fabric. (Fig. 19) Walking down the main lane and not knowing that a particular gallery or designer showroom was located down a specific side lane, one could easily miss them. It was easy to mistake the neighborhood for any of the other increasingly scarce older residential quartiers that remain in Shanghai’s city center. The graduated privacy of the public space network,118 both in proximity to the bustle of commercial life at the periphery of the block but also preserving the quiet of the interior public spaces, was important both to the social success of the urban morphology and its reuse.119 The architecture type of the lilong houses also reinforced its residential potential, rather than pushing Jing’an Villas towards complete commercialization. Jing’an Villas’ new-style lilong houses were, in their design, suited to contemporary living and upgrades, contrasting with older types that required plumbing installation and parking accommodation.120 The modernity of Jing’an Villas’ architecture also meant that the 268

feasibility of their upgrades did not require commercialization, allowing them to more likely remain as residences. Thus, in Jing’an Villas, it was not only commercial conversion that was changing the quartier. Many of the small entrepreneurs also chose to live in the neighborhood for the same reasons that their businesses were started here. Loftlike spaces on the top floors and a staggered layout around the central stairway, characteristic of the lilong house, have made the buildings favored as residences. When population increases forced the subdivision of the lilong house, originally designed for one family, into multiple units shared by many families, the separation of the front and the back of each house on the ground floor allowed the upper floors to have a private entrance from the back, while the ground floor unit had the front entrance and terrace. (Fig. 20) With the exception of the intermediate floors, through which the residents of the upper floors had to pass in order to reach their units, the lilong houses in reality became individual and independent units. Private kitchens were also installed on the roof terraces. One young Shanghainese fashion designer with a showroom in Jing’an Villas, amongst other stores in the city center, lived in a second-floor rental in 2013.121 Her popularity in the neighborhood made her a default go-to person to be introduced to the network of the young entrepreneurs. Among those active in the scene—film screenings, pop-up events, catered dinner parties, and exhibitions—but who do not have their own store on the ground floor, were a Chinese-learning American musician and a self-taught landscape designer from Australia, who shared a rooftop flat.122 The convenience of the famous local noodle stall nearby, at the end of an adjacent side lane, and the cheap rent of

types who chose to settle in Jing’an Villas. Some of the residents also purchased the usage right of their units, including a young Chinese architect who had studied in Berlin and who is the principal of a successful award-winning architecture firm. Despite reservations about the long-term uncertainties of the investment, she renovated her third-floor unit in Jing’an Villas, knocking down walls and enclosing the roof terrace to convert it into an enclosed kitchen.123 Similarly, by token of its architecture type as well as its location, the lilong compound also did not need commercializaFig. 20 Back of the houses at Jing’an Villas, 2012

tion to save its physical existence. Jing’an

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publicly managed lilong houses, were key ingredients for the network of creative

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Villas had been listed as the site of municipal-level Excellent Historical Architecture since 1994. The bestowment of conservation status, though not always a guarantee for actual protection in China,124 shielded Jing’an Villas from the kind of overt demolition that took place in many other lilong neighborhoods. If anything, the figure of Jing’an Villas was the constant among changing proposals in all the plans proposed for the West Nanjing Lu developments since the early 1990s. The moving out of older and poorer residents and the incoming of younger and wealthier residents and entrepreneurs seemed to indicate the kind of gentrification much written about since the 1960s in North America and Europe. In reality, demographic shift has been a circumstantial resolution to the systemic inability to marketize housing in Shanghai’s historic city center areas under transition economy. The unique framework in Shanghai’s city center neighborhoods, where a large

Fig. 21 The residential demographic in the lilong remains local, 2012

percentage of properties that were not marketized then came under conservation jurisdiction, has preserved the semblance of public housing in the center of some of the most valuable real estate in the city and maintained the dual housing market. In Jing’an Villas, just like in many other similar lilong neighborhoods, ‘ownership-right houses [产权房]’ sold for 60,000 R MB per square meter, equivalent to more than 10,000 USD in 2010.125 Because of legacy conditions and the fragmentation of each house, most of the units in Jing’an Villas remain publicly manag ed. Rent-free units that were allotted by the former danwei work units still nestle amongst renovated historic houses selling for millions of US dollars. Under the existing circumstances, the persistence of uncertainty as to the future of ownership rights of these structures has also made their conversion lucrative. Willing and able sub-letters could use the earnings from renting out their old cramped quarters to afford newer housing with more privacy and amenities, while sub-lettees in turn could get the chance to start a new business without having to fork out the exorbitant rents in the marketized properties of prime locations. With the growing renown of Jing’an Villas, even the older residents caught on to the market demand for commercial conversion. (Fig. 21) On seeing the neighborhood changes, an occupant at number 31 renovated her room to turn it into a gallery in 2011.126 Other businesses also blossomed in the neighborhood since the 2000s. When many of the office towers and shopping centers in the surrounding neighborhood were finished in the late 1990s, the influx of office workers was also accompanied by a boom of lunch services, not only in the official restaurants along Nanjing Lu already in place, but in the food streets like Wujiang Lu, where fast, tasty, and affordable options competed with each other in the pull for the midday white-collar diners. In the mid-2000s, 270

as more expats and white-collar workers flooded the demand side of the market, and with a limited variety of meal options, places catering to more global tastes quickly opened.127 In 2006, Denny House Milk Tea opened in the ground floor room of a house one number down from the main lane. Its Chinese name being ‘Silk Stockings Milk Tea [丝袜奶茶],’ it was not the first instance of retirees trying their hand at business. A series of small bubble tea places in the rooms just adjacent to the main lane opened in the following year. The trend for milk tea itself sits between the traditional tea-drinking culture of the older generation and the pick-up-and-go contemporary youth culture, imported from nearby Taiwan.128 Unlike the passive attitudes towards profit and patronage that the young creative entrepreneurs conveyed, these small businesses opened by older local entrepreneurs clearly cared about customer flow. To the younger creative entrepreneurs, existing alongside these small businesses opened by older local entrepreneurs also made their own new-fangled enterprises more “real.”129 At the same time, there lingered a simultaneous fear of the impact of impending commercialization.130 Not only did price hikes in rent endanger all the small businesses, but many worried commercialization would drive out the old res-

district-implemented upgrade, suggesting a possibility of commercialization. Despite their professed nonchalance towards commercial profit, the institutional framework of public ownership and low rents had in effect subsidized their small businesses. The small creative entrepreneurs’ choice to remain informal within the still largely residential Jing’an Villas fed the image of exclusivity, while ensuring flexibility. At the same time, the endogenous clustering of creative entrepreneurs and the self-organizing network seemed to suggest an alternative and more socio-economically diverse model for commercial conversions in residential neighborhoods.

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idents and the old businesses that had given identity to the neighborhood. Ma Liang [马良], an artist who grew up in the neighborhood and came back to open his studio in the adjacent Weihai Lu 696 art warehouse, feared an impending erosion of the local identity in the neighborhood where he grew up.131 This wariness of rapid commercialization by the small entrepreneurs themselves seemed to be a fundamental irony of the neighborhood’s upgrade. Anxiety about possible over-commercialization in Jing’an Villas, from the 30–70 ratio of commerce to residence, to the 70–30 ratio in places like Tianzifang, defined the mind set of the young entrepreneurs.132 Ever ready to move and find new locales, the young small entrepreneurs were prepared for the everyday effects of ad-hoc policies as part of doing business in rapidly transforming Shanghai. From state-backed promotion of a residential quartier’s conversion into a creative commercial area, such as in Tianzifang, or short-notice functional change and closure, as exemplified most recently by the shut-down of the neighboring Weihai Lu 696, the discretionary implementations have had unpredictable outcomes on different kinds of creative developments. In Jing’an Villas, the small entrepreneurs saw potential for reusing the historic architecture to accommodate a growing demand for products and services of the creative economy. They exploited the urban loophole of ambiguity, especially after the

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The Precedent of Tianzifang for Commercialization A case often cited as the precursor for the developments at Jing’an Villas in the early 2010s is the development of another lilong neighborhood called Tianzifang in the early 2000s.133 In the lead-up to its shutdown, both sides of Jing’an Villas’ conflict used Tianzifang’s developments to extol and condemn the developments in Jing’an Villas. An online attack of Jing’an Villas entitled “Jing’an Villas is not Tianzifang,”134 first triggered a continued debate about the implications of commercialization, heritage conservation, and creative incubation in the transformation of the lilong compound itself. Thus, a more thorough account of Tianzifang is offered here. Tianzifang, like Jing’an Villas, was a residential neighborhood. Partial commercialization and low rents that followed an initial round of top-down reuse and upgrade measures attracted young start-ups to Tianzifang. Within a few years of the first transformations, Tianzifang became known as a commercially successful case of bottom-up reuse in Shanghai. Along with the projects of Bridge 8 and M 50, Tianzifang was also responsible, from the mid-2000s, for the municipality’s interest in, and development of, the creative industries clusters as reuse projects.135 Together with Xintiandi, it was exemplary for informing the ensuing developments in the commercial potential of historic houses, although the scale of Tianzifang’s bottom-up success, in contrast to Xintiandi’s top-down one, has not yet been surpassed. As a prominent early example for the reuse of a residential block, Tianzifang remains one of the most popular creative clusters and has since the mid-2000s become overwhelmed by commerce, with growing rents driving out the small creative entrepreneurs who originally made it famous. There are many characteristics in the transformation of Tianzifang and Jing’an Villas that have made them comparable for the popular media, especially in the lead-up to Jing’an Villas’ shutdown. Both are considered bottom-up developments initiated by small entrepreneurs. Because their developments were not executed under one development group, the incremental transformations were notable for their endogenous process. Both developments took place in historic neighborhoods, where residential architecture was reused for commerce. They are both cited as examples and counterexamples of heritage conservation. The commercialization of residential neighborhoods both leads to shifts from old residents to new entrepreneurs, from old entrepreneurs to new entrepreneurs, and from old residents to new residents. The socio-economic shift and the nuanced relationships between different stakeholders underline the gentrification discourse. The degree of commercialization in relation to remaining residential functions in the two developments also speaks to the differing phase of development. Finally, the relationships of the developments to the local state are important in how Tianzifang and Jing’an Villas converge and diverge finally. The following interlude that describes the process of development for Tianzifang is important in understanding the comparisons made with subsequent developments, like that of Jing’an Villas. Unlike the abundance of documentation for Xintiandi’s development, the lack of a complete account of Tianzifang’s development is also a reason for its inclusion here. Although there is frequent mention of Tianzifang’s transforma272

tion in existing literature about the city center changes in Shanghai,136 surprisingly little could be found on the agents and processes of its transformation. Its inclusion in existing case comparisons for creative development137 as well as for urban historic architecture reuse138 nevertheless has precluded a full version of its development from being clarified. The lessons learned from the development of Tianzifang still offer valuable input for ensuing projects. The Street Office’s Initiative and the Threat of Demolition Located in an area on the southern periphery of the French Concession and bordering a former slum area around the now-covered canal Zhaojiabang [肇嘉浜], Tianzifang was a residential neighborhood built in the 1930s, consisting of several different lilong compounds that were interconnected and located north of the east-west running Taikang Lu [泰康路]. Administrative restructuring in 1996 changed the administrative boundaries of the Luwan District where the neighborhood was situated. The newly created Dapuqiao Street Office [打浦橋街道] appointed a new director, Zheng Rongfa [郑荣发], an ambitious local bureaucrat who had done a stint at the District’s Ministries of Culture and Publicity. Dapuqiao was one of the poorer sub-districts of Luwan, especially in comparison to the commercially oriented and culturally rich northern part of the district that is closer to the commercial Huaihai Lu [淮海路]. The economic circumstances of Dapuqiao and Tianzifang motivated Director Zheng to rethink the development of his jurisdiction. Initial thoughts were for developing a culturally oriented barbell-shaped area along the newly widened east-west thoroughfare of Xujiahui Lu. However, a collegue who had knowledge and involvement in real estate and Huaihai Lu’s upgrade redirected Director Zheng to focus on the areas around smaller neighborhood-scale streets, rather than around the high-traffic Xujiahui Lu. Director Zheng’s first move was the cleanup of the wet-market street of Taikang Lu. This opportunely followed on the heels of the nationally promoted and municipally subsidized ‘Shopping Basket Project [菜篮子工程]’ which incentivized urban upgrades around market streets.139 Because the local sub-districts had gained financial autonomy during the 1980s restructuring, Director Zheng could fund his initiative.140 At the time, administrative restructuring gave more fiscal autonomy to the officials at the Street Office level. In order to promote local development, the municipality also refunded business taxes to the registered businesses within its jurisdiction.141 Having consolidated the market into an abandoned neighborhood industrial building on the block, Director Zheng was ready for the next step. In 1998, Wu Meiseng Canada, approached Director Zheng.142 His connection to well-known contemporary artists like Chen Yifei [陈逸飞] and Er Dongqiang [尔冬强] helped bring them in as the first tenants to the disused former industry buildings in the Taikang Lu neighborhood. It was at his urging that neighborhood would develop creative industries, a term that at the time of the transformation still had little cachet. The block north of Taikang Lu, like other areas at the edge of the former Concessions, had numerous neighborhood industries set within the residential neighborhood.143 In the 1950s, nationalization had consolidated the privately owned enterprises and had also expanded production from the low-rise buildings into newer slab buildings. Local residents worked in proximity to their residences, in a configuration that is similar to

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[吳梅森], a well-known entrepreneur who had returned from half a decade’s stay in

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the work-unit layout for more newly designed areas, where work and living were side by side.144 By the 1990s, the state-owned production units that remained were Haihua Tannery [海华制革厂第二厂], Kangfu Textiles [康福织造厂], Yongming Bottletop Factory [永明瓶盖厂], Jianchen Fragrance Factory [鉴臣香精二厂], Shanghai Food Processing Machinery Factory [上海食品工业机械厂], and Shanghai Watch Accessory Factory [上海钟表塑料配件厂]. They consisted of six buildings in Lane 210 off Taikang Lu. When economic liberalization accelerated in the mid-1990s, the neighborhood factories on Taikang Lu also closed.145 Wu Meiseng’s enterprises, under the aegis of the Street Office, took the opportunity to sign contracts for long-term leases of the factory premises from the former SOE s. The first artist to move in to the factory building was the painter Chen Yifei, who had spent more than a decade in New York City before returning to Shanghai in 1992. He immediately took to the abandoned industrial spaces and commented that it reminded him of Soho, an area in New York City well known for the artists’ reuse of former industrial spaces that had in turn helped rejuvenate the neighborhood.146 Other artists followed, including the photographer Er Dongqiang in 1997. In 1999, the Taikang Lu Art Street Administrative Committee [泰康路艺术街管理 委员会] was set up to oversee the leases, tenancy, and business development of the former SOE buildings in the block north of Taikang Lu. In addition to moving into a compound of studios set up in defunct manufacturing buildings, Chen and his colleagues, with expertise learned from time abroad, were asked to help curate the selection of commercial bids to enter the block. With the justification of supporting cultural conversion, Director Zheng was able to convince the district authorities and the municipality to support renovations in mid-2001. In 2001, the municipal Ministry of Housing and Land Resources Administration announced that Taikang Lu’s Block 55, which included the artist-occupied factories where upgrade efforts had been implemented, had been designated as part of an urban renewal site.147 Development plans showed that the blocks north and south of Taikang Lu, including Block 55, were slated for demolition and redevelopment. Municipal master plans also showed the future plans for the area, with three-dimensional models of the redevelopment inserted in the City Planning Exhibition, where it was visible to the visiting public.148 Even though the municipality had announced the impending demolition and redevelopment of the Taikang Lu neighborhood, the Street Office-led upgrade continued and seemed to take on even more importance. In 2002, the artist Huang Yongyu [黄永玉] renamed the main north-south running lane, where many art and graphics studios had located, “Tianzifang,” after China’s first artist in historical records.149 The installation of the new inscription at the entrance of the lane officially marked it as the realization of the local government’s cultural aspiration. With persistent rumors of impending renewal, both Director Zheng and Wu reached out to important cultural figures in their battle against demolition and redevelopment. Seizing the Opportunity and Bottom-Up Conversions In 2003, the Luwan District government signed the contract for the land lease of Block 55 to a Taiwanese development group.150 Residents, responding to the uncertainty of the imminent demolition and displacement process, also began to sublease their exist274

ing units while awaiting the impending compensation process. Claiming to be the first to rent out his ground floor space was Zhou Xinliang [周心良], one of the middle-aged ‘educated youth [知青]’ returnees, who had been sent to Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution as part of the compulsory ‘up the mountain down to the countryside [上山下乡]’ movement for urban youths of the wrong class.151 Like many other educated youths who managed to return to their rapidly developing hometowns under the welcome-home policies, he neither fit into the collapsing state-planned economic system of job allotments nor into the blossoming new economies. He subsisted on a monthly welfare stipend of 300 R MB a month as compensation for his original displacement.152 In November 2004, he rented out his ground floor unit of 32 square meters to a young fashion designer for a two-year lease of 4,000 R MB per month and moved into an upstairs unit that had been empty, paying 1,000 R MB per month. In addition to receiving a salary of 1,500 R MB for manning the fashion designer’s shop, he received a rental income of 5,000 R MB .153 It was the first exchange of this kind in the densely populated residential neighborhood. Quickly, other residents also followed suit and profited from the potential commercial use of their existing living spaces. As the demand for commercial space in proximity to the now well-known artists’ cluster in the adjacent industrial buildings grew, Zhou also quickly became active as a fee-free agent to introduce in-coming entrepreneurs to possible locales in the neighborhood. With more enterprises in the lane, the businesses collectively benefited from the increased foot traffic. Zhou explained that it was in his self-interest to help the clustering of small enterprises: the creation of a critical mass would help people like him become entrepreneurs in a way that he had never imagined before.154 As more residents rented out their ground floor units to in-coming commerce, they set up a self-governing body, the Tianzifang Shikumen Proprietors Administrative Committee [田子坊石库门业主管理委员会], electing Zhou as their director. In addition to monitoring the kinds of renters that entered the neighborhood, the Committee was able to collect 20,000 R MB to repair the paving in the lane.155 It is noticeable that the pattern for the paving, made of square grey bricks, is different from the long and narrow ones put down by the Street-Office-backed Taikang Lu Art Street Administrative Committee. The self-governing body saw the assistance they provided, helping the resi-

rector Zheng and by Wu also reached important ears. Petitions by prominent artists protested against the demolition of Block 55. Prominent architecture historians and conservation proponents, such as Ruan Yisan [阮仪三] from Tongji University, also argued for the preservation of Shanghai’s heritage as exemplified by Tianzifang. Engagement of influential municipal economists, like Li Wuwei [厉无畏] of the municipal Economic Council gave additional support to promoting Tianzifang’s importance for Shanghai’s creative industries development. American economist Richard Florida’s 2001 book, which related the creative class to the economic transition to post-industrial knowledge-based advanced capitalist urban economy, resonated well with the econ-

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dents rent out of their ground floor units to commerce, as benefiting the community. The Committee viewed itself as representing the interests of the residents in the face of inevitable commercial development. The transformation of the neighborhood was promoted as bottom-up. While the residential neighborhood was rapidly transforming through these endogenous processes, the publicity outreach by the well-networked Street Office Di-

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omists of Shanghai.156 Shanghai’s economists and bureaucrats continued discussing the municipality’s ongoing economic transition, in which the concept of a creative industries cluster, as the aspired knowledge economy’s spatial manifestation, quickly caught on. In April 2005, Tianzifang was part of the first batch of the officially recognized Creative Industries Clusters by the Shanghai Creative Industries Center (SCIC) [上海创意产业中心], created in November 2004 by the Economic Council.157 Tianzifang’s inclusion as a municipality-recognized Creative Industries Cluster signaled the development’s significant contribution to the city’s economic development. In 2005, the Shanghai Taikang Lu Historic Style Protection and Use Plan [上海市泰康路历史风貌保护 与利用规划 ], compiled by experts at the request of the Street Office, was also endorsed by preservation experts.158 The inclusion of Tianzifang in the conservation plan indicated that its historic architecture was valued as part of the city’s cultural heritage. The validation by the double bestowments of heritage protection and creative incubation encouraged and accelerated small-scale private commercial conversion. Gao Yang [高扬], another overseas Chinese returnee who grew up in an old lilong house that had belonged to his grandfather, Wang Yachen [汪亚尘], a famous painter in modern era Shanghai, joined in the developments. Returning after more than two decades in the US , Gao initially sold his family property and bought a unit nearby in a new building on the more upscale Sinan Lu in 2004. Daily shortcuts through the lanes of Tianzi­ fang, en route to the gym, alerted him to the commercial potential of Block 55. More importantly, Gao saw rising demand in the mid-2000s in the influx of expats to Shanghai. Starting with one space that he rented out to a cashmere designer, who catered to many expat visitors as well as local customers, he eventually came to manage some 40 rental properties in the lanes of Tianzifang.159 Many other small entrepreneurs who saw the growing market quickly followed suit. Development was incremental due to limited initial investment. The returns from each developed unit in turn paid for the ensuing investment for upgrade. The individual-to-individual negotiation process for each upgrade at Tianzifang allowed both the incumbent residents and the incoming entrepreneurs to reach mutually satisfactory deals. As Wu revealed in 2006, even the 200,000 R MB initial investment for the Street Office-backed upgrades was incremental: it came from the deposits paid by the renters in the SOE properties.160 Because the Street Office initiated the upgrades, it was interested in improving the quality of the neighborhood’s environment, rather than only gaining immediate financial returns. Compared to the private sector investments, which would prioritize profitability, the local-state-sponsored projects had to perform both in terms of profitability and imageability. This emphasis on a longer-term strategy contrasted with redevelopment projects, where professional developers expected a rapid return on investment. A neighboring redevelopment and industrial reuse project invested in by Hong Kong developers charged 6 R MB per square meter per day for commercial rentals.161 In contrast, with a view toward long-term development, the Street Office was willing to maintain low rental rates of 1.50 to 2.50 R MB per square meter per day at Tianzifang.162 Compared to the prevalent mode of en-bloc developments in 1990s Shanghai, where one developer with enough investment capital pushed out all the residents to demolish a large area and redevelop at a much higher density as quickly as possible, the reuse model over a longer timespan was accommodating to existing occupants 276

Fig. 22 Enterprises in Tianzifang, 2012

ment. By incrementally developing selective commerce also, and providing spaces for artistic production, the transformations turned the neighborhood into an example of a successful creative cluster. Municipal Recognition of Tianzifang It was in the Municipal Planning Bureau in 2006 that the importance of the Tianzifang block as a precedent for ensuing developments was made clear. A key author for the municipality’s heritage conservation policies and a rising star of the Municipal Planning Bureau, Wang Lin, revealed in an interview that, following the multi-party ne-

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and in-coming entrepreneurs. It is an alternative that nevertheless still capitalized on the existing structures. (Fig. 22) The ‘soft conversions [软改造]’ of Tianzifang not only seemed to sidestep growing criticism of the brutality of forced residential displace-

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gotiations between the developer, the district, and municipal authorities, Tianzifang was the first site to use the ‘transferable air rights’ concept as a planning instrument in China.163 ‘Air right’ is a type of development right, referring to the volume of empty space above a property that has potential to be developed at a higher density. Air right belongs to the owner of the land, above which the volume exists. When the air right becomes transferable, it allows an exchange to happen between the owner of the land, above which the air right exists, with others. Those others who become the recipient of the air right can use the unfulfilled density of the original plot, from which the air right originates, in another plot, to exceed the maximum allowable development density of this second plot.164 High-density metropolises like New York have innovated the transferable air rights concept, where “it had been introduced for the sake of preservationists’ requirements—sites occupied by buildings worthy of historic preservation but with lower levels of utilization were to have been relieved of economic pressure in order to safeguard them from profit-oriented redevelopment.”165 Even though, at the time, the notion of preservation of a neighborhood such as Tianzifang had not occurred to the parties involved, it was at Wang’s suggestion that the concept of transferable air rights was considered. Transferable air rights would offer the District, as manager of the block, the financial incentive for not demolishing the neighborhood on the north side of Taikang Lu, which included Tianzifang. It also would offer the developer the same development volume that the developer had paid for. In December 2006, nevertheless, public notices were still posted announcing the impending demolition. After multiple negotiations, resistance from the residents, the Street Office, and its influential allies, the Taiwanese developer’s acquisition of the northern block was halted. The developer was able to pay for the air rights of Tianzifang. In return, it received permission to build at twice the density as previously allotted on the block to the south of Taikang Lu.166 In the process, however, Director Zheng was demoted from his post at the Street Office by the District and transferred to another post.167 His vocal advocacy for the protection of the entire block, rather than only of the former factory buildings that he helped make well known as Tianzifang, challenged the Luwan District’s political hierarchy.168 From the experience, the Municipal Planning Bureau also saw its increasingly important role as an arbiter for the different private and public interests, rather than only as an executor of development.169 With commercial and social success of reuse of lowrise structures, the Municipal Planning Bureau also saw the bottom-up problem-solving by the residents and stakeholders as necessary to upgrade by way of marketization. Reciprocal bottom-up and top-down efforts yield mutual benefits to the different public and private stakeholders.170 Moreover, given the time frame for project developments and the calculation of investment versus return, planning serves to mediate the long-term gains to meet short-term market demands. Even though Wang admitted that the circumstances for the Tianzifang project were unique, and its context in an open-minded and forward-looking Shanghai even more so, “Tianzifang is a chance and example that this kind of development is possible in China.”171 The Municipal Planning Bureau issued the Luwan District Taikang Lu Tianzifang Detailed Development Control Plan [卢湾区泰康路田子坊控制性详细规划调整 ], developed from 2007 to 2008. In 2008, the Municipal Planning Bureau included the area inside the block north of Taikang Lu, including both the lilongs as well as the factory buildings as 278

part of the municipal-level Historic Cultural Fengmao Conservation District. The block could no longer be demolished without formal permission from a municipal-level review commission. The block has been saved, at least for the foreseeable future. With uncertainty of demolition eliminated, conversions of residential to commercial accelerated in 2007. Rentals also grew along with demand. In 2004, a 32-squaremeter unit had cost 4,000 R MB a month. By 2007 it was already 8,000 R MB .172 Local stakeholders were concerned with attracting investment to upgrade, and offering cheap rents to attract creative enterprises. High vacancy rates resulted from rents that were too high, especially for the wrong kind of business that could not survive.173 The frictions between the two governing bodies, the state-controlled Taikang Lu Art Street Administrative Committee and the community-organized Shikumen Proprietors Administrative Committee, however, flared when the common foe of demolition-based development was defeated. The Art Street Administrative Committee saw the self-organized efforts of the residents in the ‘conversion of residential to non-residential use [居改非]’ as illegitimate. The resident-landlords of the Shikumen Proprietors Administrative Committee were keen on state sanction, so that the businesses that rented the ground floor units could acquire commercial licensing, undergo taxation, and become legally recognized.174 The District Retakes Control In March 2008, the Luwan District government established the Tianzifang Management Committee [田子坊管委会], formally recognizing the reality of residential-to-commercial conversions, taking control of the block’s developments. The directorship of the Committee was assigned to the Deputy Mayor of the Luwan District, and the deputy directors came from other important posts at the district level, including those

Wu Meiseng, to keep the long-term leases, for the 10 or 20 years that he had signed with the SOE s, with the exception of two of the buildings. The District would take over these two buildings under its own management firm and the two buildings would be leased out directly for one- to three-year terms, with annual rent increases of 5–10 %.178 Since Tianzifang’s inception, the majority of creative productions had been located in the five-story former manufacturing block on the eastern edge of the block, predominantly with architecture, graphic design, and advertising offices. The residential area that incrementally converted to commercial use, served initially as a catchment area to the creative hub, but soon took on a life of its own. The range of gastronomical hubs cater to a Westernizing taste, with Thai, Japanese, and Western restaurants, cafés, and bars. Retail stores sell goods popular with visitors such as antiques and Mao-era souvenirs, targeting expats and tourists. Even though a dashing new mall, the ASE Center [日月光中心], rose across the road, the tourists continued to flock to Tianzifang’s narrow

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from the District Development and Reform Committee.175 The district followed with 10 million R MB in support for the infrastructural upgrade of the residential buildings. By year’s end, the municipality changed the official land use for the block from residential land use [居民用地] to mixed land use [综合用地], through the issuing of a special annually reviewed permit for the conversion.176 With this land use conversion, small entrepreneurs could apply for commercial licenses and renters would have to pay 2.5 % tax on rental profit.177 The District allowed the real estate management company, the Tianzifang Investment Consultancy Limited [田子坊投资咨询有限公司] belonging to

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lanes and old shikumen lilong architecture, basking in its ambiance of old Shanghai. At the end of 2009, when the Dapuqiao stop for subway Line 9 opened under the ASE Center, in time for the 2010 World Expo, it conveniently brought even more visitors to the booming area. In 2010, the Municipal Tourism Bureau listed Tianzifang, which welcomed more than 6,000 visitors daily, as a Triple-A Travel destination.179 Its presence in Shanghai’s official art map additionally marked it as an important stop for cultural tourists. During the 2010 World Expo itself, Tianzifang was also named as an exemplary ’Expo Off-Site Urban Theme Realization Area [世博园外的城市主题实践区].’180 Residents who still occupied upstairs units, mostly elderly people who had no interest in benefiting from the commodification of their former dwellings and who preferred the easily accessible location of the city center, complained about the transformations to their neighborhood, even though it was the commercial success that preserved the lilong from demolition. Nevertheless, across Taikang Lu, demolition and displacement were underway in 2008, showing a remarkably different outcome for the community only one street away.181 Even though Tianzifang’s incremental development had resulted in the outward appearance of social diversity and cohesion, conflict between residents and commerce persisted. Businesses that opened noisily late into the night could not avoid disturbing their neighboring residents, especially in the confines of the dense lilong. With the formalization of commercialization in 2008, building management fees rose to 400 R MB per month from the residential norm of 20 R MB per month.182 With annual tax revenues for the Tianzifang block at 300,000 to 400,000 R MB , it had long recouped the 18 million R MB that the Luwan District invested for the area’s upgrade. Rising commercial rents were also exaggerated, with claims that they exceeded even the Jing’an District’s Golden Triangle of high-rise office towers.183 In 2009 the Luwan District also reacted to residents’ complaints and no longer permitted subletting to F & B enterprises in the block to alleviate further conflicts.184 In 2012, almost 70 % of the units of the total 671 in the designated Tianzifang area were rented out as commercial. The remaining units were equally divided between the original residents and subleasing tenants.185 Throughout the development process of the Tianzifang area, a diversity of agents were responsible for shaping its current state: a local government bureaucrat initiated the transformation of the area; state-allied entrepreneurs executed the initial conversions and reuse of former institutional real estate; small entrepreneurs saw and capitalized on the commercial potential in the residential buildings; a planning bureaucrat whose negotiations and concept of air right transfer secured Tianzifang for conservation.186 Although the citizens organized the Shikumen Proprietors Administrative Committee, it was finally the state-controlled Tianzifang Management Committee that took over management of the area. In taking back its oversight authority, the local state also reaped the benefits from the area’s continued commercialization. The business success of Tianzifang as a neighborhood could thus be attributed to the commercial interests of the local state. Often represented as a successful case of bottom-up entrepreneurism—it is important to note that though bottom-up agents did play a role, the initiation, development, and current existence of Tianzifang was and is finally contingent on the state’s consent. The financial success of Tianzifang and the unanticipated tourist draw to the old neighborhood alerted the state authorities to the image-making capacity of the project. 280

To the public sector and private entrepreneurs, Tianzifang harnessed the economic potential of a historic neighborhood as a cultural draw both for visitors and locals. To the small entrepreneurs, the degree of mass commercialization that Tianzifang experienced, endangered the kinds of boutique enterprises that they saw as their unique forte. They would have preferred the commercial spaces to be interspersed amongst residences, which would have made the visits to their enterprises more unique and authentic. In Jing’an Villas, like at Tianzifang, risk-taking small entrepreneurs exploited the urban loopholes of ambiguity and uncertainty under economic transition. Similarly, commercial conversion incrementally transformed the historic residential buildings. In a different district and at a later moment in time, the Jing’an Villas debacle would also be distinguised from that of Tianzifang in showing the limits of the urban loophole and the evolving adaptive governance of the state.

The Public Relations Wars and the Differing Visions of Jing’an Villas’ Future At the end of November 2010, the newspaper Youth Daily [青年报 ] reported on the complaints of residents against the small businesses of Jing’an Villas.187 Entitled “Jing’an Villas, Covered with Cooking Grease,” the article reacted to and concurred with a long diatribe entitled “Jing’an Villas is not Tianzifang!” In the piece, a man using the alias ‘Roger’ attacked the influx of small businesses to Jing’an Villas and lamented the commercialization of Tianzifang as a violation of the unalienable rights of the original, local, and valuable residents.188 The targets of the attacks were the small businesses that opened late into the night, infringing on the orderly living habits of their assiduous neighbors. The condemnations extended to the polluted practices of the restaurants. The article pointed out that the bars, restaurants, and even the opening of a dance hall—next to the Neighborhood Committee, no less—and the impudence of the in-comers brought the residents to a point of no choice.189 Beyond the disorder-

and small shops was confiscated. The District Administration for Housing also issued notices for reorganization, requiring that residential units not be used for other uses, reacting to the Youth Daily article’s elaboration of dangerous practices, such as unlicensed dentists endangering the lives of unknowing victims.191 In the days following the crackdown, a series of articles came out contending the opposite. In contrast to the Youth Daily, a known mouthpiece of the Communist Youth League located in the Jing’an District, articles from more liberal media cast the small creative entrepreneurs as quiet and cultural types, who were fastidious and victimized by a small number of belligerent and jealous neighbors.192 These counter articles

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liness wrought on the historic neighborhood by the in-comers, the rising rents driven by commercial growth was also a source of resentment. To top it off, according to the article, only three of the shops had official licensing. The rest, more than 80, were unregistered and illegal.190 The day after the article was published, the usual rotation of inspections by the District Administration for Industry and Commerce intensified. Signage from cafés

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reported how, during the state-led raids, some of the small shops managed to close with the help of warnings by neighbors, evading official capture, while others were lucky to stay out of unwelcome limelight, also with the help of the local community.193 The sympathetic portrayals of the startups were complemented by praises for the small creative entrepreneurs’ revival of Shanghai’s past cosmopolitan savviness and their activism in engaging the local identity. The small entrepreneurs interviewed agreed with the assertion that they too, did not wish Jing’an Villas to become Tianzifang.194 They claimed that it was they who had suffered the rent increases as they tried to balance starting a small business with doing something that they liked.195 As to the accusation that they lacked business licenses, the small entrepreneurs retorted that the Commerce and Industry Bureau had always practiced the art of “one eye open and one eye closed [睁一眼闭一眼].”196 It is well known that small commerce starting out usually lacks the legal paperwork necessary for commercial licensing. For both the local state bureaucracy and the small enterprise, this grey zone between formality and informality was the norm rather than the exception. The responses of Jing’an Villas’ small entrepreneurs thus were nothing extraordinary. The only certainty that they saw was that the “the government is certain to intervene, and the real estate prices will continue to rise.”197 If nothing more, the statements confirmed the small entrepreneurs’ acceptance of their transitory role in the neighborhood. The District government, just prior to the Jing’an Villas crackdowns, had urgent matters at hand that required a public relations diversion. In November 2010, a fire had broken out in a 28-story apartment tower under renovation on Jiaozhou Lu [胶州路], causing the death of 58 and leaving 71 people injured. The residential tower was undergoing an upgrade by District-affiliated construction firms, which had won their contracts through a bidding process. Investigations, however, revealed that the welders were working without licenses and the insulation materials were also not officially approved. This led to implications of collusion between the District-owned contractors and authorities. That the residents of the destroyed apartment building were teachers and other public servants made them influential figures in the follow-up.198 The damage from the incident, beyond the financial loss of 158 million R MB , was the tarnished reputation of the Jing’an District leadership in the Shanghai political arena. The incident even attracted the attention of Western media, which cited the fire as a case for corruption as obstacle to China’s development.199 With a reshuffling of the District leadership as a result of the fire,200 a period of calm seemed to resume. Debates continued on the balance between commerce and culture in the future of historic neighborhoods,201 with articles continuing to speculate as to the appropriate future for places like Jing’an Villas.202 In the meanwhile, the renown of the lilong seemed to have only grown, with even the American news outlet CNN reporting, “Is Jing’an Villa the new Tianzifang?”203 Early in 2011, announcements were made on the eviction of artists from a large warehouse compound at Weihai Lu 696. The compound, centered on a Concession-era building that had been converted into the Shanghai Components Factory Number Five [上海元件五厂]. The factory had been the first and one of the most important semi-conductor production sites in China under the planned economy.204 Over the decades, slab buildings had in-filled the compound and additional floors were added to the origi282

Fig. 23 Weihai Lu 696, 2014

ists who sought cheap rents, large spaces, and were willing and even happy to be in buildings that were industrial-scale and unpolished. One of the first tenants, a young photographer who grew up in the neighborhood moved in in the fall of 2006. Others quickly followed. The compound rapidly became a vibrant place of artist gatherings, exhibitions, and other events.205 Galleries opened next to painting studios and fashion designer ateliers. There was a spillover effect on neighboring Jing’an Villas, as the network of creatives expanded also into the lilong. In October 2010, artists in Weihai Lu 696 reported, in an article entitled “Gentrification in Shanghai,” that development plans seemed to be underway, with investors visiting their art factory.206 Soon, the international occupants of Weihai Lu 696 helped broadcast its impending closure. The Wall Street Journal published an article “Whither 696 Weihai Lu?”207 With a final farewell bash to celebrate the brief existence of one of the last affordable art spaces left in the city center, Weihai Lu 696 closed in May 2011. (Fig. 23) At the same time, in the plot just east of Jing’an Villas, demolition of the adjacent lilong neighborhood continued in preparation for the proposed station of subway Line 12. The District continued to announce its bureaucratic transparency with regard to the relocation of residents in the newest renewal projects.208 In November 2011, the District again sent its officers from the Administration for Industry and Commerce on a spontaneous sweep to catch un-licensed commerce operating in Jing’an Villas. The closure of Denny House Milk Tea and the carting off of one its employees would be the grim consequence of this round of crackdowns.209 The issued arguments remained the same. Jing’an Villas’ heritage status as Excellent Historic Architecture came to the fore in the demand for respect for the buildings. Simply put, the argument went, “the act of ‘break the wall and open the shop’ is not good for the

Chapter 4 The Midtown of China

nal building, which was rumored to have once been an opium warehouse. Since 2006, when the compound’s management changed hands, it was sub-leased to young art-

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overall fengmao conservation of the neighborhood [破墙开店对于小区整体风貌的保护 非常不利].”210 Condemnations of the unsanctioned ‘conversion of residential to non-residential use’ was framed around the importance of the existing residents. With each round of warnings issued by the District and accompanying inspections, the clamor for the dismantling of commercial spaces seemed to remain just that, a clamor. The District seemed increasingly organized with each drill, bringing back, under the umbrella of the Administration of Industry and Commerce, the Departments of Food and Drugs, Real Estate Management, Environment, Hygiene, and Urban Management.211 As the small commerce returned after each event, the official decrees were becoming largely obligatory rehearsals that managed to dismantle signage and chase out a few token enterprises. Even the threat of the fine of 50,000 R MB seemed toothless, as more and more publications advertised the charms of Jing’an Villas.212 The stance taken by the Neighborhood Committee deliberately avoided the issues, even affirming that those already issued licenses were making the lives of the residents better. The fine line between businesses that were considered intrusive and those that were considered neighborhood amenities would be an issue to be grappled with, in the context of the continuing debate about what is appropriate to a residential neighborhood that also happened to be designated as fengmao architecture. The primary reason given for the ban of commerce was fengmao conservation for residential use. As was visible in many other parts of the city, fengmao conservation became the ready alibi and urban loophole of exception for state involvement.213 The state’s assertion of control over properties in the name of fengmao conservation, more importantly, set an example to reinforce its authority over other small commerce. Academic experts publicly supported the state’s claims for fengmao conservation. As prominent conservation proponent, the former deputy director of the Municipal Planning Bureau and respected dean of the Tongji School of Architecture, Wu Jiang [伍江], deemed, in the case of Jing’an Villas, a necessary lowering of the residential density was better for its historic architecture.214 Interestingly, the argument against commerce in the residential neighborhood has little historic precedent. In the 1930s, the ground floor spaces of some of the houses in Jing’an Villas famously served commercial purposes. Part of the historic character that was lent to the neighborhood was its mixed use of functions. Even the District Annals from 1996 noted that Jing’an Villas historically had hotels, dance halls, billboards, and also bars and cafés run by expats.215 Since its inception, the trajectory of commercial activities in Jing’an Villas has been no more than a physical manifestation of the changing political economy. In the 1980s, with waning central planning, small shops and canteens opened in the courtyards of some of the Jing’an Villas’ houses. It was in fact the Street Office that encouraged the small shops and canteens, partly to accommodate residential shopping needs but also pragmatically to resolve the employment situation of numerous returnees from the ‘up-the-mountain and down-to-the-countryside movement.’ A small wonton shop at Number 97 run by a limping old man who had been known for selling his small wontons to the pre-1949 elites of the neighborhood became especially popular.216 He had learned his trade from his master before Liberation. His stall, which re-opened in the 1980s, was as much a response to a city returning to normalcy as the continuation of its commercial stride, drawing on the demands of the neighboring residents as well as surrounding office workers. 284

A series of discussions were tabled to debate whether fengmao conservation also meant keeping the buildings’ residential function, especially in the context of West Nanjing Lu’s commercial role in the city. Rather than dodging the crux of the problem as many of the engaged academic experts tended to do, one voice that directly addressed the issue was that of the Tongji professor Zhang Song [张松]. He commented: “facing the issues of reuse of residential buildings, the government needs to think more holistically, including ownership rights of the building, whether activities such as the opening of cafes affect the fengmao of the architecture, but also whether they impact the lives of the neighbors; in cases where there is an impact, would there be appropriate compensation given in a timely manner as part of the policy.”217 In earlier discussions with Zhang, his directness in addressing fragmented ownership in existing residences and identifying it as the determining role in future proposals is notable.218 His master’s student’s 2007 thesis focused on the small-scale lilongs located in large blocks, or what the piece referred to as ‘piecemeal [零星]’ lilongs, in Shanghai’s urban renewal processes. It was one of the few studies specifically looking at conditions on the ground, and it had used Jing’an as a case study for delving into the set of economic issues underlying the difficulties of developing city center lilong housing.219 Faced with the unsettled challenge of Jing’an Villas, one clever member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Shanghai Committee [政协] proposed, in 2012, the wholesale relocation of the residents and to set up a special organization for the reuse of the fengmao architecture.220 The committee member, the chairman of the board of Shanghai Haodu Real Estate Development and Management Limited [上海豪都房地产开发经营有限公司], also recommended the establishment of a relocation fund that accumulated earnings from earlier developments.221 The fund’s accumulation resembled the incremental development method in Tianzifang’s developments.222 Discussions of the difficulties of feasibly maintaining publicly-owned housing had already surfaced in 2010.223 This proposal seemed to be one where, if

28 surveillance cameras installed, which was more than two on each of the 12 horizontal lanes and main axis, the control that the District authorities wanted was now much more ready to be realized.225 According to the newly appointed head of the District Administration for Industry and Commerce, input from the Neighborhood Committee of 45 members, representing some 960 families living in Jing’an Villas, and totaling approximately 4,000 residents, were “unanimously for the cleanup effort.”226 He emphasized that the installation of the entry system not only cut off the customers of the businesses, but also added security to the neighborhood, thus improving the quality of life and safety. The official even elaborated that the design for the system underwent multiple design iterations so that the installed gates would not ruin the area’s historical fengmao.227

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done right, almost everyone could benefit. Despite the feasibility of the proposal and the business interests behind it, executing the negotiations with occupants required political willpower. Notwithstanding the number of years of drawn-out debate on the outlook for Jing’an Villas, the compound’s wholesale shutdown in 2013 nonetheless still seems harsh and shocking. The urban rumor was that one connected resident wrote thousands of letters to officials to complain of the growing number of commercial activities. This triggered and sealed the fate of Jing’an Villas’ small businesses.224 With more than

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Fig. 24 Rendering for the possible upgrade of Jing’an Villas, 2009

These rationalizations were well practiced by the time of the official closure in 2013. Officials attributed the influx of small businesses to the district-financed upgrade from 2009. One deputy director at the Administration for Industry and Commerce even commented that “it is as if the small commerce plotted to enter the upgraded buildings together.”228 The disparaging tone taken by officials framed the exploitation of a publicly funded investment for improving the living conditions of residents by enterprising, yet undeserving, private shopkeepers. In the publicity war for the future of Jing’an Villas, both the local state and its allies, and the small entrepreneurs and their supporters evoked Tianzifang in their appeal to the public for support. Proponents of the shutdown emphasized Tianzifang’s over-commercialization and its resident-business conflicts to magnify the negative aspects of Jing’an Villas’ commercial conversions. The small entrepreneurs similarly criticized the exponential rent rise and loss of residential life in Tianzifang to show that they too wanted to safeguard the existing diversity of Jing’an Villas. Both sides made claims to fengmao conservation in their visions for Jing’an Villas. The authorities claimed that the return to a purely residential neighborhood would be best for fengmao, while the entrepreneurs saw themselves as contributing to Jing’an Villas’ historic ambiance. While more important political priorities took precedence, the District rehearsed its justification for and the execution of the final shutdown. In the interim development of Jing’an Villas, the small entrepreneurs took a risk in thinking that their version of commercialization would be accepted. An image that had accompanied the announcement of the 2009 upgrade of Jing’an Villas showed a vision, which the entrepreneurs saw potential in taking part in: the rendering showed the Jing’an Villas with small globalized commerce. (Fig. 24) The entrepreneurs’ imag286

ined potential for Jing’an Villas did not match that of the Jing’an District officials. For the district officials, Jing’an Villas would become Global Jing’an’s own version of Xintiandi, not Tianzifang.229

At the beginning of June 2013, more than half a dozen media outlets announced the cleanup of Jing’an Villas. A few days earlier, at the end of May, the demolition of the remaining ‘nail houses’ on the Dazhongli site were tweeted on the Chinese version of Twitter, Free Weibo.230 The development of Jing’an Villas’ neighboring sites, described in this section and the following one, will contextualize Jing’an Villas’ shutdown as part the larger vision that the District has harbored for the West Nanjing Lu corridor and show the state’s closure of the earlier urban loopholes of gaps and ambiguities in favor of urban loopholes of exceptions. The 62,800-square-meter site for the Dazhongli project, considered part of the development of the subway Line 13 station, was the most recent and largest in the West Nanjing Lu area. Bordered by Shimen Lu on the west, Qinghai Lu [青海路] on the east and Weihai Lu on the south, the Dazhongli site was home to one of the largest, and intact old-style lilongs called Dazhongli [大中里]. On the last day of 2002, the Hong Kong developer HKR International [兴业国际], known for its Discovery Bay project on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island, acquired, for 1.306 billion HKD (equivalent to 167 million USD ), the land use right from the Jing’an District for Blocks 40 and 46. This was HKR ’s second project in Shanghai, having collaborated with Kerry Properties on the residential complex Central Residences, further west on West Nanjing Lu. When reporting on the Dazhongli project’s acquisition and projected redevelopment, media outlets noted how the Hong Kong developers had prospered from China’s property boom.231 A story about how a penthouse unit in a tower by Hutchinson-Whampoa, on the corner of Anfu Lu and Wulumuqi Lu, had commanded a more than 6,500-USD per-square-meter price in 2002, was cited as an example of the high profits generated by commercial housing development. Against this backdrop, Dazhongli was framed as one of the many developments by the teeming set of Hong Kong investors, including Sung Hung Kai, New World, Hutchinson-Whampoa, Wheelock, Shui On, and more. Their development experience, specializing in the high-end market, had not deterred them from betting on an emerging market such as in Shanghai. As a result, these investors were cashing in on the booming residential market in China.232 Returns of 8 % to 10 % for office developments and even more on residences, as reported by the representatives of HKR , made the more than 4.5 billion HKD estimated investment for the Dazhongli development worthy of the outlay. Plans for the northern part of Blocks 40 and 46 were for 160,000 square meters of commercial spaces, offices, hotels, and service apartments. The southern part of the block was for 120,000 square meters of residences and small commerce.233 By announcing their objective of “creating a new landmark on Nanjing Lu [打造南京路的新地标],” HKR also showcased their intent to align their development with the broader ambitions of the Jing’an District.234

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The Neighboring En-Bloc Development of Dazhongli

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Although the District Planning Bureau had announced that the relocation process would start immediately after the signing of the land lease in 2002, it wasn’t until four years later, in April 2006 that the negotiations for the relocations began. A few months later, in November, another Hong Kong development giant, Swire, would buy a 50 % stake in HKR ’s Dazhongli project, for 1.265 billion HKD (equivalent to 163 million USD ), an amount indicating that the site’s value had already doubled.235 Swire was known for its early stake in the Citic Square development, which was completed in 2000 and became part of Jing’an’s Golden Triangle, two blocks away from the Dazhongli site. The new consortium’s development investment for the Dazhongli site also doubled to more than 10 billion HKD .236 In 2006, as Ang Lee’s filming of Lust, Caution would bring this particular stretch of West Fig. 25 Cover for the film Nostalgia [乡愁] made in Dazhongli in 2006

Nanjing Lu back into the popular imagination, the grandson of one of Dazhongli’s residents

also made a documentary film called Nostalgia [乡愁 ].237 (Fig. 25) The film tried to document the daily lives in the Dazhongli before it underwent the demolition and relocation process. Of the 1,600-some families and more than 7,000 residents, some were like

the 99-year old grandmother of filmmaker Shu Haolun [舒浩仑], who had lived in the neighborhood for decades. Shu’s grandfather had come to Shanghai and worked in the Siming Bank on West Nanjing Lu, opened by fellow Ningbo financiers.238 The house that he had leased in Dazhongli was built in 1926 and was characteristic of the urban middle-class lilong housing of the time. The house had since been subdivided and shared by up to eight families of up to 35 people at one point. Like many of Shanghai’s lilongs, the proximity and density of inhabitation created uniquely local habits of spatial appropriation, marking out territories of semi-private public spaces.239 The film Nostalgia’s portrayal of life inside the old-style lilong of Dazhongli captured the social changes wrought through the decades. The documentation of everyday life inside one of Shanghai’s most prevalent forms of urban housing until the 1980s was especially prescient in the context of the lilong’s rapid and large-scale disappearance from Shanghai starting in the 1990s. The film showed the everyday life of open doors, shared meals, vegetable peddlers, and hawkers selling traditional Shanghainese snacks—the unique measures of their portioning served as reminders of the food rations under planned economy. Daily life carried on, despite the shiny office towers, global brands, fast-food chains, and gated apartment towers that sprouted up nearby, which represented Shanghai’s re-emergence as an international metropolis.240 While the film lamented the loss of the intimate social life that took place in the lilong communities, it was also optimistic about how everyday life had improved with newly 288

built housing. The reality of better living conditions, with indoor plumbing and private infrastructure especially, was fundamental to the urban renewals that began in the 1990s. Nostalgia for the past could not deter the inevitability of rapid urban transformations. As the residents recognized, the erosion of the old social network, by the growing number of non-Shanghainese migrants as well as by the exodus of the younger generation, had already changed the neighborhood.241 By the end of 2006, the District reported that almost 60 % of Dazhongli’s units, 1,224 families, had signed the relocation contracts. The residents had agreed to the compensation and would be moving to new homes in Taopu [桃浦], a northwest suburb of Shanghai.242 The site boundary for the redevelopment included the small block to the north of the Dazhongli lilongs and across a small street called Wujiang Lu. Wujiang Lu was a well-known food street that had been home to some famous local Shanghai eateries such as Yang’s Shenjian Buns [小杨生煎] among an assortment of noodle and dumpling stalls that lined its low-rise street fronts on the northern edge of the Dazhongli neighborhood. Homemade snacks brought from the kitchens in the lilong were on offer, as well as other services by tailors, cobblers, and barbers. The rising crop of office complexes along West Nanjing Lu, filling up since the 2000s, fed the street’s success. These mom-and-pop shops were not just affordable and convenient during the busy lunchtime crunches. The unpolished and slightly run-down ambiance had lent its products and services a credible authenticity, attracting visitors from other parts of the city who came to shop on West Nanjing Lu. This eastern portion of Wujiang Lu contrasted with, but also supplemented, the street’s western part, which was straightened and redeveloped in the mid-1990s when the station for subway Line 2 was

Known at one point as “Love Lane” because of its meandering profile, Wujiang Lu’s form came from its water-based origins. West Nanjing Lu, once named Bubbling Well Road, was also meandering in profile until it was straightened in the western-expansion of the International Settlement. In a 2006 Tongji University dissertation examining the origins of the road formation in the International Settlement, Wujiang Lu’s curvature was just outside the boundary of its study of the road network’s evolution along Bubbling Well Road.245 Perhaps not unrelated, the boundaries of the municipal-level conservation plans drawn in 2004 also just excluded the historic street, even as the plan emphasized the fragments of other streets for fengmao conservation.246 The conservation of the streetscape had been deemed one of the most important parts of fengmao conservation for Shanghai’s modern era urbanism. These exclusions in the 2006 research of the area may not have been deliberate. But they hinted at a prior knowledge of the inevitable development of the block to the east of Shimen Lu and the irrevocability of the growth-propelled renewal that had already sealed the fate of the neighborhood. By refraining from critical opposition, often seen in the form of research, and more crucially, withdrawing in time—for it was too late anyway to change the course of development—the proponents of conservation who were both in academia and in the state bureaucracy had, in this act, tacitly consented to the area’s erasure. Fengmao conservation, especially in the economic-growth-driven and resource-scarce district

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built.243 In the western portion of the same street, goods provided by international chains such as Starbucks and localized transnational chains like Wagas, offered what the white-collar workers called “upgraded as the ‘luxury edition’ [升级成了’豪华版’]” of the food street.244

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Figs. 26, 27 Dazhongli Control Plan with development outline, left; and proposed density, right, 2008

of Jing’an, had been an afterthought in planning around its more important developments that would generate income. At the end of February 2008, the District Planning Bureau publicized plans for the Dazhongli development,247 seeking public consultation as part of the requisite procedural transparency that was instituted with the 2003 revision of the Shanghai Urban Planning Regulation.248 (Figs. 26, 27) The unveiled plans, with a window for public feedback until 7 March 2008, showed a change in the development’s program from the inclusion of residences to an entirely commercial plan. Two towers designated as hotel usage to the northern edge of the site were limited to 80 meters. Two more office towers limited to heights of 170 meters and 250 meters were sketched out in the middle of the block closer to Shimen Lu at the western side of the block. Seeming to have come from a new sales strategy, the programmatic shift to 300,000 square meters of pure commercial space was notably rare, even for Shanghai. Nevertheless, development proceeded, and at the end of 2008, construction for subway Lines 12 and 13 began. The managing director of HKR International Limited, Victor Mou-ching Cha [查懋成], reiterated a year later, on 6 March 2009—in fluent Shanghainese no less 249—the aspiration for the Dazhongli project to become the new high-end shopping and recreation hub of Shanghai. Cha was quoted to have said “believe me, in time, this place will definitely exceed Xintiandi [你相信我，这里到时候肯定将超过新天地].”250 The primary competitor to the Jing’an development at that time was a project by another Hong Kong development giant, Sung Hung Kai, on a 39,000-square-meter site on Huaihai Lu in Xuhui, of the International Commerce Center (ICC). Like the Dazhongli development, the ICC development was planned as an enormous complex of high-end shopping and F & B in the podium of its IAPM mall, with Grade-A offices and serviced apartments in the towers above. It too aimed at becoming a new retail and recreation hub. Huaihai Lu 290

and West Nanjing Lu have historically been Shanghai’s main retail spines. They have largely maintained their status as such, despite the proliferation of competitive shopping sub-centers, both in Puxi and Pudong, since economic liberalization accelerated. The historic rivalry between the city center districts was played out in their newest and nearly last chances—given the growing difficulty of granting land lease deals—for large-scale developments in the forms of the ICC and Dazhongli projects. A few days later, the start of the Dazhongli site’s construction was officiated with the highly publicized relocation of an Excellent Historic Building to inside the development zone. With the blessing of Tongji University’s Building Relocation Technology Research Center, a 57-meter horizontal shift of what was once a garden-style private house, which later became the administrative building of a middle school, began on 10 March 2009 on the southern part of the site.251 The red-bricked house was built in the 1920s by the brothers Qiu Xinshan [邱信山] and Qiu Weiqing [邱渭卿], who made their fortune in the imported dye business during World War One.252 Like many traditional families of China, they had built two identical houses next to each other that were in a hybrid Western style.253 Reportedly known at the time for their daily morning habit of releasing their thousands of pigeons into the sky, the Qiu brothers had also, sensationally, kept a garden menagerie with tigers, alligators, and pythons.254

of the school’s architecture showed the building’s heritage importance.256 In September 2004, the school moved to a new building on Weihai Lu, leaving the 1,780-squaremeter premises of the historic building open for redevelopment. Although much of the Chinese-language coverage only spoke of the move of the building as part of conservation efforts and elaborated on the building’s stylistic elements, the English-language reporting gave away the envisioned future of the former Minli Middle School/Qiu residence: “the Jing’an government now plans to renovate the remaining ‘castle’ and turn it into a club.”257 The proliferation of the club house, especially as an economically viable means of reusing historic villas, as was elaborated in the previous chapter, reconciled the growing emphasis on heritage architecture with the impetus for development. Jing’an’s long-harbored Xintiandi aspirations, through the deployment of a conserved historic architecture as value marker, were starting to come to fruition, realized with the convergence of technical expertise and financial support. Set back approximately 55 meters from the curb, the original location of the gazetted heritage building would have been in the middle of the development of new high-end retail and office spaces. Worries about the potential destruction of the former school building by alumni of the school were publicized when the demolition of the Dazhongli lilongs began. (Fig. 28) Even though the outline of the development control area created a 30-odd meter buffer around the former Minli Middle School/Qiu

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With the start of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, the house to the east was leased to the private Minli High School [民立中学]. In the 1950s, the school was nationalized. A fire in 1942 destroyed the tower in the western building, and the school also took down its tower in the eastern building for symmetry. Several sources also reported that the house to the west was used as a clubhouse during the war by what was considered the Chinese puppet government under Japanese control. In 1999, the municipality listed the remaining building as Excellent Historic Architecture.255 The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, visited Minli Middle School on a walk in the area during the October 2001 APEC Meeting in Shanghai. Reports of his admiration

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residence in the conservation plan, the real estate needs of the developer required a continuous space for new construction rather than a ‘donut’ condition around the historic building. (Fig. 29) After extended consultation with experts, everyone involved, from the developer to the municipal bureaucrats, agreed to the horizontal relocation of the building to make possible the continuous development of new construction.258 Requirements for the fengmao building otherwise remained stringent.

Fig. 28 The demolished site of Dazhongli, 2009

The developer not only had to keep the historic building, the government also required the developer to conserve and upgrade it. The municipal Cultural Administration Committee and Real Estate Administration further required the developer to keep intact the southern and northern elevation of the historic building, as well as some of its ornamental details. The developer bought the building for 2.4 million R MB , shelled out 7 million R MB for the move of the building, and another 13 million R MB for its renovations.259 The fengmao investment, nevertheless, paled against the Dazhongli investment. The expertise for horizontally relocating heritage architecture to make room for new developments had been honed since economic transition began. Confidence in the move of the former Minli Middle School was pronounced. The 2003 move of the Shanghai Concert Hall [上海音乐厅]—originally built in 1930 and weighing 5,850 tons—by 66 meters east along East Nanjing Lu, to make space for the construction of Yan’an Lu elevated highway to its north, was cited as an important technical experience.260 One of the earliest moves of what was considered historically important architecture was the 1985 shifting of the Sanshan Guild Hall [三山会馆] to make room for the construction of the feeder road to the Nanpu Bridge.261 The 30-meter move of the Guild Hall took place with the re-assembly of the original wooden building. It set a precedent in the shifting of monuments to give room to infrastructural expansions. The moving of the former Minli Middle School thus was only an inherited solution to resolve spatial conflicts that arose between contemporary development and historic con-

Fig. 29 Plan of Dazhongli showing the overlap of conservation plan and proposed relocation of heritage building, 2009

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servation. From the neighboring lilong houses of Dazhongli, their dismantled red bricks were conveniently used to lend authenticity to the 2009 repairs of Jing’an Villas. One month after the dramatic relocation of the former Minli Middle School, the Detailed

Plan for Dazhongli at Jing’an District Plot 40 and 46 [静安区40号、46号街坊（大中里）详细规划] development was approved by the municipality on 10 April 2009.262 What was visible inside the 92,700-square-meter block, largely occupied by the lilong compounds of Dazhongli, were cutouts totaling 29,700 square meters. This made the total developable area smaller. (Fig. 30) One of the cutouts on the eastern side of the block belongs to the national-level Research Institute 711 of the China Shipbuilding Group. This plot had been developed in 2000 into a complex comprising a 28-story residential tower on its south side and a 29-story office and residential mixed-use tower on its north side joined by a three-story lobby and clubhouse podium. The complex is called Sea of Clouds Garden [云海苑]. It is noteworthy that this development did not appear in the development plan of the district from 2000, Fig. 30 Plan of Dazhongli showing subway lines, and with cutouts totaling 29,700 square meters, 2010

because of its ownership by a national- rather than municipal- or district-level state institute.

