“Pudong is not My Shanghai”: Displacement, place-identity, and right to the ‘city’ in urban China

• In Event: 4162 - Redefining Place

Abstract

The transformation of Shanghai into a global city has wiped out whole neighborhoods, and driven millions of Shanghainese away from the urban core. Over two decades, both the historic urban Shanghai and its newly built contrasting city center, recently urbanized Pudong, have turned into a manifestation of the “China Dream” with a built environment closely resembling other global cities. Situated at the intersection of phenomenological concepts of place and non-place, individuals’ place bound identity, and critique of the discriminative urban political economy and private-public partnership, based on field research in 2013 and 2017, I argue that through an alternative definition of the city of Shanghai, and individuals’ housing location preferences, dispossessed and disoriented Shanghainese engage with a changing Shanghai at different scales: the neighborhood, administrative district, and overall city levels, to articulate a sense of belonging, to make sense of their globalizing home city, and to claim their right to the city.

Author

• Fang Xu, University of California, Berkeley