Special issue article: People and plans in urbanising China
Urban Studies
2018, Vol. 55(7) 1561–1578
Ó Urban Studies Journal Limited 2017
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0042098016684313
journals.sagepub.com/home/usj
Gentrification and its contentment:
An anthropological perspective on
housing, heritage and urban social
change in Shanghai
Non Arkaraprasertkul
The University of Sydney, Australia
Abstract
Based on ethnographic research during 2013–2015, this study describes an alternative form of gentrification
in a traditional urban neighbourhood in Shanghai, unpacking how the notion architectural
uniqueness of an urban heritage neighbourhood has imbued itself with cultural capital in the eyes of
the new residents. By understanding how the original residents mobilise their knowledge of this particular
selling point to benefit themselves economically by becoming renters, this study presents a case
exemplifying a process of social change in which the ‘original residents’ themselves are active actors.
The results of this process are the socioeconomic and ethic diversification of the neighbourhood as
well as upward social mobility without any intervention by the local government or real estate developers.
By suggesting an alternative process of gentrification in which not all residents are displaced
unwillingly, this paper shows that the idea of gentrification demands more attention.
Keywords
ethnography, gentrification, heritage, Shanghai, urban renewal
Received February 2016; accepted September 2016
2013-2015
“ ”
Corresponding author:
Non Arkaraprasertkul, Honorary Senior Lecturer in Urban
Regional Planning and Policy, The Faculty of Architecture,
Design and Planning, The University of Sydney, The
Wilkinson Bldg G04, 148 City Road, Darlington, NSW
2008, Australia.
Email: non.a@sydney.edu.au
Introduction
The dominant gentrification narrative usually
laments the inequalities arising from highincome
outsiders’ pushing out low-income
original residents from their own locales.
Gentrification is, therefore, often used in a
negative way – implying that a ‘gentrifier’ is
an actor explicitly involved in the use of
financial advantage to deprive existing residents
from a lower socioeconomic status of
their rights, such as their right to home, their
right to the city, and therefore preventing
them from accessing the developmental process
of the place to which they are historically
and emotionally attached (Butler, 1997;
Herzfeld, 2009; Smith, 2006). Gentrification
is a common phenomenon found in many
large cities (see Hamnett and Williams, 1979;
Zukin, 1982). The common thread that runs
through the cases of these cities involves just
what I have described – the poorer original
residents being overpowered by the richer
incoming residents who would move into the
neighbourhoods in question believing that
they would become prime locations. The residents
with higher income would then gradually
change the neighbourhood environment,
its characteristics, and eventually its reputation
attracting other middle-class residents
with the same socioeconomic status to join
them by moving into those places. The demography
of such places would change owing to
two factors: the so-called ‘network effect’, as
a result of the perception of the place – often
as cultured and safe – that attracts a particular
group of residents; and, more importantly,
the drastic increase in the cost of
living as a result of the lifestyle and consumption
patterns of the new residents who have
higher incomes. The original residents would
move away because they could no longer
afford to live in the neighbourhood owing to
the rising cost of living. Under emphasised in
the existing literature is also how some residents
voluntarily move out as they could not
resist the temptation of receiving high rent,
which in many cases facilitates a systematic
pattern of social change. As a result, what
follows gentrification is the displacement of
the communities of the economically inferior
original residents by rich newcomers, who
may or may not have any knowledge of the
place into which they are moving. The economically
superior newcomers then take possession
of the neighbourhood, turning it into
their private enclave and limit the access of
those economically inferior to them through
market mechanisms such as high rents and
living costs.
What this general picture of gentrification
presents is both economic inequality and
structural discrimination. Although there are
cases that the settlement of the new residents
helps to rejuvenate areas, especially old
industrial areas that are left empty after the
departure of the industry, those cases are
largely considered to be exceptions in contemporary
debates on gentrification since
they do not involve the displacement of
existing residents. That is to say, the socalled
‘classic gentrification’ process usually
involves a developer, or a coalition of developers,
driving out the original residents, and
then replacing them with the residents who
are willing to pay more rent. Sooner or later,
to paraphrase the urbanist Jane Jacobs (1964
[1960]) the neighbourhood would lose its
original character because of the homogeneous
demography of the new residents, and
therefore its diversity. Eventually, the sense
of belonging of its original residents would
also disappear owing to the homogeneity of
the newcomers who may or may not know,
care, or have any emotional attachment to the
neighbourhood. Classic gentrification, therefore,
is about power: It is about how the rich
overpower the poor, and about how the poor
suffer because they do not have any leverage
against the rich. In other words, gentrification
is an inevitable product of neoliberal capitalism
(Butler, 2007; Harvey, 2005; Pan, 2011).
1562 Urban Studies 55(7)
This paper aims at showing a different
kind of narrative. What if the story of gentrification
in Shanghai, though having similar
results is not all about how the rich overpower
the poor, but how the poor understand
what the rich want – and, through that
knowledge – strategically and voluntarily
leave their neighbourhoods so that they
could gain what they otherwise would never
receive? Would this still be gentrification? I
am presenting precisely this narrative to suggest
an alternative process of gentrification.
In this narrative, not all residents are displaced
unwillingly. While the displacing
forms of gentrification may be more common,
or demand more attention, gentrification
can have an upside in circumstances
when mainly upward social mobility is not
otherwise possible without entrepreneurship
in China (see Arkaraprasertkul, 2016b). This
paper shows that the displaced original residents
are the ones who instigate the process,
and therefore profit from renting their places
to the newcomers. Taking place in an informal
manner skirting state control, the case
presented in this paper illustrates that gentrification
need not always displace and disregard
residents with the arrival of wealthy
invaders.
Theoretical and background
discussion
It has been more than half a century since
scholars began to pay attention to gentrification,
and, as pointed out above, the negative
connotation of the term (for a thorough discussion
on the genealogy of the term, see
Wang and Lau, 2009). In my case, I use the
term because it has the closest meaning to
the term zhongchanjiejihua – literally translated
as ‘middleclassification’ – which my
informants used to describe what they
believed was happening in their neighbourhood.
In addition to that, I also use the term
for the purpose of theoretical analysis.
Fitting the description of Ruth Glass (1964),
the scholar who coined the term gentrification
is the demographic change of small and
historic neighbourhoods in rapidly urbanised
Shanghai, arguing that gentrification
is a process primarily involving the replacement
of the old working class residents in
their enclave by new, affluent and ‘culturally
adept’ residents (Hamnett, 2000).1
Demographically, this replacement results
not only in a drastic change in the average
income of the residents in the neighbourhood
as a result of the decline in the proportion of
working class residents, but also in the
decrease in the average age of the residents,
the increase in the average education level,
and therefore the dramatic shrinkage in
household size. Second, the market drives the
process, as monetary exchange value plays a
significant role in both the active replacement
and voluntary relocation of old residents.
Therefore, this process involves not only the
active exchange of capital, but also dynamic
speculation, such as the invention of new sets
of criteria determining new market value
against the ‘socialist’ use value of old structures.