As a national-level state institute, it is exempt from and impervious to any sort of municipal- or district-level planning.263 A mosaic of national-level land owners in the city center districts would not only explain the irrationality of resulting developments and incoherence within their surrounding context, but, through their urban manifestations, also bring to light the political hierarchies as well as the economic positions of the state institutions and enterprises that make possible these urban loopholes of exceptions. To the northeast of the block, a low-rise hospital complex occupies a prominent

plumbing fixtures. It had been designed by Davies, Brooke, and Gran Architects. With the plaque of Villa Bayankara still visible at the entrance, the house was also home to one of Shanghai’s first cars, which was given the license plate 001, being the first to be issued. In 1943 when he died, Zhou was listed fifth in the tax roster of the Concession-era Municipal Council. The house was recorded as given to the government in 1965, though in reality it had already been occupied in 1950 by the Department for Foreign Trade’s Huadong Bureau [华东局], a high-ranking part of the CCP bureaucracy. When the bureau vacated the house, Yueyang Hospital [岳阳医院] took over the building and grounds. Like the former Qiu residence that became Minli Middle School, it is also a modern era garden-style house selected as Excellent Historic Architecture by the gazetting of 1999.265 But with its hybrid Western and Chinese architectural details of arches and colonnades, it is a contrast to the ivy-grown red-bricked ambiance of the

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corner. The original house was built in 1936 as the home to real estate entrepreneur Zhou Xiangyun [周湘云] who was originally from Ningbo.264 With a flat roof and ribbon windows, the house was a reinforced concrete structure with many of the then latest infrastructural amenities, including a small lift for the three-story house and

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former Qiu residence. Architecture pundits, who were proliferating in the early 2000s, described the house as neoclassical. The former Zhou residence would later be catalogued under the international modern style.266 (Fig. 31) Whether it was due to the intractability of removing the hospital tenant or whether the building’s architecture style, with its white-tiled façade and taut steel windows, would have rendered the building unfit for the Fig. 31 The Yueyang Hospital building

nostalgia-inducing image of old Shanghai that flourished in the popular imagina-

tion, the plot’s land use, in the publicized development plan of 2009, remained listed as medical. This second of the gaps in the Dazhongli development shows how the combination of building style and its contemporary function could yield different results in the building’s redevelopment. The fate of the former Minli Middle School/Qiu Residence, relocated and reused as part of the commercial development, differs dramatically from that of the former Zhou residence, intact and still functioning in its post-Liberation role of a hospital. Directly to the north of the hospital is a six-story office complex, the Mayflower Commercial Building [五月花商务楼], built in 1996. The site belonged to the district Administration for Grain in the land lease plan of 2000.267 To the west of the hospital is a 31-story office tower, Oriental Zhongxin Tower [东方众鑫大厦], finished in 2004. A Grade-A office building advertised as housing tenants such as Black and Decker and Belkin, it was part of the District’s 2000 land-lease plan, and its plot was listed as belonging to the municipal CCP Propaganda Department.268 In the publicized 2009 development plan, the land use of these two contemporary projects was listed as commercial. Specifically, the plot of the Mayflower Commercial Building was listed for financial industries and that of the Oriental Zhongxin Tower was listed as commercial. More similar to the gap in the Dazhongli development block on which the Sea of Clouds Garden sits, the third of the gaps belonged to institutional landlords that had developed the sites commercially. Along with the Sea of Clouds Garden compound, the mosaic of modernization had spearheaded the shift of the block from largely residential, with a school, shops, and hospital to accommodate the local population, to one that is entirely commercial. With the Four Seasons Hotel to the southwest of the block, the Shanghai Television Station tower to the east of the block, the high-rise residential development called Top of City [中凯城市之光] to the south, and the West Nanjing Lu office corridor to the north, the commercial tone was set for the realization of the goals of the district for a Global Jing’an. Disappointment soon mounted at the slow pace of the Dazhongli project’s development. At the Shanghai Jing’an West Nanjing Lu Commercial Real Estate Summit Forum [上海静安南京路商业地产高峰论坛] in September 2009, the district mayor announced the opening of the Dazhongli development to be 2012.269 There were whisperings in the background, however, of the hurdles faced by large-scale en-bloc developments that had aimed too high in the luxury market. Responding to the repeated 294

comparisons to the Champs-Élysées, Fifth Avenues, Oxford Streets, and Ginzas of world capitals that the District has aspired to emulate, Chinese developer giant, Pan Shiyi [潘石屹], retorted at the Forum that the developments along the West Nanjing Lu corridor should not only be aimed at transnational corporations, but also supply the growing number of national enterprises.270 Warnings of a property bubble also lingered at the Forum, even as the District announced a cap on commodity residential development at the same time.271 By early 2010, the Wujiang Lu food street to the north of the Dazhongli site was demolished and the horizontal moving of the heritage building of the former Minli Middle School was completed.272 Yet announcements of delays to Dazhongli’s various constructions continued.273 Technical difficulties with the subway construction, and the measured and unhurried nature of Swire’s corporate decision-making structure, were all cited as reasons for the almost decade-long development process.274 Although no mention was publicly made of the obstinacy and growing cunning of residents—registering additional hukou to claim higher compensation, amongst other tactics—the prolonged negotiations with these nail residents of the block were also another crucial source of delay.275 With the opening of the World Expo in 2010, subway construction as well as relocation negotiations with the remaining residents of the Dazhongli block halted. One of the most important municipal projects for Shanghai as measured by investment quantity, the Expo was a chance to present to the predominantly domestic visitors that Shanghai was the role model for the nation. With the slogan literally translated to ‘the city, allows life to be even better [城市,让生活更美好]’ confidence in the benefits of urban transformation could not be more palpable. The kinds of conflicts that relocation negotiations raised were not suitable for the time. Announcements for the beginning of above-ground construction were finally made at the end of 2012.276 Misgivings about the lapsed progress for the project continued to fuel speculation that the construction delays had to do with the investors waiting for the real estate prices to rise in order to ease cash flow.277 In May 2012, the central government issued an updated Regulation for Handling of Unused Land [闲置

city center locations. The block-scale development of the Dazhongli epitomized the preferred and prevalent process for urban renewal to achieve economic targets, complimented by programs and designs for attracting international corporations and global brands. (Fig. 32) In contrast to the demolition projects a decade earlier, where residents were more pliable and willing participants eager to move away to better lives, the rising prices for compensation, the difficulties posed by savvy residents, and the additional demands by the local state have all made developments increasingly expensive and laborious. The more than decade-long development time frame of the Dazhongli project not only seems to be increasing the investment outlay. The increasingly rigid demands by the

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土地处置办法] to mitigate the growing number of vacated but undeveloped urban land in prime locations.278 According to the new regulation, after a year of vacancy, a fee would be imposed on the developer, and after two years, the land could be returned to the leasing body. The clarifying of the terms of relocations was intended to be resolved prior to the issuance of land-lease. The target of this new legislation was the type of decade-long stalling that had produced conspicuously empty sites in many

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Figs. 32, 33, 34 Development Plan for Dazhongli 2009, above left; renderings for the Dazhongli project with view of the conserved and relocated heritage, above right; and birds-eye view of the Dazhongli project, below right

District, requiring, for example, that the exits for subway Line 13 be integrated into the commercial base of the building, also have added to the construction costs.279 The new-fangled emphasis on fengmao conservation also added additional costs and requests from the District for future developments. (Fig. 33) All this has made it clear that such large en-bloc urban renewal projects in Shanghai’s city center are becoming increasingly rare. Future projects would therefore have to be nimbler and less monolithic. (Fig. 34) The Dazhongli development in many ways is a continuation of the Golden Triangle projects. By engaging large international investors with real estate experience, the Jing’an District is assured that the outcome of the development would contribute to its vision for a Global Jing’an and a Midtown of China along the West Nanjing Lu corridor.

Zhang Gardens: Jing’an Develops Its Heritage Value If the Dazhongli project was the last of the large block-scale demolition and redevelopment projects in the city center, then the developments of the Zhang Gardens block—just to the west of the Dazhongli project and east of Jing’an Villas—suggests a new process for urban upgrade in the context of heritage emphasis. The location of two new subway stations and tracks for subway Lines 12 and 13, begun before the 2010 World Expo, under the block adds an additional dimension of transport-oriented development. The construction of the subway line 2 in the 1990s was crucial in shaping a 296

commercial new spine for real estate developments along its strategically located stations. Similarly, the construction of the two new subway lines and the land allotted for the construction of their stations are also closely connected to the redevelopments of the old, lower-density urban fabric into new, higher-density commercial programs. Located on two blocks, one just west of Maoming Lu [茂名路] for subway Line 12, on the eastern side of Jing’an Villas, (Fig. 35) and the other under the parallel Shimen Lu for subway Line 13, at the end of the

Fig. 35 Corner of Weihai and Maoming Lu, where demolition for the construction of subway Line 12 has left the sides of Jing’an Villas exposed, 2012

adjacent block to the east, the connection of the two stations required a linkage much like the long bar connecting the two weights at opposite ends of a barbell. The layout of subway station connections in Chinese cities is noticeably dispersed, especially in the long distances between connecting stations. (Fig. 36) Partly attributable to the difficulty of underground construction below existing urban structures, especially in dense city center areas, the barbell, rather than a shorter dumbbell model predominates in Chinese cities. Since land is needed for infrastructure development and for the public good, acquisition is easier to justify than for purely commercial development, and the barbell leads to a maximization of land acquisition. In the Chinese context, land clearance, in the name of public infrastructure construction, also provided the grounds

ing compensation demands and bureaucratic transparency required of residential relocation. Residents are growing increasingly wily in their demands and negotiations, driving profit margins down through protracted development timelines. This is exemplified by the delays and complications of the Dazhongli project. Such large-scale city center developments are thus growing increasingly rare. Smaller developments that are more acupunctural and less cost-intensive seem to be a new direction for renewal. The developments around the West Nanjing Lu stations for Lines 12 and 13 under construction, while continuing to adhere to the Jing’an District’s developmental ambitions, were also adapting to new planning strategies that capitalize on the growing value of heritage architecture. Recognition of the growing scarcity of city center land for redevelopment,282 together with the built density limits set by conservation policies, have made the rare plots even more valuable. In November 2014, one of the plots cleared for the station for subway Line 12 became one of the most expensive pieces of land to go up for bidding in Shanghai, increasing the pressure for it to fulfill developmental expectations.

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for some of the largest-scale demolition and renewal projects in many city center areas.280 Some of the largest shopping and office complexes in Shanghai are visibly located on top of subway stations, with some of the longest interchanges. Conversely, land around subway stations also increases in value because of the proximity to transport. Local media touted the value increases for land around stations as well as the guaranteed commercial rental rates of plots.281 Redevelopments are increasingly facing growing challenges, especially with ris-

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Fig. 36 Plan for the metro station connection, 2008

The lilong neighborhood called Zhang Gardens [张家花园] sits between the two ends of the barbells of the subway development. In the early 1990s, the area was slated for en-bloc demolition. In the 1993 plan drawn up by the municipality, the Zhang Gardens’ lilongs were to be replaced by point towers set in a loose landscape of plazas and pedestrian ways. But with the 1995 central government approval for subway Line 2 and the subsequent relocation and land clearance of the part of the block south of West Nanjing Lu between Maoming Lu and Shimen Lu for the construction of the subway station, plans changed. The 1998 plans showed the development of Wujiang Lu as a pedestrian street, framed by high-rises along Nanjing Lu to the north, under which would be the station, and a row of commercial buildings to the south.283 In this design, the pedestrian street of Wujiang Lu was given such high priority that the north-south Shimen Lu ended in a dead-end in the plan. This plan was not followed through. When fengmao conservation arrived in the late 1990s, the Zhang Gardens would fall inside the municipal conservation plan’s boundaries for Jing’an’s patch-worked fengmao jurisdiction. In 1999, the Jing’an District Comprehensive Conservation Plan [静安区总体保护规划] included the Zhang Gardens as a conserved neighborhood.284 That same year, the three lilongs along Maoming Lu on the western side of the Zhang Gardens block, Deqingli [德庆里], Rongkangli [荣康里] and Zhenxingli [震兴里], would also be gazetted by the municipality as Conservation Units.285 In place of the demolition and redevelopment of Zhang Gardens, Dazhongli fell just outside of the conservation boundary. Whereas in the early 1990s Zhang Gardens had been evaluated to be the site for new development and Dazhongli was kept, the fates of the two blocks were swapped. Dazhongli was land-leased by the District in 2002, and was demolished for redevelopment. In the early 2000s, a series of plans were drawn for Zhang Gardens to study the potentials of the neighborhood and how to redevelop the area. In June 2002, a Shanghai Jing’an District Taixing Lu Zhang Gardens Neighborhood Block Conservation and Renewal 298

Plan [上海市静安区泰兴路张家花园街坊保护更新规划] was drawn up by the developers of the Golden Taiyuen Group [金大元有限公司].286 (Fig. 37) In it, a study of the potential reuse for the conserved neighborhood was first drawn up. The Golden Taiyuen Group is a private developer that has been involved with luxury residential developments in Pudong. Its involvement in Zhang Gardens in the early 2000s suggested the District’s interest in a private partnership for the renewal of the neighborhood. At the end of 2003, following the municipal designation of the West Nanjing Lu Historic Cultural Fengmao Conservation Area [南京西路历史文化风貌保护区], the District Planning Bureau also issued a Plan for the Conservation and Renewal of Jing’an District Conservation Neighborhoods [静安区保护街坊保护与更新规划] in February 2004.287 In this plan, Zhang Gardens was secured from future land lease of the sort under consideration with the likes of the Golden Taiyuen Group. The District engaged a team from Tongji University in July 2004 to produce a Jing’an District West Nanjing Lu Jiedao Community Development Plan [静安区南京西路街道社区 发展规划]. The purpose of the study was to consider how to reconcile the needs of residential life in the conservation buildings with that of the District’s developmental demands. Tongji’s team of academics conducted extensive surveys and interviews in an area that partially overlapped the conservation area. They collected data on the educational level, financial status, employment type, and residential tenure type of the residents in the neighborhood around Shimen Lu. Although most of the findings remain inaccessible, an article by one of the researchers was published in 2006, critiquing the growing socio-spatial segregation that resulted from rapid commercial-oriented developments in the old residential neighborhoods.288 The piece pointedly cited the 91.10 % investment capital pumped into commercial real estate development compared to the meager 8.49 % put in for basic infrastructure and upgrade projects, resulting in the uniquely Jing’an characteristic of high-end commercial spaces.289 But more crucially, the socio-economic differentiations the research found were not only between the

Fig. 37 Plan for Wujiang Lu redevelopment at the West Nanjing Lu and Shimen Lu intersection, 1998

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adjacent newly constructed gated residential community and older lilongs, but also the growing disparity inside old lilong neighborhoods, where new residents interfaced

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with old locals.290 Concurrently, several master’s theses from Tongji delved into closer spatial analyses, complementing the study on spatial fragmentation.291 One master’s thesis zoomed in to analyze the pedestrian networks, spatial hierarchies, and public use of the open spaces in old neighborhoods like that of the Zhang Gardens.292 The studies pointed out that small commerce, which accommodated residential life and enlivened the open spaces of lilong neighborhoods, provided livelihoods to many working-age residents who had been left behind by the economic liberalization’s dissolution of socialist-era ‘iron rice bowls.’ The low-cost services and goods of small commerce had, in turn, also supported the everyday life of many aging residents. These aging residents, often with modest incomes, have remained in the city center. In March 2005, the scholars completed the West Nanjing Lu Jiedao Community Development Plan. Unlike the extensive historic studies for the western end of the French Concessions, which began in the early 2000s at Tongji University, Jing’an District’s portion of the former International Settlement was relatively under-studied.293 Whether the rapid demolitions had rendered historic studies irrelevant, or whether there was a fundamental under-appreciation of the area that encompassed Jing’an District, the lack of interest and hence study, had gone hand in hand with the plans for its modernization. The paucity of research has made the implementation of conservation policies selective on the ground to suit the economic visions of the District. While the academic analyses confirmed what most residents already knew as the growing conversion of prime city center residential neighborhoods into profitable high-end commercial developments, the building glut already set in motion continued. At the end of 2005, the new high-rise luxury residential towers, ranging from 25 to 29 stories high, of the apartments Crystal Pavilion [经典茂名公寓] opened at the northern end of the Zhang Gardens block. The buildings to the north of the Crystal Pavilion site had been owned by five main district- or municipal-level state-owned enterprises. They had been rapidly demolished in the 1990s. Their plots were consolidated and redeveloped into the first commercial towers along West Nanjing Lu in the late 1990s with the construction of subway Line 2.294 The sites of the Crystal Pavilion had been largely residential. In the same stroke of subway development, the vacated plots became consolidated and allotted to the District’s Subway Office.295 The Subway Office made good use of the land that had been cleared of residents and acquired for subway construction. The Crystal Pavilion plot, and the one adjacent to the east of it, rose to become profitable new high-end residences. Two years later, four more towers of luxury residences ranging from 27 to 32 stories, called Four Seasons Gardens [静安四季苑] opened on the plot to the east of Crystal Pavilion. Palmer and Turner Architects, a firm that played an important role in producing many Concession-era modern buildings in Shanghai and later in Hong Kong, designed the complex. With their contemporary design, recreational amenities, and exclusive clubhouses, the local newspapers deemed the two residences to be exemplary for “satisfying the successful personage’s high-ended pursuits, shaping the model for Shanghai’s most tasteful and status symbolic residences [满足成功人士的高品位 追求，塑造上海最具品味和身份象征的名宅典范].”296 The quality residents in the two new tower developments were well matched to the nearby high-income commercial and office hub of the Golden Triangle. The ease of access to the Wujiang Lu pedestrian street, with its plentiful options for food and entertainment, and to the West Nanjing Lu sub300

way stations, marked their advantageous locations as matchless.297 Thus, despite the 2005 study’s critiques of growing social segregation and highlighting the qualities of the older neighborhoods, the District’s implementation of West Nanjing Lu corridor’s upgrade continued. Mid-year 2008, it was announced that the central government’s State Council approved proposals for Shanghai’s subway Lines 12 and 13. Public consultation for the Detailed Plan for Construction on the Plot for the West Nanjing Lu Stations of Subway Lines 12 and 13 and their Interchange Passage in the Jing’an District [静安区地铁12、13号线南京 西路站及换乘通道地块修建性详细规划] (referred from hereon as the Detailed Plan) was opened on 19 September.298 The publicized plans demarcated the ‘barbell’ shape for the subway stations’ interchange on the three underground plans. While the underground specifications were still largely diagrammatic, a map labeled as ‘the area for relocation’ showed the barbell shape’s repercussions for the existing above-ground structures. The accompanying announcement confirmed the demolition of the existing buildings as necessary for the underground constructions to accommodate the

Coincidentally, on the same day as the public announcement of the Detailed Plan, an unlimited company called UK Refiners Architectural Consulting was incorporated in Hong Kong. Looking at its name, it is obvious that, despite the explicit attachment of foreign connections, there were some local connections at work.301 UK Refiners Architectural Consulting would later become the masterplanner for the Plot 110–19, the western ‘barbell’ of the transit-driven development neighboring Jing’an Villas. Tongji University was also again engaged in The Study of the Conservation and Use for Jing’an District’s Number 42 Neighborhood (known as the Zhang Gardens) [上海静安区42街坊 （张家花园）保护利用研究], which began in April 2008. Continuing until the end of 2009, the public announcement by the Jing’an District’s news website called the project the “Zhang Gardens Conservation and Strategies Research [张家花园保护与策略研究].”302 The word ‘strategy’ instead of ‘use’ in the title for the project may have been used so as not to alarm the public with the possibilities of use exchanges. Use exchanges usu-

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new stations.299 Three detailed plans showed the proposed new constructions for the three parts of the ‘barbell,’ locating the grade-level subway exits and the public plazas for the pedestrian spill-out.300 The document also clarified that, in accordance with the municipal conservation plan’s decree for height and volume in the West Nanjing Lu Historic Cultural Fengmao Conservation District, especially along the two sides of the top-graded Fengmao Street of Maoming Lu, the total rebuilt volume of the two western parts of the ‘barbell’ would be lower than their original built density. Higher volumes in the eastern part of the ‘barbell,’ which borders the much wider Shimen Lu, would compensate the reduction. The new volumes across Shimen Lu to the east in the Dazhongli development, as well as the high-rises already existing in the southeastern part of the block, including the Wangwang Tower [旺旺大厦] and the Four Seasons Hotel, justified the 19-story commercial office tower on the southern part of the eastern ‘barbell.’ The total reconstructed volume of all three parts of the ‘barbell,’ nevertheless, would be less than that of the original built density. For a District where urban densification has been crucial to its economic growth, the respect accorded the municipal conservation plan seemed to show a change of tack for development. Additionally, a number of selected historic buildings to be demolished would be reconstructed, in respect of fengmao conservation. (Fig. 38)

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Fig. 38 Conservation plan for the Zhang Gardens block, 2013

ally suggest residential relocation and compensation, associated with demolition and redevelopment projects. What was also released was that the meetings between the executing district bodies of the Jing’an Real Estate Group, Jing’an Exchange Group [静安置换集团]—the corporatized entities of the District created following economic liberalization—and the academics were fruitful exchanges of theory and practice.303 At the same time, publicized panels with expert discussions followed the public consultation for the Detailed Plan in early October 2008.304 The feedback must have been positive. Two months later, in early December, the two stations under planning began construction. In April 2009, while art studios held open houses at the informally settled artist compound of Weihai Lu 696, and the municipality approved the Detailed Plan for Dazhongli’s development, Jing’an District announced an initiative for the ‘Cultural Imprint Project [城市文化印记项目].’305 In the lead-up to the 2010 World Expo’s opening in the summer, the Cultural Imprint Project was one of many programs kicked off for its impending influx of visitors, highlighting Shanghai as the nation’s role model. Renovations of Zhang Gardens as part of the Cultural Imprint Project began in June 2009.306 A three-bay shikumen house, along Zhang Gardens’ main lane, was renovated and renamed the “Zhang Gardens Grand Living Room [张园大客堂].” It was known that the house became a citizen-formed primary school in the early 1940s and was merged with another school in the 1980s. After the renovation, old furniture, photos as well as an old movie projector were brought to the Grand Living Room to revive the ambiance of old Shanghai. An article by Lou Chenghao [娄承浩], an author of numerous books on heritage architecture in Shanghai, came out just as the renovations began, offering a historic account of the area, concluding with a call for the revival of Zhang Gardens: “to use the former site of the Zhang Gardens, commemorate its history, and rebuild its 302

brand [利用张园遗址，追忆张园历史， 重塑张园 品牌].”307 Lou’s wish list for the area seemed to be put in place. In the ground floor area, furnished with Chinese-style tables and benches, the Grand Living Room looked like a historic teahouse. The space had become a community center for the neighborhood’s elderly residents. With growing interest in the heritage of the old buildings, a local resident came out to confirm that the building had indeed been a night school to an underground resistance movement of the CCP, 308 enhancing its historic and more importantly, revolutionary credentials. In the land-scarce and economically ambitious inner city district that has set the example for Shanghai’s urban renewal, the cultural heritage of historic buildings in the neighborhood, had, until the 2010 World Expo, been largely superseded by developmentalist imperatives. It was in the preparation for the Fig. 39 Installed new gateway to Zhang Gardens, 2010 Expo, bringing together the numerous departments of the District in a concerted effort of tourism artifact production, that the District unearthed the economic value embedded in the remaining historic architecture.309 The Grand Living Room was opened at the start of 2010 to great fanfare.310 After the Lunar New Year at the end of February 2010, Jing’an District announced plaques commemorating 50-odd former residences of historic luminaries in the District.311 One of the many former dwellings of Mao, just south of the Zhang Gardens block, had already been a national-level heritage site since 1977. Visitors and guests were promised, in addition, at every hundred meters or so, descriptions of former homes of some of China’s famous sons and daughters, who had either lived or passed through the city in the

Zhang Gardens’ Cosmopolitan History, Nostalgia for the Future With the bestowment of honors, the historic significance of the Zhang Gardens neighborhood was increasingly broadcast through the popular media preceding the 2010 World Expo. The site of Zhang Gardens belonged to an English merchant who had sold it, in August 1882, to a merchant from Wuxi named Zhang Shuhe [张叔和]. Zhang turned the 22-mou site into a garden which he named Weichun Gardens [味莼园].313 Even though the Weichun Gardens had many Chinese elements, such as inscriptions of historical references in the built space, the park itself was built with lawns, ponds, and flora that more resembled the 19th century English gardens than the traditional

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Republican era. As part of the commemorations, a new 28-meter-high metal gate was also installed at the northern end of the main artery through Zhang Gardens. (Fig. 39) In the form of the shikumen, the old stone threshold entryways for the row housing, the metal form was a contemporary tribute to a newly recognized and honored part of Shanghai’s past.312

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Figs. 40, 41 Historic postcards of Zhang Gardens with Arcadia Hall, above; and amusement park, below

vernacular gardens of the region. The Weichun Gardens also came to be called the Gardens of the Zhang Family [张家花园], or simply Zhang Gardens [张园], named after its patron. In 1885, the park was opened to the public, at first with no admission charge. In 1892 a Western-style building was built at the center of the park, named Arcadia Hall [安垲第]. Arcadia Hall was two stories, with a lookout tower in one corner that was one of the highest places in the city.314 Many visitors came to Arcadia Hall, which could hold more than 1,000 people. It became the place for speeches and events in the ensuing decades. From postcards of the time, the park and its buildings looked much like other amusement parks of its era. (Fig. 40, 41) The historian Xiong Yuezhi [熊月之] related the rise of the Zhang Gardens to the cultural hybridity of modern era Shanghai.315 He posited that, as the largest public space in Shanghai, with a range of activities, from restaurants, teahouses, different kinds of theaters, meeting halls, exhibition spaces, to gyms and photography stations, the park revealed a modernity of the rapidly growing and industrializing city.316 From the first electric lights to the first bicycles, the accoutrements of the park were much in the spirit of a cosmopolitan Shanghai that was adapting all manners of new, imported, and largely Western goods and habits. One article, “Back then the Zhang Gardens was the Small World Expo,” used a comparison made by the deputy director of the Jing’an Cultural and Historic Museum.317 This deputy director was a frequent spokesman for the area’s upgrade. He compared Zhang Gardens’ assortment of cultural novelties and technological innovations to those at the 2010 World Expo. Drawing the link between international showcases at the present-day Expo and the historic Gardens did not just make the illustrious past of the Jing’an more relevant. Its claims to Shanghai’s historic cosmopolitanism also made the city’s contemporary development and global integration seem inevitable. That the old Zhang Gardens could harbor the contemporary aspirations of present-day Shanghai supports an underlying narrative of the city’s revival and re-globalization. More compelling for contemporary interests, especially the District authorities who had decided to put in the financial and manpower resources to renovate and commemorate the area, were the contributions Arcadia Hall and its gatherings made to China’s nation-founding. Amongst the noted events to have been given stage in the Zhang Gardens were the speeches and events helmed by noted Chinese modernist thinkers and reformers who espoused a growing nationalism that was also grounded in a fundamental restructuring of China’s feudal socio-political system. Speeches by 304

the likes of Sun Yat-sen and Cai Yuanpei have been touted as the highlights of Arcadia Hall, arousing a long-stifled national spirit that was beginning to stir. Events representing China’s modernity also famously took place in the Zhang Gardens. The Zhang Gardens hosted the first modern wedding ceremony in 1905. The pub-

Fig. 42 Historic photo of a gathering outside of Arcadia Hall

lic cutting of the mandatory ‘queue’ hairstyle in 1911, which the Manchus rulers had forced on all non-Manchu Chinese men during their victory over the previ-

ous and last ethnically Han ruled dynasty, also famously took place in the Zhang Gardens. The battles of the patriotic kungfu master, Huo Yuanjia [霍元甲], against foreign competitors—many contemporary audiences knew of Huo Yuanjia from the Hong Kong TV serial, which had gripped the Chinese audience at the start of economic liberalization in the 1980s318—were also fought on Zhang Gardens’ grounds in the 1910s. The dissemination of these tales was part of the re-narration of the Zhang Gardens’ past and the tales give the place a vital importance in the nascent movements towards nationhood against the omnipresence of foreign and capitalist subjugation in the early 20th century. The tales, moreover, reinforced the importance of the Zhang Gardens to the city and nation. Xiong’s extensive analysis posited the Zhang Gardens’ radical origins as the spatial manifestation of China’s modern urbanity.319 The cultural hybridity of the Zhang Gardens’ form and the programmatic fusion of its recreation spaces showed a culmination of local pragmatism with cosmopolitan knowledge transfers.320 The accessibility of Zhang Gardens attested to Shanghai’s modern era conception of public space, a new notion for its time. This open and accessible urban public space, crucially, served as a platform for the discourse essential to China’s emerging modernity. From women’s bound feet to education modernization, the discussions held at Zhang Gardens highlighted the political freedoms that were unique to Shanghai’s Concessions, which were extraterritorial and exempted from imperial persecution. Debates that would

role that a place like Zhang Gardens played within this historic context was of utmost importance: its public space was instrumental to a growing discourse on the nation’s modernization and the foundations of what the CCP called the ‘New China.’ (Fig. 42) This narrative arc was of particular importance to the contemporary media. Articles such as “Xinhai Revolution and Shanghai’s Zhang Gardens: Revolutionary Idea’s Origins” attributed the founding of modern China and its ensuing revolution to the former pleasure park,322 propelling the revival of Zhang Gardens in the lead-up to the 2010 World Expo. By the mid-1910s, many new spaces for modern entertainment arose in Shanghai, including the renowned New World [新世界] and Great World [大世界], responding to

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have been politically too sensitive in Chinese cities took place in Shanghai because of the Concessions’ special immunity from censorship and oppression under the Qing government. Conversely, the intellectual openness of the Concession city also drew the most reform-minded contemporary thinkers to the growing metropolis.321 The

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the kind of consumption growth in the metropolis that accompanied industrialization and modernization.323 As the Zhang Gardens lost its former luster, it eventually stopped operations.324 It was also in the late 1910s that the growing population of the city compelled the then more suburban areas, where the Zhang Gardens was located, to be developed. The International Concession’s Municipal Council pushed through infrastructural developments in preparation for further urban development. Road straightening of the former Bubbling Well Road, now West Nanjing Lu and the construction of north-south traversing Moulmein Road, now Maoming Lu, took place at the end of the 1910s. In 1919, the Zhang Gardens’ site was sold off to a merchant called Wang Kemin [王克敏] and developed into the lilong residences that are visible today. All that is known and reported of how the lilong housing of Zhang Gardens came about following the dismantling of the park grounds is that the residences were prestigious in 1920s Shanghai. With a luxury of space that was unseen in other denser lilong housing developments at the time, the individuation of styles in the different rows of the Zhang Gardens development also attested to the financial resources of its target residents. This individuation of styles distinguished Zhang Gardens from other lilong compounds with their repetition of uniform designs. A few concerned citizens have even traced the original names of the lilong homes to distinguish one from another.325 The locale’s ideologically embedded beginnings faded in time. Everyday life took place in its stead. Only the more public functions, such as the former schoolhouse that has been converted to the Zhang Gardens Grand Living Room—recently discovered to have had revolutionary affiliations—and the remains of the Arcadia Hall could be showcased with the re-assembling of their radical beginnings. Nevertheless, in the run-up to the 2010 World Expo, the district-wide renovations of historic monuments and neighborhoods were aimed at attracting visitors from the bright shiny international-branded shopping malls of West Nanjing Lu to an ideologically charged old Shanghai.326 The historic monuments and neighborhoods were highlighted to remind the rest of country, who were visiting Shanghai, of the city’s historic struggles and contributions to the building of the nation. Shops selling antique toys, furniture from old Shanghai, and cheongsams—the side-buttoned dresses that were worn by women in Republican China—were promoted on adjacent streets like Shanxi Lu [陕西路].327 The Republican era and its artifacts were again presented not only as part of the insurgency against imperial domination, but as reminders of the hardships the past generations had endured to make possible the success and prosperity of the present. The District’s leadership, similarly, imagined a revival of the Zhang Gardens lilong to revive the ambiance of its romantic past.328 As the Jing’an Cultural and Historic Museum’s deputy director and spokesman lamented, “today many of the young people already don’t understand the era of their parents’ lives; here in the old longtang, they can get a glimpse of living conditions of their parents [现在很多的年轻人已 经不了解父母那个年代的生活了，在这个老弄堂里，他们可以窥见父母当年的生活状态].” Whether cafés or barber shops, the desire was for the kind of furnishing, accessories, and structures that looked like they came from that past era,329 albeit one that remained ambiguous in its periodization or references. The ambiguity was perhaps more conducive to the throngs of visitors who were more interested in a simplified constructed authenticity than the complexity and nuances of history. A Chinese-American photographer who conducted tours inside Zhang Gardens, using tricycles, antique 306

Fig. 43 Plan for the redevelopment of Zhang Gardens, 2009

News Plans for an Old Area, New Ways for Heritage Conservation In spring 2010, the District Planning Bureau publicized the Urban Design and Detailed Control Plan for Partial Adjustment to Block 42 (Zhang Gardens) and Eastern Part of Block 43 [静安区42号街坊（张家花园）及43号街坊东侧地块城市设计与控详局部调整方案] for public consultation in mid-July 2010.331 The authorities announced that the construction of the new subway stations “brought opportunity to the conservation and renewal of the Zhang Gardens [给张家花园的保护与更新带来了契机].”332 The plan was a follow-up to the 2008 plan for the subway station locations, and further detailed the programmatic introductions for new construction as well functional changes to existing buildings. To align with the designation of Fengmao District, the plan kept most of the existing volume of buildings. (Fig. 43) It also abided by its objective of “holistic-ness, authenticity, sustainable development [整体性，原真性，可持续发展].” Especially for where the subway stations were to be located, and which plots required demolition, the plan followed a strategy of ‘demolish one give back one [拆一还一].’ Reconstruction of destroyed buildings was the plan’s tactic for conserving and reviving the area’s fengmao.333 There were many differences between the 2008 plan and that of 2010 for the block. Firstly, a fragmentation of plots aligned more with the subway intervention. Along

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clothing, and other props to offer his visitors an authentic experience set to the backdrop of the old houses, was cited by the authorities as the kind of historic recognition that the area should garner.330

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with the plot boundaries, functional designations were also changed. The new plan replaced the largely residential functions with entirely commercial functions. It was clear that the area around the exit of the subway station was too valuable to remain residential. It would, inevitably, become commercial due to market forces, so the plan officially outlined their commercial designations. Phase one development, outlined in the 2010 revised development plans for the Zhang Gardens area, was of the east-west connector between the two ends of the ‘barbell.’ The 2010 plan changed the land use for the site of the Gonghui Hospital [公慧医院]. Like the residential area directly to its west, the functional designation for Gonghui Hospital became that of a boutique hotel, totaling about 12,680 square meters of built area together with the adjacent plot. More specifically, the historic building at the center of the Gonghui Hospital complex was also marked for reconstruction. The building had been built in 1932 by the well-known Hungarian architect László Hudec, who had designed many of Shanghai’s modern era monuments, and was built as a villa called the P. C. Woo residence. In fall 2011, four garden-style houses disappeared from the enclosed building sites for the stations of subway Lines 12 and 13. The disappearance aroused suspicions that the demolition tide, which had swept through the District since the 1990s, was again sweeping clear heritage buildings on new construction sites. News emerged that the houses were in fact dismantled and put into storage for safekeeping until their later reconstruction.334 A 5,000-square-meter warehouse in the suburban Jiading District became the interim storage for the heritage buildings,335 while the construction area underwent clearance and redevelopment. Two of the buildings had been under the jurisdictions of the District’s Grain Administration and the municipality’s CCP committee. The other two had been publicly managed residences shared by multiple families. Like other fragmented residences they were in terrible condition. Despite the state of wear that the buildings suffered, “the four buildings are kept because of their rich historic and cultural content [之所以要保留这四幢建筑，是因为其具有丰富的历史文化内涵],” explained the spokesperson for the Jing’an Architecture Ornament Company [静安 建筑装饰公司],336 one of the more than two dozen subsidiaries of the Jing’an Real Estate Group that was responsible for the disassembly and storage of the buildings. That the historic buildings’ heritage value warranted the labor-intensive tasks of extensive surveying, documentation, and cataloguing of their material compositions, tectonic constructions, and hardware parts from the old construction made clear the significance of the effort.337 Just as the feat of the former Minli Middle School/Qiu residence’s horizontal relocation has become the norm for fengmao conservation, so the dismantling, storage, and reconstruction of historic buildings showed a newer way of fengmao conservation to make way for economically driven urban development. A new method of displaced safekeeping of valuables—even more drastic than that of the fewhundred-meter move—emerged. On the east side of the Zhang Gardens block, the southern corner along Shimen Lu was already occupied by the 38-story Four Seasons Hotel and the plot just north of it, by a 21-story tower. Both were part of the pre-2000 Jing’an developments. In the 2010 Zhang Gardens plans, a new 24-story tower, along with three low-rise buildings visibly replaced a proposed set of lower-rise commercial buildings that were closer to the original morphology on site in the 2008 plan. On closer look, three of the four lowrises are the heritage buildings that have been dismantled, catalogued, and stored. In 308

Fig. 44 Axonometric view of the Zhang Garden’s redevelopment in relation to Dazhongli in the east and Jing’an Villas to the west, 2014

Conflicts on Vestige Land: the Nail Entrepreneur Triggering a louder outcry than that on the disappearance of the heritage buildings was the designated demolition and redevelopment of another four-story building on the eastern end of the Zhang Garden block. Centering on the uncompensated eviction of an entrepreneur from the four-story office building, which was pending legal action, an article appeared in December 2010 criticizing the commercial interests of the District in the name of infrastructural development. The article provocatively assessed the land grab that the District government and its affiliates made on the occasion of subway construction.338 For the subway exits that required only 603 square meters, it announced, the subway construction had claimed more than 35,000 square meters of land for redevelopment.339 The building under scrutiny had once belonged to a state-owned bearing factory, part of the historic cluster of the automobile value chain located around Weihai Lu. In mid-2000, the factory, like many other surviving SOE s, became incorporated. It offloaded its real estate asset at auction to the larger state-owned conglomerate, Shanghai Electric. Shanghai Electric is one of a handful of municipal-level SOE s that had, by the 2000s, consolidated many subsidiaries to become an international and listed company for power generation and electrical equipment. Shanghai Electric, like other consolidated municipal-level SOE s, had large landholdings in Shanghai’s city center. As

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the plan, they are reconfigured in a new urban formation to make room for the office tower. (Fig. 44)

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the land was administratively-allocated under the planned economy,340 its exchange has been curtailed. Since the mid-2000s, the central government has limited the ability to commercialize this type of land in the dual market of the transitional economy.341 Administratively-allocated land could only be exchanged between institutional owners and remained in the hands of the state institutions. Like many other properties on administratively-allocated land, the SOE as the sitting landlord effectively marketized its well-located but un-sellable assets by subleasing to private entrepreneurs. The private entrepreneurs could either occupy the space as tenants or further sublease to other tenants following small upgrades. For the Shimen Lu Number 239 structure, a lease contract was signed in 2002 by the SOE that produced bearings with a company called Nuoheng Holdings [诺衡控股公司], which was affiliated with the American retail giant PriceSmart. After a scandal broke with corruption charges brought against top management at Nuoheng in 2006,342 the lease for the property was transferred to a private entrepreneur originally from Henan named Liu Xuedong. Although his main business had followed the Internet of Things (IOT ) trend, he signed a ten-year lease with Shanghai Electric for the 5,000-odd-square-meter former industrial space in the well-located Jing’an District. As a national IT talent solicited by the Shanghai government for investment, Liu had initially registered his business in the Zhangjiang Technology Zone in Pudong. But because of the more lucrative opportunities in the commercial city center, Liu moved his company’s business registration to the more expensive Jing’an District. Paying its higher business tax, Liu’s move was a gesture showing his contribution and cooperation with the District. Renovating the space as an industry cluster, and calling it Dream Arc Cultural Industries Park [追梦方舟文化产业园], the spaces were subleased to three companies in 2007. A Taiwanese company in the food business, the U.S. stock market-listed hotel chain Hanting [汉庭], and a business management and consulting firm that was later renamed the Zhang Gardens Company, moved into the spaces. With the start of construction for subway Lines 12 and 13, changes to the area were made public and Dream Arc Cultural Industries Park was also included in the demolition and relocation zone. After Shanghai Electric sent the first eviction notice in April 2009, Liu waged a media war as well as a legal one. He saw that the area would grow in value. Articulate and well-connected, Liu’s accusations against Shanghai Electric were not only part of the tenacious effort to reap the most benefit out of the given circumstances. His attacks also exposed and attacked the land development process that has become the prevalent order, even though his own business had also taken advantage of the inflexibilities in the institution of administratively-allocated land and the opportunity created by the dual land market. Questioning the District’s use of infrastructural development as an alibi to grab land for development, Liu scrutinized the language the state used as the basis for its evictions to expose the state’s self-interest. Liu challenged whether the new land use for ‘municipal public works [市政公用]’ was not merely an interim label for the development of a higher and denser ‘commercial’ project by the District’s affiliate themselves. The persistent charges Liu launched in the courthouse and through print and online media served to fray the nerves of the multiple stakeholders in the small but contested space. A number of blogs posted by Liu’s employees as well interviews with popular media reported on the domineering methods of the District government. In one instance, Liu’s 310

employees called the use of force by a large police presence led by the deputy district mayor to evict the employees of Liu’s company, the ‘6.5 Incident,’ named for the date of its occurrence.343 In another instance, the revelation of correspondence between governmental bodies and the district court assessing the ongoing case between Liu and Shanghai Electric was framed as undue influence by powerful bodies of the government on the legal process.344 But the key accusation Liu launched was that the District’s subsidiary companies, including Jing’an Real Estate Group and its underling Jing’an Jingdi Company, were both involved in the demolition and eviction process as well as the ensuing development process. Liu cited an impending law that was to be implemented nationwide to curb the kind of conflict of interest by the land resource organization as well as the development company as the reason for the District government’s rapid actions.345

Fig. 45 Redevelopment of Zhang Plaza on the former Semi-conductor Parts Number Four Factory site, opened in 2015

More than a dozen lawsuits were filed from the beginning of 2010 from all sides: Liu’s company Yunshui Communications Technologies Limited [上海云水信息技术有限 公司], together with its lessees accused Shanghai Electric; Yunshui accused its lessees and vice versa; Shanghai Electric accused the company that had been formed and was responsible for the demolition and relocation, the Shanghai Subway Line 13 Development Limited; and Yunshui accused Shanghai Subway Line 13 Development Limited. Liu’s direct communication with the Jing’an District’s Administration for Land and Resources early on to request a formal process for relocation and compensation revealed the businessman’s objective. Like the well-reported nail house residents who held onto their properties, Liu wanted to maximize the potential payoff compensation. The site’s profitable returns, after its development, made the legal and media-aided tactics worth Liu’s gamble. The bottom line was the fundamental driver for the marketized economy. With the growing paucity of city center real estate for densification and development, the dual land market on historic sites further exacerbated the conflicts of interest in the pur-

New Developments for the Centrality While multiple stakeholders were contesting the Shimen Lu 239 site, another former industrial site was undergoing a quiet transformation. Even though the incoming entrepreneurs had little interest in the historic Taixing Lu 99 site, they were drawn by its proximity to West Nanjing Lu’s global luxury brands and also its convenient connection to the subway. The development of a commercial cluster on the premises of the heritage building opened in mid-2014. (Fig. 45) Dubbed Zhang Plaza in some of the English-language coverage, the site belonged to the Shanghai Semi-Conductor Parts Number Four Factory [上海半导体器件四厂]. A subsidiary of the municipal-level network of production institutions that were directly managed by the Municipal Eco-

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suit of financial gain.

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nomic Council since the mid-1980s under the central government’s drive for technological development, the state-prioritized sector nevertheless failed to compete against the financially stronger and technologically more advanced private sectors in the capital-intensive industry. De-industrialization in the District has been ongoing since the 1990s. Like the closure of Weihai Lu 696’s Components Factory Number Five, which had been a key player in China’s high-tech sector prior to accelerated economic liberalization, Taixing Lu 99’s had been later than that for other manufacturing sites because of its high-profile legacy. Reprogramming of institutional sites has many successful examples. With a collection of restaurants, cafés, bars, and boutiques that have other branches also at clusters such as Ferguson Lane, Yongfu Lu 47, and Anfu Lu 109–201,346 the transformation of Zhang Plaza followed the trend of clustering enterprises, which tap into Shanghai’s growing market of fusion F & B joints produced by and catering to the localized cosmopolitan network.347 A few months after the opening of the Zhang Plaza, delays in construction of the underground interchange due to conflicts with heritage buildings was reported.348 Even as discussions of the importance of underground spaces continued and technical solutions were sought,349 it was noted that an underground passage would be impossible.350 Because the 2010 plans showed the Zhang Plaza site to be slotted for demolition and reconstruction, whether the commercial development was an interim reuse project or whether it already showed a change in development despite the plans remained unclear. While the development of the east-west passage connecting the two sides of the ‘barbell’ remained unclear, the development of the western ‘barbell’ was ongoing. At the end of October 2014, the District publicized a call for bids to develop Plot 111–09. The elongated site, buttressed by Jing’an Villas to its west and Maoming Lu to its east, was designated a heritage area in the 2004 municipal conservation plan. The municipal conservation plan also designated the north-south running Maoming Lu as one of the Fengmao Streets to be conserved in its proportions and atmosphere.351 In spite of the municipal designation, demolitions of Plot 111–09 were completed in mid-2011. One building from the site was a garden-style residence that was packed with many families. It was the fourth of the four heritage buildings dismantled and stored away in Jiading’s warehouse in the conservation project. According to the notice for development, the total site area was around 1.16 hectares. Its use was a mix of commercial and office, of which not less than 90 % would be commercial.352 The total built area was not to exceed 18,530 square meters and the height was limited to 12 meters. The main program for the site was to be specialty retail, with aims for it to accommodate cultural, entertainment, and recreational needs, as well as offices for small enterprises. Starting at one billion R MB and with a built density of 1.6, the cost for the built area would come out to 53,000 R MB per square meter. A rendering for Plot 111–09 showed grey brick buildings next to low-rise new shop fronts around a small plaza.353 The image could have come out of a North American new urbanism project. (Fig. 46) Refiners Architectural Consultants, in association with Tongji Architecture Design Institute, authored the plans accompanying the bidding application, which showed a masterplan composed of rows of low-rise lilong types between a few larger volumes. 312

Fig. 46 Rendering for the development of Plot 111 – 09 adjacent to the Jing’an Villas site

The bid application was open for download in mid-November 2014, with the cutoff for bids in mid-December. Although it was reported that there was interest from central government state-owned developers as well as Hong Kong investors,354 only one contending bid was made.355 It came as little surprise. As stipulated in the bid application, the final contender would also have to shell out an additional 126 million R MB , including 8.6 million R MB for the subway infrastructure, 2.5 million R MB for conserving heritage architecture—paying for its dismantling and storage—and also 100 million R MB for investment in the underground construction. The price per square meter for the land lease alone was two times that of another plot open for bid just a few years earlier. One of the most expensive sites on the market, with tight regulations regarding its final development, Plot 111–09 was finally taken by two subsidiary companies of the Jing’an Real Estate Group at the base price of one billion R MB .356

City center sites, with their diminishing land supply, have become increasingly difficult to acquire and develop in the three decades since economic liberalization began. The developments of the land-marketized Dazhongli site and its adjacent Zhang Gardens site in the Jing’an District, the smallest and most economically driven city center district in Shanghai, confirm the shift from an earlier mode of wholesale demolition and redevelopment-cum-densification to a more selective conversion strategy necessitated by the deceleration of development. The fragmentation of sites in their ownership showed that the legacy of planned economy has complicated top-down visions for upgrades. The changing role of former industrial sites as well as heritage buildings, since economic liberalization began, has also reshaped their transformation and reuse. At the same time, with the growing enunciation of conflicting interests between stake-

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Gentrification with Chinese Characteristics

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holders in the perpetually transitioning political economy, urban development projects have also become less clear, despite a growing impetus for procedural transparency. In the case of the Jing’an Villas, the economically ambitious and globally aspiring local state has harbored plans for the redevelopment and upgrade of this valuable heritage architecture neighborhood since the mid-2000s. Yet the exact path for its development has been uncertain. Rumors that developers have leased the property, ready to convert the residential area into a commercial one, shrouded this uncertainty. While discussions in government forums seemed to suggest marketization plans for the neighborhood, public debates and media reportage to the contrary sent mixed messages as to the future of the area. The mixed messages gave hope, for a time, to the diversification of development modes. They also gave hope for a growing openness to popular privatization that was incrementally mediating the interests of the residents as well as the image project of the local state. Small entrepreneurs took advantage of the urban loophole created by developmental uncertainty and tried to anticipate the rumored impending commercialization. Their interventions formed a deliberately offthe-radar creative cluster embedded in a residential area. The cluster gave the centrality a seemingly welcome commercial diversity. The hesitation on the part of the local state, in the image project build-ups to the 2010 World Expo and abetted also by the distraction of graver political issues, delivered an opportunity of development for the small entrepreneurs. The small entrepreneurs, in turn, filled a niche by tapping into an underused city center spatial supply. Straddling the pressures of becoming popularized in the form of another Tianzifang—which commercialized the majority of its residential units—and remaining selectively unknown and also predominantly residential, Jing’an Villas seemed to have showcased an achievable equilibrium between the creative reuse and preservation through inhabitation. Localized cosmopolitans subtly harnessed the modern era architecture and tried to stave off a full-scale commercialization that would upset the balance struck between commerce and culture. The momentary coexistence of the local and the global, along with the typological resilience of the modern era architecture, made Jing’an Villas a decidedly convincing product of bottom-up reuse and upgrade in the late 2000s. The specificities of the legacy structures, both in architecture type, urban morphology, and their public management, seemed to have been an urban resource for the continued development of Shanghai as a global city. With the dramatic shutdown of the bottom-up small commerce, which was momentarily favored and promoted, the incremental progress toward establishing a localized equilibrium between the global and local quickly halted. A supporting rhetoric of overwhelming concern for the existing local residents magnified the sentiments of those who felt threatened by the influx of new economies. When the memo to the residents [告居民书] announced the closure of Jing’an Villas’ main lane to public traffic to stem the source of consumer demand for the small commerce, the local state further propagated the residents’ antagonism. Fengmao conservation, as the newly minted priority of the culturally attuned Shanghai, also became the alibi for the small entrepreneurs’ eviction. Closer examinations reveal an increasingly shrewd use of the popular media to foment discontent, pitting citizen against citizen. Fanning support by incumbent residents, media deployment helped portray a salvaging role played by the local state, 314

in the conservation of the fengmao neighborhood. To regain control of an area so that it could be commercialized by the District and not by private entrepreneurs also distracted from the more challenging conundrum of residents left behind by the proceeds of marketization. A 2013 District-instituted policy showed the authorities’ worries about the sustainability of growing social differences. In particular, the authorities were concerned with the rising cost of lunch. In response, they enforced price controls on lunches to promote the District’s competitiveness in attracting service sector talent.357 While such a heavy-handed measure itself not only privileged the larger chain enterprises, which had more capacity to absorb the costs of the imposed price-ceilings than the small mom-and-pop shops, it also seemingly overlooked the source of rising lunch prices in the area—that of mounting rents in the first place. It was the closure of spaces with lower-rents in places like the Jing’an Villas and large-scale demolitions of areas like Dazhongli and Wujiang Lu, that closed the pipelines for the variety and affordability of lunches. White-collar customers from high-rise office towers had flocked to the small canteens in the old lilongs as well as to the newly built chain restaurants. The choices of the ten-yuan home-cooked boxed lunch, the 30-yuan small wontons at the noodle stall, or the 100-R MB fast food meal at the pizza and sandwich place were precisely what had made the West Nanjing Lu corridor appealing to the constituents of the tertiary economy. The glaring disconnect in addressing the relationship between spatial diversity and social stability is not a problem unique to Jing’an, or other neighborhoods in China only. It remains a challenge for many rapidly developing and transitioning economies, where the concurrence of high- and low-end markets, from labor to rentals, create the frictions of their coexistence. While the aspiration to become global overproduces spaces at one spectrum of consumption, spaces at the other spectrum are rapidly erased. The planned economy vestiges, themselves unplanned, were the remaining bulwarks against encroaching neoliberalization that officials were increas-

well as textured paving, new trees, and outdoor seating onto what was recognizable as the main lane of Jing’an Villas. The setting looked rather like Xintiandi and Sinan Mansions, both projects that have taken red-bricked residential housing from Shanghai’s modern era and converted it into high-end shopping districts. Closer to the model of the Sinan Mansions, with the reaping of the benefits of commercial upgrading contained in the hands of the local state and its affiliates, the orderliness of the development and the easy recognition of its brands would set the new Jing’an Villas even farther apart from that of the bottom-up ambiance of Tianzifang. Pressured by the land resource scarcity linked to revenue generation and economic growth, commercial development increasingly led and controlled by the local state is

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ing worried about in its socially destabilizing form. Even against the developmental local state’s aspirations for the West Nanjing Lu corridor to become the ‘Midtown of China,’ the transformation of Jing’an Villas may have shown an alternative development that could have mediated the two polarizing extremes, its incremental timeline a buffer against rapid change. That plans had already been made for Jing’an Villas’ development was given away by a rendering showing its commercialization.358 (Fig. 47) The image skillfully superimposed global branding, commercial signage, and ground floor shop windows, as

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Fig. 47 Rendering labeled as representing Zhang Gardens’ upgrade but showing visions for Jing’an Villas

steering the future developments of the area. The urban qualities that had diversified the centrality and made it attractive would instead steadily be streamlined to make possible variations of the sameness. With the development of multiple commercial centers in the metropolitan area, the historic commercial hubs of West Nanjing Lu and Huaihai Lu in the city center have been pressured to specialize in order to compete with the newer, larger, and often easier-to-access retail areas. For many suburbanites who avoid the congestion of the old city center and for the new Shanghainese with little memory or habit of historic shopping areas, the appeal of the city center is waning. The local state has to recognize that the historic neighborhoods in the city center, making for pleasurable strolls, appeal to a different audience. Its socio-economic diversity and range of products in close proximity to one another offer the kind of stimulating urban experience appealing to a younger urbanite segment. The richness of experiences also appeals to many international personnel who moved to Shanghai precisely for its metropolitan setting. The historic hubs, enhanced by transport access in the populous and expanded metropolis, would be better off tapping into their remaining asset of attractive urbanism to sustain growth as overall development slows.

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(December 1, 1986): 521–35; Neil Smith, “Gentrification and Uneven Development,” Economic Geography 58 , no. 2 (April 1, 1982): 139–55, doi:10.2307/143793; Neil Smith, “Gentrification and the Rent Gap,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77, no. 3 (September 1, 1987 ): 462–65; Sharon Zukin, “Gentrification: Culture and Capital in the Urban Core,” Annual Review of Sociology 13 (January 1, 1987 ): 129–47; Rosalyn Deutsche, “Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City,” October 47 (December 1, 1988): 3–52, doi:10.2307/778979. In Chinese urbanism, largely during the late 1990 s and 2000 s, gentrification has largely been used as a term to describe the effect of large-scale urban restructuring that has accompanied economic liberalization. Scholars used the term ‘gentrification’ in Chinese cities to describe residential neighborhoods that are demolished and redeveloped as high-end residences or for commercial use. It is used as a critique of the polarization of socio-economic differences that have taken place since economic liberalization began. The relationship between private capital and social segregation is critiqued. See Shenjing He, “State-Sponsored Gentrification Under Market Transition: The Case of Shanghai,” Urban Affairs Review 43, no. 2 (November 1, 2007 ): 171–98, doi:10.1177/1078087407305175; Yingying Tian and Cecilia Wong, “Large Urban Redevelopment Projects and Sociospatial Stratification in Shanghai,” in China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Urbanism, ed. Fulong Wu, Routledge Contemporary China Series 26 (New York: Routledge, 2007 ), 210–31; Shenjing He, “NewBuild Gentrification in Central Shanghai: Demographic Changes and Socioeconomic Implications,” Population, Space and Place 16, no. 5 (September 1, 2010): 345–61, doi:10.1002 /psp.548 . The author finds this general usage of ‘gentrification’ not specific enough in its description of the transformation that happened. In this manner, the entirety of Chinese cities undergoing renewal and redevelopment is undergoing ‘gentrification.’ The development of the term ‘gentrification’ will be further elaborated in this chapter and the following two chapters. 13 The concept of the ‘urban loophole,’ as elaborated in the introduction, forms the framework around which the chapters in this study are conducted. ‘Urban loophole’ is defined as a mechanism for urban spatial production that results from gaps, absences, or exceptions in the political economy, and gives rise to spatial opportunities in the city. Its products are therefore spatial. The existence of such a mechanism mediates and cushions the impact of rapid change. The concept is used to explain the rapidness of China’s economic transition and global integration while maintaining its political status quo. 14 Even with its resources of commercial building stock on large blocks, Huangpu’s less industrious and more conservative bureaucrats, mired in institutional legacies, were unable to propel development as Jing’an’s industrious and progressive ones have. 15 As elaborated in the previous chapter, David Harvey calls the development of heritage as a process ‘heritageisation’ and links it to “the production of identity, power and authority.” David C. Harvey, “Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 7, no. 4 (January 1, 2001): 337, doi:10.1

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1 Interview with residents, 2014 . 2 Yingqiong Qiu 裘颖琼, “静安别墅门禁系统还居民清净 封闭管理并非‘一刀切’ [Jing’an Villas Entry Guard System Gives Back Quiet to the Residents, Closed Management Not ‘one Size Fit All’],” 东方网, November 29, 2013 , http://news.163 .com/13 /1129/22 / 9ESP7 P9A00014AEE .html. 3 Ibid. 4 Interview, 2014 . 5 Ibid. 6 “上海静安别墅内市民养鹰当宠物 有许可证才能饲 养 [Citizen Rising Hawk as Pet in Shanghai Jing’an Villas],” October 11, 2012, http://newhouse.sh.soufun.com/201210 -11/8736892 .htm. 7 ‘Adaptive governance’ has been characterized as the flexibility of the state under a transitional economy that has been crucial to its resilience in the face of simultaneous economic liberalization and the maintenance of the political status quo. See Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adaptive Governance in China,” in Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, ed. Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard Contemporary China Series 17 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011), 1–27. 8 Kyle Long, “Shanghai: Where Skyscrapers Loom, a Street-Food Paradise Thrives,” The Guardian, December 13, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/travel/blog/2012 / dec/13/shangahi-street-food-jingan-villas. 9 Debbie Yong, “Jing’an Villa—the New Tianzifang?,” CNN Travel, April 23, 2011, http://travel.cnn.com/shanghai/life/jingan-villa-newtianzifang-351872 . 10 ‘Old Shanghai,’ as elaborated in the previous chapter, is a term often used synonymously for pre-1949 Shanghai. Rather than the more neutral ‘modern era’ Shanghai, it implies nostalgic sentiment towards the historic image of the city. 11 Wei Wang 王蔚, “藏在老弄堂的‘文化部落’ [’Cultural Tribe’ Hidden in the Old Lilong],” 文汇报 Wenhui News, April 14 , 2010, http://whb. eastday.com/w/20100414 /u1a722857.html. 12 The term ‘gentrification’ describes the process for the exchange of poorer occupants for wealthier ones in a neighborhood. It is accompanied by certain stylistic or lifestyle preferences. The sociologist Ruth Glass first used the term ‘gentrification’ to describe changes to the neighborhood in London’s Islington area in the 1960 s. See Ruth Glass and Centre for Urban Studies, London; Aspects of Change (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1964). The concept has been expanded by social scientists since, using cases from developed world cities. The ‘supply side theory of gentrification’ explains the phenomenon through the concept of ‘rent gap’ or under-evaluated real estate that has enabled their conversion and subsequent re-valuation. The ‘demand side theory of gentrification’ explains the phenomenon in the context of transition to the post-industrial service and knowledge economy and the return of ‘yuppies’ to the cities from the suburbs. Later in the context of the neoliberalization of North America and UK , the relationship to the arts and cultural producers is also drawn, in assessing how the market used culture to justify its urban developments that result in social polarization and spatial segregation. See, for example, David Ley, “Liberal Ideology and the Postindustrial City,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70, no. 2 (June 1, 1980): 238–58; David Ley, “Alternative Explanations for InnerCity Gentrification: A Canadian Assessment,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 76, no. 4

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080/13581650120105534 . 16 Kori Rutcosky, “Adaptive 23 Ping Sun 孙平, “第一章经济技术开发区规划 第三节虹桥 Reuse as Sustainable Architecture in Contemporary 经济技术开发区 [Chapter 1 Economic and Technological Shanghai” (Master’s Thesis for Asian Studies, Lund Univer- Development Zone Planning Section 3 Hongqiao Economsity, 2007 ); Wan-Lin Tsai, “The Redevelopment and Pres- ic and Technological Development Zone],” in 上海城市规 ervation of Historic Lilong Housing in Shanghai” (Master’s 划志 [Annal of Shanghai Urban Planning], vol. 9 第九篇新 Thesis for Historic Preservation, University of Pennsylvania, 区开发和重点地区改建规划 [Development of new districts 2008); Juan Guan 管娟 and Meimei Guo 郭玖玖, “上海中心 and key districts upgrade plans], 12 vols. (Shanghai 上海: 城区城市更新机制演进研究—以新天地、8号桥和田子坊为例 上海社会科学院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Scienc[The operation mechanism of urban regeneration in es Press, 1999), http://www.shtong.gov.cn/node2 /node Shanghai downtown-a study of Xintiandi, Bridge 8 and 2245/node64620/node64633 /node64725/node64731/ Tianzifang],” 上海城市规划 [Shanghai Urban Planning Re- userobject1ai58549.html. 24 “The right to use No. 26 view], no. 04 (2011): 53–59. 17 Shenjing He and Fulong land lot of 12,900 square meters in Hongqiao Economic Wu, “Property-Led Redevelopment in Post-Reform China: and Technological Development Zone for 50 years was A Case Study of Xintiandi Redevelopment Project in successfully sold out at the price of USD 28 million.” Shanghai,” 2005, doi:10.1111/j.0735 -2166.2005.00222.x; “Shanghai Hongqiao Economic and Technological DevelAlbert Wing Tai Wai, “Place Promotion and Iconography opment Zone,” accessed May 10, 2014 , http://www. in Shanghai’s Xintiandi,” Habitat International, Urbaniza- shanghai.gov.cn/shanghai/node27118 /node27873 /node tion in China, A Special Issue, 30, no. 2 (June 2006): 27997/n31510/n31511/u22ai73220.html. 25 The J. C. Man­ 245–60, doi:10.1016 /j.habitatint.2004 .02 .002; Xuefei darin was designed by Singaporean architect, Zhao Zi’an Ren, “Forward to the Past: Historical Preservation in Glo- [赵子安], who was involved in a number of other designs balizing Shanghai,” City & Community 7, no. 1 (March 1, for the first wave of towers in the district. 26 Shipeng 2008): 23–43 , doi:10.1111/j.1540 -6040.2007.00239.x; Sha 沙似鹏 and Annals of Shanghai Office 上海市地方 You-Ren Yang and Chih-hui Chang, “An Urban Regenera- 志办公室, “古典俄罗斯风格的中苏友好大厦（上海展览中心） tion Regime in China: A Case Study of Urban Redevelop- [Classic Russian Styled Sino-Chinese Friendship Complex ment in Shanghai’s Taipingqiao Area,” Urban Studies 44 , (Shanghai Exhibition Center],” in 上海名建筑志 [Annals of no. 9 (August 1, 2007 ): 1809–26, doi:10.1080/00420 Shanghai’s Famous Architecture] (Shanghai 上海: 上海社 980701507787. 18 Hiroyuki Shinohara, “Mutations of 会科学院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Tianzifang, Taikang Road, Shanghai,” in The 4th Interna- Press, 2005), http://www.shtong.gov.cn/node2 /node71 tional Conference of the International Forum of Urban- 994 /node81772 /node81774 /node81784 /userobject1ai ism (IFoU) (The New Urban Question—Urbanism beyond 108997.html. 27 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, Neoliberalism, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2009), The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Post-Contemporary http://newurbanquestion.ifou.org/proceedings/index. Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). html; Chunbin Guo 郭淳彬, “旧城居住区自发性改造问题研 28 The term “Dragon’s Head” referred to Shanghai as the 究—以田子坊为例 [Study of Organic Conversions in Old City head of the Yangtze River Delta, a region that was comResidential Neighborhoods—case study of Tianzifang],” mercially vibrant and for which further opening was alin 转型与重构 — 2011中国城市规划年会论文集 (转型与重构— lowed in the accelerated economic liberalization that took 2011中国城市规划年会, Nanjing 南京: 中国城市规划学会、南 place after 1992. 29 It is often reported, not just in news 京市政府, 2011), 13. 19 The results of the use of urban media but also in academic papers from the mid-1990 s, loophole through the creative alibi will be further elabo- that the “以浦东开发开放为龙头，进一步开放长江滑岸城市， rated in the following chapters. 20 The deployment of 尽快把上海建成国际经济、金融、贸易中心之一，带动长江三 media as PR strategy in the market economy exemplifies 角洲和整十长江流域地区经济发展。[With the development the growing entrepreneurial role the local party-state and and opening of Pudong as the Dragon’s Head, and with its affiliates are playing in the market. At the same time the further developing of the Yangtze River cities, Shangthe party-state is refining the ideological origins of pro- hai has been created as one of the global economic, fipaganda in the centrally planned economy. For an analy- nancial and commercial centers, catalyzing the economic sis of the Chinese party-state’s manipulation of contem- growth of the Yangtze River Delta and further upporary advertising, see Geremie R. Barmé, “CCPTM and stream.]” 30 Shanghai Urban Planning and Design ReADCULT PRC ,” The China Journal, no. 41 (January 1, 1999): search Institute 上海市城市规划设计研究院 Shanghai Ur1–23 , doi:10.2307/2667585 . See also Murong Xuecun, ban Planning and Design Institute, ed., 循迹启新-上海城市 “The New Face of Chinese Propaganda,” New York Times, 规划演进 [Follow the tracks and initiate the new: EvoluDecember 22, 2013. 21 Renlong Zhang 张人龙, “第三章立 tion of Shanghai’s Urban Planning] (Shanghai 上海: 同济 交工程 第二节人行立交工程 [Chapter 3 Bridges, Section 2 大学出版社 Tongji University Press, 2007 ), 135. 31 “静安南 Pedestrian Crossing Bridges],” in 上海市政工程志 [Annals 京西路规划（摘要）Jing’an West Nanjing Road Planning,” of Shanghai Urban Construction], vol. 3 第三篇市区桥梁、 Jing’an District Government, June 2002, http://www.jin立交 [Bridges], 34 vols. (Shanghai 上海: 上海社会科学院出 gan.gov.cn/jagk/csgh/ztgh/200610/t20061031_32753.htm. 版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1998), 32 Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Insti538 . 22 Jun Hu 胡俊 and Guangxuan Zhang 张广晅, tute 上海市城市规划设计研究院 Shanghai Urban Planning “ 90 年代的大规模城市开发 — 以上海市静安区实证研究为例 and Design Institute, 循迹启新-上海城市规划演进 [Follow [Large-scale urban development in the 1990 s—the Case the tracks and initiate the new: Evolution of Shanghai’s of Development of Shanghai’s Jing’an District],” 城市规划 Urban Planning], 135. 33 Ibid. 34 Jun Qu 瞿钧, “第一章 汇刊 Urban Planning Forum, no. 04 (2000): 47–54 + 80. 南京西路商业街 [Chapter 1 West Nanjing Lu Commercial

