Building Shanghai

Edward Denison

City, 2008, vol. 12, issue 2, 207-216

Abstract: Located at one of the key gateways to the world’s most populous country, Shanghai has long enjoyed a neoteric image. Today, as one of the world’s largest and fastest growing cities, this image is dutifully sustained as Shanghai offers unprecedented opportunities for domestic and international architects who have enjoyed considerable commercial success while helping to transform the urban landscape from an ageing, dense and relatively low‐rise setting into a modern, multifaceted and ubiquitously high‐rise conglomeration in little under two decades. However, the scale of change and such narrow timeframes belie a broader narrative that deconstructs the pervasive and arguably superficial image of the city. By adopting a wider historical view, the city’s radical modernity appears more as an evolutionary rather than revolutionary process in which key issues such as rapid development, urban continuity and the dominance of foreign architects all have played an important role in shaping the city since the mid‐19th century. This paper explores these issues from the perspective of Shanghai’s urban fabric and the socio‐economic influences that have helped to shape it, revealing, in the process, potentially instructive parallels between the past and present that in turn might better inform urban practices in the future.

Date: 2008
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DOI: 10.1080/13604810802166988

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