Heritage and history are the elements
that the original residents possess (see
Herzfeld, 2014) and it is precisely these elements
that entice new residents to engage in
the process that would eventually lead to a
solution that benefits both parties – the original
residents get to relocate themselves to
more comfortable locations, and the rich get
to assume ownership (permanent or temporary)
of what they think would enhance their
cultural capital. Finally, this process results in
the physical change of the neighbourhood,
such as the arrival of cafe´ s, small-scale clothing
boutiques and jewellery stores, high-end
teahouses, elite arts and crafts schools; these
diverse enterprises are agents of new ideas of
what is desirable and attractive in accordance
with the taste of the new residents.
In Shanghai, housing reform and the new
land lease regime that began in the early
Arkaraprasertkul 1563
1990s enabled a large portion of the city’s
residents to relocate from the dilapidated
apartments that were mostly built either during
the Treaty Port (1842–1945) or so-called
‘high socialist’ (1949–1978) eras, to new,
often high-rise and high-density, apartments
(Liang, 2014; Lu et al., 2001). The massive
urbanisation that followed for the next two
decades, especially in the areas that are
today’s city financial and commercial centres,
gave a large number of residents better
physical living conditions (Peng, 1986).
Some residents who were not as lucky had to
stay put in the old housing structures, waiting
for the local government, often in coalition
with a real estate developer, to offer
them a relocation package once the land in
which they live is targeted for redevelopment
(Zhu and Qian, 2003). In most cases, these
residents still live in old, mostly rundown
apartments. In spite of having doubled since
1949, the average living space per person in
these apartments is still relatively small – at
8 m2
per person (Wu, 1999). In many cases
the hazardous living conditions are a direct
result of both the dated infrastructure and
the lack of proper maintenance (Pellow,
1993). When combining these two factors
with the occupation of the aged residents
who are still using the cooking methods with
which they are most familiar such as coal
and gas stoves, it is not surprising that the
risk of fire is among the highest in urban
areas within the city (Shanghai Municipal
Government, 2013). Most of these residents
would prefer to maintain their social contacts
with old neighbours with whom they
have lived. Nonetheless, they are pragmatic
when it comes to how they would like to
spend the rest of their lives as pensioners,
and the legal possession of assets they would
like to pass on to their offspring. Thus, even
if the residents do not wish to move, what
eventually stops them from staying put is the
very pragmatic realisation that unless they
comply with the relocation process they
would be left with a small, usually rundown,
room, instead of a new apartment to pass on
to their children to live in or to resell if their
children prefer to use the cash to invest
elsewhere.
The tenants of the old apartments are
those whose housing rights were provided
for them in the high-socialist era by their
work units (commonly known in Mandarin
Chinese as danwei). But once the housing
reform began in the era of opening up and
reform (gaigekaifang) in the early 1980s, the
burden for housing maintenance was transferred
to the tenants themselves (Lee, 1988;
Wang, 1996). While this form of privatisation,
on the surface, may sound as though
an urban resident eventually gets to own
property, the real intention of the central
government was to force the tens of millions
of urban residents who resided in Shanghai
then to be responsible for maintaining, renovating
and sometimes completely overhauling
their homes should they want to have a
better living environment (Peng, 1986, 1987).
The ambiguity of the housing law itself is
also an issue, as often times the only legal
evidence that many residents, who received
their rights to live in the property confiscated
from the first owners into the common pool
during the first decade of the high socialist
era, have is the fact that they have occupied
the property for ‘significant periods of time’
(Sommers and Phillips, 2009). Whether or
not this was enough time to claim ownership
depends largely on the decision of the local
authorities. On top of the lack of funds to
improve the houses on the part of both the
tenants and local authorities, the tenants are
also reluctant to use their savings to refurbish
the now dilapidated stock of historic
housing, especially when there are a number
of cases involving the government’s use of
forced eviction and eminent domain for opaque
purposes (Human Rights in China,
2010; Richburg, 2010; Shin, 2013). Hence, it
is not rare to see many old and dilapidated
1564 Urban Studies 55(7)
houses even in the prime business areas of
Shanghai today (Shao, 2013). The physical
decay and the lack of adequate space in the
houses is one explanation for how and why
the residents themselves are active in the process
of obtaining compensation, and eventually
voluntary relocation. Many pragmatic
residents are also willing to sell as they see
an attempt to stay as risking receiving little
or no compensation from the process. With
the rapid building of new apartment typologies
in the suburbs, the new apartments in
which these tenants are often being relocated
are more spacious and well-equipped with
modern facilities such as hot water and airconditioning
systems. The expansive metro
and public transportation system also facilitates
these residents’ mobility; hence, one of
my informants expressed, ‘it is a no brainer
. I get a bigger, nicer, and more expensive
apartment here (if I decide to sell it in the
future), and if I miss the old neighbourhood
where I once lived, I could just take a bus
there – I am a senior citizen now with a jinlaoka
[senior citizens’ free public transportation
pass]!’.2
Methodology and site
Only through understanding this particular
context can we see the nuances of both the
physical and social change in China’s largest
city. On the surface, visitors to Shanghai
often have the impression that Shanghai is a
city in flux. Such fluidity has to do with the
facilitation of state-led changes in the ownership
of desirable urban spaces (He, 2007).
Many scholars, including myself, have made
romanticising remarks, such as the yearning
for the ‘old and authentic Shanghai’
(Arkaraprasertkul, 2012; Johnston and Er,
1993). Together with what Richard Ocejo
terms (2014) ‘nostalgia narratives’, the interaction
between the different generations of
residents and gentrifiers only facilitates the
reproduction of this notion of ‘lost
romanticism’, of which the critique of ‘evil
capitalism’ is a direct by-product. In a way,
history and Chinese aesthetics are a conceptual
relationship that is often taken for
granted. As Kay J Anderson (1991) points
out in her study of how the conceptual connection
between authenticity and immigrant
Chinatowns in non-Chinese cities make the
‘idea of Chinatown’, it is obvious, especially
in my case, that the idea of a romantic historic
Shanghainese neighbourhood is a simplified
nostalgic construction that takes for
granted the genealogy of contestation and
confrontation among the residents whose
physical lives and wellbeing are at stake in a
particular urban place (Arkaraprasertkul,
2010). While relying on statistical analysis as
the primary source of data is simplistic, as
the numbers do not explain the deeper
motive behind the relocation of the residents,
humanistic narratives also fall short
of getting beyond the nostalgia. In addition
to justifying ethnography as the methodology
of the research undergirding the qualitative
findings of this paper, my purpose is to
call for more ethnographic studies of similar
phenomena.
The main method I used to conduct this
research was ethnography, supported by
open-ended interviews, archival research,
and statistical analysis. I spent two years living
in Shanghai conducting thorough participant
observation. The neighbourhood in
which I physically lived for the period of my
research is a traditional lilong neighbourhood.