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迩的十大名街, 高档、时尚购物街—南京西路 [Chapter 1 Ten Famous Streets, Section High-Ended, Fashionable Shopping Street—West Nanjing Lu],” in 上海名街志 [Annals of Shanghai’s Famous Streets] (Shanghai 上海: 上海社会科学 院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2004), 1084 . 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Interview with district’s economic council, 2012 . 46 In the 2001 document The Strategy for Jing’an’s Double High Standards the densification of offices and commercial spaces was pronounced as an economic imperative given the district’s lack of land resources. See “静安区双高战略指标 体系（2006 年-2010 年）[The Strategy for Jing’an’s Double High Standards].” 47 The term ‘centrality’ derives from Walter Christaller’s study from the 1930 s on how urban settlements, or ‘central places [zentralen Orte]’ evolved, and their size and spatial distribution in relation to each other, as he studied in Southern Germany. See Walter Christaller, Die Zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland: Eine Ökonomisch-Geographische Untersuchung Über Die Gesetzmässigkeit Der Verbreitung Und Entwicklung Der Siedlungen Mit Städtischen Funktionen (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1933); Edwin von Böventer, “Walter Christaller’s Central Places and Peripheral Areas: The Central Place Theory in Retrospect†,” Journal of Regional Science 9, no. 1 (April 1, 1969): 117–24 , doi:10.1111/j.1467-9787.1969. tb01447.x. Since the 1990 s, the term has been used also in relation to theories of ‘networked cities’ and graphic theory, which posit that polycentric cities spatially simulate economic relationships in large firms in the collaborations necessary for the post-industrial, knowledge-based service economy. See, for example, Michael D. Irwin and Holly L. Hughes, “Centrality and the Structure of Urban Interaction: Measures, Concepts, and Applications,” Social Forces 71, no. 1 (September 1, 1992): 17–51, doi:10.2307/2579964; David F. Batten, “Network Cities: Creative Urban Agglomerations for the 21st Century,” Urban Studies 32 , no. 2 (March 1, 1995): 313–27, doi: 10.1080/00420989550013103. In this text, ‘centrality’ is used to denote Jing’an as an important and connected commercial hub in the metropolitan area of Shanghai. 48 For an elaboration of the centrality’s role in Shanghai’s economic restructuring, see Wufu 马吴斌 Ma, “上海中心城 区生产性服务业多中心空间结构研究 [Research on the ‘Polycentric’ Spatial Structure of Shanghai Producer Service Industry]” (硕士 Masters Thesis, 上海师范大学 Shanghai Normal University, 2009). 49 China’s sheer size and administrative pecking order dwarves many other management structures. 50 Linxia Chen 陈琳霞, “上海城区竞争力 研究 [Study of Shanghai Urban Districts’ Competitiveness]” (博士 PhD Thesis, 复旦大学 Fudan University, 2004). 51 Modern era industrial development in proximity to the Suzhou Creek had since 1949, become also interspersed in the housing neighborhoods, creating a chaotic mixture of industrial-residential area as a manifestation of the planned economy’s emphasis on production at the expense of urban planning. See the following chapter for details of the development processes for the northern part of Jing’an district. 52 “上海南京西路整体规划出炉 [Shanghai West Nanjing Lu Comprehensive Plan Fresh from the Oven],” 解放日报 Liberation Daily, February 21, 2002, http://www.curb.com.cn/pageshow.asp?id_forum=

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Street],” in 静安区志 [Annals of JIng’an District], vol. 5 第 五编商业 Commerce, 34 vols. (Shanghai 上海: 上海社会科 学院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1996). 35 Ibid. 36 Caiqin Chen 陈彩琴 and Zhisheng Yu 余致胜, “三、专业特色街道, 美食休闲街—吴江路 ［Chapter 3 Specialty Industries Streets, Section Food and Recreational Street—Wujiang Lu],” in 上海名街志 [Annals of Shanghai’s Famous Streets] (Shanghai 上海: 上海社会科学 院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2004), 1084 . 37 From interviews with former employees of such state-owned factories, the trajectory of these manufacturing sites whose former importance was reflected in their central locations, was rapidly eroded in the 1990 s economic reforms to the SOE s. One of the factories, for example, that as of 2014 was the location of a large Uniqlo on West Nanjing Lu, had been one of the many production sites of the Shanghai Instruments Bureau. The Instruments Bureau itself had consolidated and absorbed many of the privately owned manufacturing enterprises that were nationalized in the 1950 s, inheriting their skilled workers. The bulk of these small-scale, but labor-intensive and highly skilled productions were located in central locations, and these small factories specialized and supplied the entire nation’s value chain, often with few rivals outside of Shanghai. In the late 1960 s and early 1970 s, due to Cold War fears, decentralization of important industries away from the urban center in case of foreign invasion, often forcibly relocated a proportion of Shanghai’s factories, with their equipment and labor, into inland and rural sites. Although a small percentage relative to the forcible relocation of the students in the same era, both actions helped to depopulate the overcrowded cities with little infrastructural development to accommodate the growing population. However, the return of this displaced demographic, together with the return of the students, would also contribute to the housing demand following liberalization. In the 1980 s, with the national subsidization of domestic electronics and materials developments, which would evolve out of a lot of the skillsets of these existing industries, these specialized manufacturing hubs enjoyed a short period of national privilege. But with accelerated economic liberalization and the assigning of Shanghai as the nation’s exemplary site for global integration, joint ventures and foreign enterprises with much advanced know-how as well as financial resources would rapidly out-compete these domestic industries. Together with the SOE reforms of the 1990 s, privatization of the assets would also motivate real estate development as a means of institutional survival. 38 Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Institute 上海市城市规划设计研究院 Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Institute, 循迹启新-上海城市规划演进 [Follow the tracks and initiate the new: Evolution of Shang­ hai’s Urban Planning], 148 . 39 “静安区双高战略指标体系 （2006 年-2010 年）[The Strategy for Jing’an’s Double High Standards],” Jing’an District Government, 2001, http:// www. jingan.gov.cn/jagk /csgh/ztgh/ 20 0 610 /t 20 0 61011_32755 .htm. 40 Document shared by Professor Zhu Jieming of the National University of Singapore, which he received from the Planning Bureau of Jing’an in 2000. 41 Guobing Wang 王国滨 and Jun Tao 陶俊, “一、闻名遐

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000611. 53 Shanghai Jing’an District Government 上海市 静安区人民政府 et al., 打造上海世界级城市的都心 －“静安南 京路发展规划” 国际咨询报告 [Making Shanghai’s International-Graded City Center—“Jing’an Nanjing Lu Development Plan” International Consultancy Report], 2002 , http://www.shjagh.gov.cn/seconds/newsinfo.asp?id=141. 54 Ibid., 21. 55 It is notable that Lujiazui of the 1990 s replaced the Concession-era Bund as the financial district of contemporary Shanghai. 56 Michael E. Porter and Business School Publishing Corporation Harvard, On Competition, Updated and expanded, Harvard Business Review Book Series (Boston, MA : Harvard Business School Pub, 2008). 57 It is notable that the bureaucrats of Shanghai are competent and capable in the country. 58 Matthew W. Rofe, “‘I Want to Be Global’: Theorising the Gentrifying Class as an Emergent Elite Global Community,” Urban Studies 40, no. 12 (November 1, 2003): 2511–26, doi:10.1080/0042098032000136183. 59 The following two chapters will elaborate more on the significance of the creative industries cluster establishment as manifestation of the urban loopholes of exceptions under economic transition. 60 Yinzhi Luan 栾吟之 and Wenjing Wu 武文静, “南京西路如何成为国际购物标志性地区之一? [How Did West Nanjing Lu Become One of the Iconic International Shopping Areas?],” 解放日报 Liberation Daily, September 25, 2006, http://jfdaily.eastday.com/eastday/ node4 /node101/node14261/u1a170714 .html. 61 Peiyun Mao 茅佩云, “把静安南京路打造成中国的第五大道 [Making West Nanjing Lu to Be China’s Fifth Avenue],” 第一财经日 报 First Finance Daily, July 10, 2009, http://money.163. com/09/0710/02 /5DR24IV700253 B0 H.html. 62 Ibid. 63 “Shanghai Jing’an District`s Nanjing Road Set to Become the Fifth Avenue,” The Official Shanghai China Travel Website, October 15, 2007, http://www.meet-in-shanghai.net/news_detail2007.php?id=454 . 64 “威海路再变脸： 打造文化传媒一条街 [Weihai Road Makeover Again: Creating a Street for Cultural Media],” 互联网, March 31, 2008 , http://sh.pclady.com.cn/brand/review/ 0803 / 265273 . html. 65 Huifang Chen 陈慧芳, Jianyi Hu 胡剑毅, and Jukang Jin 金钜康, “三、专业特色街道, 上海汽配第一街—威 海路 [Chapter 3 Specialty Industries Streets, Section Car Parts Street—Weihai Lu],” in 上海名街志 [Annals of Shanghai’s Famous Streets] (Shanghai 上海: 上海社会科学院出 版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2004), http://www.shtong.gov.cn/node 2 /node 71994 /node 71 995 /node71999 /node72013 /userobject1ai77399.html. 66 The year 1949, which saw the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC ) under the leadership of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP ) is, in China’s periodization, the year of ‘Liberation [解放].’ 67 Guwei Zhang 张谷微, “威海路欲变身‘麦迪逊大道’ 老建筑修缮与 开发同步 [Weihai Road Will Become the ‘Madison Avenue’—Simultaneously New Developments and Old Architecture Renovations],” 新闻晨报 Morning News, April 16, 2008 , http://xwcb.eastday.com/c/20080416/u1a421602. html. 68 Jing’an Villas’ address is West Nanjing Lu Lane Number 1125. 69 “威海路696 ·开放艺术 Weihai 696 Open Art,” Aling的日志, June 23, 2007, http://jollierz.blog.163. com/blog/static/3219632420075231074912 /. 70 Ninghua Song 宋宁华, “上海最大新式里弄住宅静安别墅等整体修 缮探访记 [Visit to Shanghai’s Largest New-Style Lilong

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Jing’an Villa Awaiting Upgrade],” 新民晚报 New Citizen Evening News, October 28 , 2009, http://sh.xinmin.cn/ sqkb/ 2009 / 10 / 28 / 2815322 .html. 71 “静安别墅 2010 [Jing’an Villas 2010],” 第一财经周刊 CBN Weekly, December 7, 2010, http://finance.ifeng.com/news/20101207/ 3018536.shtml. 72 Shiling Zheng 郑时龄, 上海近代建筑风 格 [The evolution of Shanghai architecture in modern times] (Shanghai 上海: 上海教育出版社 Shanghai Education Press, 1999). 73 Unfortunately, author was not able to procure this plan. 74 The Luwan district merged with the Huangpu district in 2011, and the new district is called Huangpu district. 75 For elaborations for the conceptual framework for the conservation streets, see the previous chapter. 76 Jiang Wu 伍江 and Lin Wang 王林, 历史文化 风貌区保护规划编制与管理：上海城市保护的实践 [The establishment and management of the Historic Cultural Features and Styles Districts Conservation Plan: Cases from Shanghai’s Conservation] (Shanghai 上海: 同济大学 出版社 Tongji University Press, 2007 ). 77 The term ‘modern era’ is used throughout the text to denote the physical built environment as well as the sensibility of the period in Shanghai’s history prior to 1949, the year of China’s Liberation. The term ‘Republican-era’ is a more specific period within the modern era, largely denoting the period in the 1920 s and 1930 s and the styles of that time. 78 静 安区城市规划管理局 Jing’an District Administration for Urban Planning, “静安区保护街坊保护与更新规划 [Plan for the Conservation and Renewal of Jing’an District Conservation Neighborhoods],” February 10, 2004 , http://www. shjagh.gov.cn/seconds/newsinfo.asp?id=153 . 79 Lide Wu 吴立德, “优秀建筑整体搬家 静安区力保老街坊 [Excellent Architecture Move in Entirety, Jing’an District Ensure to Protect Old Neighborhoods],” 城市导报 City News, September 11, 2003 , http://law.eastday.com/epublish/gb/ paper115 /20030911 /class011500003 /hwz640661.htm. 80 Jing Wang 王婧, “静安区规划保护老街坊 优秀历史建筑 整体搬家 [Jing’an District Ensure to Protect Old Neighborhoods, Excellent Architecture Move in Entirety],” 青年报 Youth Daily, August 28 , 2003, http://news.sina.com.cn/ c/2003 -08 -28 /0922649638s.shtml; Wu 吴立德, “优秀建 筑整体搬家 静安区力保老街坊 [Excellent Architecture Move in Entirety, Jing’an District Ensure to Protect Old Neighborhoods].” 81 The reporters learned from the planning bureau that “这片保护街坊周边的大部分道路将有待于进一 步拓宽、辟通，道路改建时，现代建筑全部或部分拆掉，较好 历史建筑予以保留，道路瓶颈处优秀历史建筑将采取整体平移 的处理方式 [when most of the roads next to these conservation neighborhoods are awaiting the next level of widening, opening and reconstructions, modern architecture will be entirely or partly demolished, and the relatively good historic architecture will be kept, Excellent Historic Architecture at road bottlenecks will undergo moving in entirety as a method of resolution.] 82 Ang 李安 Lee, Lust, caution 色戒, video recording (Universal, 2008). 83 In 2010, a website that advertised an apartment unit for sale on West Nanjing Lu around the corner from Jing’an Villas was overt in its use of images from Lust, Caution to advertise. The description for the apartment features was preceded by a long description verifying the “cultural commercial value” of the location. See http://blog.soufun. com/30297150/10704060/articledetail.htm 84 http://

主’静安别墅行 [Thai Princess Visits Jing’an Villas],” 新闻晨 报 Morning News, April 28 , 2014 , sec. 社区报 Neighborhood, http://114 .80.76.143:8080/cb-njxl/html/2014 -04 / 28/content_33010.htm. 100 “静安别墅不是田子坊！[Jing’an Villas Is Not Tianzifang!],” 宽带山KDS, November 2010, http://wap.kdslife.com/t / 1 / 15 / 59 1612 3 /?u= 0 &p= 1&look=&sc=235 &rnd=53 c1615 ead. 101 “静安别墅元老级 咖啡馆 [Jing’an Villas’ Coffeehouse Grandee],” June 13 , 2011, http://www.myliving.cn/special_list/32 /971/2011_ 06_ 13_ 14_ 34_ 31 .htm. 102 Interviews, 2011 , 2012 . 103 Wei Wang 王蔚, “藏在老弄堂的‘文化部落’ [’Cultural Tribe’ Hidden in the Old Lilong],” 文汇报 Wenhui News, April 14 , 2010, http://whb.eastday.com/w/20100414 / u1a722857.html. 104 Ibid. 105 “腔调比人流量更重要的地 方 [the sensibility is more important than the people flow in the place]” is the reason cited by small entrepreneurs for the selection of Jing’an Villas as the place for their “showrooms.” See “静安别墅2010 [Jing’an Villas 2010].” 106 Interviews with Jing’an Villas’ small entrepreneurs, 2012. 107 Ibid. 108 Yang Yang 杨扬 and Xiaoxin Lu 卢晓 欣, “上海城市进化：静安别墅的未来在哪里 [Urban Evolution of Shanghai: Where Is the Future of Jing’an Villas],” 上海 壹周 Shanghai Weekly, March 30, 2011, http://sh.sina.com. cn/news/e/ 2011 - 03 - 30 / 1534177831_ 2 .html. 109 The 2014 Economist issue’s cover is titled “China loses its allure” highlighting the increasing barriers for multinationals to stay competitive in China and an ensuing article in the same issue highlights the growing sophistication of Chinese consumers, making up a market that has great potential. “China Loses Its Allure,” The Economist, January 25 , 2014 , http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/ 21595001-life-getting-tougher-foreign-companies-thosewant-stay-will-have-adjust-china; “Doing It Their Way,” The Economist, January 25, 2014 , http://www.economist. com/news/briefing/21595019 -market-growing-furiouslygetting-tougher-foreign-firms-doing-it-their-way. 110 Multiple interviews in 2012–2013 with Jing’an Villas’ small entrepreneurs who described their products and services with these characteristics, and who emphasized their distinction from other enterprises. 111 For details please see Chapter 3 . 112 重庆旅游新闻网 Chongqing Tourism News, “静安别墅，理想的秘密社区 ［Jing’an Villas, the Ideal Secret Quartier”],” Http://Www.cqtour.org, November 1, 2011, http://www.cqtour.org/a/zhusu/20111 101/337.html. 113 “静安别墅2010 [Jing’an Villas 2010].” 114 Ping Lin, “Chinese Diaspora ‘at Home’: Mainlander Taiwanese in Dongguan and Shanghai,” China Review 11, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 43–64 . 115 Interviews with Jing’an Villas’ small entrepreneurs, 2011, 2012. 116 Lu, “Nostalgia for the Future,” 178 . 117 This mode of knowingly risking possible fines operates even in the seemingly more formal developments, which will be elaborated in the next two chapters. 118 The large block surrounded by larger streets to the north and south of the block, and the fishbone structure of the lanes of the lilong creates a condition of graduated privacy. The houses at the end of the cul-de-sac secondary lane are the most private of the public spaces. 119 Gregory Byrne Bracken, The Shanghai Alleyway House, Routledge Contemporary China Series 95 (New York: Routledge, 2013). 120 Chunlan Zhao, “From Shikumen to New-Style: A Rereading of Lilong Hous-

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afso.net/projects/jia-hotel-lobby/ 85 “Epicure to Close All Three Restaurants,” December 15 , 2013 , http:// www.soshiok.com/print/content/epicure-close-all-threerestaurants. 86 Books published from theses show the interest in topics on how historical urban governance informs such governance during the contemporary period, namely the economic transition of the 1990 s when the market economy resumed its developments. Kai Yao 姚凯, 寻求变革之道 — 基于上海城市演进过程的规划管理创新探索 [Searching for the Way for Transformation—Exploration of Urban Planning and Governance Innovation in Shanghai’s Urban Evolution] (Shanghai 上海: 上海科学技术出版 社 Shanghai Science and Technology Press, 2005). Yuqiang Lian 练育强, “近代上海城市规划法制研究 [Study of Urban Planning Law in Modern Shanghai]” (博士 PhD Thesis, 华东政法大学 East China University of Politics and Law, 2009). 87 Documents from the Public Works Commission of the former International Settlement, and that from the Conseil d’Administration Municipale of the former French Concession, were first translated and then documented to garner the governance structures as well as the development history of Concession-era Shanghai. 88 Qian Sun 孙倩, Jiang Wu 伍江, and Hesheng Zhao 赵 和生, 上海近代城市公共管理制度与空间建设 [Shanghai’s Modern Era Urban Construction Administration System and Spatial Development], 第1版 (Nanjing 南京: 东南大学 出版社 Southeast University Press, 2009). 89 Bubbling Well Road, as known simply as ‘Horse Road [马路],’ denoting the width of the then newly built road, following its straightening. 90 Shanghai grew quickly under its status as a concession city beginning in the 1850 s, open not only to refugees escaping the Taiping Rebellion of 1860 s against the Qing Dynasty but also to mercantile influx from the southeastern coastal areas. 91 It is interesting to note that in the contemporary reportage of the Jing’an Villas, connections of the development to these modern era notables are drawn on to authenticate the importance of the place. See Meng Li 李萌, “77岁静安别墅要‘恢复青春’ [77 Year Old Jing’an Villas will ‘Recover Its Youth’],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, July 2 , 2009, http:// news.163 .com/09/0702 /10/5D78LEOB000120GR .html. 92 Hanchao Lu, “Nostalgia for the Future: The Resurgence of an Alienated Culture in China,” Pacific Affairs 75, no. 2 (July 1, 2002): 169–86, doi:10.2307/4127181. 93 See 重庆 旅游新闻网 Chongqing Tourism News. 2011. “静安别墅，理 想的秘密社区 ［Jing’an Villas, the Ideal Secret Quartier”].” November 1. http://www.cqtour.org/a/zhusu/20111101/ 337.html [in Chinese] 94 Tales abounded in the 1940 s of the indulgences by the clan, exemplified by the story of Kong’s second daughter’s installation of the first modern toilet in Chongqing during the war, using laborers to carry up buckets of water to indulge the flushing when piped water was not installed. 95 Interviews with Jing’an Villas’ small entrepreneurs, 2012 . 96 Ibid. 97 Tong Kong 孔 同, “上海 静安别墅将再现原生态海派风情 [Shanghai’s Jing’ an Villas Will Soon Recover Its Original ‘Haipai’ Disposition],” 新闻晚报 Evening News, July 1, 2009, http:// xwwb.eastday.com/x/20090701/u1a593808 .html. 98 “静 安别墅 弄堂商业的野蛮生长 [Jing’an Villas the Wild Growth of Longtang Businesses],” 壹报通, July 4 , 2013 , http:// www.yibaotong.com/news/article-6059.html. 99 “‘泰国公

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ing in Modern Shanghai,” The Journal of Architecture 9, no. 1 (2004): 49–76 , doi:10.1080/136023604200019 7853. 121 Interviews with Jing’an Villas’ small entrepreneurs, 2012, 2013. 122 Ibid. 123 Interviews with Jing’an Villas’ small entrepreneurs, 2012. 124 See the chapter on the Cultural Street in the development of the conservation policies in Shanghai and their impacts. 125 “静安别墅 2010 [Jing’an Villas 2010].” 126 Yang 杨扬 and Lu 卢晓 欣, “上海城市进化：静安别墅的未来在哪里 [Urban Evolution of Shanghai: Where Is the Future of Jing’an Villas].” 127 In 2000, for example, the founder of what would become the first outlet of contemporary healthy cuisine started his Element 72 juice bar on West Nanjing Lu. It would grow enormously successful in tapping into a yet un-fulfilled market. 128 Paul Manning, Semiotics of Drink and Drinking, Pap / Psc edition (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). 129 Interview, 2012, 2013. 130 Mu Qing 青牧 and Leilei Huang 黄蕾蕾, “静安别墅，市井与文艺的混搭 [Jing’an Villas, the mix of Urban Life and Arts and Culture],” 生活周刊 Life Weekly, December 14 , 2010, http://www. why.com.cn/epublish/node 32682 /node 37030 /user. 131 “Gentrification in Shanghai,” Shanghai Monthly, October 12, 2010, http://www.shanghaimonthly.info/blog/? p=157. 132 Interview, 2012 , 2013 . 133 “繁华都市里净土 上海闹中取静的怀旧老街 [Paradise inside the Bustling City, Quiet and Peace in the Nostalgic Old Streets of Shanghai],” 时尚传媒集团, October 17, 2013, http://xm.ifeng.com/xmlv you/zoubianzhongguo/detail_2013_10/17/1346749_0.shtml. 134 “静安别墅不是田子坊！[Jingg坊！RL ”:”http://wap.kdslife.com/t 135 The projects Bridge 8 and M50 will be discussed in the next chapter. 136 Shinohara, “Mutations of Tianzifang, Taikang Road, Shanghai”; Guan 管娟 and Guo 郭玖玖, “上海中心城区城市更新机制演进研究—以新天 地、8号桥和田子坊为例 [The operation mechanism of urban regeneration in Shanghai downtown-a study of Xintiandi, Bridge 8 and Tianzifang]”; Qingchang Chen 陈青长, “浅谈田子坊的再生模式 [Talking about the Regenerative Mode of Tianzifang],” 中外建筑 Chinese and Overseas Architecture, no. 03 (2012): 87–89. 137 Nanxi Su, “Art Factories in Shanghai: Urban Regeneration Experience of Post-Industrial Districts” (Masters Thesis, National University of Singapore (NUS ), 2008). 138 Rutcosky, “Adaptive Reuse as Sustainable Architecture in Contemporary Shanghai.” 139 Until the late mid-2000 s, numerous streets in residential neighborhoods served as daily wet-markets, where everything from poultry to fish could be bought. It was in the 1990 s when economic liberalization began that the image of development and hygiene prompted the building of infrastructures for food and the relocation of markets indoors. It was part of the nationwide initiative of the 菜篮子工程 “Shopping Basket Project.” In usual cases for open-air wet-market cleanups from the street in Shanghai, promoted by former mayor Zhu Rongji, the city usually funds 40 %, the district 40 % and the market itself 20 %, in a scheme known as 442. But in the case of Taikang Lu, the Street Office under Director Zheng paid for the renovation of the old factory building and the relocation of the stalls. 140 “老郑和他的田子坊人物聚焦 [People Focus: Mr. Zheng and His Tianzifang],” 上海知青 网, April 13, 2009, http://zhiqingwang.shzq.org/hlj/newsBody.aspx?ID =1343 . 141 Fayong Shi, “Local Pro-Image

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Coalition And Urban Governance in China,” in Contemporary China Research Papers No 1 (Hong Kong Shue Yan University: Hong Kong Shue Yan University, 2010). 142 Wu had opened a famous crab-specialty restaurant, which was popular with cultural celebrities of the time. This network would be important to the involvement of the artists in Tianzifang. 143 Early industries included Kangfu Textiles [康福织造厂], Shanghai Tannery [上海皮厂二厂], Zhengfen Dye Factory [正丰漂染厂], Jianchen Fragrance Factory [鉴臣香精二厂], Tianran MSG Factory [天然味精厂]. See Yan Zuo 左琰 and Yanqing An 安延清, 上海弄堂工厂的 死与生 [Death and Life of the Shanghai Longtang Factory], 第1版, 工业遗产保护与再生丛书 (Shanghai 上海: 上海科 学技术出版社 Shanghai Science and Technology Press, 2012). 144 The work-unit, or danwei [单位], was part of the employment arrangement under the centrallyplanned economy. Each unit was responsible not only for the employment of its employees but also for provisioning housing and other welfare infrastructure for its employees. In large production sites that are built in the suburbs, new housing neighborhoods are built to accommodate the employees. In the city center, on the other hand, housing in proximity to each work-unit may be acquired by the work-unit to rent to its employees. 145 Many SOE s collapsed under pressure of marketization and competition following reform in the 1990 s, letting go of numerous workers, and leaving their properties as their remaining asset. 146 “老郑和他的田子坊人物聚焦 [People Focus: Mr. Zheng and His Tianzifang].” 147 The announcement for the demolition and renewal plan was made in the document “Shanghai Housing Resources Arrangement Document 315 沪房地资安 [2001] 315号]” from 2001. See also hui_kai1945 , “上海市打浦桥55 街坊变成打浦桥‘商厦’ ［Shanghai’s Dapuqiao’s Block 55 Turned into Dapuqiao’s ‘Commercial Tower’],” August 10, 2012, http://huikai.wap. blog.163.com/w2 /login.do?type=relogin&tip=-16 148 Xiaoxiao Wan 万晓晓, “张氏家族‘卷土’大陆 日月光集团 数千亿地产布局 [Zhang Family Returns to Mainland ASE Group Layout Hundred Millions of Real Estate],” 经济观察 网, July 9, 2010, http://www.eeo.com.cn/industry/real_estate/2010/07/08 /174950.shtml. 149 The word 坊, transliterated fang, is used to denote both the lane and the surrounding neighborhood that it traverses, often as the main artery. The name of the first artist mentioned by the Chinese historic book 史记 Records of the Historian, was called 田子方 Tian Zifang, which is homonymous with what Huang would name as Tianzifang. Thus, the name given to the new development was an evocation of the art links from Chinese history. 150 In January 2003, the District Ministry of Housing and Land Resources Administration announced that Block 55 would undergo demolition and displacement, or chaiqian [拆迁]. The development companies were the government-backed firm Shanghai Xincheng Development [上海兴城建设发展有限 公司] and the Wealthy Joy Co Ltd [和富乐国际有限公司], which was a firm listed in Hong Kong. In May 2003, the two firms, Shanghai Rutile Real Estate Development Co. [上海鼎荣房地产开发有限公司] and the Shanghai Dingle Real Estate Development Co. [上海鼎乐房地产开发有限公 司] were founded and registered in Shanghai with registered capital of USD 34 ,200,000 and USD 33,480,000

175 Jingxin Zhang 张靖欣, “田子坊‘民办’变‘公管’ [Tianzifang Changes From ‘people Organized’ to ‘state Managed’],” 上海商报 Shanghai Business Daily, April 17, 2008 , http:// www.shbiz.com.cn/Item/77431.aspx. 176 According to the law regarding Shanghai Residential Rental 上海市房屋 租赁条例, residential designated buildings are not permitted to be converted to non-residential uses. On Luwan District’s request, the Municipal Housing Ministry issued a special document “关于卢湾区田子坊地区转租实行审批制的 申请报告 [Regarding the Application for the System of Review and Approvals in order to Implement Luwan District Tianzifang Area’s Subleasing]” that permitted the procedures to be carried through legally, pending annual review and approval process. See “上海田子坊：‘三得利’的市场化 实践 [Shanghai Tianzifang: Putting Marketization to Practice in ‘Three for Benefits’],” 世联行 World Union, September 10, 2012, http://www.worldunion.com.cn/cn/chuban/ comdetail.aspx?nc=105005001002&id=100000205139 599. 177 “弄堂里的商业区 [Commerce Area in the Longtang].” 178 For properties such as Taikang Lu Lane 210, Numbers 5 and 7 that the district has acquired, its own management firm, Luwan Jingwei Group [卢湾经纬集团], would be directly reaping the profits of the market-rate rentals. But in gratitude for Wu’s connections that initiated the culturally led conversion, his firm retains the management right to the other SOE properties. See “上海田子 坊：‘三得利’的市场化实践 [Shanghai Tianzifang: Putting Marketization to Practice in ‘Three for Benefits’].” 179 Jing Zhang 张靖, “吴梅森：一人、一坊、一梦 ［Wu: One Person, One Neighborhood, One Dream],” 北京周报 Beijing Weekly, March 18 , 2010, http://www.beijingreview.com.cn/ 2009 news/renwu/ 2010 - 03 / 18 /content_ 255923 .htm. 180 Yingcai Xu 徐银才, “上海田子坊的前世今生 [Shanghai Tianzifang Past and Present],” 徐银才文学网, February 17, 2011, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_517081ff0100 pgnr. html. 181 In an open letter to the developers, a resident wrote that the compensation proposed for his 40 -square meter unit, a unit that was occupied by five people in his family, was 13,968 RMB , commenting that the land prices were 5–6 times already. After negotiation, the final compensation by the Displacement Unit was 625,600 RMB . Accordingly, that was the equivalent to five years of rental profits, not including taxes imposed, for a ground floor unit in the block north of Taikang Lu. See Jinlong 朱金龙 Zhu, “告台湾商人张洪本、张虔生 [To the Taiwanese Tycoons Richard Chang, Jason Chang],” November 20, 2013, http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-free-3823187-1.shtml. 182 “弄 堂里的商业区 [Commerce Area in the Longtang].” 183 Dong Yang 楊冬 and Fuqing Teng 滕芙勤, “层层转租 田子坊租金 超梅泰恒 [Sublease on Every Floor, Tianzifang Rentals Exceed the Golden Triangle],” 新闻晚报 Evening News, November 2 , 2011, http://big5.xinhuanet.com/gate/big5 / www.cnstock.com/index/gdbb/ 201111 / 1643374 .htm. 184 Jingxin Zhang 张靖欣, “田子坊再次成为城市发展的热点 [Tianzifang Again Becomes the Hotspot of Urban Development],” May 15, 2014 , http://www.shbiz.com.cn/Item/ 234038 .aspx. 185 Ibid. 186 To be noted is the time lag necessary for obtaining the different parts of the case vignette. The former director of the Street Office, Zheng, who started the project in 1997, did not, until 2009, talk extensively about the project that he began. He repre-

Chapter 4 The Midtown of China

respectively. Wealth Joy Co owns 99 % of the stocks in both. And the legal representative for both firms was that of the Taiwanese tycoon Richard Chang 张洪本. In August, the two firms received the Permission for Building Demolition and Displacement [房屋拆迁许可证,] for Block 55. 151 Jingxin Zhang 张靖欣, “原住民自行开发田子坊二期出租 [Original Residents Self-Organize to Redevelop for Rental Tianzifang Phase Two],” 上海商报 Shanghai Business Daily, September 19, 2006, http://www.shbiz.com.cn/Item/ 40016 .aspx. 152 Ibid. 153 Ibid. 154 Ibid. 155 Ibid. 156 Richard L. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 157 “田子坊 Tianzifang,” 中共黄浦区委门户网站 Website of the Huangpu District CCP, accessed May 23, 2014, http://www.lwdw. sh.cn/lwdj/infodetail/?infoid= 1 b 3 eb 816 - 59 ab- 4 bdaa3 ae-2ce5079 cc04 e&categoryNum=018 . 158 Guo 郭淳 彬, “旧城居住区自发性改造问题研究—以田子坊为例 [Study of Organic Conversions in Old City Residential Neighborhoods—case study of Tianzifang].” 159 “弄堂里的商业区 [Commerce Area in the Longtang],” 23 2009, http:// www. 360 doc.com/content/ 14 / 04 01 / 13 / 15398581 _ 365447857.shtml. 160 “创意产业园模式之思：投资拉动还 是依托人力,” 第一财经日报 First Finance Daily, August 30, 2006, http://www.bridge8.com/website/htmlcn/news_18 . htm. 161 Bridge 8 , a redevelopment of a former industrial compound owned by the automobile industry nearby, cost 40 million RMB initially to upgrade and is on a 20 year lease where a fast timeline allows for returns to kick in already after 5 years. An elaboration of the processes of industrial reuse is in the following chapter. 162 “吴梅 森:生意人?文化人?策划人? ［Wu: Businessman? Culturalist? Strategist?],” 政治论文发表, 中国论文网, (February 24 , 2012), http://www.xzbu.com/1/view-164542.htm. 163 Interview with Wang Lin, 2012. 164 Alex Lehnerer, Grand Urban Rules (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2009), 162 . 165 Ibid. 166 Interview with Wang Lin, 2012. 167 Even though Zheng received additional accolades and titles, the relief of his duty was a result of his direct confrontation of both the district mayor and other ministers in the effort to preserve the block. See “老郑和他的田子坊人物聚焦 [People Focus: Mr. Zheng and His Tianzifang].” 168 Xianshu Cheng 程贤淑, “‘石库门博览馆’风韵万种 人大代表呼吁保 护泰康路历史风貌区 [Shikumen Museum Multiple Charms, People’s Congress Rep Appeal to Protection of Taikang Road Historic Styles Area],” 新闻晚报 Evening News, January 26, 2005, http://old.jfdaily.com/gb/node2 /node17/ node38 /node51268 /node51275 /userobject1ai784658 . html. 169 Wang, Interview with Wang Lin. 170 According to Wang, “个体行为”is more important, followed by the market and taste. The government’s role is the 底线 or bottom line. Ibid. 171 Ibid. 172 The same unit was more than 10,000 RMB /month in 2009. “弄堂里的商业区 [Commerce Area in the Longtang].” 173 “房租上涨，上海创意 产业受阻 [Rents Rise, Obstacles to Shanghai’s Creative Industries],” 国际金融报 International Finance Daily, June 7, 2007, http://news.sohu.com/20070607/n250431907.shtml. 174 Jingxin Zhang 张靖欣, “是城保新模式还是违规居改非 [New Model for Urban Conservation or Illegal Residential Conversion],” 上海商报 Shanghai Business Daily, September 22, 2006, http://www.shbiz.com.cn/Item/40319.aspx.

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sented the local state and it is thus understandable that publicity would slow career advancement in the pecking order of cadres. In contrast, Wu, who was largely independent, was discussing the project, in 2006, because of his role as a publicly-engaged private entrepreneur, politically backed by the Street Office. 187 Yi Chen 陈弋, “静 安别墅 油天油地 恶劣环境让居民抱怨小区里开了80多家店铺 且多数无证 [Jing’an Villas, Covered with Cooking Grease: Degraded Environment Prompts Residents’ Complaint about 80 -Some Businesses Largely without License],” 青 年报 Youth Daily, November 30, 2010, http://www.why. com.cn/epublish/node4 /node34013/node34016/userobject7ai248802 .html. 188 “静安别墅不是田子坊！[Jingg 坊！RL ”:”http://wap.kdslife.com/t 189 Ibid. 190 Ibid. 191 Chen 陈弋, “静安别墅 油天油地 恶劣环境让居民抱怨小 区里开了80多家店铺且多数无证 [Jing’an Villas, Covered with Cooking Grease: Degraded Environment Prompts Residents’ Complaint about 80 -Some Businesses Largely without License].” 192 Qing 青牧 and Huang 黄蕾蕾, “静 安别墅，市井与文艺的混搭 [Jing’an Villas, the mix of Urban Life and Arts and Culture].” 193 Ye Zhi 职烨 and Yucheng He 贺雨程, “静安别墅这次又要怎么办？[Jing’an Villas What Should Be Done This Time?],” 申报, December 8 , 2011, http://data.jfdaily.com/a/2448588 .htm. 194 Chengying Jiang 姜晟颖, Ye 职烨 Zhi, and Chao 钱超 Qian, “若把静安 别墅变成田子坊你还会喜欢吗？[Would You Still like Jing’an Villas If It Is Turned into Tianzifang?],” 申江服务导报, December 8 , 2010, http://news.163.com/10/1208 /10/6NCGQNB700014AED .html. 195 Ye Zhi 职烨, “在静安别墅，文 艺的买卖有多难？ [At Jing’an Villas, How Difficult Is the Business of Culture and Arts?],” 申江服务导报 Shanghai Times, December 8 , 2010, http://news.163.com/10/1208 / 10/6NCGP2EC00014AED .html. 196 One entrepreneur said of the district’s management of the licensing: “其实 工商对于我们的管理只是睁一眼闭一眼，没有想要正真管。他 们都知道这里的状况，但是面子上的事情还是要做的 ［in reality the Industry and Commerce bureau manages us with only ‘open one eye close one eye’, they don’t really want to manage us. They all know the situation here, but we still have to do the things (i.e. not publicizing the small business and not opening too late) that are for saving face].” Ibid. 197 Ibid. 198 The influence of the residents was apparent in their ability to secure the upgrade of the tower: because rapid development of an adjacent highrise had impinged on the daylighting, their complaints led the district to try to ameliorate their grievances through cosmetic upgrades which in turn led to the fire. 199 Victor Shih, “Guest Post: Corruption May Undo China’s Economic Miracle,” Financial Times, accessed May 2, 2014 , http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/ 2011 / 08 / 19 /guestpost-corruption-may-undo-chinas-economic-miracle/. 200 “上海‘11·15’特大火灾事故中受查处的54 名事故责任人名 单 [List of 54 Responsible Persons under Investigation and Reprimand for the Shanghai ‘11–15’ Large Fire Disaster Incident],” 人民日报 People’s Daily, June 10, 2011, http:// www.chinasafety.gov.cn/newpage/Contents/Channel_ 5498 /2011/0610/134117/content_134117.htm. 201 “上海 城市进化论 如何平衡商业与文化 [Shanghai’s Evolution: How to equilibrate commerce and culture”,” 上海壹周 Shanghai Weekly, March 30, 2011, http://sh.sina.com.cn/ news/e/2011 -03 -30/1534177831.html. 202 Yang 杨扬

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and Lu 卢晓欣, “上海城市进化：静安别墅的未来在哪里 [Urban Evolution of Shanghai: Where Is the Future of Jing’an Villas].” 203 Debbie Yong, “Jing’an Villa—the New Tianzifang?,” CNN Travel, April 23 , 2011, http://travel.cnn. com/shanghai/life/jingan-villa-new-tianzifang- 351872 . 204 Denis Fred Simon and Detlef Rehn, “Innovation in China’s Semiconductor Components Industry: The Case of Shanghai,” Research Policy 16 , no. 5 (October 1987 ): 259–77, doi:10.1016 /0048 -7333(87 )90010 -2 . 205 Sylvia Bai, “A Tour of Shanghai’s Burgeoning Art Haven, Weihai Lu 696,” Blouin Art, October 8 , 2010, 696, http:// uk.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/277663/a-tour-of-shanghais-burgeoning-art-haven-weihai-lu-696 . 206 “Gen­ trification in Shanghai.” 207 Lisa Movius, “Whither 696 Weihai Lu?,” WSJ Blogs—Scene Asia, January 11, 2011, http://blogs.wsj.com/scene/ 2011 / 01 / 11 /whither- 696 weihai-lu/. 208 Jijun Cao 曹继军 and Weiqi Yan 颜维琦, “ 上海:事前征询群众意见 让旧区改造‘一路阳光’ [Shanghai: Consult the People Before, Transforming Old Districts ‘one Way Sunshine’],” 光明日报 Guangming Daily, August 17, 2011, http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2011 -08 /17/c_ 121870028 .htm. 209 Jiawen 邬佳文 Wu, Di 徐笛 Xu, and Jiejin 吴洁瑾 Wu, “静安别墅丝袜奶茶被勒令停业 [Jing’an Villas Denny House Milk Tea Closed down],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, November 25, 2011, http://sh.sina.com. cn/news/s/2011 -11 -25 /0807201421.html. 210 Meng Li 李萌, “静安别墅将保留有证店铺 其余85 家商铺将逐步关停 [Ji ng’an Villas Will Keep Licenced Shops, Other 85 Shops Will Be Closed],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, November 26 , 2011, http://dfdaily.eastday.com/d/20111126 / u1a941407.html. 211 Ibid. 212 Kyle Long, “Shanghai: Where Skyscrapers Loom, a Street-Food Paradise Thrives,” The Guardian, December 13, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/travel/blog/2012 /dec/13 /shangahi-street-foodjingan-villas. 213 The previous chapter elaborated on heritageisation in Shanghai, the development of fengmao conservation as concept and practice, and its relation to the state hegemony. 214 According to Wu, the priority of interests should be for the residents and not for the tourists and visitors. The heritage conservation efforts will take time to implement, but should eventually lower the residential density. See “静安别墅装门禁引发利益之争 官方 称还需商讨 [Jing’an Villas’ Installation of Keycard Gates Causes Arguments over Cost Benefits, Officials State Still Need to Discuss Commerce],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, October 30, 2013 , http://sh.sina.com.cn/news/b/ 2013 -10 -30/111167959.html. 215 “素有“小上海”之称的静 安别墅（今南京西路1025 弄）内，不仅有旅馆、舞厅、弹子 房，还有西人开设的酒吧、咖啡馆等 [Jing’an Villas, also known as ‘Little Shanghai (today’s West Nanjing Lu Lane 1025, not only had hotels, dance halls, billboard houses, but also had bars and cafés opened by westerners].” Jun Qu 瞿钧, “第二章街道分述, 第四节威海路街道 [Chapter 2 Jiedao, Section 4 Weihai Jiedao],” in 静安区志 [Annals of Jing’an District], vol. 第三编街道 [Volume 3 Jiedao] (Shanghai 上海: 上海社会科学院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1996), http://www.shtong.gov.cn/ node2 /node4 /node2249/node4412 /node17431 /node 17651/node17661/userobject1ai6472 .html. 216 Liuqing Yan 严柳晴, “静安别墅‘阿跷馄饨’的前世 今生:搬场后最舍不得 老食客［Jing’an Villas ‘Wonton Uncle’’s Previous Incarna-

only did it make the commerce disappear, but also made the neighborhood secure for 24 hours, increasing the quality and security of the entire compound. And to not ruin the fengmao of the neighborhood, the design of the gate was well-considered.” See Yanping Fan 范彦萍, “静安 别墅围剿无证商户 人性化设置门禁 早晚高峰放行 [Encircle and Suppress Businesses without Permits in Jing’an Villas, Humanely Install Gated Entrance, Allowing Morning and Evening Rush-Hour Traffic],” 东方网, October 25, 2013 , http://sh.eastday.com/m/ 20131025 /u 1 a 7734121 .html. 227 Ibid. 228 Ibid. 229 Kong, “上海 静安别墅将再现原生 态海派风情 [Shanghai’s Jing’an Villas Will Soon Recover Its Original ‘Haipai’ Disposition].” 230 “今日房产：#直播大中 里#钉子户正在… [Today’s Real Estate: #livefromDazhongli#nailhouseisbeingdemolished],” 自由微博 Freeweibo.com, May 24 , 2013 , https://freeweibo.com/weibo/3581418812456377. 231 Weirong Gu 顾卫荣, “香港地 产巨头会战上海高端市场 兴业再造‘新天地’ [Hong Kong Real Estate Giant Will Battle in Shanghai’s High-End Market, HKR Re-Produce ‘Xintiandi’],” 新闻晨报 Shanghai Morning Post, January 15, 2003, http://old.jfdaily.com/gb/node2 / n o d e 1 7/ n o d e 3 3 / n o d e 6 0 5 5 / n o d e 6 0 6 4 / u s e r o b ject 1 ai 6 8 8 4 4 .html. 232 Ibid. 233 Ibid. 234 Ibid. 235 Xiuhao Liu 刘秀浩 and Jie Wang 王杰, “兴业国际携太 古地产百亿港币开发上海大中里 [HKR Takes on Swire Properties for Billion HKD to Develop Shanghai Dazhongli],” 东 方早报 Oriental Morning Post, November 30, 2006, http:// biz. 163 .com/ 06 / 1130 / 03 / 3156521 S 00020Q EO .html. 236 Ibid. 237 Haolun Shu 舒浩仑, 乡愁 Nostalgia, Documentary (2006). 238 Ningbo is one of China’s oldest cities and is in the northern Zhejiang Province. It is still known for its shrewd business people. Many of the entrepreneurs in modern era Shanghai were from Ningbo. Many of the Hong Kong tycoons who emigrated from Shanghai were originally from Ningbo. 239 Chijeng Kuo 郭奇正, “上海解放後到改革開放前城市集居形式蛻變中的身體 經驗 [The Bodily Experience within the Transformation of Dwelling Forms between 1949 and the 1980 s],” 考古人類 學刊 Journal of Archaeology and Anthropology, no. 704 (2011): 203–42 . 240 Xiaofei Zhen 甄晓菲, “石库门乡愁 [Shikumen Homesickness],” 南方周末 Southern Weekend, July 20, 2006 , http://www.xici.net/d40177025 .htm. 241 Xiaolin Hang 杭晓琳, “上海最老石库门里弄之一动迁引 爆都市乡愁 [One of Shanghai’s Oldest Shikumen Lilong—Relocation Triggers Urban Nostalgia],” 南都周刊 Southern Capital Weekly, August 14 , 2006, http://news. sina.com.cn/c/2006 -08 -14 /184810722356.shtml. 242 静 安建设和交通委员会 Jing’an Construction and Transport Committee, “大中里动迁基地签约率达到59.84％ [At Dazhongli Relocation Site Signing of Contract Rate Reach 59.84 %],” December 31, 2006, http://jianwei.jinganJing’an.gov.cn/ jajw/platformData/infoplat/pub/jajw_12 /docs/200701 / d_180117232.html. 243 Chen 陈彩琴 and Yu 余致胜, “三、 专业特色街道, 美食休闲街—吴江路 ［Chapter 3 Specialty Industries Streets, Section Food and Recreational Street— Wujiang Lu].” 244 Yanping Fan 范彦萍, “年底,上海吴江路 小吃街真的要没了 [By Year’s End, Shanghai Wujiang Lu Food Street Will Really Be Gone],” 青年报 Youth Daily, December 1, 2009, http://why.eastday.com/q/20091201/ u1a662671.html. 245 Qian Sun 孙倩, “上海近代城市建设 管理制度及其对公共空间的影响 [Urban Construction Ad-

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tion, in This Life: Most Missed Are the Old Customers after Forced Move],” 青年报 Youth Daily, November 1, 2013, sec. A. 217 “对于类似的民居，在面临再利用的问题时，政府需要考 虑得更周全一些，包括建筑本身权属是否允许，开咖啡馆等形 式有没有损坏建筑风貌，是不是影响到其他居民的生活；如果 要产生影响，是不是有相应的补偿机制及时跟进。这些都需要 早作考虑，且不能照搬某个模式一刀切。如果等到矛盾产生乃 至形成气候了再去干预，恐怕会变得很被动.” Shenjing He, “State-Sponsored Gentrification Under Market Transition The Case of Shanghai,” Urban Affairs Review 43 , no. 2 (November 1, 2007 ): 171–98 , doi:10.1177/10780874073 05175; Yingying Tian and Cecilia Wong, “Large Urban Redevelopment Projects and Sociospatial Stratification in Shanghai,” in China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Urbanism, ed. Fulong Wu, Routledge Contemporary China Series 26 (New York: Routledge, 2007 ), 210–31; Shenjing He, “New-Build Gentrification in Central Shanghai: Demographic Changes and Socioeconomic Implications,” Population, Space and Place 16, no. 5 (September 1, 2010): 345 – 61 , doi:10.1002 /psp.548 . 218 Interview, 2012 . 219 Yimin Sun 孙亦敏, “上海市中心城区零星旧里更新研 究—以静安区为例 [Study of Shanghai City Center Area’s Renewal of the Piecemeal Old-style Lilongs—using the case of Jing’an District]” (硕士 Masters Thesis, 同济大学 Tongji University, 2007 ). 220 “静安别墅出路究竟在哪里 委 员建议居民整体搬迁 [Where Is Jing’an Villa’s Outlook? Committee Member Recommends Relocating All the Residents”],” 新闻晚报 Evening News, January 12 , 2012 , http://news.sh.soufun.com/ 20 12 - 0 1 - 12 / 6 8 412 18 . htm. 221 Yiqiong 顾一琼 Gu and Zhen 邵珍 Shao, “代表委 员热议文化保护：特色民居保护该走哪条道 [Representative Committee Member Discuss Cultural Conservation: Conservation of Unique Residential Architecture Should Go Which Way?],” 文汇报 Wenhui News, January 19, 2012, http://news.dahe.cn/ 20 12 / 0 1 - 19 / 10 1057413 .html. 222 The persistence of the ’72 residents [72房客]’ phenomenon, denoting the residential overcrowding and shared infrastructure, which persist in historic housing with property tenureship holdovers from the planned economy era was cited as the major obstacle to improving living conditions. 223 Zhanjun Li 李战军, “上海直管公 房长期积累的问题十分严峻 [Long-Term Accumulated Problems of Shanghai’s Directly Managed Public Housing Serious],” May 12, 2010, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4 ­ bea7bd70100 i6 hm.html. 224 Interview with residents, 2014 . 225 Yingqiong Qiu 裘颖琼, “静安别墅门禁系统还居 民清净 封闭管理并非‘一刀切’ [Jing’an Villas Entry Guard System Gives Back Quiet to the Residents, Closed Management Not ‘one Size Fit All’],” 东方网, November 29, 2013, http://news.163.com/13/1129/22 /9ESP7P9A00014 AEE .html. 226 “在整治前，我曾委托居委会召集了四十五名 居民代表座谈，听取民意。居民们的想法很一致，很支持整治 工作，认为安装门禁是利大于弊。门禁安装后，不仅能让商户 消失，小区内还将增加24 小时安保力量，整个小区的品质和 安全性就提高了。为了不让门禁安装破坏小区的风貌，门禁的 设计更三易其稿 [before the reorganization, we had held meetings with forty-five resident representatives through the residential committee, to get the residents’ opinions. Their opinions were very similar, very supportive of the reorganization, seeing the installation of the gate as more beneficial than detrimental. After installing the gate, not

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ministration System and its Impact on Public Space in Modern Shanghai]” (博士 PhD Thesis, 同济大学 Tongji University, 2006). 246 Wu 伍江 and Wang 王林, 历史文化风 貌区保护规划编制与管理：上海城市保护的实践 [The establishment and management of the Historic Cultural Features and Styles Districts Conservation Plan: Cases from Shanghai’s Conservation], 152–53 . 247 静安区规划局 Jing’an Planning Administration, “《静安区40、46号街坊( 大中里地块)详细规划》征询公众意见 [“Jing’an District Block Number 40, 46 (Dazhongli Site) Detailed Plan] Seeks Public Feedback],” February 26, 2008, http://218.242.36.250/ News_Show.aspx?id=9882. 248 Cao 曹继军 and Yan 颜 维琦, “上海:事前征询群众意见 让旧区改造‘一路阳光’ [Shanghai: Consult the People Before, Transforming Old Districts ‘one Way Sunshine’].” 249 Victor Cha’s father is the founder and chairman of HKR 查濟民, Chi-ming Cha, a well-known industrialist who began in the textile and dye business and who, like many other industrialists, had emigrated to Hong Kong from Shanghai in the late 1940 s. The use of Shanghainese dialect is notable in the intimate connection between Shanghai’s rapid global integration and economic development, and foreign investments, largely from Hong Kong and Taiwan’s Chinese diaspora, that had made the development possible. 250 Xiuhao Liu 刘秀浩, “上海再建顶级娱乐消费地标 豪言将超新天地 [Shanghai Builds Top-Level Recreation and Consumption Landmark, Boldly States Will Exceed Xintiandi],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, March 12 , 2009, http://nb.fccs. com/news/html/2009/03/12 /2022951.shtml. 251 Guwei Zhang 张谷微, “90岁民立中学将‘走’至威海路 专家:万不得已 之策 [90 Year Old Minli Middle School Will ‘go’ to Weihai Lu, Expert Says Last Resort Strategy],” 新闻晨报 Morning News, March 11, 2009, http://xwcb.eastday.com/c/2009 0311/u1a546549.html. 252 When the stash of dyes that the Qiu brothers had bought from their fleeing former German boss became the sole supply during the wartime import cutoff, they became rich. Shipeng Sha 沙似鹏 et al., “动物安居的城堡式花园：邱氏兄弟住宅（民立中学）[CastleStyled Garden with Menagerie: Qiu Brothers’ Residences (Minli Middle School)],” in 上海名建筑志 [Annals of Shanghai’s Famous Architecture] (Shanghai 上海: 上海社会科学 院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2005 ), http://www.shtong.gov.cn/node2 /node71994 / node 81772 /node 81775 /node 81786 /userobject 1 ai 109 025.html. 253 Ibid. 254 Luxia Song 宋路霞, 回梦上海老 洋房 [Dreaming of Shanghai’s Old Western-style Houses], 回梦百年上海系列 (上海 Shanghai: 上海科学技术文献出版社 Shanghai Science and Technology Press, 2004). 255 Sha 沙似鹏 et al., “动物安居的城堡式花园：邱氏兄弟住宅（民立 中学）[Castle-Styled Garden with Menagerie: Qiu Brothers’ Residences (Minli Middle School)].” 256 Michelle Qiao, “War Paint Built Qius’ Zoo,” Shanghai Daily, November 11, 2004 , http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004 11/11/content_390515.htm. 257 Ibid. 258 Qijun Zhou 周 其俊, “‘民立’老校舍‘行走’威海路 [Minli’s Old School Building Cross Weihai Lu],” 文汇报 Wenhui News, March 11, 2009, http://news.sina.com.cn/o/2009 -03 -11/083315291265s. shtml. 259 Ibid. 260 Xinjie Jiang 蒋昕捷, “让老房子穿鞋 走路 [Allowing Old Houses to Wear Shoes to Walk],” 中国 青年报 China Youth Daily, April 15, 2009, http://zqb.cyol. com/content / 20 0 9 - 0 4 / 15 /content_ 2624261 .htm.

