“Pudong Is Not My Shanghai”: Displacement, Place-Identity, and Right to the “City” in Urban China

Abstract

Existing studies on urban redevelopment and gentrification in China have documented neoliberal urbanism and state intervention as the driving forces transforming Shanghai into a global city (see, e.g., Zhang 2002; Zhang and Ke 2004; Chen 2009; He 2005; He and Wu 2007; Ren 2008; Xu 2004). However, nearly 30 years into building a globalizing Shanghai, how much do we know about the lives of Shanghainese after their displacement? The urban landscape in the new global Shanghai alienates and disorients native Shanghainese. This new Shanghai is a three-dimensional printout designed by the state, both the central and municipal levels, and is modeled after global cities in the West. Approaches in urban redevelopment and renewal in the West in the 20th century diverged, some built up in their central districts such as New York City or London, the two quintessential global cities according to Sassen (2001), while others sprawled out such as Los Angeles. It is the former that policy makers in China aimed at, to (re)build an awe-inspiring metropolis of global significance to showcase China’s rise (Greenspan 2014:18). In the process, millions of native Shanghainese households were displaced, and millions of internal migrants came to call the city home. The limited number of studies done on the housing quality of the resettlement neighborhood and displacees’ new homes generate positive responses based on quantitative studies (Wu 2004; Li and Yu-Ling 2009; Day 2013). A more qualitative approach employed by recent researchers painted a different picture: they acknowledge that displacees experienced a strong sense of loss (Li 2014), and a lingering pain as severe and embodied as domicide (Shao 2013; Zhang 2017). Taking recent researchers’ investigations into displacees’ emotional responses to the resettlement process, and debates on the settlement housing and new neighborhoods as a departure point, my work intends to answer the questions about how displaced Shanghainese have responded to the new urban built environment and strategically adapted to it at different scales. Peter Marcuse (1967) adopts Lefebvre’s formulation of the right to the city (p. 45) as “a transformed and renewed right to urban life” (Peter Marcuse 2012:35) when exploring answers to the question “whose right(s)to what city?” His solution lies in politicizing among the disadvantageous and the disenfranchised, which unfortunately is