In order to protect the privacy and
anonymity of its residents, I assign it a pseudonym
‘Tranquil Light Neighborhood’, or
TLN, for short. TLN was built in the early
1930s, the last decade of the Treaty Port era.
As evident in its prime location, it was
designed by the finest architect with the finest
craftsmanship for affluent residents.
TLN, from the beginning, had gates on both
sides to prevent outsiders from wandering
into the neighbourhood. When the Chinese
Arkaraprasertkul 1565
Communist Party (CCP) seized the city in
1949, the neighbourhood and its housing
stocks were confiscated from the wealthy
residents (most of whom had fled the country
owing to their association with the opposition
Guomindang party), and then
redistributed to pledged socialist workers.
The population of the neighbourhood
increased almost tenfold after this redistribution
process, as these luxury ‘crescent-styled’
townhouses were turned into compact social
housing. According to the official data publicly
provided by the local neighbourhood
committee (juweihui) during my time there,
the new residents, including myself,
accounted for 438 out of the total number of
3172 residents who were ‘actually living in
the neighbourhood’ (as opposed to those
only having their names registered as residents
but not actually living there, or changzhurenshu).
These data have also been
crosschecked with the data on the population
of localities from the yearly almanac of the
district in which the TLN is located
(Arkaraprasertkul, 2016c). The population
of registered residents did not fluctuate much
from 1999–2011: the number of families (hu)
was between 1280 (in 2011) to 1558 (2010),
and the number of residents (ren; headcount)
increased from 3893 (in 1997–1998) to 4423
(2009). As the basic statistical analysis of
these data shows – assuming that the data
collection process was done correctly – there
is no direct correspondence between the
number of families and the residents. This
does not mean that the size of the families
changed drastically during these years of
data collection. Quite the opposite, there
were incoming residents, whose presence
constitutes a different set of numbers. From
an interview with district officials, the seemingly
uncoordinated fluctuation of these
numbers was a result of, what they call the
influx of migrants (liudongrenkou) who
moved in and out renting rooms from the
original residents. The district officials are
responsible for recording the names and
household registration status of all households.
Although there is a set of detailed data
that would precisely show this influx – the
differences between the registered ‘changzhuren’
(long-term tenants), and the registered
and non-registered short-term tenants – it
was only made available to the government,
and not made available to the researcher.
The demographics of these renters, or
the so-called ‘outsiders’ (wailairenshu) was
mixed: white- and blue-collar migrants from
other cities (waidiren); foreign students and
experts (including those who were on student
or tourist visas, but were in fact working);
business owners using the residential
spaces as their offices, who were attracted to
the neighbourhood’s central location as well
as its architectural uniqueness, which did
not seem to have the same appeal to the
original residents as it had with the renters
from outside. During the decade preceding
Shanghai’s Expo in 2010, there were
attempts by the local entrepreneurs who saw
the opportunity to develop TLN into a
‘commercial/artsy’ space, using its unique
historical edifices as a selling point. Such
attempts, however, did not turn into a permanent
alteration of the designated function
of the neighbourhood mainly because of
resistance from some of the original residents
who did not see the benefits from this
process (Arkaraprasertkul, 2016a).
Nevertheless, these attempts to reappropriate
TLN by the new residents had
indeed put it on the map and given the
future residents the impression that TLN
was a ‘special’ place. As of the conclusion of
this research, the local government had yet
to decide on any plans that would involve
such processes owing to the complicated
legal and financial issues specific to the site,
the residents themselves had to rely on their
own resources, which, in this case, were the
heritage structures in which they had been
given the right to reside. To understand the
1566 Urban Studies 55(7)
complex situation in which the residents are
living, I also conducted several open-ended
interviews with officials, planners, and architects
who worked for the municipal government
as well as for the private companies
involved, usually as third parties to whom
the municipal government outsource real
estate development projects.
Housing and middleclassification
The ‘original residents’ of TLN (known to
the renters as fangdong or landlords) who
rent out their spaces to outsiders learned
about the similar process which they would
eventually call ‘middleclassification’ thanks
to the local academics who had visited them
to study the changes in TLN and provided
them with this technical term. In the words
of my informants, the reason that the term
had been widely adopted in the neighbourhood
was because, ‘We love them [the
middle-class residents] . they who bring us
money!’. Given the Marxist–Maoist doctrine
embedded in the inculcation process of its
residents by the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP), this remark may be surprising since
the middle class are the enemies of the diligent
working class in this doctrine. Through
ethnography, I hope to point out through
the findings of this research how the residents
in an urban community used certain
discourses to enhance their access to new
economic opportunities.
Owing to its distinct architectural style,
clustered in a cohesive group form, as well
as its low-rise nature, TLN stands out from
the high-rise buildings surrounding it in the
city centre of Shanghai. In fact, many visitors
to TLN explicitly expressed their surprise
to find the low-rise characteristic of its
structures, which has become rare in urban
of Shanghai. Two ‘official’ reasons explaining
why TLN has yet to be razed to make
way for the high-rise buildings which would
yield higher financial returns per unit of the
built footprint: legality, as discussed in the
previous section, and heritage architecture
status (youxiulishijianzhu). In the past two
decades the municipal government of
Shanghai has also become increasingly interested
in protecting heritage structures in
order to use them as a selling point (Peh,
2014). According to the Development
Research Center of Shanghai Municipal
People’s Government (2014), the idea
behind it is the belief that a mixture of economic
modernity and history is required for
Shanghai to achieve global city status. TLN
was built using a particular type of architecture,
and is known among the local
Shanghainese as the lilong (lit. neighbourhood
lane). Lilong is basically a series of row
houses organised around the main path or
longtang (literally meaning living hall, used
to refer to the importance of those lanes, see
Lu, 1999).3
Combining the compactness of
Western row-house architecture and the spatial
efficiency of China’s courtyard structures,
lilongs mushroomed in Shanghai’s
economic heyday during the Treaty Port
era. Historians have estimated that there
were more than 9000 lilong neighbourhoods
in the city, each housing between 500 and
1500 residents. In the 1930s, about one-third
of the three million residents lived in the
lilong constituting about half of the city’s
formal housing stock (Bracken, 2013; Yang,
2013). The lilong houses, however, also
became a symbol of capitalism to many,
especially migrants and the working middleclass
who could not afford to live in the
neighbourhoods. There are many stories
about how the landlords and ‘second landlords’
(erfangdong) profited a great deal by
renting a room from the original owners of
the lilong houses and then subletting those
rooms to the people who had no choice but
to pay a large portion of their income to live
in Shanghai. These rural migrants, poor students,
writers and artists, as well as poor residents
in general came to Shanghai to escape
Arkaraprasertkul 1567
the violence of war and poverty elsewhere in
China, but still faced the greed of the second
landlords (Lee, 1999; Liang, 2008; Lu,
1999). The change that turned this status
symbol on its head began, as mentioned earlier,
when the CCP took control of Shanghai
in 1949. The CCP first abolished private
property and collectivised all housing for the
purpose of equal redistribution to all
working-class residents. Before 1949, TLN
was one of the ‘most prestigious’lilong neighbourhoods.