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261 For the importance of the Sanshan Guild Hall to the development of the conservation policy in Shanghai see the previous chapter. Also see Shipeng Sha 沙似鹏 et al., “保存最完美的会馆建筑：三山会馆 [Best Preserved Clanhouse Architecture: Sanshan Huiguan],” in 上海名建筑志 [Annals of Shanghai’s Famous Architecture] (Shanghai 上 海: 上海社会科学院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2005), http://www.shtong.gov.cn/node2 / node71994 /node81772 /node81776/node81788 /userobject1ai109095.html. 262 关于静安区40号、46号街坊（大 中里）详细规划的批复 [Approval for the Detailed Plan of Jing’an District Neighborhood Number 40, 46 (Dazhongli)], 2009, http://www.shgtj.gov.cn/ghsp/ghsp/ja/201001/ t20100107_355892.html. 263 The most prominent case of the un-touchability of a national-level plot is that of the Shanghai Exhibition Center, further west on West Nanjing Lu. Located across the Portman-built Shanghai Center, the district’s attempts to integrate its prime location site into future plans have only been met with frustration, due to the disinterest and thus inaction on the part of its central-government owner. Interview, 2012 . 264 Many of the lilong developments with the character qing [庆] in their names belonged to Zhou Xiangyun’s family enterprises. 265 Shipeng Sha 沙似鹏 et al., “美轮美奂的海上洋 楼 房地产巨商的花园住宅：周湘云住宅（岳阳医院）[Chapter Beautiful Western-Styled Buildings, Section Real Estate Entrepreneur Giant’s Garden-Styled Home: Zhou Xiangyun’s Home (Yueyang Hospital)],” in 上海名建筑志 [Annals of Shanghai’s Famous Architecture] (Shanghai 上 海: 上海社会科学院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2005), http://www.shtong.gov.cn/node2 / node71994 /node81772 /node81775/node81786/userobject1ai109041.html. 266 Shunsheng Xue 薛顺生 and Chenghao Lou 娄承浩, 老上海花园洋房 [Old Shanghai’s Western-Style Garden Houses] (Shanghai 上海: 同济大学 出版社 Tongji University Press, 2002). 267 Municipal land use plan, 2000. 268 Ibid. 269 Xiuhao Liu 刘秀浩, “静安 区大中里项目2012年开门迎客 [Jing’an District’s Dazhongli Projects Opens and Welcomes Guests in 2012],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, September 27, 2009, sec. 财经 Finance, http://xinwen.haozhai.com/news_143640.html. 270 Guilan Chen 陈桂兰, “国内名企抢占上海静安南京路 ［Famous Enterprises Fom China Fight to Occupy Shanghai West Nanjing Lu],” 文汇报 Wenhui News, September 25, 2009, http://whb.eastday.com/w/20090925/u1a634997. html. 271 Ibid. 272 Meng Li 李萌, “吴江路小吃街彻底告别 市民 [Wujiang Lu Food Street Completely Bids Farewell to Citizens],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, February 25, 2010, sec. 大都会 Metropolis, http://epaper.dfdaily.com/ dfzb/html/2010 -02 /25/content_200943 .htm. 273 Mingming Qin 秦明明, “大中里项目一年两延期 [Dazhongli Project Delays Twice in the Year],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, March 24 , 2011, http://epaper.dfdaily.com/dfzb/ html/ 2011 - 03 / 24 /content_ 4 624 4 3 .htm. 274 Ibid. 275 Interview, 2014 . 276 Zhigui Shen 沈之佳, “‘大中里’地 上工程下月开工 [Dazhongli Will Begin Construction next Month],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, November 27, 2012, http://www.dfdaily.com/html/136/2012 /11/27/900 221.shtml. 277 Yan Jiang 姜燕, “上海大中里项目十年始动 工 太古错失黄金期 ［Shanghai Dazhongli Project Starts after Decade, Swire Missed Opportunity for Golden Period],”

development density in conservation zones had passed over Zhang Gardens in 2006. Only in 2012 did there appear a master’s thesis that resembles somewhat the research done on piecing together the historic urban development of what was later to become the Jing’an District. See Peng Gao 高鹏, “上海市中心城旧居住区更新方式比较研 究—以静安区为例 [The renewal of scattered old lilong dwellings in the central city of Shanghai-case study on Jing’an District]” (硕士 Master’s Thesis, 上海交通大学 Shanghai Jiaotong University, 2007 ); Jie Hou 侯洁, “上海现代服 务业集聚区商务旅游开发研究: 以上海南京西路专业服务商务 区为例 [Research on the Business Tourism Development of Shanghai Modern Service Industry Cluster Districts—a Case Study of Nanjing West Road Professional Service Commercial District in Shanghai]” (硕士 Masters Thesis, 上 海师范大学 Shanghai Normal University, 2008); Ling Ge 葛 玲, “上海市静安区土地集约利用研究 [Study of Land Intensive Utilization in Shanghai Jing’an District]” (硕士 Masters Thesis, 上海交通大学 Shanghai Jiaotong University, 2009); Jiahuan Chen 陈佳澴, “城市历史风貌区保护规划中的建筑密 度研究—以上海历史文化风貌区保护规划的实践为例 [Study of Architectural Density in the Urban Historic Fengmao Conservation Plan, with cases from the implementation of the Conservation Plan for Shanghai’s Historic Cultural Fengmao Districts]” (硕士 Masters Thesis, 同济大学 Tongji University, 2005); Xia Ren 任夏, “近代上海静安区城市化研 究（1862–1949）[Study of modern era Shanghai Jing’an District’s urbanization (1862–1949)]” (硕士 Masters Thesis, 复旦大学 Fudan University, 2012). 294 Two of the plots belonged to the City Clock and Watch Company, which belonged to the Light Industries Group and the Beijing Zhongchuang Company, that belonged to the Municipal Science and Technology Committee. The other three belonged to the Jiubai Group and Kaikai Group, both belonging to the Municipal Commerce Committee. 295 At the same time, the low-rise lilong homes at Lane 550 in the southern portion of Zhang Gardens block were also demolished. In the late 1990 s rush for infrastructural upgrades and subway constructions, many renewal projects were pushed through in the optimism for modernization. 296 Jun Chen 陈君, “下楼即是吴江路 静安核心区域标 杆性豪宅 [Downstairs Is Immediately Wujiang Lu, Jing’an Central District’s Exemplary Luxury Residence],” 新闻晨报 Shanghai Morning Post, March 26 , 2014 , sec. 居民区. 297 Ibid. 298 静安区规划局 Jing’an Planning Bureau, “《静安区地铁12、13号线南京西路站及换乘通道地块修建性 详细规划》征询公众意见 [‘Detailed Plan for Construction on the Plot for the West Nanjing Lu Stations of Subway Lines 12 and 13 and Their Interchange Passage in the Jing’an District’ Public Consulation],” 静安区规划局 Jing’an Planning Bureau, September 22, 2008, http://www.shgtj. gov.cn: 8 2 /gate/big 5 /www.shgt j.gov.cn/hdpt /gzcy/ ja/200809/t20080922_180774.htm. 299 Ibid. 300 Ibid. 301 The company’s Chinese name “英國瑞弗士建築咨詢有 限公司,” is a transliteration of the word “Refiners”, but written in characters that could also suggests another English name, Raffles, which sometimes has the same phonetic translation. The inclusion of UK in front of the name also suggests that it is a local company, disguised as a foreign-affiliated one. 302 “张家花园保护与策略研究项目 进展顺利 [Zhang Gardens Conservation and Strategies Re-

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时代周报 Time Weekly, December 13, 2012, http://finance. ifeng.com/news/house/20121213/7424567.shtml. 278 国 土资源部 Ministry of Land Resources of the PRC , 闲置土地 处置办法 [Regulation to Handle Unused Land], vol. 国土 资源部发(2012) 第53号, 2012 , http://www.mlr.gov.cn/ zwgk/zytz/201206/t20120607_1107632.htm. 279 Yi Wu 吴怡, “独家揭秘：上海施工最难的城市综合体—大中里 [Secrets Revealed: Most Difficult Construction Site in Shanghai for Urban Mixed Typology—Dazhongli],” 今日房产 Real Estate Today, accessed January 25, 2015 , http://www. gotoday.com.cn/DefaultPage/ 17286 /new_show.htm. 280 Xinjie Tian 田新杰, “上海地铁临时用地疑似违规出让调 查 ［Investigation of Doubtful Against-Regulations Leasing of Land Used Temporarily for Shanghai Subway],” 21 世纪经济报道 21st Century Economic Report, January 20, 2011, http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2011-01-20/042421843 778 .shtml. 281 Jie Song 宋杰, “静安南京路地铁上盖地块成‘ 最后的钻石’ [Jing’an Nanjing Lu Plot Above the Subway Becomes ‘Last Diamond’],” 上海商报 Shanghai Business Daily, July 10, 2014 , http://www.shbiz.com.cn/Item/2378 09.aspx. 282 Since policies calling for transparency on urban land use-right leases came into force, Shanghai has made public all bid processes on its website http://www. shtdsc.com/bin/dkxx/t/s. Of the 1105 entries catalogued and archived since 2013, only very few are from city center districts such as Jing’an or Huangpu. 283 Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Institute 上海市城市 规划设计研究院 Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Institute, 循迹启新-上海城市规划演进 [Follow the tracks and initiate the new: Evolution of Shanghai’s Urban Planning], 140. 284 Jian Gong 贡坚, “张家花园一份关于上海传统城市 居住形态的调查报告及思考 [Zhang Garden, A Research Report and Thoughts on Shanghai’s Traditional Urban Residential Form]” (硕士 Masters Thesis, 同济大学 Tongji University, 2005), 68 , http://max.book118 .com/html/2013 / 1210/5179154 .shtm. 285 Ibid. 286 Gong 贡坚, “张家花园 一份关于上海传统城市居住形态的调查报告及思考 [Zhang Garden, A Research Report and Thoughts on Shanghai’s Traditional Urban Residential Form].” 287 静安区城市规 划管理局 Jing’an District Administration for Urban Planning, “静安区保护街坊保护与更新规划 [Plan for the Conservation and Renewal of Jing’an District Conservation Neighborhoods].” 288 Yi Huang 黄怡, “大都市核心区的社会空间 隔离—以上海市静安区南京西路街道为例 [Socio-spatial segregation in Metropolitan Nuclei Areas: a case study of Nanjing Xilu Street, Shanghai],” 城市规划学刊 [Urban Planning Forum], no. 03 (2006): 76–84. 289 Ibid. 290 Ibid. 291 Xi­ ao Wang 王潇, “关于社会分类的研究－以上海静安为例 [Research Regarding Social Fragmentation, Taking Shanghai Jing’an as Case]” (硕士 Masters Thesis, 同济大学 Tongji University, 2004). 292 Gong 贡坚, “张家花园一份关于上海传 统城市居住形态的调查报告及思考 [Zhang Garden, A Research Report and Thoughts on Shanghai’s Traditional Urban Residential Form].” 293 In addition to Gong’s analysis of Zhang Gardens in his master’s thesis, a few others, one on the residential developments in the Jing’an district in 2007, one on the growth of service industries on West Nanjing Lu, and one on high density real estate in the district, have studied the developmental capacities of the district with little reflection on the legacy structures and their contemporary impact. One master’s thesis on the

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search Project’s Progress Smooth],” 静安时报 Jing’an Daily, December 16, 2008 , http://www.jingan.gov.cn/newscenter/janews/ 200812 /t 20081216_ 68115 .htm. 303 Ibid. 304 静安区规划局 Jing’an Planning Bureau, “‘静安区地铁 12、13号线南京西路站及其换乘通道地块修建性详细规划’专 家评审会召开 [Convening of the Expert Appraisal Meeting for ‘Detailed Plan for Construction on the Plot for the West Nanjing Lu Stations of Subway Lines 12 and 13 and Their Interchange Passage in the Jing’an District’],” October 10, 2008 , http://www.shanghai.gov.cn/shanghai%5 Cnode 2314% 5 Cnode 2315 % 5 Cnode 15343 % 5 Cuserobject 21 ai 301347.html. 305 Qijun Zhou 周其俊, “打造文化休闲街 静 安启动首个城市文化印记项目 [Creating Cultural Recreation Street, Jing’an Initiates First Urban Cultural Imprint Project],” 文汇报 Wenhui News, April 22, 2009, http://whb. eastday.com/w/20090422 /u1a563703 .html. 306 Yanping Fan 范彦萍, “上海最老游乐场将进行内部整修 [Shanghai’s Oldest Amusement Park Will Undergo Interior Renovation],” 青年报 Youth Daily, May 19, 2009, http://why. eastday.com/q/20090519/u1a575816.html. 307 Chenghao Lou 娄承浩, “张家花园的前世今生 [Zhang Gardens’ Past and Present],” 上海档案信息网 Shanghai Archives, June 1, 2009, http://www.archives.sh.cn/shjy/scbq/201203 / t20120313_5786.html. 308 Tong Kong 孔同, “‘树群夜校’原 址确认 在张园大客堂内 [‘Shuqun Night School’ original Location Confirmed, inside the Zhang Gardens Grand Living Room],” 新闻晚报 Evening News, July 1, 2010, http://www. news365 .com.cn/wxpd/sh/ja/201007/t20100701_275 5100.htm. 309 Rong Yang 杨蓉, “一、中共静安区委员会, (五)宣传工作, 启动‘静安城市文化印记’项目调研认证 [Chapter 1 Jing’an CCP Committee, Section 5 Publicity, Research Confirmation for the Initiation of ‘Jing’an Urban Cultural Imprint’ Project],” in 静安年鉴 2009 [Jing’an Almanac 2009] (Shanghai 上海: 上海辞书出版社 Shanghai Encyclopedia Publisher, 2009), 89, http://www.jingan.gov.cn/ jagk/janj/jingannianjian2009/zgjaqwyh/xcgz/200911 / t20091104_38189.htm. 310 Liyin Fan 范立音, “五、社区 (街道), (六)南京西路社区(街道), 建成张园大客堂 [Chapter 5 Community, Section 6, West Nanjing Lu Jiedao, Completing Zhang Gardens Living Room],” in 静安年鉴 2009 [Jing’an Almanac 2009] (Shanghai 上海: 上海辞书出版社 Shanghai Encyclopedia Publisher, 2009), 165, http://www. jingan.gov.cn/jagk/janj/jingannianjian2009/sqjd/njxlsqjd/200911/t20091106_38651.htm. 311 “‘张家花园’春节后 迎客 50名人故居世博前挂牌 [’Zhang Gardens’ Welcomes Guests after Chinese New Year’s, 50 Former Residences of Luminaries Plaqued before World Expo],” 新闻晚报 Evening News, February 11, 2010, sec. A. 312 Ibid. 313 Zhuke Cheng 程绪珂 and Tao Wang 王焘, “第二章营业性私园 第一 节味莼园 [Chapter 2 Commercial Private Parks, Section 1 Weichun Garden],” in 上海园林志 [Shanghai Gardens Annal], 上海市专志系列丛刊 (Shanghai 上海: 上海社会科学院 出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2000), http://www.shtong.gov.cn/node 2 /node 2245 /node 69 854 /node 69859 /node 69907/node 69911 /userobject 1ai69551.html. 314 Ibid. 315 Yuezhi Xiong 熊月之, “张园 与晚清上海社会 一个游乐场所的兴衰与公共空间的形成 [Zhang Gardens and the Late Qing Dynasty Shanghai Society, the Rise and Fall of an Entertainment Space and the Formation of Public Space],” 南方周末 Southern Weekend, April 4 , 2002 , http://www.china.com.cn/chinese/ch-yu-

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wai/136299.htm. 316 Ibid. 317 “张园当年就是‘小小世博 会’ [Back Then Zhang Gardens Was the Small World Expo],” 青年报 Youth Daily, March 26, 2010, http://www. shjinganlib.net/html/main_lx1_content.asp?id=38 &fenlei_ id=136 &wz_id=3840. 318 The previous chapter elaborated how popular media, especially those produced in Hong Kong and other overseas Chinese communities and including television shows featuring heroes such as Huo Yuanjia and nostalgia literature, were important in rekindling interest in China’s pre-Liberation modern era since economic liberalization began in China. 319 The Gardens’ free admissions policy, and its installation of newest technology and infrastructures, was a direct reaction by the group of Chinese merchant citizens who rejected the many Western parks built by the International Settlement and French Concession governments, that were specifically closed to Chinese citizens. Even though the exclusion of Chinese from the racecourse and public parks like Fuxing Park and the Bund Park had often been taken out of context in the CCP ’s account of a weak China’s subjugation by the foreign powers, thus rallying the citizens around its own role in the nation’s salvation, their selective entry systems nevertheless suggested that natives, as opposed to Westerners, were not fit for what were deemed as civilized urban habits such as strolling in the park. Zhang Garden’s openness to all people of all classes, on another level, delivered the message that the people of Shanghai were not only urban enough to participate in the western imports of the latest amusements in the park, but that the many traditional activities, such as tea drinking, flower admiring, traditional story-telling and vernacular opera listening, were as fitting to the newly formed habits of the modern Chinese urbanite. 320 In contrast to the number of Chinese-style gardens that were also in existence at the same time, Xiong emphasized, Zhang Gardens was distinct in its size, cultural hybridity, the earliness of its advent, as well as its central location. 321 The public spaces of Zhang Gardens were important breeding grounds for the newly forming cultural conceptualization of a Shanghainese identity at the time. The active journalism and publishing enterprises, often led by the patrons of many of the salons at Arcadia Hall and supporting this growing Shanghainese identity, led the discourse for the nation’s modernization. 322 Mingwu Zhu 朱珉迕, “辛亥革 命与上海 张园：革命思想的策源地 [Xinhai Revolution and Shanghai’s Zhang Gardens: Revolutionary Idea’s Origins],” 解放日报 Liberation Daily, October 4 , 2011, http://jfdaily. eastday.com/j/20111004 /u1a926815 .html. 323 Toshio Kikuchi 菊池敏夫, 近代上海的百货公司与都市文化 [Modern era Shanghai’s Department Stores and Urban Culture], trans. Zu ’en Chen 陈祖恩 (Shanghai 上海: 上海人民出版社 Shanghai People’s Press, 2012). 324 Xiong 熊月之, “张园 与晚清上海社会 一个游乐场所的兴衰与公共空间的形成 [Zhang Gardens and the Late Qing Dynasty Shanghai Society, the Rise and Fall of an Entertainment Space and the Formation of Public Space].” 325 高参88 , “威海路590 弄张家花 园 [Weihai Lu Lane 590 Zhang Gardens],” 新浪博客 Sina Blog, July 9, 2014 , http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5 d1bdf480102ux0 h.html. 326 “‘张家花园’春节后迎客 50名人故 居世博前挂牌 [’Zhang Gardens’ Welcomes Guests after Chinese New Year’s, 50 Former Residences of Luminaries

MV6E0001124 J.html. 343 “上海‘6.5 事件’ 静安区出动大批 警察突围 [Shanghai ‘6.5 Incident’ Jing’an District Dispatches Large Number of Police to Break out of Encirclement],” June 16, 2012, http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-free-2588088 -1. shtml. 344 Caiyun Zeng 曾彩云, “上海政府机构发函断案被 指干预司法 [Shanghai Government Organizations Correspondence to Settle Lawsuit Accused of Intervening in Justice],” 当代商报 Modern Business News, July 19, 2013, http://news.sohu.com/ 20130719 /n 382023186 .shtml. 345 Liu 刘俊, “新‘贪吃蛇’游戏—一条地铁引发的拆迁博弈 [New ‘Greedy Snake’ Game, One Subway Line’s Triggering of Demolition and Relocation Gamble].” 346 Tomatito, Taste and See, Starling, Punch and Rosa Gallica are some of the small commerce in Zhang Plaza. 347 To give examples of the localized cosmopolitan network that have found niche markets in the F & B scene in Shanghai, the bar Starling was opened by Malaysian-Chinese entrepreneur and House of Flour (HoF) founder Brian Tan [陈绵泰] and the French co-founder of industry magazine DRiNK Theo Watt, together with American event manager and barman Adam Devermann. One news report said that, “Conceptually, Starling’s back bar shows a bias for quality rum with an interior that nods to British colonial Malaya. A full cocktail list is in the works but early efforts include the ace Tom Yam Colada, Thai Punch and Galangal Club.” Another bar, Logan’s Punch, was opened by American Logan Brouse who had also worked for clubs like M1NT and Muse, and its interiors designed by the architects Neri and Hu, who also designed the restaurant café Taste and See, by Australian-Chinese entrepreneur Kang Yang Lim. The Tomatito tapas bar was opened by Spanish chef Willy Trullas Moreno, the founder of El Willy restaurant on the Bund, and also a partner of the bar El Coctel at Yongfu 47. See “Starling Opens on Taixing Lu, Shanghai 上海泰兴路上的 Starling开张,” DRiNK Magazine | China’s Leading Bar Industry Magazine, December 6, 2014 , http://www.drinkmagazine.asia/2014 /06/12 /starling-opens-on-taixing-lushanghai-%E4%B8 %8 A%E6%B5%B7 %E6%B3 %B0 %E5 %85%B4%E8 %B7 %AF %E4%B8 %8 A%E7 %9A%84 starling%E5%BC %80 %E5%BC %A0/. 348 Jicheng Li 李继成, “为历史保护建筑让路 轨交南京西路站或只能‘虚拟换乘’ [To Give Room to Historic Conservation Architecture, West Nanjing Lu Subway Stop Perhaps Could Only Have ‘false Interchange’],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, August 4 , 2014 , http://sh.eastday.com/m/20140804 /u1a8261702 . html. 349 Jie Xu 许劼, “历史地段地下建筑空间组织模式浅 析—以静安区地铁12、13号线及连通通道地块为例 [The Analysis of the Mode of Underground Construction Spatial Sequence in Historic Areas: A Case Study of Underground Construction of Metro Line 12 and 13 in Jing’an District],” 现代城市研究 Urban Research, no. 1 (2014): 62–69. 350 Li 李继成, “为历史保护建筑让路 轨交南京西路站或只能‘虚拟换 乘’ [To Give Room to Historic Conservation Architecture, West Nanjing Lu Subway Stop Perhaps Could Only Have ‘false Interchange’].” 351 Wu 伍江 and Wang 王林, 历史文 化风貌区保护规划编制与管理：上海城市保护的实践 [The establishment and management of the Historic Cultural Features and Styles Districts Conservation Plan: Cases from Shanghai’s Conservation]. 352 “地块公告号： 201415401 静安区南西社区111-09 地块（轨道交通12号线南 京西路站地块）基本信息 [Public Notice Number 201415401

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Plaqued before World Expo].” 327 Zhou 周其俊, “打造文 化休闲街 静安启动首个城市文化印记项目 [Creating Cultural Recreation Street, Jing’an Initiates First Urban Cultural Imprint Project].” 328 Yanping Fan 范彦萍, “延续原生态居住 部落 映像张园唤醒历史记忆 [Continuing the Original Ecology of Residential Tribe, Image Zhangyuan Awakes Historic Memories],” 青年报 Youth Daily, May 12, 2010, http:// www.why.com.cn/epublish/other/node29576/node29578 / userobject7ai222318 .html. 329 Ibid. 330 Ibid. 331 静安 区规划和土地管理局 Jing’an District Planning and Land Administration, “静安区42号街坊（张家花园）及43号街坊东侧 地块城市设计与控详局部调整方案》规划公示并征询公众意见 [‘Urban Design and Detailed Control Plan for Partial Adjustment to the Block 42 (Zhang Gardens) and Eastern Part of the Block 43 ’ Publicized and Open for Public Consultation],” July 14 , 2010, http://www.jingan.gov.cn/preview/jinganweb/sypd/gs/201008 /t20100803_75413.htm. 332 Ibid. 333 “地铁三线南京西路枢纽建设将有大动作,” August 27, 2010, http://shanghai.metrofans.cn/thread152685 -1 -1.html. 334 Ningning Tao 陶宁宁, “张园老建筑‘ 拆解’至仓库 通车后复建 [Zhang Gardens’ Old Architecture ‘Dismantled’ to Warehouse, Reconstruction after Subway Connected],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, September 27, 2011, http://www.news365 .com.cn/wxpd/sh/shms/ 201109/t20110927_3145167.htm. 335 Tong Kong 孔同, “八旬老建筑拆解后赴嘉定‘隐居休假’ 轨交建成后将‘修旧如旧’ 原地复建 [80 Year Old Architecture Dismantled Head to Jiading For ‘hide-Away Holiday’, after Finish of Underground Metro They Will Be Rebuilt on Original Site ‘renovate the Old as the Old’],” 新闻晚报 Evening News, September 26, 2011, sec. A1. 336 Yanping Fan 范彦萍, “张园 4 栋老宅‘搬’到嘉定 [Zhang Gardens’ Four Old Residences ‘move’ to Jiading],” 青年报 Youth Daily, September 27, 2011, http://www.why.com.cn/epublish/node10336 /userobject7ai287360.html. 337 Kong 孔同, “八旬老建筑拆解 后赴嘉定‘隐居休假’ 轨交建成后将‘修旧如旧’原地复建 [8 Year Old Architecture Dismantled Head to Jiading For ‘hideAway Holiday’, after Finish of Underground Metro They Will Be Rebuilt on Original Site ‘renovate the Old as the Old’].” 338 Jun Liu 刘俊, “新‘贪吃蛇’游戏—一条地铁引发的 拆迁博弈 [New ‘Greedy Snake’ Game, One Subway Line’s Triggering of Demolition and Relocation Gamble],” 南方周 末 Southern Weekend, December 17, 2010, http://www. infzm.com/content/53573. 339 Ibid. 340 ‘Administrativ­ ely-allocated land’ refers to land that has been allocated by the state to institutional users, usually for free or for a nominal price, prior to economic liberalization. 341 Since land marketization, there is a dual land market in China. The first is land that is bought, sold and exchanged, and is at market price. The second is land that is state-allocated to state institutions and state-owned enterprises, and is below the market price. See the next chapter for more details for the policy shifts that have solidified the state-allocated land in the dual land market, and the ensuing conditions that in effect marketize also the state-allocated land, through the process of subleasing by private entrepreneurs. 342 Kui Li 李奎, “普尔斯马特9名高管涉嫌抽逃上 亿资金今日受审 [PriceSmart’s Top Management Suspected of Siphoning and Fleeing with Hundreds of Millions in Funds, on Trial Today],” 法制晚报 Legal Evening News, October 23, 2006, http://news.163.com/06/1023/14 /2U4G-

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Jing’an District South West Community District Plot 111–09 (Subway Line 12 West Nanjing Lu Station Site) Basic Information],” 上海土地市场-土地交易 [Shanghai Land Market—Land Exchange], October 28 , 2014 , http://www. shtdsc.com/bin/dkxx/v/201415401. 353 Qijin Zhou 周祺 瑾, “最有上海味道的土地出让：静安黄金地块要建10 栋石库门 小楼 [Leasing of Shanghai’s Most Flavor Real Estate: Jing’an Golden Site Will Construct 10 Shikumen Lowrise],” 澎湃新闻 Pengbai News, November 6, 2014 , http://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1276114 . 354 Qijin Zhou 周祺瑾, “南京西路地块10 亿挂牌起拍 起始单价5 .3万 [West Nanjing Lu Plot 1 Million RMB for Bid, Starting Price 53000 RMB Per Square Meter],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, November 7, 2014 , http://sh.house.qq.com/a/20141107/ 024445_all.htm. 355 “上海静安111 – 09 地块有效申请1人 起始价10 亿元 [Shanghai Jing’an Plot 111–09 One Valid

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Applicant, Starting Price One Billion RMB ],” November 25, 2014 , http://www.guandian.cn/article/20141127/154088 . html. 356 The subsidiaries of the Shanghai Jing’an Subway Investment Limited [上海静安地铁投资有限公司] and the Shanghai Huzhong Real Estate Development [上海沪 中房地产联合发展总公司]. 357 Patti Waldmeir, “Discount That China’s Salary Classes Can Stomach,” Financial Times, June 25, 2013, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e3054f3 cdcc5 -11e2-b52b-00144 feab7de.html#axzz30YG6 bPqF. 358 The rendering was shown as part of Zhang Gardens’ upgrade project, and labeled ‘a renovation project of a multi-functional mixed use area.’ See “3.4 、42号街坊张家 花园保护与更新研究 [Neighborhood 42 Zhang Gardens Conservation and Renewal Study],” 上海静安规划网 Shanghai Jing’an Planning, accessed January 17, 2015, http:// www.shjagh.gov.cn/seconds/deve_plan/new3_4 .htm.

Chapter 5 The New Economies Alternative Business Plan for Creative Incubation: Anken Green New Local-Global Alliances: the Upgrade of Yongkang Lu The New Economies

Anken Green, 2013

When UNESCO nominated Shanghai to become part of the City of Design network in time for the World Expo in early 2010, it also validated the city’s ‘transition [转型],’ 1 from the decades of “manufactured in Shanghai” to “designed in Shanghai.” 2 Economists and officials in Shanghai, having learnt the vocabulary of global competitiveness, 3 were, and are still, preoccupied with ‘innovation’ and ‘creativity,’ attributes necessary for the ‘transition’ to a knowledge-based, value-added development phase. This chapter focuses on two recent developments, which highlight how Shanghai’s ‘transition,’ emphasized in the lead-up to the 2010 World Expo, has shifted focus from largescale developments to more qualitative transformations. These developments seem to corroborate the Expo theme, “the city makes life even better [城市让生活更美好]”, officially translated as “Better City Better Life.” 4 Their development processes also show how Shanghai, as the city that the central government chose as the ‘Dragon’s Head’ of China’s economic liberalization and global integration, would lead the country into its next phase of ‘transition.’ This ‘transition’ would take China from an emerging economy dominated by manufacturing, to one increasingly service- and knowledge-based. In Shanghai’s city center, four projects, Xintiandi [新天地], Tianzifang [田子坊], M 50, and Bridge 8 [八号桥], are most often cited as the spatial manifestations of Shanghai’s ‘transition’ to the ‘Better City.’ 5 (Fig. 1) The projects of Xintiandi and Tianzifang paved the way as the first known examples of urban renewal through the successful commercial reuse of historic residential structures. They became recognized across China as new paradigms for urban renewal and heritage conservation. Just as Xintiandi and Tianzifang groomed China’s interest in reusing historic architecture, the Bridge 8 and M 50 projects pioneered the reuse of undervalued former factories as ‘creative industry clusters.’ Together with Tianzifang, Bridge 8 and M 50 paved the way for the ensuing modes of ‘cultural-led urban regeneration.’6 This chapter presents two more recent cases of ‘culture-led urban regeneration’ and

duced by the coexistence of and ambiguity between planned and market economics, to create spatial opportunities for development. The public-private alliances in the two projects have also evolved from their top-down and bottom-up precedents. Supporters of Yongkang Lu’s development position it as an updated version of the combination of Xintiandi and Tianzifang.7 The designer-developers of Anken Green see themselves as innovating on the existing business model for ‘creative industries cluster’ development, 8 the model that originated in the Bridge 8 project. The economic restructuring of the mid-1990s closed down the manufacturing spaces of state enterprises found in the city center, laid off the largely blue-collar workers, and left buildings disused. At the same time, the restructuring opened up new development opportunities. From the large-scale textile factories, flour mills, and steel factories to the small lilong factories embedded within residential neighborhoods, the industrial leftovers from economic transition became the opportunity for both creative producers and enterprising developers to tap into the undervalued and overlooked built resources. While Xintiandi was known as the top-down version of residential reuse, Tianzi­ fang would come to be popularly known as its bottom-up counterpart.9 Similarly,

Chapter 5 The New Economies

reuse projects, the Anken Green [安垦] development and the upgrading of Yongkang Lu [永康路]. These cases are not only representative of the heritage-creative focus that the 2010 World Expo catalyzed in Shanghai. They also both built on the processes and methods that the earlier projects developed. Both make use of urban loopholes, pro-

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industrial residential

Building Type

M50 田子坊

Tianzifang “bottom-up”

Development Type

Bridge 8

八号桥 新天地

Xintiandi “top-down”

Fig. 1 Drawing of four precedent projects for urban reuse in Shanghai, 2013

Bridge 8 reused former state-owned enterprises (SOE ) industrial buildings, becoming the top-down complement to M50’s bottom-up conversion of similar SOE -owned former industrial buildings.10 In Tianzifang, returnee artists set up their atelier spaces in vacant state-owned industrial real estate, taking advantage of the gaps left by economic reforms. Though the local street office had initiated and facilitated the first reuse, these developments triggered further

conversions, spreading also to the residential spaces. In M 50, contemporary artists and galleries moved from adjacent buildings that were demolished to take over the former production spaces of a textile factory. There, the leadership of the SOE that ran the textile factory not only tolerated but also sympathized with the artists. In the context of similar neighboring sites that have undergone demolition, the preservation of both Tianzifang and M50 was not contingent so much on the architectural or urban qualities of the buildings as on the political willpower of the decision-makers in charge. In contrast, a commercial developer affiliated with the district, was the first to convert a former factory building of the automobile group, turning it into the Bridge 8 premises. Program ambiguities and policy gaps created by the local state’s adaptive governance produced the opportune conditions for both state-affiliated and non-state affiliated actors to intervene. In turn, these actors produced spaces that resolved inefficiencies resulting from the dual market under China’s transition economy. Although the resulting reproduction of spaces looks very much like the global palette of ‘city as loft,’11 the institutional structures that both created and constrained the opportunities for development remain grounded in the framework of China’s transition economy.12 The newer projects of Anken Green and Yongkang Lu continued to exploit these inefficiencies of the dual market in their spatial productions. But their processes also show an increasingly active local state that engages and participates in the development process, also profiting from the urban loopholes. These two more recent projects show a shift towards public-private alliances, where the local state and its affiliates are increasingly active participants in the development process. This contrasts with the wider range of public-private alliances in the earlier projects. The first case in the chapter, that of Anken Green, is a unique small-scale redevelopment project in the northern part of Jing’an District. Jing’an is, as shown in the previous chapter, known as the most economically ambitious district. Despite restructuring, parts of Jing’an remain socially diverse, having inherited an industrial-residential mixed area near the Suzhou River that has not been entirely en-bloc renewed. Set in this northern industrial-residential area, the Anken Green development makes use of the development mode first established by the Bridge 8 development, which produced the creative clusters in former industrial buildings belonging to SOE s. Although one of the four important precedent projects for Shanghai’s transformation, with its business plan replicated in most ensuing industrial reuse projects, little research has actu338

ally described the mechanism for Bridge 8’s development. The brief account of Bridge 8’s development is thus included, to understand the processes and drivers for producing projects like Anken Green. In its implementation, however, Anken Green’s localized cosmopolitan designer-developers13 diverge from the growth-driven model of Bridge 8. Instead, their business model for development caters to a more diversified and real demand. The resulting spaces accommodate small creative enterprises, which cannot otherwise afford the kinds of spaces that the original Bridge 8 model produced. The Anken Green project thus shows how changing the priorities of the reuse model could cultivate, rather than hinder ‘creative industries.’ The district government has since its development shown interest in the project’s success, granting Anken Green creative industries cluster status despite it not fulfilling the outlined requirements for it. This also foreshadows a future direction for culture-led urban regeneration in the city center.14 The second case, Yongkang Lu, is a former market street close to Huaihai Lu, one of the main commercial thoroughfares in Shanghai. While formally closer to developments like Jing’an Villas and Tianzifang, its upgrade has taken on characteristics from the incremental conversion and reuse of small-scale structures. The project is also unique in its use of a development mode that has also learned from the conversion of former SOE real estate. The district government’s active role in the development, engaging the localized cosmopolitan designer-developers, and facilitating the state-affiliated stakeholders, makes it procedurally closer to the Xintiandi project. The district’s shift from large-scale renewal projects to small-scale conversions also taps into the demands of the ‘new economy’15 while exploiting the dual market. The previous two chapters followed the development trajectory of two large neighborhoods over a span of time just after economic liberalization began. This chapter focuses on two case samples, shorter in time frame, that are representative of the interests and priorities of more recent developments. They are drawn out from a larger neighborhood sample to highlight how Shanghai’s ‘transition,’ emphasized in the leadup to the 2010 World Expo, has shifted focus from large-scale developments to more qualitative transformations. These culture-led urban regeneration projects demonstrate that the Chinese characteristics of gentrification are embedded in the local institutional framework. They also show that the evolving spatial products of urban loopholes might in turn also change the institutional constructs of the urban loopholes them-

Alternative Business Plan for Creative Incubation: Anken Green Two architects started the development firm Anken in 2006 as an extension of their design firm, Enclave. One is an Australian of Chinese ancestry from Melbourne who moved to Shanghai from Hong Kong in the early 2000s. Prior to that, she worked in Los Angeles with the international landscape firm EDAW, Inc. Her partner is also an

Chapter 5 The New Economies

selves. Notably, the Yongkang Lu project faced partial shutdown in 2016, following the author’s initial research conducted from 2012 to 2014, making visible the adaptive governance, institutional amphibiousness, and the contingencies of development processes under transition economy that have necessitated urban loopholes.

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Fig. 2 Anken Warehouse in the northern part of the Jing’an District, 2013

architect with extensive experience with the New Urbanists, having led the international design firm HOK ’s New Urban Studio. Their combined international experiences brought important insights to the spatial needs of international creative offices in Shanghai.16 Furthermore, their involvement in the redevelopment of other wellknown projects in the heyday of the mid-2000s, Ferguson Lane,17 amongst others, also gave them insight into the necessity of local connections in particular and the logic for doing business in general. As a design firm, Enclave began with locations in the vicinity of the Suzhou River, where many industries have been located since the early 1900s. The former industrial buildings—with high ceilings, big windows, and floor-through spaces—have the type of ambiance that creative firms prefer. Following the restructuring of SOE s in the mid1990s, the former industrial buildings also offered low rents that were affordable to young design firms who often share the large spaces, enabling the kind of collaborations that economists would call ‘horizontal networking.’18 One of the most prominent projects in the Suzhou River area was by the Taiwanese architect Deng Kunyan [登琨艳], who had set up his atelier in an old warehouse along the river in the early 2000s. The space that Deng upgraded was enviable amongst the creative set for its expansive space and ambiance.19 The artist studios at Moganshan Lu, elaborated in the next chapter, also set examples for how the peripheral and industrial spaces could attract a certain growing market. While few commercial developers were interested in the empty warehouses at the periphery of the central districts, the crash of the dot-com boom in the early 2000s also meant there was little cash available for large new developments. Additionally, the SARS outbreak in 2003 slowed demolition and redevelopment projects. At the same

time, in the mid-2000s, a growing number of international designers came to China in response to its rapidly developing market, many landing in Shanghai. Work spaces for creative needs were limited, even as demand was rising. Working from two other industrial spaces in the Jing’an District in 2004 and 2006, Enclave’s design partners, also Anken’s founders, were drawn to the Huai’an Lu industrial building, a disused ware340

M50 Anken Anken Gree Gr een n

Xintiandi Xin tiandi Yongka Yong kang ng Bridg Bridge e8 Lu Tianz Ti anzif ifang ang

Municipal Level Historic Cultural Heritage Areas 历史文化风貌区 Creative Industries Cluster 创意产业园区

District Level District Jurisdiction 区规划局管制

settled area until 1949 1950-1960 1960-1980 1980-1990 1980-1990

small creative entrepreneurs

Fig. 3 Map showing the location of official creative industries clusters in relation to heritage districts and small creative entrepreneurs

found a space for their own growing design office there, the two designers undertook redevelopment of the entire building, calling it Anken Green. The development of the Anken Green building was timely. (Fig. 2) The shift of Shanghai’s city center from manufacturing to service industries, part of the fundamental restructuring of the metropolis, also coincided with the growing discourse on the competitiveness of global cities. The “rise of the creative class,” as promoted by Richard Florida in 2002, as both indicator and instigator of a post-industrial value-added economy, required the accompanying spatial provision for their accommodation.20 In November 2004, the Shanghai Creative Industries Center [上海创意产业中心] (SCIC) was founded, with the start of its operations in the beginning of 2005. Supported by municipal Economic and Information Committee and also under the jurisdiction of the Social Groups Bureau, the SCIC is a semi-governmental organization that promoted the creative industries through the designating of municipal-level creative industries clusters.21 (Fig. 3) With precedent developments like Tianzifang, M50, and Bridge 8 already

Chapter 5 The New Economies

house owned by a local SOE at the edge of the district close to the Suzhou River. Having

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in operation, the SCIC in effect promoted the mode of development for properties on ‘administratively-allocated land [划拨土地]’—a unique form of ownership tenure that is a vestige of China’s planned economy, and thus restricted in their development on the market—that supplied space to the programmatic demand of the creative industries. Administratively-Allocated Land and Creative Industries The coexistence of ‘commercial leasehold land’ and administratively-allocated land has formed the unique situation of the dual land market in China’s transition economy. Before economic liberalization, all land was ‘administratively-allocated’ as there was no commercial land market under the centrally planned economy. With the introduction of the commercial land market after economic liberalization, ‘commercial leasehold land’ came into existence. With discrepancies in procedure as well as in price, the dual land market has been identified as the cause of an inherent inefficiency in the urban development process.22 The laxity in procedures related to the transfer of land-use rights and land-use change produced urban loopholes in the first decade of land marketization. The 1990s saw the overzealous transfer of administratively-allocated land to leasehold land. These land-use right transfers were also accompanied by rampant change in land use on the administratively-allocated land, most of which was provisioned for industrial use, to profit-making commercial and residential functions. Not only were these conversions considered by the state to be an erosion of state assets, but the often-unsanctioned land-use change also brought little direct benefit to the local government, not to mention the surrounding residents and other occupants. This informal conversion of administratively-allocated land not only led to inefficiencies in the parallel leased land market,23 but also contributed to an inability to coordinate planning.24 Central government policies from the late 1990s had allowed the development of administratively-allocated land by the SOE s, who held land-use rights, with the profits realized used to resettle laid-off workers. These measures were necessary to ease social instability in the 1990s, caused by massive layoffs of workers in the aftermath of SOE reforms. SOE s that were not privatized were often expired industries that had shed their labor force but retained only their management structure. However, because they held the land-use rights, they could also gain compensation from the district or municipal government should the administratively allocated land be formally acquired. As a result of an over-conversion of administratively-allocated land, the central government increasingly restricted land-use changes. As a control measure against the over-commercialization of administratively-allocated land through low-cost transfers, the central government required formal processes for the transfer of land from administratively-allocated to lease-hold status.25 In Shanghai, the municipality followed with complementary policies 26 that prohibited SOE s from redeveloping the buildings via demolition-reconstruction. SOE s could therefore only lease out their buildings for earnings, in order to support the welfare benefits for their laid-off workers. For the dilapidated industrial structures—some historic architecture given heritage status in the mid-2000s, but largely ordinary buildings built after 1949—restrictions on official land-use change also ruled out their functional upgrade. As a result of these restrictions, many of the structures that remained in the possession of SOE s that were no longer operating on their premises, had little prospect for formal redevelopment or reuse. 342

Institutional Landlords Local SOEs

Creative Clusters

食品厂

Tianzifang

Local SOE

Anken Green

ShangTex

M50

High Street Loft

N. 10 Steel Factory

上钢十厂

Shanghai Automobile

Red Town

Bridge 8 Dream Wharf

This was a dilemma for the municipal economists, concerned with the inefficiencies created by the dual market.27 More challenging was how welfare benefits for the laidoff workers of the former SOE s could be sustained.28 A solution soon emerged as a result of a shift in the country’s development ambitions. In the 2005 Eleventh Five-Year Development Plan of Tourism Industries in Shanghai [上海市旅游业发展‘十一五’规划], a part of the plan was noted for its promotion of creative industries clusters in former industrial architecture.29 It specified that permission for land-use change was granted, provided the functional upgrade was intended for creative industries.30 This permission was also granted on the condition that the official land-use designation of ‘industrial’ remained on the ownership certificate.31 This course of development for administratively-allocated land held by SOE s offered a viable business plan for the informal redevelopment of the industrial structures while avoiding the transfer of land-use rights and consequent fees that a formal development would have required. SOE s that had retained their land-use rights were allowed to lease out their built structures for more lucrative, non-industrial functions under the guise of making spaces in the city center available for the creative industries.32 (Fig. 4) At the same time, this satisfied the central government’s stipulation that developments avoid the over-commercialization of administratively-allocated land, a subsidized state asset. The municipal government’s creation of the exception, based on the central government’s prioritization of creative industries development, effectively created the urban loophole for the authorized commercial redevelopment of otherwise off-limits administratively-allocated land. Furthermore, in this way, the former SOE properties could still generate revenue to pay for the SOE welfare responsibilities to its former workers. At the same time, the redevelopment of former industry buildings for creative industries also satisfied the call to protect increasingly valued historic buildings. This procedural resolution, through the spatial production of creative industries clusters, has helped

Chapter 5 The New Economies

Fig. 4 Diagram of creative clusters and their institutional landlords

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sustain the necessary social stability through funding raised in the development of SOE properties. It has also helped to avert the erosion of state assets; a gaffe blamed on earlier conversions. The founding of the SCIC in 2004 made official the designation of ‘Creative Industry Clusters.’ Between 2005 and 2006, the number of officially designated creative industries clusters in Shanghai grew from the initial 18 to 75. The first batch included Tianzifang, a lilong neighborhood with small-scale industries that had already begun transforming in the mid-1990s; and the Moganshan Lu area, former industrial buildings of the defunct textile industries that had become art studios, and had been transformed and occupied by artists since the late-1990s.33 The prototype of the business model that would be replicated in ensuing developments was the Bridge 8 project. The Precedent of Bridge 8: Business Plan for Industrial Reuse In 2002, a developer from Hong Kong, Huang Zonghan [黄瀚泓], formed his own firm, Hong Kong Lifestyle Co Ltd [时尚生活管理], after leaving the development company of Xintiandi, Shui On [瑞安].34 As a result of his experience on the Xintiandi development, Huang had maintained good connections with the Luwan [卢湾] District authorities and the municipal Economic Commission, and they offered him an abandoned site for redevelopment as a commercial site. The site had seven buildings that were formerly workshops of the Shanghai Automobile Industry Corporation (SAIC) [上汽集团]. Although the land-use right belonged to a municipal-level SOE , it was not unusual that the district leadership and municipal bureaucrats could be influential in steering its development. Particularly with a site that was both visible and centrally located, its successful development would add commercial revenue to the district coffers and give performance credibility to the local bureaucrats.35 The developer signed a 20-year lease with the SAIC for the site and began working with a Japanese architect to renovate the abandoned 15,000-square-meter space in early 2004.36 Investing 70 million R MB for the renovation for office and commercial usage, and with little change to the cluster layout, the developer opened the compound at the end of the year, with upgraded interiors, a new façade and bridges linking the different buildings, giving the cluster its name.37 Even though the original street number had been “10,” the name of the cluster became “Bridge 8,” since the number “eight” was considered auspicious, especially in southern China, where the developer was from.38 With a majority of international design firms as new tenants, the developer tapped into a market that he saw as largely under-served. In the mid-2000s, numerous international design firms entered the Chinese building market to participate in China’s rapid urban development. Like firms from other economic sectors that were also seeking office spaces for headquarters in cities like Shanghai and Beijing, the design firms too, found a dearth of choices at the higher end. Huang deliberately selected upmarket design firms as tenants, turning down sectors that were not considered creative. This gave the Bridge 8 development a reputation as a culture-oriented work environment, drawing in more similar tenants.39 The developer’s good connections to the district government also made the commercial registration of the tenant firms, many of which were international, easier, and this further built up the standing of the cluster. The annual rent to the district, which the SOE pays for the right to use the admin­ istratively-allocated land it has been assigned, is usually at far below the market price. 344

When a private developer sublets a former industrial building from the SOE , the developer usually pays above the state-subsidized rents that the SOE pays to the government, but below the market rate, which they lock in for as long as possible. In turn, after a fast renovation, when the spaces are rented out at rates that are near market rates, breaking even as early as two or three years after the initial outlay for renovation, both the developer and the SOE profit. With a short renovation time and leases granted to creative offices—at rates well above lease rates from the tenure-holding SOE on administratively-allocated land, but still slightly below office rentals on the market—the investment return could be recouped rapidly, at full occupancy. Compared to the one-off returns recouping for residential developments, the difference between rising and high rental profits and low leasing fees that are locked in for the term with the SOE generates continuous profit. In 2006, for example, the average daily rent per square meter in the Tianzifang development was still around 1.50 to 2.50 R MB , relatively affordable since the initial investment for renovations and infrastructure had been low.40 In the same year, the rents charged at spaces in Bridge 8 were already at 6 R MB per square meter, the same as market rates for office rentals in the city center. However, compared to the investment of 200,000 R MB for Tianzifang, the 70 million R MB for Bridge 8 necessitated the high rents. This business formula for upgrading vacant former industrial areas by turning them into revenue-generating service industries was supplemented by the financial and non-financial benefits offered by competing districts, each eager to jump on the bandwagon of incubating creativity. Business registration addresses, giving compa-

from commercial enterprises attracted to the new developments.41 Furthermore, the granting of official designation of being a creative industries cluster by the Municipal Economic Commission, complete with ceremonial prestige, brought an assortment of incentives, from tax holidays to rental subsidies and expedited business registration, all attracting creative industries to settle in the designated areas. This deceptively simple business formula led to a proliferation of creative industries clusters, which, in turn, also saw a parallel growth of high vacancy rates. In seeking to maximize profits in the shortest time, developers tended to set rents too high for the very creative industries enterprises their developments intended to attract. Unsuccessful models are visible in cluster developments like High Street Loft [尚街], developed by the Sanqiang [三枪] part of the municipal-level SOE ShangTex Group [上纺集团].42 At High Street Loft, the high turnover resulting from high rents and inadequate amenities has left the development with the feeling of dereliction.43 Even in the showcase project of the 1933 Old Millfun, a modern-era slaughterhouse-turned creative industries cluster that was designated an industrial monument in 2005 and since then has housed the Shanghai Creative Industries Center itself,44 the higher-than-market-price rentals and its spatial structure destined it to high turnovers and a steady vacancy rate. The building, built in 1933, was one of the first mechanized slaughterhouses in the world and its modern concrete form marks it out as a unique piece of heritage architecture for Shanghai. Unfortunately, despite its architectural importance, the curation of tenants

Chapter 5 The New Economies

nies prestige, especially in Shanghai’s central districts, and limited period tax incentives, were perks that district governments threw in for developers to entice them to invest in upgrade projects. The district governments, in return, earned tax revenue

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for its reuse has been visibly unsuccessful, as seen in its high vacancy rate. This, coupled with its inflexible architectural qualities, has led to a business plan of high rentals that has made the space a commercial flop. Anken Green’s Approach: Creatives Attracting Creatives Unlike most state-backed developments that capitalized on district incentives for developing creative industries clusters, Anken Green, having been founded by designers for themselves, invested in renovations by calculating backwards from what design offices such as their own could afford, making the development feasible from the outset.45 This implicit understanding, of the tastes as well as the budgets of design offices, does not subscribe to the dominant and top-down logic of supply creating demand. Rather, it follows real demand and not a projected one, aimed at maximizing revenue for both the developer and the district. With desks renting at 2,000 to 2,500 R MB per month and facilities for office infrastructure including meeting rooms and event spaces, which also served as areas for networking with other creatives, the reasonable price for a start-up freelancer brought many initial tenants. Office rental rates of 4.5 to 5 R MB per square meter per day in 2013 were not only much lower than the downtown Grade-A office rents of 12 to 15 R MB , but also many of the other creative industries clusters, which often asked for between 8 and 12 R MB , well beyond the budget of design firms.46 In addition to cheaper rents, communal spaces and amenities were provisioned with the designers as occupants in mind, rather than with a commercial outlook that many developer-produced creative industries clusters favor. The restaurant on the ground floor of Anken Green, the Warehouse Café, is also priced reasonably, so much so that it is cited by Time Out as one of the most affordable cafés.47 With fresh ingredients that highlight the environmental consciousness of the designer-owners, the café caters to both the tenants with similar affinities and like-minded visitors. Anken Green also accommodates gatherings and events that are often important parts of the design offices’ repertoire, and is one of the many public spaces in the development designed for spontaneous meetings, encounters, and networking between different designers.48 On each floor, meeting rooms are placed at prime locations, rather than in leftover spaces between desks. These simple design strategies not only created better environments for meetings but also give Anken Green a reputation for understanding its clientele. The recognition of the nature of public and shared spaces as crucial elements to design culture is being extended to the larger set of amenities that the Anken designers are planning for in a site near the Anken Green. Fitness studios for spin and yoga classes would not only benefit the creative labor that comes but also reach into the changing community in the neighborhood. The recent completion of a sky farm on the roof of the Anken Green building highlights the role new concepts play in the development of these spaces. Functions that are welcomed by the transnational set of creative workers—many of them from places like Brooklyn and Shoreditch, where the latest ideas about urban agriculture, low carbon–footprint organic vegetables, and slow food are being tested—are created to the sensibilities of the incoming creatives, rather than the other way around. Anken’s developers could design for a real demand rather than for a projected one because they themselves are part of it. 346

As with Bridge 8, more than half of the occupants at Anken Green are from an international background. (Fig. 5) They are either expats or locals who have been educated abroad. The studios of Anken Green thus serve as nodes of knowledge exchange, filtering ideas from abroad and localizing them. They serve as a micro-

Fig. 5 The transnational creative enterprises in Anken Warehouse, 2013

cosm of the openness of Shanghai that attracted many of the foreign talents to the city in the first place. Despite the formally high entry cost for small studios, many transnational start-ups are willing to set up an enterprise in Shanghai because of

the openness to foreign ideas as well as a growing demand for sophistication.49 Also in contrast to top-down curation by most developers of these creative industries clusters, Anken’s founders saw the selection of the incoming tenants as being of utmost importance.50 This fundamental aspect of community building and forma-

local Friendship Store, a state institution.51 Both were financially secure and well-connected enterprises that would have ensured steady returns. But waiting for the right ground-floor tenant yielded a better fit. The Danish design firm Paustian moved into the space in 2008. Paustian decided to base its representative for international markets in Shanghai to meet both the growing demand for exclusive designed furniture in the expanding Chinese market and the increasing utilization of production in Asia. The 300-square-meter showroom and sales office at Anken Green serves as an exhibition space for incoming clients as well as the site from which local customizations are designed. The furniture design showroom utilizes the high-ceilinged former industrial space, and showcases the types of products and services offered by the knowledge economy and transnational creative entrepreneurships in the building. The music agency, Massive Music, was the first tenant to take over a space at the top of the six-story building.52 With offices in Amsterdam, London, New York, Los Angeles, and Shanghai, it is also representative of the kind of value chain that serves the growth and demand of the Asian market. Their clients include large multinationals like Nike, Audi, and Sony, who have also arrived in the expanding local market. Meetings with representatives of creative sectors from around the world call for the kind of spatial ambiance that Anken Green supplies. It would take another year and a half for the building to be at full occupancy, but Anken’s founders emphasized that the selection of the right tenants was more important for a longer-term commitment that would benefit the community than immediate returns.53

Chapter 5 The New Economies

tion of an ambiance rather than simple commercial co-location is also the reason that, unlike many other creative clusters created by SOE -backed firms only interested in short-term returns and as a result producing an oversupply of generic spaces, Anken Green has had good occupancy rates from its inception. When the space was nearing completion, proposals were submitted by both multinationals and local SOE s to become the ground-floor tenant of the most visible and accessible real estate of the building. Anken’s founders rejected both the international conglomerate of DHL and the

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Architects, graphic designers, photographers, and theater consultants have settled in, some in the form of studios and others starting with renting by the desk while their business expanded. The diversity of spaces is designed with the growth of the successful start-up in mind, from that of a one-person enterprise to small growing teams to commercially established creative firms. At the same time, the design community offers camaraderie and business support. Anken organizes events and gatherings, which are conducive to networking between new and old tenants, small and large firms. Additionally, Anken offers commercial registration for small offices: an added service for start-ups, many of whom would otherwise work in unregistered spaces.54 Although many of the other officially designated creative industries clusters also promise a platform service for their start-up firms (part of the requirements for being a creative-industries cluster), these formal services are often charged at consultancy prices. For small start-up firms, these added costs can too high to bear. The benefits of informal networking thus far surpass the fulfillment of ‘creative city’ goals on paper. State Connections and Recognition Most small, private developers choose not to invest in such small urban retrofit projects today because the returns are not worth the investment, unless the relationships to the district authorities and to the SOE s landlords are excellent and assured.55 Since the initiation of the creative industries clusters as a business plan, the return on investment has usually been around seven to eight years because of higher rents charged by the SOE landlords. Lease terms have also been shortened to ten years, with the result that rent hikes can be more frequent. For a small developer, the uncertainty of being able to continue the lease also discourages a commitment to a space rather than seeing it as a contribution to the city. Even though the Anken Green project on Huai’an Lu is only 6,700 square meters— officially not qualified to be honored with the creative industries cluster designation that requires at least 10,000 square meters56—the development has been recognized by the municipality because of its reputation. Anken Green’s ability to attract desirable creative enterprises, large and small, and its curation of a vibrant, conversant community have sealed its reputation as an exemplary case for the district and the municipality. Anken Green has become a must-stop on many official tours to showcase the creative know-how of Jing’an and Shanghai. District officials acknowledge the project’s contribution to the city. They have come to consult the developers of Anken on the five-year plan that will help shape the vision for the future of the district.57 Through a decade of working in the Jing’an District, the Anken designer-developers have also become familiar with key decision-makers in the bureaucracy, and they cite the district as one of the most progressive in Shanghai.58 Since economic liberalization began in the 1980s, the leaders of Jing’an District have boldly rejuvenated the historically famed West Nanjing Lu area through land marketization and the attraction of overseas Chinese development capital to remake the district’s thoroughfare, turning it into an alternate central business district (CBD ). From the Shanghai Center complex to Plaza 66, the first international hotel, high-end commerce, and Grade-A office spaces brought in the revenue that would help develop the other parts of the district. The fact that these much-needed functions are centrally located and not on the greenfield developments in Pudong showed the audacious 348

vision of a group of experimenters who gambled on a win. The district’s personnel are under direct authority by the municipality, and the rotating leadership is made up of ambitious, young entrepreneurs, often well connected with the outside and commercial world. Given the locational advantages of Jing’an as central and accessible, a current plan for creating a specialized fashion sector involves not only retail but also schools and production spaces to make use of the labor force in design, marketing, and production. Most recent involvements of well-reputed reuse architects Neri and Hu in the renovation of a former police station and also the Zhang Gardens cluster showed the forward thinking of the district council in integrating international concepts and localizing them in context to compete in the global framework. The continuing openness of both the district leadership and ministry authorities remains extremely important in the Chinese context of discretionary decision-making that is embedded in the planning relationships. The differing physical and socio-economic conditions of the districts have defined territorial competition among them and have also led to very different preferential policies in relation to creative development. Anken’s founders, having tried to work in the different districts, describe the outlook of the Huangpu [黄浦] District decision-makers as outdated.59 Huangpu, unlike Jing’an, has legacy advantages. The Bund and the modern era civic district, with its large blocks and institutional buildings built in the 1930s, are in Huangpu. The developers of Anken, like many others, expected these urban resources of Shanghai’s historic CBD to be valuable for contemporary development. But because the Huangpu authorities projected immediate and high returns from targeting high-end financial services, these aspirations remained unrealized. Despite tax incentives by all the districts to attract creative cluster development, discrepancies remain in project realization due to differing demands and thus prioritization by the district authorities.60 Ambiguous property rights of much of the historic financial district’s building stock in Huangpu have also created a high barrier to efficient redevelopment plans.

reuse and rejuvenation projects.65 An alternate mode of cluster development such as that by the designer-entrepreneurs of Anken Green, although officially recognized by the authorities, reveals the divergence of a cosmopolitan user- and community-based approach to creative spatial production from the customary processes for creative cluster formation by statebacked developers. The importance of curation in the formation of a like-minded design network and the amenities that extend beyond the cluster enclave provokes a rethinking of the conventional business model for creative incubation. The alibi for creative industries made possible the urban loophole for the authorized commercial redevelopment of otherwise off-limits administratively-allocated land. Anken abides by the

Chapter 5 The New Economies

The Anken group’s attempts to initiate change in the historic architecture behind the Bund have only met with some frustration.61 Municipal-level SOE s that are in perpetual possession of many of the prime properties in Shanghai’s city center are holding out on their real estate assets; resulting in many properties that are otherwise valuable locations in the city remaining empty.62 The dominant municipal-level SOE s were consolidated from smaller SOE s in the SOE reforms of the 1990s.63 These entities are often so large and fragmented that one branch holding onto property in one location has no knowledge of other properties on another location.64 Management ineptitude has thus thwarted innovations by small creative entrepreneurs like Anken in potential

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business model of the creative industries cluster to exploit the inefficiencies of the dual market. But by updating, at the same time, precedent business plans, Anken, as well as other developers like it, could offer alternative creative hubs that actually cater to small creative entrepreneurs. Not unlike the initiatives taken by the artists of Moganshan Lu a decade earlier, which has since become packaged to become the M 50 cluster, the designers are forming their own community that goes far beyond that of the designation of a cluster into the transformation of the city. Nevertheless, the importance of official backing in the transformation and updating of development modes remains.

New Local-Global Alliances: the Upgrade of Yongkang Lu In contrast to the Anken Green development, which is an industrial warehouse, located close to the manufacturing belt of northern Jing’an, in the former International Settlement, Yongkang Lu was a former wet-market street in the Xuhui [徐汇] District. It is located between the later and more modern buildings of the western end of the former French Concessions and the earlier, denser and older building typologies closer to the old Chinese city to the east. The locational overlap has facilitated its historic function as a commercial hub, where fresh produce, poultry, seafood, and various other wet-market goods had historically been deposited and sold. From a street lined with dried goods and sundries shops with bare minimum décor, selling everything from shoelaces to soy sauce, and providing essentials to the residents close by, Yongkang Lu transformed into a styled and polished café and bar street, catering to the growing number of international consumers. The transformation, which took place in the span of three years, was catalyzed by the rejuvenation projects for the Expo in the late 2000s. It was also triggered by commercial developments in the surrounding neighborhood. The street’s transformation also reflects a change in the social composition of the surrounding neighborhood, revealing a broader shift in the demand for consumption spaces in the city and their relationships to existing residences. The street’s upgrade came at a time when small-scale developments were starting to be increasingly emphasized by the local state. (Fig. 6) The district government’s active participation in facilitating the development, engaging both private investor and SOE landlords, followed its motto of “government steered, society participates [政府引导, 社会参于].”66 Pro-Growth and Developmentalist: the Local State Actors Xuhui District’s bureaucrats have tabled Yongkang Lu’s upgrade since the late 1990s.67 Prior to the mid-2000s, Yongkang Lu was a residential street flanked by lilong houses, with small stores on its ground floor units. Together with its neighboring Jiashan Lu [嘉善路], it had historically been a bustling commercial street, full of small stores providing goods and services, and hosting a wet-market that dated back to the 1930s.68 In 2006, when the district dismantled two markets from neighboring Nanchang Lu [南昌路] to begin the construction of the International Commerce Center (ICC), a large en-bloc project by the Hong Kong developer Sung Hung Kai Group [新鸿基], Yongkang Lu and 350

Fig. 6 The developer’s model for the development of east-west Yongkang Lu, and north-south Xiangyang Lu and Jiashan Lu, as shown by the grey buildings lining the streets, 2013

its adjacent Jiashan Lu became an expanded wet market overnight.69 As vegetable

populated residential neighborhoods around Yongkang Lu, one of the densest in the precinct,72 removing the space for a local amenity only made that amenity settle in a new un-anticipated location. The district recognized the repercussions of removing the space of one neighborhood amenity without providing for a nearby alternative. The debacle taught the district officials an important lesson in planning for spaces to accommodate consumer demand.73 It also led to the construction of an indoor market at the parallel Fuxing Lu [复兴中路] to accommodate both market vendors and neighborhood residents.74 With the replacement market in the pipeline, Yongkang Lu’s cleanup was underway. The cleanup of wet-market streets had, since the 1980s, given impetus to Shanghai’s neighborhood transformations. In Tianzifang’s initial development, it was also the removal of the open-air wet market on Taikang Lu that whetted the appetite of the local street office director for a neighborhood upgrade.75 Some of the other streets in the district

Chapter 5 The New Economies

peddlers and fish vendors, many licensed, found their market space on Nanchang Lu closed for the new construction, they flocked to the small street of Yongkang Lu to continue their daily trade.70 They were joined by a number of unlicensed vendors who have always floated through the neighborhood. The authorities did not expect the informal resettlement of the wet market. They had planned for other markets in the precinct to absorb the vendors from the closed Nanchang Lu market.71 But those other markets were too out-of-the-way for the neighborhood’s residents, and the proximity and convenience kept the newly created Yongkang Lu market afloat with strong local demand. Just as providing space for a new program does not necessarily make that program automatically commercially successful, taking away a space for an old program does not necessarily make that program disappear. Especially for the densely

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that had been wet-market streets, including Julu Lu [巨鹿路] and Wuyuan Lu [五原 路], have become the new trend streets

cash flow

MINIMIZE

investment returns

after acquisition, eviction+ renovation

full of small boutiques and cafés.76 By 2008, the Fuxing Lu market had been completed. It had almost 100 stalls time

MAXIMIZE lease term

development expenditure

Fig. 7 Diagram representing the relationship between development time, lease term and returns for investment, in projects like Anken Green and Yongkang Lu

to accommodate the vendors of Yongkang Lu.77 Rising costs for Yongkang Lu outdoor market’s upkeep by the different bureaus of the district also made its removal a financial priority.78 The completion of the indoor market coincided with com-

plaints by some influential and politically connected residents to the district authorities in the mid-2000s. Together, the combination of rising costs, pressure by connected residents and municipal encourage-

ment for pre-Expo image upgrades pushed the district authorities to go forward with the Yongkang Lu upgrade project. In 2009, the district selected a private development company called the Platform Group [派丰集团] for the Yongkang Lu upgrade. Unlike administratively-allocated land, where a single entity holds the land-use right, ownership of the small plots on Yongkang Lu belongs to multiple leaseholders, as is usual in a dense urban neighborhood. For an investor redeveloping an area, the faster the development cycle, the faster the recouping of investments. This has contributed to the rapidness of the upgrading itself, as shown in Bridge 8 and Anken Green, and is representative of most projects.79 (Fig. 7) However, acquisition time, especially in dense urban neighborhoods, has become increasingly protracted since the beginning of economic liberalization. Optimism about modernization made residents and incumbent occupants eager for change, when they were just emerging from the eras of economic impasse and political instability in the early 1990s. But since the first decade of rapid urban developments, residents and incumbent occupants have grown weary of relocations and often demand high compensation in return for central locations. Thus, the longer acquisition time as part of the development cycle has driven up the cost of investment. One of the preconditions for a fast development cycle is the possibility of acquiring either a majority ownership in an area for redevelopment or key locations that would catalyze changes to the neighboring areas. Tianzifang’s initial number of small SOE s served as the necessary critical mass, or ‘anchor tenants,’80 for its ensuing redevelopment. This would serve as a lesson for the Yongkang Lu development. At Yongkang Lu, the consolidation of a majority of the ground floor spaces on the street became a way to expedite development. Because it was a former market street, three district-level SOE s, principally in the food and beverage industries, owned a large portion of the real estate on Yongkang Lu.81 Notably, the district owns the three SOE s. At the urging of the district and the Tianping Street Office [天平街道] that oversaw the jurisdiction, the officials leading the SOE s agreed to offload their real estate assets

for a lease term of 13 years.82 This would give the developers 29 of the 56 street-facing units, on the shorter, eastern portion of Yongkang Lu, between Xiangyang Lu 352

Fig. 8 The collation of existing uses and ownerships on Yongkang Lu, with the 56 units developed in the first phase of Yongkang Li development indicated by the red rectangle, 2013

[襄阳路] and Jiashan Lu. (Fig. 8) It would also make it easier for the developers to negotiate end-leases with the other tenants on the street.83 In exchange, the private development company formed an investment alliance with the SOE s, Platform Yongkang Incorporated [派丰永康公司] where a 70-10-10-10 division in profits was agreed upon between the development company and the three SOE s.84 The timing was important, as several of the key SOE decision-makers were retiring,85 and rather than actively developing new markets, or expanding the existing business, the retiring officials of the three SOE s were ready to utilize the existing real estate assets in their charge. Crucially, these centrally located properties are, due to systemic constraints, undervalued, and the differential to their potential market value made for a great resource. The temporarily offloaded SOE real estate in turn gave the development group over 60 % of the total ground floor space on the street, propelling the development to proceed. In a conventional cash-flow model, an investor profits from the differential be-

day in 2010, is below market prices, but above any fees that the SOE s nominally pay to the district for the use of the land. It would incrementally increase at 5 % annually. The rent that new tenants would pay the investment alliance started at 10 R MB /square meter/day in 2010, with incremental increases of 25 % annually. In effect, the SOE s earn 30 % of the 10 R MB minus taxes and other fees, as well as the 3 R MB . The district earns commercial taxes and management fees. The developers take the rest. The urban loophole created by the constraints of the dual land market, when exploited, benefits the local state and its public and private sectors allies as privileged market players. From a projected cash flow analysis, the total income received by the investment alliance would come to 106.5 million R MB , of which 70 % would go to Platform and the

Chapter 5 The New Economies

tween earnings and expenditures. (Fig. 9) In the case of the development model where the landlord is also the part of the investment alliance, the landlord earns both a percentage of the net earnings as well as what would have been expenditures for the investment alliance, but would be paid to the landlord as rentals. From the investment alliance, the SOE officials would share in a part of the net profit, in addition to the rents that the development company pays to the SOE as landlord for lease of their spaces. (Fig. 10) The rent that the investment alliance pays to the SOE s, at 3 R MB /square meter/

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Figs. 9, 10 Diagram of cash flow for the 13 -year lease with net income (green), net expenditures (red) and cash flow (blue), left; diagram of cash flow for SOE s with earnings from a percentage of net income (light green) and rentals (pink), right

other 30 % to the three SOE s, which receive 31.9 million R MB .86 Additionally, the rental income that the investment alliance pays to the SOE s totals 30.3 million R MB .87 This means that at the end of the 13 years, the SOE s will have received roughly 62.2 million R MB .88 The initial investment of 2.5 million R MB by Platform will net, at the end of

the 13 years, roughly 72 million R MB .89 These numbers, in their returns, pale by comparison to the large-scale developments. But given that the initial investment was minimal, 6 million R MB by the investment alliance,90 this business model appears extremely lucrative for all the participants involved. The transaction cost lay mostly in labor costs for old tenant evictions and new tenant recruitments, part of the overall operation costs of the district, the street office, and the developers. In return, the benefits to the stakeholders were great. For the district SOE s, an otherwise undervalued asset in their possession became utilized. For the district, street office, and the developers, the success of the development increased their credibility in ensuing urban developments. For the municipality, the development cleaned up what the authorities saw as a “dirty and chaotic [脏和乱]” area,91 in time for the projection of “Better City Better Life.” While the private investor contributed capital from its Hong Kong-listed company and manpower for the development process, the district SOE s contributed otherwise unavailable and undervalued real estate resources. The Xuhui District authorities created the platform on which possible bureaucratic obstacles could be alleviated. The wet market on Yongkang Lu belonged to the jurisdiction of the district Commerce Commission so its closure was easy.92 The Administration for Urban Management and Law Enforcement [城管] was on standby should disturbances arise following the dismantling of the wet market. This showed a change in approach since the 2006 closure of the wet market’s former incarnation, and which in turn led to the market’s creation on Yongkang Lu. With the district’s backing, access to the various city-level bureaus, from those in charge of security to hygiene, further facilitated the functional upgrade.93 Without the collaboration and backing of the different municipal agencies, 354

as smoothened by the district authority’s relationships, the street upgrade would not have been come to fruition in such a short space of time. More importantly, it is in the mediation of the relocation of displaced incumbent occupants that the district and street office played a crucial role. Because the majority ownership for the developer was initially insufficient, street office authorities had to step in to help with negotiations for the removing of other ground floor tenants.94 Furthermore, many of the shops had multiple sub-tenants who used the same space at different times of the day, and the compensation package that the developer offered should have taken into account the multiple rents that the primary tenant would have collected from the sublets.95 Instead, the developer offered a compensation package that was too low, without acknowledging the lucrative multiple uses for the same space. The street office officials and their subsidiary resident committee, with much more intimate knowledge of the tenants were indispensable in expediting the eviction and thus shortening the development time cycle. As street office officials strategized, they first gathered as much background information on the target units, through street office informants, to identify the pressure points for each tenant or resident. Pressure was then applied through the network of acquaintances and friends as well as employers of family and relatives.96 In situations where financial weak points could be found, the developer, with the help of street office officials, then dangled package deals with sufficient monetary buyouts. As expected by officials, these tenants often were willing to accept the compensation packages to alleviate their economic troubles.97 A social affinity and empathy also existed between the largely middle-age bureaucrats and sitting tenants who were of a similar age

ipal administrators,’ the term for law enforcement officers, under the instruction of the district officials, to restrain and pacify the angry man. Just as the public display of defiance and resistance was an attempt at calling wider attention to the plight of the neighboring community, while hoping for support from fellow small entrepreneurs, so the ability by authorities to persuade tenants to submit was an important demonstration of the authorities’ power. The term ‘nail houses’ has been used for the obstinate remaining residents or tenants who refused to be evicted and displaced in order that their houses or units be demolished or renovated for new development.100 As one of the department heads responsible for the eviction negotiations recounted later, the district’s rich experience with “pulling out nails [拔钉子]” has made the authorities savvy about how to deal with the most “difficult cases.”101 The units that the street office and its neighborhood committee identified as most difficult to deal with and most likely to resist were dealt with first, through a combination of negotiation, payoff and coercion.102 As the street office official explained, “once the ‘hard-to-pull-out-nails’ are removed [最难的钉子先拔出来],” the other evictions would follow much more smoothly.103

Chapter 5 The New Economies

group and background. This was especially so with returnees who had been sent to the countryside during the years after the Cultural Revolution but who had managed to come back to Shanghai under the Sunshine policies of the 1990s. In the initial eviction of Yongkang Lu’s ground floor tenants, six district level departments came together to the street to inform the sitting tenants that their rental term was up.98 One of the most dramatic moments was the subduing of one store owner, a burly figure wielding a butcher knife, who openly rejected the district’s offer by ejecting him from his butcher shop.99 It took the force of a large group of ‘munic-

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The authorities involved justified the evictions on the one hand, as the social good they were doing by helping out especially the “families with difficulties [困难户], that is, those suffering the greatest hardship.”104 On the other hand, the street upgrading yielded immense benefits for the district and its affiliated SOE s both in terms of income and their own public image. From a public relations perspective, the street upgrade was presented as a success as the concerted effort had removed the lower-end commerce that had long made Yongkang Lu “dirty and chaotic.” 105 This pro-image development was timely for the authorities, especially in the lead-up to the Expo. Programming for New Consumption: the Cosmopolitan Developers Since the mid-2000s, numerous local and transnational development companies have emerged, specializing in city center reuse projects. Of similar scale, resource and capacity, Anken included, they often compete for the same type of projects.106 However, while the district and street office had established working relationships with some of these developers, including the Hong Kong Lifestyle Co. that developed Bridge 8, and the Xuhui District, the Tianping Street Office eventually chose Platform as the developers for the Yongkang Lu upgrade. Platform is made up of two key members. One partner of Platform is a younger American-trained Taiwanese architect who worked in New York for the architecture firm of SOM before joining the real estate company F&T Group, which was founded by a Taiwanese entrepreneur and headquartered in New York. The other partner of Platform is an older Taiwanese-American former architect who led the Asian office of HOK in Hong Kong in the 1990s. After arriving in Shanghai in 1999, the older partner of Platform also worked with the F & T Group. Their shared experience in upgrading creative industry clusters in Nanjing and Hangzhou consolidated the duo’s collaboration. Through the process of development, they had also learned the nuances of subleasing from SOE s, redeveloping on administratively-allocated land, and negotiating mutually beneficial packages that convinced sitting SOE landlords to profit from otherwise undervalued state assets. One of the projects that the older partner of Platform had worked on in Shanghai was Ferguson Lane’s upgrade.107 Ferguson Lane is a prominent food and beverages and office cluster which is a reuse project redeveloped by a Hong Kong investor in the mid-2000s. Crucially, it belongs to the same street office jurisdiction as that of Yongkang Lu, and parts of the Ferguson Lane complex belong to local SOE s in the district. Through this project, the older partner of Platform became familiar with the process of redeveloping district assets. He also became familiar with some of the district’s crucial decision makers. Because of his guanxi Platform was selected as the developer for the Yongkang Lu development.108 While the older partner of Platform had the guanxi crucial to getting the project, his partner brought a younger take with his experience in market research, architecture design, and real estate management. The younger partner also, crucially, had the financial backing of his family’s investments. Their combined backgrounds, as overseas Chinese with global resources and local understanding, made them the ready agents for capitalizing on the growing consumer demands, within the local framework. With the help of the district authorities, the developers leased their first 1,100 square meters of ground floor space in March 2009 from the district SOE s. At the same time, 356

Fig. 11 Rendering for the developments of Yongkang Li, 2013

Platform solicited design ideas from local architects for the physical upgrade of Yongkang Lu. The Xuhui Real Estate Group [徐房集团], the district’s development group, agreed in mid-2009 to pay for the street-facing façade of the buildings and also repave its street and sidewalk surfaces. Platform agreed to pay for the addition of awnings, at the unit cost of 42,000 R MB . The projected expenditure for public relations and media coverage for the next year was also projected to be 800,000 R MB .109 From March to August 2009, Yongkang Lu’s physical upgrades were rapidly executed. And starting in August, the developers began to look for new tenants. The district had given Platform the authority to issue commercial licenses to its tenants and it pushed Platform to fill the upgraded units, each around 20 to 30 square meters large, in two months.110 The street opened on 18 October 2009 with an official launch.111 A large red stage with ribbon cutting and a lion dance celebrated this “new Xintiandi in Xuhui.”112 Presented with a brand new façade, the development was also branded “Yongkang Li [永康里],” taking on the traditional term for Shanghai’s vernacular neighborhood, ‘li [里]’ of ‘lilong [里弄],’ to suggest a connection with history. Platform’s initial strategy for Yongkang Lu’s re-programming [业态调整] tried to

yielded many inexperienced businesses. Platform had to file legal complaints against numerous tenants who owed overdue rents due to their lack of cash flow.114 The apparel merchandizing proved commercially difficult. In the half year following the opening of Yongkang Li, business success looked uncertain. Vanguard entrepreneurs in the fashion industries mentioned that the urban ambiance of the street also did not help.115 The upgraded façades lacked the patina that they sought in locations for new shops. These experienced boutique owners also gave feedback that the location was wrong for the target market.116 Yongkang Li was a few blocks too far from the high street of Xuhui District, Huaihai Lu, where fashion held court. If it were even a block closer, the locational advantages would benefit some small boutiques. Spillovers from the brand names of the big box stores and the imminent twenty-four-hour mall would have helped make Yongkang Lu successful.

