Cultural Capital, Spatial Productions: cases from Shanghai

Abstract

The presentation will showcase the transformation and reuse of two types of city center spaces in Shanghai to form creative areas, paralleling the larger paradigm shift in urban development since economic liberalization began in 1990s and its maturation by the mid-2000s. The specific zoom-ins to cases including Tianzifang and M50 reveals larger pathways for the city‘s brownfield developments and the most relevant issues at hand. In the context of resumption of consumer and spatial demand, the recognition of heritage protection coincided with the advent of creative industries, creating moments of development opportunity. Creative industry development became both an urban alibi by which state-owned enterprises (SOEs) could transition to the market economy as well as a means by which existing structures could be reused. The constellation of actors, a combination of top-down and bottom-up capitalizes on Shanghai‘s cosmopolitan legacy, and in the period between 1990 and 2005, instigated an open system of development that made the city center extremely vibrant and dynamic.