Right after the takeover of the
CCPP in 1949, it was turned into a worker’s
housing neighbourhood (gongfang).
Originally built for a single family, each row
house has since been subdivided into multifamily
worker housing to maximise the
building’s occupancy (Zhao, 2004). It was
during this period that the meaning of the
lilong shifted from houses representing the
economical design of full-fledged capitalism
to the collective living arrangement of socialism
(Morris, 1994). No additional lilong
houses have been built since 1949 thanks to
how the CCP sees the typology, as closely
associated with the middle class, as previously
discussed (also see Lu et al., 2001).
The lilong have, therefore, fallen out of
favour and been replaced by Soviet-inspired
‘socialist’ architecture, namely low-cost sixstorey
apartment buildings. It was also during
this period of heavy use that the lilong
houses rapidly deteriorated. The combination
of heavier use than intended by the
builders and the lack of maintenance over a
period of more than half a century has
resulted in the rapid decline of the physical
condition of these dwellings. Some of them
have reached the point of becoming
unhealthy places to live, creating not only
fire hazards but also sick building syndrome
as a result of the lack of ventilation, sunlight
and adequately hygienic conditions. Despite
all of these shortcomings, however, these old
cramped, and rundown lilong houses have
unexpectedly become the defining
characteristic of Shanghainese dwelling culture.
Most of the city’s residents have lived
in them for the decades since the 1940s
(Pellow, 1993). Many historians have
claimed that it is not an exaggeration to say
that every Shanghainese who lived in
Shanghai before the economic reform and
opening up era of the 1980s–1990s has memories
of the lilong.
So, for almost two decades since the late
1990s when, along with 70 other lilong neighbourhoods,
the TLN received official recognition
as a ‘tangible urban heritage site’ (see
Peh, 2014), its demographic has changed
from being fully occupied by the working
class to, at its peak around 2008, 70% original
residents and 30% ‘new residents’ (or
those who simply rented rooms from the
original residents). In this paper, I will refer
to the working class whose homes in the
TLN were allocated to them between 1949
and mid-1950s and during the massive housing
reshuffling process in the 1970s (Dwyer,
1986; Parish and Whyte, 1985), as ‘original
residents’.
There was an influx of ‘new residents’
during the three-year period preceding the
Shanghai Exposition in 2010, an international
event that drew more than 73 million
people worldwide to Shanghai. These new
residents, most of whom were between their
late 20s and late 30s, rented rooms in TLN
to live as single occupancy tenants, and set
up their small businesses in the TLN. They
were attracted to TLN thanks to the neighbourhood’s
location and the affordable rent.
The original residents were happy with the
extra income they could receive from these
new residents. Since the concerns of these
original residents were often either their
medical care or the wellbeing of their offspring,
the extra income from subletting
their rooms was perceived as essential support
especially in the face of the inadequate
healthcare system (especially when the pretext
of getting ‘safety net’ service includes
1568 Urban Studies 55(7)
bribing the doctor to pay more attention to
the patient, see Blumenthal and Hsiao, 2005;
Hesketh et al., 2012 ) and ruthless marketoriented
competition for basic services
(Feldstein, 1999).
The rise of outside renters
When I arrived in TLN for my research in
the summer of 2013, more than half of the
rooms on the ground floor were shops catering
to the tastes of middle-class residents
and downtown office workers, such as coffee
shops and bars; milk tea and grab-and-go
lunchbox vendors; collectible antique, souvenir
and small independent clothing stores.
Foreign and the Chinese visitors alike
flocked to TLN, especially during the weekends
and holidays, and the numbers of visitors
would sometimes rise to a combined
total of 3000, or the total residential population
of TLN itself. As the writers of a popular
international contemporary design
magazine dwell put it:
What is attractive about these lilong houses
and neighborhoods beyond its architectural
style are ‘how, though intimate and neighborly,
the lilong still afford residents the privacy
and seclusion of living in one’s own multistory
home’. (Rose, 2013)
This ‘privacy and seclusion’ did not seem to
be the case for this neighbourhood that was
on the verge of becoming another commercial
district. The impression of the neighbourhood,
as expressed by journalists and
mainstream media, were along the same
lines as that of the hip, new retail districts of
the time such as Tianzifang and many others
that were mushrooming out of the international
and touristic perception of the lilong
neighbourhoods (for a detailed discussion of
this particular case, see Yung et al., 2014).
In fact, a famous travel blogger posted in
2012, ‘Given up on the crowded streets of
Tianzifang and looking for something new?
We show you the 10 best stores in the TLN
shopping paradise’. The owners and employees
of these shops constituted only about
half of the approximately 400 registered new
residents of the TLN. During the time of my
research most of these new residents rented
87 of the rooms on the ground floors of the
buildings in the TLN to operate their commercial
businesses. Only a small number of
the businesses that did not need to be on the
ground floor, such as offices, rented the
much cheaper second floor of the buildings.
The other half of the new residents were
white-collar workers. They were renting the
rooms on the second and third floors as
residential spaces. The original residents
converted the kitchens, storage rooms, communal
corridors, balconies and almost all
spaces they could make use of in the buildings
into commercial spaces and bedrooms
to rent out to the new residents. Despite the
municipal government’s regulation prohibiting
such practices as some of them induce
both health and public hazards, there were
always local agents (zhongjie) who would
help new residents find spaces to rent for a
fee – including those that were smaller than
5 m2
, which was smaller than what regulations
permitted for a single tenant (Wang
and China Daily, 2011).
Jack, a 26-year-old American man of
European origin with a master’s degree in
humanities, who, up to the moment that I
got to know him in the summer 2013, had
lived in the TLN for two years remarked,
‘The only reason anyone would call this
‘‘gentrification’’ is because of the presence of
white people like us [referring to his
American friends who also lived in the TLN
at the time]’. Jack spoke to me with a sense
of anger, as his landlord was about to ask
him to pay more rent once his current contract
was over. What he meant by that was,
as a timely rent-payer resident of TLN, he
did not see himself as a gentrifier, who used
Arkaraprasertkul 1569
money to drive the original residents out of
the neighbourhood. ‘I am just a foreigner in
my mid-twenties who wants to live in the
middle of the city’, said Jack. Jack continued,
sharing his perceptions of how his original
resident neighbours saw him:
My landlord is a greedy man, who always tried
to tell us that we have done something wrong
to get us to pay even more . There were many
of us – educated, white, and classy, foreigners
– in this neighborhood; and we are the ones
who are clean, peaceful, responsible, and –
guess what – care more about this neighborhood
than anyone else.
The public demographic data provided by
the neighbourhood committee did not go
into the detail of the ethnicity of the renters.