Chapter 5 The New Economies

capitalize on the Chinese affinity for lavish nuptials through specialized bridal shops, as part of a broader fashion district concept.113 (Fig. 11) But the rush to find tenants

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Figs. 12, 13 1938 map showing the old Chinese settlements (shaded), French planning (unshaded), and Yongkang Lu (in red) left; and the historic map from 1949 with Yongkang Lu indicated in red rectangle, right

In the blocks between Yongkang Lu and Huaihai Lu, some of the poorest and densest residential neighborhoods in the ward were located.117 In these neighborhoods, old-style lilongs mixed with new ones. From the French Concession plans of the area, it is visible that the neighborhood around Yongkang Lu had already been settled before the Concession planning regulated the urban developments in the areas around it. (Fig. 12, 13) These legacy conditions gave rise to the commercial hub around Jiashan Lu and Yongkang Lu, but also contributed to what the authorities disdained as “dirty and chaotic” urban conditions. Additionally, a large plot bordering Huaihai Lu had been left vacant since before the 1990s, its indeterminate future further spawning and fostering the informal developments around it. In 1996, a Hong Kong developer leased the land-use right of the 24,000-square-meter site from the Xuhui District to build a five-star hotel.118 A consortium of district-affiliated development companies demolished en-bloc in 1998.119 But because the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis aggravated the developer’s cash flow problems, the demolished site remained vacant. As an interim solution, the district installed the Xiangyang Fake Market [襄阳路假货商场] on the site.120 Made up of small stalls known for selling brand knock-offs, the success and popularity of the Fake Market triggered a spillover effect in its surrounding blocks. Small enterprises peddling everything from faux Louis Vuittons to pirated DVD s infiltrated the old houses and winding lanes of the neighboring blocks, dodging authorities that routinely cracked down on the fake goods. Only in 2008, at the same time as the decision was made on the Yongkang Lu upgrade, was the site emptied again. Another Hong Kong real estate giant, the Sung Hung Kai group had taken over the land lease from the district and was 358

ready to develop the site into a high-end commercial podium block, with a hotel and office tower mixed-use compound, called the International Commerce Center (ICC).121 The catchment area around the construction site remained rundown and vibrant with the remnant informality. Several upgrades have been proposed to formalize many of the small shops that had been spillovers from the Fake Market. Street peddling and mobile hawkers nevertheless still populated the surrounding streets. Because of these legacy conditions of the area, the commercial tenants from fashion retail who did set up shop on Yongkang Lu were of a lower caliber than the developers hoped for in the first round of the upgrade project.122 After a sluggish and disappointing start with fashion specialization, the Platform developers changed tack. For a short period, the street became home to almost a dozen galleries as part of the cultural strategy to rejuvenate the street. District and municipal incentives for creative industry incubation were tapped into for the second round of development in mid-2010. However, high turnover and low commercial success prompted the developers to re-strategize their development plan again, after two years of being a commercial flop and with a painful financial low point at the end of 2011. In switching to the food and beverage industry, the developers finally found success in 2011. The success of the first venues showed that, rather than targeting local shoppers of fashion and accessories, Yongkang Lu’s location and spaces were more attractive to Shanghai’s internationals.123 The bar Café Stagiaire was the first to set the tone for the street.124 Started by a partnership of five graduates from the Lucerne School of Hospitality, the bar’s opening was well timed. The new venue was patronized

street. (Fig. 14) The scale of the street made it ideal for outdoor seating. Other food and beverage tenants arrived within a few months, setting up tables and stools also outside under the new awnings. (Fig. 15) The cafés, bars, sushi, and pasta places on Yongkang Lu finally took off in late 2011, following the popularity of Stagiaire, attracting a young, largely international crowd.125 As with conversion projects under pressure of time, commercial licensing followed development, rather than the other way around. The informality of procedure is more the norm than the exception in a quickly changing city that is responding to immense market demands.126 The district, along with the municipality, appear to have little choice but to overlook and acquiesce to commercial developments proceeding first, without fulfilling their lengthy list of requirements. The local government’s adaptive governance has facilitated rapid urban transformation and in many cases allowed bottom-up developments to exploit the urban loopholes that adaptive governance created in the first place.

Chapter 5 The New Economies

by a growing population of expatriates, especially a younger crowd that had steadily moved to East Asia from Europe and North America, ever since the economic crisis of 2008 made employment opportunities more difficult in their home countries. Drinks from as low as 15 R MB a pint compared to double the price in other expatriate-friendly spaces made the street a hub for office gatherings, birthday parties and get-togethers. In addition to happy hour drinks, outdoor seating in the small street also made the place a unique attractor in the city. The compactness of the east-west street, spanning only two blocks before connecting at the two ends to small north-south streets, resulted in little through-traffic for the

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Figs. 14 , 15 Perspective of the eastern part of Yongkang Lu realized, 2013, above; and elevation of one of Yongkang Lu’s upgraded units, 2013, below

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Even in the district-administered Yongkang Lu redevelopment, which is not formed by endogenous processes, the developer, given the responsibility of commercial administration, used the techniques learned from the endogenous processes. The developer gave the commercial spaces leeway to experiment with programming over several short lease terms. The entrepreneurs and tenants also postponed the application for licensing until a feasible and successful enterprise could be determined. Food and beverage venues often only get snack licenses first and then move to the beverage license while serving food, awaiting success and official food licensing when cash flows become stable.127 Once cash flow becomes stable, then entrepreneurs may apply for licensing for the corresponding functions. By creating a grey zone of testing time, the district authorities gave the developer responsible for ensuring the commercial success of the upgrade a free hand to balance the urgency to develop against ensuring the most appropriate and profitable function. Compared to other self-generated streets and neighborhoods, where small creative boutiques and cafés, restaurants and bars have clustered organically, attracting more investors and customers, the curation of a street by one development group commissioned by the district has made Yongkang Lu’s transformation unique. Endurance of the Old and the Future of the Centrality Part of Yongkang Lu’s appeal to its young and transnational market audience is its proximity to the authentic Shanghai experience. Yongkang Lu’s former self is visible on the adjacent Jiashan Lu that remains a market street. It is part of the ongoing plan to

vices, tailoring services, carpentry services, bicycle repair and more. Open games of mahjong or Chinese chess are surrounded by onlookers in the evenings. Sometimes the hawkers cook their meals on makeshift stoves at mealtimes. Other times a boisterous dinner is set up under a tree along the sidewalk. (Fig. 16, 17) The district authorities had chosen the area for upgrade precisely because these are the last streets in the area that still reflect the ambiance of Shanghai’s bygone days. Until the early 2000s, many commercial spines of the city center still looked and felt like Jiashan Lu. The visible messiness and rowdiness has been a source of mortification for authorities, but more so because the selling of local foods and cheap goods reminds them of price fixing and state-subsidized commerce under the planned economy. The stalls can still sell goods at affordable prices because of their low rents. The rents remain below market price in central locations because most remain under district management and have not undergone upgrades. Once units are upgraded, replacing old spaces with new programs, such as cafés, bars or sushi restaurants that cater to an upper-middle class and expatriate consumer market, their rents multiply ten-fold. For the authorities and enterprising entrepreneurs, the profits from upgrades make the effort of acquisition and redevelopment worth the earnings from the rent-gap that still exists in large parts of Shanghai’s city center. For the local residents, however, the stores of Jiashan Lu are the few remaining ones still selling everyday goods at affordable prices. In most central locations, this is no longer the case.

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renew the area. On a given day, one can still get everything from live fish to shoe soles repaired. The storefronts spill onto the sidewalk with fruits, vegetables, local snacks, household goods, hardware supplies. The public sidewalks are dotted with changing vendors who peddle shoelaces and nail clippers, DVD s and fake books, shaving ser-

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Figs. 16, 17 The adjacent streets of Xiangyang Lu with local commerce and public life, 2013

The renovation of the first portion of Yongkang Lu visibly cleaned up much of the street life, the sale of everyday goods and the small-scale productions from carpentry to tailoring that had taken place before. Ironically, it is precisely these aspects of public space appropriation and spaces of encounters that are a source of fascination for a number of expatriate inhabitants who choose to settle in the area. The liveliness that the expatriates came to view as the authenticity of a Chinese, even East Asian, urbanism is combined with the convenience of being able to procure amenities within the distance of the block, from a framing job to a quick hemline alteration. In a development that is a few blocks to the south on Jiashan Lu, an AustralianShanghainese designer duo chose a local wet-market lane to create a live-work and ground floor commerce courtyard called the Jiashan Market [嘉善老市]. The appeal of the local street life that had remained in that former wet-market lane has made the development popular and commercially successful. A Dutch architect whose atelier is a block down from Yongkang Lu on Jiashan Lu also observed that if the same setup of the al fresco Yongkang Lu had taken place on the ground floor of new town high-rises or in the plaza of the new malls, the same attraction just would not be there.128 Even if it is the program that was the main attractor, the urban setting was still important to attracting the customers who come because “it still feels Chinese here.”129 As a cultural geographer and expert of North American gentrification processes, David Ley, once wrote of as a key component of the learning process of foreign cultures, “cosmopolitans are cultural consumers who embrace difference (by using it).”130 Ironically, the vibrancy and convenience that appeal to the cosmopolitan inhabitants as urban qualities resulted from the decades of densification in Shanghai that the locals associate with privacy deprivation and infrastructure dilapidation. Behind the upgraded façades and reprogrammed street front of Yongkang Lu, the older architecture types that required extensive infrastructural upgrading still house residents living in overcrowded conditions, and with only recently acquired plumbing facilities that remain shared. In the second and third phase of the development expansion, Platform’s developers could not rely on the majority state-owned real estate as they had in the first phase of development. Although the developers acquired more than 2,000 square meters of SOE -owned units on Jiashan Lu, they needed to continue negotiations with local residents who were ‘usage right’ owners of the other properties, if the upgrade was to encompass the entire street.131 At a compensation fee of 50,000 R MB /square meter for 362

an individual unit, ranging from 6 to 35 square meters, the development would take 12 years to break even at rentals of 12 R MB /square meter/day, not accounting for initial renovations investments.132 Each house along the street might be subdivided into as many as twelve units. This meant that, in order to acquire the house as a unit, the developer would have to negotiate with twelve different ‘use right’ owners, leading to a delay in negotiation time for acquisition of the units. Another strategy would be to pay the ‘use right’ owners five years rent up front for their units. This way the ‘use right’ owners still retained the ownership of their units and could be compensated should a demolition occur. Both strategies were slow and difficult in implementation.133 But the old way of life would continue. The developers deemed a densification at the block scale, with an increase in allowable built volume, economically necessary to make the development feasible.134 Platform engaged teams led by friends at the local universities, including Fudan, Tongji, and Jiaotong Universities for extensive urban analyses of the neighborhood. The teams studied the area’s building types, commercial programming, and transport networks.135 International teams from the University of Southern California also did fieldwork in the area and gave potential ideas for the area’s development. They proposed concepts of office insertions with higher density to offset the initial costs of restoring the neighboring houses. Ideas presentations were made to district officials and mu-

the rest of Yongkang Lu and Jiashan Lu profitable. But its scale and commercial positioning would not be possible to replicate in the building types of Yongkang Lu and Jiashan Lu. The new development was set to pivot the area, and authorities expected it to trigger upgrades along Xiangyang Lu, cleaning up more of the “dirty and chaotic” areas. The influx of white-collar workers from multi-national companies, with more than 250 people per floor in its two 30-odd floor towers, have indeed spilled into the neighborhood for their midday lunches. But the overall effects on the old lilong houses and their feasible upgrade seem minimal. From wet markets and traditional street foods to globalized consumption habitats, the coexistence for both sides of development is spatially manifested in the transitional economy. In the spatial policies made, the question of whether the former, often offering lower-cost but unique and culturally specific products that also bear the marker of history and local traditions, would survive the onslaught of upgrades that are part of economic growth. Leftover spaces have played an important role in the economic survival of culture-embedded services and goods, commercial traditions that are eroded when rapid physical transformations dissolve the fertile grounds on which they thrived. Institutional structures under China’s economic transition played the double

Chapter 5 The New Economies

nicipal planning officials in hopes of changing the allowable density in the area, zoned as part of the conservation area. But, thus far, priorities have been elsewhere. Without the possibility to partially densify, only a new development with the projected rental of 50 to 60 R MB /square meter/day would be as profitable as in the first phase. Two blocks to the north of Yongkang Lu, the International Commerce Center (ICC), in which its IAPM mall would highlight the western end of commercial Huaihai Lu, was completed in late 2011. It is a large-scale, mixed-use development with commercial, high-end residential as well as Grade-A office spaces that replaced a large block of lilong houses, similar to the houses in the blocks to the north and south of Yongkang Lu. Its retail rentals come close to the 50 R MB that would have made the upgrade along

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role of expediting these intangible cultural artifacts’ demise but also sometimes cushioning their complete erasure due to inherent contradictions. At Yongkang Lu, the commercialized spaces were only able to transform the street with the support of the district government and the district SOE s. The ensuing difficulty, in acquiring the complex and fragmented residential spaces, has exacerbated the spatial conflicts between socially polarizing groups. They have also served as the bulwark against rapid development and preserved the semblance of local identity and social diversity. When leadership change and intensification of heritageisation led to the shutdown of

Fig. 18 Worker bricking up the street-facing facade on Yongkang Lu following the expulsion of commercial enterprises, 2016

Yongkang Lu’s small entrepreneurs in 2016,136 the precarious equilibrium between old and new shifted again. District authorities implemented the reversion of street-front shops to facades that looked residential, (Fig. 18) with

the illegality of many of the small enterprises and the conservation of historic fengmao the main reasons for the heavy-handed approach. As already anticipated, the only certainty remains the uncertainty.

The New Economies At the end of the second decade of accelerated economic liberalization, urban quality, rather than development quantity, which led the growth of the first decade, was increasingly emphasized. The “Better City” shifted emphasis from the ‘hardware’ of economic progress, though still important as a performance indicator,137 to the ‘software’ of urban prosperity. The urban image projects in the lead-up to the 2010 World Expo, as represented by Yongkang Lu and Anken Green, showed that financial investment and market understanding in the international context were not enough to be successful in China. More important are the informal and personal connections, or guanxi, to the decision-makers of the local state. Developments in China’s transition economy necessitated not only capital and international know-how but also personal access to the local institutions. Despite two decades of marketization, these local institutions remain in the city center and occupy spatially prominent positions. Cosmopolitan agents, thus working within local institutional frameworks, have been obliged to entrepreneurially innovate development processes and reformulate possible public-private coalitions. Both the Anken Green and Yongkang Lu developments show that pro-growth coalitions and urban regimes that are developmentalist persist, 138 albeit innovating through entrepreneurial forms and mediated by cosmopolitan actors. Both cases exploited urban loopholes created by the dual land market and the policy exceptions created by the local state to alleviate inefficiencies resulting from central government 364

decrees. Both consequently also formed ‘new economies’ as a hybrid of market and planned economy elements. Post-industrialization and the emergence of knowledge-based sectors, especially in the late 1990s in developed capitalist societies, generated the ‘new economies’ of the West.139 In contrast, the new economies of transitioning urban China are the result of both post-industrialization and marketization. The local state aspires to a value-added service and knowledge-based economy based on creative industries, in emulation of that in the West. In Shanghai, enterprising and transnationally networked entrepreneurs expedite the knowledge flow, facilitating the rapid transformation of the city center areas with new economies. At the same time, the new economies in Chinese cities are executed within the local institutional frameworks, governed by the fluid rules of the adaptive and developmental state. In this way, the new economies of urban China take from the new economies of late capitalism in the post-industrial developed economies in their products. These ‘new’ new economies are firmly grounded in the institutional framework of transition China, and form an upgraded ‘planned economy 2.0.’140 In the ‘planned economy 2.0’ the urban loophole occupies a crucial function, by mediating the spatial production between planned economy constraints and market demands. As shown in the Anken Green case, representative of developments on SOE properties, the convenient and opportune urban loophole for creative industries clusters was invoked to get around central government constraints on the commercialization of administratively-allocated land. The promotion of creativity, as part of China’s shift

ing the restriction. At the same time, however, Anken’s developers diverged from the growth-driven model set by Bridge 8, by showing how adjustments to the dominant business model could be just as productive and lucrative in finding its niche market. On the other hand, the development of Yongkang Lu, which local officials and planners promoted as taking from the best of Tianzifang and Xintiandi, capitalized on the undervalued real estate by local SOE s. Using business plans developed also from the earlier SOE reuse models, as exemplified by the Bridge 8 project, the private-public coalition applied it to the urban scale of the street. The local state as a privileged market player, allied with private developers tasked with the project upgrade, exploited the urban loophole created by the dual land market. The development group also appropriated techniques of bottom-up conversion projects, by creating the urban loopholes for program adjustments. Under the development pressures of the district, its sweeping and uniform upgrade process distinguished its outcome from the products of endogenous processes. Without lifting the existing density requirements, the upgrade project would not be able to feasibly extend farther. The difficulty of rapid development in residential areas thus serves as the buffer against the erosion of cultural traditions in the last parts of a rapidly upgraded city center. The juxtaposition of the new economies against the old, although not frictionless, seems to sustain a precarious socio-economic diversity worth tending. Shanghai’s municipal bureaucrats seem well aware of the inefficiencies of the dual market and its challenges to urban planning. In May 2015, the municipal government issued a new Urban Renewal Enactment Act.141 Though vague, the new Act proposed

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from progress to prosperity, led by cities like Shanghai that aspire to become knowledge and service economies, has become the exceptional circumstance for bypass-

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making the functional conversions on administratively-allocated land possible, within the oversight of the municipal planning bureau. If implemented, the proposal would in effect stop the need for the existing urban loopholes made possible by the recognition of creative industries cluster. It shows that the local government is increasingly valuing efficiency in the face of sprawling urban growth. In a context where institutional transparency, impartiality and certainty are state priorities, urban loopholes that do arise would be closed with permanence. In a context where institutional opacity, state partiality in the market, and uncertainty is an important part of the governing tactic, urban loopholes will persist. The closing of one set of urban loopholes means that it is opportune for another set to be discovered, tested and exploited. In the growing restrictions set by the different levels of the state, the internalization of earlier and more straightforward urban loopholes would only lead to more sophisticated means to realize privileged profit. As long as the legacy ownership by local state-affiliated stakeholders persists, as upheld and privileged by CCP ideology, new urban loopholes will take place. It remains to be seen what new spatial opportunities will arise, and what newer new economies will emerge from the plug-ins for ‘planned economy 2.0.’

1 The term ‘transition’ as used by the Chinese government, refers to the economic imperative to shift to a more knowledge-based economy, where a higher percentage of GDP comes from non-manufacturing sectors. Currently the secondary sector accounts for nearly 50 % of the GDP for Shanghai municipality. In this sense, the ‘urban transition’ used by Chinese government literature is fundamentally different from the ‘urban transition’ that many English-language scholars use to refer to the urban manifestations of China’s economic transition from planned to market economics. See for example the term highlighted in a recent publication from the Shanghai Urban Planning Institute, Shanghai Urban Planning and Land Resources Administration 上海市规划和国土资源管理局 and Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Institute 上海市城市规划设计研究院 Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Institute, eds., 转型上海 规划战略 [Shanghai in Transition, Urban Planning Strategy] (Shanghai 上海: 同 济大学出版社 Tongji University Press, 2012). 2 Xiejun Chen 陈燮君, “世博是创意的摇篮 [The World Expo Is the Cradle of Creativity],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, May 9, 2010, http://pinglun.eastday.com/p/20100509/ u1a5193473.html. 3 Michael E. Porter, On Competition, Harvard Business Review Book Series (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2008). 4 The 2010 World Expo not only showcased Shanghai’s accomplishments in becoming the “Better City,” but it also played the catalyst for further creative development. Official plans show that reuse projects will cover large swathes of former industrial sites along the Huangpu River. The Expo site itself, if its conversion proceeds as planned, will become the largest creative in-

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dustries cluster in the world. 5 The four projects have been studied as representative cases for Shanghai’s neighborhood transformation, heritage architecture reuse, and commercial upgrade. Even in discussions with the authorities of the Shanghai Urban Planning Bureau, they suggested the four projects as pioneers for Shanghai’s current developments. For the number of research projects that have helped establish the canonical status of these four projects, see Xiaowei 罗小未 Luo, “上海新天地广场—旧城改 造的一种模式 [Shanghai Xintiandi Plaza—a model for the revitalization of the old city],” 时代建筑 Time+Architecture, no. 04 (2001): 24–29; Tianshu Pan, “Historical Memory, Community-Building and Place-Making in Neighborhood Shanghai,” in Restructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space, ed. Laurence J. C Ma and Fulong Wu (New York: Routledge, 2005), 122–37; Albert Wing Tai Wai, “Place Promotion and Iconography in Shanghai’s Xintiandi,” Habitat International, Urbanization in China, A Special Issue, 30, no. 2 (June 2006): 245–60, doi:10.1016/j.habitatint.2004.02.002; Kori Rutcosky, “Adap­ tive Reuse as Sustainable Architecture in Contemporary Shanghai” (Master’s Thesis for Asian Studies, Lund University, 2007 ); You-Ren Yang and Chih-hui Chang, “An Urban Regeneration Regime in China: A Case Study of Urban Redevelopment in Shanghai’s Taipingqiao Area,” Urban Studies 44 , no. 9 (August 1, 2007 ): 1809–26, doi:10.1080/ 00420980701507787; Pan Lu, “The Remaking of Shanghai Local Spaces,” Spacesofidentity.net 8 , no. 1 (July 8 , 2008), http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/soi/article/ view/17740; Xuefei Ren, “Forward to the Past: Historical Preservation in Globalizing Shanghai,” City & Community 7,

Chapter 5 The New Economies

no. 1 (March 1, 2008): 23–43 , doi:10.1111/j.1540 -6040. eds., City as Loft: Adaptive Reuse as a Resource for Sus2007.00239.x; Nanxi Su, “Art Factories in Shanghai: Urban tainable Urban Development (Zürich: GTA Verlag, 2012). Regeneration Experience of Post-Industrial Districts” 12 Former industrial properties of SOE s exist on admin(Master’s Thesis, National University of Singapore (NUS ), istratively-allocated land, which is the planned economy 2008); Wan-Lin Tsai, “The Redevelopment and Preserva- left over in the dual land market. In the wake of SOE -retion of Historic Lilong Housing in Shanghai” (Master’s The- forms in the 1990 s, many industrial properties were consis for Historic Preservation, University of Pennsylvania, verted to commercial usage, leading to what the central 2008); Hiroyuki Shinohara, “Mutations of Tianzifang, government saw as the erosion of state assets. In the midTaikang Road, Shanghai,” in The 4th International Confer- 2000 s, the central government tightened the land-use ence of the International Forum of Urbanism (IFoU ) (The conversion on administratively-allocated land. By this New Urban Question—Urbanism beyond Neoliberalism, time, many of the procedural gaps that the rapid economAmsterdam, the Netherlands, 2009), http://newurban- ic transition wrought in the 1990 s also were closed. With question.ifou.org/proceedings/index.html; Sheng Zhong, the more stringent constraints on the commercial conver“From Fabrics to Fine Arts: Urban Restructuring and the sion of administratively-allocated land on which the forFormation of an Art District in Shanghai,” Critical Planning, mer industrial real estate existed in the dual land market, no. 16 (2009): 118–37; Chunbin Guo 郭淳彬, “旧城居住区自 it also rendered reuse legally difficult. The central govern发性改造问题研究—以田子坊为例 [Study of Organic Conver- ment’s growing emphasis on creative industries and sions in Old City Residential Neighborhoods—case study Shanghai’s ambition for ‘transition’ to knowledge indusof Tianzifang],” in 转型与重构 — 2011中国城市规划年会论文 tries at this time, however, became an opportunity. The 集 (转型与重构— 2011中国城市规划年会, Nanjing 南京: 中国 conception of alternate business plans for feasible func城市规划学会、南京市政府, 2011), 13. 6 ‘Culture-led urban tional change on former industrial buildings took on the regeneration’ is a term used to describe the use of cultur- creative industries trend. The creation of the creative inal industries, including the creative industries, to redevel- dustries label made an exception to the constraints on op undervalued areas in the city. Even though the term the function changes on administratively-allocated land wasn’t officially used until the mid-2000 s, earlier critics and made it legally permissible to convert buildings to such as Rosalyn Deutsche already criticized the use of cul- new uses for creative industries. 13 The ‘localized costural developments as the urban strategy in New York. mopolitan’ is an actor in the urban development process The use of culture in urban regeneration is also affiliated in Shanghai, who has an international background while with the rhetoric of the ‘creative class’ as promoted by at the same time enjoying access to the local deciRichard Florida as an indicator of a society’s transition to sion-makers and having knowledge of the local processes a knowledge-based service-dominated economy. See and mechanisms. The ‘localized cosmopolitans’ are more Graeme Evans, “Measure for Measure: Evaluating the Evi- adept at detecting and exploiting the urban loopholes dence of Culture’s Contribution to Regeneration,” Urban created by the state’s adaptive governance. The concept Studies 42, no. 5–6 (May 1, 2005): 959–83, doi:10.1080/ of the ‘localized cosmopolitan’ was elaborated in previous 00420980500107102; Rosalyn Deutsche, “Uneven Devel- chapters. 14 As was shown in the previous two chapters, opment: Public Art in New York City,” October 47 (Decem- local governments have been actively upgrading and deber 1, 1988): 3 – 52 , doi:10.2307/778979. 7 Interviews veloping city center areas for capital accumulation. New with local architects, 2012. 8 Interview with the Anken developments are largely pegged to the highest internadevelopers, 2013. 9 The district initiative for the Xintian- tional standards and prices, even though most local ocdi project, financed and developed by the Hong Kong de- cupants would be priced out of the developments. The veloper Shui On Land as part of the larger Taipingqiao Anken Green development, also aiming at a target clienarea’s urban renewal, seemed to contrast with Tianzi- tele of transnational service economy workers, responds fang’s incremental initiatives by small entrepreneurs that to the diversity of demands on the ground in Shangconverted and upgraded the residential block into a com- hai. 15 The term ‘new economy’ was used, especially in mercially vibrant area. The previous chapter elaborated the late 1990 s, for the new knowledge-based sectors that that the popular representation of the Tianzifang devel- are associated with the economic transition from a proopment privileges this narrative of the bottom-up reuse. duction-based to service-based economy. In its usage in The local street office played an important role in starting this chapter, ‘new economy’ alludes to this and represents the area’s transformation. 10 Similarly, M50 ’s conversion the aspirations of the local government authorities for the has been attributed to the successful initiatives of the art- city to similarly develop a value-added service economy. ists and galleries. Its bottom-up conversion of disused in- The upgrades and pursuit of creative industries are all in dustrial buildings became recognized after its occupants the same vein. At the same time, it also represents the became increasingly renowned. The cluster has since giv- small entrepreneurs who are transnationally networked, en the city a notable identity for its contemporary art de- who are responsible for the knowledge flows that have so velopment. A closer analysis of the spatial transformations rapidly transformed Shanghai’s city center areas, but have to the development of a ‘contemporary arts ecology’ in done so within the local frameworks. In this sense, the Shanghai will be analyzed in the next chapter. In contrast, economy is ‘new.’ It neither comes purely from the late a commercial developer upgraded Bridge 8 . Its conver- capitalism of the post-industrial developed economies. sion of former state-owned enterprise buildings formal- Nor is it the old one from the planned economics. Rather ized the template for ensuing developments of former it is a combination or hybrid of them. It is, in this sense, a SOE buildings. 11 Martina Baum and Kees Christiaanse, ‘new’ form of economy. 16 Interview with the Anken de-

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velopers, 2013. The official creative industries cluster of 1933, for example, charged 12RMB /sqm/d, in 2013. 17 The development of Ferguson Lane was elaborated in the chapter “The Cultural Street.” It will be notable also that the developers of Yongkang Lu also were part of the Ferguson Lane development. 18 Economists have studied the relationship of ‘horizontal networks’ and innovation. It is part of the larger body of literature on the relationships between networking, its spillover effects, knowledge flows and the new economies. See Knut Koschatzky, Marianne Kulicke, and Andrea Zenker, Innovation Networks: Concepts and Challenges in the European Perspective (Springer Science & Business Media, 2012). 19 The author, before starting this research project, had visited the atelier space of Deng Kunyan in 2004 . 20 Richard L. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 21 It wasn’t until the Social Groups Bureau was created in 2008 that the SCIC would become a subsidiary of this Bureau. 22 The creation of a land lease system for commercial land while maintaining the administrative allocation of land to state institutes and enterprise would be the crux of numerous challenges to urban planning of Chinese cities under transition. As Hsing You-tien wrote about the paradox, “commodification without privatization” would lay the foundation of numerous contestations. For further analysis of the development of the land market, see Anthony Gar-On Yeh and Fulong Wu, “The New Land Development Process and Urban Development in Chinese Cities,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 20, no. 2 (1996): 330–353, doi:10.1111/j.1468 -2427.1996.tb00319.x; Jieming Zhu, “Urban Development under Ambiguous Property Rights: A Case of China’s Transition Economy,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26, no. 1 (2002): 41–57, doi:10.1111/1468 -2427.00362; You-tien Hsing, “Global Capital and Local Land in China’s Urban Real Estate Development,” in Globalization and the Chinese City, ed. Fulong Wu, vol. 7, Routledge Contemporary China Series (New York: Routledge, 2006), 167–89. 23 Zhu, “Urban Development under Ambiguous Property Rights.” 24 Yeh, “Dual Land Market and Internal Spatial Structure of Chinese Cities.” 25 国务院 State Council, 中 华人民共和国土地管理法实施条例 [Regulation for the Implementation of the Land Administration Law of the PRC], vol. 国务院令 (1998) 第256 号, 1999, http://www. people.com.cn/item/faguiku/jjf/T1070.html; Ministry of Land Resources of the PRC 国土资源部, 招标拍卖挂牌出让 国有土地使用权规定 [Regulation on Lease of State-Owned Land by Bidding, Auction and Listing-for-Sale], vol. 国土 资源部发(2002)11号, 2002, http://www.gov.cn/gongbao/ content/2003/content_62586.htm; 国土资源部 Ministry of Land Resources of the PRC , 关于继续开展经营性土地使用 权招标拍卖挂牌出让情况执法检查工作的通知 [Notice of the Continuation of Law Enforcement Inspection Work of Commercial Land Use Rights by Bidding and Auction], vol. 国土资源部发〔2004〕71号, 2004 , http://wenku.baidu. com/view/a54 aa6087cd184254 b353561. 26 上海市城市 规划管理局 Shanghai Urban Planning Administration, 加强 中心城内改变土地使用性质规划管理的暂行规定 [Provisional Regulations on the Planning Control of Change in Land-

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Use in the Central City (Shanghai)], vol. 沪规法〔2004〕 355号, 2004 , http://www.law110.com/law/32 /shanghai/ law11020062231212 .htm. 27 Wuwei Li 厉无畏 and Huimin Wang 王慧敏, “创意产业：一种发展模式的创新 [Creative Industries: An Innovation in Development Model],” 文汇报 Wenhui News, March 12, 2007, http://theory.people.com.cn/GB /49154 /49155/5460519.html. 28 Shanghai is one of the most socialist of places in the provision of social welfare, of course only to its hukou holders. In this sense, more efficiently using former SOE properties is necessary to sustain the welfare system. For the welfare provisions for laid-off workers after the 1990 s SOE restructuring, see Grace O. M. Lee and Malcolm Warner, “The Shanghai Re-Employment Model: From Local Experiment to Nation-Wide Labour Market Policy,” The China Quarterly, no. 177 (March 1, 2004): 174 – 89. 29 The 2006 Plan mentions the creative industries: “relying on the effects of fashion industry park, media and cultural park and other creative industries clusters, the use of the media culture, creative design, historic buildings and other resources, to construct of a number of creative, cultural and leisure tourism areas with historical heritage, knowledge-intensity, cultural diversity, vitality, aesthetical strength [依托时尚产业园，传媒文化园等创意产业集聚效 应，利用传媒文化，创意设计，历史建筑等资源，建设一批具 有历史底蕴，知识密集，文化多元，充满活力，观赏性强的创 意文化休闲旅游区].” See “上海市旅游业发展‘十一五’规划 [Plan for the Development of Tourism Industry during the ‘Eleventh Five Year Plan’ in Shanghai],” 2006, http://wenku.baidu.com/view/0083665f804 d2b160 b4 ec0a9.html.“ 上海市旅游业发展‘十一五’规划 [Plan for the Development of Tourism Industry during the ‘Eleventh Five Year Plan’ in Shanghai].” 2005, p 40. http://wenku.baidu.com/view/ 0083665f804d2b160b4ec0a9.html. 30 Zilai Tang, “The Renewal of Allocated Industrial Land in the Perspective of Property Right System: The Case of Hongkou District, Shanghai,” in Institutions of Land Rights and Sustainable Asian Urbanization (National University of Singapore, 2013). 31 Ibid. 32 In the ‘three non-changes and five changes [三不变五变]‘ policy issued by the Shanghai Creative Industries Center in 2005, there is to be no change to building structure, meaning no development by demolition-reconstruction; there is no change to ownership, meaning the SOE retains its perpetual leasehold on the administratively-allocated land; and there is no change to land-use status, meaning officially land-use remains industrial, while the status of ‘creative industries’ is a unique ambiguity between service and manufacturing that allows commercialization to be condoned and encouraged. 33 The development of this area around Moganshan Lu is elaborated in the following chapter, “The Contemporary Art Ecologies.” 34 Ibid. 35 For local bureaucrats, performance indicators such as image projects and projects that add additional revenue to the district are important to their career advancements. See Fayong Shi, “Local Pro-Image Coalition And Urban Governance in China,” in Contemporary China Research Papers No 1 (Hong Kong Shue Yan University: Hong Kong Shue Yan University, 2010). 36 Chenghua Tang 唐骋华, “城市之美之时尚地标：八号桥， 面朝喧嚣创意转身 [City Beautiful’s Landmark: Bridge 8 , Creative Transformation toward Urban Bustle],” 生活周刊

Biochemical Pharmaceutical Factory, and used as a storage facility. 45 Interview with the Anken developers, 2013. 46 The official creative cluster of 1933, for example, charged 12RMB /square meter/day, in 2013. 47 “Best Al Fresco Cafes,” Time Out Shanghai, no. 33 (May 5, 2011): 32–33 . 48 Interview with the Anken developers, 2013 . 49 In Shanghai, many more small design firms are run by expatriates who came to China in the mid-2000 s, even if competition with the large design institutes is increasingly dominating the design landscape and the cost of starting a business is expensive: 1 million RMB of registered capital to start a business in China. In Hong Kong or Singapore, for example, the initial cost to start a business is much lower and procedurally much easier. But few small creative studios are transnational, because of higher expenditures, thus there is a limited creative ecology of other creatives as well as the locationally dependent market breadth. 50 Interview with the Anken developers, 2013. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Interview with the small entrepreneurs of Anken Green, 2013 , 2014 . 55 Ibid. 56 Shanghai Economic Council 上海市经委 and Shanghai Propaganda Bureau 上海市委宣传部, 上海市加快创意产业 发展的指导意见 [Guiding Advice on Accelerating Creative Industries Development]. 57 Interview with the Anken developers, 2013 . 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Usually 40 % portion of the tax goes to the district, and the other 60 % goes to the central government. For the startup period of two to three years, the return of the 40 % by the district as a tax break back to the leasee was offered to attract developers to develop creative clusters. In an interview with another local developer who worked on several reuse projects in Xuhui District, some of which have been designated ‘Creative Industry Clusters’, the comparison of Xuhui to Huangpu was made to prove the point of necessary curation. Huangpu District offers incentives to attract the right kind of tenants, but Xuhui being a smarter district ends up with the higher-classed ones. The comment seems to indicate either the demand sophistication of the district leadership or inherent structural advantages of each of the areas. 61 Ibid. 62 The SOE leadership often set up local companies that run the properties, waiting to be compensated at market price should the district government want to requisition the state-allocated land. This holdout is not much different from the expectations of the local residents holding onto the use-rights of their residences should redevelopment come with compensation, even if they no longer live in their original abodes. According to a conversation with an investor from the Beijing office of the private equity firm Warburg Pincus, budget hotel chains, such as the omni-present, are often redeveloped on these state-allocated lands that cannot undergo redevelopment via demolition and reconstruction. 63 The dominant SOE agglomerates are Shang Tex Group [上纺集团], Shanghai Paper Group [上海包装造纸集 团], Shanghai Electric Group [上海电汽集团], Bailian Group [百联集团] (including N. 1 Department store, Wing-on [永安], Hualian [华联集团]), and Shanghai Automobile Industries Group [上海汽车集团]. 64 One of the projects in the former civic district behind the Bund that Anken has redeveloped belongs to the Bailian Group. When they approached another branch of Bailian regarding the rede-

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Life Weekly, January 25, 2010, http://www.why.com.cn/ epublish/other/node29576/node29578 /userobject7ai20 9295.html. 37 Ibid. 38 This instance of number change shows the influx of influences in urban developments under the transition economy. The naming of sites with names that evoked the Republican era, as described in the last two chapters, shows the influence of overseas Chinese returnees. Their nostalgia for ‘old Shanghai’ from before 1949, as reflected in the names, magnifies the commercial developments from the ideologically different built environment of the post-Liberation era. Similarly, the influence of pre-modern superstitions, in these numbering conventions, also shows the contrast to Shanghai’s modernity, which in its urbanity and Westernization, had rejected many of these geomancy-based decisions. 39 “ 黄瀚泓：做商业地产像导演电影 [Huang Zonghan: Commercial Real Estate Is like Directing a Movie],” 长江商报 Changjiang Times, May 20, 2009, http://bj.house.sina.com.cn/ biz/hd/2009 -05 -20/15273770.html. 40 The total investment for renovations and infrastructure was around 200,000 RMB , which came from the deposits from renters. See the previous chapter on Tianzifang’s development. 41 2008 also saw the release of a central government directive on encouraging the development of service industries, which was followed by a municipal directive on the development of a modern service industry in Shanghai. See Shanghai Economic Council 上海市经委 and Shanghai Propaganda Bureau 上海市委宣传部, 上海市 加快创意产业发展的指导意见 [Guiding Advice on Accelerating Creative Industries Development], vol. 沪经规(2008) 452 号, 2008 , http://www.sheitc.gov.cn/0105020804 / 656508 .htm. 42 ShangTex traces its roots to the textile industries of Shanghai that were largely private companies until nationalization following Liberation. One of the most important industries in Shanghai, the sector folded when economic liberalization accelerated. The number of workers laid off during the SOE reforms show the disintegration of the industry. See Chi-Wen Jevons Lee, “Financial Restructuring of State Owned Enterprises in China: The Case of Shanghai Sunve Pharmaceutical Corporation,” Accounting, Organizations and Society 26, no. 7–8 (October 2001): 673–89, doi:10.1016/S0361-3682(00)00007-6. Nevertheless, under the same reforms, the ShangTex Group restructured and corporatized in 1995. The company today is number three in the country for “Top 100 Enterprises in China Textile and Garment Industry” and the top one for “ the Exportation of China Textile and Garment Industry,” according to its website. The firm’s most noted creative industries clusters are M50 and High Street Loft and it claims a total of 42, 12 of which are recognized by the SCIC and 3 more of which are recognized by the municipal Publicity Department. M50 used to be the grounds of a spinning factory and High Street Loft was part of a production site for Sanqiang. 43 Entrepreneurs who had collaborated on the public relations promotion for the project shared their misgivings about the business-orientation and decision-making capacity for creativity in the project. Interviews 2012. The building continues to be headquarters of the Shanghai Creative Industries Center (SCIC ). 44 Until the mid-2000 s, the building was owned by the municipal level SOE Shanghai Great Wall

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velopment of another building that belonged to the group, it became apparent that different parts of the same conglomerate were not only not in communication but also worked differently. That the modern era building was clearly disused, as many in the area were, was of little concern to the decision-maker in charge. And that Anken would be interested in developing the building also evoked little interest from the bureaucrat. It became clear that the decision-making process, even for the same SOE , was dependent on the personnel in authority. Interview with the Anken developers, 2013. 65 For the deficiencies of many of the SOE s, see also Xuefeng Lu, “Governance of Shanghai State-Owned Enterprises: Deficiencies and Recommendations,” International Journal of Law and Management 51, no. 3 (May 15, 2009): 169–78 , doi:10.11 08 /17542430910959245. 66 Interview with a Xuhui District street office official, 2012. 67 Ibid. 68 The author’s grandmother, who moved to the safety of the French Concession at the onset of war in the 1930 s, like many from the region, had first lived on the corner of what is now Jiashan Lu and Yongkang Lu. Also see Yihua Xiao 萧一华 and Xuhui District Annal Editing Committee 徐汇区志编纂 委员会, “第四章名特商店 第一节大型商场 [Chapter 4 Famous Shops Section 1 Large Markets],” in 徐汇区志 [Xuhui District Annals], vol. 21 Commerce [第二十一篇商业], 32 vols. (Shanghai 上海, 1997 ), http://www.shtong.gov.cn/ node2 /node4 /node2249/xuhui/node38422 /node3846 8 /node63510/userobject1ai23633.html. 69 Haiyan Wang 王海燕, “集贸市场拆迁 马路菜场‘现身’ [Market Removed, Roadside Wetmarket ‘Appears’],” 解放日报 Liberation Daily, July 13, 2006, http://old.jfdaily.com/gb/node2 /node17/ node167/node89864 /node89875/userobject1ai1401036. html. 70 Yiqiong Gu 顾一琼 and Zhen Shao 邵珍, “永康路: 老菜场拆除，新菜场未建，无人给说法‘正规菜贩’无奈占路打 游击 [Yongkang Lu: Old Wet Market Removed, New Wet Market Not Built, No One Gives Reason, ‘Registered Vegetable Sellers’ Have No Choice but to Take over Road and Play Guerilla Warfare],” 文汇报 Wenhui News, July 14 , 2006, http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2006 -07-14 /0753945 6083s.shtml. 71 Interview with a Xuhui District street office official, 2012 . 72 Earlier experiences with the dismantling of the neighboring Jiashan Lu [嘉善路] wet market had not been entirely effective. Residents found the newly established market at Nanchang Lu [南昌路] to be too far and inconvenient. And the small sellers still returned to the lane in Jiashan Lu to peddle their goods. These small sellers are still there as of 2014 . Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 The nationwide initiative of the ‘Shopping Basket Project [菜篮子工程]’ had incentivized the building of infrastructure for wet-market vendors and relocating outdoor wet markets, which had occupied streets during the day, indoors. Until the late mid-2000 s, numerous streets in residential neighborhoods served as daily wet markets, where everything from poultry to fish could be bought. Yongkang Lu, even though it had not been a market street, became one by virtue of the destruction of a nearby one. The implications of marketization on the wet markets, both as an urban public space provision by the district and as a provider of produce is not yet fully examined. See G. William Skinner, “Vegetable Supply and Marketing in Chinese Cities,” The China Quar-

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terly 76 (1978): 733–93, doi:10.1017/S0305741000049572; Arieh Goldman, “Supermarkets in China: The Case of Shanghai,” The International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research 10, no. 1 (2000): 1–21, doi:10.1080/095939600342370; Qian Forrest Zhang and Zi Pan, “The Transformation of Urban Vegetable Retail in China: Wet Markets, Supermarkets and Informal Markets in Shanghai,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 43 , no. 3 (2013): 497–518 , doi:10.1080/00472336.2013 .782224 . 76 The architecture firm Neri and Hu had worked on the upgrade of Julu Lu. Wuyuan Lu has also transformed to a street with trendy bars, boutiques and restaurants. 77 Interview with a Xuhui District street office official, 2012 . 78 Ibid. 79 This speed of development would have an impact on the architectural design itself. 80 The ‘anchor tenant(s)’ is one of the primary tenants in a development project that would be the primary draw(s) for customers. The anchor tenant, usually in a retail mall, makes the development economically viable for the investor and other tenants to develop the project. 81 The three SOE s included the Xuhui Non-stapels Food Co. [徐 汇副食品有限公司], New Xuhui Group [新徐汇集团] and the New Road Group [新路达], a subsidiary of the Bailian Group since 2004 . The New Xuhui Group and the Xuhui Non-staples Food Co. belong to the Xuhui District government. The Xuhui District government had a 49 % ownership of the New Road Group when it started. 82 Interview with district street office official, 2012 . 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 The author did a cash flow analysis for the 13 year lease term, based on the parameters for rental income per square meter, expenditures, taxes, management fees, leasing fees, etc. which the developer sha red. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 The District Yearbook announced the 6 million RMB initial investment and that the “model of collaboration between local and international investment for the management of a commercial street is a first for the city (of Shanghai) [中外合资管理商 业街的模式在全市尚属首创].” It is also notable that the Yongkang Lu project is filed under the chapter for “State Owned Assets Oversight and Management” and its subsection on the New Xuhui Group. See Note 119 for the formation of the New Xuhui Group. See Xiufeng Zhou 周 秀芬, “十七、国有(集体)资产监督管理 (十二)上海新徐汇(集 团)有限公司 [Chapter 17 State Owned Assets Oversight and Management Section 12 New Xuhui Group],” in 徐汇 年鉴（2010) Yearbook of Xuhui 2010 (Shanghai 上海: 上 海辞书出版社 Shanghai Encyclopedia Publisher, 2010), 97, http://daj.xh.sh.cn: 8082 /xhdainfoplat/platformData/ infoplat/pub/xhda_ 152 /docs/ 201102 /d_ 88633 .html. 91 The use of the phrase, “dirty and chaotic,” for Yongkang Lu was repeated in interviews with district officials, as propagated by the popular media. Interview with district street office official, 2012. See also Kai Yu 俞凯, “永康 里打造第二个新天地 ‘最脏乱街区’消失 [Yongkang Li Becomes Second Xintiandi, ‘the Dirtiest Neighborhood’ disappears],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, October 19, 2009, http://2010.qq.com/a/20091019/000024 .htm. 92 Interview with district street office official, 2012 . 93 Ibid. 94 The street office officials cite the inexperience of the developers in requiring the street office officials to step in. Ibid. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid.

新天地 [Yongkang Li Wants to Become Xuhui’s Xintiandi],” 上海商报 Shanghai Business Daily, October 26 , 2009, http://biz.xinmin.cn/rehouse/2009/10/26/2801273.html. 113 Interview with developer of Platform, 2012. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 Interviews with small entrepreneurs in the fashion industry, 2012. 117 Jiang Wu 伍江 and Lin Wang 王林, 历史文化风貌区保护规划编制与管理：上海城市保护的 实践 [The establishment and management of the Historic Cultural Features and Styles Districts Conservation Plan: Cases from Shanghai’s Conservation] (Shanghai 上 海: 同济大学出版社 Tongji University Press, 2007 ), 72–74 . 118 The Hong Kong development company called Maxdo Group [万都集团], led by businessman Chung Kin-kwok [ 钟健国] leased the Huaihai Lu Plot Number 3 or Xuhui District Plot Number 28 . 119 The Xuhui District Office for Residences [徐汇区住宅办], China Enterprise [中华企业], Shanghai Jiushi Corporation [上海久事], and what is now called the Shanghai International Group (SIG ) [上海国际 集团], but formerly called 上投房产 formed a company New Shanghai International Commercial City Development Company [新上海国际商城发展有限公司]. The New Shanghai International was responsible for the demolition and relocation of the Huaihai Lu Plot Number 3 site. See Huiqun Cai 柴会群, “襄阳路钻石地块使用权归属之谜 [The Mystery of the Ownership of Xiangyang Lu’s DiamondValued Plot’s Land-Use Right],” 南方周末 Southern Weekend, February 16, 2006, http://finance.sina.com.cn/roll/ 20060216/1517554180.shtml. The China Enterprise, foun­ ded in 1954 , is one of the first real estate companies established after the founding of the PRC and became publicly listed in 1993. Shanghai Jiushi was established in 1987. SIG was established in 1991. All are connected to high level government entities. 120 The relationship of the Xiangyang Fake Market to Shanghai’s new economies begins in its former incarnation. Before there was the Xiangyang Market, one of the first street markets with private entrepreneurs selling early, sometimes smuggled fashion imports was the Huating Lu [华亭路] Market that opened in 1984 . Even though it brought imports in from south China in proximity to Hong Kong, it also triggered many talented and skilled local entrepreneurs to develop small businesses, challenging the monopoly of state enterprises in the state-planned economy. Until its closure in August 2000, the Huating Lu market, initially dubbed “Little Hong Kong” but later taking off on its own, was the first free market for proud local creative entrepreneurs. After the Huating Market closed many of the stalls moved to the Xiangyang Market. See Xiangyi Kong 孔祥毅, “第三 章上海市区名特市场 第七节华亭服装市场 [Chapter 3 Shanghai City and District’s Special Markets, Section 7 Huating Apparels Market],” in 上海工商行政管理志 [Shanghai Industrial and Commerical Management Annals], vol. 第八篇集 贸市场管理 [Volume 8 Market Management] (Shanghai 上 海: 上海社会科学院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1997 ), http://shtong.gov.cn/node2 /node 2245/node69674 /node69686/node69724 /node69852 / userobject1ai69429.html; Mingyan Zhu 朱敏彦, “独具特色 的服装街—华亭路 [Unique fashion street—Huating Lu],” in 上海名街志 [Annals of Shanghai’s Famous Streets], 上海特 色志丛书 (Shanghai 上海: 上海社会科学院出版社 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2004), http://www.

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99 Ibid. 100 The term ‘nail house’ comes from the image of the remaining structures standing in the midst of a demolition site. It also refers to the difficulty of the nail’s adherence to the ground, requiring the removal of its ‘nail residents.’ For the resistance and similarly increasing savvy techniques of the ‘nail residents,’ see Qin Shao, Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity, State and Society in East Asia (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2012). 101 Interview with district street office official, 2012. 102 Ibid. 103 The author, having encountered also the other side of the resistance and witnessed the savvy of the ‘nail occupants,’ notes that the street office official, who uttered the remark in a heavily Shanghainese-accented bureaucrat-speak, represents the counterweight. The cunning of both sides does not justify the reality of the eviction processes, but nevertheless gives a dimension of complexity to the multiple interests involved. In the conventional representation of Western media, the eviction process is often simplified. On the other hand, in the Chinese media, the relocation process is also represented from the official side. Ibid. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid. 106 The author had interviewed a few of the other developers of similar scale and inclination. These developers developed projects like Surpass Court [永嘉庭], Yongfu Lu N. 47, Anfu Lu N. 305, and many are also pursuing the impending upgrades to Wulumuqi Lu [乌鲁木齐 路]. 107 The development of Ferguson Lane [武康庭] was detailed in the chapter “The Cultural Street.” It is a compound that includes a former neighborhood SOE production building, a garden-style house that had housed many families, and an adjacent tower that had been the hospital of real estate bureau, and which had been converted to the guesthouse of the real estate bureau in the 1990 s. A Hong Kong developer bought the leases for the buildings and converted them into a food and beverage (F & B ) hub with office spaces. 108 Interview with developer of Platform, 2012. In conversation with them about another project, about to take place on Wulumuqi Lu [乌鲁木齐路], which has a similar structure and program to Yongkang Lu, the developers mentioned an important contact at the street office who had made their bid for its redevelopment possible. But due to news of his transfer, the outcome of the development remained uncertain. It is clear that having access to crucial decision makers, who are also often mobile in the hierarchies of the local state bureaucracies, is what makes development projects possible. This confirms the discretionary decision-making of the local state, that is part of the adaptive governance, lubricating and facilitating China’s urban transition. As elaborated in previous chapters, ‘guanxi [关系]’ denotes connections and relationships that facilitate business and other dealings in the East Asian context. 109 Platform Group, “永康路时尚街项目实施控制流程 [Yongkang Lu Yong­ kang Fashion & Lifestyle Street Project Implementation Control Flow Process]” (Shanghai, November 5, 2009). 110 Ibid. 111 Xiufeng Zhou 周秀芬, “Illustrations,” in 徐汇 年鉴（2010) Yearbook of Xuhui 2010 (Shanghai 上海: 上 海辞书出版社 Shanghai Encyclopedia Publisher, 2010), 11, http://daj.xh.sh.cn: 8082 /xhdainfoplat/platformData/ infoplat/pub/xhda_ 152 /docs/ 201102 /d_ 88633 .html. 112 Yao Ye 叶尧 and Song Ye 叶松, “永康里意在打造徐汇区

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shtong.gov.cn/node 2 /node 71994 /node 71995 /node 71 999/node72013 /userobject1ai77406 .html. 121 Lijun Jiang 姜丽钧 and Ningning Tao 陶宁宁, “淮海路变局：APM 商 场试营业 [Huaihai Lu Changes: APM Mall Tests Operating],” 东方早报 Oriental Morning Post, August 6, 2013, sec. 大都 会 [Metropolis], http://epaper.dfdaily.com/dfzb/html/2013 08 /06 /content_800810.htm; “新鸿基加速落子上海 淮海路 将诞生首个摩尔 [Sun Hung Kai Accelerate Seeding in Shanghai, Huaihai Lu Will Give Birth to First Mall],” January 11, 2006, http://news.yipu.com.cn/cre/sydckfkx/170880. html. 122 Interview with developer of Platform, 2012. 123 Places like Huaihai Lu and West Nanjing Lu had a reputation for their high-end fashion. The younger, local trendsetters gravitated towards places like Xinle Lu, Julu Lu, Anfu Lu, and even more hidden places like Jing’an Villas. The ambiance that is desired for the cool kids just was not there on Yongkang Lu. The spatial legacy also contributes to the commercial programming for reuse projects. 124 Interview with developer of Platform, 2012 . 125 Ibid. 126 Interview with small entrepreneurs, 2012. 127 Ibid. 128 Interview with architect, 2014 . 129 Ibid. 130 David Ley, “Transnational Spaces and Everyday Lives,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29, no. 2 (June 1, 2004): 151–64 . 131 ‘Usage right’ housing and ‘ownership right’ housing form the dual housing market in city center areas of Chinese cities, as explained in chapters 2 and 3. Since housing marketization, ‘commodity housing’ is housing sold on the housing market. But in historic areas of cities, state management of housing has barred the units from being sold on the ‘commodity housing’ market. Rather their ‘use rights’ could be traded, but limited to local hukou holders. 132 The calculations are based on the numbers provided by the developers in 2012. 133 In implementation, the building type was not amenable to reprogramming. Residences along the upgraded Yongkang Lu remain unpopular. And the programming of office spaces above the restaurants and bars has not been very successful either. 134 Interview with Platform developers, 2012. 135 A consortium of local architects who led studios at the local universities conducted design studios to study the Yongkang Lu development. Several master’s theses from Tongji University, for example, studied the Yongkang Lu case as a way for city center redevelopment. 136 Minyi Jin 金旻矣, “徐汇区区长鲍炳章: 永康路酒吧街将调整业态 [Xuhui District Mayor Bao: Yongkang Lu Bar Street Will Be Programmatically Adjusted],” 新民晚报 New Citizen Evening News, July 11, 2016, http:// sh.eastday.com/m/20160711/u1ai9519022 .html; Wenjie Xiao 肖文杰 et al., “最上海”的街区面临整改，发生了什 么？[The Most Shanghainese Neighborhood Is Facing Adjustment, What Happened?],” 第一财经周刊 CBN Weekly, August 13 , 2016, http://www.wxrw123 .com/cf/2016

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0813 /2293010_2 .html. 137 The municipality targeted more than 400 kilometers of new subway lines and 150 odd subway stations to be launched for the opening of the first World Expo to take place in a developing country, which would put Shanghai’s subway by quantity at the world’s number one, even before New York or London. 108 kilometers of new subway lines and 60 new underground stations opened in time for the more than 74 million visitors. See Shanghai Metro 上海地铁, “光辉的历程—写 在上海轨道交通400 公里网络建成之际 [Glorious Progress: On the Realization of 400 Kilometers of Rail Transport Network in Shanghai],” May 2010, http://www.shmetro. com/node52 /node76/node129/201005/con103927.htm; Yicui Yin 殷一璀, “中国2010 年上海世界博览会 [2010 World Expo in Shanghai, China],” in 上海年鉴 2011 [Shanghai Almanac 2011] (Shanghai 上海: 《上海年鉴》编辑部 Shanghai Almanac Press, 2011), http://www.shanghai.gov.cn/ shanghai/node 2314 /node 24 651 /node 2927 7/node 29280/u21ai578099.html. 138 Tingwei Zhang, “Urban Development and a Socialist Pro-Growth Coalition in Shanghai,” Urban Affairs Review 37, no. 4 (March 1, 2002): 475–99, doi:10.1177/10780870222185432. 139 Theories of ‘new economies’ of the developed industrialized economies of the West also overlap with those of the ‘creative class,’ and ‘competitiveness.’ See, for example, Robert J. Gordon, “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure up to the Great Inventions of the Past?,” Working Paper (National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2000), http://www. nber.org/papers/w7833; David B. Audretsch and A. Roy Thurik, “What’s New about the New Economy? Sources of Growth in the Managed and Entrepreneurial Economies,” Industrial and Corporate Change 10, no. 1 (March 1, 2001): 267–315 , doi:10.1093 /icc/10.1.267; Thomas A. Hutton, “The New Economy of the Inner City,” Cities 21, no. 2 (April 2004): 89–108 , doi:10.1016 /j.cities.2004 .01.002 . 140 The analogy of ‘planned economy 2.0 ’ is made to the terms ‘xx 1.0,’ ‘xx 2.0,’ etc. which have been used since the emergence of upgrades to existing software. Windows 1.0 is the predecessor to Windows 2.0, which is an upgraded version of the previous version. In this manner, ‘planned economy 2.0,’ as used by the author, denotes the way planned economy institutions have been upgraded to accommodate market elements and integrate international procedures. But the planned economy institutions, namely that of party-state rule and the state-directed economy, remain. 141 Hanlu Zhao 赵翰露, “《城市更新实 施办法》即将施行，上海进入‘内涵增长’时代 [‘Urban Renewal Enactment Act’ will Be Implemented, Shanghai Enters ‘content Growth’ era],” 解放日报 Liberation Daily, April 29, 2015 , http://www.jfdaily.com/minsheng/bwyc/201504 / t20150429_1464546.html.

