Cole Roskam, Improvised City: Architecture and Governance in Shanghai, 1843-1937

Surprisingly few studies of architecture and urbanism in English have presented a complete sweep of the turbulent history of the treaty port of Shanghai during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Christian Henriot’s Shanghai, 1927-1937 (1991) translated from the French in 1993, Leo Ou-fan Lee’s Shanghai Modern (1999), and Meng Yue’s Shanghai and the Edges of Empires (2006), have examined, in remarkably different registers, its burgeoning twentieth-century manifestations; while Samue...