It was a series of interviews with realtors that
had gotten me to realise that a handful of
foreigners of European origin in the neighbourhood
were not just passers-by, but renters
who actually rented a place, and lived as
registered residents in the TLN. According
to Mr Cai, an original resident who was
known in the TLN as a local real estate
agent (his motto: ‘want a room, come find
Mr Cai’):
It was only a few years ago [around 2007] that
white foreigners (bairen) begun to ask me if
there are any rooms for them here . I was
puzzled, of course, why would foreigners want
to live here – in a rundown neighborhood.
They also pay a lot more because many of
them receive housing remuneration from the
transnational companies that hired them to
work in Shanghai. Then, some of them who
could speak Chinese told me that TLN was, to
them, very ‘unique and special’ (tebie he weiyi),
and that they would like to live in a unique
and special place.
As mentioned earlier, there were multiple
owners in each individual structure, since
the original rooms in each three-floor row
house were allocated to different households
as a result of the redistribution of confiscated
private properties in the post-1949
period. So, on one floor, for instance, there
could be up to three families – one in the
original bedroom, study and storage (the latter
two turned into bedrooms afterwards) –
who shared the same kitchen and washing
facilities. This spatial arrangement was far
from ideal for foreigners who often, if not
always, ‘required that the room they would
like to rent include at least a private bathroom’,
according to Mr Cai. The first batch
of foreigners, in fact, not only spent their
own money refurbishing the room to fit their
basic needs and suit their tastes, but also
encouraged the landlords to install additional
amenities, such as gas stoves and private
bathrooms by providing them with the
incentives such as doubling the amount of
deposit (so that the landlords could use it to
carry out the renovations), and signing a
long-term lease (usually, also, with a clause
to pay upfront) to guarantee the landlords
received stable, uninterrupted rental income.
Globalisation and the cultural
capital of heritage
Many of the original resident landlords preferred
to rent out their rooms to foreigners
rather than Chinese tenants (local
Shanghainese and from other parts of
China, or waidiren, included). Similar to
what the social anthropologist Michael
Herzfeld (2009) found in Rome, locals are
considered not to be dependable renters. In
TLN, the primary reason was that the foreigners
usually paid higher rent than the
Chinese tenants. According to my interviews
with many foreign residents, the rent in
TLN was relative cheap given its location
compared with what they would have to pay
for a similar location in the cities from which
they came. Many of these renters were earning
a high income compared with the local
Chinese in similar positions. Many of them
1570 Urban Studies 55(7)
also received housing allowances in addition
to their base salaries from their companies,
making the decision to rent at the asking
price by the landlords in the TLN an easy
choice. In Mr Cai’s words, they were also
‘more straightforward’ than Chinese tenants.
In Mr Chai’s testimony, he said that
Chinese residents had a more frequent tendency
to be ‘problematic’ such as not paying
rent on time, and sneaking in more people
than agreed in the contract to stay in the
room. That said this was only a generalisation.
There were also foreigners who,
according to the tenants and the neighbourhood
committee, ‘partied all the time’,
to the extent that the original residents filed
noise complaints to the police. Nevertheless,
even when foreign and Chinese persons of
equal socioeconomic status would make the
same offer, most of the original residents
would still prefer to sublet the place to foreigners.
As I have observed through participant
observation, original resident landlords
saw having foreigners renting their rooms as
a form of cultural capital. In practice, they
would have more ‘stories’ to share with their
fellow neighbours regarding the importance
of their houses. ‘See, even the foreigners
want to live here’, said one of the original
resident landlords who had been renting her
best room on the second floor to a foreigner.
This resident continued:
I don’t mind giving up the best room in the
house that even has a small balcony and the
best view facing the desirable south side
[according to Chinese belief in geomancy of
fengshui that the south is the best direction] of
the lane to my renter; and that’s because he’s
laowai [foreigner] – he pays the rent on time
and is always friendly to us.
She gushed of her laowai renter before going
on at length to complain about her previous
Chinese tenant who never treated her in any
manner close to how her current tenant did.
According to my interviews, there is some
truth to the perception that foreigners were
more ‘friendly’ with their landlords and that
may have to do with how they planned to
stay only for a short period of time (around
one to two years); hence, in general they
were more satisfied with their situations. On
the landlords’ side, they saw renting their
rooms to foreigners as a way to claim, implicitly,
an access to much coveted cultural
capital. Half a dozen of my informants were
among the first group of foreigners to arrive
in the TLN. At its peak before a sudden
crackdown on illegal commercial and noncommercial
subletting took place in the
autumn of 2013 (see Arkaraprasertkul,
2016a), foreigners and creative entrepreneurs
constituted about half of the approximately
400 renters in the TLN.
Charlie, a 24-year-old renter from an
English-speaking country who also studied
Chinese in college, shared with me the reason
why, prior to his arrival, not many foreigners
had thought about living in such a
prime location, and in his words, ‘a classylooking
and historical-looking house’ like
those in the TLN:
The fact that we’ve gotten to know more about
China through many sources of media – official
or otherwise – did help, and now that we
have a better grasp of Chinese, we have been
able to ‘bust’ a lot of myths about ‘living with
the Chinese,’ and live with them with mutual
respect.
Charlie, a native of Manhattan, also proudly
shared with me his achievement in renovating
his landlord’s 20 m2
half-storage-halfbedroom
into a compact-sized bedroom in
which he would live for the next four years
until he returned to the USA: ‘Given the
location – and more important, its historic
appearance – TLN is equivalent to a neighborhood
in Manhattan where you’d have to
be someone like (CNN Anchor) Anderson
Cooper to be able to afford to live there.’
Charlie was obviously no Anderson Cooper,
Arkaraprasertkul 1571
and his income as a manager of a local
English language school where he was teaching
Chinese students was less than US$4000
per month (2007 exchange rate), but the fact
that he could live right in the centre of
China’s largest city, and have stories to tell
about his lifestyle in, what he called, ‘an
authentic alleyway-house of Shanghai’ is
representative of the globalisation of culture
and the ideology of consumerism at work.
As the sociologist Leslie Sklair (Sklair, 1999)
suggests, the study of globalisation should
extend beyond the realm of phenomena limited
by the scope of the study of the ways in
which transnational corporations have
induced capital and production at the global
scale, into the realm of everyday cultural
consumption. When the sociologist Michael
Thompson (1979) made an observation
about how and why people regard old
objects as collectible (as well as their fetishisation),
he was simply making a theoretical
claim about the structural idea behind the
process of ‘heritagisation’ and conservation
(also see Silvia, 2011). Rather than the ‘nostalgically
perceived’ aesthetics, the major factor
in the process is the rarity, the uniqueness,
and the class-based association of a particular
object – which, in the case presented in this
paper, is the lilong house. A fact that the original
renters became increasingly aware of
leading them to drive the gentrification of
TLN themselves. The Chief Executive of one
of the world’s most respected advertising
agencies and a long-term resident of Shanghai
Tom Doctoroff (2009) writes:
Yes, lilong life, is certainly not for everyone,
has charm. But, with an open eye and mind,
one can plumb the scene for insights on the
fundamental motivations of Chinese people,
even the structure of Chinese society . [T]his
foreigner’s experience in the Shanghai lanes
has been more than satisfying. I am reminded
– vividly, on a daily basis – that the Chinese,
even those who have not benefited directly
from the winds of economic reform, are noble.