1992

APEC in Shanghai

Pudong Airport opens

Jinmao Tower opens

Deng Xiaoping passes away

Asia Economic Crisis Hong Kong Handover

SOE restructuring

1996

Jiang Zeming becomes General Secretary of the CCP

Rising Inflation

Tian’anmen Incident

Shanghai becomes Dragon’s Head

1989

Shenzhen as SEZ

Mao Zedong passes away

1976

“Changes Every Year, Transformations Every Three Years” 1982 Article 10 of the Constitution states

"urban land is owned by the state only" and "not allowed to be bought, sold or transferred"

1979 Ministry of Urban and Rural Construction and Environment Protection formed Bureau of Urban Planning formed to organize and approve masterplans

People’s Congress Standing Committee issues (1987/1/1) N.27 土地管理法 [Land

Administration Act]

LAND REFORM AND DEVOLUTION OF AUTHORITY

1994 State Council issues (1991) 中华 State Council 人民共和国城镇国有土地使用权出 (1993) 城市房地产管理法 Urban Real 让和转让暂行条例 [Provisional Provisional Land Estate Admin Law control

Standing Commit tee issues (1989) N.23 中华人 民共和国城市规划法 [City Planning Law of the PRC] gives the local state the power to issue land use

140 关于扩大城 市住宅补贴出售 试点的通知

[Regarding the Pilot Sites for the broadening of sale of housing subsidies in Large Cities]]

public housing at discounted prices

Shanghai issues (1984) 上海市出售

商品住宅管理办法( 试行）[Measures for the management of Commodity Housing Sales] 3

购买和建设住宅的暂行办法

[Provisional Regulations Regarding using Overseas Chinese Remittance to purchase and construct housing]

关于棚户简屋改造规划和实施情况的 报告 [Report Regarding Slum

Housing Upgrade Plan and Implementation]

Accelerating of City Center Slum Slum Upgrade Implementation] Upgrade] authorizes district governments reduces land leasing fee, subsidies to the approval right for applications of redevelopment proposals from private developers

private developers $40-$110/sm demolished

State Council issues (1998/7/3) N.23 关于进一步深 化城镇住房制度改革加快住房建设的通知 [Notice regarding the deepening of the Urban Housing System Reform and the acceleration of Residential Construction] prohibits danwei from building or buying

[Decision regarding Deepening of Urban Housing Reform] supply

and demand side programs

new housing units for employees danwei has to convert housing fund into monetary subsidies so employees can buy homes on market

National HPF 公积金

Shanghai issues (1998) Doc N. 19 关于促进本市住宅产 业的健康发展的若干意见 [Some views regarding promoting the healthy development of the residential industry in Shanghai]

Shanghai issues (1994) Doc N. 19 关于出售公房的暂行办法

Shanghai issues (1999/1/19) Doc N. 4 上海市公有住房差价交换试行办法 [Pilot measures for the exchange of Shanghai public housing with pricing difference] city center units allowed to be

[Regulations Regarding Implementation of Sale of Publicly-owned housing]

purchased with ownership rights

Cheap Rental Housing (CRH) require small units

starts district level developments

OVERSEAS CHINESE AND FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT Shanghai issues (1993/12/28) 上海 Shanghai issues (1995/8/28) 上 市利用外资开发经营内销商品住宅暂海市利用外资开发经营内销商品 住宅规定 [Regulation regarding 行规定 [Provisional Regulation regarding using Foreign Investmentusing Foreign Investment for the development and management for the development and of commodity housing sold to management of commodity the national market] housing sold to the national market] landlease for 70 years to

Procedures of Shanghai Municipality on the Intake of Experts From Abroad]

1997 上海市历史文化名城保护 规划 [Shanghai Historic Cultural City Protection Plan]

GDP 121.1bio RMB

43RMB GDPP 5,000,000inhab

State Counc 管理条例 [R Housing De

than residents

Shanghai iss 111 上海市城 [Detailed Re Managemen Demolition Implementa

Shanghai iss 184 上海市房 除直管公房等 [Some Regu Compensatio Directly Man the like]

25% increa 70% increa

Foreigners

Shanghai is (implement 外销商品住 [Some Com consolidati housing ma

[Provisions on the Employment of Foreigners in China]

Shanghai (1993) Shanghai (1994) N.8 N.47 amend +2 +175 Locations declared (became 61) 优秀 优秀历史建筑 近代历史建筑

State National 建设部、文 Council 化部 issues (1986/12/ (1988/11/10) 关于重 08) 关于请 点调查保护优秀近代 Shanghai issues (1991/12/05) 公布第二 建筑物的通知 上海市优秀近代建筑保护管理 批国家历 [Notice regarding State Council issues 史文化名 Key Investigations 办法 [Measures for the conservation and management (1982/11/19) 城名单报 into Protecting of Shanghai’s Excellent 中华人民共和国文物 告的通知 Excellent Modern-era Architecture] 保护法 [PRC Law for [Notice Modern-era the Protection of regarding Building] Shanghai City Planning Cultural Relics] the Bureau, Tongji University, announce-1988 publication of Shanghai Museum produce ment of 上海近代建筑史稿 (1991/7) 上海历史文化名城保 the [History Of 护规划 [Conservation Plan for second list Shanghai Shanghai Historic Cultural of Modern-Era Renowned City] proposes 11 National Architecture areas for conservation Historic Manuscript] Cultural by Chen Congzhou Renowned Cities] lists Shanghai as one of 38

Shanghai is

N. 68 关于鼓 轮旧区改造的 Encouraging Move back, round of pilo

(2001/9/1) erased from 卖的合同文

Shanghai issues (1994) N.43 上海 State Council issues (1996) N.152 市引进国外专家暂行办法 [Interim 外国人在中国就业管理规定

MONUMENT PROTECTION

Shanghai (1989) N.62 issues 59 locations declared 优秀近代建筑

Shanghai issues (1999/12/01) N.42 关于内销商品住房种类归并 的若干规定 [Some Regulations Regarding the consolidation of the Types Commodity Housing for Local Market]

foreign developers in the city center

Shanghai issues (1990/3) 关于发展本市侨汇，外汇商 品房的意见 [Thoughts regarding development of commodity housing for overseas remittances] forbids selling of commodity housing for overseas Chinese to local enterprises

Amending Rights in S

HOUSING MARKETIZATION

State Council issues (1994) N.43 关于深化城镇住房制度改革的决定

Shanghai issues (1994) Doc N. 34 关于出售公有住房的实施细则

Cutoff for working period counting towards housing

修改《上海市

reduces landle who qualify

[Regarding accelerating city center Slum Upgrade-related Tax Issues]

1987 Shanghai pilots sale of 2000sm of housing

1986 上海市沿街 公有营业用房管理 暂行办法 [Provisional measures regarding the management of street-front publicly owned commercial units]

demolished

Shanghai issues (1997/3/17) N. 20 关

[Provisional Measures Regarding Sale of Publicly-owned housing]

1987/9 侨汇商品住宅建设回忆 State Council issues opened 19 sites, 450000sm, 5000units (1983) N.152 关于引进国 1988/3 上海市外商投资房产企业商品 外人才工作的暂行规定 住宅出售管理办法 [Administrative [Provisional regulations re Measures of Shanghai Municipality the importation of Foreign Governing the Sale of Commercial Talent for work] Housing by Foreign Investment Real State Enterprises] accelerates 1979 Law of Joint Ventures of overseas investment the PRC begins FDI

State Council lists (1982/2/8) 24 cities as 国家历史文化名 城 National Historic Cultural Renowned Cities

Shanghai issues (1996/4/22) N. 18 关 Shanghai issues (1998/8/2) N. 33关于 365 Plan 于加快本市中心城区危棚简屋改造若干 加快本市中心城区危棚简屋改造实施办 completed 意见 [Some Views Regarding 法 [Accelerating of City Center 365 Ha

Shanghai issues (1998/9/4) N. 53 关于加快 本市中心城区危棚简屋改造的有关财税问题

encourages home purchase, financing and restructure rents

Shanghai i

rights for com

于执行〈加快本市中心城区危棚简屋改造若 干意见〉中有关问题的实施意见

1992 Shanghai establishes Housing Reform Office 房改办

10 Year Reform Strategy to

use state-allocated land occupied for real estate development, with

SLUM CLEARANCE AND REDEVELOPMENT Tax sharing reform deprives local government of revenue

Shanghai issues (1993/12） 365 Plan - demolition of 365 Ha aimed

State Council issues 1991 Shanghai pilots 公积金 (1988) N.11 关于在 Housing Provident Fund 全国城镇分期分批准 (HPF) 行住房制度改革实施 方案[Implementation 8th Five Year Plan (1991-1995) Plan for a Gradual 关于全面进行城镇住房制度改革的意见 Housing System Reform in Cities and [Urban Housing Reform Resolution] Towns] begins sale of

State Council issues (1984) N.

types of funding for housing: 1. state, 2. SOE, 3. developer

1992 first land lease to foreigner in Shanghai Shanghai issues（1992/3/13）

State Council issues (1991) N.78 城市房屋拆迁管理条例 [Regulations for the Management of Urban Housing Demolition and Relocation]

[Shanghai Old District Seven Year Housing Renovation Site Layout Plan] demolition of 540 Ha, 161000 families displaced

Property Right Administration of Allocated Land in the Reform of State Owned Enterprises] allows SOEs to

classes corresp to 3 use types (mixed, residential and industrial), but largely reflects 外销商品房

for 2000

Shanghai issues（1982）

Land Admin Bureau issues (1998) N. 8 国有企业改革中划拨土 地使用权管理暂行规定 [Provisional Regulations on the

profits generated to compensate laid-off workers Shanghai implements (1996/6/2) 上海市基准地价 [Basic prices of Urban Land in Shanghai] rates defined for 12 land

and building permits, and enforce development control through the urban plan

Shanghai issues (1987/11/27) N.42 上海市土地使用有偿转让办法 [Measures of Shanghai Municipality on the Compensatory Transfer of Land Use Rights] Shanghai issues (1986/10/30) N.113 上海市中外合资经营企业土地使用管理办法 [Measures Concerning Land Use Administration for Sino-Foreign Joint Equity Enterprises in Shanghai]

State Council issues (1980/3/5) N.61 关于用侨汇

State Council issues (1998) N. 256 中华人民共和国土地管理法 实施条例 [Regulations for the Implementation of the

Land Administration Law of the PRC] grants property right of urban land to local government, but central government takes small percent of land leasing premium

Regulation on Granting and Value Increment land speculation state owns all urban land and Transferring Land-use Rights Tax on collectives own rural land on State-owned Land in Cities State-owned Land Act and Towns] 1988 Constitution amended to separate land 土地增值税 Sh government promotes ownership from land use rights; the non-gratuitous 两级政府三级管理 transfer of land use rights came into effect

上海旧区七年住宅改建基地布局规划

“Build Preser

Shanghai (1999) N.57 +162 Locations declared 优秀历史建筑 1999.03 Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau publishes 上海市 历史文化名城保护规划[Conservation Plan for Shanghai Historic Cultural Renowned City]

1999.03 上海市历史文化名城保护

Shanghai issues (1994/10/08) N.1101上海市房产管理局关于重申 加强对本市优秀近代建筑保护管理 的通知 1997 publication of 上 海百年建筑史 1840-1949［A history of Shanghai’s hundred years of architecture 1840-1949] by Wu Jiang

31,100mio RMB GDP 2,500RMB GDPP 10,000,000inhab

与发展关系基础研究 [The Basic Research on the Relationship of Conservation and Development in Shanghai Historic Cultural Prominent City] Shanghai issues (1999/9/8) N.0678 关于本市历史建筑与街区保护改造 试点的实施意见的通知 [Notice regarding the recommendations for the implementation of the historic architecture and neighborhood conservation and upgrade pilot projects]

121,100mio 9,380RM

1999 publication of 上 海近代建筑风格 [Shanghai Modern-era Architecture Style] by Zheng Shiling

12,900,00

business purposes (commercial, tourism, entertainment, commodity housing) to transfer publically after 1 July 2002 either through tender, auction or quotation

36000 RMB/sm hsg

Land Admin Bureau issues N. 71 (2004) 关于继续开 2007 城市房地产管理法 [Urban 展经营性土地使用权招标拍卖挂牌出让情况执法检查工作的 Real Estate Admin Law] 通知 [Notice on continuing on Inspection of and Supervision over law enforcement for the Lease of prohibits SOEs from real estate Market-allocated Land-use Right by Bidding, Auction and Listing-for-Sale] sets 31 August 2004 as development

鼓励动迁居民回搬推进新一 的试行办法 [Regarding g Displaced Residents to pushing forward new lot for urban upgrade]

Central Government Land and Resource Administration (2012) Doc. N. 53 闲置土地处置办 法 [Regulation to handle unused Shanghai Municipal land] Development and Reform Commission issues (2014/4/11) N.37 关于推进上海市轨道 交通场站及周边土地 综合开发利用的实施 意见（暂行） []

deadline for all cities to ban negotiated conveyance for commercial development

State Council issues N. 28 (2004) 关于深化改革严格土 地管理的决定 [Decision on Deepening Reform and Strengthening Land Administration] strictest land policy

GDP 1’690bio RMB

Regulations on the Planning Control of Change in Land-use in the Central City (Shanghai)] any

redevelopment and expansion projects on the land of existing public facilities, including culture, education, health, sports etc, and the land of secondary industry like factories, warehouses etc., should be strictly controlled accordance with the approved plans

ssues (2001/02/09) Doc

Xi Jinping becomes General Secretary of the CCP

“Better City Better Life”

issues Doc N. 101 (2001) ever to reiterate the orders of n. 11 and n. 71 decrees 市土地使用权出让办法》的决定 [Decision on Shanghai Planning Dept issues N. 355 (2004) 加强中 the Methods of Granting Land Use 心城内改变土地使用性质规划管理的暂行规定[Provisional Shanghai]ensures that the granting of land-use

mmercial land is acquired via public bidding

World Expo in Shanghai

Hongqiao T2 opens

Beijing hosts Olympics World Financial Crisis

ding New is Development, rving Old is also Development” Land Admin Bureau issues N. 11 (2002) 招标拍卖挂牌出让国有建设土 地使用权规定[Regulations on Lease of State-owned Land by Bidding, Auction and Listing-for-Sale] requires all land for

2010

2008

Policy to tighten control over land

2004 Macroeconomic measures to cool rising prices

Hu Jintao becomes General Secretary of the CCP

( 11 Dec 2001)

China joins WTO

2002

State Council issues N. 17 (2008/10) 上海市人民政府机 构改革方案 [Plan for the organizational reform of the Shanghai Municipal Government] forms 上海市规划与国 土资源管理局 Shanghai Municipal Planning and Land Resources Administration as result of municipal reform and consolidated land resource management with urban planning

ease for selected developers

AFFORDABLE HOUSING Central Government issues Cheap Rental Housing Guarantee Plan 2009-2011

cil re-issues (2001) Doc N.305 城市房屋拆迁 (2004) [Ways to provide cheap rental Regulations for the Management of Urban housing for the poorest urban emolition and Relocation] based on area rather residents]

Ministry of Housing issues (2011) [Push Forward Social Security Housing Construction in a Large Scale] raises the ratio of urban

State Council issues (2013/9) N. 35 关于加快发展养老服务业的若干意见

households covered by affordable housing [Some views regarding accelerating to about 20 per cent by 2015 elderly care service industries]

s

State Council issues (2003/8/12) N. 18 State Council issues (2005/5/9) N. 26 关于做好稳定住房价格工作意见的通知 State Council issues (2010/4/17) N. 10 关于坚决遏制部分 关于促进房地产市场持续健康发展的通 [Opinion on Doing a Good Job of Stabilizing House Prices] imposes a tax on 城市房价过快上涨的通知 [Circular on Steadfastly Preventing Rapid Housing Price Inflation in Some Cities] 知 [On Promoting the Continuous and housing transactions at 5.5% of sale price on non-ordinary housing to curb housing speculation a ban on mortgages for third home purchase Healthy Development of the Real State Council issues (2006/6/30) N.37 关于调整住房供应 Estate Markets] stipulates ordinary 结构稳定住房价格意见 [Opinions on Adjusting House State Council issues (2008/12/20) N.131 关于促进房地产 market housing should dominate housing Supply Structure and Stabilizing House Price] 市场健康发展的若干意见 [Several Opinions on Promoting supply ‘for the majority of households to the Healthy Development of the Real Estate Market] Ministry of Construction issues (2006/11/27) N.171 关于规 sues (2001/11/09) Doc N. buy or to rent’ 范房地产市场外资准入和管理的意见 [Opinions on 房屋土地资源管理局关于拆 Regulating Access of Foreign Capital into the Real Estate 等房屋补偿款的若干规定 State Council issues (2011/1/27) N. 1 Market] stricter regulations for real estsate operations ulations Regarding 关于进一步做好房地产市场调控工作有 Ministry of Commerce issues (2007/5/23) N.50 关于进一 ion for the Demolition of 关问题的通知 [Circular on Relevant 步加强、规范外商直接投资房地产业审批和监管的通知 naged Public Housing and Issues to Further the Control of the [Notice on Further Strengthening and Regulating the Real Estate Market] purchase restrictions Examination, Approval and Supervision of Foreign Direct were imposed for units beyond first home Investment in Real Estate Industry] requires local

sues (2001/10/29) Doc N. 城市房屋拆迁管理实施细则 egulations for the nt of Urban Housing and Displacement ation]

Shanghai issues (2014/6/17) N. 关于 开展老年人住房反向抵押养老保险试点 的指导意见 [Views regarding pilot and steering elderly housing reverse mortage]

governments to have better supervision of foreign investment in real estate market

TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION

ase in housing price in Chinese cities ase in Shanghai (2001-2004)

Shanghai Urban Planning Dept issues (2008) Doc N. 866 关于促进节约集约利用工业用地加快发展现代服 务业的若干意见 [The Directives on Accelerating the Development of Modern Service Industry and the Promotion of Intensive Utilization of Industrial Land] Foreigners no longer allowed to buy 2008 Shanghai establishes 上海市外国专家局 Shanghai Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs Ministry of Commerce issues (2007/3/6) N.25 关于 2007年吸收外商投资工作指导性意见 [Guidance on Absorption of Foreign Investment in China 2007]

allowed to buy

ssues (2001/6/15) N.22 tation 8/1) 关于本市内 住房并轨的若干意见 mments regarding the ion of commodity arkets]

‘W’, ‘N’ m 商品房买 文本

o RMB GDP

MB GDPP

00inhab

encourace investments in inland markets as well as in high-tech industries, strict limitations on foreign investment in real estate market

State Council establishes (2012/09/05) N.53 外国人在中国永 久居留享有相关待遇的办法

[Foreigners’ Permanent Residence in China]

CREATIVE ECONOMIES 2004/11/6 上海创意产业中 心 Shanghai Creative Industries Center (SCIC) founded

75 sites given Creative Center plaque

Sh Economic Council issues (2008/6/13) N. 452 上海 Sh Economic Council issues (2011/9/2 市加快创意产业发展的指导意见 [Guiding advice on 8) N. 51 关于推进上海规划产业区块外产业结构调整 accelerating Creative Industries Development] 转型的指导意见 [Guiding advice on promoting industrial structure reform and transition of 上海市创意产业集聚区认定管理办法（试行） industrial districts outside of planning in Shanghai] [Confirmation and Management of Shanghai Creative Industries Clusters (pilot)]

HERITAGE CONSERVATION

Shanghai approves (2003/11) 12 历+282 Locations declared 史文化风貌区 Historical Cultural 优秀历史建筑 Features and Styles Areas Pudong included in Historical declared = 27 sq km and Cultural Area +12 sq km Shanghai issues (2005/11) 中心城 Shanghai implements (2003/01)上 风貌保护道路规划管理办法 海市历史文化风貌区和优秀历史建 determines (2006) 144 风貌保护道 筑保护条例 [Regulations of Shanghai 路 Historical Cultural Features and Municipality on the Conservation of Styles Streets and 64 永不拓宽的道路 the Districts with Historical Cultural Never-to-be-widened streets （一类 Features and Styles And The Excellent 风貌保护道路） Historical Buildings] (2004)上海市衡山路复兴路历史文

化风貌区保护规划[Hengshan Lu Fuxing Lu Historic Cultural Features and Styles District Conservation Plan] Shanghai issues (2004/9/11) N.31 关于进一步加强本市历史文化风貌 区和优秀历史建筑保护的通知 National 建设部 issues (2004/03/06) 关于加强对 城市优秀近现代建筑规划 保护工作的指导意见

Shanghai issues (2007/9/17) N.30 关于本市风貌保护道路（街巷）规 划管理若干意见的通知 [Notice of

Some Suggestions on the Administration of Planning Work for Preservation-of-Historical-Look Streets (Alleys/Lanes)]

477,100mio RMB GDP 36,217RMB GDPP

[Views and directions for strengthening of thePlanning and Protection of Excellent Modern-era Building in the City]

Fig. 19 Timeline of the policies implementations juxtaposed against the development projects and agents (drawn by author, based on plans from officially surveyed plans, Google Earth, and fieldwork)

915,400mio RMB GDP 67,492RMB GDPP

4,300,000floating population 13,000,000inhab registered

Chapter 6 The Contemporary Art Ecologies From Contestation to Appropriation: the Transformation of M50 “Made in China”: New Museums and the Business of Art Uncertainty and Regeneration Art and Architecture Catalyze Development Contemporary Art Ecologies

Figs. 1 – 4 The P. S. Art, upper left; the Long Museum, upper right; the Rockbund development, lower left; the Himalayas Museum, lower right

The opening of the Power Station of Art (P. S. Art) [当代艺术博物馆] on Chinese National Day, 1 October 2012, to host the 9th Shanghai Biennale of Contemporary Art, epitomized not only the economic re-globalization of Shanghai since marketization began in the early 1990s, but also its growing cultural ambitions. The city’s cultural chief proclaimed that the new museum, the first publicly held museum of contemporary art in China, would position Shanghai as the hub of contemporary art in East Asia.1 The new museum, P. S. Art, would be comparable to the Tate Modern of London, amongst others.2 (Fig. 1) The openings of the Long Museum [龙美術館] (Fig. 2) and YUZ Museum [余德耀 美術館] in Shanghai’s West Bund Cultural Corridor [西岸文化走廊], an eight-kilometer southern extension to the World Expo site—buildings designed by internationally renowned architect Sou Fujimoto, amongst others—the conversion of the post-

[艾未未]’s studio. Together, the events underline that the Chinese state’s cultural ambitions in service of economic growth are selective. This is nowhere more visible than in the active appropriation and commercialization of contemporary arts spaces that validate the urban growth regime, and the destruction of other contemporary arts spaces that do not advance the local pro-growth coalition’s interests.4 The following cases of spatial development in Shanghai over the two decades since economic liberalization began reveal how the reshaping of urban spaces for contemporary art increasingly serves state control. Through the spatial productions, they show how the urban loophole, a concept that has been examined at the scale of the neighborhood in the previous chapters, is also relevant for understanding the targeted spatial developments of selected sectors at the scale of the metropolitan area.5 China’s developmental state is increasingly promoting a ‘contemporary art ecology,’ 6 as one of the economic sectors for representing the Chinese transition economy’s global integration. Even though economic liberalization and global integration seemed to signify to the outside world an accompanying loosening of political restraints, growing state control that is at once “dictatorial, opportunistic, and merciless” 7 underlines the authoritarian resilience of what David Harvey has termed ‘neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics.’ 8 The increase of top-down measures is capitalizing on the growing value of culture as market currency. Their impingement on artistic autonomy, has also, in turn, provoked increasingly subtle and evolving bottom-up modes of resistance. In the global competition to attract creative talent, government white papers and urban plans are incubating cultural industries and clustering creative hubs. The push for transition from a predominantly manufacturing-based to knowledge-based and value-added economies is complemented by an increasing emphasis on cultural production.9 Cultural development is promoted by economists and appropriated by state

Chapter 6 The Contemporary Art Ecologies

Expo site itself into the largest creative industry cluster in the world, the openings of the Rockbund Museum [外滩美术馆]—designed by architect David Chipperfield—as part of the Bund redevelopment project, (Fig. 3) the Himalayas Art Museum [喜馬拉 雅美術館] designed by architect Arata Isozaki, (Fig. 4) and more new city center spaces dedicated to contemporary art consumption, such as at the K 11 Arts Mall, confirm what both the Western and local media have hailed as China’s “museum boom.” 3 This spate of openings seemed to contradict, at the same time, the concurrent shutdown of the art warehouse Weihai Lu 696 and the demolition of artist Ai Weiwei

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authorities as an important catalyst of the economic transition from modernization to internationalization. Not only is cultural development an indicator for economic progress, it, more importantly, also bolsters the country’s global image. Culture, in addition to politics and economics, is seen as essential to China’s soft power ascent.10 The endorsement and development of contemporary art ecologies is a crucial part of the growing local urban pro-image coalition.11 It is also part of the greater national aspiration for China’s re-ascendance in the international cultural sphere.12 As a recent Artprice.com report shows, the demand side of the global art market has shifted markedly eastward. One of the subheadings for the report ran: “New York/ London gives way to Beijing/Hong Kong.”13 Almost 50 % of global contemporary art consumption is taking place in Asia. In 2011 30 % of global art sales took place in China, up from 9 % in 2008.14 Seven of the ten largest auction houses in the world by sales revenue are in China.15 The Chinese art market, as an exclusive market of apex commodities,16 shows both the increasing numbers of elite consumers and the growing demand sophistication of the affluent consumers.17 On the supply side, production of contemporary art has increasingly come from China since the 2000s.18 As a country whose transition from a closed, centrally planned economy to one whose growth and global integration has astounded the world, China’s production of the apex commodities with international market cachet also represents its global integration. Already showcasing glistening new cities and the domination of manufactured goods production, the cultivation of a contemporary arts ecology would exemplify the successful transition to the next phase of China’s economic development, from ‘progress to prosperity.’19 To the next generation of policy makers, urban policies prioritizing the growth of contemporary art are crucial to this latest and most urgent of image projects and its ability to generate even more business opportunities. The word ‘ecology’ has been used in policy-speak to suggest the necessity of an all-encompassing framework for developing the cultural industries.20 ‘Ecology’ denotes the value chain of contemporary art, from the production to consumption, in its spatial and programmatic terms.21 The use of ‘ecology’ at the same time aligns with the naturally embedded connotations of ‘sustainability,’ suggesting a more natural, organic, and thus ‘sustainable’ version of the economic term of the ‘value chain.’ The usage of ‘ecology’ also implies a social dimension in addition to the economic one, imparting a holistic tinge to what would otherwise be growth-pursuing economics.22 Discussions have hovered over how to cultivate a contemporary art ecology specifically within the Asian context, evolving from the discourse on creative ‘incubation,’ where top-down efforts steer the growth of ‘habitats’ for fostering creativity.23 In the case of contemporary art, the necessary material and immaterial conditions needed to foster collection, exhibition, criticism, and education, and the business plans for the financial sustenance of art institutions are challenges still faced by developing economies. The cases elaborated in the following chapter trace the spatial developments of Shanghai’s contemporary art ecologies. Like other sectors that fundamentally transformed when China underwent economic transition and global integration, the spatial developments of the contemporary art ecologies reflected the growing global influence, on one hand, and the local and central state’s intensifying involvement in the sector, on the other. Like other sectors, artists and art entrepreneurs exploited the urban loop382

holes that complemented the local state’s adaptive governance in the first decade of economic transition. The first section, “From Contestation to Appropriation: the Transformation of M 50,” follows the development of the arts hub known today as M 50. Artists and art entrepreneurs seized on the spatial opportunities resulting from the programmatic and regulatory gaps of the economic transition and established spatial habitats for contemporary art production, exhibition, and consumption there. They also asserted their artistic autonomy in the grey zone left by rapid urban development, resisting what they saw as political appropriation under transition economy. From its vanguard origins as the ‘red houses [紅房子]’ along the Suzhou River, the area that was the site of artistic resistance has since been groomed by the local state into a creative industries cluster, a Triple-A tourist destination, as well as party elite training ground. The second section, “‘Made in China’: New Museums and the Business of Art,” shows how as international integration progressed and the growth of Chinese contemporary art became a niche sector in the global market in the mid-2000s, the spatial productions for contemporary art also increasingly assimilated within market logic. As spatial productions for contemporary art became increasingly prevalent as an instrument of local urban regimes, contemporary artists, especially in Shanghai, responded to the growing state developmentalism by aligning with private sector practices. The con-

and the consequent process for the destruction of the newly erected studio exposed and confirmed the institutional plasticity and volatility of China’s party-state governance.24 The resolution of Ai’s contestation in the lead-up to the 2010 World Expo, set in Shanghai, lead to the political rise of the local state leader who both initiated and terminated the spatial production of Ai’s ‘red houses.’ The fourth section, “Art and Architecture Catalyze Development,” follows the subsequent spatial productions of the same local state leader, who rose from Jiading to lead the elite central district of Xuhui [徐汇], where the new cultural district of West Bund was already underway. The planning and opening of new cultural institutions in West Bund, which began under the auspices of a former Shanghai leader Xi Jinping, realizes the pro-growth aspirations for the district, for the city, and for the nation. The establishment of cultural districts, like that of special economic zones for industrial production or technological development in the first decade of economic

Chapter 6 The Contemporary Art Ecologies

flict between private sector commercial appropriation and artistic autonomy, which is prevalent in market economies with benign state governance, evolved in the Chinese context to one of necessary coexistence. Alignment with the private sector and granting commercial appropriation is not only a means for artists to maintain financial independence. Alignment with the private sector is also the only mode of eluding encroachment by the authoritarian and predatory state. This chapter’s third section, “Uncertainty and Regeneration,” outlines the construction to destruction cycle for Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s studio, also ‘red houses [紅房 子],’ concurrent with the eviction of Weihai Lu 696’s artists. Despite the growing emphasis on the cultural industries in preparation for the Expo, the two events revealed the party-state’s selectivity of spatial developments to advance its agendas. The internationally recognized but locally controversial artist Ai’s construction of his studio in the suburbs of Shanghai in Jiading [嘉定] District, on the invitation of the local state leadership, epitomized Ai’s subversion of the developmental state’s appropriation by participating in it. Ai’s resistance of the central government injunction against him

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transition, tested the potentials for the next steps of China’s global integration. Special economic zones and other locales of exemptions were intended, in their establishment, to close the gap to global standards and procedures, while preserving the existing system of transitioning economy and incomplete marketization, in the territories that surround the zones. Nationally, Shanghai competes with Beijing as China’s arts hub. Shanghai also competes with Hong Kong and Singapore in East Asia as a regional hub for the larger ‘art ecology.’25 Shanghai’s locational advantages, in its proximity to both the cultural producers and to the rising crop of art patrons from the affluent coastal region around Shanghai, are offset by its confinement to the Chinese socialist market system, still largely detached from the international economic structures.26 The construction of the art districts and cultural corridors, with prioritized functions for the cultural industries, form the state-deployed urban loopholes of exceptions that have become increasingly prevalent at the end of the second decade of economic transition. In the context of a deferred transition from planned to market economics, where the state itself has been exempted and shielded from encroachments of market logic,27 the urban loopholes produce exempted spaces for continued global integration, coexisting within surrounding spaces obligated to conform to the frameworks of transition economy.

From Contestation to Appropriation: the Transformation of M50 Reuse of former industrial quarters by artists as studios and for exhibitions is a wellknown phenomenon in Western cities.28 The form it takes on in China is not only related to de-industrialization, but also to a fundamental restructuring of the centrally planned socialist units of production. The nation-founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 began the rule of the vast country by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the one-party authoritarian regime that premised its first three decades of reign on Soviet-styled centrally planned economy isolated from the world. Under central planning, all units of production were state-owned and factories occupied central locations in cities, since under central planning real estate values did not exist. Cities were also rendered spaces solely for industrial production rather than places for consumption under Communist ideology.29 It was not until the end of the 1970s that the new leadership under Deng Xiaoping initiated economic liberalization, reconnecting China to the world economically, socially, and politically. When economic liberalization accelerated in the early 1990s, the central government implemented drastic reforms to state-owned enterprises (SOE s). Many restructured SOE s abandoned their loss-making production in the face of market competition and vacated their industrial spaces in inner-city areas.30 In Shanghai, the municipality also recognized the spatial inefficiencies and programmatic chaos left by planned economy production sites. In the fundamental spatial restructuring that accompanied the central government’s imperative for Shanghai to grow, the municipality pushed out many of the centrally located manufacturing sites.31 384

Figs. 5, 6 The ‘red houses’ on Suzhou River, left; and the visitors to the Counter Biennale, 2000, right

Artists Reusing the ‘Red Houses’ As a result of relocation of manufacturing sites from city center to the periphery, many of the industrial buildings became vacant. The high-ceilinged, light-filtered, and openplan structures of the former industrial buildings were appealing to many of the emerging artists and designers, who were the first to appreciate the then-underval-

duction since modernity. A Taiwanese architect, Deng Kunyan [登琨艳], set up his atelier in an old former grain warehouse along the river. The space that he upgraded was envied by the creative set for its expansive space and ambiance.33 Soon, other artists and designers moved into former factories and warehouses and converted them into studio and exhibition spaces. Ding Yi [丁义], the Shanghainese abstract artist who was one of the first artists to move into the area.34 He was followed by friends, including the Swiss gallerist Lorenz Helbling, whose ShanghArt [香格納] gallery opened in 1996 and had been located in the former French Concession. Li Liang [李梁], the Shanghainese artist and gallerist, who returned from his decade-long stint in Australia also opened the Eastlink Gallery [东廊艺术] in 1999. West Suzhou River Lu’s Numbers 1131 and 1133 quickly became early hubs for the contemporary art set. The two red-bricked buildings were warehouses belonging to the Shanghai No. 2 Rice Mill and Shanghai Fodder Mill [上海饲料], and were disused after economic reform.35 Because of their color, they have been called Suzhou River’s ‘red houses.’ (Fig. 5) Like many of the city center processes of spatial reuse described in the previous chapters, the artists’ appropriation of the warehouse spaces used urban loopholes that resulted from the regulatory and programmatic gaps and were prevalent in the first decade of economic transition. The local state’s adaptive governance allowed the bottom-up processes to exploit the urban loopholes, which, in turn, compensated for the spatial inefficiencies resulting from rapid transition. In the ‘red houses,’ the studios and galleries held salons, vernissages, and events that were still largely unknown to a Shanghai which had been culturally dormant since China’s isolation from the world

Chapter 6 The Contemporary Art Ecologies

ued warehouses and factory buildings. In addition to the spatial qualities the industrial spaces were also cheap to rent. In 1996, a municipal project to clean up the Suzhou River dramatically upgraded the polluted river, which had been an industrial dumping ground for the numerous manufacturing sites located around it in the preceding decades.32 The area around the Suzhou River was Shanghai’s area of industrial pro-

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in the 1950s. Away from the valuable real estate of new special economic and technology zones, and also peripheral from the city center’s density, the happenings that took place in the ‘red houses’ represented a kind of freedom for questioning, doubting, resisting, and experimenting that was echoed in their spatial activation. (Fig. 6) The artist studios and galleries gathering like-minded sensibilities also questioned, in their spatial reuse, the then prevalent mode of seeing old buildings as disposable. The Chinese art scene, coming out from the aftermaths of the Tian’anmen Protests in 1989, was characterized by the art historian and critic Wu Hung [巫鸿] as discarding an ideologically driven discourse of social and political change in favor of a pragmatist approach in the context of China’s accelerated economic transition.36 The shift was dramatic. Under Communism, painters trained in the style of socialist realism and imitated Soviet painters. Art, like other cultural productions, served the political purpose of mobilizing the masses.37 In the early eras of China’s economic reform, the 1980s generation of artists, though still constrained by the system of labor and resource allocation under planned economy, held great hopes for the country’s re-opening to the world and its potential for political change.38 Exhibitions from foreign museums and new translations of books from the West that first entered the country excited young Chinese artists in places like Shanghai. With the influx of new information in the 1980s, the young artists began looking to outside sources for inspiration, including Chinese painters who had trained in the West before Liberation in the 1930s.39 After the Tian’anmen Protests, however, a growing cynicism towards the possibilities of fundamental political change grounded and shaped the Chinese artists’ conceptual maturation. Ding Yi explained in an interview, “even though the passion for cultural progress was wounded in the process [尽管对于当代文化推进的热情收 到了伤害], … 1989 was a turning point for Chinese contemporary culture [1989年是中国 当代文化的一个转折].”40 Until the 1990s, art production and exhibitions were subsumed by state art institutions. Artists, like all other citizens, were assigned roles in the planned economy hierarchy and were bound to their danwei, or work units, in the system of production. If there was a value chain for artistic production, it was in service of the state and ideologically bound to the CCP. It was only in the mid-1990s that commercial galleries started to appear in cities like Shanghai. Helbling’s ShanghArt Gallery, housed initially in the ‘red houses’ by the Suzhou River, was one of the first private institutions for art in the city. Private galleries, mostly still foreign-owned, were able to support artists outside the dominant system of state art institutions, financially and conceptually. They provided the artistic community with an alternate ecology that, more importantly, gave them conceptual freedom and artistic autonomy not inhibited by the state hierarchy. Shanghai’s International Biennale and The Uncooperative Approach It was not only the artists who grew world-wise and became more globally attuned. The state-sponsored art ecology was also maturing. The inaugural Shanghai Biennale [上海双年展] was established in 1996 in the Shanghai Art Museum [上海美术馆], housed in the former clubhouse of the concession-era race course, which had been transformed into People’s Square since Liberation. The 1996 edition of the Shanghai Biennale, with the theme of “Open Space [开放的空间],” and two years later in 1998, with 386

the theme of “Inheritance and Exploration [融合与拓展],”41 though mostly of paintings by local artists, already harbored ambitions for establishing itself as an international affair. The classically trained ink painter, then director of Shanghai Art Museum and initiator of the Biennale, Fang Zengxian [方增先], announced: “China should have its own international-level art exhibitions, in order to realize reciprocal and equal selections and exchanges with real meaning; these are the noble ideals for art and also the inevitable route for history [中国应该有自己的国际级美术展览。以实现真正意义的双向

took into consideration the artist’s fame and influence,” said Li Xu [李旭], one of the three curators of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale who also helped found the first Shanghai Biennale.46 The English title for the 2000 Biennale was Shanghai Spirit. In the Chinese version of the title, On the Sea, Shanghai [海上.上海 ], the play of words with the name of Shanghai and its connotation of openness and cosmopolitanism,47 referred to the historic commercial spirit of the city that was undergoing revival under economic transition.48 What had been important were not only the Biennale’s international affiliations, with 66 artists from 18 countries, but also the changing content of the Biennale. The first two Biennales were exhibitions that presented mostly paintings, in line with the state authorities’ prevailing understanding of what art was. The engagement of Hou and his invitation of internationally renowned artists such as William Kentridge from South Africa, Pipilotti Rist from Switzerland, and Miyajima Tatsuo from Japan, validated to the state authorities the avant-garde media of contemporary art that were not only confined to that of painting.49 Videos and installation art, until then very little seen in Shanghai, became part of the vocabulary of the state-sponsored art institution. If the Biennale could be read as a turning point for the post-socialist authoritarian developmental state, appropriating culture to vindicate economic liberalization sans political change, then the violent reaction of a select group of Chinese contemporary artists marked a similar turning point for contestation. Curated by the Beijing-based artist Ai Weiwei and art critic and curator Feng Boyi [冯博一], an exhibition, held at the same time as the official Biennale, called itself F*ck Off. The Chinese version of the name for the exhibition F*ck Off was The Way Not to Cooperate [不合作方式 ] or The Uncooperative Approach.50 Hosted by the gallery Eastlink, the exhibition, in its statement and its title, openly and irreverently rejected what the artists considered

Chapter 6 The Contemporary Art Ecologies

选择和平等交流。这是艺术的高尚理想，也是历史的必由之路].”42 It was in 2000, with the invitation of curator Hou Hanru [侯瀚如] that the Shanghai Biennale became what Hou asserted as the “first state-sponsored exhibition to host international artists and curators.”43 Hou’s earlier collaboration on the international exhibition Cities on the Move was one of the first to highlight the emergence of East Asia to the world.44 Cities on the Move, co-curated with Hans Ulrich Obrist, made Hou the first Chinese curator of international renown in the contemporary art world. Hou’s appointment as the curator of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale was a strategic move for the event’s growing international image. Art historian Charles Merewether contextualized the 2000 Shanghai Biennale within the trajectory of economic liberalization: “the move signaled the government’s engagement with a new policy of strategic cultural diplomacy.”45 The Biennale was a carefully curated affair. Works were by established artists. The works were also apolitical and free of sexual content. “We did not choose works we judged pornographic or with political messages. We also

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the post-socialist authoritarian developmental state’s appropriation of contemporary art as a tool to showcase the state’s open-mindedness to the world. Though Ai rejected questions of deliberately holding The Uncooperative Approach at the same time as the Shanghai Biennale, 51 their concurrence nevertheless suggested that the participants of the exhibition rejected the Biennale and saw the Biennale as representative of the state encroachment on art. The developmental state, which has shown itself to be acquiescent to capital despite maintaining the political status quo, was in its new espousal of contemporary art, encroaching on the autonomy of the artists as intellectuals. When asked with whom the F*ck Off exhibition organizers did not cooperate, Ai declared, “we do not cooperate with anyone; we do not cooperate with anything. This is a challenge to all powers,

Fig. 7 The First Intellectual, by Yang Fudong, 2000

authorities and the system. It is small yet not to be ignored, like a nail in the eye, a thorn in the flesh, a little grain of sand in the shoe, reflecting a valuable cultural

spirit [与谁都不合作, 与什么事都不合作。是对所有权力和权威, 所有的体系的挑战。它像是 眼中钉、肉中刺、鞋里的一粒小沙子, 虽然小, 却不能被忽视, 体现了一种可贵的文化精神].”52 His co-curator Feng affirmed “not cooperating with the mainstream in contemporary China, not cooperating with the establishment in today’s art world, not cooperating with Western standards [与中国当代的主流时尚不合作，与艺术界已经形成的格局不合作， 与西方的标准不合作].”53 A summary of the 2000 Biennale in the magazine Art World [艺术世界] reported that the event was an “eye opener for the crowd of onlookers [让围观的人群大开了眼界].”54 One artist known for his performances, Zhu Ming [朱冥], floated down the Suzhou River in a large plastic bubble, wearing only a diaper. The piece, titled Float [漂浮], had been shown previously in Nagoya and Berlin. In Shanghai, it was a novelty. Another, by the now famous Yang Fudong [杨福东], who was largely unknown at the time, was his photographic series, The First Intellectual [中国第一个知识份子] from 2000, removed by the Cultural Inspection Bureau for its “pornographic” content.55 The piece showed a young man in a torn suit and loosened tie in the middle of a road, standing in front of the then newly finished Jinmao Tower in the Lujiazui Financial District, which was visibly under construction in Pudong. The young man’s head is covered in blood. He is holding a brick, looking like he has either been struck already or was ready to strike. (Fig. 7) Even though it is clear that the image is neither sexual in nature nor aberrant in form, the authorities read its imagery as the kind of overt critique barred under the 388

Fig. 8 Plans for development in the Moganshan Lu 50 area, 2002

party-state. They deemed its blatant association of the economically propelled stateendorsed urban development in Shanghai—represented by the gleaming high-rises against the backdrop of a vast construction site in Pudong—with violence and injury—represented by the blood-stained young man who looks like he has either struck himself or was struck by a force outside the frame—not suitable for public viewing. The Uncooperative Approach attracted throngs of visitors to the ‘red houses’ along Suzhou River. Since 1996, the Shanghai municipal government was planning for the upgrade of the riverside areas. The Uncooperative Approach exhibition and its happenings persuaded the municipal officials, as well as the central government to push forward further cleanups. In April 2001, the central government issued a statute against performance art and exhibitions that showed extreme content.56 A municipal official, reacting to Zhu Ming’s piece, criticized the artists as disruptive and unruly. Relating the provocation and disobedience exhibited at The Uncooperative Approach to the location of the abandoned former industrial quartier, the official warned: “some of the pieces performed around the warehouses were too out of order … the remoteness of the warehouse area doesn’t mean that anybody could freely run amok [一些在仓库周围上演 的作品太出格了 … 老仓库偏僻的地理位置并不意味着可以任由一些人胡作非为],” forebod-

From the ‘Red Houses’ to M50 Plans for redevelopment in the Suzhou River area were already underway. The 2000 neo-noir film Suzhou River [苏州河] by Lou Ye [娄烨] was famously set to the backdrop of the river,58 with the lingering warehouses awaiting their impending demolition insinuating that the area was already, as film critic Zhang Zhen analyzed, “a reservoir of urban memory.”59 As dumping ground of industries for decades, the Suzhou River underwent rehabilitation in the mid-1990s, sponsored by the Asia Development Bank.60 Municipal plans to upgrade the entire area show rapidly erected large swaths of high-rise residences.61 (Fig. 8) The municipality had almost discarded earlier plans for a 200-hundred-meter green space around the river due to corruption and greed. The plans for the green space were only restored after public protests led by the local artist Han Yuqi [韩妤齐], in collaboration with the professor Zhang Song [张松] from Tongji University.62

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ing imminent changes.57

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In 2002, the demolitions of the ‘red houses’ were impending.63 After the continuing flattening of surrounding warehouses, artists and galleries flocked into the last bastion of available space at Moganshan Lu 50. The buildings had originally served as warehouse for cotton in 1933. They then became part of a yarn factory and cotton mill before becoming a state-owned textiles factory in 1966. With the SOE reforms of the mid-1990s, the factories along the Suzhou River that had made Shanghai a national hub for textile production were shut down.64 In 2000, the management of the SOE for Moganshan Lu 50 leased one of its spaces to the artist Xue Song [薛松]. He moved into the third floor of Building 7, where a 250-square-meter space became his studio. At the time, other small manufacturing, including for fashion and printing, continued to occupy other spaces in the compound, making up more than 60-some enterprises in what was then called Chunming Industrial Park [春明工业园区].65 Initially Xue signed only a two-year lease with the SOE landlord of Chunming Woolen Mill [春明 粗纺厂] as the future of the premises remained uncertain. Within three months, more than a dozen artists moved in, despite continued rumors of demolition.66 The galleries ShanghArt and Eastlink also both moved to new spaces at Moganshan Lu 50. The leadership of the Chunming Woolen Mill, which became part of the municipal-level SOE ShangTex [上海纺织集团], was accepting of the artists and galleries as new tenants. The leadership saw the artists, some of whom also had jobs as instructors in art schools, as of the intellectual class rather than blue-collar businesses that had previously occupied the premises.67 By the mid-2000s, the convergence of interests by cultural heritage conservationists and creative-industry-promoting economists became formalized in the state recognition of the cultural rehabilitation of industrial buildings. As the areas around Suzhou River were developed with pencil tower condos and office buildings, academics led by Professor Ruan Yisan [阮仪三] of Tongji University formed the National Research Center for Historic Cultural Sites [历史文化名城研究中心] in 2003.68 The Center was created by the concerned academics in direct reaction to the en-masse demolition and redevelopment that had been prevalent in Shanghai’s urban transformation. The Center, in contradiction to the statutory plan already approved by the municipal planning bureau that showed new developments along the river, produced an alternate masterplan for the Suzhou River area. Notably, the alternate masterplan kept Moganshan Lu 50.69 As a reputable state-affiliated research institution with high-level connections, it organized a number of public forums, with the support of national ministries as well as municipal officials, and raised awareness of the Moganshan Lu area along the Suzhou River as a potential neighborhood for cultural production. At the same time, Shangh­ Art, which had initially rented the space as its warehouse, also moved its gallery to Moganshan Lu 50, becoming its anchor tenant. With the presence of ShanghArt, the Center for Historical Cultural Sites made a convincing case for the conservation and conversion of the area. (Fig. 9) The rising interest in conserving industrial heritage found a great complement in the municipal economists who were also advocates for creative industries at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. As elaborated in the previous chapter, the urban loophole of the ‘creative industries clusters’ became the mechanism for formalizing commercial redevelopment of otherwise off-limits administratively-allocated land.70 With the establishment of the Shanghai Creative Industry Center (SCIC) in 2004, under 390

Fig. 9 The former industrial area along the Suzhou River as viewed from Moganshan Lu number 50, 2007

nated the compound at Moganshan Lu 50 as a ‘creative industries clusters.’ Prior to this, the SOE officials who allowed the artists to rent their spaces were doing it largely “under the table.”71 With the bestowment of the ‘creative industries cluster’ title, newspapers reported that Moganshan Lu 50 was on its way to become the new Soho of Shanghai.72 In the proposal made by the National Research Center for Historic Cultural Sites, the name “M 50” was also bestowed on the compound of Moganshan Lu 50.73 M50 became the easily pronounceable and visually identifiable branding that has come to represent the compound in the tourist brochures and cultural newspapers. The initial ambiance of a bottom-up artist quarter with diverse and dilapidated structures has also given way to a formalized area with a visible, almost aggressive, branding strategy. New paving on the ground and repainted and restored buildings package the branded M 50. Tagged with yellow plaques delineating their historic uses, M 50’s buildings, some of which were built as late as the late 1980s and all of which have survived en-masse demolition, have come to represent Shanghai’s increasingly scarce and hence precious industrial heritage. A tourist information center, several cafés, and small stores have been inserted to accommodate the inflow of visitors. As the surrounding area continues to be marked for ongoing demolition and development, creative activities are confined to the demarcated M 50 area. M 50 remains occupied by artists, despite discernible signs of commercialization and sanitization today. With rising rents and upgraded spaces, however, younger artists could ill afford a studio. The studios that remain belong to the now established, globally known Chinese contemporary artists, including the likes of Ding Yi and Zhang Enli [张恩利]. Younger artists who are just starting out seek out an entry into M 50 to help establish their professional credibility. It is not only the rising rents that have made M 50 it increasingly difficult for younger artists to access. The SOE land-

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the auspices of the municipal Economic Council, reusing former industrial structures on administratively-allocated land found a business model: with the creative industries conferment, a zoning change could be made on industrial land that facilitates the reuse of industrial heritage into commercial spaces. In 2005, the SCIC officially desig-

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lord of M 50 has also become selective in the choice of new tenants. As the SOE leader confirmed, “our prices are quite flexible. Having money does not mean that one could get a lease. Not having money does not mean that one could not get a lease. We value the qualifications of the artists and organization, not only money. We hope to build a platform, attracting those well-known, talented, and creative personnel and organizations with potential [有钱不一定租得到，没钱不一定租不起。我们看重艺术家和机构的 资质，而不只是有没有钱。我们希望能建一个平台，吸引那些有名望有实力有潜力的创意人士 和机构].”74 One well-known new tenant who was not part of the original tenants was Gu Wenda [顾文达],75 an established conceptual artist who also has a studio in Brooklyn. Xue Song, the first artist to move into Moganshan Lu 50 before it became M 50, noted also a change in the SOE landlord from state-enterprise bureaucrats into savvy market-oriented businesspeople: “when I came to rent the spaces, they still followed the classical SOE work style, talking in the bureaucrat style, inefficient in doing things, but now they are very business-minded and service-oriented [我来租房子的时候，他 们还是当时典型的国企作风，说话哼哼哈哈，办事效率低，而现在他们已经很有商业头脑和服 务意识了].”76 Along with highlighting the cultural businesses that are able to afford the ten-fold rent increase commanded by industrial heritage, one sign designates M 50 as a Triple-A tourist destination. Another plaque indicates that M 50 is also one of the on-site teaching bases [现场教学基地] of the Pudong Leadership Academy [浦东干部学院], one of the most important training grounds for top CCP leaders. (Fig. 10) Although not as insidious as the infiltration and apprehension of known political enemies, the decision to embed a CCP training ground in M 50 could be made out to be not entirely without deliberation. Since economic liberalization accelerated, the CCP has grappled with the predicament of implementing capitalistic practices within the continuity of the party-state political ideology of Communism. Legitimized by the country’s dramatically raised living standards through the economic success of marketization without letting go of single-party rule, the imperative for the latest crop of CCP leaders, in order to retain their political hegemony, is to continue to keep up with new ideas brought by the penetration of global capital and its new economies.77 The political need for exposure to the kinds of globalized hubs, which M50 represents, in order to hone an image of openness and cultural understanding to project to the outside world, made it crucial to place one of the on-site teaching bases of the Leadership Academy in what was once a marginal site of cultural dissent. The fundamental

Fig. 10 Plaques at the entrance of the M50 Creative Industries Cluster, 2012

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political intransigence of China’s economic transition, decoupling economic liberalization from a political one under the continued rule of the CCP,78 formed the

basis of the artists’ dissent in 2000’s The Uncooperative Approach near M 50 along the Suzhou River. Even though the CCP training academy’s embedment in M 50 could be understood to represent the ultimate form of political appropriation, the presence of the Academy also assures the place of its economic and physical survival. Resistance to the kind of globalization and commodification, embodied by the counter-Biennale of The Uncooperative Approach in 2000, has since been eroded. Demolition of the industrial urban fabric along the Suzhou River, which was the place for bottom-up cultural productions and an alternate sphere of artistic autonomy, and the confinement of ‘creative industries’ to the demarcated space of M 50 and its appropriation physicalize the developmental state’s containment of resistance and autonomy. The site along Suzhou River, which was an initial battleground of resistance to appropriation, succumbed to usurpation by the developmental state in the name of its physical preservation. As recounted in the previous chapter, the model of producing the newly fashionable ‘creative industry clusters’ has since been replicated throughout Shanghai. Ensuing projects in the mid-2000s pursued a strategy of creative development reusing SOE structures, many of them former industrial production sites, vacated and left behind by marketization and global competition. The local developmental state and its affiliates have learned to deploy the bottom-up urban loophole, which first realized the reuse

project centered around a new Shanghai Sculpture Space. As the website of the Corporation declares, Redtown “focuses on cultural asset investment and management.”79 Although not commonplace, the installation of public spaces for contemporary art increasingly became a way for a development to distinguish itself from other projects and become more competitive under transition economy. Interestingly, the third-generation leadership of ShangTex was taking arts management courses at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in the early 2010s.80 Given the numerous but unknown number of properties that the consolidated municipallevel SOE ShangTex still occupies in Shanghai’s city center and nearby suburbs, and the number of laid-off workers that the social welfare system inherited from the era of planned economy and still is responsible for, it certainly makes sense. The ShangTex leader is widely consulted in the expertise of converting industrial structures into creative spaces, and has already expanded the M 50 franchise to a suburban site of Taopu [桃浦].81 M50 Taopu, as the art cluster which has also reused a larger former textile site is branded, offered low rents to known artists like Yang Fudong and Yang Zhenzhong [杨振中] when it opened in 2010. With even larger spaces than at M 50 and undisturbed by the foot traffic at the now centrally located M50, many artists hope that the outpost of M 50 Taopu will remain affordable.82 Together with the artists’ studios, ShanghArt also opened a larger warehouse there, showcasing large-scale pieces that would dwarf even its high-ceilinged space at M 50. At the same time, the adjacent sites that have also been largely undeveloped in the decade since the influx of the artists are recently moving along. In the early 2010s, the London-based studio of designer Thomas Heatherwick, which was known for the

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of former industrial spaces. The project of Shanghai Redtown [红坊] Development Corporation, a district-affiliated entity, took on the M 50 model of adaptive reuse of industrial area for contemporary art in 2005. Redeveloping the site of a former Number 10 Steel Factory, the

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spectacular British pavilion at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, has been called on to propose a new masterplan along the Suzhou River on the sites next to M 50. (Fig. 11) The studio’s visions show a rising carpet of dense mid- to high-rises that culminate in a canyon with its overgrown green backside facing the M 50. With the

Fig. 11 Proposal for the development next to M50 by Heatherwick Studio, 2015

development of the West Bund Cultural Corridor following the World Expo, galleries like ShanghArt and artists includ-

ing Ding Yi have also set up spaces in the state-incentivized West Bund locales, in proximity to numerous new museums and art institutions opening there.83 The future of M 50 clearly looks to be shifting.