Their sense of community, not to mention an
instinct of finding pleasure in the moment,
suggests the masses will march, head held
high, towards the future. Despite inevitable
setbacks and unpredictable twists and turns,
the Chinese will adapt and, finally, thrive.
Since 2009, Doctoroff, has deliberately
opted out of living in a handful of glass
high-rise apartments for expatriates, and
bought a four-story low-rise lilong house in
Shanghai, which he renovated himself into
what The New York Times columnist Casey
Hall (2014) calls ‘a modern authentic piece
of old Shanghai lane house (nongtang lao
fangzi), with twists of tradition’.
The possession of a house whose significance
and therefore economic value is raised
by the attention of agents of the global community
rather than the locals is the construct
of an unfamiliar means of value judgement
that Herzfeld (2004) calls ‘the global hierarchy
of value’. When he began working as a
realtor, Mr Cai clearly did not believe that
anyone, let alone foreigners, would like to
live in a ‘rundown (louhou) neighborhood’
such as TLN. But, as the economic returns
have proven beneficial to the original residents,
such disbelief has gradually been converted
into a window of opportunity,
through which, simply by keeping oneself in
touch with this the global hierarchy of value
through everyday discourses, one could continue
to benefit until the walls of these profitable
heritage houses come down and the
residents have to move elsewhere. The original
residents saw this particular process of
demographic change as beneficial thanks to
the voluntary agreement between the original
and potential new residents on the rent
and the length of the contract. Thanks to
the high demand for residences in a neighbourhood
located in a prime location like
TLN and also for heritage architectural
structures, there was no single instance,
where an original resident was forced to
1572 Urban Studies 55(7)
accept rent that was lower than what he or
she could live on elsewhere. The majority of
the original residents, during the term of this
research, were living elsewhere either with
their children or relatives.
As Doctoroff (2009) has pointed out,
‘lilong life is certainly not for everyone’, but
the fact that it was possible even for young
foreigners to experience this kind of lifestyle
in a big city that they would not otherwise
have back at home, as Charlie pointed out
above, certainly played a role in the rise of
this alternative housing market. By 2013, the
average rent in TLN had increased twofold
from RMB50 per month in 2007 to RMB100
per square metre per month. So, for example,
Charlie’s rent for the four year term of
his contract was RMB2000 per month
(approximately US$416–420). The landlord
did not increase his rent because Charlie had
helped to renovate the room and also
because of the long-term contract that he
signed – in fact, as Charlie expressed, he
‘wasn’t sure whether the landlord would
stick to her word to not increase the rent had
he not signed that contract with her to freeze
the rent for four years’. By the time Charlie
left the TLN, the room was put up for rent
at RMB4000 per month, and was snapped
up right away by a German expatriate working
for a transnational market research company
based in Shanghai.
Both the recent slowdown in Chinese
economy and the heritage status of the TLN
put the developers at odds with the tactic of
‘bulldoze-and-rebuild’ that had been the
main transformational force of the city for
the previous two decades. The discussion on
how to make use of the heritage structure
has been put back on the table, but this time
with the municipal, local and global agents
all being represented. It would have been
only two of these three groups of actors who
would get to determine the trajectory of the
heritage structure if not for the mixed ownership
of the properties. Most of the legal
residents with government-issued property
ownership certificates of TLN were former
employees of the now dissolved work-units,
who were paying a nominal rent (i.e. rent
control) to the government. That said, the
issue with properties does not stop at the
economy of compensation for these residents
should the municipal government want them
out to make way for an urban development
project. In fact, this was the area that is most
difficult to enquire about for two reasons:
First, because of the nature of the buildings’
structure, the boundary of ownership is
unclear. For instance, if three families shared
the bathroom and kitchen areas; to whom
then should the right to sell and renovate
those spaces belong in the case that there is
no consensus on what to do with those
spaces? Second, the original residents were
deliberate about being strategically ambiguous
about the rights that they had, as a
result of the history of forced eviction and
the use of eminent domain. This was the case
even with the residents who possessed actual
paperwork stating their rights. There were
also discrepancies among the original residents
themselves: although most of them
were pragmatic about their future and were
prepared to be relocated, they somehow held
firm to the fiction that they ‘belonged there’.
Those who had already moved away or
rented their rooms to someone else were still
fully retaining the right to compensation in
absentia by using their networks of former
neighbours to keep them updated about the
latest developments in the housing market.
Encouraging these residents to strategise
even more carefully was the rising number of
foreign residents in Shanghai whom the old
residents deemed much more ‘desirable’
tenants than the locals.
Conclusion
In addition to developing an alternative
understanding of gentrification in which the
Arkaraprasertkul 1573
existing residents themselves were the key
actors in the active urban process resulting
in changing demographic diversity, the goal
of this paper was to engage in contemporary
debates regarding the use of the term gentrification.
At present, the term implies that,
the two categories of winners and losers are
often established as a result of the process of
social change and urban transformation. It
may be true, as my informant Jack has informally
observed, that there were more
expatriates with middle-class tastes in the
neighbourhood, and therefore, by definition,
the neighbourhood was much more ‘gentle’
than the typical working class neighbourhoods.
Buildings, lanes and communal
spaces were physically much better maintained
as well as more hygienic thanks to
both the personal funds and particular tastes
that these new residents had brought with
them. By this ‘gentleness’, we may be able to
understand the change as the subjugation of
the young educated middle-class gentries
against the retired uneducated working class
poor. But, as I have shown in this paper,
that was only one side of the story. Now that
we know the contexts of the housing policy
vis-a` -vis social welfare, the impact of the globalisation,
and the nature and consequence
of the subletting process, should we still consider
this phenomenon ‘gentrification’?
Through the case of TLN, I have illustrated
a case of gentrification in which the
original residents not only received adequate
income from the process, but also, in many
cases, substantial economic gain, and, as a
result, became economically and physically
better off. In my case of TLN, the reciprocal
economic understanding between the two
sides lead to a collaboration between them,
resulting in the upgrading of the houses,
which otherwise would not happen. In addition,
as opposed to homogenisation, the
process seems to have led to much more
diversity among the residents. With the presence
of the new residents drawing even more
attention to the cosmopolitanism of this particular
urban place that, to the original residents,
was free publicity that benefited them
by offering new opportunities to rent out the
rooms that they did not use at economically
advantageous terms.
I argue that the term gentrification should
cease to be automatically understood as
referring to a process with clear winners and
losers. In downtown Shanghai, there is a
case of a new district undergoing urban
renewal whereby the local government guaranteed
each of the original residents the right
to receive a commercial unit so that they
could continue to ‘maintain their lifestyle
and the sense of our community’; yet, as
soon as this new district was complete and
the big corporations saw the opportunity to
invest in the area, the original residents,
almost unanimously, agreed to rent out their
spaces to the corporations so that, according
to an interview with the original residents,
‘we would no longer have to work, and simply
be benefactors of passive income’. This
process was by no means forced. It was the
changing of economic circumstance that the
residents themselves saw as best for their
families that was crucial in how they made
the decision to no longer continue, sometimes,
businesses that they had engaged for
generational and move out. A former owner
of what was once one of Shanghai’s most
famous wonton stalls (who happened to live
near TLN) shared with me, ‘it would be nice
if I could still sell wontons – since I had been
doing that for years – so did my father, my
grandfather, and my great-grandfather’.
‘But that said I would like to rest, as selling
wontons, as you know, is a lot of laborious
work and I am too old for that’, the 64-yearold
stay-at-home father shared with me.
When asking whether his son could help, his
response was: ‘Oh, that’s another thing. My
son has no interest in selling wontons – he
doesn’t even like eating them! By renting out
my space to someone else, I could afford to
1574 Urban Studies 55(7)
send him to a good school, and perhaps
abroad if he wishes to pursue his study overseas
afterwards’. This case of the wonton
stall owner exemplifies an alternative form
of gentrification, as the decision to move out
was initiated by the original resident himself
thanks to the benefits of renting out his old
space.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank John Logan, Jianfa Shen,
Alan Smart, and Fulong Wu as well as the three
anonymous reviewers of this paper for their constructive
criticisms resulting in this paper. I am
especially grateful to my anthropology colleagues
Leo Pang and Alex Joseph Nelson who had carefully
read the entire manuscript many times for
me. I also want to thank my readers on various
occasions: Ted Bestor, Alan Crawford, Xiangmin
Chen, Julie Chun, Jie Feng, Magnus Fiskesjo¨ ,
Matthew Gutmann, Byron Good, Mary-Jo
Delvecchio Good, Erik Harms, Shenjing He,
Edward Akintola Hubbard, Michael Herzfeld,
Roderick Hills, Arthur Kleinman, Marcia
Johnson, Tess Johnston, Maksis Knxutinxsˇ ,
Michael Lestz, Fei ‘Anna’ Li, Sirui ‘Sherry’ Li,
Maria Montoya, Xinyan Peng, Paul E. Rabe´ ,
Charlotte San Juan, Qin Shao, Leslie Sklair,
Kristin Stapleton, Wenqing ‘Ann’ Tang, Sue
Anne Tay, Matthew Williams, Michael J White,
Jieyi Yang, Shunyao Yang, and Chang Zhao. I
also owe my students at New York University
and the Alliance for Global Education Shanghai
great debts of feedback on multiple drafts that
eventually became this paper. I also want to
thank John Crespi and his students from Colgate
University who gave me lively comments brought
about by their keenest curiosity and fresh eyes
during their study trip to the community where I
had conducted the research (i.e. TLN) which
served as a much-needed final push for this
paper.
Funding
The research and writing for this paper had been
generously supported by the International Center
for Studies of Chinese Civilization (ICSCC) and
the Fudan Fellow Program at Fudan University,
Global Postdoctoral Fellowship at New York
University Shanghai, Cora Du Bois
Anthropological Research Fellowship, and
Expert-In-Residence in Urban Anthropology
Program at IDEO in Shanghai.
Notes
1. Also known as ‘the gentries’, and therefore
‘gentrification’ as the process by which the
new urban gentries emerge to transform
urban spaces. In addition, this reference to
the 18th and 19th century English gentry also
renders the translation of the term into the
popular usage in Chinese impossible.
2. The cost of taking the bus in Shanghai is 2
yuan (US$ 0.3) for most routes in the city.
3. Scholars do not have consensus on the translation
of the names; many use the terms
‘alleyway-house’, ‘lane house’ and ‘neighborhood
lane house’ interchangeably (Lu, 1999).
References
Anderson K (1991) Vancouver’s Chinatown:
Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980. Montreal,
Buffalo, NY: McGill-Queen’s University
Press.
Arkaraprasertkul N (2010) Leaping beyond nostalgia:
Shanghai’s urban life ethnography. The
Newsletter of the International Institute for
Asian Studies 55(Autumn/Winter): 28–29.
Arkaraprasertkul N (2012) Moral global storytelling:
Reflections on place and space in Shanghai’s
urban neighborhoods. Storytelling, Self,
Society 8(3): 167–179.
Arkaraprasertkul N (2016a) The abrupt rise (and
fall) of creative entrepreneurs: Globalization,
creative economy, and structural inequality
among old residents and new renters in urban
Shanghai. In: Novy J and Colomb C (eds) Protest
and Resistance in the Tourist City. London,
New York: Routledge, pp. 282–301.
Arkaraprasertkul N (2016b) Gentrification from
within: Urban social change as anthropological
process. Asian Anthropology 15(1): 1–20.
Arkaraprasertkul N (2016c) Locating Shanghai:
Globalization, heritage industry, and the political
economy of urban space in a Chinese metropolis.
PhD Thesis in Anthropology, Harvard
University.
Arkaraprasertkul 1575
Blumenthal D and Hsiao W (2005) Privatization
and its discontents – The evolving Chinese
health care system. New England Journal of
Medicine 353(11): 1165–1170.
Bracken GB (2013) The Shanghai Alleyway
House. Volume 95. New York: Routledge.
Butler T (1997) Gentrification and the Middle
Classes. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Butler T (2007) For gentrification? Environment
and Planning A 39(1): 162–181.
Development Research Center of Shanghai
Municipal People’s Government (2014) The
First World Cities Day of the United Nations:
Global City Forum Thesis Intercommunication
2014. Shanghai Municipal People’s Government.
Shanghai, People’s Republic of China.
Doctoroff, T. 2009. ‘‘Life in the ‘Lilong’: My
Shanghai Lane House Adventure’’ Huffington
Post (Online Edition). http://www.huffington
post.com/tom-doctoroff/life-in-the-lanes-myshan_b_250547.html
Published September 3,
2009 (accessed 12 December 2016).
Dwyer DJ (1986) Urban housing and planning in
China. Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers January: 479–489.
Feldstein M (1999) Social security pension reform
in China. China Economic Review 10(2): 99–107.
Glass R (1964) London: Aspects of Change. London:
MacGibbon & Kee.
Hall C (2014) Great Homes & Destinations: Modern,
With Twists of Tradition, in Shanghai.
The New York Times (Online Edition), 14 May
2015. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/
2015/05/15/greathomesanddestinations/modern-
with-twists-of-tradition-in-shanghai.html?_r=0
(accessed 15 December 2016).
Hamnett C (2000) Gentrification, postindustrialism,
and industrial and occupational restrucuring
in global cities. In: Bridge G and Watson S
(eds) A Companion to the City. Malmen, MA;
Oxford, UK; Victoria, Australia; Berlin:
Blackwell, pp. 331–341.