“Made in China”: New Museums and the Business of Art As the city returned from being a place of production under planned economy to a place for consumption under state-controlled market economy, a crop of privately funded museums of contemporary art sprang up in the mid-2000s. The Duolun Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ) [多伦现代美术馆], the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA ) [当代艺术馆], and the Zendai Art Museum [证大现代艺术馆] all took on positions of public institutions while being privately funded. Duolun opened in 2004 and is considered a privately run state institution because it is approved at the district government level.84 The MoCA opened in 2005. Zendai, which would later become the Himalaya Art Museum, opened also in 2005 as a privately funded institution of the Zendai Group, a real estate and financial group. The art fair Shanghai Contemporary also began in 2007. It was, for a period, under consideration for potential purchase by Art Basel.85 At the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, art critic Wu Hung, in his talk about the development of the museum in the West, contended that the Western model for the museum has become increasingly commodified. Wu saw the commodification of the museum as a consequence of the neoliberalization of Western society, where commercial worth superseded the cultural value of an artwork, rendering the artwork’s cultural importance dependent on the market. This was so much so that Wu declared that nascent “Chinese museums should not follow the Western model.”86 Wu added, however, “but what model they (the Chinese museums) should follow I cannot say; it is still a dream.”87 The establishment of the company MadeIn by conceptual artist Xu Zhen [徐震] in 2009, one of the original artists still operating out of M50, seemed to be making works that commented on the possibilities of a new Chinese economic model for contemporary art. The name of the company, MadeIn [没顶公司], is a spoof on the phrase ‘Made in China,’ synonymous with China’s global economic growth and manufacturing prow394

ess.88 ‘Made in China’ represented the success of the country’s rapid economic growth, which relied on an export-based model of development. At the same time, the phrase also suggested inertia for the country’s economic transition. In the decades since rapid transition began, the country seemed stuck in producing for the world, rather than transitioning to a more innovation and knowledge-based economy that would bring added value to the manufacturing base of economic growth.89 Xu’s word play in the naming of his art company is a deliberate commentary on the relationship between commerce and cultural production. Xu adopted roles in other parts of the contemporary art value chain, blurring the boundaries of production, promotion, support, and curation. Xu’s title as the CEO of MadeIn mimics the corporate structures prevalent for economic efficiency. At the same

only slowly evolve with the growing importance of culture to economic development. The trajectory of the art business also led to a venture called BizArt [比翼], which developed from flirtations with the notion of art as a business in the Art for Sale Exhibit. Xu, together with Sinologist and curator Davide Quadrio, founded the experimental art space located at Moganshan Lu 50 in the early 2000s. As a non-profit space, they intended the project to showcase the first stage of many younger artists’ works. They also intended the space to complement the commercial galleries such as neighboring ShanghArt.94 At the same time, design work done for other artists and galleries financially supported the space of BizArt without having to resort to state support, which was avidly avoided.95 The duo professed that BizArt’s goal is to “bring business closer to art and being able to sustain the art activities without compromise.”96 For the artists, the support of the private sector secured their financial independence. This financial independence, importantly, defended their artistic autonomy against state

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time, the formation of MadeIn company also mocks contemporary art’s inability to detach itself from the market economy, and alludes to the phenomena of commercially successful artists structuring their studios like assembly lines for the production of cultural goods for exchange on the market. The theme of market economy and the interaction between the art and the consumer had always been present in Xu’s works. In 1996, Xu insinuated his work into the exhibition Let’s Talk About Money—1st International Fax Art Exhibition [让我们谈谈钱 首届 国际传真艺术展].90 The Let’s Talk about Money show exhibited faxes from solicited artists. Xu showed his originals, rather than a facsimile, commenting on reproducibility in the contemporary art market.91 The Art for Sale Exhibit of 1999, which Xu co-curated with Yang Zhenzhong and Alexander Brandt, was an illustrious lead-up to The Uncooperative Approach in 2000. Located in Shanghai Square [上海广场], the commercial podium of a 36-story office tower development finished in 1999,92 the exhibition took place in a supermarket in the mall, giving the exhibition also its Chinese name, Supermarket Art Exhibit [超市艺术展]. The contents of the Art for Sale Exhibit were all for sale. The exhibit elicited shock from a local reporter who covered the event.93 Despite being shut down only three days after its opening, with agreement between the artists and the supermarket owner, the exhibition achieved its intended effect of putting contemporary art into the direct access of the public. The use of a commercial space inside a then newly-developed shopping mall for the exhibition of contemporary art would set an example that would be capitalized on a decade. The advantageous role that contemporary art could play in the development of commercial spaces in the city center would

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encroachment and interference. In a local framework in which the propaganda bureau is disguised as the cultural ministry, wariness of the intrusive party-state already became second nature to many intellectuals. The pressures to secure their place in the contemporary market economy became the new struggle for contemporary artists, in a political economy of marketization within state control.97 MadeIn focuses, according to the company website, on the “inner structure of the art system, seeking to expand its working field beyond the mere accumulation of experiences or individual subsistence, and opening a new direction.” 98 The betweenthe-lines vagueness that pervades Chinese expressions, intended to bypass censors, continues to be part of the ongoing ‘language game’ that simultaneously imitates and, often undetectably, mocks the vacuousness of pronouncements by the presiding regime.99 By the time private art museums like Minsheng [民生现代美术馆] and the Rockbund Art Museums opened in 2010, coinciding with the opening of the World Expo in Shanghai, a palette of established first-generation Chinese contemporary artists with global reach were being exhibited in and pivotal to the establishment of the new spaces for contemporary art in China. With names like Cai Guoqiang [蔡国强] and Zhang Huan [张洹], the new Chinese vanguards were adept at courting the international art arena by evoking sensational specificities of Chineseness, while bypassing the sensitivities in the country and still fostering a local following. Cai’s opening show for the Rockbund Museum featured the inventions of Chinese peasants, taking note of an overlooked populace and their contemporary plight.100 The pieces seemed to be a social commentary of a well-known phenomenon in the transforming country, that of rural-urban migration to feed the rapid economic developments of the nation. Zhang Huan’s building-scale Confucius statue overpowering the exhibition hall and accompanying pieces in the Rockbund, on the other hand, also referenced the hierarchical structure of Chinese society.101 Although alluding to the slogan of ‘harmoniousness,’ which the central government has been using since the 2000s, the piece featuring the historical sage was also subtle enough to not result in confrontations with state authorities. Both fit well into the architectural re-adaption of the former Royal Asiatic Society (R AS ) building as a contemporary art institution. The Rockbund Art Museum (R AM ) is the cultural highlight of the larger redevelopment project Rockbund [外滩源] on the north Bund, an area that housed a number of Western-style civic buildings remaining from Shanghai’s Concession era.102 The British contemporary star architect David Chipperfield transformed the former R AS building, one of the Concession-era masterpieces, into the Rockbund Art Museum. The development is a joint venture between the U.S.-based Japanese developers the Rockefeller Group, Shenzhen-based Sinolink Holdings and the Shanghai New Huangpu Group [新黄浦集团], a development group of Shanghai’s Huangpu District. The Rockefeller Group, the developer of the Rockefeller Center commercial complex in New York City, is a unit of Japan-listed Mitsubishi Estate Company.103 The municipal government approved the project in 2003 and designated it as a priority project assigned to the New Huangpu Group. The mid-2000s was a time when investment in Chinese real estate development was rapidly accelerating with high returns. Together with Sinolink, the Rockefeller Group formed the Rockefeller Fund in 2006 to raise money for investment in the Rockbund project.104 396

The initiation of the area’s development with a new art museum designed by a worldfamous architect was not only strategic in raising the profile of the area. The art museum also insured high real estate prices for high-end projects neighboring a respected cultural institution. The art museum, though not necessarily creating the urban loophole for development, was nevertheless an important part of the instruments used to promote and legitimize the area’s upgrade and the eviction of incumbent tenants. As already elaborated in the previous chapters, transnational know-how and capital fled Mainland China after 1949. When economic liberalization first began in the 1980s and then accelerated in the 1990s, the first sources of foreign direct investments for Shanghai came from the Chinese diaspora, from Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, who invested in manufacturing facilities, initiated real estate development projects, and facilitated transnational investments. It was not until the mid- to late 2000s that the transnational reconnections would move beyond the immediately commercial

cial complex New World Tower on a prominent stretch of Huaihai Lu [淮海路], one of the most important commercial thoroughfares in Shanghai, a 2010 renovation allocated an entire floor—3,000 square meters of valuable real estate in the mall—for contemporary art exhibition. K 11’s Art Foundation, based in Hong Kong and initiated by Cheng, sponsors young artists and promotes its collection as “art for the masses.”106 In Hong Kong’s K 11 Art Mall, the first of the art malls, spaces between commercial venues were allocated for public art exhibitions and events. It is in the Shanghai K 11, however, where the significant spatial contribution for contemporary art exhibition seems to realize the foundation’s aspirations for public outreach. In Shanghai, local authorities are increasingly demanding that private commercial developers provision public amenities, such as public infrastructures and open spaces. This makes art a key component for facilitating obtaining permission for real estate development. Permissions for commercial development, which may be difficult to get from the increasingly stringent local authorities, could be expedited if spaces, such as that for art exhibition or education, are part of the development plan. Even though the art spaces seemed to be financially as well as culturally motivated, the Shanghai curator Leo Xu [许宇]’s initiative for the inaugural exhibition in the Shanghai K 11, Shanghai Surprise [上海惊奇], made a statement about the cultural significance of such a privately sponsored public space. The exhibition was nuanced, centering on the specificities of Shanghai and the local artists of the region. (Fig. 12) In collaboration with ShanghArt, which represents many of the artists shown, the 2013 exhibition highlighted the works of artists who were representative of the contemporary arts development of Shanghai. Distinct from Beijing, Shanghai’s catchment area in the Yangtze Delta region has always cultivated a subtlety in critique that differs fundamentally from the in-yourface polemics of Beijing.107 In Beijing, known as the center of the Chinese cultural scene, the capital city’s domination of the propaganda apparatus and control of the media industries, along with the provision of cheap spaces, have made places like 798 and

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realms and also move into the cultural developments. Exemplary of diasporic investment facilitating the rapid global re-integration of Shanghai, the third-generation Hong Kong tycoon Adrian Cheng’s development of the K 11 Art Mall showed new ways the public spaces specific to the contemporary East Asian city could showcase contemporary art.105 In the podium of the commer-

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Fig. 12 Inaugural exhibition “Shanghai Surprise” at the K11 Art Space, 2013

Caochangdi [操场地] into significant hubs for contemporary art. In contrast, Shanghai’s artists, aside from those clustering in the M 50s, are more scattered in the periphery, where the realities of real estate prices in the city center have pushed them. The differing way of dealing with the contemporary market economy and the subtler responses to the state control distinguish the artists of the region.108 Shanghai Surprise’s collection of artists from this specific lineage and its setting in the K 11 show the crucial support of the region’s private sector. A 2011 exhibition at the Minsheng Museum was significant in retracing the two decades of developments in Chinese contemporary video art, demonstrating a new awareness and attention to more recent art historical lineages. The K 11 exhibition, similarly, was held in conjunction with a lecture series that included many stakeholders in the Shanghai contemporary arts scene, including discussions with the developers for M 50 and Red Town, as well as artists and curators. An important component of the K 11 inaugural exhibition was a physical archive of contemporary art from the Shanghai catchment area since the 1990s. The non-profit art group Artlinkart, collaborators on the archive, highlighted the difficulty of establishing a physical archive in the quickly changing cities of China.109 In the face of an imminent uncertainty that renders permanence, both physical and procedural, difficult to sustain, even the digital archive project that Artlinkart undertook remains at the discretion of transition economy’s adaptive governance. The only certainty is the perpetual obsolescence and erosion of sites by the development processes, processes accommodated and abetted by the pro-growth state.110

Uncertainty and Regeneration The unpredictable and ever-changing nature of the physical environment of the contemporary city was an underlying theme in many artworks. Xiao Hong [肖红]’s painting of red bricks, in the Shanghai Surprise exhibition at K 11, (Fig. 13) recalls the red brick that caused the uproar for the then-unknown Yang Fudong at The Uncooperative Approach in 2000. The red bricks also hark back to the dismantled ‘red houses’ of Moganshan Lu. The red bricks, more importantly, are a reminder of another prominent example of persistent uncertainty: the construction and then destruction of Ai Weiwei’s red-bricked studio in 2010. Ten years after the closing of The Uncooperative Approach and the formalization of M 50, the developmental state’s desire for prestige, represented by an international cultural celebrity such as Ai, was being contradicted by the authoritarian state’s demand for his artistic and intellectual containment. The site of Ai’s red-bricked studio, his ‘red house,’ amidst the vineyards of Dayu Village in Jiading District, a northwest suburb of Shanghai, became the interface for an ideological battle over what Ai had deemed, in The Uncooperative Approach, a “precious cultural spirit.”111 The irreverence of The Uncooperative Approach in 2000 exemplified Ai’s first encounter with Shanghai in his resistance to what he saw as cultural vulgarization, commodification, and the state’s encroachment on artistic autonomy. His second encounter in 2010 would be the prelude to an evolving negotiation of art with politics in the artists’ claims to autonomy. 400

Ai received a 2008 invitation to set up his studio by the district leadership of Jiading District northwest of Shanghai. The deputy party secretary of Jiading who invited Ai had previously been the deputy mayor of the district of Qingpu [青浦], another suburb of Shanghai. In Qingpu, the deputy party secretary had been instrumental in initiating an unprecedented deployment of avant-garde architectural designs and cultural engagement to spearhead its real estate growth.112 In Jiading, the deputy party secretary continued his

Fig. 13 Xiao Hong’s Red Brick, 2011, shown at the “Shanghai Surprise” exhibition, 2013

efforts in encouraging design to engage urban development and promote culture. As part of the initiative in Dayu, renowned artists and architects were invited to develop a new creative cluster in the vineyards, and Ai, an internationally renowned Chinese artist, was on the top of the list.

festivities of the Summer Olympics in Beijing. Even though his collaboration with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron had produced the design for the Chinese National Stadium, popularly known as the ‘Bird’s Nest,’ for the summer of 2008, Ai turned his back on the project in rejection of the Olympics as what he criticized as the authoritarian state’s image project.115 At the same time, Ai’s probes into the state’s responsibility for the unfolding tragedy of Sichuan Earthquake irritated many important official nerves.116 In later summer 2010, Jiading’s local authorities told Ai’s representatives in Shanghai that the studio building they finished must be torn down.117 In negotiations with local authorities following the announcement of the request for demolition, the word “karma [缘分]” repeatedly came up as a hint at the fate of the place rather than direct confrontation regarding the responsibility for the demolition.118 The extensive negotiation transcripts as recorded and disseminated by Ai and his representatives could be a study on the processes of land procurement, land use change, and building permissions under economic transition.119 Despite apologies from the local authorities, including from deputy party secretary himself, who had actively courted Ai to settle in Shanghai but receded when demolition negotiations began, it seemed that higher-ups

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As the Jiading developments were underway, the aftermath of the Sichuan Earthquake was unfolding. It was two days before the earthquake took place in May 2008 that the deputy party secretary from Shanghai arrived in Beijing to personally invite Ai to build his studio in Shanghai. Collapsed schoolhouses in Sichuan triggered a furor over the local government corruption that resulted in their shoddy construction, causing the deaths of children. The tragedy of Sichuan became the subject of a project by Ai in 2008. Even though Ai had repeatedly expressed his disdain of the materialism and petite-bourgeois outlook represented by the Shanghai113 he accepted the Jiading offer, to the surprise of many. Nevertheless, Ai discussed his acceptance of the offer and the impending construction in an August 2008 interview with interest.114 Ai’s acceptance of the Shanghai offer was juxtaposed against his about-face toward the concurrent

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from the central government were determined to remove Ai’s studio from Jiading. Ai’s dialogues with the local officials, which he recorded and uploaded online, and which were quickly taken down from the cyber commons,120 directly exposed the urban loopholes that had become a ritual of adaptive governance. Like the script for a performance piece, the progression from invitation, negotiation, construction to eviction from the ‘red house’ Ai built also confirmed the discretionary authority of the party-state that was at once opportunistic and ruthless. The day before it was announced that the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize would be awarded to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo [刘晓波], another intellectual under house arrest,121 Jiading’s authorities publicly announced, on 9 October, that Ai’s Shanghai studio was to be demolished.122 After a further bout of arbitrations, Ai conceded, tweeting an invitation to a party to celebrate the end of the ‘red house’ on 7 November 2010, and ordered river crabs for the occasion. The word hexie [河蟹], Chinese for ‘river crab,’ is homonymous with hexie [和谐], the word for ‘harmoniousness.’ The state has used the slogan ‘Harmonious Society [和谐社会]’ to brand the stance of the state, encapsulating the leadership’s vision for governance. The Chinese masses have also used the same word as the euphemism for censorship in China.123 This play on language, thus, was a direct and unambiguous affront to authority. With almost one thousand RSVP s, Ai was prohibited from attending the farewell party, the first incidence of his confinement by authorities. In turn, many who attended were asked to ‘drink tea [喝茶],’ which is another euphemism for police questioning. In a less storied incident, the studio of the artist Ding Yi, whose occupation of the original ‘red houses’ on Moganshan Lu initiated the art factories on the Suzhou River, was also demolished along with that of Ai’s studio on 11 January 2011.124 (Fig. 14) Soon thereafter, the arrest of Ai beginning of April 2011 would cause an international outcry and lead to a series of international exhibitions of Ai’s work to rally for his liberation.125 The arrest caused many local artists and intellectuals to accuse Ai of manipulating events in order to pull off his biggest performance piece to date.126 Hong Kong artists’ protests of Ai’s imprisonment, on the other hand, would use the namesake of The Uncooperative Approach to express what Ai uttered at the 2000s show: “This is challenge to all powers, authorities and system. It is small yet not to be ignored, like a nail in the eye, a thorn in the flesh, a little grain of sand in the shoe—it reflects a valuable cultural spirit.”127 On 12 January 2011, the day after extensive international news coverage of the destruction of Ai’s ‘red house,’ The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Whither 696 Weihai Lu?” portending a similar erasure by demolition in Shanghai’s city center, second-guessing the government’s real reasons.128 Since the plaques of the SCIC officially began gracing the entrance of the Moganshan Lu 50 in the mid-2000s, marking its formal recognition, an industrial compound on Weihai Lu, in relative proximity to the bustle of Shanghai’s commercial drag of West Nanjing Lu, was similarly initiated by artists. Just as the first pioneers of Chinese contemporary art gave way to the rising generation of younger avant-gardes, so M 50 seemed to be giving way to the new locale of experimentation in the spaces of Weihai Lu 696. It was in 2006 that the then CCP party secretary of Shanghai Chen Liangyu [陈良宇] was accused of corruption by the Politburo in Beijing as part of a political purge to dash the rise of the Shanghai-based clique in central government politics and their grab for 402

Fig. 14 Demolitions of Ai Weiwei’s studio in Jiading, 2010

lodged against Chen to stem his growing power, which was premised on Shanghai’s commercial success and its consequent autonomy. Weihai Lu 696 was under Chen’s jurisdiction, and due to his fall, the premises became accessible to reuse. Under the less controlling charge of the district’s social security bureau, cheap rentals in the otherwise defunct buildings that had belonged to Shanghai Number Five Components Factory [上海元件五厂], led to the clustering of young artists and gallerists.130 The factory compound at Weihai Lu 696, ironically, had been the recipient of federal subsidies in the 1980s to develop and advance the then nationally emphasized high-tech sector.131 In the 1990s SOE restructuring and the shift to joint ventures rather than local SOE s to develop high-tech sectors in the newly built centrally granted zones in Zhangjiang, Weihai Lu 696 became industrial real estate that awaited reuse. Thus, it was the central government’s retrieval of autonomy from the Shanghai in mid-2000 that serendipitously and ironically coincided with the nurturing of the younger generation of artists. The political shifts between center and localities had created the urban loophole that made possible Weihai Lu 696’s bottom-up appropriation. For half a decade, the network of studios in the lanes of former Number 5 Components Factory, at the center of which is an old British building reputed to have once served as an opium warehouse, was Shanghai’s city center site of art making and exhibition,

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political autonomy for Shanghai from the central government.129 Accusations were

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and a hub of transnational creative types. As the number of official creative clusters rose in the city center along with rising rental prices, Weihai Lu 696 became one of the few havens for creative production that remained outside the formality of official prescription. With low rents, organic structure, and an informal atmosphere, the Weihai Lu 696 of 2010 recalled what the ‘red houses’ around Moganshan Lu 50 had been like a decade earlier. After finissages to Weihai Lu 696’s closure in May 2010, artists relocated. It remains to be seen, however, what new forms the ‘red houses’ will take under the perpetually transitioning economy.

Art and Architecture Catalyze Development On National Day 2012, the 9th Shanghai Biennale, entitled “Reactivation [重新发电],” opened in the newly renovated P.S. Art. One year later, preparations for the inaugural West Bund Biennale for Architecture and Contemporary Art [西岸建筑与当代艺术双年展] were underway. This new Biennale was a central piece for the development of the eight-kilometer-long Xuhui Binjiang [徐汇滨江] corridor, now known as West Bund to its non-Chinese speaking audience, located along the Huangpu River in the southern and more suburban part of the Xuhui District. The West Bund Biennale’s chief curator was Yungho Chang [张永和], the highly respected Chinese architect who had opened the first private practice in China and who was also the dean of the MIT School of Architecture. With its board members including many prominent local design powerbrokers from Tongji, the Biennale for Architecture and Contemporary Art opened with great fanfare in October 2013. Lectures, seminars, concerts, art performances, and other events took over old industrial structures strewn along the riverside sites. Temporary pavilions, newly designed by the network of invited international architects, and renovations of old infrastructure complemented the newly constructed boardwalks and waterfront public space.132 The Biennale was the brainchild of the former deputy party secretary of Jiading who has since become the district party secretary of the city center district of Xuhui. In Jiading, the abundance of modern architecture built under his patronage made the area a pilgrimage site for both national and international design-visitors. In Qingpu, the district party secretary began the construction of an arts district, where favorites such as the architects Sou Fujimoto and Zhu Xiaofeng [祝晓峰] were included to contribute designs. When the district party secretary rose to lead one of the wealthiest and most powerful city center districts in Shanghai, Xuhui, he had already become known amongst Shanghai’s select inner circles as someone who could raise the price of the land in the districts he comes to lead. Before the district party secretary joined in 2012, Xuhui District had already been successful in securing of the famous American animation studio DreamWorks’ setup of a new animation hub in the new development of West Bund.133 Xi Jinping, who had been the party secretary of Shanghai municipality, continues to grace the many glossy publicity pamphlets for having been responsible for signing on DreamWorks in Shanghai.134 The coalition of investors from DreamWorks, Hong Kong’s Lan Kwai Fong Group and the Shanghai arm of CMC Capital Partners were designated to turn a four-acre site along the Huangpu River into a new media and entertainment cluster for 404

Fig. 15 Landuse plan and proposed key projects along the West Bund of Xuhui District, 2013

Shanghai. The district-backed development corporation, The West Bund Development Group [上海西岸开发集团], was established in 2012 to oversee the developments of West Bund.135 (Fig. 15) After district party secretary joined Xuhui, he spearheaded the development of

became the repeated motto for the Xuhui District’s development strategy.136 On the banks of Huangpu River in the Xuhui District, the palpable competition for cultural spaces that had taken hold of the country, its cities, and ambitious districts in Shanghai was causing ripples. The West Bund Biennale was one of key parts of the publicity campaign for making the West Bund Shanghai’s own ‘Rive Gauche’ or ‘South Bank.’137 The West Bund Biennale of 2013 was the prelude to a series of openings by a number of cultural institutions. Discussions have been ongoing with Shanghai’s prominent art collectors on possibilities of collaborations for the establishment of private museums in Xuhui. One of the most publicized new institutions to open in the West Bund was the Long Museum in 2014. The Chinese collector Liu Yiqian [刘益谦], known for his record-breaking bid of what would be known as the Ming-dynasty ‘chicken cup’ at a Sotheby’s auction in 2014,138 and his wife Wang Wei [王薇], had been investing in and assembling an assortment of Chinese classical, Republican-era, Revolutionary-era, and post-socialist contemporary art, which they aspired to put on the cultural map through their new private museum, the Long Museum. In December 2012, the collector couple opened the first branch of their museum in Pudong. Xuhui and its West Bund Development Group offered the art collector couple Liu and Wang a piece of prime real estate in West Bund in return for the establishment of their private art museum also in Xuhui. Even though Liu and Wang is the owner of the Long Museum’s contents, the district-owned West Bund Development Group are the clients for the museum’s new building on the West Bund, designed by the Shanghai-based architecture studio Atelier Deshaus [大舍 建筑], led by Liu Yichun [柳亦春] and Chen Yifeng [陈屹峰]. Only when the building was completed would the district Development Group lease the use of the building to the operators of the Long Museum, the art collectors, for a pre-determined sum. Because

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the Xuhui portion of the riverside into a cultural hub to catalyze its ensuing real estate developments. “Letting culture lead, using cultural industries, getting culture to light up Xuhui Binjiang’s development, pushing forward the area’s sectorial development [用文化引领、用文化产业、用文化来点燃徐汇滨江的发展，进而推动滨江的产业发展]”

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the client for the building of the museum is the district development company, but the design is for the users, who are the museum operators—in this case the collector couple Liu and Wang—the architect occupies a precarious position between the client, the district, and the future user, the museum operator, against the backdrop of the newest urban loophole created to facilitate culture-led urban developments.139 The exhibition spaces in the West Bund Long Museum are organized around what the architects describe as flanged ‘vault umbrellas’ that reference the industrial history of the West Bund site, which was an important logistics interchange for coal transport and processing in Shanghai until the mid-2000s.140 The architects’ design sensitivity to both the context and the program for both contemporary and classic art is juxtaposed against the collector and museum owners’ concern for the museum’s programmatic and commercial viability.141 The museum’s capacity to sustain the space beyond the first successful shows would map out how the cultural project would continue, also as an important role model for future cultural spaces to come. Along with the Long Museum, the Shanghai-based Chinese-Indonesian art collector Budi Tek [余德耀] opened the YUZ Museum, a private art museum of international caliber on the West Bund. The YUZ Foundation, devoted to philanthropy and to Tek’s world-class art collection, which also showcased in Jakarta, laid out the framework for their West Bund private museum’s curation strategy. The West Bund Development Group engaged the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, who has often been commissioned by the district party secretary, to renovate a red former airplane hangar that had been given by the district as the site for the new YUZ Museum.142 (Fig. 16) The Longhua Airport, once East Asia’s largest airport in the 1930s, was located in what has been demarcated as the West Bund area, and was, before Shanghai’s spatial restructuring in the 1990s, an important part of the industrial and logistic hub for Shanghai. Tek has long been a collector of contemporary art and the YUZ Foundation had previously been actively engaged with esteemed critic of Chinese contemporary art Wu Hung as

Fig. 16 Rendering for the design of the YUZ Museum by Sou Fujimoto, 2013

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well as one of the first collectors of contemporary Chinese art Uli Sigg.143 The carefully curated opening shows at the YUZ Museum featured both internationally renowned as well as Chinese vanguards in contemporary art. The two museums that opened in 2014 seemed to manifest the broader trend of museum boom in the country. In Shanghai alone, the powerful and autonomous districts have vied for cultural sites in their intra-metropolitan competition. Jing’an District, though land scarce with its small size, has also been aggressively developing new cultural projects. Its Neri-and-Hu designed Design Commune that converted a redbricked former police station, built during the Concession era, into a hub for its design products, as well as home to an industrial-chic restaurant by an internationally wellknown chef, had been one of its many successes. The Jing’an Sculpture Park commissioned many international artists to produce works for the large public space. Together with the promotion of large-scale public art installations at the Kerry Center, these projects all attested to the ambitions of Jing’an’s open-minded bureaucrats.144 Simi-

mer director of the Minsheng Museum Zhou Tiehai [周铁海] as the artistic director and opening with a handful of selected leading international galleries.147 The area around the former airplane factory building in which the inaugural West Bund Art and Design Fair took place was part of a masterplan for a cultural cluster, which Atelier Deshaus proposed. In this cultural cluster a selective group of art galleries, artist studios, and architecture studios opened, promoted by the municipal urban planning bureau’s Design and Promotion Center for Urban Public Space (SUSAS ) [城市公共空间促进中心] and with rent-free leases as incentives from the district authorities. Amongst the artists and galleries who set up spaces in the West Bund were Ding Yi and the gallery Shangh­ Art, both also based in M 50. Atelier Deshaus and several other architecture studios also set up in the creative district of West Bund. Possibilities for studios and galleries from M 50 to expand into the West Bund area seem to confirm its rising stature also in the cultural production networks.148 The advantages of the site location along the river as well as its proximity to the high-end neighborhoods of Xuhui District, which has developed also a cluster of galleries in the former Concession-era buildings, have made the West Bund a realistic competitor to the former Expo site’s conversion into the largest creative cluster in the world.149

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larly, Huangpu [黄浦] District, with its spacious windfall in land from the World Expo 2010, pushed ahead to rush out the P. S. Art. The Tate Modern look-alike was a reincarnation of a former power station that had been the Future Cities pavilion during the Expo. Hastily finished for National Day 2012, and coinciding with the opening of the 9th Shanghai Biennale, the P. S. Art had hoped to be a new pivot for developments in the area. Even with the moving of different urban bureaucracies to occupy the neighboring sites,145 however, the area’s physical disconnect from bustling parts of the city center remains. With its riverbank site of the West Bund south of the Expo area, Xuhui also steadily developed its public spaces as part of the attraction for the area. A series of summer music festivals on West Bund’s vacant sites put the area on the map for its target of young creative users. Landscaped waterfront parks have brought many visitors from around the city to its new recreation infrastructures. At the same time the culture-led developments continue. In September 2014, the district launched the West Bund Art and Design Fair [西岸艺术设计博览会],146 engaging the contemporary artist and for-

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Structures commissioned for the inaugural West Bund Biennale became more permanent institutions, including the Shanghai Center of Photography (SCoP) [上海摄 影艺术中心], which opened in May 2015,150 and the impending openings of the West Bund Art Museum [西岸美术馆] designed by David Chipperfield, the otherwise yet unannounced Star Art Museum [星美术馆],151 and the Tank Shanghai [油罐艺术中心], which reuses old oil tanks along the Huangpu river as an art institution. The prominent Shanghainese collector of contemporary art Qiao Zhibing [乔志兵] and backer of Tank Shanghai also opened an exhibition space for his collection, Qiao Space [乔空间] in the cultural cluster of the West Bund. Seeming to confirm the West Bund’s pull as a cultural hub,152 the well-known Hong-Kong-based gallery Edouard Malingue opened a space in West Bund in 2016, adding another notch to Shanghai’s art belt. At the same time, new luxury housing developments are already steadily underway, flanking the views from the cultural icons along the West Bund and capitalizing on the culture in the vicinity. Even though central government designations remain important and the bequeathing of special economic status has encouraged the intra-regional competition also for sites for tax-free art storage, Xuhui District’s ability and connections to attract the right resources for its development would trump the interregional competition to attract international investment. Beijing’s politically backed auction houses and joint ventures have already been active in the setting up of an art freeport near the capital’s airport.153 A few months after Beijing’s announcement at the end of March 2013 for its tax-free zone for cultural products, Xuhui District also made its own announcement for the opening of a tax-free art storage space.154 Even though the conventional location in Shanghai for tax-free status is Waigaoqiao, which is the central-government-designated location for a special economic zone,155 the personal networks brought by the art collectors, as well as other stakeholders, helped attract the international Le Freeport Group’s attention to Xuhui District’s West Bund. Because of its proximity to the YUZ and Long Museums, and the district’s longer-term plans for Biennales, Art Fairs, exhibits, and more art-related events, Le Freeport’s choice of the Xuhui site was pragmatic, following the eastward shift for contemporary art and other valuables. Le Freeport Group’s inaugural East Asian art storage space, which opened in Singapore in 2010, was more than two and half times as large as the one in Geneva. Its planned space for the Shanghai would be twice as large as the one in Singapore,156 demonstrating the shifting market potential. The delivery of cultural spaces is not only a visible legacy but also a key performance indicator for any rising politician. The cultural patron and district party secretary’s sojourn in Xuhui also was not too long. In 2013, he rose again to become the party secretary of the Pudong District, where a number of newer initiatives also began.

Contemporary Art Ecologies State-sponsored gentrification, in the form of endorsing, quarantining, and subsidizing designated cultural districts, deviates glaringly from the shutdowns of unsanctioned art spaces. The demolition of Ai Weiwei’s studio and the shutdown of Weihai Lu 696 epitomized the flipside of the top-down effort to grow a ‘contemporary arts ecol408

ogy.’ Their destructions could, on the one hand, be read as a kind of performance in service of the larger spatial production system that is still largely ambiguous in framework, uncertain in outlook, and discretionary in procedure. On the other hand, what remains certain is the political adaptability of hegemony. After the fallout from these disturbances settled, the art and architecture patron-cum-leader who had first invited Ai and then executed the demolition of his studio, rose in political rank to take charge of the developments of a central district. Ongoing construction of new spaces continues to occur under state patronage, most notably in the ongoing culture-led developments in the eight-kilometer long West Bund Cultural Corridor. Shanghai, as China’s chosen ‘Dragon’s Head’ had led the experimentation with exemptions since economic liberalization accelerated. Its urban spatial productions were role models for other Chinese cities, first leading the way for rapid urban renewal and then, in the second decade of transition, setting new paradigms for heritage conservation and creative incubation.157 Contemporary art as both apex commodity as well as vessel of cultural value helps create urban loopholes of exceptions for expediting spatial production in the second decade of economic transition. Contemporary art and the spatial production are image projects that advance the local growth coalitions’ interests. For the local state authorities, cultural centers are showcase image projects that also justify infrastructure developments, network connections and public space provisions. For the developers affiliated with the local state, cultural projects front economic interests and deliver a philanthropic guise needed for positive publicity to both appease the bureaucrats and allure the market audience. Cultural institutions enhance a neighborhood and also increase value for the surrounding real estate. And they present a global image to the outside world. For the artists looking to maintain both their intellectual autonomy and financial independence, there lies a precarious balance between averting state suppres-

tional frameworks and the fundamental role of the contemporary art ecology under the party-state. It not only fulfills, according to the press office, the artist’s urge “to emphasize with an irreverent attitude the many contradictions and derangements of society, aberrations which can only be dealt with by playing with them, turning them into seemingly innocent games or funny scene.”158 The piece shows the artist’s keen awareness of the urban loopholes of exceptions that exploit contemporary art as one of the developmental state’s main alibis. Its feature in a 2013 solo show of the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in Shanghai, a well-curated space that is central to the larger real estate project of one of the earliest and influential central-governmentlevel SOE developers, illustrates the persistence and necessity for ambiguous links between contemporary art’s critique of the post-socialist authoritarian developmental state and its dependence on the developmental growth regime in the face of authoritarian resilience.

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sion of socio-political commentary and succumbing to market pressures. Artist Yang Zhenzhong [杨振中]’s 2010 piece Red Venus Sitting in a Corner continues the ‘language game’ that toes the fine line between permissible and disqualified. The collapsed red star, a clear reference to the Communist star that adorns the People’s Liberation Army lapels as well as military gateways, (Fig. 17) poses nuanced questions about institu-

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Fig. 17 Yang Zhenzhong’s Red Venus, 2010

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ble Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, ed. Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard Contemporary China Series 17 (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2011), 13. 8 ‘Authoritarian resilience,’ according to political scientists Wang Zhengxu and Ern Ser Tan, “combined one-party authoritarianism with successful economic development, which seems to sustain the legitimacy of the political system.” See Zhengxu Wang and Ern Ser Tan, “The Conundrum of Authoritarian Resiliency: Hybrid Regimes and Non-Democratic Regimes in East Asia,” Asian Barometer Working Paper Series, no. 65 (2012), http://www.asianbarometer. org/newenglish/publications/workingpapers/no.65 .pdf. The coexistence and survival of both authoritarianism and economic liberalization is what has been noted by theorists like Harvey in his term ‘neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics.’ See David Harvey, “Chapter 5 Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics,’” in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 120–51. 9 The terms ‘value-added’ and ‘knowledgebased industries’ have been used by economists for the tertiary industries, indicators for advanced, post-industrial economies with successful transition service economies. In developing economies that have strong central states, policy makers believe that provisioning spaces for these value-added knowledge industries would expedite their development and often practice it. See, for example, Michael E. Porter, On Competition, Harvard Business Review Book Series (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2008). 10 A Communist party delegate said in an interview: “powerful foreign nations wish to use culture as a weapon against other nations, and for this reason we must work hard to raise our country’s soft power.” See Murray Whyte, “How China Is Using Art (and Artists) to Sell Itself to the World,” The Toronto Star, December 12 , 2009, http:// www.thestar.com/news/insight/2009/12 /12 /how_china_ is_using_art_and_artists_to_sell_itself_to_the_world.html; Joshua Kurlantzick, Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power Is Transforming the World (Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 2007 ). 11 The term ‘pro-image coalition’ incorporates the importance of image-projects to the Chinese party cadre’s political advancement in the local developmental state. Political scientist Cai Yongshun explained that the local state agents engage in imagebuilding projects, which extend beyond resource allocation and predation, due to the political structure of the party-state. The concept of the ‘pro-image coalition’ also develops urban analyst Zhu Jieming’s concept of China’s transition urbanism’s ‘local growth coalitions,’ which is based on urban economist Harvey Molotch’s concept of city as ‘growth machine.’ See Molotch, “The City as a Growth Machine”; Zhu, “Local Growth Coalition”; Yongshun Cai, “Irresponsible State: Local Cadres and Image-Building in China,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 20, no. 4 (2004): 20–41; Fayong Shi, “Local Pro-Image Coalition And Urban Governance in China,” in Contemporary China Research Papers No 1 (Hong Kong Shue Yan University: Hong Kong Shue Yan University, 2010). 12 President Xi Jinpin first mentioned the ‘Chinese Dream [中国梦]’ at an exhibition celebrating the Communist Party. The ‘Chinese Dream’ is

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1 Jialu Shen 沈嘉禄, “美术场馆，艺术的‘种子基地’：专访 上海市文化广播影视管理局艺术总监滕俊杰 [Art Museums, Seeding Ground of Art: Interview with Shanghai Municipal Culture Media and Entertainment Management Bureau Executive],” 新民周刊 New Citizen Weekly, October 1, 2012, http://www.xinminweekly.com.cn/News/Content/ 1194 . 2 The choice of the name Power Station of Art, shortened as P. S. Art was inspired by New York’s contemporary art institution P. S. 1 . The name ‘P. S. 1 ’ stands for ‘Public School 1,’ which was the original use of the building that has been converted into the art institution. Interview with the deputy director of P. S. Art Li Xu [李旭], 2012. This kind of name or brand ‘borrowing’ is a prevalent phenomenon of China’s rapid development and transition. See, for example, Julie Weed, “Welcome to the Haiyatt. In China, It’s Not the Hotel It Sounds Like.,” The New York Times, April 28 , 2014 , http://www.nytimes.com/2014 /04 /29/ business/international/sound-alike-hotels-in-china-borrowwestern-brands-prestige.html. 3 Holland Cotter, “A Prosperous China Goes on a Museum Building Spree,” The New York Times, March 20, 2013 , http://www.nytimes. com/ 2013 / 03 / 21 /arts/artsspecial/a-prosperous-chinagoes-on-a-museum-building-spree.html; “Mad about Museums,” The Economist, accessed August 15, 2015, http:// www.economist.com/news/special-report/ 21591710 china-building-thousands-new-museums-how-will-it-fillthem-mad-about-museums. 4 Theorists use ‘urban regime theory’ to describe state and private sector collusion in urban development. The term ‘local growth coalitions’ is based on the concept of city as ‘growth machine.’ ‘Local growth coalitions’ describes the developmental local state’s collusion with private resources in pursuit of economic growth. See elaboration of the concepts in relation to the urban loophole in the introduction chapter. 5 The scale of spatial opportunity as generated by the urban loophole is neither confined in size, nor to its scope of functions. Through this chapter, a mode of inquiry based, economically, on the framework of an industrial sector, rather than, spatially, on a neighborhood, also shows the spatial production processes that mediate the market and planned elements in China’s transition economy. 6 The term of ‘contemporary art ecology’ is used to describe the socio-economic and cultural value chains associated with the contemporary art market. The contemporary art market is a unique sector of a globalized cultural industry. It is a specialized market sector that is at the apex of advanced capitalism. The Chinese state’s approval and promotion of the sector suggests closer integration with the global market, on the one hand. At the same time, the scale of Chinese integration has also distorted the market interactions. See, for example, Abigail R. Esman, “China’s $13 Billion Art Fraud—And What It Means For You,” Forbes, August 13, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/abigailesman/2012 /08 /13 /chinas-13 -billion-art-fraud-and-whatit-means-for-you/. 7 Political scientists Elizabeth Perry and Sebastian Heilmann ascribed these fundamental characteristics of CCP ’s distinctive guerrilla-styled policy-making to the Chinese party-state’s ‘authoritarian resilience’ (see next note). See Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adaptive Governance in China,” in Mao’s Invisi-

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one of “a rich and powerful nation, a revived nationality, a well-off people.” The term has come to stand for the re-assertion of China as an international economic as well as cultural power. China’s premier historic position in the world prior to its defeat by Western powers during the modern-era is a predominant cultural narrative for the country. It is important in shaping the slogan of the ‘Chinese Dream’ of Xi’s tenure. While mimicking it, it also directly challenges the ‘American Dream,’ which has come to represent America’s economic and cultural hegemony. See, for example, Thomas L. Friedman, “China Needs Its Own Dream,” The New York Times, October 2 , 2012 , http://www.nytimes.com/2012 /10/03 /opinion/friedmanchina-needs-its-own-dream.html; Ian Johnson, “Old Dreams for a New China,” NYR blog, October 15, 2013, http://www. nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/ 2013 /oct/15 /china-dreamposters/; “Chasing the Chinese Dream,” The Economist, May 4 , 2013, http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/ 21577063 -chinas-new-leader-has-been-quick-consolidatehis-power-what-does-he-now-want-his. Xi, emphasizing the role that the arts plays in service of the Chinese Dream on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of CCP ’s rule over China, held a conference with the prominent representatives of China’s artistic community in mid-October 2014 . See “China Voice: Boom of Arts, a Must for Chinese Dream,” Xinhua, October 16, 2014 , http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014 -10/16/c_133721891.htm. 13 Art Stage Singapore, “The Emergence of an Open and Decentralised Asian Art Market in 2012,” 2013. 14 “From Picasso to Qi Baishi,” The Economist, September 29, 2012, http://www. economist.com/node/ 21563742 . 15 Russell Flannery, “Big Chinese Auction House Looks To Open Office In New York,” Forbes, May 5, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ russellflannery/2011/05 /05 /big-chinese-auction-houselooks-to-open-office-in-new-york/. 16 The term ‘apex commodity’ is used by the author here to denote art as a commodity item that, because of its financial value at the high end of the spectrum, is often considered the ‘apex’ of the market hierarchy. 17 Art is also a ‘luxury good,’ not a ‘necessity good.’ It is dependent on a growing economy and affluent buyers, who are increasingly mobile on the global market. Cultural economists have correlated economic growth, disposable income (of the affluent especially), and lagging equity returns, as determinants of art prices. See, for example, Benjamin R. Mandel, “Art as an Investment and Conspicuous Consumption Good,” The American Economic Review 99, no. 4 (September 1, 2009): 1653–63; William N. Goetzmann, Luc Renneboog, and Christophe Spaenjers, “Art and Money,” American Economic Review 101, no. 3 (2011): 222–26, doi:10.1257/ aer.101.3 .222 . 18 Three of the ten most expensive artworks sold at auctions were by Chinese artists in 2011. Jia Guo, “What Drives the Chinese Art Market? The Case of Elegant Bribery” (Columbia University Business School, 2011). 19 Political economist Henry George in his book Progress and Poverty for economic development used the term ‘progress’ for its positive contribution to poverty alleviation in the industrialization of America. See Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Enquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (New York: H. George & Co,

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1879). The term ‘prosperity’ has been used to denote post-industrialization, as used by, for example, Paul Krugman in his book Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995). The concept of ‘prosperity’ as applied to China is whether it will continue to grow at a sustained rate. And whether the ‘Chinese model’ of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ or ‘neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics’ would continue to be successful. See, for example, “Pedalling Prosperity,” The Economist, May 26, 2012, http://www.economist. com/node/21555762; “The Paradox of Prosperity,” The Economist, January 28, 2012, http://www.economist.com/ node/21543537. The term ‘from progress to prosperity’ has come to represent the aspiration to transition from the industrialization to post-industrialization, from a developing economy to a developed economy. 20 The term ‘contemporary art ecology’ has also been actively used by other developmental states. Singapore, for example, in the development of the Gilman Barracks art galleries cluster, as sponsored by its Economic Development Board (EDB ), opened with a conference discussing the ‘contemporary art ecology.’ The discussions revolved around the value chains and a business plan to sustain them so that the initial state subsidies would eventually fade out. The ‘elephant in the room’ in many of the developmental states’ discussions on developing the contemporary arts is the economic growth that is generated. “Emerging Ecologies: Discussing Art in Asia” (Gilman Barracks, Singapore, September 15, 2012). 21 Zhengqing Jiang 姜澄清, 中国艺 术生态论纲 [Discussion of Chinese Art Ecology] (甘肃 Gansu: 甘肃人民美术出版社 Gansu People’s Art Publisher, 2009). 22 Samwai Lam, “Art Ecological Chain,” A.m. Post, May 2013 . 23 Feng Jin 金锋, “怎样理解上海的艺术生态 [How to understand Shanghai’s Art Ecology],” 艺术国际 Art International, August 16, 2008 , http://review.artintern. net/html.php?id=2584. 24 Perry and Heilmann described the institutional plasticity and volatility as attributes of the Chinese party-state, which embraces uncertainty as governance stratagem, to reap the most from the opportunities emerging from the uncertainties. See Heilmann and Perry, “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adaptive Governance in China.” 25 The world’s premier art fair Art Basel opened to Art Basel Miami to tap into the North American market. In the expansion into the growing East Asian market, Shanghai had been considered a potential location, both because of its hinterland of cultural producers and also because of the rising crop of art patrons from the affluent coastal region around Shanghai. Partly due to political uncertainty and the censorship of politically themed art by the cultural bureau, Shanghai Contemporary, the art fair under consideration of purchase by Art Basel, was not chosen. Similarly considerations were given as to whether Uli Sigg, one of the first and comprehensive collectors of Chinese contemporary art, would donate his collection to an institution in Mainland China. But due to considerations of censorship and political uncertainty, his collection was donated to Hong Kong. From interviews, January 2012. In both cases, Hong Kong benefited. Art Basel Hong Kong began in 2011. And the M+ Museum, which will house the Sigg collection,

ing and educating the people while attacking and annihilating the enemy, and help the people achieve solidarity in their struggle against the enemy.” See Bonnie S. McDougall, “Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art’: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary,” in Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, vol. 39 (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1980), 58 . 38 Ding Yi recounted the 1980 s as a time when the generation born after 1949 were first exposed to the outside world. He called it “the first liberation of thinking in China since 1949 [从49 年以 来中国的第一次思想解放].” He emphasized the hovering uncertainty that had traumatized the generation: “before the 1980 s, you have no way of predicting your future [在 八十年代之前，你没有办法预测自己的未来].” See Yi Ding 丁义, Ding Yi Interview, interview by Zijian Wen 翁子健, November 26, 2008 , Materials of the future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art From 1980–1990, http://www. china1980 s.org/en/interview_detail.aspx?interview_id=27. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 It is interesting to note that the English-Chinese translations of titles are not always one-toone. The second Shanghai Biennale, from 1998 , for example, has the English title of “Inheritance and Exploration.” Its Chinese title translates more directly to “Merging and Expanding [融合与拓展].” “1996 ~2012 上海双年展时间简史 [ Shanghai Biennale 1996 –2012, a Concise Timeline],” 艺 术世界 Art World, 2014 , http://www.yishushijie.com/magazines/content-3994.aspx. 42 Ibid. The Shanghai Art Museum, under Fang, had hosted one of the earliest performance pieces The Last Supper [最后的晚餐], which was shut down two hours after its opening. The 1993 Gilbert and George Exhibition and the 1998 exhibition of Seven Japanese Contemporary Artists curated by Toshio Shimizu both showed that, despite its reputation as a state institution, the Shanghai Art Museum’s direction under Fang in the mid-1990 s had opened the museum to many new and international exchanges. See, for example, Rebecca Catching, “Why Care about the Shanghai Biennale?,” Randian 燃点, December 15, 2010, http://www.randian-online. com/np_feature/why-care-about-the-shanghai-biennale/. 43 Hanru Hou, “Shanghai, a Naked City: Curatorial Notes, Shanghai Biennale 2000,” in On the Mid-Ground (Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Ltd, 2002), 230–45. 44 Douglas Fogle, “Cities on the Move,” Flash Art, 1998, http://147.123.148.222 / interno.php?pagina=articolo_det&id_art=382&det=ok&title=CITIES-ON-THE-MOVE ; Andrew Gellatly, “Cities on the Move,” Frieze Magazine, October 1999, http://www.frieze. com/issue/review/cities_on_the_move/. 45 Charles Me­ rewether, “The Freedom of Irreverence,” Art Asia Pacific, no. 53 (June 2007 ), http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/ 53/TheFreedomOfIrreverenceAiWeiwei.no. 53 (June 2007 46 “News Digest: Radical Art Blooms,” The China, January 5, 2011, thechina.biz/china-economy/radical-art-blooms/. 47 The name Shanghai [上海], when broken into the characters, means ‘up [上]’ to the ‘sea [海].’ The word for Shanghai style takes from the ‘sea [海],’ pronounced ‘hai.’ ‘Shanghai style’ thus is called ‘haipai [海派],’ or literally ‘style [派]’ of ‘hai [海].’ In China there is an ongoing rivalry of haipai, or Shanghai style, which represents China’s embrasure of modernity and Western influences, against jingpai, or Beijing style [京派], which represents attachment

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is under construction in the West Kowloon Cultural District. 26 Global cities like New York, London, Singapore are, for example, where financial public offerings are executed in the stock markets. Shanghai, despite having been the ‘Dragon’s Head,’ remains behind inside the confines of the Chinese transition economy. 27 The deferment of complete marketization has been described with great insight by Cao Lan, a novelist and international legal scholar. See Lan Cao, “Chinese Privatization: Between Plan and Market,” Law and Contemporary Problems 63 (Autumn 2000): 13–62. The consequences of state control of and intervention in the market and its economic distortions are visible, for example, in the central government propping up of the stock market after the crash in China. See, for example, “China’s Botched Stockmarket Rescue,” The Economist, July 30, 2015, http://www.economist.com/ blogs/economist-explains/2015/07/economist-explains-22. 28 See, for example, Sharon Zukin, “Gentrification: Culture and Capital in the Urban Core,” Annual Review of Sociology 13 (January 1, 1987 ): 129–47; Martina Baum and Kees Christiaanse, eds., City as Loft: Adaptive Reuse as a Resource for Sustainable Urban Development (Zürich: GTA Verlag, 2012). 29 Under Communist central planning the city was depleted of all commerce other than the bare necessities controlled by the state. All resources were directed toward industrial production to achieve economic autonomy cut off from the world economy. 30 For more detailed analysis of the impacts of SOE reforms, see Yingyi Qian, “Enterprise Reform in China: Agency Problems and Political Control,” Economics of Transition 4 , no. 2 (1996): 427–447, doi:10.1111/j.1468 -0351.1996.tb00181.x; Xiaobo Hu, “The State, Enterprises, and Society in Post-Deng China: Impact of the New Round of SOE Reform,” Asian Survey 40, no. 4 (July 1, 2000): 641–57, doi:10.2307/3021186; Ross Garnaut, Ligang Song, and Yang Yao, “Impact and Significance of State-Owned Enterprise Restructuring in China,” The China Journal, no. 55 (January 1, 2006): 35–63, doi:10.2307/20066119. 31 For a detailed analysis of the spatial redistribution of manufacturing sites, see Sun Sheng Han, “Shanghai between State and Market in Urban Transformation,” Urban Studies 37, no. 11 (October 1, 2000): 2091–2112 , doi:10.1080/713707226. 32 Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Institute 上海市 城市规划设计研究院 Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Institute, ed., 循迹启新- 上海城市规划演进 [Follow the tracks and initiate the new: Evolution of Shanghai’s Urban Planning] (Shanghai 上海: 同济大学出版社 Tongji University Press, 2007 ), 153. 33 The author, before starting this research project, had visited the atelier space of Deng Kunyan in 2004 . 34 “明天,苏州河不再苏荷 [Tomorrow Suzhou River Will No Longer Be Soho],” 新上海人 New Shanghainese, June 5, 2002 . 35 Sheng Zhong, “From Fabrics to Fine Arts: Urban Restructuring and the Formation of an Art District in Shanghai,” Critical Planning, no. 16 (2009): 118 –37. 36 Hung Wu, “A Case of Being ‘Contemporary’: Conditions, Spheres and Narratives of Contemporary Chinese Art,” in Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader, ed. Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2011), 391–414 . 37 Mao declared that culture must “become a part of the whole revolutionary machinery, so it can act as a powerful weapon in unit-

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to traditional Chinese culture. This cultural rivalry would be a thread also in the counter Biennale led by many Beijing artists who reviled Shanghai’s commercialism and Western-leaning outlook. The name for the 2000 Biennale, called On the Sea, Shanghai [海上.上海], was a direct play on the words that connote haipai, which has connotations especially of Shanghai’s modern era commercial and cultural cosmopolitanism. For the modern era development of the haipai culture, see, for example also, Marie-Claire Bergère, “Haipai and the Ideal of Modernity,” in Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 242–86; Xudong Zhang, “Shanghai Image: Critical Iconography, Minor Literature, and the Un-Making of a Modern Chinese Mythology,” New Literary History 33, no. 1 (January 1, 2002): 137–69. 48 Scholar of Chinese contemporary culture and film Robin Visser had written, “the one constant of haipai culture is its pragmatic engagement in commerce, with consumerism providing the sociological link between old Shanghai and its post-socialist revival.” See Robin Visser, “Consuming the Postsocialist City, Shanghai Identity in Art, Film, and Fiction,” in Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Post-Socialist China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 179. 49 David Barrett, “Shanghai Biennale 2000,” Eyestorm, November 2000, http://www.royaljellyfactory. com/davidbarrett/articles/eyestorm/eye-shanghai-intro. htm. 50 The curator and critic Feng Boyi, in an interview from October 2000, contextualizes the exhibition in the transition of art from a state of purity that has been eroded by packaging and yield. See “2000–11–4日 不合作方式 [’Fuck Off’],” 艺术档案 www.artda.cn, April 2, 2008, http:// www.artda.cn/www/14 /2008 -04 /309.html. 51 To the question of whether he considered The Uncooperative Approach a satellite exhibition to the Shanghai Biennale, Ai retorted that the exhibition’s relationship to other events and movements could not be confined to such a narrow view: “if one must say that this exhibition has to do with so-and-so, then this exhibition has to do with any cultural movements, and all movements after the May Fourth movements. One should not limit the understanding of this exhibition in such a narrow spatial time framework [非要说这次展览跟谁有关，那么他和任何文化运动，和 五四以后的所有文化运动都有关。不能把这个展览放在一个特 别小的范围和狭隘的时空背景中去理解].” “2000–11–4日 不 合作方式 [’Fuck Off’],” 艺术档案 Www.artda.cn, April 2 , 2008 , http://www.artda.cn/www/14 /2008 -04 /309.html. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 “形形色色外围展 ［Assortment of Peripheral Exhibitions],” 艺术世界 Art World, January 2001. 55 Chuan Zhao 赵川, “Fuck Off: An Uncooperative Approach,” trans. Hsuan-ying Chen, Broadsheet, November 6, 2010, http://www.randian-online.com/np_review/ fuck-off-an-uncooperative-approach/. 56 文化部 Cultural Bureau, 文化部关于坚决制止以“艺术”的名义表演或展示血腥 残暴淫秽场面的通知 [Notice by the Cultural Bureau Regarding Firmly Banning Performances Made in the Name of “Art” or Exhibitions Showing Violence and Sexual Content, 2001, http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/cn_law/2004 06 /28 /content_49708 .htm. 57 See Jie Wang 王捷 and Wenjie Zhu 朱文洁, “苏州河仓库艺术变迁 [Suzhou River Art Factory’s Transformation],” 东方企业家 [Asian Business Leaders], February 9, 2003, http://business.sohu.com/02 /

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99/article206219902.shtml. 58 Ye 娄烨 Lou, Suzhou River 苏州河, Drama, Romance, (2001). 59 Zhen Zhang, ed., “Urban Dreamscape, Phantom Sisters, and the Identity of an Emergent Art Cinema,” in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007 ), 344–88 . 60 “Suzhou Creek Rehabilitation Project,” Text, Asian Development Bank, (May 31, 1999), http://www.adb.org/ projects/documents/suzhou-creek-rehabilitation-project-0. 61 Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Institute 上海市城市规划设计研究院 Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Institute, 循迹启新-上海城市规划演进 [Follow the tracks and initiate the new: Evolution of Shanghai’s Urban Planning]. 62 The artist and the architecture professor also collaborated on a book. Yuqi Han 韩妤齐 and Song Zhang 张松, 東方的塞納左岸：蘇州河沿岸的藝術倉庫 [Left Bank of the Seine of the East: The Art Warehouses of Suzhou Creek] (上海 Shanghai: 上海古籍出版社 Shanghai Classical Press, 2004), http://www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/ Details/11050. 63 “明天,苏州河不再苏荷 [Tomorrow Suzhou River Will No Longer Be Soho].” 64 The textile industries of Shanghai were important contributors to the national economy since Liberation. All were privately owned factories before 1949. They were nationalized following Liberation. When economic liberalization accelerated and SOE reforms were implemented in the 1990 s, the sector in Shanghai disintegrated. Large number of its blue-collar workers were laid off during the SOE reforms. See Chi-Wen Jevons Lee, “Financial Restructuring of State Owned Enterprises in China: The Case of Shanghai Sunve Pharmaceutical Corporation,” Accounting, Organizations and Society 26 , no. 7–8 (October 2001): 673–89, doi:10.1016/S0361-3682(00)00007-6. Following reforms, the former SOE s that weren’t privatized were restructured and corporatized. 65 “莫干山路 画家聚集处 [Moganshan Lu Artist Cluster],” 上海一周 Shanghai Week, September 2002, http://enjoy.eastday.com/epublish/gb/paper253/1/ class025300003 /hwz893216 .htm. 66 Ibid. 67 Under planned economy, artists were largely engaged as teachers in state institutions for art. Teaching, along with art production for the state, was the only means of livelihood for artists, as there was no art market for financially supporting artists and their productions. Under economic transition, many artists remained in the state institutions. To many in Chinese society, including the SOE landlord of Moganshan Lu 50, the profession of teaching remains highly respected and is associated with the intellectual class. Thus, compared to the small manufacturing that took place in places like Moganshan Lu 50, the artists, who were also teachers, were welcome because of their social class. Weidong Jin 金伟东 and Alexia Dehaene, “从M50到 新桃浦 [From M50 to New Taopu]” (“上海惊奇”展览系列讲 座 [“Shanghai Surprise” Exhibition Lecture Series], K11, Shanghai, March 3 , 2013). 68 Zhong, “From Fabrics to Fine Arts: Urban Restructuring and the Formation of an Art District in Shanghai.” 69 Ibid. 70 ‘Administratively-allocated land’ refers to land that has been allocated by the state to institutional users, usually for free or for a nominal price. The previous chapters have elaborated on how the coexistence of administratively-allocated land with lease-hold land has created the dual land market under

ed in “The nomenklatura—Vertical meets horizontal—Who really holds the power in China?” (2012, December 1) The Economist. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/ news/china/21567427-who-really-holds-power-chinavertical-meets-horizontal. 85 Art Basel purchased the Hong Kong Art Fair to become its Asian hub of Art Basel Hong Kong. Hong Kong remains the exceptional location in China as a Special Administrative Region. Publications banned in China are published in Hong Kong, for example. And despite increasing control by the central government, freedom of speech and for assembly and protest has remained the precious asset that has become even more emphasized in Hong Kong. Many of the institutions established before its return to China in 1997 remain. Compared to the opaque, repressive and irregular political system of China that is still largely outside of the writ of international regulations, Hong Kong’s relatively transparent ruleof-law and global financial integration provides a stability and confidence that is unique in China. 86 Barrett, “Shanghai Biennale 2000.” 87 Ibid. 88 Barbara Pollack, “Risky Business,” March 29, 2012 , http://www.artnews. com/2012 /03/29/risky-business/. 89 “The Problem with Made in China,” The Economist, January 11, 2007, http:// www.economist.com/node/8515811. 90 Philippe Pirotte, “Belief of Conscious,” accessed April 20, 2014 , http:// www.madeincompany.com/en_bk/article-show.asp?­ kid=28 &id=10. 91 Ibid. 92 The Shanghai Square is part of the developments along Middle Huaihai Lu [淮海中路], which includes also the K11 tower, Shui-on Plaza, among others. Located also just north of the Xintiandi site, it was part of Luwan District’s strategic growth in the 1990 s. The buildings, as urban scholar Zhu Jieming and his colleagues assessed, represent the foreign investment, mostly from Hong Kong, engaged in large scale real estate development. See Jieming Zhu, Loo-Lee Sim, and XingQuan Zhang, “Global Real Estate Investments and Local Cultural Capital in the Making of Shanghai’s New Office Locations,” Habitat International 30, no. 3 (September 2006): 462–81, doi:10.1016 /j.habitatint.2004 .12 .003 .z 93 Jialu Shen 沈嘉禄, “‘超市艺术“刺激? 恶心?［”Art in Supermarket’ Exciting? Disgusting?］,” 新民周刊 New Citizen Weekly, 1999. 94 Davide Quadrio [大豆] commented on why BizArt is like a training center for artists starting out: “for an artist to go right away to a commercial gallery is not good for his career. But I don’t try to produce artists for the art market, rather for the cultural market.” Rebecca Catching, “For Art’s Sake, BizArt’s Non-Commercial Approach to Culture,” June 2006, http://www.artlinkart.com/ en/space/txt/fbcbyv. 95 Ibid. 96 “BizArt,” Artfactories, September 24 , 2004 , http://www.artfactories.net/BizArt-Shanghai,78 .html. 97 Since economic liberalization began, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Chinese party-state appropriates market practices and integrates with the world where it is economically beneficial. But the state retains political control in the continuity of its rule. Contemporary art is useful to represent to the outside world China’s global integration. The kind of public and institutional financial support for artists that is present in developed capitalist countries is missing. This lack indicates both the rapidness of economic transition and the nascency of the contemporary arts developments. The

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transition economy. 71 Zhong, “From Fabrics to Fine Arts: Urban Restructuring and the Formation of an Art District in Shanghai.” 72 Jing Lou 娄靖, “上海‘苏荷’前途未卜 [Shang­ hai’s SoHo: Hanging in the Balance],” 人民日报 People’s Daily, August 17, 2004 . 73 Zhong, “From Fabrics to Fine Arts: Urban Restructuring and the Formation of an Art District in Shanghai.” 74 Feng Xie 谢岚, “莫干山路50 号‘变形 记’ [Moganshan Lu 50 ‘Transformation’],” 新闻晨报 Shanghai Morning Post, August 14 , 2005, http://old.jfdaily.com/ gb/node2 /node4085/node4141/node44005/userobject 1ai1027783 .html. 75 Ibid. 76 Feng Xie 谢岚, “热闹点挺 好，但最好别太吵 [Popular is good, but not too rowdy],” 新闻晨报 Shanghai Morning Post, August 14, 2005, http:// old.jfdaily.com/gb/node 2 /node 4085 /node 4141 /node 44005/userobject1ai1027782 .html. 77 The party-state is appropriating the language and processes learned since economic transition necessitated global integration. Contemporary art, often considered a developed economy cultural phenomenon, needs special training. For the CCP ’s new techniques of training its cadres for the globally connected world, see, for example, “The Party and the Media, Learning to Spin,” The Economist, February 8 , 2014 , http://www.economist.com/news/china/21595925 communist-party-training-school-functionaries-learnhow-handle-more-aggressive-news. For an analysis of the Chinese party-state’s manipulation of contemporary advertising, evolving from the ideological origins in the centrally planned economy, see also, for example, Geremie R. Barmé, “CCPTM and ADCULT PRC ,” The China Journal, no. 41 (January 1, 1999): 1–23, doi:10.2307/2667585. See also Murong Xuecun, “The New Face of Chinese Propaganda,” New York Times, December 22 , 2013 . 78 As elaborated in the previous chapters, the decoupling of political reform from economic reform had confounded Western political scientists who anticipated that the development of a market economy would lead to political democracy. 79 http://www.redtownsh.com/ 80 Interview 2012 . ShangTex [上海纺织集团], the corporatized SOE , which arose out of the decline of the textile industries in the economic restructuring of the late-1990 s is the umbrella organization above the Chunming Woolen Mill. The head of Chunming holds the titles of Chairman of Shanghai M50 Creative Industry Development Co., LTD , Marketing Director of Shanghai Textile Fashion Industry Development co., LTD . And was the factory Director of Shanghai Chunming Woolen Mill, President of M50 Creative Industry Park, Executive Director of Shanghai Wuling Creative Industry Development Co., LTD . 81 Jin 金伟东 and Dehaene, “从M50到新桃浦 [From M50 to New Taopu].” 82 “New Kid on Art Block: Taopu M50,” Shanghai Daily, January 1, 2012, http://www.gg-art.com/news/read.php?newsid= 87129. 83 Shane McIansland et al., eds., Ding Yi: What’s Left to Appear [丁乙：何所示] Exhibition Catalogue (Shanghai 上 海: 上海世纪出版社 Shanghai Century Press, 2015), http:// eprints.soas.ac.uk/20140/1 /Ding %20Yi %20 Catalogue_ complete.pdf. 84 Shanghai municipality is subdivided into a number of districts that wield power that would be equivalent to that of municipalities in other cities. Thus, the approval by the district in Shanghai is important to confer legitimacy to the museum. This aspect of the complexity of the Chinese bureaucracy was recently highlight-

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social and political commentary and critique that are often part of the intellectual engagement of contemporary artists also poses a threat to the party-state governance practices. Thus, in this context, the processes of art production, despite products that may look like works from developed market economy countries, remain beholden to the local context. 98 Retrieved from http://www. madeincompany.com 99 Subtleties in language have been deployed as resistance and critique against the government in China. See Astrid Nordin and Lisa Richaud, “Subverting Official Language and Discourse in China? Type River Crab for Harmony,” China Information 28 , no. 1 (March 1, 2014): 47–67, doi:10.1177/0920203X14524687. 100 Don J. Cohn, “Shanghai Expo Cai Guo Qiang And The Chinese Dreamship,” ArtAsiaPacific, June 2010, http://art­ asiapacific.com/Magazine/68 /ShanghaiExpoCaiGuoQiang AndTheChineseDreamship. 101 Alexandra A. Seno, “China’s Zhang Turns Ash Into Spectacle,” Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2011, sec. Life and Style, http://www.wsj.com/ news/articles/SB 100014240529702036331045766 25312822080454 . 102 Shanghai as a city rose to importance after China was forced to cede a number of important and strategic ports to the alliance of foreign forces who defeated the weakened last Chinese ruling dynasty, the Qing, in the First Opium War. The urban areas ceded to foreign sovereignty came to be called Concessions and were special economic zones—outside of the jurisdiction of Chinese sovereignty they took on functions that met the financial needs of foreign powers entering the vast Chinese market. It was in the Concessions where the circulation of early 20 th century global capital produced Western-styled financial and civic buildings. Even though the Concessions were regarded by the CCP as representing the kind of foreign domination when it came to power in 1949, their urban form, with modern street layouts and building types, became increasingly important to Shanghai’s re-globalization as economic liberalization accelerated. 103 Jonathan Li, “Sinolink to Raise $500 Million For Chinese Real-Estate Fund,” Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2006, sec. News, http://www.wsj.com/articles/ SB114115583871385627. 104 Ibid. 105 The concept that the Asian collective is distinct from a Western one in its public spaces was originally proposed by the theorists of the post-war generation like the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki and his colleagues. Architects like Tay Kheng Soon and William Lim took up these concepts and realized design proposals for the Asian collective space. The shopping center type became recognized as a form for public space in Asia, as much as the market square or parks were in the West. 106 See the website of K11 Art Foundation for its motto. http://www.k11artfoundation.org/en/. 107 The region around Shanghai has historically been the hub of commercial affluence and literati culture, and is known for its less direct manner of communication that avoids confrontation, even if provocative. This cultural legacy has made the expression of critiques embedded and circuitous rather than explicit. Since modernity, Shanghai is formed by the demographic influx from the region. This inherited legacy of the subtlety of critique is reflected not only in the distinct sorts of “language games” that are played by the artists working in Shanghai and the region,

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but also in the visual metaphors that push the boundaries of censors while seeming to retreat from the forbidden. Xu Zheng’s MadeIn and Art Biz, for example, are not an explicit critique of commercialization, whereas Ai Weiwei’s F*ck off is direct and confrontational. Both Zhang Huan and Cai Guoqiang’s pieces at Rockbund address crucial issues in China’s political economy, from social hegemony to rural development, but neither could be caught as confrontational. The Shanghai catchment area thus denotes the region that both accommodates and attracts these similarly pragmatic sensibilities. It is for this reason that Ai regards Shanghai as commercial. But it is this pragmatism of working with the restraints of censorship that brought about pieces that are extremely interesting in the between-the-line subtleties in critique that are multiple in meaning and nuanced in expression. 108 The Uncooperative Approach could be read as exemplary of the direct confrontation led by Beijing-based artists to authority. Some of the Shanghai-based artists that were part of the show have become established and their pieces are included in the K11 show. 109 The organizer spoke with enthusiasm about one of the premier institutions of research and criticism for Asian contemporary art, the Asia Art Archive (AAA ), located in Hong Kong, and envied its context, as a relatively more stable institutional framework that also makes possible a more certain future for an archive of contemporary art development in East Asia. 110 So, Alvin Y., and Yin-wah Chu. 2012. “The Transition from Neoliberalism to State Neoliberalism in China at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.” In Developmental Politics in Transition, edited by Chang KyungSup, Ben Fine, and Linda Weiss, 166–87. Palgrave Macmillan. 111 “2000–11–4日 不合作方式 [’Fuck Off’].” 112 The district party secretary was well known as a staunch patron of innovative design and world-recognized Chinese contemporary art. He had nurtured a crop of young architects with projects in Qingpu and Jiading through his patronage when he had served as their leaders. Examples of the projects that the district party secretary developed in the suburban districts of Qingpu and Jiading have been featured. See, for example, Yuyang Liu 刘宇扬, Xiangning Li 李翔宁, and Harry den Hartog, eds., 公共外延 上海青浦与嘉定的当代建筑实践 [Edge of Public Contemporary Architecture in Shanghai’s Qingpu and Jiading New Towns], 2011 Hong Kong and Shenzhen BiCity Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, 2011. 113 Ai has repeatedly commented on the hollow materialism of Shanghai, which he disdains in his blogs and interviews. It is also distaste for the more indirect, ambiguous and negotiating approach of the artists from around Shanghai, as distinct from that of the Beijing artists, of whom Ai is a prominent member known for his outspoken and explicit provocation. 114 In the interview held by Zhang Yu with Ai Weiwei, the discussion was about the architectural development of the space for a studio. See 建筑是生活 的自然流露—艾未未上海嘉定大裕村工作室设计访谈 [An interview with Ai Weiwei about his workshop Dayu village, Jiading in Shanghai], interview by Yu Zhang 张彧 and Weiwei Ai 艾未未, August 18 , 2008 , http://aiwwstudy.appspot. com/20001.html. 115 Flora Zhang, “China’s Olympic Crossroads: Bird’s Nest Designer Ai Weiwei on Beijing’s

asia/12 shanghai.html. 130 For more detailed development of the Jing’an Villas areas, see the chapter “The Midtown of China.” 131 Simon, Denis Fred, and Detlef Rehn. 1987. “Innovation in China’s Semiconductor Components Industry: The Case of Shanghai.” Research Policy 16 (5): 259–77. doi:10.1016/0048 -7333(87 )90010 -2. 132 Interviews 2013. This was a common complaint amongst young designers who still lack the financial resources to be presented at a Biennale. Unlike Biennales in the developed countries, where designers are selected to present their work and often given a stipend for their contribution, Chinese designers without the right connections could pay their way into part of a show. 133 Yingqiong Qiu 裘颖琼, “东方梦工厂今日落户上海徐汇 ‘梦中心’园区2016 年诞生 [Oriental Dreamworks Settles in Shanghai Xuhui Today, ‘Dreamworks Center’ Cluster Will Be Realized in 2016],” 东 方早报 Oriental Morning Post, August 7, 2012 , http:// finance.sina.com.cn/roll/20120807/152712782142 .shtml. 134 See, for example, “西岸传媒港 城市设计进入最终成果 评选.” 2013. 西岸, January. 135 Interview with representative of the Shanghai West Bund Development Group [上海西岸开发集团], 2013. 136 “Preface,” 西岸 West Bund, January 2013. 137 In the opening words to the new publication dedicated to the West Bund development, called West Bund [西岸], the district party secretary notably compared the Binjiang development to that of Paris’ Rive Gauche and London’s South Bank, areas known for their cultural life, in Paris’ case, and their contemporary art institutions, in London’s case. See Ibid. The naming of the area of Xuhui Binjiang also went through several iterations before arriving at the English name of West Bund. From the author’s interview with the representative of the West Bund Development Group, a previous iteration of the name of the development area in 2012 had been a literal translation of the Chinese name of ‘西岸’ as ‘West Bank,’ which because of its use already in Israel-Palestine, had problematic suggestions. 138 For reportage of the rise of Liu and Wang as art collectors, see, for example, Iona Whittaker, “Liu Yiqian Acquires Antique ‘Chicken Cup’ for USD 36 Million,” April 11, 2014 , http://www.randian-online. com/np_market/liu-yiqian-acquires-antique-chicken-cupfor-usd36 -million/; Donghuan Xu, “‘Uncultured’ Multi-Billionaire Is China’s Biggest Fine-Art Collector,” South China Morning Post, April 22 , 2014 , http://www.scmp.com/ news/china/article/1494278 /uncultured-multibillionairechinas-biggest-fine-art-collector; Frederik Balfour, “The Expensive Antics of China’s Gaudiest Billionaire,” Bloom­ berg, April 16, 2015, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/ 2015 - 04 - 17/the-expensive-antics-of-china-sgaudiest-billionaire. 139 Under this business model that is prevalent in the spatial production for cultural spaces under the institutional framework of the transition economy, the architect bears the extraneous responsibility. Even though the programmatic needs for the museum building were already determined because of the knowledge of the art collection belonging to the user, the architect must still equilibrate the wishes of the client and that of the user. Discussion with the architects, 2016. Often under the institutional framework of China’s transition economy, because of political leadership changes, agreements made under one leader would often undergo revi-

Chapter 6 The Contemporary Art Ecologies

‘Pretend Smile,’” Rings Blog, 1217861255, http://beijing 2008 .blogs.nytimes.com/2008 /08 /04 /chinas-olympiccrossroads-birds-nest-designer-ai-weiwei-on-beijingspretend-smile/. 116 Ai Weiwei’s exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2009 had covered the façade of the building with children’s schoolbags, forming a pattern in Chinese characters quoting a mother describing her dead child: “she had lived in this world happily for seven years [她在这个世界上开心地生活了七年].” It was also during his stay in Munich that he underwent surgery for a brain hemorrhage. The brain hemorrhage was caused by police brutality in reaction to Ai’s research for the Sichuan Earthquake Names Project and his testifying in defense of two activists researching government corruption in contribution to the collapse of schoolhouses during the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 . See Katherine Grube, “Ai Weiwei Challenges China’s Government Over Earthquake,” Art­ AsiaPacific, August 2009, http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/ 64 /AiWeiweiChallengesChinasGovernmentOverEarthquake; Katherine Grube, “Ai Continues Activism Against China Government Responds,” ArtAsiaPacific, October 2009, http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/65 / BeijingAiContinuesActivismAgainstChinaGovernment Responds. 117 See “艾未未上海马陆工作室建拆纪要 [Ai Weiwei Shanghai Malu Studio Construction Demolition Timeline],” accessed April 3, 2012, http://aiwwstudy.app spot.com/14001.html. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid. 120 “艾未未上 海马陆工作室建拆纪要 [Ai Weiwei Shanghai Malu Studio Construction Demolition Timeline].” 121 Andrew Jacobs and Jonathan Ansfield, “Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Chinese Dissident Liu Xiaobo,” The New York Times, October 8 , 2010, sec. World, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/ 10/09/world/09 nobel.html. 122 See “艾未未上海马陆工 作室建拆纪要 [Ai Weiwei Shanghai Malu Studio Construction Demolition Timeline].” 123 Nordin and Richaud, “Subverting Official Language and Discourse in China?” 124 The media response to the event was overwhelming. See, for example, Evan Osnos, “Ai Weiwei and the Art of Demolition—The New Yorker,” The New Yorker, January 12 , 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/news/evan-osnos/ ai-weiwei-and-the-art-of-demolition; Edward Wong, “Chinese Government Tears Down Studio of Ai Weiwei,” The New York Times, January 12, 2011, http://www.nytimes. com/2011/01/13/world/asia/13china.html; “China Artist Ai Weiwei’s Shanghai Studio Demolished,” BBC News, January 12, 2011, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-12174873. 125 Shows featuring Ai Weiwei’s works opened in Bregenz, Austria, and Winterthur, Switzerland in July 2011, and in fall 2011 in London, New York, and Taipei. 126 From discussions with several local intellectuals and artists in China, they mention that Ai was the only one with such stature who could push the boundaries of the party-state authority. Thus, they see his provocations as deliberate, and part of a broader publicity project. 127 See “2000–11–4日 不合作方式 [’Fuck Off’].” 128 Movius, Lisa. (2011, January 11) “Whither 696 Weihai Lu?” Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://blogs.wsj. com/scene/2011/01/11/whither-696-weihai-lu/ 129 David Barboza, “Former Party Boss in China Gets 18 Years,” The New York Times, April 12, 2008 , sec. International / Asia Pacific, http://www.nytimes.com/2008 /04 /12 /world/

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sions under another ensuing leader, leading to potentials for conflicts, as is the case for the Long Museum. 140 Yichun Liu 柳亦春, “原始与当代 龙当代美术馆的设计思 考 [Primitive and contemporary, the design concept for the Long Contemporary Art Museum],” 西岸 West Bund, no. 1 (January 2013): 26–31. 141 In a brief conversation at the Long Museum in 2014 , Wang Wei, the director of the Long Museum, expressed concern for the commercial sustainability of the museum. Her ideas for family packages for visitors, and opening new cafés and educational programs, were all commercial concepts for the museum. 142 Interview with the YUZ Foundation representatives, 2013. 143 Hong Wu 巫鸿, ed., 2011巴厘岛对话，当 代艺术的知识生产 [2011 Bali Conversations: Knowledge Production in Contemporary Art] (Guangzhou 广州: 岭南 美术出版社 Lingnan Art Press, 2012). 144 See Chapter 4 , “The Midtown of China,” for the developmental ambitions for the Jing’an District and how culture has increasingly played a role in the commercial projects developed since the mid-2000 s. Jing’an’s networks with international consultants have also tried to create the buzz around its concepts for a media and fashion hub in the city center. 145 The Shanghai Urban Planning Institute, for example, moved one of its institutes into a building in the former Expo site. Nevertheless, the number of people is still lacking. 146 Dekuan Deng, “Westbund Art & Design Fair Opens in September,” Randian 燃点, June 27, 2014 , http:// www.randian-online.com/np_news/westbund-art-design/; Jun Zhang 张骏, “西岸艺术设计博览会9月举行 [West Bund Art Fair Opens in September],” 解放日报 Liberation Daily, July 2, 2014 , sec. 09－文化 Culture. 147 The West Bund Art and Design Fair hosted 20 top galleries to cover the 8 ,000 square-meter space. It was clearly a subsidized affair that was part of the attempt to attract international investment in the form of contemporary art in the area. 148 Interviews with gallerists from M50, 2015. 149 “西 岸的发展与城市关系－孙继伟与李湘宁对谈 [The relationship between West Bund Development and the City— Dialogue between Sun Jiwei and Li Xiangning].,” in 进程

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西岸 2013建筑与当代艺术双年展 West Bund 2013 A Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary Art, vol. 1: Architecture, 2 vols. (Shanghai 上海: 同济大学出版社 Tongji University Press, 2013), 21–25. Shanghai 上海: 同济大学出版社 Tongji University Press. 150 Xiaolin Liu, “Reframing the Art of Photography,” Shanghai Daily, November 13, 2016, http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sunday/art/Reframingthe-art-of-photography/shdaily.shtml. 151 Shu Shu 舒抒, “‘南拓北联’文化空间成片 [Opening South Connecting North, Cultural Spaces Becomes Area ],” 解放日报 Liberation Daily, August 24 , 2016, sec. 2, http://newspaper.jfdaily.com/ jfrb/html/2016 -08 /24 /content_212980.htm. 152 Justin Bergman, “An Arts Explosion Takes Shanghai,” November 18 , 2015, https://cn.nytstyle.com/culture/20151110/t 10 shanghai-cultured/en-us/. 153 Jason Chow, “Chinese Create Tax-Free Zone for Art,” Wall Street Journal, March 24 , 2013, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB100014 24127887323854904578261171833355606 . 154 Ibid. 155 Gu, Huiyan 顾慧妍. 2013. “上海：全国首家艺术品保税 区崛起 [Shanghai: First Art Freeport Zone in the Nation to Start].” 投资有道 Investment Way. April 9. http://news. 99 ys.com/news/2013 /0409/9_124592 _1.shtml. 156 Interestingly, Hong Kong, as the tax-free zone, for which Art Basel’s acquisition of an Asian location was prioritized, was out of the running as a site for setting up a Freeport art storage space, because of Hong Kong’s uncompetitive property tax. On the other hand, Singapore and Shanghai’s state subsidies, in the form of property tax free locations, make up for other locational disadvantages. Interview with the Singapore Freeport’s personnel, 2013. 157 Shanghai’s selection as the ‘Dragon’s Head’ in 1992, like that of Shenzhen in the 1980 s, could be thought of as urban loopholes of exceptions on the national scale. They allowed for ‘exemptions’ of marketization in a planned economy to occur in the larger territory without forgoing continuity in political economy. 158 http://www. randian-online.com/np_event/trespassing-yang-zhenzhongs-solo-show/

Chapter 7 Outlook Cases from Shanghai and Urban Loopholes Shifts in the Urban Loopholes under Economic Transition The Urban Loopholes as Equilibrators and Learning From the Urban Loophole

“Paris was the capital of the 19th century. New York was of the 20th century. Shanghai will perhaps be the capital of the 21st century?” There are several reasons to understand the rapid changes that have transformed Chinese cities. In our globalized world, where international architects from developed economies often descend on the rapidly developing countries, planning villages the size of small European cities at speeds that far outpace the industrialization and urbanization of the West, specificities of context are crucial for architects to understand. The astronomical economic rise of China, with the country’s growing political clout on the world stage, also compels the unraveling of the logic of its tickings. The focus from the Western media has highlighted the social polarization, labor contestations, corruption, pollution and food scandals that seemed to be symptomatic of China’s rapid rise. Social scientists and political theorists have sought to define the patterns and pathways for the developments in Chinese cities. The concepts of adaptive governance and amphibious institutions, among others, which political theorists define based on vocabulary developed from both Western experiences and the local institutional context, help clarify the Chinese party-state’s political resilience under economic transition. The predominant conceptual frameworks for understanding China’s urban transition, however, remain embedded in the logic of Western institutional structures. Planning scholars identified “the experimental, incremental and pragmatic path that is unpredictable in the short-term,”1 which shapes China’s contemporary planning institutions. They cogently explained that “whereas marketization creates an ungovernable tendency, it also provides the opportunity for the state to innovate within its system and consequently to solve institutional constraints.”2 Yet they stop short of offering a conceptual framework for spatial production specific to these conditions that predominate many parts of the developing world. The question seems to be, how can we understand those “experimental,” “incremental,” “pragmatic” and “unpredictable” developments as the norm rather than the exception? The existence of city center areas in Shanghai, where an equilibrium of complex drivers created diverse and globally integrated neighborhoods while embedded in vestiges of planned economy, begs a different reference point. What is China doing right under its transition economy? Is it possible, for example, that Shanghai’s incremental, adaptive and small-scaled developments in its city center neighborhoods, which have defied and prospered under homogenizing and segregating forces—forces that have uncompromisingly restructured large parts of the cities after accelerated liberalization—could reveal a different framework for thinking about cities under rapid transition? As illustrated by the cases in this book, the concept of the urban loophole proposes a framework specific to the often illiberal and rapidly changing developing political economies of the non-West in order to understand their spatial productions. Specifically, the urban loophole, as theoretical framework, elucidates how the city center neighborhoods in Shanghai, which have come to represent the city’s global integration, survived and thrived in the context of rapid economic transition. Despite the look of deliberate curation and globalized ambiance in these neighborhoods, their spatial productions are unplanned, and are inextricable from the institutional frameworks of China’s political economy. The cases analyzed in this book untangle 424

the processes and pathways for these urban spatial productions that seem exceptional by Western standards, yet are the norm in many parts of the rapidly developing political economies of the non-West. They reveal how the urban loopholes, which mediate between planned and market economics in the Chinese context, not only facilitated development but also enabled the resilience of a developmental autocracy under economic transition.3 More pertinently, the framework of the urban loophole offers a method of thinking about and understanding spatial production in cities under transition, which is taking place at unprecedented scales and speeds in many parts of the developing world today.

Cases from Shanghai and Urban Loopholes The chapters in the section, “Preservation via Inhabitation,” follow the evolution of one neighborhood through two lenses, bringing heritage conservation and housing marketization together. Chapter 2, “The Residential Neighborhood,” shows how diaspora capital began to reconfigure the city center neighborhood in the 1980s and influenced the nascent institutions of commodity housing in the 1990s. The consequent demographic changes and changing consumption demands spurred bottom-up street-front commercial developments in the early 2000s. These bottom-up developments exploited urban loopholes of gaps and ambiguities in the first decade of economic transition, facilitating the localization of global knowledge flows with the tacit consent of the local state. Exploiting the undervalued but centrally located historic buildings, state institutions and small entrepreneurs incrementally transformed historical buildings into pioneers of heritage reuse projects catering to the creative class. While the streetfront developments cultivated a global trend quarter vibe, the same historic buildings remain mired in the residual institutions of the planned economy. Since the 1990s, the dual housing market, created by the coexistence of privately owned commodity, or ‘ownership right’ housing, with publicly managed ‘use-right’ housing, was the basis for many of the bottom-up urban loopholes in the city center neighborhood. The dual housing market, in which the majority of the historic housing is publicly managed ‘use-right’ housing that remains embedded in the residual institutions of the planned economy, also protracts the wicked problem of Chinese urbanism, notably where the residents are trapped between development and conservation. A closer look at the neighborhood transformations show that the global-looking spaces visible in the city center neighborhood are products of entrepreneurial prowess, the local state’s adaptive governance, the dual markets of the transition econo-

tion of Wukang Lu as “The Cultural Street,” in the mid-2000s. While mass media, facilitated by linkages to the diaspora, revived popular interest in Shanghai’s modern era history, academics and bureaucrats garnered concepts and practices for heritage and conservation established in the West, localizing these concepts and practices in their call to conserve Shanghai’s modern era historic and cultural fengmao. The municipal

Chapter 7 Outlook

my, as well as the spatial legacies of modern era planning and architecture. Set in the same neighborhood as analyzed in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 traces the academic, popular and state recognition of modern era planning and architecture since the 1980s and the development of heritage conservation in Shanghai, culminating in the designa-

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establishment of the heritage conservation plan in the mid-2000s defined Shanghai’s conservation districts, the largest of which includes the city center neighborhood analyzed in Chapter 2 and its centerpiece, Wukang Lu. The conservation plan restricted demolition and densification in the conservation districts, driving up the real estate value of historic buildings that are largely publicly managed. The conservation plan, in essence, preserved the residual institutions of the planned economy, affirming the state ownership of historic buildings in the modern era neighborhood, as elaborated in Chapter 2. Making possible the urban loophole of exceptions in the second decade of economic transition, the conservation plan helps advance the interests of the increasingly involved developmental local state. The local state increasingly engages academic proponents of heritage conservation, absolving them of their criticality through their employment, and exploits their historic knowledge to justify measures for socio-economic upgrades. The conservation-based upgrade and selective commercialization of Wukang Lu exemplifies the inevitable effect of its designation as ‘Cultural Street.’ Local state crackdowns on small entrepreneurs and the demolition of small enterprises in the name of heritage conservation since 2016—all following the completion of the research for this book—also illustrate the consequences of the urban loophole of exceptions. In the local institutional frameworks of a developing and authoritarian transition economy, the local state deploys the conservation plan, wrought from urban practices appropriated from developed and liberal Western political economies, in order to justify discretionary authority. Shanghai’s conservation plan, nevertheless, halted the erosion of socio-economic diversity by the more prevalent en-bloc redevelopments that rapidly homogenize neighborhoods, despite its undertone of encouraging incremental and premeditated gentrification. The spatial coexistence of Communist-era elites alongside new entrepreneurs, of transnational creatives next to migrant restaurateurs, at the time of this writing, manifests a precarious and precious socio-spatial diversity under transition economy. Whereas the first section, “Preservation via Inhabitation,” looked at the same area through different lenses in order to reconceptualize the overlap of conservation and housing, the second section, “Gentrification with Chinese Characteristics,” analyzes three different areas undergoing transformation in three chapters. The three chapters show how gentrification, as a phenomenon that sociologists defined from economically developed and liberal Western political economies, inflects in a developing and authoritarian transition economy. Despite the physical products that look similar to those from gentrification in the West, the cases show how unique institutional frameworks dictate the processes of urban transformation. In Chapter 4, “The Midtown of China,” the historic lilong compound of Jing’an Villas underwent a bottom-up upgrade since the mid-2000s but was harshly shut down in 2014. At first, Jing’an Villas’ transnational entrepreneurs reproduced spaces and products in the image of global creative hubs, fulfilling the demands for consumption and creative production spaces that were also seemingly in line with the global aspirations of the local state. Retracing the pathway of development for the larger West Nanjing Lu corridor, which the local state and its affiliates dubbed as the ‘Midtown of China,’ shows the broader economic interest of the local state-led pro-growth coalition. The political context of local state competition also precludes non-state-affil426

iated bottom-up developments, leading to the shutdown of Jing’an Villas’ bottom-up developments. In contrast to the transformation of Jing’an Villas by non-state-affiliated entrepreneurs, the upgrade of Yongkang Lu and the development of the Anken Green hub, analyzed in the chapter “The New Economies,” offer development modes that engage and promote, rather than contradict the interests of the local state. By adding revenue and imageability to the local state through their spatial products, Yongkang Lu’s upgrade and the Anken Green project exemplify the procedural legitimacy necessary for spatial innovation. The Anken Green project highlights the urban loophole of exception, namely that of the designation of creative industries clusters, which the municipality created to commercialize the planned economy legacy of administratively-allocated land. In the Yongkang Lu upgrade, the direct financial engagement of the local state and its affiliated state institutions solidified its development prospects. It is the decisive role of the local state and its affiliated state institutions that ultimately endorses or overturns spatial productions. As reflected in selective shutdowns on Yongkang Lu that took place in 2016, following the completion of the research for this book, discretionary politics and adaptive governance confirm the limitations of urban loopholes. Chapter 6, “The Contemporary Art Ecologies,” offers a larger-scale or macro perspective for the converging interests of cultural diplomacy, real estate development and political advancement. The cases from Shanghai show that the central party-state remains the final and ultimate decision maker in the changing constellations of interests and alliances, even within the different layers of the state itself. The urban loopholes, contingent on the dual market under economic transition, overlapped with the nationally prioritized and municipally incentivized creativity impetus. When the spatial productions resulting from the urban loopholes threatened to destabilize the larger political structure, the central state swiftly supersedes lower levels of the state and close the urban loopholes. As the chapters in the section, “Gentrification with Chinese Characteristics,” show, the interests of the state are not singular. The local state equilibrates intra-metropolitan competition, central government decrees, local business and political interests of its affiliates, and the increasingly important public reception, especially compounded by the vocal virtual commons of the Chinese internet. Within this changing dynamics of urban transition, the urban loophole has also increasingly become an instrument of the involved local state as privileged market player. The adaptive governance and institutional plasticity, to which political theorists

cases from Shanghai, where economic transition overlaps with developing economy under an authoritarian state, urban loopholes equilibrate conflicting top-down versus bottom-up interests to adapt market demands to legacy planned institutions. The urban loopholes facilitate the bottom-up interests in evading but at the same time abiding by the continuously self-interested but also laissez-faire-until-motivated adaptive local state. The urban loopholes also mediate the global aspirations within the local frameworks, reconciling market demands in planned frameworks.

Chapter 7 Outlook

attribute the Chinese party-state’s resilience in face of managing its diverse, complex and challenging constituencies under economic transition,4 create the urban loopholes that continue to evolve and mediate incongruities in China’s urban systems. In the

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Shifts in the Urban Loopholes under Economic Transition Just as institutional frameworks evolve with economic transition, so the changing phases of economic liberalization are also reflected in the shifts of urban loopholes. In the first phase of accelerated liberalization, transition regulations were lax in control in favor of productivity growth and opportunities rife for changes that were often economically motivated. The Chinese central government strategy of keeping planned institutions while introducing market mechanisms incrementally, so as to avoid the abrupt privatization typified by IMF -instigation in post-socialist Eastern Europe, resulted in the establishment of multiple parallel markets and institutions open to trial and error. Fiscal independence of local governments pushed their entrepreneurial capacity in order to sustain development and therefore growth. As a consequence, institutional and procedural porosity together with prioritized economic growth and profit made possible numerous urban loopholes resulting from gaps and ambiguities in regulations. The rapid sprouting of new structures on large demolished plots in the city center, the hasty erection of apartments amidst existing neighborhoods, the commercial conversions of formerly residential and institutional buildings, and even the empty plots and buildings that prominently occupy central areas were produced, in one way or another, through the gaps offered by transition institutions that allowed an unprecedented freedom to develop in the name of progress. As shown in Chapters 2 and 4, the lease of urban land through negotiation rather than through open auction, the conversion of administratively-allocated land to commercial usage, the continued supply of housing by the state-owned enterprises, the demolition of old housing districts—even if they were not all of the unsalvageable quality, but of adequate size and location for development—and the construction of profitable high-end commodity housing instead of an even spread of mid-range units emerged from the urban loopholes. Small conversions of street spaces, reuse of existing housing and the introduction of new programs into existing spaces took advantage of the urban loopholes and inserted themselves spatially and economically into existing openings. Small-scaled enterprises as much as large ones, private as well as stateaffiliated, facilitated rapid transition to the market economy, while helping establish ensuing modes of developments. Whereas large-scale interventions were often top-down visions by local state authorities, creating supply before demand to catalyze a growing market in key sectors that are representative and indicators for growth, small-scale creations responded to the rapidly evolving demands on the ground. These small-scale projects developed overlooked, and thus unplanned, sectors that were nevertheless important to the overall urban life of the city. The central government’s strategy of “letting go of the small and keeping track of the big” during the SOE reforms, to focus on keeping the key sectors under its thumb, in effect acquiesced to the private sectors’ takeover of the “small.” So long as there was no destabilization of the broader reforms, restrictions were ambiguous. At the time, local states were too busy with economic growth, vying for selection as nationally or municipally allocated development zones, competing with 428

other areas for a piece of higher-level strategic plans, and meeting performance targets, to interfere except where necessary. Local authorities condoned the small stores and restaurants that first opened without license, and their retrofits that initially took place without permits. When the small businesses became successful, the processes for permissions formalized and procedures standardized. Similarly, local-government-issued policies serve as confirmation of processes that have been deemed productive and contributive after they first have been developed. By the mid-2000s, the central government started to react to what it saw as dilution of state assets, growing social discontent as a result of local government indiscretions, and what loomed as a speculation-driven economic bubble. A series of legislations tightened the procedural ambiguities that accelerated much of the development of the first decades of economic liberalization. The closing of the most conspicuous of the urban loopholes that resulted from the omissions and absences of regulations in the early transition period, mandating transparency in the land market, and re-centralizing bureaucratic structures and hierarchical management systems, stabilized the volatility of rapid change in the urban system. For many coastal cities, the rapid transition had also decelerated and become more evenly kilted after the first decade of economic transition and urban restructuring. The procedural tightening that aimed to buttress against a potential economic meltdown, however, resulted in further ingenuity on the ground to counter the topdown one-for-all restrictions. Central government policies implemented to recentralize authority also reinforced the dual markets, which was crucial to the incremental strategy for transition. As a consequence, administratively-allocated land and publicly managed housing became the sites for new sets of urban loopholes. Rather than urban loopholes that form from absences and omissions, as in the initial phase of transition, urban loopholes increasingly form based on exceptional circumstances in the maturing market. Reuse of former institutional buildings on administratively-allocated land has been able to use the convenient and timely urban loophole for creative industries clusters, promoted for a time by the competitive municipal and district governments. The national promotion of service-sector development gave the local states the exception of creative industries clusters to bypass the central government restriction on the commercialization of administratively-allocated land, elaborated in Chapter 5. Enterpris-

clusters. The utilization of otherwise inefficient land-use in city center areas, in turn, benefits the local government as well as the surrounding urban neighborhood. The success of M50, Tianzifang and Ferguson Lane, which tested the reuse of former institutional buildings, showed both the viability and the possibility of collaborations with the local institutional structures. From the precedent development of Bridge 8, ensuing projects followed a formalized development path. The projects at Yongkang Lu and Anken Green, shown in Chapter 5, continue to exploit these urban loopholes of exceptions, while updating new public-private alliances. The passing on of urban loopholes as opportunities for subsequent developments reflects both the agent-driven learning process for the development procedures as well as the evolving participation of the local state in development.

Chapter 7 Outlook

ing developers and designers could thus develop otherwise undervalued and under­ utilized spaces in the city, through the urban loophole based on creative industries

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Heritage conservation and cultural developments, increasingly emphasized in the second decade of transition, have also created urban loopholes of exceptions that advance the local state’s interests. Heritage designation for neighborhoods had the dual effect of solidifying the public hold on city center real estate, left by legacy ownership ambiguities, and of being used as a means to expedite the gentrification process, shown in Chapter 3. Conservation has, in effect, trapped the incumbent residents inside the vestiges of planned economy housing structures by thwarting their access to housing commodification through demolition and relocation. It has also raised the ‘rent gap’ and magnified the socio-economic differential of the market and planned economies under transition. Even though state management has limited the supply of privatized historic houses, leading to growing demand pushing up those that are commodified to higher values, it has, in the interim, also kept the rents of valuable city center locations affordable. The state institution of what appears to be economic inefficiencies has the unexpected result of ensuring more diversity and freedom for endogenous processes, for the time being. The recent shutdowns at Jing’an Villas, Yongkang Lu and Wuyuan Lu, which took place since the completion of the research for this book, moreover show that this diversity and freedom is uncertain and temporary. The local state, in land-scarce and economically ambitious districts such as Jing’an, is particularly interested in harnessing the currently undervalued profits from these areas, both from their historic architecture and from their central locations. Despite the local state’s ultimate decision making capacity, the multiplicity of conflicting interests have keep the homogenization at bay. The momentary lapse of Jing’an Villas and its adjacent Weihai 696 to endogenous processes show that contemporary publicity tactics could be effective in mass motivation, having swayed and delayed the homogenizing developments. The state’s increasingly sophisticated deployment and control of media also show the counter strategies in maintaining its authority in the face of the diversifying and skeptical public.

The Urban Loopholes as Equilibrators and Learning From the Urban Loophole Under conditions of institutional transparency and stability, the state acts in the interest of the public, through regulation, incentivization, advocacy and community enablement. Because the autocratic state in China has shown itself to be at times actively predatory under the conditions of rapid transition, the urban loophole has facilitated entrepreneurial innovation through the simultaneous evasion of and acceptance of the party-state control. Since the party-state is the ultimate decision maker, regulator, and participant in the market all in one, abiding by, rather than contradicting, local institutional rituals is fundamental to the economic and political survival of non-state affiliated actors. But beyond this baseline rule, staying under-the-radar rather than being conspicuously in line of interests would be the safest bet for non-state actors to achieve the local state’s acquiescence. Prioritizing profit and image-ability rather than values in the local competition for political performance, smaller scale developments could evade while still observing the tacit but discretionary rules on the ground. As 430

long as there is no overt infringement on the party-state’s interests, a laissez-faire state continues under transition. The urban loophole, made possible by the state’s adaptive governance, closes as soon as alternative plans are prioritized. The developments and shutdowns shown in the cases of this book are examples of the urban loophole, as a window of opportunity under circumstances of ambiguity, which is time-limited. It is in the embrasure of uncertainty that the state, as privileged player in the market, could reap the most benefits. The small developers cultivated guanxi relationships with the local authorities to gain acceptance and credibility in their projects’ contributions. The pragmatic appropriation of their know-how and capital, together with the state’s procedural authorizations, have been able to more rapidly meet the also rapidly changing market demands, because of their small scale. It is also in the aggregation of multiple flexibilities that cities like Shanghai are able to so rapidly catch up in their global re-integration. Central government sanction was fundamental to the city’s initial take-off. But different levels of rigid and cumbersome institutions would have slackened if not hindered the overall dynamism of progress to prosperity. Despite the economic inefficiencies and to a lesser extent political insecurity of an incomplete economic transition, the coexistence of the planned and market economies in the Chinese case has ensured the cohabitation of social differences in an otherwise spatially homogenizing and socially polarizing trend of state-led neoliberalization. The diversification of actors and development processes has also made the neighborhoods with open networks, small-scaled structures, and endogenous processes competitive in the metropolitan competition of centralities. Had the urban loophole been tightly closed, these areas would never have had the chance to offer the possibilities and potentials of the kind of neighborhood diversity that appear so effortlessly constructed. It is precisely in the amphibiousness of the institutional structures that design, if clearly comprehending the existing framework, could also have instrumentality. The mechanism of the urban loopholes shows unconventional, non-Western techniques to urban spatial production that should not be dismissed as anomalies, divergences or externalities. The Chinese local state’s simultaneously proactive and eva-

able as far as the local state, at whose behest their development is contingent, is resilient, they have remained socially vibrant and culturally productive centralities that have since taken on unique roles in the livability of the metropolis. The transformations of these central neighborhoods in Shanghai not only offer alternatives to the demolition-and-densification mode of development, prevalent in most developing economies. The processes gleaned from their transformation processes documented in this book could also be important in rethinking the antidote to the Chinese cities’ growing socio-spatial segregation. As socio-spatial segregation increasingly mani­ fests the country’s social polarization and functional homogenization, the growing

Chapter 7 Outlook

sive tactics for managing sudden change and uncertainty may not apply in developed political economies where relative stability has made these tactics redundant. For rapidly changing and developing political economies and their cities, the flexibility of the state, especially an assertively authoritarian one, to accommodate innovation in spatial production would not only effect its resilience. It would also promote the interests of its constituents, to the simultaneous benefit of the state. Although the neighborhoods, such as the ones seen in Shanghai, are only adapt-

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cost of externalities of rapid development processes compels a re-evaluation of existing modes of understanding and evaluating urban development transformation.5 For other Chinese cities and cities in the developing world run by strong states that increasingly venerate and emulate the Chinese mode for development, the urban loopholes show how the state, despite being dominant, could devolve authority in its own interest, which at the same time allows the endogenous processes conducive to development and economic growth to flourish. This institutional porosity in condoning an equilibrating counterweight allows the urban loopholes to ensure incremental and heterogeneous development, and can create a kind of internal competition to offset the homogenizing tendencies of a strong state. They are necessary to compensate for the otherwise ideologically rigid validations for the dominance of the strong state. What could possibly be lessons learned from the processes and procedures of the urban loopholes found in developing and transitioning economies that could motivate the stable but much more slowly growing economies of the developed capitalist worlds? Creative reuse projects, where a degree of flexibility would have to emerge from the development, rather than be prescribed preceding it, could be one way in which developed cities could incorporate the logic garnered from the urban loopholes of transitioning economies. At the same time, the degree of state subsidization of economic inefficiencies, or whether in service of overall public interest, would make possible the spatially proximate social diversity that market economies would through market efficiencies erode. In China, the state subsidization of economic inefficiencies, in the form of the dual markets in the transition economy, is intended for political control, and social stability and popular sentiments, although ineffective but still influential, are part of the political legitimacy of the party-state. In cities like New York and London, where an undersupply of housing accompanied by continued economic growth have pushed up impossibly expensive rents, and even rent control, where dereliction and location have not managed to carve out affordable areas, combined flexibility and statism would benefit the creative communities that would most desire and perhaps deserve them.

1 Daniel B. Abramson, “The Dialectics of Urban Planning tive Governance in China,” in Mao’s Invisible Hand: The in China,” in China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, Urbanism, ed. Fulong Wu, Routledge Contemporary Chi- ed. Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard na Series 26 (New York: Routledge, 2007 ), 66. 2 Fulong Contemporary China Series 17 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Wu, “China’s Changing Urban Governance in the Transi- University Press, 2011), 3 – 4 . 5 As the latest issuance of tion Towards a More Market-Oriented Economy,” Urban an urban renewal plan on the 1st of May 2015 announced, Studies 39, no. 7 (June 1, 2002): 1090, doi: 10.1080/00 Shanghai municipality is outlining a series of concepts 420980220135491. 3 The political theorist Minxin Pei to intensify its city center resources. See Hanlu Zhao refers to China’s political economy as a ‘developmental 赵翰露, “《城市更新实施办法》即将施行, 上海进入‘内涵增 autocracy’ to show its long-term limits. The author uses 长’时代 [‘Urban Renewal Enactment Act’ will Be Implethe term here to show how the urban loopholes have, mented, Shanghai Enters ‘content Growth’ era],” 解放日报 in the short term, facilitated developments despite what Liberation Daily, April 29, 2015, http://www.jfdaily.com/ Pei refers to as China’s “trapped transition.” Minxin Pei, minsheng/bwyc/201504 /t20150429_1464546.html. This China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmen- decree shows that the government authorities are keental Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, ly aware of the unsustainable sprawl conditions resulting 2006), 206. 4 Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, from rapid growth and the need to reexamine existing “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adap- city center developments.

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Acknowledgments I am grateful to many people whom I have had the chance to meet, get to know, and learn from, for this project. Discussions with and thoughts from some of the foremost experts on and on Shanghai’s urbanism, Professors Zhu Jieming, Tang Zilai, Wang Lin, Zhang Song, Lü Yongyi, Hou Li, Liu Gang, Liu Yuyang, and many others sharpened the research with their feedbacks. Friends and research colleagues, Stephen Cairns, Kah-Wee Lee, Gregory Bracken, Daan Roggeveen, Pascal Berger, Cole Roskam, Max Hirsh, Mechtild Widrich, Koon Wee, Darren Zhou, Huang Zhengli, Katja Hellkötter, Wang Jun, Wang Lan, Ding Junfeng, and many others, have given me platforms to share my work-in-progress and drafts along the way. Friends on the ground in Shanghai, and some who have since been off the ground, too, Lyla Sulaiman, Steven Chen, Ellen Chen, Tiger Lin, Kenan Liu, Zou Jie, Zhang Xu, Robert Chen, Gavin Lu, Jiahua Lu, Xu Yunfang, Wang Yingzhe, Tang Lingjie, Jacob Dryer, Wu Yilei, Eva Xiong, Katya Knyazeva, Andres Batista, Frank Krueger, Wang Fang, Neville Mars, Erika Lanselle, Chiyan Chan, Huimin Tzeng, I-Shin Chow, Susanne Seitinger, and many more, have been so generous in connecting me to the right people and showing me the right places. I am most grateful to my editor Katie McGunagle for her careful editing of the book and to Michelle Teo for her detailed and efficient proofreading of all the words on all the pages in the final stretch of the dissertation. Nadia Sbaihi and Josh Roberts were also invaluable in their editing of parts of the book. I am utmostly indebted to Cressica Brazier for her untiring and sharp editing and reading of numerous early drafts. My former team, colleagues, and friends at the Future Cities Laboratory of the Singapore ETH Centre, Anna Gasco, Iris Belle, Ting Chen, and Sonja Berthold, have been supportive along the research journey. My assistant in Shanghai, Zou Jie, has been tremendous in her help in Shanghai’s archival research. My students, Justin Yeung, Cherry Xia, and Desmond Choi, were crucial in refining the graphics of the supporting images in the last stretch of production. My family and friends, despite not always understanding what I was looking for, went out of their way and made the most important and difficult connections and resources possible. The resources of the Future Cities Laboratory of the Singapore-ETH Centre have been more than generous, without which this project would not have been possible. The generosity of the Chair of Architecture at the ETHZ specifically has made the publication of this book possible. I am also grateful for the support of the Wheelwright Fellowship from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, which was crucial to building the initial set of concepts for this larger project.

understanding and comments. Thank you to my second reader Professor Marc Angélil for his astute and meticulous feedbacks, pushing me to refining the overall result. Of course, foremost, to my advisor and mentor Professor Kees Christiaanse, for the untiring readings, inputs and criticism along the way that have made this book possible. This work is dedicated to my parents and grandparents.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editor for the publisher, Andreas Müller, for his patience,

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About the Author Ying Zhou is an architect currently based in Hong Kong, where she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interest on contemporary urban developments, the growth of cultural industries and new economies in East Asian cities, global linkages, and architectural knowledge exchange developed from her work with Professor Kees Christiaanse at the Future Cities Laboratory of the Singapore-ETH Centre and with Herzog & de Meuron at the ETH Studio Basel. Born in Shanghai, Ying holds

About the Author

a B.S.E. in Architecture and Engineering from Princeton University, an M. Arch. from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and a Ph.D. from the ETH Zürich. She was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Stuttgart. Ying has practiced and taught in New York City, Shanghai, Detroit, Boston, Basel, and Hong Kong.

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Illustration Credits Preface

Fig. 17 Photo by author of archival map

Fig. 1 Photo collage by the author

Fig. 18 Map drawn by the author, based on plans drawn from officially surveyed plans and historic maps

Fig. 2 Photos by Daniel Stockhammer and Nicola Wild, 2009 Fig. 3 Photos by the author, 2011 – 2012

Figs. 19, 20 Plans redrawn by author and Justin Yeung, from Shanghai Lilong Residences [上海里弄民居], 1993

Chapter 1 Fig. 1 Google Earth

Figs. 21 Plans redrawn by the author and Cherry Xia, from Shanghai Lilong Residences [上海里弄民居], 1993

Fig. 2 http://sh.eastday.com/m/20170217/ u1ai10346508 p2 .html

Fig. 22 Commercial Atlas of Shanghai [上海市商用地图册] 1949

Fig. 3 Map from The Geography of Contemporary China, 1990, redrawn by the author

Fig. 23 Map drawn by the author, based on plans drawn from officially surveyed plans and fieldwork data

Fig. 4 Photos from the Shanghai Urban Planning Bureau exhibition, 2011

Fig. 24 Diagram drawn by the author, based on fieldwork data and research

Figs. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Diagrams drawn by the author

Fig. 25 Photos by the author, 2012

Fig. 11 Map drawn by the author, based on plans drawn from officially surveyed plans, Google Earth, and fieldwork data

Fig. 26 https://www.tax.sh.gov.cn/

Figs. 12, 13, 14 Diagrams drawn by the author, based on fieldwork data and research

Fig. 27 Photos and map by the author, 2012 Fig. 28 Photo by the author, 2011

pages 66 – 67 photo by the author, 2012

Figs. 29, 30 Maps drawn by the author, based on plans drawn from officially surveyed plans and fieldwork data

pages 70 – 71 photo by the author, 2011

Fig. 31 Photo by the author, 2012 Fig. 32 Photo by the author, 2013

Chapter 2 Fig. 1 Photo by Ruard Absaroka, 2009

Fig. 33 Diagram drawn by the author, based on fieldwork data and research

Fig. 2 Photos by the author, 2013

Fig. 34 Photo by the author, 2011

Fig. 3 Map drawn by the author, based on plans drawn from officially surveyed plans and Google Earth

Fig. 35 Photo by the author, 2016

Fig. 4 Google Earth

pages 140 – 141 photo by the author, 2011

Fig. 36 Photos by the author, 2012 and 2013

Fig. 5 Photos by the author, 2011 Fig. 6 http://china.usc.edu/talking-points-july-15 -1971 nixon-and-zhou-shake-world Fig. 7 Google Earth

Fig. 1 Photo by the author, 2012 Fig. 2 Photo by the author, 2013

Fig. 8 Photo from New and trans-century architecture in Shanghai [跨世纪的上海建筑], 1995

Fig. 3 Photo by the author, 2013

Figs. 9, 10 Diagrams drawn by the author

Fig. 4 Photo by the author, 2012

Fig. 11 Photo by the author, 2013

Fig. 5 http://www.essential-architecture.com/CHINA / BUND/SH-BU .htm

Fig. 12 Plan from http://esf.sh.fang.com Fig. 13 Map drawn by the author, based on plans drawn from officially surveyed plans and historic maps

Fig. 6 http://www.bjweekly.com/ Fig. 7 https://www.hpcbristol.net/visual/ro-s044

Fig. 14 Photo by the author, 2011

Fig. 8 Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau

Fig. 15 Diagram by the author, 2014

Figs. 9, 10 Plans from Debates and Compromises: Conservation and Development of the Northern Old Hongkou in Shanghai by Feng Luan and Yiyun Wang, 2009

Fig. 16 Map drawn by the author, based on plans drawn from officially surveyed plans and fieldwork data

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Chapter 3

Fig. 11, 12, 13, 14 Photos by the author, 2012

Chapter 4

Figs. 15, 16 Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau

Fig. 1 http://www.shanghaidaily.com/Metro/society/ Illegal-stores-structures-pulled-down-insidehistoric-Jingan-Villa-/shdaily.shtml

Fig. 18 Changning District Government Figs. 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 Photos by the author, 2016 Figs. 24 , 25 Photos by the author, 2012

Fig. 2 http://wap.maimaigongkong.com/ 24 -0 -77787-1.html Fig. 3 http://sh.edushi.com/

Fig. 26 Le Passage Fuxing

Figs. 4 , 5 Photos from New and trans-century architecture in Shanghai [跨世纪的上海建筑 ], 1995

Fig. 27 Map drawn by the author, based on plans drawn from officially surveyed plans and historic map

Fig. 6 Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau

Figs. 28 , 29 Photos by the author, 2012 Fig. 30 Map drawn by the author, based on plans drawn from officially surveyed plans and historic map Fig. 31 Photo by the author, 2012 Fig. 32 http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_ a9 f8 c06001011t7 v.html Figs. 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 Photos by the author, 2011

Fig. 7 From “上海中心城区生产性服务业多中心空间结构 研究 [Research on the “Polycentric” Spatial Structure of Shanghai Producer Service Industry]” by Wufu Ma, 2009 Fig. 8 From Making Shanghai’s International-graded City Center—‘Jing’an Nanjing Lu Development Plan’ International Consultancy Report [打造上海世界级 城市的都心], 2002

Figs. 37, 38 Photo by the author, 2013

Fig. 9 Map redrawn by the author, based on plans from Jing’an District Planning Bureau

Fig. 39 Map drawn by the author, based on plans drawn from officially surveyed plans and fieldwork data

Fig. 10 Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau

Fig. 40 Photo by the author, 2011 Fig. 41 Lyon Institut d’Asie Orientale, http://www.virtualshanghai.net/Asset/Preview/ dbImage_ID-175_No-1.jpeg Fig. 42 Shanghai Municipal Archives Fig. 43 Shanghai Municipal Archives Fig. 44 Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau

Fig. 11 Lyon Institut d’Asie Orientale, http://www. virtualshanghai.net/Photos/Images?ID=1837 Fig. 12 Plans from Urban Construction Administration System and its Impact on Public Space in Modern Shanghai [上海近代城市建设管理制度及其对公共 空间的影响] by Qian Sun, 2006 Fig. 13 Plan from Shanghai Lilong Residences [上海里弄民居], 1993

Fig. 45 http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_ 816414 ab0100 rn36 .html

Fig. 14 Café Chabrol

Fig. 46 Photo by the author, 2011

Fig. 16 Plan drawn by the author, based on officially surveyed plans and fieldwork data, 2012 – 2013

Fig. 47 Photo from Shanghai Wukang Lu, Explorations in Historic Research and Conservation Planning for a Conserved Fengmao Street [上海武康路 风貌 保护道路的历史研究与保护规划探索], by Yongjie Sha et al., 2009 Fig. 48 Photo by the author, 2013 Fig. 49 Photo from Shanghai Wukang Lu, Explorations in Historic Research and Conservation Planning for a Conserved Fengmao Street [上海武康路 风貌 保护道路的历史研究与保护规划探索], by Yongjie Sha et al., 2009

Fig. 15 Photos by the author, 2012

Fig. 17 Photo by the author, 2012 Fig. 18 Photos by the author, 2012 , with plans from Shanghai Lilong Residences [上海里弄民居], 1993 Figs. 19, 20, 21, 22 Photos by the author, 2012 Fig. 23 Photo by the author, 2014 Fig. 24 Jing’an District Planning Bureau Fig. 25 Film cover Figs. 26 , 27 Jing’an District Planning Bureau

Figs. 50, 51 Photos by the author, 2012

Fig. 28 http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_6 ca6 dca60101c79 h.html

Fig. 52 Photo by the author, 2013

Figs. 29, 30 Jing’an District Planning Bureau

Fig. 53 Photo by the author, 2014

Fig. 31 http://www.kankanews. com/a/2014-09-14/0015541183.shtml

Figs. 54 , 55 Photo by the author, 2016 Fig. 55 Map drawn by the author, based on plans drawn from officially surveyed plans and fieldwork data

Figs. 32 , 33 , 34 Jing’an District Planning Bureau

pages 230 – 231 photo by the author, 2014

Fig. 36 Jing’an District Planning Bureau

pages 232 – 233 photo by the author, 2011

Fig. 35 Photo by the author, 2012

Illustration Credits

Fig. 17 Redrawn by author from Shanghai Municipal Statistics Book, 2006

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Fig. 37 Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau

Fig. 11 Platform Yongkang

Fig. 38 Jing’an District Planning Bureau

Fig. 12 Commercial Atlas of Shanghai [上海市商用地图册] 1949

Fig. 39 Photo by Beizhi Zhou, 2017 Fig. 40 http://www.virtualshanghai.net/Asset/Preview/ dbImage_ID-34141_No-01.jpeg

Fig. 13 Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau

Fig. 41 http://www.virtualshanghai.net/Asset/Preview/ dbImage_ID-34142 _No-01.jpeg

Fig. 18 Photo by the author, 2016

Fig. 42 http://www.fotoe.com/www_bak/mgallery/ image_detail.php?Id=10157223 Figs. 43 , 44 Jing’an District Planning Bureau Fig. 45 http://www.shanghaiwow.com/index.php/ en/2014 /08 /Bar-Buzz-Logan-s-Punch Figs. 46 , 47 Jing’an District Planning Bureau

Figs. 14, 15, 16, 17 Photos by the author, 2013 pages 376 – 377 photo by the author, 2013 Chapter 6 Fig. 1 PS Art Fig. 2 Long Museum Fig. 3 Rockbund

pages 332 – 333 photo by the author, 2012

Fig. 4 Himalayas Museum

page 336 photo by the author, 2013

Figs. 5, 6 Randian, 2010 Fig 7 Yang Fudong

440

Chapter 5

Fig. 8 Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau

Fig. 1 Diagram drawn by the author

Fig. 9 Photo by the author, 2007

Fig. 2 Photo by the author, 2013

Fig. 10 Photos by the author, 2012

Fig. 3 Map drawn by the author, based on officially surveyed plans and fieldwork data, 2012 – 2013

Fig. 11 Heatherwick Studio

Fig. 4 Diagram drawn by the author

Fig. 14 Ai Weiwei

Figs. 5, 6 Photos by the author, 2013

Fig. 15 West Bund Development Group

Fig. 7 Diagram by the author, based on fieldwork data

Fig. 16 West Bund Development Group

Fig. 8 Platform Yongkang

Fig. 17 Yang Zhenzhong

Figs. 9, 10 Diagrams by the author, based on fieldwork data

pages 420 – 421 photo by the author, 2011

Figs. 12, 13 Photos by the author, 2013

Index of Persons, Institutions, and Firms A

Chen, Ben 155

Abramson, Daniel B. 27

Chen Congzhou 153, 154, 159

Administration for Cultural Relics 158, 206

Chen Danyan 162, 163, 175, 199

Administration for Industry and Commerce 281, 283, 285, 286

Chen Guichun 157

Administration for Urban Management and Law Enforcement 354

Chen Liangyu 402, 403

Ai Weiwei 6, 381, 383, 387, 400, 403, 408 Ambassy Club 93, 173 Amoka 122 Ang Lee 147, 198, 256, 288 Art Basel 394 Asia Development Bank 23, 389 Atelier Deshaus 405, 407 Audi 347 B Ba Jin 145, 193 Baker and Spice 122 Barmé, Geremie 48 Baxter 74

Chen Yifei 85, 273, 274 Chen Yifeng 405 Chen Yuanqin 189, 190, 191 Chen Zaochun 172 Cheng Naishan 162 Cheng, Adrian 397 Chiang Ching-kuo 93 Chiang Kai-shek 93, 258, 259 China Industrial Bank 189 China Knit and Textiles Factory 189 China Realty Company 259 China Shipbuilding Group 293 Chinese Communist Party (CCP ) 24, 48, 80, 107, 131, 146, 147, 149, 150 – 153, 160, 166, 189 – 193, 211, 245, 247, 249, 259, 261, 293 f., 303, 305, 308 , 366, 384, 386, 392, 393, 402

Biennale for Architecture and Contemporary Art see Shanghai Biennale

Chipperfield, David 381, 396, 408

Biennale for Art and Architecture see Shanghai Biennale

Chow Yun-fat 153

BizArt 395

Christiensen, John 122

Chirac, Bernadette 175 Christiaanse, Kees 14 – 15

Bo Qin 28

Chunming Woolen Mill 390

Brandt, Alexander 395

Citic Group 247

Budi Tek 406

CMC Capital Partners 404

Building Relocation Technology Research Center, Tongji University 291

Cody, Jeffrey W. 155

C Café Stagiaire 359 Cai Guoqiang 396 Cai Yuanpei 258, 305 Castells, Manuel 49 Catie Lo 208, 209 Center for the Conservation of Shanghai’s Historic Architecture 206

Coffee Tree 183 Commerce and Industry Bureau 282 Committee for Conservation 166 Committee for Cultural Management 166 Communist Youth League 281 Conseil d’Administration Municipale 98, 199, 201 Construction Ministry of the PRC 154 Cornell University 155 Cultural Inspection Bureau 338

Central Academy of Fine Arts 393

Cultural Management Bureau 157, 166

Chabrol, Claude 238, 261

Cultural Relics Department at the Shanghai Museum 155

Chang, Eileen 198, 256

Index of Persons, Institutions, and Firms

Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs 119

Chen Kaige 147

441

D

Foucault, Michel 46 – 47

Dapuqiao Street Office 273

Franck’s 183

Davies, Brooke, and Gran Architects 293

Friedmann, John 27, 252

Deng Kunyan 340, 385

Friendship Store 347

Deng Xiaoping 7, 14, 22, 25, 80, 243, 245, 384

Fudan University 172, 363

Denny House Milk Tea 271, 283

Fujimoto, Sou 381, 404, 406

Department for Culture 152

Future Cities Laboratory of the ETH Zürich, Singapore 14, 435

Department of National Development 153 Department of Urban and Rural Development and Environment Protection 152

G

Design and Promotion Center for Urban Public Space (SUSAS ) 407

Gao Yang 276

DHL 347

Golden Taiyuen Group 299

Ding Xueliang 26, 29

Gonghui Hospital 308

Ding Yi 385, 386, 391, 394, 402, 407

Gu Wenda 392

Disney, Walt 8

Gucci 174, 247

Gezi Café 261

District Bureau for Land Resources, Jing’an 247 Douban 263

H

Dow Jones 247

Hahn, Emily 189

DreamWorks 404

Haihua Tannery 274

DTZ 171, 249

Han Yuqi 389

Duolun Museum of Modern Art 394

Hang Lung Properties 247

Dutch Items Shanghai 184

Hannerz, Ulf 124 Hanting 310

E

Harvard Business School 253

Eastlink Gallery 385, 387, 390

Harvey, David 49, 210 – 211, 381

Economic Council 248, 252, 253, 275, 276, 391

He Guoyun 189

EDAW , Inc 339

Heatherwick, Thomas 393

Edouard Malingue (Gallery) 408

Heilmann, Sebastian 26, 30, 35, 212

Element Fresh 184

Heisenberg, Werner 36

Enclave 339, 340

Helbling, Lorenz 385

English as Second Language (ESL ) Education Center 122

Herzog & de Meuron 14, 401

Er Dongqiang 273, 274 Estée Lauder 74 ETH Studio Basel 14

F F & T Group 356

Fan, Robert 189 Fang Zengxian 387 FedEx 74 Feng Boyi 387 Ferguson 183 Florida, Richard 341 Forbes Jing’an Nanjing Lu Forum 253

442

Hessler, Peter 49 Himalaya Art Museum 394 HKR Development Group 252 HKR International Limited 287, 290

Ho, Stanley 92, 173 HOK 340, 356

Hong Kong Lifestyle Co Ltd 344, 356 Hong Kong Textiles 207 Hou Hanru 387 Hou Li 27 Housing Ministry 166 Housing Provident Fund 90, 112, 115 Hsing You-tien 29 Huang Yongyu 274

Huang Zonghan 344

Leighton Textiles 207

Hudec, László 308

Leung, Henry 207

Huicheng Group 84 – 85

Ley, David 362

Huntington, Samuel P. 36

Li Jilan 189

Huo Yuanjia 153, 305

Li Ka-shing 74, 172

Hutchinson Whampoa 74, 98, 247, 287

Li Liang 385 Li Wuwei 275

I

Li Xu 387

Institute for Architecture Research 154

Link, Perry 48

International Concession’s Municipal Council 306

Liu Xiaobo 402

Ipluso 208 – 209

Liu Xuedong 310 – 311

Isetan 247

Liu Yichun 405

Isozaki, Arata 381

Liu Yiqian 405, 406 Liu, industrialist 190

J

Lo, Vincent 173

Jacobs, Jane 165

Lolo Love 128

Jameson, Fredric 244

Long Museum 380, 381, 405 – 406, 408

Jianchen Fragrance Factory 274

Lou Chenghao 170, 302

Jiang Zemin 193, 245

Lou Ye 389

Jiaotong University 183, 363

Louis Vuitton 247, 358

Jing’an Architecture Ornament Company 308

Lu Bingjie 158

Jing’an City Commercial and Trade Corporation 247

Lu Hanchao 107, 258, 265

Jing’an Cultural and Historic Museum 304, 306

Lucerne School of Hospitality 359

Jing’an District Planning Bureau 256, 261, 288, 290, 299

Luo Xiaowei 154, 157, 164, 202

Jing’an Exchange Group 302

M

Jing’an Jingdi Company 311

Ma Liang 271

Jing’an Real Estate Group 255, 302, 308, 311, 313

MacFarquhar, Roderick 48

John Portman and Associates 174, 175, 244, 245

MadeIn 394 – 396

Johnson, Ian 165

Mao Zedong 7, 14, 22, 149, 151, 193, 303

Jones Lasalle 171

Massive Music 347 Merton, Robert 37

Kaisiling Cake Shop 257

Ministry of Land Resource 166

Kangfu Textiles 274

Ministry of National Cultural Relics 153

Kaplan, Abraham 37

Minli Middle School 291 – 295, 308

Kentridge, William 387

Minsheng Art Museum 396, 400, 407

Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF ) Architects 247

Mitsubishi Estate Company 396

Kong Xiangxi 259

Miyajima Tatsuo 387

Koolhaas, Rem 18

Mou-ching Cha, Victor 290 Mr. Willis 122 – 123

L Lan Kwai Fong Group 404 Lao Wu 261, 265 Le Freeport Group 408 Leaf, Michael 27, 29

Municipal Administration for Labor Resources and Social Security Bureau 119 Municipal Bureau for Housing and Land Resource Management 172

Index of Persons, Institutions, and Firms

Merewether, Charles 387 K

443

Municipal Economic Council 248, 252, 253, 275, 276, 391

R Real Estate Bureau, Shanghai 157

Murphy, Henry K. 155

Ren Xuefei 164

Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA ) 394

Riegl, Alois 159 Rist, Pipilotti 387

N

Rockbund Art Museum 381, 396

National Research Center for Historic Cultural Sites 390, 391

Rockefeller Group 396

Neri and Hu Architects 181, 260, 349, 407 New Huangpu Group 396 New World 287, 305, 397 Nike 262, 347 Nixon, Richard 82 – 83, 174 Nuoheng Holdings 310 O Obrist, Hans Ulrich 387 OCT Contemporary Art Terminal 409

Osnos, Evan 6, 49

Ruan Yisan 164, 275, 390 S Sassen, Saskia 252 Schneider, Romy 8 Service des Travaux Publics 203 Sha Yongjie 202 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences 390 ShanghArt Gallery 385, 386, 390, 393 – 395, 397, 407 Shanghai Art Museum 387 Shanghai Automobile Group (SAG ) 108 Shanghai Automobile Industry Corporation (SAIC ) 344

P

Shanghai Biennale 76, 381, 386 – 388, 394, 404, 405, 407, 408

Palmer and Turner Architects 10, 300

Shanghai Bureau for Quality Assurance 89

Pan Shiyi 295

Shanghai Center of Photography (SCoP ) 408

Pan Su 258, 259

Shanghai Components Factory Number Five 282, 403

Paulaner Brewhouse 163

Shanghai Computer Research Institute 108

Paustian 347

Shanghai Construction Bureau 88

Pei, I. M. 10, 154

Shanghai Contemporary 394

People’s Liberation Army (PLA ) 192, 193, 409

Shanghai Creative Industries Center 252, 276, 341, 345

Perry, Elizabeth 26, 27, 30, 35, 48, 212

Shanghai Drama Arts Center 89, 122

Petite Jasmine 209

Shanghai Electric 309, 310, 311

Platform Group 352, 354, 356 – 357, 359, 362 – 363

Shanghai Film Group 124

Platform Yongkang Incorporated 353 Powell, Colin 291

Shanghai Flower and Trees Company 208 Shanghai Food Processing Machinery Factory 274

PriceSmart 310

Shanghai Haodu Real Estate Development and Management Limited 285

Public Works Commission 258

Shanghai Housing Bureau 170

Pudong Leadership Academy 392

Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau 155, 159, 161

Pye, Lucian 18

Shanghai Municipal Planning Institute 161 Shanghai No. 2 Rice Mill and Shanghai Fodder Mill 385

Q

Shanghai Nuclear Power Office 192

Quadrio, Davide 395

Shanghai Number Five Components Factory see Shanghai Components Factory Number Five

Qiao Zhibing 408 Qinghua University 152, 155

Shanghai People’s Art Theater 122

Qiu Weiqing 291

Shanghai Port Authority 89

Qiu Xinshan 291

Shanghai Port Real Estate 89 Shanghai Redtown Development Corporation 393

444

Shanghai Semi-Conductor Parts Number Four Factory 311

Tianzifang Investment Consultancy Limited 279

Shanghai Subway Line 13 Development Limited 311 Shanghai Tang 163, 177

Tianzifang Shikumen Proprietors Administrative Committee 275, 279, 280

Shanghai Tractor Factory 108

Tokyo University 155

Shanghai Urban Development Group 84

Tongji Architecture Design Institute 312

Shanghai Watch Accessory Factory 274

Tongji University 85, 154, 155, 157, 160, 161, 164, 165, 169, 186, 202, 255, 275, 284, 285, 289, 291, 299, 300, 301, 312, 363, 389, 390, 404

Shanghai Xiandai Architecture Design Group 170 Shanghai Youth Drama Group 122 ShangTex Group 343, 345, 390, 393 Shenya Development Company 88 Shenya Real Estate Company 88 Shikumen Proprietors Administrative Committee 275, 279, 280

U UK Refiners Architectural Consulting 301

University of Hong Kong 253 University of Southern California 363

Shin Muramatsu 155

W

Shu Haolun 288

Wagas group 122, 123, 184, 289

Shui On 163, 164, 173, 287, 344

Wang Anyi 162, 163

Sigg, Uli 407

Wang Jun 165

Siming Bank 288

Wang Kemin 306

Sinmay Zau 189

Wang Lin 277, 278

Sinolink Holdings 396

Wang Wei 405, 406

Smith, Neil 126

Wang Xingzheng 173, 174, 175, 176, 177

SOM 175, 356

Wang Yachen 276

Song Luxia 189

Wang, Vera 10

Sony 347

Weibo 263, 287

Soong, Madame (Soong Ching-ling) 93

West Bund Art Museum 408

Sotheby’s 405

West Bund Development Group 405, 406

Star Art Museum 408

West Samoa Southern Investment 186

Starbucks 163, 289

Westgate Corporation 247

State Council of the PRC 23, 82, 83, 87, 90, 119, 151, 152, 159, 243, 246, 301

Wheelock 248, 287

Staw, Barry M. 37

William the Beekeeper 128

Sugar and Spice 123

Willis, Craig 123

Sun Sheng Han 28

Wong, Nina 92

Sun Yat-sen 93, 305

Wood, Ben 164

Sung Hung Kai 287, 290, 350, 358

World Bank 23

Sutton, Robert I. 37

World Expo 2010 33, 47, 48, 124, 127, 149, 198, 203, 240, 253, 254, 261, 280, 295, 296, 303, 304, 305, 306, 314, 337, 339, 364, 381, 383, 394, 396, 407

Swire Group 247, 254, 288 Swire Properties 247 T Taikang Lu Art Street Administrative Committee 274, 275, 279

Wieden + Kennedy 263

World Primary School 145, 150, 206 – 210 World Trade Organization (WTO ) 91, 187 Wu Changshuo 158 Wu Fulong 48, 49

Tank Shanghai 408

Wu Hung 386, 394, 406

Tianping Street Office 352, 356

Wu Jiang 154, 157, 158, 159, 160, 164, 165, 169, 199, 202, 205, 212, 284

Index of Persons, Institutions, and Firms

Shanghai Writers’ Association 193

Tianzifang Management Committee 279, 280

445

Wu Meiseng 273, 274, 275, 276, 279

Yueyang Hospital 293, 294

Wukang Lu Tourism Information Center 145, 189, 207

Yun, Jackie 122 Yungho Chang 404

X

Yunshui Communications Technologies Limited 311

Xi Jinping 383, 404

YUZ Foundation 406

Xiao Hong 400

YUZ Museum 381, 406, 407

Xinlelu 128 Xiong Yuezhi 304

Z

Xu Jilin 177

Zendai Art Museum 394

Xu, Leo 397

Zendai Group 394

Xu Zhen 394, 395

Zhang Boju 258

Xue Shunsheng 170

Zhang Enli 391

Xue Song 390, 392

Zhang Gardens Company 310

Xuhui District Old Houses Art Center 145, 189, 207

Zhang Huan 396

Xuhui Real Estate Group 84, 85, 88, 186, 187, 357

Zhang Shuhe 303 Zhang Song 285, 389

Y

Zhang Tanru 258

Y+ 181

Zhang Zhen 389

Yang Fudong 388, 393, 400

Zheng Rongfa 273, 274, 275, 278

Yang Zhenzhong 393, 395, 409, 410

Zheng Shiling 160, 202, 206, 255

Yang’s Shenjian Buns 289

Zhou Enlai 82, 192

Yenn Wong 257

Zhou Tiehai 407

Yin, Robert 37

Zhou Xiangyun 293

Ying Zhou 14, 15

Zhou Xinliang 275

Yongfoo Elite 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 185

Zhou Zuomin 189

Yongle Group 124

Zhu Jieming 29, 49, 87

Yongming Bottletop Factory 274

Zhu Ming 388, 389

Yo-Yo Ma 10

Zhu Rongji 245

Yu Youren 258

Zhu Xiaofeng 404

Yu Zhensheng 261

446

Graphic design: Jenna Gesse Layout and typesetting: Kathleen Bernsdorf Production: Heike Strempel Copy Editor: Katie Anne McGunagle Editor for the Publisher: Andreas Müller This publication is made possible with the support of the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL ) of the Singapore-ETH Centre’s publication fund. Paper: Hello Fat matt, 115 g/m² Printing: Beltz Bad Langensalza GmbH Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in databases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. This publication is also available as an e-book (ISBN PDF 978-3-0356-0890-8) © 2017 Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel P.O. Box 44 , 4009 Basel, Switzerland

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