Hamnett C and Williams P (1979) Gentrification
in London 1961–71: An empirical and theoretical
analysis of social change. Birmingham: University
of Birmingham, Centre for Urban and
Regional Studies.
Harvey D (2005) Spaces of Neoliberalization:
Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical
Development: Hettner-Lecture 2004 with David
Harvey. Volume 8. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner
Verlag.
He S (2007) State-sponsored gentrification under
market transition. The case of Shanghai.
Urban Affairs Review 43(2): 171–198.
Hesketh T, Wu D, Mao L, and Ma N (2012) Violence
against doctors in China. BMJ 345:
e5730. doi: 10.1136/bmj.e5730
Herzfeld M (2004) The Body Impolitic: Artisans
and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value.
Chicago; London: University of Chicago
Press.
Herzfeld M (2009) Evicted from Eternity: The
Restructuring of Modern Rome. Chicago, IL;
London: University of Chicago Press.
Herzfeld M (2014) Heritage and corruption: The
two faces of the nation-state. International
Journal of Heritage Studies 21(6): 1–14.
Human Rights in China (2010) Home Demolished
for World Expo, Shanghai Petitioners
Seek Just Compensation. Available at: http://
www.hrichina.org/en/content/385.
Jacobs J (1964) The Death and Life of Great
American Cities. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books in association with Jonathan Cape.
Johnston T and Er D (1993) A Last Look: Western
Architecture in Old Shanghai. Hong Kong:
Old China Hand Press.
Lee LOF (1999) Shanghai modern: The flowering
of a new urban culture in China, 1930–1945.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press.
Lee YF (1988) The urban housing problem in
China. The China Quarterly 115: 387–407.
Liang SY (2008) Where the courtyard meets the
street: Spatial culture of the li neighborhoods,
Shanghai, 1870–1900. Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 67(4): 482–503.
Liang SY (2014) The developer’s real estate culture.
In: Remaking China’s Great Cities: Space
and Culture in Urban Housing, Renewal, and
Expansion. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 91–128.
Lu H (1999) Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday
Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Lu J, Rowe PG and Zhang J (eds) (2001) Modern
Urban Housing in China 1840–2000. Munich;
London: Prestel.
1576 Urban Studies 55(7)
Morris LD (1994) Community or commodity?: A
study of lilong housing in Shanghai. PhD
Thesis, University of British Columbia.
Ocejo RE (2014) Upscaling Downtown: From
Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York
City. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press.
Pan T (2011) Place attachment, communal
memory, and the moral underpinnings of gentrification
in postreform Shanghai. In: Kleinman
A, Yan Y and Jun J, et al. (eds) Deep
China: The Moral Life of the Person, What
Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell Us About
China Today. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, pp. 152–176.
Parish WL and Whyte MK (1985) Urban Life in
Contemporary China. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Peh C (2014) Politicizing Heritage: The Intangibility
of Shanghai’s Shikumens. Bachelor of Arts
undergraduate dissertation in History,
National University of Singapore.
Pellow D (1993) No place to live, no place to
love: Coping in Shanghai. In: Guldin GE and
Southall A (eds) Urban Anthropology in China.
Leiden: Brill, pp. 396–424.
Peng R (1986) Towards a new housing approach:
Analysis of settlement environment and housing
policy in Shanghai, China. M.S. Thesis,
Department of Architecture, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Peng R (1987) Urban housing trends in Shanghai:
Learning from the neighborhoods in Shanghai.
First Year Paper. Department of Urban Studies
and Planning. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, pp. 1–42.
Richburg KB (2010) Disneyland project in Shanghai
spotlights forced evictions in China. Available
at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/18/AR2010061
805277_pf.html.
Rose K (2013) Modern Lilong House Renovation
in Shanghai. Dwell Magazine (Online Edition).
Available at: https://www.dwell.com/article/
modern-lilong-house-renovation-in-shanghaifa91995f
(accessed 12 December 2016).
Shanghai Municipal Government (2013) Notice
of the General Office of Shanghai Municipal
People’s Government on Printing and Distributing
the Provisions of Shanghai Municipality on
the Administration of Fire Safety in High-firerisk
Units. Vol. 2015. Available at: http://
www.shanghai.gov.cn/shanghai/node27118/
node27386/node27408/n31241/n31271/u26ai
39132.html (accessed 15 December 2016).
Shao Q (2013) Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance
in a Chinese Megacity. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Shin HB (2013) The right to the city and critical
reflections on China’s property rights activism.
Antipode 45(5): 1167–1189.
Sklair L (1999) Competing conceptions of globalization.
Journal of World-Systems Research
5(2): 143–163.
Silva L (2011) Folk architecture heritagization in
rural Portugal. Constructing Cultural and Natural
Heritage. Parks, Museums and Rural Heritage.
Girona, Institut Catala` de Recerca en
Patrimoni Cultural, pp.135–145.
Smith N (2006) Gentrification generalized:
From local anomaly to urban ’regeneration’
as global urban strategy. In: Fisher MS and
Downey G (eds) Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic
Reflections on the New Economy. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, pp. 191–
208.
Sommers AL and Phillips K (2009) A Tragedy of
the Commons: Property Rights Issues in
Shanghai Historic Residences. Penn State
International Law Review 28: 137–175.
Thompson M (1979) Rubbish Theory: The Creation
and Destruction of Value. Oxford, New
York: Oxford University Press.
Wang J and Lau SY (2009) Gentrification and
Shanghai’s new middle-class: Another reflection
on the cultural consumption thesis. Cities
26(2): 57–66.
Wang Y (2011) City ‘ants’ face eviction from colonies.
China Daily (Online Edition) 10 January
2011. Available at: http://usa.chinadaily.com.
cn/2011-01/10/content_11817267.htm (accessed
12 December 2016).
Wang YP (1996) The process of commercialisation
of urban housing in China. Urban Studies
33(6): 971–989.
Wu W (1999) City profile: Shanghai. Cities 16(3):
207–216.
Yang J (2013) Shikumen pledged extra protection
after readers offer city suggestions. Shanghai
Daily, 25 August 2014: A4.
Arkaraprasertkul 1577
Yung EHK, Chan EHW and Xu Y (2014) Sustainable
development and the rehabilitation of
a historic urban district – Social sustainability
in the case of Tianzifang in Shanghai. Sustainable
Development 22(2): 95–112.
Zhao C (2004) From shikumen to new-style: A
rereading of lilong housing in modern Shanghai.
The Journal of Architecture 9(1): 49–76.
Zhu L and Qian Z (2003) Understanding Slums:
Case Studies for the Global Report on Human
Settlements 2003. The Development Research
Centre of Shanghai Municipal Government.
Shanghai, People’s Republic of China.
Zukin S (1982) Loft Living: Culture and Capital
in Urban Change. Baltimore, MD; London:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
1578 Urban Studies 55(7)